You know, if you were to walk into an average
American teenager's bedroom in, like, 1970 and
then walk into that exact same room in 1989,
you might genuinely think you had stepped onto
a different planet. Oh, absolutely. The contrast
is just staggering. Right. Because in 1970, you've
got, you know, a radio playing Casey Chasm's
brand new American Top 40 Countdown. Maybe you
have some posters on the wall. Yeah, very analog,
very physical. Exactly. But by 1989, that same
room... has a Nintendo entertainment system hooked
up to the television. The Simpsons is playing
on the newly launched Fox network. And there's
probably a personal computer sitting right on
the desk. Yes, the transformation is just absolutely
wild. But, you know, how did we get from the
analog age of Casey Cassum to the digital dawn
of the 90s in just 20 years? Well, I'll tell
you, it wasn't a smooth ride. I mean, it took
a complete, fundamental collapse of institutional
trust to get us there. It really did. And today,
our mission for this deep dive is to look at
a timeline covering U .S. history from 1970 to
1989. And we're not just going to recite dates
here. No, definitely not. We want to uncover
the underlying narrative of how America transformed.
Right. Going from the post 60s era into the dawn
of the hyper connected modern 90s. And I am so
glad to have you here today to help us connect
all these historical dots. Thanks for having
me. I mean. We often look back at the 70s and
80s and caricature them, right, with disco balls
or neon windbreakers. Oh, for sure. Big hair
and shoulder pads. Exactly. But when you look
at the source material, you see a profound crucible.
This was an era of unprecedented technological
birth. It was an absolute reckoning for massive
government systems. And a complete rewiring of
global power, too. Right. It's not just history.
It is the literal blueprint of the modern world
you are navigating right now. OK, let's unpack
this, because we really have to start with the
early 1970s. The narrative through line that
jumps out immediately is this jarring reality
check regarding American leadership and the economy.
Yeah, there is this really intense juxtaposition
happening. Right. On one hand, there is a massive
surge in social and environmental idealism. You've
got the first Earth Day in 1970. And the creation
of the EPA and OSHA too. Exactly. Plus the 26th
Amendment finally lowering the voting age to
18. There's this tangible push for a better society.
But slamming right up against that idealism is
just deep systemic tragedy. It's true. You have
the horrific events at Kent State and Jackson
State in 1970. Where National Guard troops and
police fired into crowds of student protesters.
Yeah. It completely shattered the illusion of
domestic stability. And That tension bleeds directly
into a cascading series of political crises.
Like the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Right. The
Supreme Court rules that those papers can be
published. Suddenly, the government's internal
secret assessments of the Vietnam War are out
in the open. And the public realizes, wow, we
have been systematically lied to for years. Exactly.
Which brings us to the absolute collapse of executive
trust, which is Watergate. We all know the basic
story of the 1972 break -in at the Democratic
National Committee headquarters. But it wasn't
just a burglary that broke the public's faith,
was it? No, not at all. It was the mechanism
of the cover -up. Right, that slow -motion realization
that corruption went all the way up to the Oval
Office. Especially when they discovered Nixon's
secret tapes in 1973. And, you know, it wasn't
an isolated event. Right around the same time,
Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns in disgrace
due to an entirely separate bribery and tax evasion
scandal. Oh, wow. I always forget that happened
at basically the same time. It's crazy, right?
And then you have the Saturday Night Massacre.
This is a crucial mechanical moment for American
trust. Nixon ordered his attorney general to
fire the independent special prosecutor investigating
Watergate, right? Yes. And the attorney general
refused and resigned. Then the deputy attorney
general refused and resigned. It was like a live
constitutional stress test just playing out on
the evening news. It really was. And it all culminates
in August 1974 when Richard Nixon becomes the
first and only US president to resign. Follows
shortly by Gerald Ford pardoning him. This era
fundamentally alters the relationship between
the citizen and the state. It absolutely does.
And of course, alongside these massive political
shifts, we see monumental judicial shifts. Things
like the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Right. And
we should pause here to note that we are neutrally
reporting these political and judicial shifts,
including Roe v. Wade, just as factual historical
milestones. Exactly. We aren't taking any political
stance here, just looking at the timeline. But
that ruling fundamentally altered reproductive
rights across the country. The landscape of what
the government could and couldn't do was just
shifting beneath everyone's feet. Yeah. But it
wasn't just the political system that was failing
the stress test. The economy was falling apart,
too. Oh, right. Let's talk about the economic
shock. So in 1971, you have what became known
as the Nixon shock. And the most consequential
piece of this was the president completely ending
the United States gold standard. Wait, let me
stop you there, because I think a lot of people
misunderstand this. Before 1971, every dollar
in my pocket was theoretically tied to a physical
piece of gold sitting in a vault somewhere. Yes,
theoretically. So how did untethering that actually
cause the economic chaos of the 70s? Well, under
the post -WWII Bretton Woods system, global currencies
were pegged to the U .S. dollar, right? And the
dollar was pegged to gold at $35 an ounce. OK,
makes sense. But by the late 60s, the U .S. was
spending massively. on the Vietnam War, on the
domestic Great Society programs. They were printing
more money than they had gold to back it up.
Uh -oh. I can see where this is going. Exactly.
Four nations started getting nervous and demanded
their gold instead of holding dollars. Nixon
realized the U .S. gold reserves would be totally
depleted, so he just completely severed the tie.
Wow. So the dollar became a fiat currency, backed
only by trust in the U .S. government. Right.
And as we just discussed, trust in the U .S.
government was currently plummeting. Yeah, not
the best time to run on trust. No, not at all.
So without the anchor of gold and combined with
other pressures, inflation absolutely skyrocketed.
The money in your wallet was suddenly losing
value by the month. And then the ultimate physical
shock hits, right? The 1973 Arab oil embargo.
Yes. Because the U .S. supported Israel in the
Yom Kippur War, OPEC retaliated by cutting off
oil exports to the United States. And this wasn't
just some abstract line on an economic chart.
This was an immediate visceral disruption of
the American dream. Totally. Gas stations were
literally running out of fuel. They brought back
daylight saving time in January, which is months
early, just to save electricity. And they dropped
the national speed limit to 55 miles per hour.
It was a profound psychological blow. For decades,
the American identity was built on limitless
highways, big cars, endless expansion. Right.
Suddenly, foreign nations had the power to turn
off the tap and grind the world's superpower
to a halt. You were suddenly subject to limits
you couldn't control. Looking at this back -to
-back sequence of political scandal and economic
strain, it makes me think of an analogy. Oh,
let's hear it. It's like relying on a massive
city -wide public transit system your whole life.
You trust the trains will run on time, but then
you find out the conductors are corrupt, the
tracks are crumbling, and suddenly the city cuts
the power grid. You are just left stranded. That
is a really great way to look at it. Like a teenager
finding out their parents are deeply flawed while
simultaneously getting their allowance slashed.
So I have to ask you, did this double whammy
of disillusionment permanently alter the American
psyche? What's fascinating here is that this
immense loss of faith in macro institutions,
you know, the presidency, the macro economy,
the energy grid, it actually created a vacuum.
A vacuum. Yeah, and that vacuum set the stage
for micro -level innovation. When the public
transit system fails, to use your analogy, you
don't just sit on the platform forever, you figure
out how to build your own car. Oh, I see. When
you stop trusting large centralized powers to
solve your problems, you start looking for tools
that you can control yourself. Here's where it
gets really interesting, because that brings
us right into the mid -1970s and early 1980s.
As people lost faith in the establishment, They
turn their focus inward. Exactly. To their own
homes, their own screens, and personal technology.
We are talking about the era of basement hackers
and blockbusters. The timeline of technological
birth here is just staggering. And it's driven
by that exact desire for autonomy. In 1975, Bill
Gates founds Microsoft. Wow, 1975. Yeah. In 1976,
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple. By
1977, you had the release of the Commodore PET,
one of the first retail personal computers. Which
is a huge shift, because before this, computing
meant massive mainframes locked in university
basements or government facilities running on
punch cards. It belonged to the establishment.
But now, it was sitting right there on your desk.
You controlled the inputs. And it wasn't just
computers, right? It was how we entertained ourselves.
Right. In 1975, Sony introduces the Betamax.
Think about the mechanical shift there. Oh, it's
huge. Before home video, you watched what the
big three networks told you to watch. exactly
when they told you to watch it. With Betamax,
you seized control of the broadcast schedule.
And in 1977, the Atari 2600 hits the market,
popularizing microprocessor -based hardware and
game cartridges. So you're no longer just passively
consuming media. You are actively manipulating
pixels on a screen. Exactly. And at the exact
same time, pop culture is providing this massive
collective escapism. Steven Spielberg releases
Jaws in 1975, practically inventing the modern
summer blockbuster. And Star Wars debuts in 1977.
Plus, you get the premieres of Saturday Night
Live and Wheel of Fortune in 1975. Right. And
I love thinking about why those movies and shows
resonated so deeply. Look at what was happening
outside the theater. It's true. You had the 1977
New York City blackout that resulted in massive
looting. You had the terrifying Three Mile Island
nuclear accident in 1979. Again. This feeling
that massive complex systems were failing and
literally threatening our lives. And the Iranian
hostage crisis that same year, which triggered
a second energy crisis and sent gas prices over
one dollar a gallon for the first time ever.
The real world felt chaotic, completely out of
control and morally gray. So what do people do?
They line up to watch Star Wars. It gave them
absolute pure black and white morality. Good
versus evil, a hero who defeats the massive corrupt
empire. The psychology is spot on. The shift
from massive industrial hardware to these tiny
personal microprocessors, perfectly mirrored
society's shift from trusting large government
solutions to valuing individual empowerment.
Yeah, that makes so much sense. You couldn't
control the nuclear power plant down the road,
and you couldn't control the oil prices dictated
by foreign cartels. You could control your Atari
joystick. You could control your own digital
universe. Exactly. And that inward retreat that
focus on the screen in your living room seamlessly
sets up the next major evolution. Really it does.
As we move into the 1980s, the screen goes from
being an escapist toy to being a relentless window
into global culture and shared trauma. Right.
And the structural shift happens in 1981. with
the launch of MPV. It becomes the first 24 -hour
cable network. Which is wild to think about now.
I know. MTV proved to the broadcasting world
that audiences would eagerly consume a relentless
24 -hour feed of content. And once that was proven,
news networks realized they could do the exact
same thing. But they had to fill airtime. And
when you have to fill 24 hours of airtime, you
start turning the spotlight onto things that
had previously been kept in the shadows. Yeah,
the 1980s saw an explosion of national awareness
campaigns driven entirely by this new media saturation.
Right. The tragic cases of missing children like
Adam Walsh and Johnny Gosh weren't just local
news anymore. Their faces were everywhere, eventually
ending up on milk cartons. You had national coverage
of eating disorders following the death of singer
Karen Carpenter in 1983. and 60 minutes doing
deep coverage on child abuse. You also had the
rise of mothers against drunk driving gaining
massive traction after horrific events like the
1988 Carrollton bus crash. And, you know, it
wasn't just domestic issues. Media saturation
created unprecedented global empathy. Think about
the 1985 Live Aid concert. Oh, absolutely. And
the We Are the World campaign. Right. Famine
in developing nations wasn't a new phenomenon
in the 1980s. What was new was the logistical
capability to broadcast that suffering directly
into living rooms across the globe in real time.
Paired with the biggest rock stars on the planet.
Exactly. It forged a shared global consciousness
that just hadn't existed before. And we saw similar
national awareness with the AIDS crisis, especially
after Rock Hudson's diagnosis became public in
1985. But that same shared consciousness meant
we were also experiencing collective shock together.
The 1980s were marked by tragedies that unfolded
practically in real time. It really were. Like
the 1981 Kansas City Hotel walkway collapse or,
you know, the most glaring example, the 1986
Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion. That wasn't
just a rocket failing because schoolteacher Krista
McAuliffe was on board. NASA had specifically
encouraged schools to tune in. Right. So you
had classrooms full of children all over the
country watching live as the shuttle exploded.
It completely shattered the aura of American
technological infallibility and it traumatized
a generation simultaneously. You also had weird
shared moments like the 1987 Max Headroom broadcast
interruption and then the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Oh right. Caught live on television. because
it happened right in the middle of the World
Series. The ground is literally shaking on live
television. It makes me want to push back a little
on the era, though. Okay, go ahead. When you
look at all this and you add in the violent realities
of the time, like the 1984 arrival of crack cocaine
or the Bernhard Goat subway shooting in New York,
it feels incredibly violent and chaotic. It does.
Was the 1980s genuinely a more dangerous era
to live in or were the cameras just finally turned
on and broadcasting it directly into our brains?
This raises an important question about the mechanics
of media psychology. This era truly marks the
beginning of modern information overload. for
the average citizen. Information overload, yeah.
Before the 24 -hour news cycle, you got your
news once a day in the paper or on a 30 -minute
evening broadcast. It was curated and contained.
Right. But when tragedies, warnings, and missing
children are broadcast constantly, it fundamentally
alters cultural empathy and fear. The world may
not have been statistically more dangerous in
every metric, but it felt exponentially more
dangerous. Because you're suddenly bearing witness
to all of it, all the time. Exactly. Your brain
just wasn't evolved to process the tragedies
of an entire planet simultaneously. That makes
total sense. And while all this domestic culture
and media saturation is altering the American
mind, the global order is shifting massively
in the background. Oh, absolutely. If we zoom
out to the late 1980s, the intense global tensions
of the Cold War finally reach a dramatic, highly
televised climax. Yeah, we can trace the arc
of the Cold War right through these two decades.
Back in 1975, there was a brief moment of physical
cooperation with the Apollo Soyuz handshake in
space. Right, where an American and a Soviet
spacecraft actually docked in orbit. But by the
early 80s, the proxy tensions were back in full
force, playing out on the world stage. The U
.S. boycotts the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
To protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Yes. And in retaliation, the Eastern Bloc boycotts
the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. And
this brings us to the presidency of Ronald Reagan,
which was defined by massive aggressive shifts
in geopolitics and economics. Yes. And again,
we are just looking at the historical mechanics
impartially here. Of course. Domestically, you
have sweeping moves like the 1981 Kemp -Roth
tax cuts. And that same year, the incredible
firing of the striking air traffic controllers.
Right. Which was a clear signal that the era
of powerful labor unions was facing a severe
headwind. But internationally, the administration
creates the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed
Star Wars. And there's the Iran -Contra affair,
which was a massive geopolitical scandal. Right.
And it's vital to understand the mechanism behind
the Star Wars. War's initiative. The public perception
was about shooting down nuclear missiles with
lasers from space. Which sounds very sci -fi.
It does. But the underlying geopolitical strategy
was largely economic. The Reagan administration
knew the Soviet economy was stagnating. By announcing
a massive futuristic defense system, the US essentially
forced the Soviets into a high -tech arms race
they literally could not afford. It was an economic
strategy designed to bankrupt the Soviet system.
Wow, it's like a high stakes poker game where
one player just keeps raising the bet with money
the other player doesn't have, forcing them to
eventually fold. That's a great analogy. But
all that spending and economic rewiring caused
massive volatility at home, too. Right. The decade
saw wild financial swings, culminating in Black
Monday in 1987. when the stock market crashed.
Yeah and what's wild is that the very personal
computers and digital systems born in the 70s
contributed to the crash. Early computerized
trading programs automatically sold off stocks,
accelerating the panic. Speed of the new digital
world was a double -edged sword. It was. But
the defining narrative of the late 80s, the event
that truly capped off the anxiety of these two
decades, was a resolution of that Cold War poker
game. Right. In 1987, President Reagan goes to
Berlin and challenges Soviet Premier Gorbachev
with the famous line, tear down this wall. That
same year, they signed the INF Treaty. physically
reducing their nuclear arsenals. And it all culminates
in 1989. President George H .W. Bush and Gorbachev
signal that the Cold War is ending. And symbolically,
the Berlin Wall finally falls. People are literally
taking sledgehammers to the physical manifestation
of the Iron Curtain. It's an incredible, euphoric
climax. But 1989 wasn't just a clean, happy movie
ending where the credits roll, was it? No, not
at all. The geopolitical map was redrawn, yes,
but the year immediately pivoted into deeply
modern challenges. Right. In 1989, we have the
Exxon Valdez oil spill, forcing a reckoning with
the environmental cost of our energy demands.
And we see the official declaration of the war
on drugs shifting domestic law enforcement strategies
for decades to come. So what does this all mean?
How are you, the listener, supposed to process
this massive historical shift? It's a lot to
take in. It is. We went from the Vietnam War
and the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 through the
disillusionment of Watergate, the birth of the
personal computer, the rise of the 24 -hour news
cycle, all the way to the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, this timeline demonstrates the incredible
resilience, but also the sheer mechanical adaptability
of society. Adaptability, yeah. Think about it,
in just 20 short years, the world fundamentally
rewired its economy, it rewired its technology,
and it rewired its geopolitical boundaries. The
sheer velocity of change is breathtaking. It
is a phenomenal amount of ground we've covered,
from the founding of Microsoft to the fall of
the Berlin Wall, from Watergate to the Simpsons
debuting in 1989. Yeah, it's wild to see it all
laid out like that. We always say that understanding
these timelines is the ultimate shortcut to understanding
why our modern world functions the way it does.
Absolutely. Because the smartphone you might
be using to listen to us right now, the 24 hour
media feeds you scroll through and the geopolitical
alliances you read about in the news, they didn't
just appear out of nowhere. No, they were forged
in the friction of these two specific decades.
Exactly. The desire for personal technology was
born from a loss of institutional trust. We'd
like to leave you with a final thought to mull
over. Think about the speed of the shift we just
mapped out. Okay. In 1970, humans had just walked
on the moon, but you couldn't even record a television
show in your own home. Right. By 1989, we were
holding global live -streamed concerts and experiencing
the birth of the 24 -hour news cycle. As you
look around at the rapid rise of artificial intelligence,
algorithms, and the massive technological shifts
happening today, ask yourself, Are we in the
middle of our own 1970s style disruption right
now? Oh, that's a good question. Are our institutions
facing that same crucible? And if so, what will
our 1989 look like when the dust finally settles?
That is a brilliant question to leave on. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive,
whether you're listening on a smart speaker,
a phone, or maybe even a vintage Commodore PE
if you somehow kept one running. We appreciate
you spending your time with us. Keep learning,
keep questioning, and we will catch you on the
next deep dive.