This Is What It Was Actually Like To Live Through The Tech Bubble

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

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

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, it's great to have you back.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Thank you, thank you. I've come back refreshed and reinvigorated for another year of Odd Lots Podcast.

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

I am extremely excited about another year of doing the show with you. I was very sad to not have you for the last two episodes.

So yeah, I'm very excited that we're back at it in the new year.

Tracy Alloway (0:38)

Aw, thank you. You know, the flip side of not doing the Odd Lots Podcast with you is that I get to listen to them on my own time, which is something I don't do when I record them with you, obviously.

Joe Weisenthal (0:49)

Good point. So that'll be my excuse when I take off.

When I take off a few weeks at some point, I'll just say, oh, it's because I really just wanted to give them a fresh listen and not hear them biased by my own participation.

Tracy Alloway (1:00)

I'm sure that will be the case.

Joe Weisenthal (1:02)

So you know, obviously we talk a lot about bubbles on the show.

Last year, we had a whole series about various bubbles throughout history. And then we had a bunch of episodes, I think, about bubbles that weren't even part of the series. I'm sure we'll have many more. It's just one of our recurring themes for obvious reasons.

Tracy Alloway (1:21)

Yeah, bubbles remain, I think, personally, probably the most interesting phenomenon that we observe in markets, because there's all this collective behavior and sort of psychology involved in every single one.

Joe Weisenthal (1:36)

Right. I think it's like when psychology takes hold to such a dominant degree, and the underlying reality of what's going on seems to exert just such a minimal force in the underlying market.

Tracy Alloway (1:48)

I think that's a good way of describing it.

The other interesting thing about it is, of course, you never know when a bubble is going to pop, right? Because a bubble that doesn't pop is also known as a really good bull market, right?

Joe Weisenthal (2:02)

It's one of these things where we only can definitively say something is a bubble in the aftermath.

Tracy Alloway (2:07)

Yes, all bubbles are retrospective in nature.

Joe Weisenthal (2:11)

Well put. So, you know, the thing is, we talk a lot about these from a sort of, like, you know, market perspective. Like, what are the signs that something is in a bubble, and what are price movements that suggest something is in a bubble? And, you know, that is certainly one way to examine it.

But what we haven't done as much is talk about, like, what it's like to actually live your life through a bubble, the perspective of a person who is just sort of right in the middle of it, someone right on the inside, as opposed to a speculator.

Tracy Alloway (2:42)

I really like this idea because it gets, again, to that behavioral aspect of bubbles. How do people actually behave and live when they are going through this kind of episode?

Joe Weisenthal (2:56)

So, today, I'm very excited. We're going to be talking with our colleague Dash Bennett. He works with us here at Bloomberg. He's an editor. He does social media for us. He does a bunch of other stuff. We both worked with him for many years.

And what's interesting and why I'm excited about talking to Dash is that he lived through the.com bubble. So all this stuff that we talk about, people are trading it in the stocks.

He was actually working for one of these companies whose stock went completely insane and then totally imploded.

Tracy Alloway (3:27)

Right. And the way this podcast is coming about is we were having a sort of casual conversation on our internal messaging system.

And Dash started saying some really interesting and slightly outrageous things about what his whole experience was like. And we thought we need to dig into the details of this, right?

Joe Weisenthal (3:46)

Exactly. So without further ado, Dash Bennett, thank you very much for joining us.

Dash Bennett (3:50)

Oh, thank you, good to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (3:52)

So let's get started with your history.

Tell us where you were in 1999 So we already set it up. You were working for one of the companies that was sort of most emblematic of the dot-com era. What was the company, how did you join them, and what were you doing for them?

Dash Bennett (4:11)