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

2025/1/6
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Odd Lots

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C
Colette Shade
J
Joe Weisenthal
通过播客和新闻工作,提供深入的经济分析和市场趋势解读。
T
Tracy Alloway
知名金融播客主播和分析师,专注于市场趋势和经济分析。
Topics
Joe Weisenthal: 90年代后期,特别是后半段,给人一种乐观、富裕、和谐与和平的印象。这种感觉可能是个人怀旧情绪与实际情况的混合。90年代似乎没有多少战争,这种感觉在911事件后迅速结束。90年代个人经历的财富增长,虽然事后看来并不富裕,且不可持续。90年代人们对新技术的探索,缺乏对潜在负面影响的认识。90年代存在一种信念,即人类可以克服物质限制,一切将在线化、软件化。冷战结束后,人们认为社会、民主和市场的问题已经解决。现在与90年代相比,世界面临多场重大战争,经济情绪低迷,人们幸福感下降。Y2K事件预示了90年代末期乐观情绪的不可持续性。Y2K指的是对2000年计算机系统千年虫问题的担忧,最终问题得到解决。 Tracy Alloway: 90年代末到2000年初,人们对人类未来成就抱有极度乐观的态度,这种乐观在今天已经不复存在。如今对AI的乐观情绪中夹杂着对就业等问题的担忧,而2000年前后则不存在这种担忧。互联网泡沫的破裂和911事件对当时的乐观情绪造成了双重打击。互联网泡沫的破裂和911事件分别摧毁了经济乐观和地缘政治乐观。90年代末期和2000年代初期的审美风格发生了显著转变,从温和转向激进。如今,人们对新技术的乐观情绪更加谨慎,并预料到潜在的风险。90年代的乐观情绪是独一无二的,难以复制。90年代的乐观情绪在当时是可以理解的,因为人们认为一些核心问题已经得到解决。 Colette Shade: 作者撰写本书的动机源于2018年发现的一封1999年撰写的信,以及对90年代末乐观情绪的反思。作者在1999年预测2008年将发生住房危机和金融工具CDOs的出现,部分预测准确。硅谷文化中存在一些奇怪的现象,例如对经济持续增长的盲目乐观。1998年一位麻省理工学院经济学家预测经济将持续增长,不会再出现衰退,体现了当时的过度自信。1998年一位麻省理工学院经济学家认为经济可以永远增长,不需要也不想要经济衰退,体现了当时的傲慢自大。宏观层面,经济学家预测经济持续增长,书籍预测股市大幅上涨,都反映了当时普遍存在的财富和繁荣感。1999年出版的《道琼斯指数36000》一书预测股市将在未来几年获得巨额回报,反映了当时普遍存在的乐观情绪。互联网泡沫是90年代末期乐观情绪的主要原因,这种情绪渗透到整个文化中。文化是经济和技术力量的产物,需要时间才能反映出结构性变化的影响。充气沙发作为一种流行的家具,象征着90年代末期对未来的乐观和对科技的幻想,最终破裂,如同互联网泡沫。Y2K美学风格,以圆润、透明为特征,象征着互联网带来的透明性和和平。Y2K美学风格的圆润、透明等特征,象征着互联网带来的透明性和和平,与后来的棱角分明、攻击性强的设计风格形成对比。作者选择“Y2K”作为书名是为了SEO优化,并专注于探讨互联网泡沫和2008年金融危机之间的文化现象。本书探讨了互联网泡沫和2008年金融危机之间的文化现象,以及作者个人的成长经历。Y2K千年虫问题在本书分析中并不占据重要地位。大众甲壳虫汽车的造型设计反映了90年代末期人们对小巧、节能、和平的社会理想的追求。90年代SUV的流行与大众甲壳虫的流行形成对比,反映了当时社会中存在的多种力量。90年代SUV的普及率逐年上升,到2000年悍马H2的出现,标志着一种与大众甲壳虫截然不同的审美趋势。本书中“拉里·萨默斯导致我的饮食失调”一章探讨了90年代末期模特行业的兴起及其对个人生活的影响。90年代末期,尽管存在普遍的乐观情绪,但也存在着严重的性别歧视问题。911事件后,社会文化发生了保守的转变,这加剧了女性所面临的压力。90年代末期的性别歧视问题可能与对女性主义运动成果的抵制有关。文化战争往往是经济增长焦虑或技术焦虑的体现。当前的文化战争可能源于人们对人工智能、不平等和生活水平下降的担忧。McBling美学风格反映了2001年至2008年期间的文化现象,体现了一种虚假的奢华和享乐主义。McBling美学风格的特点包括Juicy Couture运动服、UGG靴子、漂白金发、深色假晒黑、名牌服装和配饰等。McBling美学风格是次贷危机的文化体现,反映了一种不可持续的虚假繁荣。McMansion(大型郊区住宅)的建筑质量差,但反映了人们追求虚假奢华的心理。McMansion(大型郊区住宅)的建筑设计缺乏实用性,体现了人们追求表面光鲜的虚荣心。互联网泡沫主要影响高收入人群,而次贷危机则影响更广泛的群体,包括中低收入人群。互联网泡沫和次贷危机的影响范围不同,前者主要影响富裕人群,后者则波及更广泛的社会群体。写作本书的过程对作者来说具有宣泄作用,帮助她处理了与90年代末乐观情绪相关的个人经历。将个人经历与历史事件结合起来进行反思,能够带来深刻的自我认知和理解。通过写作,作者能够理解自己过去经历的痛苦,并将其与更大的社会历史背景联系起来。互联网泡沫对作者的家庭产生了影响,这促使她对这段历史进行更深入的思考。1999年亚特兰大的一起日内交易中心枪击案预示了当时经济的潜在风险。1999年夏季的一些事件预示了互联网泡沫的即将破裂。尽管当时存在普遍的乐观情绪,但也有人预见到互联网泡沫的不可持续性。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

Why did the late 1990s feel like a period of optimism and wealth in America?

The late 1990s were characterized by a booming stock market, the dot-com bubble, and a sense that technological advancements would solve many of society's problems. There was widespread belief that the economy would continue to grow indefinitely, and many people felt personally wealthy and optimistic about the future.

Why did the Y2K bug not feature prominently in Colette Shade's book?

Colette Shade focused on the broader cultural and economic trends of the late 1990s and early 2000s, rather than the Y2K bug itself. She used the term 'Y2K' because it is widely recognized and used on social media, but the bug itself did not significantly impact her analysis of the era.

Why did the cultural aesthetic of the late 1990s shift to the McBling aesthetic in the early 2000s?

The McBling aesthetic, characterized by excessive and ostentatious displays of wealth, emerged as a cultural response to the economic growth and the emerging subprime mortgage crisis. It reflected a subconscious understanding of the unsustainable nature of the economic boom and the impending financial crisis.

Why did the dot-com bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis have different impacts on the economy?

The dot-com bubble primarily affected upper-middle-class individuals and tech investors, leading to portfolio losses and job cuts in the tech sector. In contrast, the subprime mortgage crisis affected a broader segment of the population, including middle-class and low-income individuals, leading to widespread foreclosures and a more severe economic downturn.

Why did the 1990s feel like a unique and unrecoverable period of optimism?

The 1990s were marked by a combination of economic prosperity, technological advancements, and the end of the Cold War, which created a sense that many core problems of human civilization had been solved. This optimism was later shattered by events like 9/11 and the Great Financial Crisis, making it difficult to recapture the same level of unbridled hope.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lodge podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, where were you in the 90s?

Uh, 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. 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. No, I just moved around a lot. And you don't remember whenever I tell you my time periods and locations. Well, that's okay. That's okay. That's possible. I also moved around a lot. But I have to say the 1990s.

So I'm struggling with this. The 1990s, particularly the second half of the 90s, I remember it as a period of a lot of optimism and wealth and harmony and peace. But the other thing is I was young and now I'm old. And I'm sort of trying to reconcile this thing of like, were those really good years? Or is it just personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old? I mean, the answer is it's probably a mix.

Right. But you're right. There was something kind of going on in the late 1990s. Actually, Joe, you'll enjoy this story. My after school job when I was in Chicago for a while was taking care of our next door neighbor's giant aquarium. And.

And he was an early investor, apparently in Oracle. Amazing. And he spent all his money on tropical fish. Amazing. 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 going to 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. I thought there was going to be like an allegory for the dream of the dot-com bubble and then it all collapsing with the fish dying.

Yeah, that's where I'm going with it. That's what it is. So here's my memory of the 90s. You know, it seemed like there weren't many wars happening. And, of course, that feeling ended very quickly, not long after, with September 11th.

But the other thing, I have this one summer, I got made $2,000 from a summer job and I got into day trading and I turned it into $20,000, which was just an insane amount of money at the time. And I had this memory of walking down the street somewhere and I was thinking, wow,

We're rich now. 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.

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. Like I remember specifically being 11 years old on AOL chatting on instant messenger, probably to adult men. But, you know, we didn't know that back then and everything was fine. Everyone was really relaxed about it.

And then the other thing is there seemed to be like this very, this sense that like humanity could triumph over physical constraints, right? Like everything was going to be online. Everything was going to be software. We didn't really have to worry anymore about the physical world. And, you know, fast forward to the post 2020 years, that turned out not to be true.

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. The end of history. Yeah. You could like, my takeaway from that back then is like,

I get why people got caught up in it. Anyway. Well, you and I got caught up in it because we both went on to do international relations. That's right. At university. That's right. Which was not a useful degree. Not a useful degree at all. And I don't know why I did, but only 20 years later in retrospect did I realize why I went and majored in international relations. And I was like, oh, yeah, because I didn't know I was living in a moment of history. In retrospect, I realized I was living in a moment of history where people thought multilateralism and all

We are all products of our time. Yes. And in a way, it took me many years to realize. Anyway, these days, there's multiple major wars going on in the country. Economic sentiment has been dismal for a long time. People are less happy than they were, I believe, despite even accounting for the nostalgia factor. So let's talk about what it was like when everyone at least or at least a few of us felt we were all rich and peaceful and happy in a permanent state.

We have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with 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 going to short circuit on January 1st, 2000. It's kind of like an early foreboding symbol in retrospect, Colette, that it wouldn't all last. Yeah.

Yeah, it wouldn't all last. And actually, just to note, the reason that I picked the phrase Y2K for the book's main title is because it's the primary search term that people use on nostalgia fashion resale websites and also on social media. So I thought that it would be good for my SEO. Do people actually want Y2K fashion? Because that worries me a little bit. 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. Oh, I just searched Y2K fashion. Yeah. Oh, it's bringing back

The aesthetics were not that good in the early 2000s. Anyway, that's just subjective. I don't know. The kids might not know these days what Y2K meant, which was there was this fear that all the computers would short circuit because when software was first invented, they didn't have room. Everything was just truncated to have two digits for the year. So 98, 99, people thought that then computers would revert to the year zero and everything would melt down. But setting aside, that didn't happen. They fixed it.

Setting aside Y2K fashion, why did you write this book? 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, 2020.

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. Whoa. Yeah. And it was dated April 1999. And it was for school because our elementary school made a time capsule. And

I guess what we had been assigned to do is we'd been assigned a particular year to predict. And the year I had to predict was 2008. What did you say would happen in 2008? Human would crash. Housing collapse. You see there would be these complex financial instruments called CDOs. Now, what did you say? What were your expectations? Well, first I said I would be a junior at Stanford University.

That didn't happen. Then I said that we would cure all cancer. I mean, you know, there have been a lot of innovations in the past 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. You got that right. One out of three, I guess. That's pretty good. Not terrible. In high school, I decided to start a DVD collection because I thought I was going to have DVDs forever. And so, you know, I'm going to get started early and have this awesome library of videos. And that lasted for like a couple years before streaming became a thing. So you were way ahead of me. Remember the DVD Bros? Yeah.

I mean, you were... Yeah. That was a type of guy who's like, has a really good DVD collection. Oh, yeah. No, it was a total status symbol, especially once you got to the early to mid-2000s. People would collect them, and it would be like, oh, well, this person has 40 DVDs. Wow. Or this person... Yeah. Come over to my house and watch Clerks, because I feel like a DVD bro thing to say. And then fall asleep, and then...

The DVD intro menu is playing and then you wake up in the middle of the night and it's just on a loop. Yeah. And you're confused. There was this amazing website. I don't know if either of you remember it. It was called You Fell Asleep Watching a DVD. Do any of you remember that? No. And it would just be this website that just had it was a picture of a living room and then there was a TV in there and it was floating that sort of DVD menu at the end. It was a very peaceful website. I wonder if it still still exists.

That's cool. Yeah, I really want to see that now. But this actually reminds me and Joe's made this point before, which is the sort of late 1990s, maybe early 2000s before the bubble burst time period was really a period of like, in some respects, it's

insane optimism about what humans would be achieving in the coming years. And I think even now, obviously, there's a lot of excitement in the stock market about things like AI and what that's going to be able to do. But even now, it's still tinged with some degree of skepticism, some degree of worry over what's going to happen to jobs and things like that. Whereas

around like 2000, that just wasn't there. It was like we were really looking at this Nirvana-like future. Yeah, and I think that that's a really good term, Nirvana, which I can get to a little later, talking about the culture of Silicon Valley. There were some really strange things that I found in my reporting, in my research for this book. So to be clear, I started researching the book

in, I mean, I really started around the time I found that letter and I was getting very into these nostalgia accounts on Instagram and 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 Chicago.

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

It's just like previous generations were too stupid to not want one. 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.

I kind of still think that's the case. I kind of still think. But setting aside human – I mean there is probably some truth to that actually. 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 – I mentioned my epiphany that at some point like 1999, I was like, oh, everyone is rich and life is great. Yeah.

Was that rare? Were a lot of people in those years having personal feelings of that? Talk to us about, and again, not everyone remembers it, how widespread was this feeling of abundance and wealth at the general population? Obviously, there were exceptions. There were poor people, obviously. But how widespread were these feelings of wealth and so forth? I mean, they were extremely widespread. So on a sort of macro level, you have these

big figures like this MIT economist saying we're never going to have another recession. You have a book that comes out in 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 for

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

Yeah, yeah.

It's all about how, oh, we're all so affluent now and there aren't any problems. Isn't that sad? Sort of. Right. That was sort of like suburban on me. Which I guess you had before. But there is a sort of funny thing looking at it now or watching You've Got Mail or any of these movies from the late 90s where it's like, what are you people so upset about? You own property. You're rich.

you know, your portfolio is doing great. You're going to be fine. So if you had to pinpoint like the foremost reason behind this sense of optimism about the future, what do you think it was looking back? Well, I think the foremost reason was the dot-com bubble. So everyone was in fact getting rich? Not, well, here's the thing. Okay. So I see

culture as being downstream from big forces, whether they're economic forces or technology. And, you know, it takes a few years. Now it's faster because we have social media, but it takes a few years for it to kind of trickle through the culture, for the vibe of the structural things that are happening to inform fashion, to inform design, music,

Things like that. And so even if you weren't personally invested in the stock market or you weren't involved in the tech world, I think that the feeling just grows.

permeated culture. So there are a couple examples. So in the book, I talk about this inflatable chair I have, which, by the way, I had one of those, too. Yes. So I'll just say I've read all of Colette's book and like page after page. I'm just nodding, going like, yes, this was my experience as well. Yeah. Yeah. Say more about the way you say more about this.

Well, mine was blue. Okay. And you would inflate it and sit on it. And inevitably, it would eventually spring a leak and you would just sort of be sitting on it while it slowly like collapsed onto the floor. But they were a big deal. They were a huge deal. And yeah, mine was silver. The exact same thing happened, which I write about in the book. It's kind of like the fish. It's almost a perfect metaphor for the dot-com bubble. But

there were these inflatable chairs that you sat on. Mine was silver and I was obsessed with it because I was like, this is the chair of the future. In the new millennium, we will all be sitting on silver inflatable furniture. Everything's going to be silver. Our clothes, our makeup. We're going to have these big, clear, blobby iMac G3s, which had just come out. That was a huge,

Huge. Yeah. Did any of you? Yeah. Did either of you have those? No, I did not. So I remember, what year did the colorful IMAX come out? Was that? So that was 98. They came out the first in 98 and then 99 was when they had the full range.

Right. They were so cool and they just looked cool. They looked cool. I think in my imagination at the time, this is what you used if I were in my mid-20s and I'm working 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 commercials.

Talk 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? 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 going to have sharp militaristic edges. They're going to be round and blobby, right? So just imagine, think about the new Beetle, which was the Volkswagen super trendy Y2K car that came in all these cute colors, like 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? The Cybertruck's ugly. Sorry. Ugly. 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? 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 is Y2K. So that's what I used. And I think the reason I didn't include discussions of the Y2K bug or the Y2K scare, I think at all was because it just,

In hindsight, when I'm analyzing the moment, it doesn't really figure large into what the true story was to me. I was at a New Year's Eve party on December 31st, 1999, and a friend of mine, his dad went into the basement and turned off all the power of the house, right? So we, for a second, I think we knew it was a joke, but it was a pretty good gag because there were fears that all the power was going to go out because all the utilities, their software would break, etc.,

It hadn't occurred to me, though. You know, the other thing about that Volkswagen Beetle that came out in the 1990s, and, you know, it's cute and comparing and contrast to the Cybertruck aesthetic. But just to dwell on this, because I hadn't clicked, it's really not aggressive. It's small. It's compact. We're really just sort of not going to take up space. It's sort of...

a preemptive surrender or a sort of everyone agrees we're just going to be very tidy and contained at that time. I hadn't really thought about that in terms of the core imagery of what that meant at the time that that was aspirational to people.

Yeah, it's peaceful, it's smooth, it's modern, and we're all just going to get off. Fuel efficient. Fuel efficient. But there were other cars that were popular at that time that were not that small, right? 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 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...

The Hummer came out with the Hummer H2, which was the opposite of the VW Bug aesthetic. That's really interesting. I remember there was a lot of sneering at SUVs in the early days. And now most cars are basically SUV. Right. SUV of everything. But in the beginning, there was... I hadn't really...

That's again, I hadn't really thought about that. No, in the beginning, you'd drive down the highway and you'd see someone in like a crazy Hummer or an SUV and you'd be like, oh, look at those selfish people polluting the world. And now it's like, oh yeah, everyone has them. But this idea of like, okay, there were multiple forces emerging at once. There's the tiny, modest VW Beetle people and then the rise of the...

And the SUV people won. 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 was an engineer. And I was like, well, I don't know if that's the issue. But yeah, he would say, oh, look, there's a stupid, ugly vehicle. And actually, the essay in the book about SUVs is called Stupid, Ugly Vehicles. ♪♪♪

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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 like in many respects, it was not a great time to be a young girl growing up in that particular era. Why do you think like on the one hand, there was this unbridled optimism, but then on the other hand, girls in particular seem to be under pressure?

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 to go back to the SUV topic, I think the SUV aesthetic really, that's when it really...

really stop 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

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, OK, we're done with all of this. Let's, you know,

Let's have the man show. We're going back to the idea of nature being like cyclical, basically. 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 growth

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 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 writing about America, a lot of Americans, their living standard had declined even before

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.

You know, you mentioned the sort of cultural shifts that happened after 9-11. And I think that's absolutely the case in many respects. But so 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 downturn

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 was 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? Yeah, it wasn't great. And if you look at just some of the crazy stuff that was happening before

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? I remember that. I'm going to Google that. Keep talking. 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

And just this really just riding around in a Hummer. There's a real nihilism to it almost. Yeah, like a vulgarity. Vulgarity, right. And I think that, again, to go back to this

hunch I have about how culture is downstream from economic forces, I interpret that as almost a, this is almost Freudian, but it's like a kind of Freudian kind of subconscious understanding of what's going on in markets with the, what would become the subprime mortgage crisis. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Good. The McBling aesthetic is downstream from the emerging market.

Subprimer. 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. A Von Dutch hat. That's right. It was very serious. No, trucker hats, maybe a trucker hat. Paris Hilton wearing a trucker hat might have been a little less serious, but.

Or the statement tease. But there was, yeah, I do think that there was a seriousness about it. There was a sense that it was glamour. Like, I had a couple of juicy pieces that never, I never had the tracksuit, but I had a couple of pieces that I got at Lohman's and, which RIP, but I just felt so glamorous. I was like, look at me in my green terrycloth dress for some reason. Yeah.

I am living. 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. Oh, I did that. Oh, God. Yeah. Because I have you have a little wave in your hair and I do too. Well, my hair used to be really curly. Yes. I used to relax it with like the actual chemical products that you would get from the drugstore. Yeah. It was bad. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like I can smell that. Yeah. Like, yeah. No, but it's interesting too as a downstream from the emerging subprime world. Because, right, it's a very...

external aesthetic. 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 this sort of presentation of rich in a way that's unsustainable. A hundred percent. And actually I tie that in with McMansions as well. Yeah. Because like another person you should have on is Kate Wagner who does McMansion Hell. Oh yeah. 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 going to have roof problems in two years. I hate these things.

And so I get it. I get my critique from him, but also just other stuff I've read about the actual architectural and structural integrity. And these are garish because they you know, there's no reason to have this giant foyer that Kate Wagner calls a lawyer foyer where it's like for some reason it's like this giant three story foyer.

foyer with a giant fake crystal chandelier. There's just no reason for that from a functional standpoint. And it's really it's inefficient for heating and cooling. Yeah, just these aren't even like fine luxury goods that are well made, but ostentatious. These are like fake luxury goods that are ugly and tacky and are going to fall apart. But it doesn't matter because all that matters is in that moment you feel like you're a rich person, even though you're not.

So what's the through line from the tech bubble to the subprime bubble? Because on the face of it, they seem to have some similarities, you know, people getting rich in an unsustainable way. But on the other hand, there are some differences where, you know, there were a lot of low income people who bought houses that they couldn't afford. Whereas I don't think there were that many people necessarily buying like tech

IPOs, but I could be wrong. No, no. And I think in terms of the differences between them, that's exactly it. So the dot-com bubble was mostly affecting, you know, upper income people, you know, maybe not the ultra, ultra rich, you know, people who were upper middle class took a hit

in their portfolios or whatever, or they worked at pets.com and they got laid off. But yeah, it didn't have the same kind of effects throughout the entire economy because it was kind of contained among more affluent people, whereas the subprime mortgage crisis affected people

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. 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.

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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 that

In the summer of 1999, the things were going to go off the rails or that despite this incredible wealth that was in the sort of in the headlines, 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.

Yeah, no, I think that that's, I actually didn't know about that shooting. But yeah, no, I think that there were, there were indicators. And there were also people here and there who were saying, hey, this is not sustainable. I mean, even Alan Greenspan, he talked about, he called it irrational exuberance in the market. So there were people sort of being like, you know, this is all very fun and exciting. And it's this sugar rush, but it's not going to last the way you think it is.

So writing the book and reflecting on your own experiences of this time period, was it cathartic for you? What did you learn? Oh, my God. So cathartic. Yeah, I mean...

I felt like I had a lot to process from that time. And I felt lucky that I got to incorporate memoir elements into it because these are personal essays, but they are personal essays that are structured within a bigger historical story. And I think that when we learn how our lives that are unique to us are structured

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. Say more. I knew someone in the 90s who happened to live in San Diego. And he was the first person who was aware of this company called Qualcomm, which was one of the –

huge winners at the time because they were going to make the chips and phones and everyone was aware of that. And people in his area got made a ton of money, et cetera, because they knew about it a little bit before the people on TV knew about it. What was that experience like? To what extent those people who rode the road it up and then wrote it down, what did it do to them? What was it like for them on the way up and then afterwards?

Yeah, I mean, on the way up, there was just this idea that, well, gee, everyone can just be rich now. This is to go back to what we were talking about earlier, about how there's just this kind of surreal thing of like, oh, okay, wait, suddenly I can like...

buy a second home or 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

I think it was when he had just sold Zip2. And so he had sold his first company and he's getting a McLaren. And this is a CNN video. And so he bought a McLaren, which I believe at the time was a $1 million car. And he bought himself a McLaren. And there's this video where he is getting this McLaren. And keep in mind, no one knows who Elon Musk is at the time. This is when he this is actually when he got his first big break.

And he's like, oh, this is so surreal. And he's like this kid, this like little boy who is like having his dream come true. And that's really how I think it felt for a lot of people, because a lot of these people who were not all, mind you, but many of these people who were in the tech world were coming out of the California Bay Area counterculture. And they were kind of maybe bohemians before they were able to get into the computer world, 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 scrounging for food. I'm going to go whatever. This is really important, actually. And I hadn't thought about this before. But right now, if you want to be in tech, you're probably studying like crazy while you're in high school to get into the right college and study electrical engineering or whatever. But back then, it was people who...

a few years earlier in their life were like counterculture hippies and stuff like that. And some of whom were basically self-taught. Some of whom were just self-taught, you know, or they were like, gee, I'm going to go back at the local community college and 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. Imagine if Elon Musk had gotten the new VW bug instead of the McLaren and how different today's All of history, all of history would have changed. Yeah. I'm still stuck on that possibility. Colette Shade, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots and congrats and good luck on the book. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Tracy, I really enjoyed that conversation. First of all, nostalgia, you know, thinking back. But I hadn't really thought about the sort of connection between, I guess, just how sharp that aesthetic turned out.

turn was between the late 90s and the sort of the aggressive McBling culture of the 2000s. Yeah. I think Colette has like put her finger on something, which is there was that sense of like really unbridled optimism around that time. It wasn't like

oh, tech is cool, but maybe there are going to be downsides. No, there was no... 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 going to make money and we're all going to have, like, great new jobs in this industry and we'll live in McMansions, etc.,

And I think, you know, maybe it was because we hadn't had a big technological revolution for some time. And so people kind of had forgotten the downsides. But I think there's just no way that you really are ever going to get that sense of optimism anytime soon. Even if we invent like the coolest new piece of technology, I think everyone now is just so conditioned to like wait for the drop.

I think the 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 myself.

in my head a bit. And it's like, I get it. I get what they saw or I get why they thought that to some extent, certain core problems of human civilization, whether we're talking about world peace, whether we're talking about economics specifically, kind of had been solved. Like I don't blame them much for it. Obviously, a lot of the optimism in retrospect seems silly. We got 9-11. We got the great financial crisis. We had the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, multiple wars. Now,

But I get why in that brief period of time they sort of didn't see it coming. Should we – Even if they should have. Should we re-embrace the Y2K aesthetic? Yeah.

You know what? I don't like it. You don't like it, Jeff? I don't know. Sometimes I'm walking through the park and I see kids wearing stuff that I could have worn in high school and it still warms my heart a little bit. I don't really like it that much. I don't know. I'm going to find my low-rise jeans. It's actually pretty bad. Start wearing those into the office. It's actually pretty bad. It's not that bad. You're crazy.

All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. You can follow me at Traci Allaway. And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. 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, Kermen Rodriguez at Kermen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks.

Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash 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 slash OddLots.

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

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