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

Joe Weisenthal (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:05)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

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

Tracy Alloway (0:25)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Tracy, where were you in the 90s?

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

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

Joe Weisenthal (0:46)

I have to say, even though we've been doing this podcast together nine years, 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 (0:58)

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

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

Well, 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 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, was there an, was those, were those really good years? Or is it just personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old?

Tracy Alloway (1:35)

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 he was an early investor, apparently, in Oracle.

Joe Weisenthal (1:55)

Amazing.

Tracy Alloway (1:56)

And he spent all his money on tropical fish.

Joe Weisenthal (1:59)

Amazing.

Tracy Alloway (1:59)

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. 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 an upshot.

Joe Weisenthal (2:28)

I thought there was going to be like an allegory for the dream of the.com bubble and then it all collapsing with the fish dying. But I like what you're talking about.

Tracy Alloway (2:35)

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

Joe Weisenthal (2:36)

That's what it is. So here's my memory of the 90s. 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, 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 (3:30)

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. 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 this very, this sense that humanity could triumph over physical constraints.

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 fast forward to the post 2020 years, that turned out not to be true.