Oh, I'm going to be Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Happy

New Year everybody. As promised, here is a long overdue chapter episode for you.

It's about something that I've wanted to delve into really from day one of this project. It might even be the reason I started this

project telling the story of the dot-com bubble. What you're going to hear today is

obviously a first draft of one of the chapters that I've been working on for the forthcoming book.

There will be at least two, maybe three chapters in the book covering the dot-com bubble, it's bursting and its

aftermath, and this one will obviously be the first of those. It's about the roots and causes of the dot-com bubble.

So I'm going to label this episode Chapter 8 on the website, even though at this point

it's either Chapter 10 or 11 depending on how I end up splitting things up.

But as I said before, the podcast is not going to line up with the book exactly anyway,

so please enjoy, as once again you get to listen in as I work out my researching

and writing in real time.

For people of a certain age, my grandparents, for example, the Great Depression was not just a historical event.

It was an economic and social apocalypse that simply by having occurred once could

ipso facto recur at any time. The Great Depression played on their minds like a psychic bogeyman. Anytime things got too good that could only mean that a crash was right around the corner.

In many ways I feel like the dot-com bubble and its subsequent bursting have been a similar bogeyman at least to the tech industry in Silicon Valley.

Anytime a new technology leads to the proliferation of startups,

any time venture capital investments increase year over year. Anytime company

valuations pass stratospheric levels and high-profile IPOs hit the market,

people inside and outside of tech seem to fall all over themselves to declare that a new bubble is here and everybody should probably head for the hills.

But the fact is, the dot-com bubble was a truly singular event, brought on, as we'll see by a unique

mixture of causes, and the truth is we're unlikely to see its kind again in our lifetimes.

...