What It Felt Like When Everyone Was Hopeful, Happy, and Rich

Summary

Odd Lots Podcast Summary: "What It Felt Like When Everyone Was Hopeful, Happy, and Rich"

Released on January 6, 2025, Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast hosted by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway delves into the compelling narratives that shaped the financial and cultural landscapes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In this episode, the hosts explore a period characterized by unprecedented optimism, economic exuberance, and significant cultural shifts. They engage in a rich discussion with Colette Shade, author of the forthcoming book "Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything," uncovering the intricacies of an era that seemed destined for perpetual prosperity but ultimately gave way to unforeseen challenges.

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1. Nostalgia and Personal Memories of the 1990s

Joe Weisenthal opens the conversation by reflecting on the 1990s, a decade he remembers as a time of optimism and burgeoning wealth. He shares a personal anecdote about turning $2,000 into $20,000 through day trading, a memory that encapsulates the era's financial exuberance:

"I had this one summer, I got made $2,000 from a summer job and I got into day trading and I turned it into $20,000... there was that personal experience, in retrospect, $20,000, not really rich."
[04:27]

Tracy Alloway complements Joe's nostalgia by recounting her own experiences, including an after-school job caring for a neighbor's aquarium—a story that serves as an allegory for the dot-com bubble's fragile optimism:

"My after-school job when I was in Chicago for a while was taking care of our next door neighbor's giant aquarium... one week, it was my job to go feed the tropical fish... it wasn't my fault. That was the upshot."
[02:53]

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2. The Illusion of Permanent Prosperity

The hosts and Shade discuss how the late 1990s fostered a belief that economic and geopolitical stability were here to stay. The end of the Cold War led many to believe that major societal and market issues had been resolved:

"With the end of the Cold War, like, okay, the questions of society and democracy and markets, they've been solved."
[05:14]

Tracy adds depth by highlighting the era's technological optimism, where advancements were seen as universally beneficial without acknowledging potential downsides:

"It was the time where we were just discovering new technology without realizing how terrible it actually could be... humanity could triumph over physical constraints."
[05:01]

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3. Cultural Reflections and Technological Optimism

Colette Shade introduces the "Y2K aesthetic" as a cultural manifestation of the period's optimism. This aesthetic favored blobby, transparent designs symbolizing a future of transparency and harmony:

"The Y2K aesthetic... everything was really blobby, so it was really round. There weren't sharp edges. Everything was very transparent."
[19:38]

The conversation delves into how this aesthetic influenced various aspects of culture, from fashion to automotive design. Tracy reminisces about inflatable chairs—a popular trend that mirrored the era's futuristic dreams:

"I have this inflatable chair... it's almost a perfect metaphor for the dot com bubble."
[17:09]

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4. The Dot-Com Bubble and Economic Hubris

The episode examines the dot-com bubble's role in fueling the widespread belief in endless economic growth. Shade references significant milestones, such as the Dow Jones hitting 10,000 and the publication of "Dow 36,000," which projected unrealistic investment returns:

"There was this book called Dow 36,000 which argued that you could basically expect like 300% returns on your investments in the next three to five years."
[13:02]

Tracy points out that this era's cultural output, including films like "American Beauty," reflected a society grappling with its newfound affluence and questioning underlying happiness:

"American Beauty... it's all about how, oh, we're all so affluent now and there aren't any problems. Isn't that sad?"
[15:10]

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5. Transition to the McBling Aesthetic and Subprime Crisis

As the optimistic veneer of the late '90s began to crack, the early 2000s saw the rise of the "McBling aesthetic"—a display of overt wealth through fashion and consumerism, epitomized by figures like Paris Hilton:

"The McBling aesthetic is... juicy couture tracksuits with words on the butt, Ugg boots, super dark fake tan statement tees... it's almost a kind of nihilism."
[29:30]

Shade connects this cultural shift to the emerging subprime mortgage crisis, suggesting that the ostentatious display of wealth was unsustainable and lacking substantive economic backing:

"These are fake luxury goods that are ugly and tacky and are gonna fall apart. But it doesn't matter because all that matters is in that moment you feel like you're a rich person even though you're not."
[32:41]

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6. Impact of Economic Bubbles on Society

The hosts explore the differing impacts of the dot-com and subprime mortgage bubbles. While the dot-com bubble primarily affected affluent individuals, the subprime crisis had widespread repercussions across middle and lower economic classes:

"The dot com bubble was mostly affecting, you know, upper income people... the subprime mortgage crisis affected people lower down, much poorer, more middle class and poor people."
[34:26]

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7. Reflections and Catharsis Through Storytelling

Colette Shade shares her motivations for writing "Y2K," revealing the personal challenges she faced and how uncovering a time capsule letter from 1999 provided a lens to understand her experiences amid broader economic and cultural forces:

"I wrote this book because I was sort of going through a tough time... I found a time capsule letter... it was for school because our elementary school made a time capsule."
[08:02]

She emphasizes the therapeutic aspect of intertwining personal memoir with historical analysis, offering insights into how individual lives are shaped by larger societal currents:

"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."
[38:19]

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8. The Aftermath and Lasting Lessons

The episode concludes by acknowledging the unforeseen challenges that followed the era of optimism, including the September 11 attacks and the Great Financial Crisis. The hosts and Shade reflect on how these events shattered the belief in perpetual prosperity and forced a reevaluation of economic and technological trajectories.

Joe remarks on the fragility of the optimistic bubble:

"Everyone is rich and life is great. Was that rare? Were a lot of people in those years having personal feelings of that?"
[13:41]

Tracy underscores the cyclical nature of cultural and economic sentiments, suggesting that the backlash against the feminist movement mirrored broader economic anxieties:

"There was incredible misogyny throughout pop culture... a lot of cultural reaction and culture war stuff is kind of a proxy for economic anxiety or concerns."
[27:28]

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Key Takeaways

• Unbridled Optimism: The late 1990s were marked by a pervasive belief in continuous economic growth and technological advancement, often overlooking potential pitfalls.

• Cultural Aesthetics as Mirrors: Design trends like the Y2K and McBling aesthetics reflected underlying societal attitudes towards transparency, wealth, and sustainability.

• Economic Bubbles' Divergent Impacts: While the dot-com bubble predominantly affected the affluent, the subprime mortgage crisis had a more widespread and devastating impact across varied economic classes.

• Personal Narratives and Historical Context: Integrating personal stories with historical analysis provides a deeper understanding of how macroeconomic forces influence individual lives.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Tracy Alloway on Misogyny and Cultural Backlash:

  "There are a lot of reasons for that. I find Susan Faludi's argument of backlash to be convincing... widespread resentment about gains that had been made by the feminist movement through the 70s and the 80s."
  [26:25]

• Joe Weisenthal on AI and Business Priorities:

  "89% of business leaders say AI is a top priority, according to research by Boston Consulting Group... this is why teams at Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly."
  [00:00], [13:05], [24:57], [35:32], [36:36]
  (Note: These segments relate to recurring advertisements and announcements, which the summary has purposefully omitted to focus on content.)

• Colette Shade on the Y2K Aesthetic:

  "There were these inflatable chairs that you sat on. Mine was silver. They were a huge deal... almost like the fish. It's almost a perfect metaphor for the dot com bubble."
  [17:09]

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Conclusion

This episode of "Odd Lots" masterfully intertwines personal anecdotes with broader economic and cultural analyses, painting a vivid picture of a bygone era marked by hope and excess. Through engaging dialogue and insightful reflections, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, and Colette Shade invite listeners to reconsider the complexities of optimism and the cyclical nature of economic and societal trends.

For more in-depth discussions and to explore additional content, visit Bloomberg's Odd Lots.

Transcript

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Bloomberg Announcement]

Bloomberg in Atlanta or via livestream on February 11th for the future investor finding the opportunities. This 2025 event series will examine how companies are investing in their businesses to create efficiencies, innovate their products and services, and improve the customer experience. This series is proudly sponsored by Invesco. Qqq [e-mail] futureinvestoratlanta Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts.

[Radio News]

Radio News.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Tracy, where were you in the 90s?

[Tracy Alloway]

Good question. I was in Chicago for a couple years. Like I want to say 90, 91 and then from like 91 to 94, 95 I was in Japan and then 95 to I guess 98 or 99, I was in Chicago.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I have to say, even though we've been doing this podcast together nine years, like, there actually is quite a bit that I don't know about you. And I feel like there is a lot of, as the kids say these days, Tracy lore that comes out from time to time or the Tracy.

[Tracy Alloway]

No, I just moved around a lot. And you don't remember whenever I tell you my time periods and locations?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Well, that's, that's okay. That's okay. That's possible. I also moved around a lot, but I have to say the 1990s. So this is. I'm struggling with this. The 1990s, particularly the second half of the 90s. I remember it as a period of a lot of optimism and wealth and harmony and but the other thing is I was young and now I'm old and I'm sort of trying to reconcile this thing of like, was there an object? Was those, were those really good years? Or is it just personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old?

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, the answer is it's probably a mix, right? But you're right, there was something kind of going on in the late 1990s. Actually, Jo, you'll enjoy this story. My after school job when I was in Chicago for a while was taking care of our next door neighbor's giant aquarium and he was an early investor apparently in Oracle.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Amazing.

[Tracy Alloway]

And he spent all his money on tropical fish.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Amazing.

[Tracy Alloway]

And so for one week, it was my job to go feed the tropical fish. And I would go every day. And one by one, the tropical fish started dying. 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 gonna get in trouble for ruining this guy's like, multi million dollar aquarium. But it turns out he had had it installed like the week before and they hadn't got the salt levels and the water right or something. So it wasn't my fault. That was the upshot.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I thought that was gonna be like an allegory for the dream of the dot com bubble and then it all collapsing with the fish dying. But I love it.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, that's where I'm going with it. That's what it is.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So here's my memory of the 90s. You know, there was just. It seemed like there weren't many wars happening. And of course, that feeling ended very quickly, not long after with September 11. But the other thing, I have this one summer, I got made $2,000 from a summer job and I got into day trading and I turned it into $20,000, which was just an insane amount of money at the time. And I had this memory of walking down the street somewhere and I was thinking, wow, we're rich now. Like, I'm rich now. And I never thought this would happen. I'm a rich person and my family is rich because I turned $2,000 into $20,000. And so there was that personal experience, in retrospect, $20,000, not really rich. 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

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. Right. Like, I remember specifically being 11 years old on AOL, chatting on Instant messenger, probably to adult. 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. This sense that like, humanity could triumph over physical constraints.

[Radio News]

Right?

[Tracy Alloway]

Like everything was going to be online, everything was going to be software. We didn't really have to worry anymore about the physical world. And, you know, fast forward to the post 2020years that turned out not to be true.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know, not to just keep droning on, but it was this period between the Cold War and 2001 too. And it felt like with the end of Cold War, like, okay, the questions of society and democracy and markets, they've been solved.

[Tracy Alloway]

The end of history.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, you could. Like, my takeaway from that back then is like, I get why people got caught up in it anyway.

[Tracy Alloway]

Well, you and I got caught up in it because we both went on to do international relations.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's right.

[Tracy Alloway]

At university. That's right. Not a useful degree.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Not a useful degree at all. And I don't know why I did. But only 20 years later, in retrospect, did I realize why I went and majored in international relations. I was like, oh, yeah. Because I didn't know I was living in a moment of history. In retrospect, I realized I was living in a moment of history where people thought multilateralism and all that stuff, we.

[Tracy Alloway]

Are all products of our time.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes. And in a way, it took me many years to realize, anyway, these days, there's multiple major wars going on in the country. Economic sentiment has been dismal for a long time. People are less happy than they were, I believe, despite even accounting for the nostalgia factor. So let's talk about what it was like when everyone, at least, or at least a few of us, felt we were all rich and peaceful and happy in a permanent state. We have the perfect guest we're gonna be speaking with. Colette Shade. She is the author of the forthcoming book Y2K how the 2000s Became Everything. Y2K is such a perfect stand in because that was like the one thing we didn't really know what it was. We thought all the computers were gonna short circuit on January 1, 2000. It's kind of like an early foreboding symbol in retrospect, Colette, that it wouldn't all last.

[Radio News]

Yeah, it wouldn't all last. And actually, just a note. The reason that I picked the phrase Y2K for the book's main title is because it's the primary search term that people use on nostalgia fashion resale websites and also on social media. So I thought that it would be good for my SEO.

[Tracy Alloway]

Do people actually want Y2K fashion? Cause that. That worries me a little bit.

[Radio News]

Oh, they sure do. I actually just spoke with the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago about how to pull off the best Y2K look and why it's so challenging and why it's so popular right now.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, I'm I just searched Y2K fashion. Yeah. Oh, it's bringing back the aesthetics were not that good in the early 2000s anyway. That's just subjective.

[Radio News]

I don't know.

[Joe Weisenthal]

The kids might not know these days what Y2K meant, which was there was this fear that all the computers would short circuit because when software was first invented, they didn't have room. Everything was just truncated to have two digits for the year. So 98, 99. People thought that then computers would revert to the year zero and everything would melt down. But setting aside that didn't happen. They fixed it. Setting aside Y2K fashion, why did you write this book?

[Radio News]

Well, that's a really good question. So I wrote this book because I was sort of going through a tough time in my life around 2017, 2018, 2019. It was a few rough years, but things were going very badly for me. And then in 2018, I found this time capsule letter in my parents house in a box in their basement that I had written for a millennium time capsule in 1999.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Whoa.

[Radio News]

Yeah. And it was dated April 1999. And it was for school because our elementary school made a time capsule. And I guess what we had been assigned to do is we had been assigned a particular year to predict. And the year I had to predict was 2008.

[Tracy Alloway]

What did you say would happen in 2008?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Human would crash housing.

[Tracy Alloway]

You see, there would be these complex financial instruments called CDOs. And now what did you say? What were your expectations?

[Radio News]

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 25 years, but I can't say we've cured all of it. And I also said that we would be watching our. We would be watching our movies on the computer, which you were right about.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You got that right.

[Radio News]

So one out of three ideas. That's pretty good. Not terrible.

[Tracy Alloway]

In high school, I decided to start a DVD collection because I thought I was gonna have DVDs forever. And so, you know, I'm gonna get started early and have this awesome library of videos. And that lasted for like a couple years before streaming became a thing. So you were way ahead of me.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Remember the DVD Bros? I mean, you were. Yeah, that was like a. That was a type of guy who like, has a really good dvd.

[Radio News]

Oh, yeah, no, it was. It was a total status symbol. Especially once you got to like the early to mid 2000s, people would collect them. And it would be like, oh, well, this person has 40 DVDs. Wow. Or this.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah. Come over to my house and watch Clerks, because I feel like a DVD bro.

[Radio News]

And then fall asleep and then the DVD intro menu is just playing. And then you wake up in the middle of the night and it's just on a loop and you're confused.

[Joe Weisenthal]

There was this amazing website. I don't know if either of you remember it. It was called you fell asleep watching a dvd. Do any of you remember that? No.

[Radio News]

No.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And it would just be this website that just had. It was a picture of a living room and then there was a TV in there and it was floating. That sort of DVD menu at the end. It was very peaceful website. I wonder if it still still exists.

[Tracy Alloway]

We'll go looking for it.

[Radio News]

Yeah, I really want to see that now.

[Tracy Alloway]

But this actually reminds me, and Joe's made this point before, which is the sort of late 1990s, maybe early 2000s, before the bubble burst time period, was really a period of, like, in some respects, insane optimism about what humans would be achieving in, like, the coming years. And I think even now, obviously, there's a lot of excitement in the stock market about things like AI and what that's going to be able to do. But even now, it's still tinged with. With some degree of skepticism, some degree of worry over what's gonna happen to jobs and things like that. Whereas around, like, 2000, that just wasn't there. It was like we were really looking at this nirvana, like, future.

[Radio News]

Yeah, And I think that that's a really good term, nirvana, which I can get to a little later, talking about the culture of Silicon Valley. There were some really strange things that I found in my reporting, in my research for this book. So to be clear, I started researching the book in. I mean, I really started around the time I found that letter. And I was getting very into these nostalgia accounts on Instagram and watching all these old movies and listening to old music and all that sort of thing. And then I signed the contract for the book in 2022, because I was like, well, I'm totally obsessed with this thing. I'd like to write a book about it. 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 1998 who said, we will never have another recession again. The economy will keep going up forever. And then here's the really interesting thing that he said. He said, we don't want one. We don't need one and we have the tools to prevent one. So it's almost as if the laws of.

[Tracy Alloway]

Or it's just previous generations were too stupid to not want one.

[Radio News]

Yes, it was quite a lot of hubris. Right. If they had only changed how things worked in their mind differently, then they could have easily avoided all of those other depressions and recessions.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I kind of still think that's the case. I kind of still think. But sitting aside human, I mean, there is probably some human nature is cyclical and we were wrong to think it would be permanent peace and expansion forever. So here's, I guess, another way of entering. I mentioned my epiphany that at some point in like 1999, I was like, everyone is rich and life is great. Was that rare? Were a lot of people in those years having personal feelings of that? Talk to us about. And again, not everyone remembers it. How widespread was this feeling of abundance and wealth that the general population, obviously there are exceptions, there are poor people, obviously. But how widespread were these feelings of wealth and so forth?

[Radio News]

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 gonna have another recession. You have a book that comes out in 1999 called Dow 36,000, which I know that number doesn't sound impressive now, but at the time the Dow had just hit 10,000. And that was a really big deal. And that was like, by the way, that was like practically a holiday. One of the chairmen of the New York Stock Exchange and Rudy Giuliani, who was at the time the New York City mayor, wore special hats that said Dow 10,000. And they rang the closing bell in March, March 1999. But yeah, there's this book called Dow 36,000 which argued that you could basically expect like 300% returns on your investments in the next three to five years. And that 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 in 1999. It's all about how, oh, we're all so affluent now and there aren't any problems. Isn't that sad? Sort of.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Right.

[Tracy Alloway]

That was sort of like suburban on.

[Radio News]

Yeah, suburban on. Yeah. Which I guess you had before. But there is a sort of funny thing, looking at it now or watching youg've Got Mail or any of these movies from the late 90s where it's like, what are you people so upset about? You. You own property, You're. Your portfolio's doing great. You're going to be fine.

[Tracy Alloway]

So if you had to pinpoint the foremost reason behind this sense of optimism about the future, what do you think it was, looking back?

[Radio News]

Well, I think the foremost reason was the dot com bubble.

[Tracy Alloway]

So everyone was, in fact, getting rich, not.

[Radio News]

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 examples. So in the book, I talk about this inflatable chair I have, which, by.

[Tracy Alloway]

The way, I had one of those too. Yes. So I'll just say I read all of Colette's book, and, like, page after page, I'm just nodding, going like, y. This was my experience as well.

[Radio News]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's say more about the. Wait, say more about this.

[Tracy Alloway]

Mine was blue.

[Radio News]

Okay.

[Tracy Alloway]

And you would inflate it and sit on it and event, inevitably, it would eventually spring a leak and you would just sort of be sitting on it while it slowly, like, collapsed onto the floor. But they were a big deal.

[Radio News]

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 gonna be silver. Our clothes, our makeup. We're gonna have these big, clear, Blobby iMac G3S, which had just come out.

[Tracy Alloway]

That was a huge.

[Radio News]

Yeah. Did any of you. Did either of you have those?

[Joe Weisenthal]

So I remember. What year did the colorful IMAX come out? That was that.

[Radio News]

So that was 98. They came out the first in 98, and then 99 was when they had the full range.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Right. They were so cool. And the Different. Yeah. And they just looked cool, I think, in my imagination at the time. Like, this is what you used. As if I were like, if I were in my mid-20s and I work in Seattle or San Francisco or New York doing something like being an editor for a magazine, I would be on one of these cool looking computers. So 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 90s that are emblematic of this society feeling very happy and rich?

[Radio News]

Well, yeah, so there's this thing called the now. It's called the Y2K aesthetic, broadly. There's a really cool collective of archivists who catalog all. They're called the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. You should totally check them out, maybe have them on the show. They do a lot of stuff about just design and marketing trends from the late 20th century to the present. And they and others coined this term the Y2K aesthetic, which was where everything was really blobby, so it was really round. There weren't sharp edges. Everything was very transparent, which to me, when I kind of did a deep read of it, almost seemed like it was symbolizing, like the Internet will bring about transparency, like political transparency. And things aren't gonna have sharp militaristic edges. They're going to be round and blobby. Right. So just imagine think about the New Beetle, which was the Volkswagen, super trendy Y2K car that came in all these cute colors, like kind of a Peridot green one that I really wanted. And think about that compared to the cybertruck, which is like, scary and sharp and the windows are small, you know, cybertruck's ugly.

[Tracy Alloway]

Sorry.

[Radio News]

Ugly.

[Tracy Alloway]

Sorry. But it is. Okay, so speaking of Y2K, one thing that never. Well, you actually don't write in your book that much about the actual Y2K moment. Right. Was that like a conscious choice to avoid that?

[Radio News]

Well, it just didn't figure into my analysis because in hindsight, okay, so first of all, I was calling it Y2K because I wanted to talk about this era basically between squarely between the dot com bubble and the 2008 crash and the culture around it, as well as my own coming of age, which coincided with that. And I wanted to kind of weave them all together to talk about these, to kind of situate my own memoir and coming of age within this broader narrative of what was happening economically, politically, technologically, et cetera. And the term that people. Like I said the term that people, I found people using on social media was Y2K. So that's what I used. And I think the reason I didn't include discussions of the Y2K bug or the Y2K scare, I think, at all, was because it just. In hindsight, when I'm analyzing the moment, it doesn't really figure large into what the true story was to me.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I was at a New Year's eve party on December 31, 1999, and a friend of mine, his dad went into the basement and turned off all the power of the house, right? So we, for a second, I think we knew it was a joke, but it was a pretty good gag because there were fears that all the power was going to go out because all the utilities, their software would break, et cetera. It hadn't occurred to me, though. You know, the other thing about that Volkswagen Beetle that came out in the 1990s, and, you know, it's cute and comparing in contrast to the cybertruck aesthetic. But just to dwell on this. Cause 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 gonna 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.

[Radio News]

Yeah, it's peaceful, it's smooth, it's modern, and we're all just going together.

[Tracy Alloway]

But there were other cars that were popular at that time that were not that small, right?

[Radio News]

That's absolutely true. And that's something that I talk about in the book as well. And I argue that, well, this is a whole other. This is a whole other kind of train of thought or SUV of thought. But, yeah, SUVs started to get really popular in the early 90s. And they went up. I mean, the numbers of SUVs being purchased went up every year throughout from the beginning to the end of the 90s. And then I think I forget what year it's in my book. I believe it was 2000, but it's in the book. So they. Hummer came out with the Hummer H2, which was the opposite of the VW Bug aesthetic.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's really interesting. I remember. And 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? That's again, I hadn't really thought in.

[Tracy Alloway]

The beginning it was, yeah, you drive down the highway and you'd see someone in like a crazy Hummer or an suv and you'd be like, oh, look at those selfish people polluting the world. And now it's like, oh yeah, everyone has them.

[Joe Weisenthal]

But this idea of like, okay, there are multiple forces emerging at once. There's the voice, the tiny, modest VW Beetle people, and then the rise of the SUV people. And the SUV people won.

[Radio News]

They won. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, my dad used to call those people, not the people. Well, he said they were stupid. He was like, they don't know how to read science papers because he's 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Tracy Alloway]

So speaking of essays in the book and chapters, you have one of my all time favorite chapter titles that I've ever seen, which is Larry Summers Caused my eating Disorder, which is absolutely amazing. And the chapter, in case you think that's a joke, it's about basically the explosion in models in the sort of 1990s, early 2000s. A lot of them came from Eastern Europe. And Larry Summers sort of indirectly had a hand in the opening up of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union and things like that. I did want to ask you because we're talking about how great that period was, but I also remember, and I'm sure you will as well, given that we're roughly the same age, but there was, like, this sort of undertone of misogyny in all of that. And in many respects, it was not a great time to be a young girl growing up in that particular era. Why do you think, like, on the one hand, there was this unbridled optimism, but then on the other hand, girls in particular seem to be under pressure?

[Radio News]

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. And I do want to add that I think things got even worse after 9 11. You had this real reactionary shift. And. And to go back to the SUV topic, I think the SUV aesthetic really. That's when it really, really stopped being as much of a joke. And it was like, okay, no, this is the winning aesthetic. But, yeah, like, I think there also just was a general reactionary cultural turn after 9 11. But even before, as you point out, there was incredible misogyny throughout pop culture. I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I find Susan Faludi's argument of backlash to be convincing, which is basically that there was widespread resentment about gains that had been made by the feminist movement through the 70s and the 80s, you know, and there was just this cultural, like, okay, we're done with all of this. Let's, you know, let's have the.

[Tracy Alloway]

We're going back to the idea of nature being, like, cyclical, basically.

[Radio News]

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 70s onward and then even through the 90s, but that was not being fully reflected by these big indicators in the late 90s.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know, you mentioned the sort of cultural shifts that happened in after 9 11, and I think that's absolutely the case in many respects. But so there were, there were really two events. I mean, there was the peak of the dot com bubble, which was in March 2000, and it sort of took us a little while afterwards to realize, oh, this actually has come to an end because it could have just been a blip. And you know, things kept going a little bit this year and then I guess 18 months later with the September 11th attack. And so you have the economic bubble punctured and then the world peace bubble. This idea that after the Cold War, now we have the issues of geopolitics are solved. And so really there are sort of the economic story got blown to bits and then the political story or the geopolitical story specifically got blown to bits. And it's sort of a real double whammy for us, huh?

[Radio News]

Yeah, it wasn't great. And if you look at just some of the crazy stuff that was happening during that second half of the Y2K era from 2001 to 2008, I mean, it's just really strange stuff. Like I talk about the McBling aesthetic. Do you guys know about the McBling aesthetic?

[Tracy Alloway]

I remember that.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'm gonna Google that. Keep talking.

[Radio News]

So it is. This is a term again, like the Y2K aesthetic. These are terms that are applied now, they weren't used at the time, but the McBling aesthetic is. Think Paris Hilton, right? So think juicy couture tracksuits with words on the butt, Ugg boots, super, you know, straight bleached blonde hair, super dark fake tan statement tees, giant Louis Vuitton logo bags and just this really just riding around in a Hummer. There's a real nihilism to it, almost.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, Like a vulgarity.

[Radio News]

Vulgarity, right. And I think that again, to go back to this hunch I have about how cultures 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, that's Good. Good. The McBling aesthetic is downstream from the emerging subprime.

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Radio News]

A Von Dutch Hatch hat.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's right. It was very serious.

[Radio News]

No trucker hats.

[Tracy Alloway]

Maybe a trucker hat. Paris Hilton wearing a trucker hat might have been a little less serious, but. Yeah.

[Radio News]

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 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 Lohman'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 did that. Oh, God. Yeah. Because I have. You have a little wave in your hair and I do too.

[Tracy Alloway]

Well, my hair used to be really curly.

[Radio News]

Yes.

[Tracy Alloway]

I used to relax it with, like the actual chemical products that you would get from the drugstore.

[Radio News]

Yep.

[Tracy Alloway]

It was bad.

[Radio News]

Yeah. I feel like I can smell that.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Radio News]

Like. Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, but it's interesting too, as a downstream from the emerging subprime world, because. Right. It's a very external aesthetic. Like, it's sort of anti taste. There's nothing internal. And so the idea of the economy is like, there's no real economic basis for it, but there's the sort of presentation of rich in a way that's unsustainable.

[Radio News]

100%. And actually I tie that in with McMansions as well.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Radio News]

Because like, another person you should have on is Kate Wagner, who does McMansion hell.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, yeah.

[Radio News]

But McMansions are structurally unsound. They are built. Like I said. My dad's an engineer, and he would drive me around and look at McMansions in suburban Virginia and be like, this is bad. The architecture is terrible. It's gonna have roof problems in two years. I hate these things. And so I get it. I get my critique from him. But also just other stuff I've read about the actual architectural and structural integrity. And the. These are garish because they, you know, there's no reason to have this giant foyer that Kate Wagner calls a lawyer foyer where it's like. For some reason, it's like this giant three story foyer with a giant fake crystal chandelier. There's just no reason for that from a functional standpoint. And it's really, it's inefficient for heating and cooling. Yeah, just. These aren't even like fine luxury goods that are well made but ostentatious. These are like fake luxury goods that are ugly and tacky and are gonna fall apart. But it doesn't matter because all that matters is in that moment you feel like you're a rich person even though you're not.

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Radio News]

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 [e-mail] 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

89% of business leaders say AI is a top priority, according to research by Boston Consulting Group. But with AI tools popping up everywhere, how do you separate the helpful from the hype? The right choice is crucial, which is why teams at Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly. With over 15 years of experience building responsible, secure AI, Grammarly isn't just another AI communication assistant. It's how companies like yours increase productivity while keeping data protected and private. Designed to fit the needs of business, Grammarly is backed by a user first privacy policy and industry leading security credentials. This means you won't have to worry about the safety of your company information. Grammarly also emphasizes responsible AI so your company can avoid harmful bias. See why 70,000 teams and 30 million people trust [e-mail] Enterprise that's [e-mail] Enterprise Grammarly Enterprise Ready AI Join Bloomberg in Atlanta or via livestream on February 11th.

[Bloomberg Announcement]

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[Joe Weisenthal]

I don't want to take too dark of a turn here, but another incident that I recall, there was a mass shooting at a day trading center in Atlanta in 1999, and there were a lot of people getting into day trading. And the day trading centers would have all of these computers there because probably people didn't have good Internet setups at home. There were these early indications in the summer of 1999 that things were going to go off the rails or that despite this incredible wealth that was in the sort of in the headlines of the newspapers and on financial tv, et cetera, that there was something that couldn't hold there even before the formal collapse in March 2000.

[Radio News]

Yeah, no, I think that that's, I actually didn't know about that shooting, but yeah, no, I think that there were, there were indicators. And there were also people here and there who were saying, hey, this is not sustainable. I mean, even Alan Greenspan, he talked about, he called it irrational exuberance in the markets. 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

So writing the book and reflecting on your own experiences of this time period, was it cathartic for you? What did you learn?

[Radio News]

Oh, oh, my God. So cathartic. Yeah, I mean, I felt like I had a lot to process from that time, and I, I felt lucky that I got to incorporate memoir elements into it because these are personal essays, but they are personal essays that are structured within a bigger historical story. And I think that when we learn how our lives that are unique to us are still within a bigger story of history and these forces, tech forces, economic forces, I think that that can be really cathartic and can really give us a lot of insight. Like things that we think are our fault, say, 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 startup and it really changed his fortunes. And that was a very odd experience. And now doing research, I found out that there were other people who had had similar experiences.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Say more. I knew someone in the 90s who happened to live in San Diego, and he was the first person who was aware of this company called Qualcomm, which was one of the huge winners at the time because they were going to make the chips and phones, and everyone was aware of that. And people in his area 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 wrote 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.

[Radio News]

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 quit my job at 40 or, you know, 45 or 30 or whatever. Or I can buy a new, you know, a new luxury car or a private jet or go on vacation for three months all over Europe or something. Right? I mean, there's this. Actually, there's a video of elon Musk in 1999, and he's getting. He had just sold zip two, I think it was when he had just sold zip two. And so he had sold his first company. And he's getting a McLaren, and this is a CNN video. And so he bought a McLaren, which I believe at the time was a $1 million car, and he bought himself a McLaren. And there's this video where he is getting this McLaren. And keep in mind, no one knows who Elon Musk is at the time. This is actually when he got his first big break. And he's like, oh, this is so surreal. And he's like this kid, this little boy who is 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 70s, 80s, 90s, you could be. It's not like now where you have to go on a track early in your life to get into that. You could just be like, you know what? I'm tired of living in a co op and, like, scrounging for food. I'm going to go, whatever.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is really important, actually. And I hadn't thought about this before, but right now, if you want to be in tech, you know, you're probably studying like crazy while you're in high school to get into the right college and study, you know, electrical engineering or whatever. But back then it was people who, a few years earlier in their life were like counterculture hippies.

[Radio News]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And stuff like that.

[Radio News]

And like, some of whom were basically self taught.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Radio News]

Some of whom were just self taught, you know, or they were like, gee, I'm gonna go back at the local community college and take some programming classes and then you could just go on in and get a job. I mean, it helped if you were, you know, a white man. But yeah, it was really. It was more open. It wasn't like this structured thing like it is now.

[Tracy Alloway]

Imagine if Elon Musk had gotten the new VW bug instead of McLaren and how different all of history.

[Joe Weisenthal]

All of history would have changed.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, I'm still stuck on that possibility.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Claude Shade, thank you so much for coming on Odd lots and congrats and good luck on the book.

[Radio News]

Thank you. Thanks for having.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Tracy. I really enjoyed that conversation. First of all, nostalgia. I'll take you back. But I hadn't really thought about the sort of connection between, I guess, just how sharp that aesthetic turn was between the late 90s and the sort of the aggressive McBling culture of the 2000s.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. I think Colette has, like, put her finger on something, which is there was that sense of, like, really unbridled optimism around that time. It wasn't like, oh, tech is cool, but maybe there are gonna be downsides.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, there was no.

[Tracy Alloway]

Like, there wasn't any of that. It was like, oh, yeah, let the kids on AOL and they can talk to whoever they want. And we're all gonna make money, and we're all gonna 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 gonna 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I think the 90s really were a unique, unrecoverable period. And you go back and read some of the optimism, the end of history stuff, and you're just like, oh, that's. You know, how could they? But I've tried to do this experiment in my head a bit, and it's like, I get it. I get what they saw or I get why they thought that to some extent, certain core problems of human civilization, whether we're talking about world peace, whether we're talking about economics specifically, kind of had been solved. Like, I don't blame them much for it. Obviously, a lot of the optimism in retrospect seems silly. We got nine, 11. 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Should we.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Even if they should. Even if they should have.

[Tracy Alloway]

Should we re. Embrace the Y2K aesthetic?

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know what? I don't like it.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, you don't like it.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I don't know. Like, there's some. You know, sometimes I'm walking through the park and I see kids wearing stuff that I could have worn in high school, and it feel. Warms my heart a little bit. I don't really like it that much. I don't know.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'm gonna find my. My low rise jeans.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's actually pretty bad.

[Tracy Alloway]

Start wearing those into the office.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's actually pretty bad.

[Tracy Alloway]

It's not that bad. You're crazy. All right, shall we leave it there?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's leave it there.

[Tracy Alloway]

This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart, Follow our guest colette shade at Ms. Shade, and check out her new book, Y2K. Follow our producers, Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Erman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kel Brooks. Thank you to our producer Moses Ondam. For more Odd Lots content go to bloomberg.com oddlots we have transcripts, a blog and a newsletter and you can chat about all of these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord GG oddlots.

[Tracy Alloway]

And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we take these nostalgic tours back in time, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg account with Apple Podcasts. In order to do that, just find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and Podcasts. Follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

[Bloomberg Announcement]

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