Margaret O’Mara on the Clintons, Tech, and Memory

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Margaret O’Mara on the Clintons, Tech, and Memory

Date: June 8, 2026
Host: New Books (Ben Waterhouse & Lee Vincel)
Guest: Margaret O’Mara, Professor of American History, University of Washington
Producer/Contributor: Joe Fort

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Episode Overview

This episode brings historian Margaret O’Mara—renowned for her work on American politics and the history of technology—into conversation with hosts Ben Waterhouse and Lee Vincel. The discussion bridges two central themes: the political transformation of the 1990s through the lens of the Clinton administration, and the concurrent technological revolution, particularly the rise of Silicon Valley. O’Mara, drawing on her unique vantage as both participant (campaign staffer, political insider) and scholar, offers personal memories and analytical insights into how tech and politics shaped one another—and how historians grapple with the living memory of recent decades.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Memory of Political Change: Remembering the 1992 Election

- Hosts open the conversation with personal recollections of Clinton’s election and the era’s political mood.

• Ben shares his contrarian experience of “wearing black” after Clinton’s win, mourning the Bush administration in his Massachusetts school—a motif highlighting generational and ideological divides.
• Margaret O’Mara recalls her hectic Election Day, moving from Michigan campaign operations to Little Rock headquarters, witnessing Clinton’s victory amid euphoria and disbelief at a local governor’s ascent to the presidency.
• Notable Quote:
  • "The government of Arkansas as president. Does anyone know how small Arkansas is?... I mean, I’d grown up in Little Rock dying to get out of there and successfully escaped. And then I’m like, holy cannoli. Does anyone realize that a state of 2 million people has just elected this president?” — Margaret O’Mara (14:00)

Timestamps:

• Election recollections: 07:36–15:11

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2. The Character and Strategy of the Clintons

- O’Mara offers an insider’s view of Bill Clinton’s charisma and the evolution of the Clinton political approach.

• The intimacy and small-scale nature of Arkansas politics, contrasted with national ambitions.
• Clinton’s unique combination of “political animal” instincts and policy wonkishness; the influential role of Hillary and their boomer-era reformist impulses.
• Generational conflict and transition: Gen X cynicism vs. boomer idealism; the “earnestness deficit” of the 1990s campaign culture.
• The campaign’s calculated shift to centrism after the 1988 Dukakis defeat and the “neoliberal” (neo-liberal) project of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Notable Quotes:

• “Bill Clinton is the most charismatic human being I have ever encountered in my life, full stop. The guy has a glow, an aura, a something that is this magnetism…” — Margaret O’Mara (15:24)
• “This was very much a baby boom presidency. That's true... Clinton and Gore were 45 and 46 when they were elected, which now...seems impossibly young.” — O’Mara (24:10)

Timestamps:

• Clinton's persona and Arkansas: 15:13–17:37
• Generational/strategic shifts: 20:00–27:42

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3. Writing History vs. Living History: Memory as Both Tool and Trap

- The challenges of writing recent history, especially as a participant and historian.

• O’Mara describes writing her book Pivotal Tuesdays: discovering her own “misremembering” and the value and limitation of oral histories and first-person accounts.
• The ever-evolving nature of the Clinton story—how living figures complicate efforts to historicize recent decades.
• Discussion of “temporal distance” and when the recent past becomes ‘history’—with the 25-year rule as a rough guide.

Notable Quotes:

• “I misremembered so much. It has been incredibly useful to me in understanding both the bounty and the limitations of oral history and first person accounts…” — Margaret O’Mara (28:52)
• “Memory is fallible. And the memory is also stories. And we too are telling stories. We are telling the best version of the story we can with the evidence we can.” — Margaret O’Mara (64:00)

Timestamps:

• Memory & writing history: 27:44–36:07, 63:15–67:13

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4. Historians and the Acceleration of Change

- How technological and societal acceleration shapes historical “distance” and perspective.

• Is accelerated pace (24-hour news, Internet) making history settle faster? O’Mara posits that while information overload is real, “settled” refers more to the passage of events and the dust settling, not to consensus.
• The 1992 election as the “first CNN election” — cable news lowers the threshold of what counts as news, fueling scandal and information overload.

Notable Quotes:

• “One of the things…the hallmarks of the commercial Internet age is information overload…the intensity of the spin cycle of the news cycle that begins with cable news…That’s one of the reasons…contributes to the kind of scandal driven politics of 80s and 90s and beyond.” — Margaret O’Mara (38:43–40:28)

Timestamps:

• Acceleration and “settling” history: 37:41–41:51

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5. The Clinton Administration and Tech: The Early Connections

- The Democratic embrace of technology in the 1990s, and the evolving role of Silicon Valley.

• In 1992, Silicon Valley is still largely hardware focused, and seen as more Republican until a public endorsement of Clinton-Gore.
• O’Mara’s experience in the White House: the “Internet guy” a novelty, and early connections forged with tech executives (e.g., John Scully sitting next to Hillary Clinton and Alan Greenspan at State of the Union).

Notable Quotes:

• “Tech was not seen…certainly Al Gore was the technologist in chief and kind of a super geek…but in the beginning, tech was… seen as kind of Scully’s a great example…a CEO of a company that was a ‘new economy’ company. This is the age of the famous new economy, right?” — Margaret O’Mara (43:09)

Timestamps:

• Early Clinton admin & Silicon Valley: 43:09–47:19

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6. Silicon Valley’s Transformations: From Hardware to Platforms

- The 1990s as the era of transformation from hardware to software, deregulation, and financialization.

• The 1996 Telecom Act, Wall Street financialization, and the emergence of the “new Wall Street” culture in the Valley.
• The rise of the “golden geeks,” tech’s shift from outsider to archetypal big business, and narratives of exceptionalism (“kinder, gentler capitalism”).
• The enduring myth of Silicon Valley as a free-market miracle, ignoring deep ties to government funding and Cold War origins.

Notable Quotes:

• “What happens in the 1990s is this confluence of deregulation, the Telecom act of 1996…Wall street and financialization…MBAs…going out to the Valley because that’s where money was gonna be made…the late 90s is kind of when it becomes this sort of a different kind of business story. And it’s entirely a software story.” — Margaret O’Mara (51:27)
• “There’s a sort of a fascinating story to be told simply by looking at Time Magazine’s covers featuring dot com…tech CEOs…the way they’re being portrayed — these golden geeks.” — Margaret O’Mara (55:55)

Timestamps:

• Silicon Valley’s 90s transformation: 51:27–59:15

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7. The Dot-Com Bubble, Bust, and Echoes in Today’s Tech Landscape

- The structural and cultural dimensions of the dot-com boom and bust.

• The similarity between the infrastructure buildout of the dot-com era and earlier “ahead of demand” cycles (e.g., transcontinental railroad).
• The hype, overinvestment, subsequent fraud and collapse—parallels to the present-day AI boom.
• A bipartisan tech optimism, personified in the 1990s by both Vice President Gore and Speaker Gingrich.

Notable Quotes:

• “The dot com boom was also about infrastructure and wires…the Internet is a series of tubes, turns out…Very similar to the transcontinental railroad built ahead of demand.” — Margaret O’Mara (61:33)
• “Everything you just said about the Internet, you could just swap in the word AI.” — Ben Waterhouse (62:14)

Timestamps:

• Dot-com era analysis: 59:15–63:01

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8. Memory, Storytelling, and the Historian's Role

- The intersection of memory, narrative, and historical analysis — for both politics and technology.

• How collective amnesia and storytelling shape both how Silicon Valley views itself and how we see the Clinton years.
• Historians’ struggle with the mass of digital sources in the 21st century, and the blurred line between memoir, journalism, and historical analysis.

Notable Quotes:

• “Memories are the stories we tell about the past…the connective tissue that connects…Clinton himself and the Clinton years and Silicon Valley have been…really powerful storytelling.” — Margaret O’Mara (64:00)

Timestamps:

• Memory & historiography wrap-up: 63:15–67:13

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Notable Quotes (With Timestamps)

• "The government of Arkansas as president...holy cannoli. Does anyone realize that a state of 2 million people has just elected this president?" — Margaret O’Mara (14:00)
• “Bill Clinton is the most charismatic human being I have ever encountered in my life, full stop.” — Margaret O’Mara (15:24)
• “I misremembered so much...it has been incredibly useful...in understanding both the bounty and the limitations of oral history and first person accounts.” — Margaret O’Mara (28:52)
• “One of the things…of the commercial Internet age is information overload…and the spin cycle of the news cycle that begins with cable news…” — Margaret O’Mara (40:28)
• “The dot com boom was also about infrastructure and wires…the Internet is a series of tubes, turns out.” — Margaret O’Mara (61:33)
• “Memories are the stories we tell about the past…Clinton himself and the Clinton years and Silicon Valley have been…powerful storytelling.” — Margaret O’Mara (64:00)

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Memorable Moments

• Ben Waterhouse recounting his adolescent protest attire after Clinton’s election (07:36–09:46).
• O’Mara’s insider description of the Clinton war room on election night, complete with the legendary “It’s the economy, stupid” whiteboard (11:41–12:55).
• Personal reflection on the humility of writing history from lived experience and discovering the limits of memory (28:52–33:01).
• The recognition that today’s tech hype cycles (AI) are echoes of past booms and busts—from the 1990s dot-com flowerings to the present moment (59:15–63:01).

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Key Episode Timestamps

• 07:36 – Opening election memories and generational context
• 14:00 – O’Mara on the “smallness” and charm of Arkansas politics
• 20:00 – Centrist turn in the Democratic Party
• 28:52 – Writing history vs. living memory
• 37:41 – When is history “history”? Acceleration and the settling of events
• 43:09 – Early Clinton administration and tech (John Scully, new economy)
• 51:27 – Silicon Valley’s transformation in the 90s
• 59:15 – Dot-com bubble and its hard/soft infrastructure
• 63:15 – Memory, narrative, and the role of historians

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Summary Tone

The conversation is rich and reflective—humorous at times, candidly humble at others, with the light but deeply informed tone of colleagues at work. O’Mara’s narratives blend personal anecdotes with analytical clarity; the hosts interject with nostalgia, mild skepticism, and appreciation for both irony and earnestness. The overall spirit is critical yet affectionate toward the flux of politics and technology in late 20th-century America.

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Conclusion

This episode not only traces the intertwined development of American politics and technology in the 1990s, but also interrogates the very process of how we remember—and historicize—the recent past. Margaret O’Mara’s unique experience as both a participant and chronicler of these changes brings depth and self-awareness to issues of memory, bias, and storytelling that define how we (and future generations) come to understand the “end of the century moment.”

Transcript

[Margaret O'Meara]

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[Lee Vincel]

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[Margaret O'Meara]

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[Joe Fort]

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[Ben Waterhouse]

Hello listeners, and welcome to episode three of the I Heart 90s History podcast, where we explore how historians study the 1990s. A Ben I'm Ben Waterhouse from the University of North Carolina.

[Lee Vincel]

And I'm Lee Vincel from Virginia Tech. For this episode, we're talking to Margaret o', Meara, who is Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American History at the University of Washington, where she teaches and writes about technology and politics and the interaction between the two.

[Ben Waterhouse]

So we were especially excited to talk to Margaret because those two concepts, technology and politics, fit so well into the themes that we've started unpacking on this podcast about the history of the 90s. In our earlier episodes, which we definitely encourage you to go check out, we talked to David Kirsch about the dot com era and Angus Bergen about the rise of the Internet. And what was implicit in those conversations was that the fast pace of technological change, especially in information technology, became absolutely central to American life in the late 20th century. And Margaret allows us to push that connection first. Further, many listeners may be familiar with her for her first book, Cities of Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley, which was published in 2004, and more recently for her magisterial biography of Silicon Valley called the Silicon Valley and the Remaking of america, published in 2020.

[Lee Vincel]

Margaret also has a fascinating background when it comes to the politics of the 1990s and the Clinton administration. As a teenager, she was one of the Clinton family's babysitters. Then she got deeply involved in Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, and after the election, began working in the White House. She wrote about some of those experiences in her book, Pivotal Tuesdays for Elections that shaped the 20th century. Part of our goal in talking to Margaret was to use this conversation to pivot from a set of conversations about Silicon Valley and the.com boom and bust to. To a series of conversations about the Clinton administration and Democratic Party politics in the 1990s, which you'll be hearing about more soon. Our producer, Joe Fort, was also in the virtual room. Joe, what stood out to you about our conversation with Margaret?

[Joe Fort]

Well, I did really appreciate her unique perspective and the perspective she was able to share on Arkansas society, Arkansas politics. She. She described living across the street from the governor's mansion when Bill Clinton was governor and how just sort of like intimate and small politics was in that state. And I loved hearing about the evolution of both the political philosophy and the political strategy of the team that the Clintons were, as she described from the beginning. And, and it was really also interesting as we spoke about the Clinton presidency. We also talked about, as we do on this podcast, studying the 90s and sort of the timing of historians choosing focus, so relatively recent in the past. And the Clinton story was specifically complicated in that discussion because it's still unfolding. Right. And we talk about that as we spoke with Margaret about how the Clintons are still in the news. And even since we recorded this podcast, there's been, like, testimony from both of them on the Epstein files. And so there's a lot of, like, sort of big plot points still sort of hanging out there with regard to the Clintons. And that sort of dovetailed with the other thing I really liked about talking with Margaret, and that was the way she addressed memory as it sits in the historian's toolbox. She talked about, like, remembering and misremembering and how that could lead to different sort of questions and directions of inquiry. And we also talked about memory just in a more broader way with regard to things that happened in one's lifetime and how that's in conversation with looking at the history of those times. And that's right in our wheelhouse for this podcast. So that was all very rich.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah, totally. That's really one of the big meta questions of this entire project. You know, how do you, how do you reconcile your personal memory, your lived memory with your kind of objectivity as a, as a historian? And how do we make those decisions? This is a great conversation for bringing those conversations out.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, totally. So the way we got this conversation started was with our own memories, thinking back to what we were all doing around the time Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992.

[Ben Waterhouse]

All right, can I just tell you about how I Wore Black to 9th grade on the 4th of November of 1992?

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I mean, that is actually the entirety of the story. But I remember being a kind of contrarian 14 year old and, and so my, my best friend and I wore like black sweaters or button shirts. I don't even remember what it was. But we, we like wore whatever black clothing we had in mourning the day after Bill Clinton was elected president. This is in suburban Massachusetts, so you can imagine that this was a minority opinion of the subject. And I think somebody asked if we were mourning the Perot campaign. And I think my friend was, and I think I was actually mourning the Bush administration. And so that was my kind of entree point to this at the age of 14. And the only other thing I remember about that is I remember waking up that morning and my mother was getting ready for work and she always had Good Morning America on when she was just kind of getting ready in the morning. And they had an interview with Dan Quayle, who was, you know, looked like hell. Like the dude was just, he clearly had been up all night. And he was the one who they got, you know, shoveled off to talk to, you know, Charlie Gibson or whatever about losing. And, and, and my mother was kind of bummed. She was just like, she was just sad for the Bush administration. And you know, she was, she had turned 43 the day before. So she was like a, you know, middle aged, boomer, professional woman and was just like profoundly disappointed that the country had shoveled George H.W. bush out the door and embraced this, this Arkansas guy, Bill Clinton. Yeah, that was, that was me. And I was wearing, I wore black just to just to like, get the goat of my social studies teacher who was this giant Massachusetts, you know, liberal Democrat. So. Welcome to our podcast, Margaret.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Welcome to the 90s.

[Ben Waterhouse]

That's right. But I share that only to kind of segue to, you and ask, what do you remember about that election night? Where were you on election night 1992?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Where was I? Well, let me start with my. Where was I on election day? Because my, you know, it's. Now I reflect back on it and I'm like, well, of course I became a political historian. I started election day in a bank vault in Detroit counting money, cash, putting cash in envelopes for what was then colloquially known as walking around money or also quote, unquote, volunteer reimbursements for the Michigan campaign. I had spent the whole of. Since June of 92, I'd been working as an employee of the Clinton Gore 92 campaign in Little Rock headquarters, Little Rock being my hometown. I've got the best origin story of any unemployed history major ever. I graduated in June 92 without a job, went home to my childhood bedroom and thought, well, maybe I'll just volunteer in the campaign for a while while I figure out what I really want to do. Anyway, I worked on the campaign the last several weeks of it. I went up to Michigan to do get out the vote for the swing states and then flew after doing my counting the cash in the bank vault. There was just a pile of $20,000 on the table in front of us that we're sitting there putting in an envelope. Oh, yeah, that's. I went from there to the airport, got on a flight to Little Rock. I'm sure I had to connect through Chicago or something because there's very few things. Like there's no direct flight to Little Rock from most places. And I show up and go straight to campaign headquarters, which was in a building that was a couple blocks away from the old State House, which is where the victory party was going to be. And by that point the legendary war room, which was the place presided over by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos throughout the campaign.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Did it still have the sign on it?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Oh, yeah. Oh, heck yeah. Yeah. The whiteboard was there. Other signs kind of printed out were all over the room.

[Ben Waterhouse]

This is the sign that said, it's the economy, stupid.

[Margaret O'Meara]

It's the economy. Yeah. It was a whiteboard that said, it said health care, always healthcare. It's the economy, stupid. And then the third thing that I can't remember now, but I should, and there were signs all printed out in kind of proto Microsoft Word in black and white that said speed kills. That was all about. It's a 24 hour news cycle and the fastest you are to the story, you're on top of the story. So these things have really embedded themselves in my psyche. But I walk in there by about, I'm guessing it was probably around 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon. No, it was maybe a little closer. Happy hour was well underway, let's put it that way. The returns were coming in. Whiskey had been broken out, a lot of whiskey. There were some people standing on desks. It was as wild and crazy as early 90s campaign people could get. Policy wonks, people were loosening their ties.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Did you know that it was in the bag?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yes. Although actually people more seasoned than me were more confident. And even the last. It was interesting. The last week or so of the campaign, it was pretty clear that Clinton was gonna win. And I didn't believe it. I was still a kind of newbie and I didn't understand why. The elders around me, the campaign professionals, were kind of getting like, okay, this is gonna happen. And the polling was just trending our way. And Ross Perot, thank God for Ross Perot. I mean he is why Bill Clinton became president. Cuz it split the vote. That the Bush campaign's major calculation, much to the sadness of you and your mom, Ben, was that they thought that Ross Perot was going to bleed votes from Bill Clinton. And in fact he was more of an impact on Bush. It was a change election and Bill Clinton was the change candidate. I mean it's always a change election. Let's be clear. When is it not a change election?

[Ben Waterhouse]

It's always the most important election of our lifetime.

[Margaret O'Meara]

It always is. It always is. Yeah. So, yeah, so after some. I was not a big whiskey drinker at the time, nor am I now, but I definitely, I think I had some, some of that happy hour, extended happy hour whiskey. And then everyone kind of as en masse, kind of made their way down by the evening time, just down the street to where they closed off the streets to the old State House. And we stood there below the portico as Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and Alan Tippergor came out and it was victory. It was extraordinary. And I sat there going, holy cow. The government of Arkansas as president. Does anyone know how small Arkansas is? I mean, I'd grown up in Little Rock dying to get out of there and successfully escaped. And then I'm like, holy cannoli. Does anyone realize that a state of 2 million people has just elected this president? And he was someone that, you know, if you grew up in Arkansas in the 80s, you knew Bill Clinton because it's a tiny place. And so, you know, it was really kind of extraordinary and continues to just blow my mind.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Joe what do you remember about it?

[Joe Fort]

Well, first, I'm curious, growing up in Arkansas and Little Rock, what was your sense of Bill Clinton before that election cycle?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Well, Bill Clinton is the most charismatic human being I have ever encountered in my life, full stop. The guy has a glow, an aura, a something that is this magnetism that transcends his, you know, his well known women problems, but is something that, and no less than Newt Gingrich agrees with me on this. You can be his political rival and you can be, you know, no matter your gender, no matter what, if you come in the force field that is Bill Clinton. And I remember, like as a, you know, young person, I was in third grade when he was elected governor. I lived in the same. The house I grew up in was. And this, trust me, this makes me sound fancier than I am. But Arkansas is not fancy and everything's tiny. But I grew up in a house across the street from the governor's mansion and which my husband, who was a New Yorker when he first came to visit Little Rock in the late 90s, he's like, this is it. So let's just calibrate. But yeah, there's this intimacy. But even with that intimacy and kind of like, oh, I would come home from college and go for a ride and the governor would be running in the neighborhood and you'd say hi. And you know, even with that intimacy, I still remember every time I met him because you get in this force field of where for the 30 seconds, 45 seconds that you're in conversation with him, you were the most important person in the world and all he wants is your vote. Doesn't matter if you're not a voter or if he's not running for office. He has this extraordinary political intelligence and this combination of kind of a. He's a total political animal and he's an ultimate policy wonk. And that combination is extraordinarily rare.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, he's a nerd is what I read.

[Margaret O'Meara]

He is a big nerd. Yes, yes. And he really digs deep in the, you know, in the weeds of policy and also just can do the, you know, what needs to be done, the glad handing and the, you know, the politicking that needs to happen. It's really extraordinary.

[Joe Fort]

Yeah, that charisma is something I came to know publicly Right. During his eight years. And. But I wasn't on board with that, like, at first.

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Joe Fort]

This was like this election and the one previous or the lead up to it were a kind of political awakening for me in college. Right. That's when I started to pay attention, and immediately I was just so. Obviously, my experience of 92 is not as insider as yours or as contrarian as Ben's, but it's contrary I thought of it as contrarian because, like, hey,

[Ben Waterhouse]

38% of the country was on my side.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah.

[Joe Fort]

I felt there was this inevitability to the Reagan Bush thing to keep rolling. And I was hesitant to embrace the polls, but I was immediately out of the gate. As left as I remain today. That's where I went and that's where I stayed. So Clinton didn't appeal to me because of that. But yeah. And I remember we're talking about memories of that election night. I remember I was out of college, but I was still hanging out with people in my college town in a house where we had done a lot of, you know, sort of just drinking and talking and hanging out. And we had this. We drew a map on the wall and we colored in states and, like, it was kind of like a party atmosphere. But, yeah, that's. Those are my memories. They're tightly connected to my political awakening, my starting to pay attention to politics and society generally, I suppose. So it's key for me in that way.

[Lee Vincel]

Margaret and Ben, something Joe and I have talked about, riffing off that before is like, how with the Democrats, this is kind of famous, but I feel like we don't talk about it enough in the primaries, there's often people further to the left than, like, who ends up getting chosen. Right. And that's happened, like, again and again. And like, the 90s were this kind of real centrist moment, though. I mean, that's kind of like something people say about it, right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. I mean, I think you can't. You can't think about. It's impossible to think about the 92 election without the shadow of 88. And one of the interesting things about the Clinton campaign is there were a heck of a lot of Dukakis, 88 people on it, in fact. So much so that, you know. Well, there were some. There were some differences, but it was all, you know, the entire campaign was staffed with people, you know, had been in the White house wilderness for 12 years. So no one had been in the executive branch. There were lots of former congressional staffers. People like George Stephanopoulos, for example, had worked on the Hill their whole career. It was a very young campaign. You know, the people like George were 10 years older than me, which means they were in their early 30s. They seemed impossibly old, and now they seem impossibly young to me that there was a, you know, that coming out of the Dukakis defeat in 88, there's this very famous, you know, post mortem by Bill Galston and Elaine Kmark, who are kind of famous DLC Democratic Leadership Council policy aides that then become Clinton aides and go on and on beyond that. That's like we've just gotta, we've have to completely, you know, turn away from this left. You know, we've gotta some. We've been painted as liberal because keep in mind Mike Dukakis was not a lefty at all.

[Ben Waterhouse]

He was a centrist Jesse Jackson, right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was the centrist solution of 1988. And then he very successfully was painted by Lee Atwater and George H. W Bush as a liberal and making that a dirty word. So there's this real kind of political pragmatism that is just suffusing the Clinton campaign in going to 92, just in ways that kind of triumphed. I mean we talk about the 90s kind of being the reality bites ironic Gen X. We kind of were to be earnest and to be. You had to. It was not cool. And I'll say that even as a very young person, I was, you know, I didn't have this political earnestness that I, you know, sort of saw I see on display at other times and other moments in history. There just wasn't that kind of. Sure, there were plenty of true believers. I don't want to sort of speak for everyone, but there was kind of this. We're going to do what it takes to win. And I also came onto the campaign, you know, the camp by June, by the time someone like me shows up and the nomination is in pretty much in hand.

[Joe Fort]

The.

[Margaret O'Meara]

There's been such a bruising primary. I mean, it's just been so, so, so nasty and there's, you know, you're doing what it takes.

[Ben Waterhouse]

So the generational aspect of this is fascinating to me because, you know, on the one hand you have someone like you, Margaret, who you know, at the time, well, it was sort of. And you and Joe, I think probably prime Gen X by kind of birth cohort and then like me, a bit younger at the very end of that cohort, but still a kid. Bill Clinton himself is in his early 40s.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Right. So he's. But he is the oldest baby boomer you can be.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Right.

[Ben Waterhouse]

So even in the 20 years between you and him, or 20 some years, I guess, you know, there's, it's still a Generational change. But I guess the question is, is this the baby boomer's time to shine with all of their sort of 60s optimism and you know, don't stop thinking about tomorrow stuff, or is it the Gen X who are, you know, at the time the youngest people possibly involved with that sort of cynicism and you know, try hard is not cool and all that kind of. I wish we had the term try hard in the 90s.

[Lee Vincel]

That would have been so great.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I love that that exists today. But anyway, I mean, what do you make of this? And this is sort of asking you to put the historian hat on, not necessarily the participant hat. But yeah, it's a generational shift, but it's a shift from the older like the Reagan and Bush generation and you know, to the baby boomers.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, yeah. And this was very much a baby boom presidency. That's true. The people who were in the positions of power at the top, the people who were in the Senate confirmed cabinet secretary and sub cabinet positions were baby boomer age. And yeah, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were 45 and 46 when they were elected, which now again to me at age 55 seems impossibly young. And also now in our age of the gerontocracy seems impossibly young. And that was. And that also contoured the whole campaign, which was about Vietnam and kind of how you what the litmus test of what happens. What did you do or not do you with their.

[Ben Waterhouse]

It was only 17 years afterwards, which at the time seemed like forever. But you know, today that would be like talking about 2008.

[Margaret O'Meara]

That's right. Yeah, that's right. It's like, what did you do in the financial crisis? What did you do in Vietnam? It's about the same. And so and it was very, you know, the Clintons as a duo. And I think it is worth kind of thinking of them as a political duo, not only because of her subsequent political career, but because of sort of her. The role that Hillary played throughout his governorship and presidency and his presidential run. You know, interestingly, you know, Joe, you probably would have liked the 1978, 79 vintage Bill Clinton who you know, they came in, he came into the governor's office when he was elected at age 31, just shockingly young. And it was two year term then for Arkansas governor. And they came in and they were like, we're gonna change the world. And there was lots of baby boomer idealism and it was all of their friends from, you know, Wellesley and Washington D. And they were coming in hot. And Hillary didn't change her name and she didn't get, she still wore her glasses, she didn't dye her hair. And Arkansas did not like that

[Ben Waterhouse]

she

[Margaret O'Meara]

didn't dye her hair.

[Ben Waterhouse]

What color should she have dyed her hair?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Well, she had dark blonde hair, that sort of photo and then she lightened it, so. So he's elected in 78, he's unelected, he's defeated in 80. He comes back in 1982 as a, you know, and look, he's governing Arkansas. He is like attuned to the will of the voters, but it also kind of, he comes in as a more centrist, interesting politician. Hillary Clinton is now Hillary Rodham Clinton wearing contacts and has a blond bob. So there's that. I will, incidentally, Hillary Clinton was the first married woman I had ever encountered in my life at age 8 who'd kept her unmarried name. So that's Arkansas 1978 for you. So there was a real. But they had a real kind of reformist urge. They came with education programs and healthcare and anti poverty programs and a lot of things that were very, you know, kind of not centrist in the least. Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

Also Democrat.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. So there was a real, you know, there was a real kind of calculus and a real shift and that just, you know, that was part of what made his national reputation as a leader of the dlc, the Democratic centrist organization, which was about, let's figure out a way in the Reagan era how to get beyond liberalism. It was neoliberalism of kind of its first, in its kind of classic iteration,

[Ben Waterhouse]

you know, neoliberal with a hyphen, almost.

[Margaret O'Meara]

With a hyphen, yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Neo, hyphen liberalism. Yeah. So among your scholarly work is this book, Pivotal Tuesdays, that came out now 10, 12 years ago.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Am I right about that? 10 years ago.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah, yeah. Which is great for classroom teaching. I will say I have used it with great success. And just so listeners know that the Tuesdays in question are election days. And this is a survey of, of four particularly important presidential elections across the 20th century with sort of interstitial chapters summarizing big movements in political history that kind of shaped and were shaped by those, those elections, the last of which is the 1992 election. And so, you know, you, which is where you spell out your actual role in this and your, your experience as a staffer. I'm curious as a, as a historian and just someone who's interested in the period, but also the writing of history, what it was like to write the 92 chapter as history. And what did you, you know, how'd you feel about that?

[Margaret O'Meara]

I'm glad you asked that question. It was humbling is what it was. So this, the genesis of Pivotal Tuesdays was actually a set of four lectures I delivered at public lectures I delivered at UW in the fall of 2012. So that was the Obama Romney election cycle. And as you all may know, you know, putting together four public lectures that are televised, they're scripted. That in four consecutive weeks was a massive amount of work. And my husband, after witnessing me going through that whole process, he's like, well, why don't you just turn that into a book? Which is a very good idea. Thank you, Jeff, for that idea. And so with some, you know, some revision and expansion and all that, that was the genesis of it. So I started with those, the four. It was 1912, 1932, 68 and 92 and 92 I had chosen for the series. Cause I'm like, well, you know, that makes sense. I'll tell. I was a staffer and da da, da, da. So. But when I actually turned to turning this into a book manuscript and also with this assumption, like, well, I remember what happened. This is going to be an easy lift, right? And I'm going to have insider knowledge that people don't have. Well, first of all, I knew nothing about the inside of the Bush campaign or the Perot campaign because I wasn't on them. And so I had to approach those really fresh. And it also just simply the entire research process, including into the Clinton campaign itself and the Clinton archives, was humbling in that I misremembered so much. And if anything, it has been incredibly useful to me in understanding both the bounty and the limitations of oral history and first person accounts, it really kind of actually was the perfect ramp up for me. Then in my book after that, which was the code about Silicon Valley, where I did a ton of interviews of people who. And I was asking them to recall events of 20, 30, 40, 50 years prior. I understood. Even when you, you know, even when it's me and I'm trying, I have this idea about this is what, this is the way 92 went. I totally forgot things. I misplaced times and dates and people, even big things.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Like what was the biggest thing, do you think?

[Margaret O'Meara]

I think I had memory holed the whole timeline of Ross Perot dropping out and coming back in. I just completely like he was there. And then I kind of like, oh yeah, he dropped out. And then he came back and it was weird.

[Ben Waterhouse]

There was like the explanation was always very vague. It had to do with Republican sabotage of his daughter's wedding.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, yeah. It was weird.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And his position in the polls changed.

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I mean, he was like way up there in the spring before he dropped out.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Uh huh. Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

Interesting.

[Margaret O'Meara]

So it's a real. In fact, he was number one in the polls the day I signed on the Clinton campaign. So that was.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I was also thinking, like in June, you said, right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

In June. Yeah, the beginning of June, when I was. And I was thinking to myself, well, I'll do this for like a little over the summer, then I'm gonna go to like a real place and do a real thing. Because.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Has that ever been explained to your knowledge? Like, like, are you satisfied with that whole story?

[Margaret O'Meara]

No, it's not clear. Yeah, it's very clear. I think that they. Yeah. And it is, you know, unsurprisingly, the Perot election. You know, the archive is not rich there. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so it was a really. It's a really interesting exercise. I'm glad I did it. But with all those caveats. I think the fact that I had lived it did, you know, brought. I brought a perspective to those two chapters. The final. The fourth election that wouldn't have been. I couldn't do to the others. I mean, there is something. It's both, it's both an asset and it can give you blind spots. I think that the dangerous thing is that you ask questions you wouldn't normally ask and you also forget to ask some important questions.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Did you talk to the Clintons at all?

[Margaret O'Meara]

I didn't, I didn't, no. I sent him a copy of the book. Like, hey. Didn't get a response. And they were in mind. I sent him a copy of my other book. No, I didn't, I didn't. I didn't do any interviews for that. It was interesting. The other thing about Pivotal Tuesdays is I kind of. Because it was a book. I had the classic historian's second book problem where I was totally grinding my gears on a project that eventually became the code, but was something completely different at that point. And Pivotal Tuesday has kind of presented itself to me as a. As a really. Kind of a way through that writer's block and that second book problem. And I really didn't approach it like a historical monograph that I kind of was like, well, these elections have been. There's so much good secondary literature. I'm not going to try to, you know, I'm going to just approach this in a more synthetic fashion. Rather than sort of addressing it.

[Lee Vincel]

Both have done that.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yes, totally. And it seems to be the book that sells the best, it turns out.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, yeah. Because there's so much good scholarship out. He's like, well, and also. Yeah. Things that were easily sort of a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of primary source material. So, yeah, so would I. And it's interesting. Like, you know, if I went back, I've toyed with, and I say this with some reluctance because I don't think I'm gonna write this book, or at least not in any time in the near future, but I've toyed with the idea of a dual biography of the Clintons, of writing one. Cause I think there is something.

[Lee Vincel]

Oh, that'd be cool, actually.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Interesting story there. I just think everyone, including me, needs more temporal distance from the whole thing before it could be written about in a way that would really do it. That justice is a piece of history.

[Lee Vincel]

That's an interesting issue we're dealing with on this podcast. And we're actually going to talk to like, Bruce Schulman, one of the early historians of the 70s, about this whole issue.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Like, temporal distance.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And I mean, the thing that I've been surprised at from my own perspective is how my personal view of the problem of temporal distance has changed as my own, as I have aged.

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Ben Waterhouse]

You know, Bruce Schulman was writing about the 70s in 2001 is when his, his book came out. And I was reading it in like 2003 when I started graduate school, and I was like, yeah, we can do the 70s. And I was 25. And if you do the same math today, I'm like, oh, I don't know about that. That seems a little like we need, as you just said, Margaret, we need more time. We need more distance. We can't possibly talk about the Clinton administration.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And yet 20 years ago, we did it for the previous, you know, the two decades previous.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, well, actually, I think we can talk about the Clinton administration. I think the 90s is totally fair game. I think the Clintons themselves, they've continued to make news well into the 2020s.

[Lee Vincel]

Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yes.

[Margaret O'Meara]

And that's the rub. Right.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Last week even.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yes, yes. So it's a moving. Yeah. Talk about it like you could cut

[Lee Vincel]

it off at some date, though.

[Margaret O'Meara]

You can, you can. I mean, trade editors don't like that very much, but you can, you can. But the 90s are, I think, really kind of coming into their own. And we do. The dust has settled and here's Another benchmark I have, well, this is my teaching benchmark, is that that window's shifted a lot. You know, we now have college, traditional college age students who were all born in this century, most of them born after 9, 11, 2001. There are things like when I ask my students, given these open ended questions at the end of the US survey, like, what are some things that you would love to learn about in a history class that you just have not been. It hasn't been taught to you yet. What do you want to know? And they want to know about the Iraq war, and they want to know about gun culture and mass shootings and why the NRA is so powerful. They want to know about things that are for us middle aged folk, like, well, that's. Oh, that's a little too soon. But I think there's a. My benchmark's 25 years. Dust is subtle. You can kind of build out the contours. And look, I do not practice any of this. I write about very alive tech moguls, which makes me tear my hair out, but it's very difficult. But there are some things you can perceive, you know, certainly the 90s is. You guys are in it. We're in it. It's good. We're okay.

[Ben Waterhouse]

All right, well, so let's do it. Lee, you had a question about the 90s?

[Joe Fort]

Yeah, yeah, hang on a second. Here's a question about temporality before we move on. Right?

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

Good.

[Margaret O'Meara]

I love it.

[Joe Fort]

So Ben, your perspective changed and Margaret, you're saying the 90s is fair game. I'm wondering, because it's settled is what you said. Right, so like, like is there something about acceleration that plays into this?

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Joe Fort]

Like the acceleration of technological change, of societal Change, and a 24 hour news cycle and things like this. Is it accelerated pace, settling things faster than it used to?

[Lee Vincel]

I don't know.

[Joe Fort]

Is that playing into.

[Ben Waterhouse]

You asked three historians about accelerating change. Grumpy answers.

[Lee Vincel]

I'm sorry, you violated. See, Joe, this is why you're here, bud. You gotta violate the.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Joe Fort]

So what then plays into whether or not something is settled?

[Lee Vincel]

Like if I think that's true, to

[Joe Fort]

me it says we've moved on from. That things are different enough that it's settled.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Oh, I think when I say settled, I think of the dust settling after the building collapse. I don't think any argument settled. Otherwise we historians would be out of business. Right? Like our whole business is, you know, disrupting and troubling the archive. Troubling the narrative. Going back and saying, well, what if you looked at it this way, but I do to your point about not really acceleration, but I think one of the things, the hallmarks of the, you know, commercial Internet age is information overload and the. Yeah. The kind of intensity of the spin cycle of the news cycle that that actually begins with cable news. And one of the things I write about in pivotal Tuesdays about the 1992 election is how this is kind of the first CNN election in so many dimensions that cable news provides free media for one also it elevates the bar for what is news drops dramatically because you have so much time to film philosopher. So when it's the evening news of 30 minutes, when it's Walter Cronkite and company sort of deciding what's important to put in front of America's eyeballs for 30 minutes, you gotta. That's a high bar.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And so breaking news is something that everyone knew was gonna happen.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. And so now you just have. So that's one of the reasons, you know, contributes to the kind of scandal driven politics of 80s and 90s and beyond. It's information overload to breakthrough. You've gotta just, you know, true crime and sex scandals and all this stuff and then just launder it again and again and again every hour on the hour because you got 24 hours.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And that does accelerate. Joe. I think you can, you can trace, you know, CNN circa 1985 is slow potatoes right in the 90s and then it's like 96, I think is that when Fox is created and MSNBC comes along a couple years after that. And so by the time you get into the period of 9, 11 in the Iraq war in the 2000s, you've got this new ecosystem. And then of course, you know, putting news on social media a couple of years after that also ratchets. So it's a process. And I think as historians we can see that as an accelerating process. It might not be that time itself accelerates, but a specific thing like media consumption does.

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Joe Fort]

That's like how I read settled. Right. Like if cable, the cable news cycle ceases to be the thing that controls how we're digesting all this, then it becomes fair game for historians.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Right.

[Joe Fort]

Like as something is still alive and dynamic and change, like for example, social media, you're not going to write a history of the way social media carries sort of perspectives around an election or something like that.

[Lee Vincel]

But there's stuff on it, but it's sociological.

[Joe Fort]

Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

I think as historians we probably wouldn't tackle it yet.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. But we can Talk about its first 10 years. Right. Sort of face. Yeah, maybe.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Well, and this problem with this is also something you dealt with in the code, which is your biography of Silicon Valley, which, you know, you do bring up to the, to as close to the present as you can, but it doesn't, it doesn't. No history feels the same when you're wrapping it up compared to the meat of it when it's kind of in the case of a sort of biography style book that you wrote the earlier periods.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

So Margaret, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on and it's, and it's fun to have you here is that we knew we could talk to you about a couple different 90s topics. So we also want to get you to talk to you about Silicon Silicon Valley a little bit. And we wanted, I wanted to kind of transition to that conversation in two ways. And the first is that, you know, how was the Clinton administration in your experience, like being a part of it, like in the offices, like how is it relating to Silicon Valley? I mean there's this kind of narratives out there about the, like those neoliberals we were talking about the New Democrats and the Atari Democrat, like these, that there is like the, the parties having some relationship, you know, Al Gore seen as being a part of that. How did that continue into, you know, into the White House in Europe?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. But in a different way. I mean the, the Silicon Valley of 1992 was still one dominated by hardware companies like HP and Apple to some degree. Although Steve Jobs famously kind of always had these Democrats like from Gary Hart forward trying to pursue him and get an endorsement. And he's like, eh, whatever.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Was he at Apple? Was he back at Apple by 19?

[Margaret O'Meara]

He was. No, he's still in the wilderness. So John Scully, who was CEO of Apple, who was the one who famously fired Steve in 1985 and was still around in 92, Apple is not having a good run, but Scully is really tight with the transition. And in fact. So Clinton and Gore have this economic conference in Little Rock in December of 92 during the transition period. And so where tech functioned in that. So there were two things. One, there was this famous kind of group endorsement by Silicon Valley CEOs, including the CEO of HP who was a Republican, a number of former Republicans, Republicans or Republicans endorsing Clinton Gore in September of 92, which was a big deal because up until then Silicon Valley had been very rock, ribbed Republican Reaganite Democrats were few and far between. And in terms of the CEO class because they're business people.

[Ben Waterhouse]

That was just one of those anti regulatory. Yeah.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Anti labor. But they were really seen as. Tech was not seen. I mean, certainly Al Gore was the technologist in chief and kind of a super geek and early adopter and was really interested in the science of all of it, too, kind of on the academic side. And Clinton wasn't that interested in the details, but he likes powerful people and rich people and smart people and tech people are those things. But in the beginning, tech was kind of. Scully's a great example. Scully was there not because he was Steve Jobs and kind of this magical, think different sort of guy. He was a CEO of a company that was a quote, unquote, new economy company. This is the age of the famous new economy. Right. Zantec was part of that. And so Clinton, the first State of the Union, in the First Lady's box, which is where all the symbolically significant people sit, flanking Hillary Clinton on one side, Alan Greenspan on the other, John Scully. So there's your new economy in a nutshell.

[Lee Vincel]

Holy shit.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Holy shit. Exactly. But in those first term. And so I was there during the first term in the White House, and I remember there was one guy in the press office who was like the online. The Internet guy. And he had.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I think every office has that guy, right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. But no, everyone was like, what is he. This is so weird. Like, who's on the Internet? First he was like, bulletin board guy. You know, like the electronic bulletin boards. And then he. I mean, in his office was. If I remember correctly, it was like a former janitor's closet with no windows. Like, he was. This was not a big thing. And it was kind of like, oh, this is Gore's kind of information superhighway thing that no one really understands. Whatever. We're just busy here doing healthcare. And then a couple years later, I actually went and worked in Gore's office. Not on Internet stuff, not on tech stuff. I was working on empowerment zones, which is the, you know, urban reinvestment policy. And I remember, well, when I was again in the Clinton archives researching for the code, and I'm looking up these memos about the Gores having these groups of Silicon Valley people come, and this is sort of 96, 97, to come to the White House for meetings. And I suddenly had this flash of like, oh, my gosh. I was in the room next door to the room where it happened, and I remember them walking down the hall and I'm like, who are these dorks in their khakis and their blue shirts with no ties. Like, who's not wearing a suit at the White House? That's weir. And so there I was, history happening right next door, and me being like, oh, I'm just here working on my commerce grant. I don't know, I just missed it. Missed the whole thing. Another moment of humility. Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

For whatever it's worth, I have the exact same feeling about the founding of Facebook, which was, like, across the street from the Harvard History department library that I was studying for graduate school exams in when Zuckerberg was creating it.

[Margaret O'Meara]

All right. Questionable life choices on offering the wrong way.

[Lee Vincel]

No. So that's awesome, Margaret, because I think that really nicely sets up the next transition question I wanted to ask you, which is about cities of knowledge and your first book. Right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

And the subtitle of that was Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Right. And so, I mean, I imagine that grew out of your dissertation or. It did.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Lee Vincel]

And so you were thinking about Silicon Valley already pretty early, right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

I was. I was the dissertation. So I had the kind of, you know, fortune, you know, right place, right time. Who knows what I did? Against the advice of my dissertation committee, I moved across the country while I was writing my dissertation. I was at grad school at Penn. I finished my comps, and it was the spring of 2000, and I was newly married. My husband, we decided he had gotten a job offer at a dot com startup in Silicon Valley earlier that spring, and we decided to, what the heck, let's move to California just for fun.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Which we could add is the peak of the dot com bubble.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Right before the NASDAQ drops.

[Margaret O'Meara]

We moved into our apartment the day the NASDAQ was at its highest point ever.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Wow.

[Margaret O'Meara]

And so we were there for all of the downhill. So timing. And I find myself in. But still, the boom is still Booming in late 2000, early 2001, when I am sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco, just like you, Ben, just right next door to where people are doing the things. And I'm like, what am I doing with my life? I have made terrible life choices. But being there kind of got me. Made me realize that universities were the central actors of my story. And Stanford's role in the foundation of Silicon Valley was really critical and also helped me appreciate, you know, kind of. Yeah. How the sort of how the valley's origins, where to come from, and that this was an unlikely place to become what it was in the 40s. And also that the entire place, the entire Tech community had a severe case of collective amnesia when you talked about the role of government in. And this really has continued for years and years and years. Now, I don't have to convince people as much, but when you tried to sort of push back on the free market miracle, they were convinced that they were engaged in and say, you know, the defense. There was a lot of defense contracting then and there still is. They were like, no, no, no, no, no. It was all just Steve Jobs in. You know, kind of magically all this tech appeared. And the secret of Silicon Valley is that government got out of the way, which is not the case at all. So the historiographical side note to this,

[Ben Waterhouse]

by the way, that's the same year that you were, you know, 2001, that Lisa McGurr's Suburban warriors came out. And it's not, I don't think, a coincidence that she spends the whole first chapter of that book making just that point, like all through the 40s and 50s and 60s, like, this is what was undergirding the California A tech mirror.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yes, yes. She, like me, was driven crazy by all of these tech people being like, it's just a free market, you know, like, there's no such thing as a free market. Stop.

[Lee Vincel]

Nice. Yeah, I mean. So one question I wanted to ask you about, you know, you wrote this whole book on the history of Silicon Valley is like, like when you think of the 90s in Silicon Valley, how is it different than what happened there before? Was there like what was changing during that time?

[Margaret O'Meara]

It was, it was a profound transformation and one that's kind of harder to see. Well, sometimes it's kind of forgotten. What's forgotten is that Silicon Valley, up until the commercialization of the Internet and the dot com boom, was really primarily a computer hardware platform place. And for some time it was a manufacturing place, chips and computers, the software, up until, you know, when, up until the time of, you know, Bill Gates and Paul Allen figured out how to make desktop toss software a very lucrative business. Software was just not a standalone industry. And what happens in the 1990s is this confluence of deregulation, the Telecom act of 1996, that is sort of pumping all of this money and opportunity into the system in terms of infrastructure as well as kind of creating rules of the road for the Internet that create a pretty smooth Runway for the growth of the industry and was very favorable to the Internet industry as the kind of the David among the Goliaths of the telecoms. So that's a rich irony there. And also The Wall street and financialization. Thank you, Alan Greenspan. So Alan Greenspan, sitting next to Hillary Clinton, played a role in that. And the stock market booming, a lot of money, looking for a home and putting it in tech stocks. And this turns Silicon Valley into the new Wall street that you have MBAs. So some of the, you know, I started grad school in 1997, friends of mine who started at Wharton again, better, different Life Choices in 1997. Two years later, we're going out to the Valley because that's where you know, money was gonna be made. You know, it had it. Suddenly people have been making money. There have been, there have been Ferraris in Silicon Valley before the late 90s. But the late 90s is kind of when it becomes this sort of a different kind of business story. And it's entirely a software story. It's software networking. And then when you move into the post.com boom Silicon Valley and then really after the financial crisis of 2008, you get the super sized Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley 2.0, 3.0. Utterly different in scale and scope and wealth and kind of find than ever before. So there's these really distinctive. I only wrote the code. I brought the code up to what was on the present day, June 2018, as I turned in my manuscript at my editor's suggestion, because it was a trade book. And at first I bristled at it because I was like, well, I'm going to end at the dot com bust and that's fine. I was again doing the 25 year rule of like, that's history and I'm just going to stop there. And I'm so glad I did the last section. It was very difficult to write. It was the hardest one to write.

[Lee Vincel]

Oh, interesting.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, yeah. Because it was so present tense and so moving. It gave a logical, a narrative logic to the rest of the book. It kind of helped me focus the rest of the narrative on. All we're doing is we're figuring out how we get to now, the now being the platform era, not to be present, but to be like, okay, is this, is this phenomenon, is this moment, is this person, is this company helping us understand how we get to now? And that writing about the 21st century valley helped me properly understand that this was kind of a new animal altogether. It still had the same building blocks and a lot of the same players and people, same people deciding the winners and the same networks. But the product is different, the impact is different. It migrates from being a technology that you, you have on your desk and then you turn off at the end of the day and leave to this ubiquitous. It's in everything. It's, it's everywhere.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Do you think was the 90s part of a transition as well in the sort of cultural place of, of, of Silicon Valley? I mean, in particular, I've always been curious or I've been curious about when, when tech companies became, you know, archetypal big business or if they ever did. I mean, I know there's a, there's a tech exceptionalism, right, that, that people in that industry like to say that we're not the same as those big bad smokestack industries. For a while that seemed to be a winning argument, but my sense is that it's less of a winning argument. But yeah, you know, that, that. Yeah, no, you're, you're, you're, you're big.

[Lee Vincel]

The master of understatement today.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, right.

[Ben Waterhouse]

But I mean, how do you trace that, that sort of trajectory?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, it was I think in the 80s and the 90s together from the personal computer, when the personal computer moves in and it becomes time's machine of the year in 1982 to through the 1990s. The Silicon Valley story is not the sort of business page one story. It's still sort of off to the side of the main act of American capitalism. But it is a very exciting, sexy story where it's this kind of the phoenix rising from the ashes of the 1970s and the ashes of the manufacturing economy. It's one of the reasons that Democrats, New Democrats kind of embrace it. So such enthusiasm. This is a business we can get our heads around. No smokestacks, although terribly polluting, but we just hide it. And it's helmed, these companies, helmed by figures like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, these new style CEOs. So there's a sort of a fascinating story to be told simply by looking at Time Magazine's covers featuring dot com, sorry tech CEOs from the 80s and the 80s and 90s. And just the way that they're being persuaded, these golden geeks. That was the headline of the issue that featured Marc Andreessen, who was then the 24 year old CO founder of Netscape. Now he is a venture capitalist and vocal Trumpist and defender of writer of manifestos. Very, you know, he was a golden geek and this kind of fascination with these. And Jeff Bezos in his pleated khakis and books era before we went on all Iron man on us. So there's a real, there's been a lot of Transformations. I mean that's why I can't stop writing and talking about these guys because they just give me so much material. But it's an interesting kind of off to the side. It isn't the big and the line that they're sort of selling. Kinder, gentler capitalism is one that is really compelling. And then it kind of really reaches its apex with Google. Founded in 19978 by a couple of nerdy grad, the ultimate golden geeks, these computer science graduate students building a campus that's this fantastical extra extra nice version of a college campus with free food and bicycles everywhere and sunshine and shutting down to go to Burning man and giving people climbing walls and heated toilet seats and everything in between. That even if it becomes big, there's this. Yeah. And I think the idea that we're still just a startup and we're scrappy outsiders is something that really is embedded deeply in the psyche of, of the leaders of these companies even to this day. So that's why we have these aggrieved billionaires who are like everyone's doesn't understand us. They're being so mean to us. We're so discriminated against. You're like, dude, you have $100 million billion dollars. Like what are you talking about? But I digress.

[Lee Vincel]

I did want to ask you one thing about the dot com bubble and bust. The reason I'm asking you this is because we're maybe in another tech bubble moment and we witnessed another. I mean that Silicon Valley has gone through multiple tech bubbles. Right. Even during this history that you've been writing. So I mean, how do you think of that story these days and connections like American culture and these kind of broader historical trends?

[Margaret O'Meara]

I'm thinking a lot about these connections. Well, the dot com bubble and bust was. It was both hard stuff and soft stuff. The soft stuff being the Internet companies, the kind of the bids for e commerce, famously pets.com, buying dog food on the Internet. It was a too soon sort of idea. Subsequent companies, Chewy et al have proved very successfully that you can sell dog food on the Internet, but the infrastructure just wasn't there yet. So there was a lot of kind of. And then this is fueled by the market. You know, this is all this kind of, you know, irrational exuberance that's plowing into this enthusiasm about stocks. It's retail investors as well as institutional ones. The hype cycle is really, really intense. It's being kind of egged on by deregulation and rhetorical encouragement from the Clinton side, you know, wiring schools to the Internet is going to solve all our educational problems. Yeah, that worked. But you know, that was really, that was, it was kind of. And it was this kind of ultimate neoliberal play at a time when Republicans had taken control of both houses of Congress and were stopping any social legislation in its tracks. And so what are you gonna do? Like, let's just put some Internet on it. And Newt Gingrich was a great technophile as well. I think there's, you know, something to be said for the fact that the Vice President and the speaker of the House were both major early adopter super geeks about this stuff and recognized the, the platform shift that was the Internet well before others did. And it was indeed a platform shift. It just was a too soon thing. So that's the soft side. On the hard side. The dot com boom was also about infrastructure and wires and things. And the Internet is a series of tubes, turns out.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Right, right, right.

[Margaret O'Meara]

And so there was this huge build out of broadband fiber optic networks, all those things that were largely unused because there just was not stuff to put in those tubes and there weren't people. There wasn'. Very similar to the transcontinental railroad built ahead of demand. So much so that you have a lot of unused track and you have bankruptcies. This happens.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And fraud and all kinds of.

[Margaret O'Meara]

And fraud and all sorts of things. And so this happens with the railroad, this happens with the dot com boom and bust. And what's happening right now, we're having a lot of infrastructure build out and a lot of highly leveraged, you know, debt.

[Lee Vincel]

It does feel.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And everything you just said about the Internet, you could just swap in the word AI.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Sounds very familiar.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Sounds very familiar. So then this is. So I think it's important too, I think that the parallel's useful in thinking. Well, yeah, the Internet was a platform shift. It was economically transformative move. I have a little more. I think AI is such a. It applies to so many things that of course, yes, transformed it. It was kind of. It's advanced computing and it includes machine learning and generative AI and it also includes protein folding and solving really thorny medical problems. Scientific questions that can't be solved otherwise. So there's a lot of there there. Does that mean OpenAI is going to be profitable anytime soon? I don't know.

[Lee Vincel]

Joe, I'm wondering, Joe, if you. We got to wrap up soon just because we have a time cap at soon, but Joe, I wonder if you have. There's any question you Want to ask just to get it on tape, like just some thought you might have.

[Joe Fort]

No, I mean, the thing that's standing out to me, I guess, through a lot of this conversation is memory, right. You talked about holes in your memory with regard to writing about the Clintons, and then in 92, and you said at one point it seems like Silicon Valley doesn't remember. Right. And. And it's like sort of underneath everything you're talking about with regard to AI, like, this looks familiar. This looks familiar. Like, I don't know. I'm just the function of memory. And maybe it's interrelatedness with what we're talking about in terms of time passing and the way our perspective lands on things. But, I don't know, know, thoughts on memory, I suppose.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, I like that. Question it immediately what it. I think adjacent to it is, you know. Well, memories are the stories we tell about the past. Right. The things we remember are always. It's storytelling. And I think the connective tissue that connects the Clinton. Clinton himself and the Clinton years and Silicon Valley have been, you know, really powerful storytelling. That was Silicon Valley's secret. It kind of got the. It had the storytelling edge on Boston. You know, someone like Steve Jobs who was able to say in 1980, you know, computer is like a bicycle for the mind and really kind of make this exotic product something that people could relate to intellectually and make it tangible. The story that Silicon Valley has told itself, told about itself as kind of these wacky, disruptive people doing these wacky, Living on the, you know, we're contrarian disruptors. We're outside the. We're painting outside the lines. It's a much more, you know, conservative place than not just politically conservative, but kind of kind of business conservative than it lets on. The most successful companies and investors have been doing so by kind of, you know, adhering to good sort of standard business practice. Not always, you know, sometimes they've let some of the, you know, those pesky regulations get in the, you know, in the way, but they haven't. Haven't cared as much about HR as some other firms have. But there's, you know, the story, the power of the. You know, I think this is also very interesting when we're writing history where those of us who are writing it and those who are reading it are people who also lived that history. And, you know, this is always. This is true for any modern historian who's writing kind of in the sort of. Of the half century prior to the moment they're writing that you're going to have people who. It's in their living memory what these events were. But memory is fallible. And the memory is also stories. And we too are telling stories. We are telling the best version of the story we can with the evidence we can. But it's. And I think the other challenge, and this alludes to your sort of acceleration or the sort of. This question of acceleration of speed of information is just volume one of the challenges of any 20th century historian is like weeding through the hundreds of pieces of carbon paper in a manuscript box. Right. In an archival box. That's.

[Ben Waterhouse]

What do the medievalists always say? Crimea River. Right?

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, Crimea river, yeah. And then the 21st century, it's just bewildering. Like, how can we as historians really tell the full story when we have a million emails that tell that story rather than just 200 pieces of onion skin paper? So there's a. I don't have. I wish I had an answer to that. But I think about it a lot and I think about sort of where does the historian end and the journalist begin? Or where is it memoir? And where is it, you know, where am I just observing and where am I. Where am I a participant? And how do I make that a proper distinction?

[Lee Vincel]

I don't think. I cannot think of a more beautiful place to end than that. That was perfect. That was so much fun. Thank you for coming and hanging out with us.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah, this was awesome fun to hang out with you guys.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah, yeah, this was great.

[Margaret O'Meara]

Yeah. I want a picture of you in that black shirt. Be.

[Joe Fort]

Well, that's the 411 home slice for us. This has been all that and a bag of chips. Word, Word. Mad props for today's guests and contributors and for all of the hands that helped to make this episode a thing. Our hosts have been Ben Waterhouse of UNC Chapel Hill and Lee Vincel of Virginia Tech Tech. The show is created in cloud spaces across the ether, but is anchored right here in the Newman Library Athenaeum on the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech. The whole thing chillaxes under the auspices of Virginia Tech Publishing and Press, and the New Books Network distributes our show to all of the places you'll find your podcasts. Along with myself, JM Lamb, and Graham Conway are editors. Sara Beatty built the art and animation any YouTube listeners may encounter. I am producer Joe Fort, and this has been the I Heart 90s history podcast. As a final note, I'd like to say that our deepest and most earnest gratitude has been reserved for you, our dear listener thank you very much for listening. Peace out,

[Ben Waterhouse]

Sam.