In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 149: Boston's Very Own Music TV Station; When the Dot-Com Bubble Burst; Highest Rated TV Show Episodes Ever; Baseball's Origin(6-19-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 149

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The brief time when Boston had it's own music television station. The financial catastrophe of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The highest-rated television show episodes ever.
Episode 149 of the podcast turns up the heat with nostalgia as summer kicks off.
As MTV was conquering cable television in the early 1980s a Boston-based radio personality thought it would be a good idea to create a local music television station for young people that did not have cable access. The year was 1985. The station was V66. We kick off the show by looking back at this brief but fondly remembered channel.
For a short while it felt like everything in the dot-com world was golden. Sadly that was not the case and as the 21st century began the bubble burst and the landscape of internet business changed forever. We go way Back In the Day to when the Dot-Com Bubble Burst and the effects it had.
This week's Top 5 is actually a Top 10. We'll list the highest-rated television show episodes ever, with a few caveats of course. Did you watch any of these shows?
Of course there will be a new This Week In History and Time Capsule centered around the first baseball game ever played.
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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 149. School's out for summer, maybe where you are by now. blast the music and get excited. We're going to start it off with a look back at something I'd never heard of, Boston's very own local music channel, V66. We're going to go way, way back in the day to the beginning of the 21st century and look at the dot-com bubble bursting, what that meant, and some of the big companies from the turn of the century that went under. There's going to be a special brand new top five that's actually a top ten as we look at the top 10 highest rated television show episodes ever. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule looking back at the very first ever officially recognized baseball game. All of that is coming up right now on episode 149 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we going to talk about this week? Well, first, if you can hear a fan in the background, it is muggy, humid, not too hot. I'll do my best in editing to get rid of any sounds of the fan. But just know if you hear a buzzing in the background, it is a fan keeping me cool. First off, I gotta start the show by shouting out my Patreon subscribers. Lori, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin. $5 a month on Patreon will get you access to bonus episodes of the podcast. early access to this show, the main show, early access to my YouTube videos, and whatever other good stuff I can think of as we go along. I'm also trying to add more stuff to the free tier on Patreon so you don't have to become a subscriber to go over there and just join. It doesn't cost anything. Because I know that subscribing to podcasts to support content creators, it's not feasible for everyone. I mean, hell, I listen to a lot of podcasts and they all have Patreons and I'm not subscribed, so I understand. What you can do that's even better than subscribing is sharing the show, letting others know about the content that I work really hard on. Even if you don't like it, just lie and tell people to come watch to get me views on YouTube and downloads and such. Shh, I won't tell anyone. So is school out wherever you are listening from? I know a lot of listeners of mine are from the Northeast, so I would figure our school schedules are kind of all the same. This is the time for summer vacation. And speaking of summer vacation, recently on Cape Cod, for the first time ever, we had an authentic pink flamingo at one of the beaches. When I saw the photos, I thought it was fake, like someone bought a plastic one and stuck it out in the flats at Chapin Beach in Dennis. But nope, it was real. There was a video of it. I'm trying to think of what other cool animals that have never really been on Cape Cod could come up here to give me photo opportunities. I mean, I don't really want grizzly bears and such, but cuter, smaller animals that I can go take pictures of and not worry about it ripping my arm off would be great. This week is one of those shows where I always research and try to come up with topics that you'll find interesting and want to listen to. And we're going to kick it off with a topic that I'd never even heard of at all. Luckily, one of my listeners, Scott, he messaged me. He kind of mentioned it in passing. I immediately went on Google, started researching this. So this here is not something I'm going to be an expert on. So I'm going to be learning a lot here as I share it with you as well. So let's kick off episode 149 of the podcast with the story behind Boston's very own local music television channel, V66, coming up right now. As a fan of history and a fan of research and learning, I always love it when I find something I had no idea existed. To me, it's like getting a new toy. So I was so pleasantly surprised when one of my listeners, Scott, actually messaged me through social media and he casually dropped the V66 call letters. I'm one that it's hard to stump me with things, especially from the 80s. I have a pretty good memory and I had no memory of this. Maybe it's because this station came out when I was seven, eight years old. So maybe some of you listening who are, you know, in your 50s, Getting closer to 60. Maybe you'll remember this. And for those of you that don't, let me do a deep dive into Boston's own music television station. The gist of it, kind of the topic sentence, was V66 was a music television channel. Call letters WVJV. And it was channel 66. The channel was created by Massachusetts radio personality John Garabedian in 1985. This was meant to be a local alternative to MTV for teenagers that didn't have cable. It was actually a good idea because in 1985, just over 50% of homes had basic cable. So that meant that almost half the homes didn't. I think it was around this time, 85, when my family got cable. That's kind of where my memories of MTV and Nickelodeon start. I'm going to give you as much as I can about the history of V66, but there is a full-length documentary that was directed by Eric Green called Life on the V, The Story of V66, so you should probably check that out too. But if you don't want to watch the full-length documentary, there is a website, lifeonthev.com, and I'll link to that in the description of the podcast. So back to the beginning. MTV had premiered in August 1981. It was huge. It was a cultural revolution. But like I said, by 1985, roughly half the homes in the country had cable, so half didn't. So what do you do here in New England? John Garabedian, he was on... Stations like WORC, WMEX, WGTR, and WBCN. He wanted to launch a UHF TV channel that would function as music television for Boston. And it was going to be live. It was going to be like a radio station, but videos, where there was always people there. Garabedian spent a few months kind of preparing to launch this station. He had the help of radio legend Arnie Woo-Woo Ginsberg, radio veteran Roxy Mizal, television veteran David Beadle. They interviewed a lot of VJs, you know, the video jockeys. The first on-air personalities for V66 were David O'Leary, Perry Stone, Mary Jo Kurtz, and Bill Stevens. The grand debut of V-66 was February 12, 1985. V-66, the beat goes

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on.

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This

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is the new V-66, and I'm Bill Stevens, and you're witnessing television history. This is Boston's first music video station and stereo

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24 hours a day. And it was an immediate sensation, partially buoyed by the fact that Boston and the surrounding area has a lot of famous musicians and bands from the time. You had Aerosmith, who was huge. The Cars, who were huge. Jay Guile's band. And V66 was also an opportunity, a platform for up-and-coming local artists like Till Tuesday, Extreme, the Del Fuegos. V66, despite being small and local and on UHF, they did try to differentiate themselves from MTV, playing a wider variety of music genres, and often playing local unsigned bands in between international superstars. And sometimes V66 made their own music videos, so they were really trying to help the local music scene. Perhaps the biggest claim to fame for V66, besides the fact that it got on the air at all, was that in July 1985, they were the only non-cable TV channel, besides ABC, to broadcast the historic Live Aid concert in Boston.

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They'd also

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broadcast live concerts and events from all over the Boston area. They'd have their own cutaway segments, fans on the streets, videos of dancing at the clubs, and people calling in to win contests. This became as much a part of V66 as the music itself. For all intents and purposes, it really was like MTV. Granted, on a much smaller scale, but the idea was similar. And therein lies the problem. For those that had cable... It was hard to justify choosing to watch local V66 over the big national MTV. And even though it was a noble premise to create a music television alternative for teenagers in the area that didn't have cable, they still were beholden to the ratings. So within a year of being on the air, they were already trying to find ways to increase their ratings. This is where they started to lose what had made them unique in the first place. They increased their programming with magazine news shows, sports highlight shows, music profiles, which that makes sense, comedies, and syndicated programs. One of the things that I found, and it's just a fascinating slice of life at the time, is in January, February 1986, when the New England Patriots were going to Super Bowl XX to play the Chicago Bears. If you were around back then, you know the Bears had that famous song, the Super Bowl Shuffle, where the whole team was singing and dancing poorly choreographed moves. V66 put together their own rebuttal video. It was called New England, the Patriots, and We. Here, it goes like this.

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New England I

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don't know, it's part endearing and part really cringy. V-66 played a lot of mainstream acts, but still, it was that local connection that kind of endeared it. Local bands, ones that would come down to Cape Cod that I remember their names, like the Fools and the Stompers. But again, therein lies the problem. If you're a teenager from... Boston area or the surrounding area. I don't know what the reach was of V66, but if you're not into local, lesser known music, when that comes on, you're going to tune out. And that was the problem with the ratings and the problem with attracting advertisers. It was this channel surfing by the young audience that really messed around with ratings. Because the ratings were measured by 30 and 60 minute blocks and not by 3 to 5 minute music video blocks. Meaning that you couldn't tell which videos were popular, but also you couldn't tell really what videos or segments weren't popular. It was kind of a mess. Ultimately, that sort of model isn't sustainable. The writing was on the wall by the summer of 1986, and after several attempts to keep it going, V-66 was sold to the Home Shopping Network, with it going off the air finally for the last time on September 21st, 1986. So you're looking at a year and a half that this was a thing? It was a really great grand plan by John Garabedian. And I'm sure it was a super fun time working on that channel, but ultimately became kind of a blip on the radar. Like I said, I had no idea this existed until a few weeks ago. I have more memories of Cape Cod's own channel, WCVX TV 58, which if you're a longtime Cape Codder and you haven't heard my segment about TV 58, that's way back in episode 8 of the podcast. So that's about all there is to V66. I'm glad that I learned about this. I'm glad that I got to share its history and give you some clips from the network. But do any of you out there who grew up in this area, New England-ish, do you remember V66? I know you do, Scott. You're the one who gets credit for this. check out the documentary Life on the V, The Story of V66. You can watch it for free, and I'm going to link to it in the description of the podcast, like I said. That very brief time in the mid-1980s when Boston had its own music television station, V66. This week in history, we are going back 178 years ago to June 19th, 1846, and the very first ever officially recognized baseball game being played. When people still say to this day that baseball's America's pastime, this is the reason why. This historic first was played on a sunny afternoon on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, at a place called the Elysian Fields, which is still around now. It's a park. Even to this day, it's got picturesque scenery and ample open space, and back then it was a popular spot for various recreational activities. Located right across the Hudson River from New York City, it offered an ideal venue for the very beginnings of the sport of baseball. When you close your eyes and picture baseball as it is now, this game back then was not what you're going to think, but we'll get into that. This very first game was played between the New York Knickerbockers, so the New York Knicks were one of the very first baseball teams ever, and the New York Nine. The Knickerbockers were founded by Alexander Joy Cartwright, and that team, the Knickerbockers, is credited with organizing and formalizing the rules of the game. On this day, the Knickerbockers took the field wearing blue wool pants, white flannel shirts, and straw hats, which sounds like perfect baseball uniforms. The New York Nine, their opponents, were an informal group of local ballplayers. The Knickerbockers had enthusiasm, but they got smashed by the New York Nine 23-1. But that's not the main thing. The significance of the game isn't in the outcome, but the establishment of the structured format for playing baseball. And that came in the form of the Cartwright rules. Alexander Cartwright that we just mentioned. He's often referred to as the father of baseball. Some of the key elements of his cartwright rules included the diamond-shaped infield with three bases and a home plate placed 90 feet apart, nine players per team, nine innings per game. And then when it came to pitching and batting, back then the pitcher was required to deliver the ball underhand, so like softball. And the batters aimed to hit the ball and reach the bases with the goal of scoring runs. And finally, the Cartwright rules included tagging and force outs where players were put out by being tagged with the ball or forced out at a base. So all these things sound familiar. Well, except for the underhand pitching. This very first baseball game, June 19, 1846, it was the beginning of that America's pastime, that structured nature of the Cartwright rules. They provided a consistent, enjoyable framework so people could understand the game and know what was going on. In the decades that followed, baseball's influence expanded globally. It became an integral part of sports culture in numerous countries. That first game at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey started something that's still beloved to this day. The most accurate number I could find for games played has to do with Major League Baseball, the official league of the United States, North America. As of May 2024... There have been well over 238,000 Major League games played with that growing every day. While you're listening to this podcast, there's probably games going on right now. But it all had to start somewhere with that first ever officially recognized baseball game occurring 178 years ago this week in history. Oh yes, and now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going back 53 years ago to June 19th, 1971. Let's see what was going on in the world of pop culture back then. The number one song was It's Too Late slash I Feel the Earth Move by Carole King. This is off of Carole King's iconic Legendary Tapestry album. Widely considered, not just one of the greatest albums ever by a female artist, but one of the most impactful of the 70s, one of the most influential in music. The album won four Grammy Awards, and in a 2020 countdown through Rolling Stone magazine, it was listed as the 25th greatest album in the history of music. And this helped to solidify Carole King, like I said, as one of the most important musicians of her generation. The number one movie was Willard. And you could get into the theater with a ticket costing $1.65. This is a horror movie about a social outcast who has no friends except for rats that he uses to exact his revenge on his tormentors. It basically broke even at the box office. It's 52% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but this is one of those movies if you like horror, 70s horror, you'll like this movie. It's also well known for the sequel titled Ben, where a young Michael Jackson created the theme song. Basically a love song to a rat. The number one TV show was Hawaii Five-O. This is the original show. that was on for 12 seasons from 1968 to 1980. This police drama ran for 281 total episodes. It's got the iconic theme song that I figure if I put in here would likely get me flagged for copyright when the podcast goes up on YouTube. But you know it, you can hear it. And if you were around back then, 53 years ago this week, you were looking for the cool, hip, in fabric patterns to put on your furniture, well, you're in luck or out of luck. In the Sears catalog, you could get rustic print furniture. These are prints, the patterns that my grandparents, my Nina and grandpa had a couch with this pattern. Kind of floral, kind of like a brown and butterscotch, which is ironic because you can get these cushions with scotch guard, butterscotch guard. I don't know how my grandparents ended up with a whole couch with this pattern, but basically in the Sears catalog here, they make you measure your furniture, chair, couch, and then send them the dimensions and they'll make it and mail it to you. I'll put a picture of this up on social media so you can see what I mean. It'll probably bring flashbacks to so many of you that grew up in the 70s and 80s. That's going to wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History. Now it's a special top five that's really a top 10. So let's count down the highest rated TV show episodes ever coming up right now. All right, it's time for the top five. I mean, top 10. We're going to look at the top 10 highest rated television show episodes ever. There are some caveats here with this. One is that these episodes had to have been on one single network, so that excludes things like the moon landing, which were on multiple channels. I also, in order to make this list interesting, had to take out the Super Bowl, which I think made up nine of the top ten. So that would have been a boring list to go through, but I guess another Super Bowl and another. I also found it easier to do it this way with highest rated. So it's not most watched as far as millions of homes. It's highest rated as in percentage of households with televisions that were tuned to this show.

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Those are all my caveats to this list.

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There are no honorable mentions this time because they are part of the list. And unlike most of these top five, top 10, whatever's, these are in a particular order. So let's dive in. Highest rated TV show episodes ever, starting with number 10, Roots, the miniseries, part six. This had a 45.9 rating, which means 45.9% of all houses with TV's We're watching this show. Roots is the drama miniseries surrounding a family based during slavery in America. It's famous for LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte. This came out in 1977, and I'll just say you might be hearing of this miniseries again on this countdown. Number 9 is the television show The Fugitive, the episode The Judgment Part 2. which was tied with Roots at 45.9 as the rating. This was the American crime drama based around the main character, Dr. Richard Kimball, wrongly accused of the murder of his wife. It became a really great movie with Harrison Ford from 1993. And as you've probably figured out, this episode, The Judgment Part 2, is the final episode of the show from 1967. Number eight... is the television movie The Day After. This was the ABC Sunday night movie, first airing on November 20th, 1983, and it depicts a fictional nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and kind of the fallout that would happen after. With its rating of 46.0, this is the highest rated made-for-TV movie ever. Number seven is the Bob Hope Vietnam Christmas Special, which had a 46.6 rating. Bob Hope is the iconic comedian movie star of the 20th century. He did a lot of these USO tours, performing for the troops. This aired on January 15th, 1970, so after Christmas. Bob Hope headlined 57 shows on the USO tour from World War II in 1939 up to the Iraq-Persian Gulf War in 1991. Number 6 is Gone with the Wind the Movie Part 2, which got a 47.4 rating. This is the iconic historical romance drama set in the South during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era after Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, with Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh playing those main characters. With a runtime of almost four hours, it's no wonder why this had to be split. And so fittingly, number five is Gone with the Wind, the movie part one. which had a 47.7 rating so this here the gone with the wind it was called the big event it was on nbc november 7th and 8th 1976 it's crazy that the numbers for part one and part two are almost identical only a 0.3 percent drop so that's a lot of people that watch the whole thing And I know I mentioned this before way, way back in a podcast, but Gone with the Wind is the highest grossing movie ever when adjusted for inflation with an adjusted box office of more than $4.2 billion. Number four is the 1994 Winter Olympics ladies figure skating competition. This had a rating of 48.5. For those of you that might not have been around back then 30 years ago or don't remember, this all stemmed from the infamous incident between Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and Tanya Harding's goons that she had attack Nancy Kerrigan in the back. This was that culmination. This is specifically for day one from February 23rd, 1994. And in case you were wondering, Nancy Kerrigan won a silver medal while Tonya Harding placed eighth, with Harding getting booed and jeered during her routine. Number three is Roots, the miniseries part eight. This had a rating of 51.1. This was the eighth and final part of the miniseries, airing on January 30th, 1977. The miniseries was nominated for 37 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning nine, and spawned two sequel miniseries, Roots the Next Generation from 1979 and Roots the Gift, which was a Christmas special, released in 1988. Number two is the TV show Dallas, the episode Whodunit, which got a rating of 53.3. This was episode four of season four of Dallas, airing November 21st, 1980. The show was centered around the Oil Ewing family. And this here, the whodunit, this was the culmination of the Who Shot J.R. Ewing storyline, which is one of the most famous storylines in the history of American television. And even though this episode is from 44 years ago, I'm not going to spoil who shot JR for those of you that might want to binge watch the original Dallas this week. So we're here now. Number one, the highest rated TV show episode ever. Those of you that have kind of a knowledge of television history, you might know what's coming up, but I won't keep you in suspense. Number one, highest rated TV show episode ever. is the TV show MASH, the episode, the finale, which had a monstrous rating of 60.2. This episode was more of a full-length movie, two and a half hours long, entitled Goodbye, Farewell, Amen. It aired on February 28th, 1983. This show drew more than 121 million viewers. And to tell you how much of a big deal the final episode of MASH was, 30 second commercial blocks were being sold for $450,000 in 1983. So it was like a Super Bowl. And in fact, if a company wanted a commercial on MASH for the final episode, it cost more than it costs to have a commercial in the Super Bowl the same year. So there you have it. Top 10 highest rated TV episodes ever. Are any of these surprising for you? When I was doing my research, the only one that I looked at and I was kind of surprised... Well, there's two. The Bob Hope Vietnam Christmas special and the Winter Olympics figure skating. But I also wasn't alive when the Vietnam Christmas special happened. And I was 16 when the figure skating was happening and wasn't really interested. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll do a top 10 lowest rated episodes ever. It'll just be sad last days of all these shows. I first got access to the internet my senior year of high school, 1996. My first few years of surfing the net, it was a lot of chat rooms, learning about email, doing college papers, and of course finding out all the latest pro wrestling news from the message boards. To me, it was a fun distraction, sometimes a useful tool for education. But for others, it was a chance for big business. What we're going to do now is go way, way back in the day to the turn of the 21st century, because it's almost 25 years ago, and look at what happened when the dot-com bubble burst. For those of you too young to remember what exactly I'm talking about, obviously I'll go into detail about it, but it was this time in the late 90s when I was... sending hotmail emails or surfing the web on Yahoo or Ask Jeeves. There was a rapid rise of internet-based companies. And these were often launched with these grand promises, but with no solid business plans. And I guess it's kind of to be expected, because back then in the late 90s, the internet as we know it was so different. So there wasn't really a playbook on how to create an internet business. If you have a moment, pause this and go to archive.org, which I've mentioned them a whole bunch before. They have a feature on their website called the Wayback Machine. What you can do is type in any web address or keywords, and you can find websites timestamped from all the way back then, up to almost 30 years ago. Click on some of those websites from 96, 97 and look at them. Those websites then are of lesser quality than what a five or six year old could make today. Back then, as the dotcom bubble started to grow, venture capitalists were pouring billions of dollars into these startups. And it was driven by the fear of missing out on getting rich. I think that's kind of something that comes around with every generation. Wherever the next big thing is, before it kind of settles into wherever its level is, it's got this peak where everybody's trying to get involved, and then you kind of learn what you're doing, so some of the ones fall away. During this time, the stock market, in particular the NASDAQ, saw unprecedented growth. as the investors scrambled to buy shares of any company that had .com as the suffix. Now, I know the gist of this segment is the .com bubble bursting and all the craziness that came from that, but it wasn't all failures. There are some that made it big then and survived the bubble bursting, like Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. and it started as an online bookstore. Do you remember that, when Amazon was more of a bookstore, trying to compete with Borders and such? Like I said, way back machine on archive.org. By the end of the 90s, Amazon had quickly expanded its product range, their stock price had skyrocketed, and it made Bezos one of the richest people in the world, which he still is to this day. His net worth today, at the latest date I could find, is about $203 billion. Most people find change in their cushions to go buy a coffee or a burger at McDonald's. He finds change in his cushions to go buy a yacht. But Amazon survived. They evolved into what they are today. Probably the most well-known website there is. You can buy anything there. They got into streaming. Another company that made it big and survived it through the dot-com bubble bursting was Yahoo. They were at one time the king of internet search engines before Google really was a thing. And again, their stock price soared and they became one of the most visited websites on the internet. And they're still around. They're not as big, but they made it through. And you'll see there are some sites that wish they had what Yahoo's got now. Then there's eBay. eBay came out in 1995, online auction and shopping platform. I remember visiting that site so much in the late 90s, getting so many great deals. I still do, but not like it was back then. Checking to see what my beanie babies were being sold for at auction. Oh God, what a great investment that was. By the time of eBay's IPO in 1998, their value had surged. And that basically made them kind of bulletproof when the dot-com bubble burst. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. So there were some really high-profile companies in the late 90s that did not survive the dot-com bubble. The most iconic failure of that time is probably Pets.com. It starred this dog.

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Today, I'm overseeing some deliveries for Pets.com, purely in an advisory role. I like your shorts. You're a good looking fella. I hope they're home. Oh wow, you cats hit the

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jackpot. It was all just a sock puppet dog, not a real one. But Pets.com was an online retailer. They sold pet supplies. They went public in February 2000. But by November of the same year, they had shut down. Nine months. This, most people say, comes back to their excessive spending on advertising, which is why you remember those ads with the sock puppet dog. They didn't have a sustainable business model, and now they're one of the poster children of the dot-com bubble bursting. Then there was Webvan, which was one of the original online grocery delivery services. Sort of like what Instacart is.

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Fish and poultry of the highest integrity and the right to receive them at everyday grocery store prices. You have the right to be in your house when a delivery is made. You have the right to the good stuff. Brought to you by Webvan.

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They expanded rapidly across the U.S. They invested heavily in infrastructure and logistics. But the problem was, despite all of the good ideas and good intentions with what they were doing, they couldn't generate enough revenue to cover those expenses. In 2001, within two years of its IPO, Webvan had filed for bankruptcy. Another huge online retailer that went away when the dot-com bubble burst was eToys.com. They were going to be what Toys R Us was as far as brick and mortar stores.

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This holiday, it's easy to shop eToys for everything children love. You can shop eToys by brand, every brand imaginable. And you can shop eToys until December 20th and still get your toys on time. eToys, where the holidays come to you.

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An online toy retailer, they had a highly anticipated IPO in 1999 and they had initial success. But it's kind of an interesting turn of events because they couldn't compete with the brick and mortar stores like Toys R Us. It's almost like the inverse of what it is now. eToys filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and it seems like you almost had to be the biggest of the big to even have a chance of surviving. So I've given you a few successes, a few failures, but it comes back to why. Why did the dot-com bubble burst? And there's a whole bunch of factors. The first one is the most common one, overvaluation, where these companies were valued based on their potential rather than what they were actually doing. So the investors were willing to pay exorbitant prices for shares, inflating the stock prices beyond sustainable levels. There's a famous Simpsons episode from season 13, which is 2002, where Bart turns his comics he made about Homer, Angry Dad, into an internet cartoon. Bart sells the rights to the cartoon to some internet site in exchange for stock. And they have various scenes in there where Bart's grabbing stock like it's a toilet paper roll. So he's got thousands of shares of stock, but then the dot-com bubble bursts, And Bart's shares might as well have been toilet paper. Another issue with these early internet companies was the lack of a profitable business model. These startups focused on rapid growth and market share rather than the big picture. Get cash quick and then burn through it and rely on continuous infusions of venture capital, which eventually dried up. There were things like speculative investment with investors, including retail investors, entering the market with little understanding of the underlying business, driving prices up to unrealistic heights. Another major issue was market saturation. Everyone had an internet business to varying degrees of success. So it's sort of the idea of if everyone is special, then no one is special. So there's so many internet companies in the late 90s that you needed to be like that top 0.1%, something really special, or else why are people going to invest in you? You're telling me there weren't other imitators of Amazon or eBay or pets.com? And that final nail? was the loss of investor confidence. As these companies began to fail, negative earnings reports surfaced. Then the investor confidence waned. They didn't want to lose all their money just because the business was. That's when the stock prices began to fall. There was a mass sell-off. And it was sort of like once the snowball started rolling down the hill, you just get out of the way. It's hard to really nail down an exact time when the dot-com bubble burst. It seems to be 2001-ish. The Nasdaq composite, which had peaked at over 5,000 points in March of 2000, fell nearly 80% by October 2002. Many companies went bankrupt. Thousands of jobs were lost. But out of that, out of the ashes of the dot-com bubble bursting, it paved the way for more mature and sustainable internet companies. So it's sad for those that... lost all their money or lost their jobs or put their heart and soul into an internet company that ultimately failed at the turn of the 21st century. But those lessons learned from that bubble contributed to the rise of these Web 2.0 companies with better business models, focus on profitability and user experience. Amazon survived, but then Google got huge. Facebook came along and got huge. Like I said a couple times, check out archive.org, the Wayback Machine. Or if you like to binge watch old commercials like me, find compilations of commercials from 1999-2000 and look at how many web-based companies there are advertising there. And then think if you even remember what happened to them. They probably burst in the dot-com bubble. But until next time, that's going to wrap up the podcast. Let's pop the top in celebration. Yay! Ooh, it's like sizzling because there's so much carbonation in there. I'm almost done, I promise. But I do have a few more things. So coming up next week is a very special episode. Episode 150. This is the listener's choice episode. Everything on the show is picked by you people who voted. Thankfully, I remembered to put all the polls up so things could get voted on. So that being said, if you don't like what's coming up next week on the show, it's your fault. You should have voted. I'm going to review another classic employee training video. This one will be from Pizza Hut from 1988. We're going to go way, way back in the day and look at the K-Tel Records music compilation albums. Consider them the vinyl versions of those Now That's What I Call Music CDs. There'll be a brand new top five that are the top five discontinued serials. I'm going to look for ones that I remember and wish they were still around, but we'll go way back as far as I can. All that and more chosen by you, my listeners, coming up next week on episode 150, Listener's Choice of the In My Footsteps podcast. I wanted to make sure that I took a few moments to properly wish one of my oldest and dearest friends, Steve, a happy birthday. It would have been yesterday from when the podcast goes live. And he doesn't often listen to the show, so I can really embarrass him here. He's the one we coined the phrase dedication to the craft for our wild photo adventures of getting the photo, even if it puts us at great risk to physical harm. He taught me so much of what I know as a photographer, so much so that my Cape Cod Heart and Soul Beyond the Beach photo book is dedicated to Steve and my high school photography teacher, Mr. Murphy. It's kind of fitting that we had the phrase dedication to the craft, because when I think of Steve, I think of dedication to people, friends, family. He works full time, has a side gig, just like me. But I know, and so many of you out there that know Steve, know that if you need him, he'll always have your back. And as I've gotten older, I hate to say older, but I've realized that traits like that are so rare to find in people in your life. I can look around at my life right now, and I am lucky that I have people that I know if I needed them, they would be there. But people like that don't grow on trees. So if you have them in your life, never take them for granted. It's more than him being my friend for over 30 years now since Monsieur Steve and Monsieur Chris in French class at DY. It's photo trips that are some of my favorite memories of my adult life. It's laughs and talking trash and hanging out. It's even putting in a dock and getting soaked and muddy to help other people out. So happy official birthday to my brother from another mother, Steve. Dedication to the craft. I am lucky to know you and consider myself blessed to have you as a friend. And boy, I need to chug that energy drink after that. That was way harder than I expected. A little more emotional than I expected. Now I hope Steve doesn't listen and laugh at how sentimental I got. The segue, I guess, is find me all over social media. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'm trying to put up more videos based around the podcast. Recent ones include the 70s diet and fitness fad fails, the me versus AI underrated New England locations, the blink and you'll miss it retro TV shows, the weirdest jobs ever. So go check those out. I put a lot of work into them to make them worth you sitting down and watching. Get out there and enjoy the beautiful weather. Enjoy the sun, the warmth. I love fall. It's my favorite time of year. But summer is a close second. It's second because it's super busy because Cape Cod is a popular vacation destination. And there's tons of pollen, loads more bugs. But that's fine. That's the price you pay. And besides, before you know it, it's going to be cold and winter again. So enjoy the weather while you can. And remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. Thank you to all of you who listen, share, review the podcast. A big shout to my Patreon subscribers. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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