Oh What A Time... - #15 Money

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

As the 20th century poet Des'ree once said: "Money don't make my world go round, I'm reaching out for a higher ground". Sadly, for the rest of us, the acquisition of money is a necessity. So this week we're back into the history books to analyse a series of money making ventures; from the Dutch Tulip craze of the 1600s to the 'Black Gold' of the Rhondda Valley and we wind the clock back to the 2000s and the infamous dot-com bubble. A listener suggested this week's episode, so do you have an episode suggestion yourself? Let us know about that or any of our other AMAZING FEATURES by emailing: [e-mail] Aaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice? Oh and please follow us on Twitter at @ohwhatatimepod And Instagram at @ohwhatatimepod And thank you to Dr Daryl Leeworthy for his help with this week’s research. Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk). And thank you for listening! We’ll see you next week! Ps... THIS IS IT NOW! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And I'm Tom Crane. And each week on this show we'll be looking at a brand new historical subject. And today we're going to be discussing money, money, money. From the Dutch tulip boom and bust to the black gold of the ronda valley and the dot-com bubble delivered by tom his first modern subject i can't wait we're recording this podcast in the morning l and you've just let us know you're living a medieval experience at the moment the boiler has gone down uh yeah is he went into the bathroom she said the towel rail's off. That's how it begins. That's first world problems if ever I've heard one, that is

the most first world problem. And I said, well that's weird, and then I thought, oh the radiator in our bedroom's off. Oh no. Well that's a shame. Let that be a localised issue. And then I checked the living room and then I had a look at the boiler, it's just completely dead. So obviously I hadn't come on.

So we had to have a cold cold shower like a proper cold shower yeah and uh god she made a fuss it is awful to be fair cold shower is just terrible i mean we've talked about on this show quite a lot basically that none of us would really have survived in the time prior to central heating that seems to be history wise the biggest issue for us it's weird i can see why you wouldn't wash if you didn't have access to hot water interesting but people have always tried to you know people have bathed in front of fires and they've warmed water for baths and stuff but certainly if you go back far enough when that was difficult i could see why you'd be sitting there in your tracksuit thinking sod that yeah I don't think you have to go back too far for heating water to be a problem.

Any era, which is not even that long ago, probably 1920s, if you're having to create a fire to warm water, that's quite a high bar, isn't it? You're having to head into the wood to find dry sticks for your sort of... As soon as you don't have central heating, you're basically in that world.

That's true. However, I've got quite a few friends who've got into this sort of Wim Hof cold shower thing. Henry Packer, who's a brilliant comedian and a writer who I work with, he has cold showers like three or four times a week. Me too, Tom. You do that as well, do you?

Yeah, and I cannot wait to have a cold shower in front of Izzy and not make a fuss, actually make a negative fuss. And just go, hmm, hmm, yeah. Talk me through the situation where that's happening. Are you saying, Izzy, come in here, I want to show you something? Or is she cleaning her teeth, or what's she doing? The shower's upstairs, relatively close to the bedroom

and relatively close to the bathroom. So, yeah, I'll have a shower. I probably won't mention it. Yeah. And then I'll just have a really, really cold shower. And then just to let her know, just a reminder that it's cold. About three minutes in, I'll go... But that will be it.

She sounded like she was being tortured. It's like, exhale. Ellis, do you remember this? This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me in a shower. When Ellis and I were both at Cardiff University at the same time, in the third year, downstairs we had one of those stand-up rectangular showers where all the sides are glass walls.

You know those ones? Yeah, a classic student shower. I was in there, relaxing in the heat. Relaxing. Leaning against one of the walls of the rectangular shower, and the whole thing came off the floor and toppled over and exploded. And I'm lying on the ground, surrounded in shards of glass,

the water still spraying on me. No shower anymore. The cubicle has completely collapsed. It's fallen down like a high-rise building. And I'm lying naked on the floor in glass being sprayed by water. Horrendous. You could have ended up with

injuries to your worst bits. The anus. The bits you want to injure the least are going to get injured the most. So what were you doing leaning? It's like leaning on the glass. I mean, that's kind of your fault.

I've got limited sympathy with this. That's a pretty good lean. Because how are you topping over a glass shower? Tom used to lift at university. He was a really heavy guy. Yeah, exactly. I was really hench back then. No, well, ideally, I lie down in a shower.

I think we've talked about this before. I always lie down in a shower. That's how I relax. And you can't lie down in one of those showers, so the best you can do is lean against the wall, like sort of you're wearing a leather jacket in Greece and looking cool. As in the movie, not Greece the country.

Not just really specific about where I'm leaning. Shall we get into correspondence absolutely rebecca close has emailed about britain's best format point one day time machine cue the jingle it's the one day time machine it's the one day time machine it's the one day time machine it's the one day time machine so rebecca said hi lads okay let's face it if you've only got one day in the past we all know we're not going back to cure cancer have we done that by the way i don't think we have cured cancer yet i don't i think you can only go back and do things that we've done now that would be a time machine that goes forward to the future i think hang on is she using her one day time machine to come back to email us now

she's going no she's got two single trips she's going once forward about 100 years to find out that information and then she's going way back with that information to to cure cancer and she says i'm going back to make some sound financial investments the question i've been toying with over the last couple of weeks is how far back are you going and what are you investing in which is quite an interesting one that do you go back to the 1800s to invest in oil corp and generate some real generational wealth and trust your ancestors not to screw it all up or are you going back 15 20 years to invest in facebook and buy a load of bitcoin or do you go for the hail mary as she described it by heading back to marry one of your infant ancestors into the British royal family.

Then she said, as a subject, money is a great one to delve into in general. Well, we're doing that today, Rebecca. So how are you making your money? You've got to go back. You've got to invest soundly. How are you making your money? First off, can I just say that Rebecca Close is my kind of person? Yeah.

That is such a sensible use of Britain's best format point. Of course, and it hadn't occurred to me. It's so pathetic. It says so much about my personality that when we invented one day time machine I thought, oh, I'd go back to Carnaby Street and just watch people have a good time and then think about it.

Well, of course you would be investing, wouldn't you? That's the clever thing to do. Well, actually, your initial reaction was, Ellis, you were going to go back as a coffee table. So it's even further from anything useful. I'd be a coffee table next to some young people having a good time. I'd be the coffee table that Paul McCartney

was putting his cups on as he was changing music. The idea of going back in time to turn it into a revenue opportunity is this is the Biff Tannen approach, isn't it? From Back to the Future. So what are you investing in? I think it's really hard to go back and try and marry off your kids.

Also, I think the thing with being a royal is an awful lot of hassle that comes with that. So I just think... I completely agree. Also, how are you getting the opportunity to present your infant to the king or queen? How are you... What are you saying to the people at the door of Buckingham Palace

that are going to let you in and offer your child as a... What opening gambit allows you to say, but honestly, seriously, he's going to be a real looker when he's older. Or you could teach a child a load of popular songs from the modern era, the Beatles' back catalogue, Islands in the Stream, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers. Yes. And you go, wait till you hear the ditties that this kid's bringing with him.

You see, I... That's it. That's your in. You're in the core. I mean, that's the old... Richard Curtis wrote a film about that. I occasionally imagine myself going back, but I don't think I've got the personality or the charisma to sell Love Me Do six months before The Beatles wrote it.

I think I'd be criminally ignored. It's not troubling the chance. Especially at a point where a guard has a pike to your throat. And it's clear. What, two in one? Yeah. So I've taken my kid to Buckingham Palace

and I've got an acoustic guitar and I'm playing Love Me Do and I'm like, seriously, listen to me. Guess you guys ain't ready for that yet. Yeah, it's a tricky one, investments, isn't it? I think for me, I would go back. I think it's Google, it's these sort of i think i think for me i think i i would go back i think it's google it's these sort of stocks i think that's where you are so that's not that's not far then is it yeah but at least i'm secure in what i'm asking for there i think i'm in fact i

my worry is if i go sporting results i'll go back i'll go i'll put 10 grand on the fa cup final and i'll get the year wrong there'll be twoArcelor ones and I've chosen the wrong one and I come back and I've lost 10 grand. Google, it was only founded in 1998. You would have ages to invest and I think you'd still see a really amazing return.

You could basically go back, rescue yourself from the shattered shower and then invest in Google. And I think that would be a day spent well. I think that would be the one thing that would make that weirder. If the bathroom door had opened at that point and me from 2023 had come in and said,

get up, Tom, we're going to invest in Google. I'd say, at least let me put some clothes on. And then I'd say, I've seen it all before you're me and I'd go that's a fair point and we both leave together one of us naked

one of us fully dressed to Nat West to Nat West and we get to Nat West and they say we're not sending you telling you any shares you're not wearing any clothes

please leave and I go I've got one day to do this you go home you put your clothes on you come back they go you've got one day to do this. You go home, you put your clothes on, you come back, they go, you've got no money. Oh, yeah.

Yes, that's again a big issue. You're a student and you're covered in broken glass. You aren't in a fit state to make this investment. All right, you horrible lot. Here's how you can stay in touch with the show. You can email us at hello at oh, what a time dot com. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at oh, what a time pod. Now clear off.

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TD. Ready for you. So I'm going to be talking about the dot-com bubble and the way it burst so dramatically. I am going to be talking about the coal boom in the Rhondda Valley. And I'll be talking to you about tulip mania in the 17th century. The 17th century was the Dutch Golden Age. The Netherlands were frankly... No, the Dutch Golden Age was Euro 88 when it was rude

frank reichardt and marco van basten and ronald kuhlman and uh yeah and they are also the amazing kit but still a lot of people get that wrong feel free to carry on embarrassing has happened so early in your piece chris normally the first sort of you know glaring mistake is at least 10 minutes in but no the dutch were kings of the world between about 1600 and 1720 they had the highest per capita income in the world in that period they were a global financial powerhouse and established most of the terms of modern capitalism it It all came out of the Netherlands. Well, well. And do you know what the Dutch love?

I'll tell you what they love. Marijuana. Orange things. Yes. Bicycles. Canals. Yep. Houses of ill repute.

We can't ignore that one. Yep. I think you handled that perfectly, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Good job, man. Phew! We're Dutch listeners. yep i think you handled that perfectly by the way thank you thank you good job man our dutch listeners turning off in their droves that's the dutch covered off tulips as well you got um you know what tulips are obviously a brightly colored bulbous flower uh originated as a wildflower in central asia Yeah, they're all right.

Tulips, yeah. Have you got opinions on tulips? Do you ever look at a tulip and think, wow, I love that. I've read about the Dutch tulip craze, and it really, really changed my opinion on tulips. For the better. Which had previously been neutral. So I'll just say that.

Now, some of our listeners will know about the Dutch tulip craze if you don't strap in because this is absolutely incredible it's quite a pretty flower i'm just having a look here it's a pleasant it's a middling flower is that all right for me to say that yeah yeah yeah i think yeah it's quite it for me it feels like quite a sort of um oh no i've forgotten their I'm pulling in at a petrol station at 11pm. That's what I'm going to go with, type flower. It's garage quality flowers, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Is it right? This is a half-remembered historical anecdote.

Doesn't Elton John hate tulips? I don't know. I swear I saw it on John Ryder and he asked for like these specific flowers but not tulips never tulips he's got a real thing

against tulips really I mean they're fine we had a tulip randomly grow in our front garden I was like oh that's quite that's interesting he has a song

called Tulips on my organ I'm sorry can we be very specific here about what sort of organ we're referring to here? So maybe he really likes them. Some people like roses on their piano, but he prefers tulips on his organ.

Sorry, I don't know if I'm being pranked. So just to clarify, Elton John either loves tulips, hates them, or is indifferent. But what we do know is he does own an organ. We know that. We've got that information so um so the tulip craze really starts with the ottomans they regarded them as a symbol of their empire and its riches they ottomans went mad for it and because they were so big for the ottomans when when european diplomats came to visit uh they would

give them as gifts tulips the europe European diplomats would take them home. I presume the wives, the girlfriends, the other partners, they're looking at those tulips going, wow. And that thus planted the seed, oh, that's nice, of the tulip craze in Northern Europe. The name tulip is thought to be derived from turban. In Dutch, it's more obvious because the Dutch is tulpen. So it looks like a little turban.

That's where they think the name comes from. So if in the 17th century, in Northern Europe, Tom, you've got your garden. If I come over and see your garden in the 17th century and it hasn't got a tulip in it, I might be sick because anyone who had a garden needed a tulip in it. It was the number one fashionable commodity. I don't know what the garden craze is now. I don't know what the equivalent would be. Decking and astroturf.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you live outside of a city, a big trampoline. The garden craze now is a tired-looking bloke at a barbecue saying, we just astroturfed it in the end. We tried two summers where we put actual turf down, but it didn't work. It was a complete ball leg, so we've astroturfed it. Do you know what the guy, the house I moved into, do you know what the guy before me had done?

He'd got it astroturfed, but not by a proper astroturfer he'd nixed off cuts from other people's astroturf gardens and just hammered it into the ground with massive nails that is incredible yes i know and then what happened because it wasn't done properly the grass had kind of grown through the astroturf in places so you had this kind of partially partial grass partial astroturf nailed in turf that was in the garden it does sound a little bit like he's buried a body if you don't mind me saying anyway so the tulip craze was was massive but the reason the dutch especially were good at growing uh tulips far better than england france italy the dutch climate

is just perfect for tulip growing and propagation and it was becoming really lucrative because people wanted tulips they wanted specifically rarer varieties so there's this thing called the tulip breaking virus they've actually gone quite deep on tulips this morning and the ones that have this tulip breaking violet virus they produce these really kind of remarkable exotic colors they just look they do look amazing multi-colored different flowers these these are the ones that had a premium chris you've been sucked in man i feel myself getting sucked in but the other thing that happened is so you had these really amazing exotic tulips and then you had the printing press and the

dutch were turning out these catalogs should demonstrating these are beautiful tulips and then you had the printing press and the dutch were turning out these catalogs should demonstrating these are beautiful tulips that got people the buyers abroad excited and yes they wanted tulips now we get to the important part so can i just ask a quick quick question so were those tulip catalogs is that what you're saying tulip catalogs they're knocking out tulip catalogs like argos through your letterbox or whatever and you'd leaf through all the different tulips that are available i imagine you're passing around the catalogs yeah and you're picking them and you're going yeah these are the ones i want i see it feels like quite a calming read that a nice cup of tea comfy chair leafing through the tulip catalog be quite nice yeah and the the um they're like illustrated you've seen some pictures of these tulip catalogs they look amazing I have to tell you that the reason why the...

You know, you couldn't just grow them in England. Firstly, because the climate wasn't ideal. But secondly, it takes ages to grow a tulip. Tulips grow from bulbs, but it takes three years for a seed to turn into a bulb. Wow. Right. Okay.

I'm instantly bored. I'm out. I am done. No way. So the tulips themselves are very exotic, and certain strands are really precious, but because of the time it took to grow from a seed to a bulb... So you plant the seeds, you wait three years, you get a bulb, you plant the bulb, that's the thing that flowers.

So the Dutch realised... This is the invention of the forward contract really, because the Dutch were like, well, we're flogging these flowers. Everyone's absolutely loving it. But the thing we could be selling is, why don't we sell the bulb? And so they were selling the bulb before the bulb was ready in these forward contracts. Are we saying things like the kind of stuff that all marketing people say? We're not actually selling a bulb, we're selling a lifestyle. And it would work on me.

Yeah, absolutely. So then people started imagining, well, hang on, these bulbs are going for loads of money. Well, if I buy the bulb and then I start growing the seeds of my own, you know, growing my own tulips, then I could be making loads of money. if i buy the bulb and then i grow start growing the seeds of my own you know growing my own tulips then i could be making loads of money i become a speculator myself so the bolt the the price of the bulbs started rising and rising and rising people started buying like forward contracts for delivery of flowers and bulbs um in the dormant period in the summer so people started buying up their bulbs long before they'd actually when they were ready wow but in the 1630s these money-making schemes started get out of hand people started buying up their bulbs long before they were ready. Wow. But in the 1630s, these money-making schemes started to get out of hand. People were buying the bulbs up front, the flowers up front,

and the price just kept going up and up and up. Apparently, the price of three tulip bulbs could buy you a house. That's how much. Three tulip bulbs. Wow. The price of the tulip bulb was, in a lot of cases, a single bulb being grown in a garden would be worth more than the cost of the entire garden. One bulb.

One bulb. So the Dutch have gone tulip mad. Yeah. Interestingly, in the year 1657, according to an article published in August 1817, in the year 1657, 120 tulips were sold for the sum of 90,000 guilders. It was mentioned in the Dutch records that a single tulip had been sold for 7, 8, 9, even 10,000 guilders, which is 10 times more than what any person would have given

for the garden in which they grew. So, like, it's gone mad so the the the pressure the kind of external demand was extraordinarily high yeah contracts of this kind eventually it had to crash contracts at this point it's worth bearing in mind are not being signed at the amsterdam stock exchange they're being signed in taverns over a few beers like you kind of think of like traders and stuff like there is no traders they're in taverns having a few drinks and so the only thing that really was being traded in theory was the signature on a contract no physical tulip bulbs were changing hands so if something went wrong the price would come crashing down and in the winter of 1636 1637

i think people just woke up the price of tulips suddenly crashed and people were no longer being prepared prepared to buy at the prices being offered and those stuck with expensive contracts for delivery were liable to lose a fortune and then they know the date the tulip crash began to happen the 3rd of february 1637 the price of tulips peaked disputes at auctions in harlem unraveled and then the entire house of cards came down uh the whole industry collapsed almost overnight contracts were not being honored the tulip sellers lost a fortune a financial disaster and this many people think was the first boom and bust of the capitalist system but there is one note i will add which is that there's a book with an amazing title yeah extraordinary

popular delusions and the madness of crowds uh by charles mckay written in 1841 this is where a lot of the kind of hyperbole around the the dutch tulip craze comes from he he told the story but many people think in that the story that he told in this book is not necessarily factually accurate they may have been overstated somewhat but there is without a doubt there was a tulip craze and a tulip crash but the extent to which people are still not quite sure see i've read extraordinary popular delusions so that's what i knew about the dutch tulip craze and until daryl historian said oh there are there is some there are queries as to how accurate his uh portrayal of this crisis is or was um i remember that book was my only knowledge of of Dutch tulip craze. I just remember reading that chapter

and every sort of paragraph or so thinking, it's just a tulip. Yeah. Can everyone calm down? They're just tulips. Do you know one thing I read is, people who defend his account, there's evidence that in some places

the prices of tulips dropped by 99.99999%. Right. Down to the price they should have been, basically. That's a lot, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. It's almost free. A point that I love from that, Chris, is the fact that so many of these deals were done in pubs.

That's amazing when drinking. Because that feeling of waking up i once woke up the next day having hammered and found i bought a zega dreamcast on ebay this was like 20 years after the zega dreamcast but that only cost me 40 quid or whatever i hadn't spent 140 000000 on a bouquet of flowers. So how do you think you're feeling the next day when you've woken up? You roll over and there's a note on the bedside table. You're hungover and it says, by the way, you owe rude £300,000. Oh, God. In the middle of it, you'd have thought, oh, that's good.

I had a drink last night and i made a fantastic investment that will never go wrong the price of these tulips is only going up i also wonder what what the tip was where this dawning realization came from was it one particularly respected person in the community went oh wait, wait a second, this is ridiculous. And then suddenly everyone else did. What happened? What's the tip? I bet it's one person didn't honour their contract and suddenly everyone went...

You know, like in the petrol crisis recently, it only takes a few people to panic. Yeah. And everyone's like, ah, nah. It took one person to go, I'm not paying that for that. I'm not going to honour this contract for these tulips. Sod that. And then the other one goes, yeah, me neither.

Me neither, me neither. Yeah, they're just flowers. I've all come to realise I've spent an enormous amount of money on some flowers, and I think we've all gone mad. It's a bit like the crazer on Prime, the energy drink. Yeah, absolutely. I've just invested loads in that. If you're not involved in it, it just seems absolutely baffling.

And I remember I was being shown around as like a student, not a student flat, I was trying to rent a flat in Cardiff when I was in my mid-20s, about a year before the credit crunch and the 2008 economic crisis. So I was in my sort of mid to late 20s by that point. I remember the estate agent saying, how long do you want to rent it for? And I said, well, for the foreseeable,

because I'm not really in a position to buy. And she said, oh, you should move out. You should go back to your hometown. You've got to buy a house. I said, well, I'm waiting for a stock, like a housing crash to come. And she said, it never will will it's just going to be like this forever now a year later when i turn the news on mayhem it never will it never this is it

now this is it now i think that's because that's becoming a it's becoming a catchphrase for this podcast. This is it now. It never will. Claire and I were once shown around a flat in Dalston, and Claire knows a bit about property, and she went over to one of the walls and went, I think this might be rising damp here. And this day didn't say, rising damp doesn't exist. Which is incredible, just to be that brazen.

Rising damp doesn't exist. We incredible just to be that brazen rising damp doesn't exist what i could we're looking at the rising damp and then of course and then of course you went into the shower to test it lean on it smashed it and they said well they lie on the floor naked amongst the broken glass we knock 10 grand off this yeah Right then, I'm taking you back to South Wales Now if you'd wandered through the Rhondda Sometime around 1830 You wouldn't have seen a huge amount It's a very small population It was mainly farming and farmers

And you'd have thought Yeah, it's pretty here actually I like it so a very small population. It was mainly farming and farmers. And you'd have thought, yeah, it's pretty here, actually. I like it. And you might have thought to yourself, I might write a poem about this, or maybe paint a bit of it. But you'd never think to yourself, I'm going to make a fortune here. The idea of making money from that place just wouldn't have crossed your mind.

Now, within half a century, the Rhondda was the centre of the world's steam coal trade its energy supply and it was the most important industrial valley anywhere on the planet with a population that had grown from 500 in 1801 to a peak well in excess of 150 000 just over a century later. That's mad, isn't it? Now imagine that. Just imagine if you were one of the original people who lived in the Rhondda. So you were probably a farmer. There were tiny little villages and settlements. And then 100 years later, there's 150,000 people there.

Like towns that hadn't existed are suddenly a really big, important Welsh town. Now, can I say, one day times here, go back, start the time lapse, so you can see that build over time. Oh, yes. That's wasted. That'd be lovely. What a great idea.

Again, it's not going to make you a fortune, Chris. But what a YouTube video. Yeah. You'd get at least 10,000 hits on that, wouldn't you? Exactly, yeah. First question, how's he done that? It doesn't make any sense i don't know how he's that's the past now then coal it was referred to as black gold and it found its

way onto ships including the great ocean liners going back and forth across the atlantic uh steam engines in factories power stations producing electricity that powered homes office blocks even the london underground powered homes you homes when it came to cooking and heating, steam locomotives. Railways in Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Egypt, India, Turkey, most of South America, and the Russian Empire all relied upon the coal dug out of the ground

by tens of thousands of miners crammed into sort of narrow gulches in South Wales. So... No. It's insane when you think what the coal industry meant to wales yeah now so it's people are still really really proud of it um but the what people forget is the the initial businessmen and engineers who got involved people thought that they were mad they thought that they were as mad as the touch tulip sellers they were like what are you doing yeah it's quite a kooky thing is it to dig into the ground look this stuff this does worse loads of course it is mate of course it is idiot now the greatest speculator of all the man who perfected the art of the deal you know uh to use don Donald Trump's phrase, was David Alfred Thomas,

otherwise known as Lord Ronver. And he inherited a modest mining company from his dad, Samuel, but transformed it into a giant combine or a trust, which had this octopus of business interests all over the world. So he was providing coal, he was providing transport, you know, trains and ships. He was bringing goods back because they had interest in, like, Argentine beef and Peruvian fertilizer and citrus fruits from the Levant and all sorts of stuff. And it was all managed by local agents. So it was a Cambrian company. Now, anyway, someone might need coal.

Mr. Thomas was there. He was able to sell it. He would ship it to you, make a tidy profit from the simplicity of the transaction. So the Americans referred to him as the Coal King. It was, you know, he was the sort of Jeff Bezos of the 19th century. The Ronda Valley. He made millions and millions of pounds. He made millions and millions of pounds.

On average, each of the four coal companies he owned in the Rhondda made £175,000 a year between 1907 and 1912. Wow. To put together, that made for a sum of £875,000 per company, or £3.5 million in total. In today's money, that equates to more than £330 million. But to get a sense of the scale, you can actually add a few notes to the end of that like it's he was just vastly wealthy yes yeah he died in 1918 at the age

of uh 62 he'd survived the sinking of the lusitania 1915 but then he began working on the demise of the industry that had made him rich now the thing i i always find almost difficult to believe with the coal industry is that by 1913 welsh mines reached a peak in their output so it's 36 million tons of coal produced that year um and it just uh it was it was it was employing about a third of the Welsh workforce. All in the same industry. So then obviously if coal is affected, everything is affected. Because even if you're not a coal miner, if you run a shop or something in a pit village,

if those people lose their jobs, then obviously you're affected. So it just affected absolutely everything. So when did that start? When did that decline start? What was that? The decline began in 1913. That was the absolute peak. So obviously there's no coal industry left in Wales now,

but the peak was 1913. Now, he foresaw that oil, whether from the Middle East or from the North American oil fields, would provide a new age of energy production. And he was determined to monopolise that industry before anyone else. When it was pointed out to him that this would irreparably damage the collieries of his native South Wales, he shrugged his shoulders and said, that's business. Oh wow. Have you ever thought, Ellis, genuine question, had you been born at a time that the Welsh minds were at their strongest, how do you think you'd have dealt with that life as someone who... My grandfather did it.

Your grandfather did it, okay. So I'm kind of not that far removed from it. It absolutely terrifies me because I would be so rubbish. I find that era so romantic like the welsh valleys the coal mining boom like i imagine the communities and what the pubs would have been like well that's the thing is camaraderie they would often say stuff like you know your your life is in your mate's hands so that creates a kind of friend a bond of friendship that is difficult to imagine.

Absolutely. That's really interesting. My brother was a climber and I've never seen a tightness of friendship like with his mountaineering friends. And it's the same thing where literally your life is in the hands of those people. And I'm sure it is exactly the same. I'm not drawing the comparison with this, but I once went caving for my Duke of Edinburgh award. And I can categorically say it was the worst afternoon of my life it is the most unhappy i've ever been so i'm going to take us now to the 1990s oh yeah should we name should we name some things from the 90s shell suits anyone else want to say anything warpman melcy melcy that's nice chris uh my thought is

into trolls i'm like i feel like so old because i'm like oh i remember trolls the thing the trolls as well always on the desks of girls doing important exams yeah yeah and i love as well when you've been someone would have a pencil with a troll on the top yeah you did your gcse's array levels in the 1990s the girl sitting next to you almost certainly had a troll on her desk yeah absolutely and now like the dutch tulip craze appears absolutely crazy so i'm going to talk to you about the dot-com bubble in the 90s so a bit of context the internet properly took off in the 1990s um it previously been used uh for one of a better phrase, by boffins and the government.

And ministries of defence. I remember a lot of those websites were left up there because the general public didn't have access to them. I remember reading the paper, a list of web addresses that gave away military secrets. Yeah. That's amazing. I bumped into the guy who did the Labour Party's first website. And he said, yeah, it was just getting hacked in all the time. And people were putting pictures of knobs on it and stuff like that.

All it's like, this is like 95. The golden age. It was like there was no password. You could just go into it and just do what you wanted. Just like a whiteboard for the nation. Anyone could just add whatever you want. Yeah, I remember going On the first

White House website And there was a Very simple recording of The White House dog who would have been Bill Clinton's Dog barking And just a picture of the White House Do you know that there's a wonderful Bit of internet archaeology you can do

The Space Jam website is still up have you seen this Tom no this is fantastic just google now it's worth it

oh wow that's amazing yeah it's really funny it takes you back and another wonderful bit of internet archaeology

the footballer Andy Carroll still has a Bebo page live does he and he's like from the age of about 16, yeah. Oh, Aaron Ramsey had a Myspace from when he was 16.

With just a picture of him in his teenage bedroom in Caerphillies and a list of all the bands he liked. It's great. Did you have Tom in your top eight or did you move him out of the incredible Myspace? I moved him out. Did you? Okay, I had him there for far too long

in a way that I think Ratspector made it look like I only had seven friends. So, very briefly, do you remember what the internet was called to begin with? What the main... Internet superhighway? That's right, the information superhighway.

Oh, yes. So, in the mid to late 90s, it really started to take off. And dot-com companies started growing from everywhere. And the main reason for that is because interest rates were really, really low at this time. So venture capitalists were kind of ready to put their money anywhere they could into these online companies. So a huge number of these companies started up at this time um very quickly domain names uh attracted sort of premium costs i'll

give you an example here the founder of jungle.com which is one of the early.com companies which later went under paid 250 million dollars for the domain name alone for Jungle.com. Such was this early boom. Out of interest, what would your.com business idea be if you had to come up with one, either then or now? For now, you know Shazam? If you're not familiar with it, it's an app on your smartphone and if you hear a song on the radio and you don't know what it is, you hold, you Shazam it.

So you hold the phone up and it will say, oh, that is Get Back by the Beatles. I don't know how you'd invent this, but a Shazam for smells. So if I walked past a kitchen, I thought, oh, someone's house, this smells nice. So if I walked past a kitchen, I thought, oh, someone's house, this smells nice. I'd hold my phone up and they would say, they're cooking with oregano. So in the late 90s, as I say, investors were desperate to invest their money in these growing dot-com businesses. I'll give you an example. PayPal is one of the early examples of this. So in early 2000, Elon Musk and his business partner, Peter Thiel, formed PayPal,

who initially were running at a huge loss because they were basically giving out free money. You got £10 when you signed up. And also if someone you referred, they also got $10. And they had $15 million in the bank to begin with. And the head of the company told them this money at the rate they were growing would last six weeks basically they had six weeks such was the hemorrhaging of money at this rate of ten dollars for signing up they'd have six weeks they needed to get investors now this is how much people wanted to invest in dot com they went to south

korea they met with three different companies They weren't quite sure who they were going to take the money for. They came back to America. One of these Korean investment companies rings up PayPal's lawyer and says, hi, where do you want koreans pay five million dollars into the paypal company next day peter fiel rings them and goes no we haven't come to any agreement sorry this isn't happening can i have your bank details so i can send your five million dollars back and the korean um investors said we're not giving you our bank details you can't send it back you have to keep the money. Do you remember this? This reminds me of the story. Half-remembered historical anecdote.

There was a guy in Wigan who the UN went to send some money to a country and it was hundreds of millions and they got the account number wrong and sent it to a guy in Wigan or something like that. And then he woke up one day and he had like hundreds of millions in his account. And he now owns Wigan.

I'm pretty sure that's right. And I think he did ultimately raise his hand and go, what's this? So they refused to give him the bank details, as they say. And they ended up just having to keep their money. And they became one of the early investors and, of course, made huge money from PayPal. It worked. These Korean investors made huge money. But this was the spirit of the time.

People were desperate to pump their money into these companies. And a company that represents the boom and then bust of the dot-com bubble more than any other really is a company called priceline.com now i don't know if you've heard about priceline.com and they were founded by a man called jay walker which i quite like because he was american what a perfect name yeah yeah jay walker lovely stuff if he was british it'd be called cross where you want just go for it more specifically if you're not with your kids cross whenever you want if you're with your kids wait for the green light yeah yeah so um Priceline noticed that 500,000 airline tickets uh were being unsought going on sold uh each year and Priceline offered these

seats online to customers who were able to name the price of the tickets so you could bid what you wanted for these unsold tickets they launched in 1998 this is staggering they grew from 50 to 300 um 300 employees very very quickly by the end of 99 they were selling more than a thousand tickets a day now would you like to fancy get we'd like to would you fancy guessing how much they lost in the first few quarters as running as this new business? How much do you think they lost? Oh, it's going to be something daft, isn't it? This is the way these dot-com businesses run.

I couldn't guess. In the first few quarters alone, they lost $142.5 million. Oh, my God. That's what they're running at. I feel sick. Okay. Any idea why they might have been losing that sort of money? Would you like to guess why they were losing that sort of money?

I can't understand. No, I couldn't guess. They were losing that money because they had to buy tickets on the open market to fulfill the customer's global offers. So they were losing $30 on every ticket they sold. Oh, my God. Okay. They also spent $20 million on advertising alone to become visible basically but the key

thing is about this and this is what's staggering the investors didn't care because they were seen as a sort of company it would change the way we all lived in the way we bought and this is any company that was able to sell that idea investors just shoved money into them and so in march 1999 when this company was losing 14 $142.5 million every few quarters, went public on the stock market, on the first day it was valued at $9.8 billion. That is insane. It's the largest first day valuation of an internet company to that date. But this is what's heartbreaking and awful about it.

This is exactly what the venture capitalists wanted and is it the root of the bubble bursting because they didn't care if these dot-com companies were functioning companies they just needed the first day pop on the market at which point all of the investors got out they just sold their money they sold their shares to the general public. And this is what's happening time and time again with these dot-com companies. None of them were functioning companies. They couldn't survive. There's no way they could sustain the way they were, but it didn't matter. The investors put their money in. They waited until they floated in the stock market. The first day, they'd always boom because the media were pressing this idea that the dot-com future was with everything

and then the general public would buy those shares so these investors were just making unbelievable money knowing that these companies couldn't function they just but it didn't matter and the drops were huge so i'll give you an example price line dropped from dropped by 94% in value, basically, almost immediately after this. Oh, God. And it's no surprise then, the bubble, when it burst in the early 2000s, investors lost staggering sums of money. So by 2002, they think investor losses were estimated around $5 trillion. Oh, my God.

This is basically the general public. Oh, no. $5 trillion. Think what you could do with that Blimey That's terrible really isn't it That is mad I remember Reading about the bubble bursting

The Guardian The G2 I think it was Did a long piece on it When I was in my second year at university I remember reading this long piece Sitting in a baguette shop in Cardiff. That's perfect. That really dates it. I love that.

That's great. Baguette shop, which was huge for a period. Yeah, yeah. Not only was the baguette shop huge, I'd invested £100 million in my local baguette shop. The baguette boom. Remember the baguette boom? That was the big one, wasn't it? I was sitting in a baguette shop

in Cardiff between lectures reading about the dot-com bubble bursting and just thinking, well, I'm glad I'm subsisting on a student loan and was unable to invest any money because ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. I think I took the right decision, actually, going back to my flat with Rising Damp,

which my landlord has acknowledged does exist. At least my shower's still standing. But the result of this, and this is what's interesting, is that because so many of these companies collapsed, it completely rewrote the online environment. It's basically created what we have now. So the companies that survived, Amazon, eBay, Google, google things like this were able to consolidate their place in the market because previously the marketplace had been loads of companies just infinite number of companies tiny ones and um up and coming companies trying to wrestle for this space after this collapse after the bubble burst you're basically left with these very large companies who had the profits of sort of like nations, basically.

That's kind of what we have now. Final thing, to give you an idea of the disaster it was, during Super Bowl 34 in 2000, 14 dot-com companies advertised, which is up from just two the year before. advertised uh which is up from just two the year before and total spending on dot-com advertising during the 2000 super bowl game was 44 million dollars okay but within just a few years barely any of those companies that featured existed and today only one of the 14 companies that advertised during super bowl 2000 still exists and that's autotrader.com. That's the only one that's... Autotrader? Autotrader advertised at the Super Bowl? They did. The money that's required to advertise at the Super Bowl, okay?

The strength of company you should be to be advertising at the Super Bowl. And 13 of the 14 of those companies advertised have collapsed. That's incredible. Because it's the most expensive piece of advertising in the world, isn't it? Sort of, half-time at the Super Bowl. I'm always accused of being unambitious, financially. Hear me out. I think we should advertise this podcast

during half-time at the Super Bowl. So there we have it. Thank you very much for downloading this week's episode of Oh, What a Time. Now, the suggestion of money and speculation, that came from Rebecca's email. So thank you very much to Rebecca Cross. So if you have a topic suggestion for us, send it to hello at oh, what a time dot com. We love reading your emails, we love your correspondence. It's just of such a high quality, Tom. I don't know how

our listeners do it. It's tremendously pleasing to me. If you'd like to leave us a review, make sure it's five stars, because I'm emotionally fragile. And also, I'm going to make that lie that it helps people find the podcast, but really, I just really, really benefit from praise.

I work well when I'm being complimented. Would you like me to keep screen-grabbing them and sending them to you on our WhatsApp group, Ellis? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You seem to quite enjoy that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't this nice? Basically, the flavour of our WhatsApp group is about once every two hours or three hours, I'll send one round, it'll be, oh, isn't this nice?

Oh, that's nice. Oh, it's lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a real pick-me-up. It really, really does put a spring in my step. So keep sending us your stuff. If you've got any one-day time machine stories you'd like to send us, if you are related to anyone from the past who's done anything incredible or weird,

do get in contact and keep supporting the show, and we'll see you next week bye goodbye Thank you.