Hello and welcome to this day an esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, January 17, 2001, the company Pets.com stopped trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

If you were holding pets.com stock, it had not been a good few months and today was definitely not a good day.

For many months at this point, Petz.com was imploding.

It was the highest profile company to go bust during the 2001 dot-com bubble. The liquidation of the company

would be complete just a couple days later January 18th. So let's talk about

pets.com the 2001 bubble and some lessons about the And our special guest this episode is Julia Frelan podcast host and producer and she was the host of the series Go for Broke which is a new podcast series from Vox about the dot-com crash of 2000.

Julia, it's really nice to have you on. Thanks for doing this.

Hi it's my pleasure I assure you I love talking about this stuff. Yeah a really fun

series and I also should say that I guess it's a series that will look at other bubbles and crashes in theory in future seasons.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But this was 01 and I think pets.com you know is the most defining crash of it all so give us a sense like

before we talk about the implosion give us a sense of the ascension I mean how big was

was pets.com there are lots of different versions of big that pets

dot com ended up getting to be. I would say the like most significant way

that pets.com was big is that it was absolutely everywhere. There was this sock puppet that most people

remember basically like this poor sock puppet took the fall for like the entire bubble.

The sock puppet was this emblem of pets.com that like absolutely propelled the

company to the largest stage in the advertising world, which was the Super Bowl.

But PetS.com basically, it got up to 250-ish employees total it got to the size of spending 11 million dollars on

advertising just over half a million dollars in revenues and it only existed for 18 months

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