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

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0:49Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, where were you in the 90s? 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 in nine years, like there actually is quite a bit that I don't know about you. And I feel like there is a lot of, as the kids say these days, Tracy lore that comes out from time to time or the Tracy. No, I just moved around a lot.

1:29And 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? Is it just nostalgia? Or is it just personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old? I mean, the answer is it's probably a mix, right?

2:07Yeah. 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 he was an early investor, apparently an 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.

2:43And 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. But I like what you're talking about. Yeah, that's where I'm going with it. That's what it is. So here's my memory of the 90s. You know, there was just – it seemed like there weren't many wars happening.

3:12And, of course, that feeling ended very quickly not long after with September 11th. But the other thing, I have this one summer, I 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 a 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.

3:54But 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. Yeah. So number one, it was the time where we were just discovering new technology without realizing how terrible it actually could be. Yes. Like I remember specifically being 11 years old on AOL, chatting on Instant Messenger, probably to adult men, but we didn't know that back then and everything was fine. Everyone was really relaxed about it. And then the other thing is there seemed to be like this very, the sense that like humanity could triumph over physical constraints, right?

4:34Like everything was going to be online. Everything was going to be software. where 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. Yeah, the end of history, yeah. Yeah, you could see, like, my takeaway from that back then is, like, I get why people got caught up in it. Anyway.

5:06Well, you and I got caught up in it because we both went on to do international relations at university, 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 that stuff. 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.

5:43Economic 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.

6:20And it's kind of like an early foreboding symbol in retrospect, Colette, that it wouldn't all last. 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.

6:59Oh, I just searched Y2K fashion. 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?

7:34Well, 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. 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.

8:24What did you say would happen in 2008? The human would crash. Housing collapse. You see there would be these complex financial instruments called CDOs. And what did you say? What were your expectations? Well, first I said I would be a junior at Stanford University. That didn't happen. And 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 movies on the computer. Which you were right about. You got that right. So one out of three, I guess. That's pretty good.

9:04Not terrible. In high school, I decided to start a DVD collection because I thought I was going to have DVDs forever. And so, you know, I'm going to get started early and have this awesome library of videos. And that lasted for like a couple of years before streaming became a thing. So you were way ahead of me. Remember the DVD bros? I mean, you were. Yeah, that was like that was a type of guy who's like has a really good DVD. 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.

9:39Wow. hour this yeah come over to my house and watch clerks because i feel like a dvd bro and then 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 yeah and you're confused there was this amazing website i don't know if either of you remember it it was called you fell asleep watching a dvd do any of you remember that and it would just be this website that just had it was a picture of a living room and then there was a TV in there and it was floating that sort of DVD menu at the end. It was a very peaceful website.

10:15I wonder if it still exists. That's cool. We'll go looking for it. Yeah, I really want to see that now. But this actually reminds me, and Joe's made this point before, which is the sort of late 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 some degree of skepticism, some degree of worry over what's going to happen to jobs and things like that.

10:55Whereas 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.

11:33And 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 the economy. It's like previous generations were too stupid to not want one.

12:24Yes. 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 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?

13:00Talk to us about, again, not everyone remembers it. How widespread was this feeling of abundance and wealth that the general population? Obviously, there were exceptions. There were poor people, obviously. But how widespread 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.

13:37And that was a really big deal. And that was like, by the way, that was like practically a holiday. one of the chairman 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.

14:27Yeah. 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. Right. That was sort of like suburban on me. 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. Your portfolio is doing great. You're going to be fine. Hmm. 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?

15:14Well, I think the foremost reason was the dotcom bubble. So everyone was, in fact, getting rich. not well here's the thing okay so i see culture as being downstream from big forces whether they're economic forces or technology and you know it takes a few years now it's faster because we have social media but it takes a few years for it to kind of trickle through the culture for the vibe of the structural things that are happening to inform fashion, to inform design, music, things like that. And so even if you weren't personally invested in the stock market or you weren't involved in the tech world, I think that the feeling just permeated culture.

16:08So 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 two 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 say more about this mine was blue okay 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. They were a huge deal. And yeah, mine was silver.

16:45The 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 dotcom 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. Yeah. Did any of you? Yeah. Did either of you have those? No, I did not.

17:19So I remember, what year did the colorful iMacs come out? Was that? So that was 98. Yeah. They came out the first in 98, and then 99 was when they had the full range. Right. They were so cool. Yeah. 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 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. 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?

18:02Well, 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.

18:48They'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. 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.

19:47And 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?

20:34So 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 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 sort of everyone agrees we're just going to be very tidy and contained at that time.

21:12I hadn't really thought about that in terms of the core imagery of what that meant at the time. That was aspirational to people. Yeah. It's peaceful. It's smooth. It's modern. And we're all just going to get along. 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 from the beginning to the end of the 90s.

22:00And 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 would, yeah. You'd drive down the highway and you'd see someone in like a crazy Hummer or an SUV and you'd be like, Like, oh, look at those selfish people polluting the world.

22:36And now it's like, oh, yeah, everyone has them. But this idea of like, OK, there were multiple forces emerging at once. There's the tiny, modest VW Beetle people and then the rise of the SUV people. And the SUV people won. They won. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, my dad used to call those people – 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.

23:26so uh 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.

24:12And 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 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.

24:59But 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's just this cultural like, okay, 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. 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.

25:41But 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.

26:33But 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 bubble punctured and then the world peace bubble, this idea that after the Cold War, now we have the issues of geopolitics are solved.