Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - I Miss the 90s. What I Really Miss is Real Life

00:00:00.000 Chew on this bold question from Dentine Gum.

00:00:03.560 Is it ever okay to compliment a millennial on their skinny jeans in 2026?

00:00:12.660 Dentine, chew bold.

00:00:21.320 Everywhere I look, people are longing for a fantasy of the past.

00:00:25.960 And I am not talking about the tradwife fantasy of the 1950s or the 1890s. I'm talking about the

00:00:34.420 1990s. The very real, messy cigarettes outside and inside of the bar, Oasis on repeat, Carolyn

00:00:44.120 Bessette in a white tee and perfect hair, flip phones if you had a phone at all, brand new episodes

00:00:51.020 of friends and ER every single week, the nostalgia for the 90s is very, very real.

00:01:00.720 Today I'm talking about it with my dear friend, Glynis McNichol, who has a lot of theories

00:01:04.880 on why 90s nostalgia isn't just very prescient right now for those of us who lived through

00:01:11.220 the 90s, but for those of us who were either born in the late 90s or the early 2000s who

00:01:18.080 never lived it in reality at all. What Glynnis thinks, and I totally agree, is that we're all

00:01:24.360 really just craving life offline. We want community without a feed telling us what to think,

00:01:32.180 a little serendipity, a little adventure. Glynnis calls the 90s a code word for the fact that we

00:01:38.540 just want real life. And I think she's right. So time travel with us. Back to a time when 1.00

00:01:46.460 jagged little pill had just come out. Sex and the City was on screens for the very first time.

00:01:51.600 You'd have to walk past a newsstand to get the actual news, and no one was reachable all the

00:01:55.840 time. Travel back with us to the 90s. Hello, Glynis. Hi. I was just saying you look more

00:02:04.660 French than I do, and I'm the one calling in from Paris right now. And you're the one calling in

00:02:08.800 from Paris. It's the bangs. It's the bangs that Casey cut me. And the stripes. And the lips.

00:02:12.240 yeah all of it yeah you got it all going on well our friend marissa melzer the bangs are her fault 0.62

00:02:17.800 oh i saw that yeah i had her on the podcast uh her episode is actually on on tuesday for her new 0.51

00:02:24.340 jane birkin book and when you look at pictures of jane birkin you're like god damn it now i need

00:02:29.780 bangs yeah now i need jane birkin the french it girl who was british exactly exactly but then but 0.60

00:02:36.420 also her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, had perfect bangs as well. Also, Lou Dwellon is her 0.99

00:02:42.020 daughter. Lou, I have such a fan of Lou, who I share a birthday with. She's got that amazing,

00:02:46.660 they've all got. They've all got excellent bang situations. So I blame Marissa, but in a great 0.70

00:02:55.240 way because I'm so happy with these bangs. Yeah, no, they look fantastic. Bangs need to

00:03:00.440 make a comeback. Bangs need to make a comeback. So today we are not talking about bangs. Today 1.00

00:03:05.900 We are talking about something near and dear to my own heart, which I think about on a daily

00:03:11.280 basis. So many people right now are very nostalgic for the 90s. And this makes sense because the

00:03:20.600 world is burning down around us. Why are we so... And it's also very funny to me because

00:03:26.520 I think of Trad Wives and the whole make America great again, go back to the 1950s aesthetic,

00:03:32.800 Whereas everyone that I know wants to go back to the 90s and be like smoking cigarettes outside of bars, listening to Oasis and fawning over pictures of Carolyn Bessette in Vanity Fair.

00:03:47.420 Why are we so nostalgic for the 90s right now?

00:03:52.360 So I actually have a theory that we are nostalgic for the 90s, but we keep saying like we're nostalgic for the 90s right now.

00:03:59.700 I think that we've been in a nineties phase now for much longer than a

00:04:03.740 phase. Like, it's not like a, you know, in the eighties when we were kids,

00:04:06.960 it was like a phase that we were obsessed with the 1950s.

00:04:09.800 And then wonder years came on and we were obsessed with the 1960s.

00:04:12.640 I think we are like in some perma version nineties obsession.

00:04:17.300 Cause we're all, and I mean, all of us,

00:04:20.260 like the stories about teenagers who were trying to get flip phones and the

00:04:24.180 stories about you know um young people who is speaking of carolyn beset like when i wrote a

00:04:33.340 feature about her for town and country 10 years ago my editor said do you think enough people

00:04:38.340 know who she is because she had disappeared for such a long time and if you weren't in new york

00:04:42.640 you really didn't have an awareness of her and now she's all of the you know gen z i think it's

00:04:48.400 gen z i get the generations confused now are all completely obsessed with her as like the biggest

00:04:52.860 fashion icon of the moment. But I think in the larger picture, all of us, all of us, those of us

00:05:00.240 who remember and those of us who dream about it are obsessed with a time period that existed

00:05:04.980 offline, right? Like, I just think that we are all craving our response to both the chaos of

00:05:12.820 what we're living through, the impending AI, the screen time, which we know is terrible for

00:05:19.520 everyone and particularly young people who don't want the phones in school, who are telling us

00:05:24.020 that they're relieved to be removed from their phones. All of this is us craving community and

00:05:28.800 real life and real life connection. And that was how we lived, right? Like that wasn't something

00:05:33.420 you had to look for in the nineties or before the nineties. I think the reason we keep coming

00:05:39.160 back to the nineties is it's the most recent time in which we were all offline and parts of it still

00:05:48.460 feel very modern right like speaking of that you can look at carolyn beset and there's nothing

00:05:54.060 about her that ties her to a time period or oasis just went on tour or leonardo caprio is back as

00:06:01.300 the starring person i mean my entire everyone i know is obsessed with this paul thomas anderson

00:06:06.940 who is also a director from the 90s like we are both inundated with these figures as sort of that

00:06:13.020 last moment of the monoculture and they all seem very modern because in certain ways things haven't

00:06:19.800 progressed that much and it was the most recent moment so I just I think we're going to be

00:06:24.500 permanently craving this time period and also it's our lived memory right like we I remember

00:06:32.380 being a kid and being obsessed with the 1950s after Back to the Future came out and it was like

00:06:36.760 It seems like a million years ago, even though my mother was a child of the 50s.

00:06:42.700 It's both our lived memories and also seems weirdly modern. So it's this, and the screens

00:06:48.500 and social media and TikTok make it seem very present because we're constantly being bombarded

00:06:53.720 with images from it. And those images don't look dated because film has not changed so drastically

00:07:01.040 in the in the 30 years since then so it's like this weird perfect storm of

00:07:06.480 relevance nostalgia real life and like modernism that it encapsulates and so i think the 90s is

00:07:17.860 operating as like um almost like a a weird like code name for real life that we want right we're

00:07:25.300 craving yeah it's just it's now just the code word for oh we're craving the 90s i actually

00:07:30.080 think what we're craving is real life pay phones talking to people wandering outside without

00:07:35.960 knowing everything that's going to happen you know a sense of sort of like adventure and serendipity

00:07:42.080 and and the 90s is just the easiest way to say that in the shortest version possible like I'm

00:07:49.940 craving the 90s I'm craving I'm craving oh let's make sweatshirts that say I'm craving the 90s

00:07:54.800 Right. Because the thing is, if we time traveled back to the 90s, we time traveled back to the 50s, when we were kids, there would have been, you know, no birth control, there would have been, you know, a lot more diseases, it would have been quite good, like a whole bunch of things. But if we, if you and I time traveled back to 1999, or anyone did, it would be, you know, not having a iPhone, I think would be tough, but so much of it still is in certain ways better than this moment that we're living in, right?

00:08:24.800 But in certain ways, it would also feel very familiar in that like late 90s panic about

00:08:28.860 the millennium.

00:08:29.580 Like we're all in a panic right now about the end of the, understandably in a panic

00:08:33.720 about sort of the AI impending AI apocalypse.

00:08:37.880 Truth, truth.

00:08:38.880 Y2K feels so quaint now.

00:08:43.500 You're like, oh, you're worried about Y2K.

00:08:46.200 We're worried about the planet burning to the ground. 0.99

00:08:48.600 But at the same time, our concern about Y2K, I have such clear memories of it.

00:08:54.800 is also sort of like an avatar of our concern right now of the grid going down, right? 0.73

00:09:01.140 Like I am in Paris right now and Europe, the EU,

00:09:05.640 the advice to EU citizens is to have a certain amount of cash on hand

00:09:10.840 and water in case the grid goes down, right?

00:09:13.460 Like there's very, we're living in sort of a permanent state of Y2K

00:09:18.060 in terms of it's not tied to a clock, like a specific clock necessarily. 0.91

00:09:24.340 But we don't have a countdown clock, which I did enjoy.

00:09:28.080 Remember those big countdown clocks all over New York?

00:09:30.480 Yes, I do.

00:09:31.260 But also like that sense of like tick tock, like if this all goes down, are you prepared

00:09:35.480 to live on?

00:09:36.100 Like if that threat sort of hangs over us in a much more comprehensive way and in a 0.92

00:09:41.860 very real way, whereas the Y2K, we were told to prepare for all of this, but it was tied 0.93

00:09:46.960 to a clock, which was kind of amusing in hindsight, but at the time felt very real. 0.90

00:09:52.540 It did feel very real.

00:09:53.560 I also think I Miss the 90s is shorthand for, I mean, this is just another way of saying what

00:09:59.400 you said, but I miss fun. Yeah. Yes. Because if we time traveled back to the 90s right now,

00:10:06.740 we would know how to have some fun. Okay. In fact, I feel like I did the other night. So Casey and I

00:10:12.860 were in New York. We went to a book launch for Gabrielle Hamilton's new book, Next of Kin.

00:10:21.000 it was prune around in the 90s it was right wasn't it a 90s restaurant i thought it was pre-9-11

00:10:26.460 it was pre-9-11 i'll look it up because i mean i i was at prune a lot in the 2000s right uh but

00:10:34.320 so we went we go to this book launch and then we went to like just we we saw a random bar

00:10:41.700 on the street that we're like that looks cool we we had not seen it on instagram we had not

00:10:47.860 looked up any reviews for it yeah we just walked by a bar and we're like that looks weird and cool

00:10:52.980 it's painted turquoise let's go in that bar and then we hung out there for two hours just talking

00:10:57.500 to the bartender talking to patrons and then i smoked a menthol cigarette for no reason whatsoever

00:11:02.600 i know it was 1996 you really are very parisian i'm so parisian right now uh and but it was a

00:11:10.300 blast and we didn't look at our phones for hours yeah and i think that's what people are craving

00:11:16.620 It's like, I want serendipity. Yeah, I want real human connection. And I want to have a little bit

00:11:24.080 of fun. And I want to be fully in the moment without it being perforated by, you know, 15

00:11:30.840 other what other other people doing and also the sense of performance, right? I think to real life

00:11:36.240 releases you from that idea of performing life, or how are people going to think about me? Not

00:11:42.240 that we didn't think about it was much a different way. It's so funny to imagine going back and

00:11:45.920 thinking, uh, and saying to someone, it was the best night. Cause I went out and I just walked

00:11:52.720 into a bar without knowing what the bar was like, that was just how I don't know the name of the

00:11:56.980 bar. I'm like, that was a great bar. No idea. No idea. And those, and of course, and your memories

00:12:01.840 of it are so vivid too. I think it's funny to, um, to, to have my very clear memories of magazines

00:12:09.780 and articles and quotes, and then to go look them up and realize I'm remembering them perfectly

00:12:13.620 because our attention was not so frayed I know um and and on also like culturally like speaking of

00:12:20.560 like Leo or all these other people it was like they occupied we had a like a focal point really

00:12:27.820 I mean you could also make the argument that you know Trump is the last of the monoculture right

00:12:32.600 like one of the reasons he I mean this is now years later but like one of the reasons he was

00:12:40.740 elected was like his name recognition was so comprehensive and that's very hard to come by

00:12:48.740 you know now i guess mom donnie in a much much different way in smaller way but although even

00:12:52.900 people in paris know it's funny to talk to people in paris because they're all following the new

00:12:56.480 york city election it's funny to you know we new yorkers get accused of being um you know naval

00:13:04.920 gazey and thinking the whole world revolves around them but when you leave new york you're like

00:13:09.380 actually it's not that the world revolves around new york but everyone is very highly aware of

00:13:13.660 everything that happens in new york because it exists as an idea and like um i went to a wine

00:13:19.800 bar and you know over on the 14th the other night which is not a very touristy part of paris and

00:13:24.560 the bartender said was asking my friend and i where we were from and i said oh new york city

00:13:28.680 and he went oh new york city the dream and i thought you know it's interesting even now

00:13:33.720 particularly with everything going on in the world to still be outside of the states and hear

00:13:39.340 people refer to New York as the dream and as yeah you know yeah it's the dream there's a reality to

00:13:44.820 it that is very not dreamy but anyway that's off topic but I just think that in that sense of like

00:13:50.280 a comprehensive ideas or like people we all knew about I think we're craving that too we're craving

00:13:57.880 tastemakers we're craving a unified experience we're craving like we all know the same thing

00:14:04.460 at the same time or not the same time like the all you know the same news story and not 15

00:14:09.600 different versions of it or we're all watching the same movie yeah at the same time or we're

00:14:14.820 all watching the same tv show at the same time i mean the 90s had sex in the city we had the

00:14:20.740 sopranos like there was something that we could all talk about um and two shows that are still

00:14:27.580 way so incredibly relevant like sex in the city is just evergreen in terms of its cultural

00:14:35.820 relevance and we're still living in sort of a soprano's aftermath it's wild to consider that

00:14:42.180 but yes that we all talked about the same thing i mean the seinfeld finale played in time square

00:14:47.880 right like they it's it's and and how everybody watched it it's sort of incredible to think of

00:14:55.220 Incredible to think of.

00:14:56.600 I mean, it truly, truly is.

00:14:58.860 All right, let's take a quick break.

00:15:00.060 And when we get back, I want to dive a little bit into the stories that we were all reading.

00:15:05.740 Like what was in the headlines in 95, 96?

00:15:10.780 So many good headlines.

00:15:16.800 Chew on this bold question from Dantine Gum.

00:15:19.420 is it ever okay to compliment a millennial on their skinny jeans in 2026 dentine too bold

00:15:31.720 okay we are back my biggest regret of the fall is not smoking that menthol cigarette outside that

00:15:42.220 bar the other night um but it was not getting never regret that actually i don't regret that

00:15:50.280 i was like in the morning i woke up with bangs which case you cut when we got home um and i was

00:15:56.500 like i love us so much and i love my bangs and i don't even regret that menthol cigarette uh but

00:16:02.400 my biggest regret of the fall is not getting oasis tickets because i love oasis when we were in tokyo

00:16:10.460 Nick and I sang Oasis karaoke alone in a room for about three hours. And yet, for some reason,

00:16:16.820 we thought it was going to be hard. It was going to be sold out. And now I'm just sad.

00:16:20.900 They're going to do it again because they love money. So I'm sure they're going to do it again.

00:16:24.920 And people will come. I mean, a friend of mine, not to rub salt in the wound,

00:16:28.100 but a friend of mine did see them in LA and was one of the better experiences.

00:16:33.800 Well, I mean, I recently went to, not recently, for my birthday last year,

00:16:38.520 last September, I went to the Weezer concert. And it was one of the best concerts that I've

00:16:42.440 ever been to. And people were so joyful there. And yeah, I mean, I think that we're craving that

00:16:49.780 nostalgia. We're craving that in-person connection. I want to talk a little bit about what the news

00:16:55.480 landscape was in 95, 96, which is the year, what's the story, Morning Glory was released to the

00:17:03.620 world was it really it was yeah because nick the nick last night um i was i was telling him about

00:17:09.040 my my largest regret to the extent that i was looking up what what the final dates are and

00:17:13.460 i'm like we can go to mexico city and he's like shut your mouth but uh nick never said that but

00:17:20.860 yes yeah actually nick nick is like i'll look at flights but um anyway yeah he's like no they

00:17:27.640 were a 2000s band so i immediately googled it this morning and i was like you're wrong because

00:17:31.400 i just like totally wrong they were i was in university when at least i know it was 95

00:17:35.680 popped on the scene yeah this is going i mean we're at the height of clinton uh it's uh which

00:17:41.760 is not good okay like which there's a lot of good but we're also at the height of the monica

00:17:46.340 lewinsky scandal which was covered fucking terribly yeah the bill clinton scandal the

00:17:52.200 bill clinton scandal that's not the height of it though i think was it was 1996 97 maybe i think 0.68

00:17:59.260 be um i mean we're at the beginning this is so funny because it's like you go across the board

00:18:05.700 right you're um we're at the height of the supermodels uh uh isaac mizrahi's documentary

00:18:14.020 unzipped comes out and sort of catapults that to another level we're at the height of um we're

00:18:19.880 talking hollywood it's like the emergence of brad pitt and gwyneth paltrow two people who

00:18:24.740 both taking up too much oxygen in the news still today still today still at this moment um

00:18:32.140 I think too the thing about thinking of headlines and during that time and this is sort of when I

00:18:40.200 became much more sensitive to actually what was going on in the news is that you would get up in

00:18:44.740 the morning and walk to the newsstand and see what was see what had happened in the world it's

00:18:49.580 wild to think of now but i remember when i first came to new york um i'd watch the newsstand and

00:18:56.800 see like get my news from the front page of the new york post in the daily news like you actually

00:19:01.900 were actually sources of news they were sources of local news um and then you'd look at the times

00:19:06.500 to see the global news and we were all getting the exact same headline so um yeah what else was

00:19:13.220 happening nothing it's in hindsight it's so hard to because um i think columbine you know speaking

00:19:20.080 of mass shootings and i'm not sure i don't think that was the first one but maybe it was the first

00:19:26.400 you know we're seeing a lot of the origins of the of of things we're still living in and with

00:19:32.400 from that time and also in hindsight um so many of those headlines or news stories seem

00:19:41.780 gentle and like calm compared to now i think uh i have a theory i have a theory about this

00:19:51.020 because i'm i'm gonna throw out a couple of headlines from 95 okay they're not great okay

00:19:57.640 they're not great but the way we consumed news was different okay so we we did we knew about

00:20:05.160 these things. We read about them. But we were not inundated with them constantly, and then

00:20:12.440 inundated with think pieces about what every other person thought about them, and then have them

00:20:16.620 re-shared in feeds as memes. So while these are terrible headlines, they did not occupy our brains

00:20:25.860 in the same way. And I think that's why it seems like a gentler time. But listen to this. 95,

00:20:31.060 OK, we've got the Oklahoma City bombing.

00:20:34.560 Right. Which was which here's the thing, too.

00:20:38.320 God, what was that? It was 95.

00:20:40.400 Is that story stayed in the headlines for months?

00:20:44.700 Of course, I think what's exhausting right now is that the Oklahoma City bombing, you get a new version, like something that calamitous, if not every day, like four times a day.

00:20:55.620 And so that happened. And then we had months and months of dealing in the aftermath of that.

00:21:01.060 Um, which doesn't make it better, but makes it, uh, like allows our brain to process.

00:21:07.900 I mean, again, thinking of thinking of like things that happened in that time period that

00:21:14.540 sort of marked bookended the time period, but we're in right now in ways that are hard

00:21:19.600 to see, um, then better.

00:21:23.640 Well, we've also got OJ Simpson.

00:21:25.940 Oh God.

00:21:26.440 Yeah.

00:21:26.640 I mean, again, people were never getting away from.

00:21:33.720 People were never getting away from.

00:21:35.560 But this one's interesting.

00:21:37.000 There's a government shutdown that year.

00:21:38.900 Oh, of course.

00:21:39.720 Much like this morning.

00:21:41.380 Right.

00:21:41.920 Of course.

00:21:42.500 Wasn't that Newt Gingrich?

00:21:43.820 It was Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

00:21:45.340 Yeah.

00:21:45.860 Who back then seemed like the worst person on the planet and now seems almost quaint.

00:21:49.980 This is the thing, too.

00:21:50.720 I mean, the new Gingrich would is in so many ways marks that beginning of maybe it's not beginning because I do think it's like these things have existed for a long period of time.

00:22:03.680 But that idea of sort of the inflammatory Republican Congress that's intransigent and using language and flipping the house, like these are all very – if you change the names, this is all very recognizable to what we're experiencing now.

00:22:25.760 Exactly. Exactly.

00:22:26.880 And then we also internationally have the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack.

00:22:31.760 oh god i forgot that yeah it's wild that that all yeah and i had forgotten that until i was in the

00:22:36.780 tokyo subway a couple weeks ago um so yeah we had all i mean look terrible things were happening

00:22:43.480 but we were given news in a much more gentle way yeah also terrible the thing i mean the idea of

00:22:52.400 saying when you say the 90s were an easy peaceful decade it is to identify yourself as being as

00:23:04.180 living in a particular place uh as a particular person there's plenty of people around the world

00:23:10.040 and in america for whom that was not true but i think more broadly it it reflected uh uh you know

00:23:17.340 a calmer, a much calmer time. And I think that idea of the end of history was pretty pervasive,

00:23:23.860 right? It was very easy to buy in after the Berlin Wall, that history had ended, and we were in some

00:23:28.920 new, you know, promised land of war was over, people knew better, we progressed, we progressed

00:23:39.400 beyond it. Like, I think it's, it's hard to grasp now the degree to which that belief system like

00:23:45.440 sunk into the mentality of that time so that it made it easier to ignore

00:23:50.480 other sorts of warning signs that, you know, perhaps contradicted it.

00:23:56.420 I mean, what if Fukuyama truly would have been such a good, like TikToker, just with that title,

00:24:03.700 the end of history, that was the end of history. That was so viral in the moment. I know. It's so

00:24:08.980 great. I remember seeing him on Charlie Rose and being like, it is the end of history.

00:24:12.820 Oh, Charlie Rose.

00:24:13.960 That didn't end well.

00:24:15.300 No.

00:24:15.800 So now I do want to talk a little bit about pop culture because what is past is prologue.

00:24:22.840 Friends and ER ruled primetime.

00:24:25.740 Yeah.

00:24:26.220 Well, Friends, too.

00:24:27.300 I mean, Friends, again, we're still living with Friends, right?

00:24:31.160 We're still living with Friends.

00:24:32.320 It is, I think, the most streamed show by Gen Z. 0.98

00:24:36.840 Right.

00:24:37.340 And Jennifer Aniston was just on the cover of something.

00:24:39.580 Like I do think that there's really, I wrote an op-ed for the Times earlier this summer that I heard a lot about where it's like Gen X is still running. It's not even just the nostalgia. Like these people are still so present in our lives across the board in ways that are really directly influencing our lives.

00:24:59.140 And Friends, you know, is certainly like if you think about if, you know, when Lucille Ball died, which I believe is in the 90s, I have a vague idea who she was because I Love Lucy reruns were probably on TV, but it wasn't sort of the degree.

00:25:14.460 She did not hold the cultural space that Jennifer Aniston or Gwyneth Paltrow or Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio, all people that came out of that same time period, hold over us now, this many years later.

00:25:29.840 We're talking 30 years later, right?

00:25:31.500 Like it's so bizarre.

00:25:37.160 Well, it is.

00:25:38.500 But again, I mean, it just shows the impact of that time on now.

00:25:44.460 and the massive interest in that time period.

00:25:48.480 We can't get enough of it.

00:25:49.780 We cannot get enough of it.

00:25:51.740 It's turned into an evergreen topic

00:25:53.480 in the same way like we can't get enough

00:25:55.280 of World War II stories.

00:25:56.720 We can't, certain time periods in certain places

00:25:59.200 lend themselves to a retelling

00:26:01.820 and a retelling and a retelling.

00:26:03.320 And you can really see the 90s is going to function

00:26:06.480 the further forward we go as this touchstone

00:26:10.760 that we keep returning to to generate stories

00:26:12.940 that you know that come to define our cultural moments in the present even though we keep

00:26:20.480 dipping into the back like think in 1994 speaking of no it wasn't 94 it wasn't 99 uh or 98 save no

00:26:27.420 99 saving private ryan right the biggest yes about world war ii like sort of in his example

00:26:32.940 of we get the we continue to return to world war ii we continue to return to the 90s for much

00:26:39.520 different, to satisfy much different needs. But it is, this is what I mean when we started out

00:26:44.520 talking, like it's not a temporary, it's not a shallow well, it's not a temporary phase we're

00:26:49.360 going through. I think it is like a deep well that we're not going to be satisfied

00:26:56.100 by for a long, long period of time, which is funny. I mean, it's a 90s word ironic because

00:27:04.020 my memory of the 90s. Speaking of ironic, my friend, in 1995, Alanis Morissette released

00:27:10.020 Jagged Little Pill. Was it 95? I was just going to say, God, remember when she was on Sex and the

00:27:14.320 City? You know, the irony is having lived through the 90s in a clear memory, I just remember the

00:27:23.400 sense of being a young person in the 90s was like all, like history was over and you've missed all

00:27:28.660 the good decades and nothing that's happening now is relevant. And sort of like that very Gen X

00:27:33.220 sort of, um, like indecision, lack of ambition, which I don't actually think is true because 0.99

00:27:39.840 we've created the entire culture and world that we're living in right now for better

00:27:43.400 or worse.

00:27:43.800 But I do think comes from a place of like relentlessly being told by the boomers that

00:27:48.720 you've missed everything important and relentlessly being told by your grandparents that you will

00:27:52.560 never know any hardship.

00:27:54.080 And then being a young person headed into the millennium where everyone's like the world

00:27:58.480 is ending in 1999, but the overlappingness of all of that is like.

00:28:03.220 well, why would I have ambition, you know, and in whatever, right, exactly, whatever.

00:28:08.940 But it's like, we're not, we're never going to get tired of it. It's, it's, I think we're

00:28:13.020 actually only at the beginning. I actually think we're only at the beginning of returning to this

00:28:16.840 time period. And it's just going to be like, go back and like looking for different ways to go

00:28:21.880 back and find different ways into it. Because this is very, this is very true. This is very

00:28:28.080 true. And in fact, we're going to take one more quick break. And then I've got three more things

00:28:32.780 that happened in 95, of which we are now seeing a resurgence of right now.

00:28:37.520 All right.

00:28:38.620 Okay.

00:28:42.620 Chew on this bold question from Dentine Gum.

00:28:46.280 Is it ever okay to compliment a millennial on their skinny jeans in 2026?

00:28:55.600 Dentine, chew bold.

00:29:01.180 All right, we are back.

00:29:02.780 So isn't this fun when I Google what happened in 1995? So as I said, Friends and ER ruled primetime. I mean, The Pit is essentially an ER sequel in so many ways.

00:29:17.020 Completely. And also when I went back to, I remember watching, cause they both started in

00:29:21.320 1994. I remember watching and they, they both premiered on the same night. I remember watching

00:29:27.760 the premiere of both wildly enough. I was in university and we all sat around and watched

00:29:31.020 it on TV and friends was like, you'd never seen anything like it. And ER was like taking drugs.

00:29:36.760 It felt very visceral. And it's funny friends I've now seen it so many times. I don't have

00:29:41.000 thoughts about it anymore. But I went back and watched ER and it feels so dated, but in that way

00:29:47.640 that things that change the landscape feel dated because you're like, oh, this is cliche. And then

00:29:53.180 you realize, maybe young people don't realize, but you realize like, oh no, this is what the cliche

00:29:59.280 emerges from, right? Like this is, this is where, you know, yes. Clueless came out in 1995 and now

00:30:09.200 we are seeing the clueless reboot right oh i mean everything is the whole it's just this isn't 95

00:30:16.840 it's 99 but my entire instagram and i first i thought it was me and then i realized it's

00:30:21.620 everywhere is obsessed with this uh ryan murphy john f kennedy carolyn beset show that he's doing

00:30:30.120 like just consumed with it in a way that i'm like oh it's so wild to think of to to encounter a

00:30:35.700 thing that you know everything about just take over the culture and you're like all of these

00:30:40.240 reboots of people these reboots of like are they going to remake the titanic like it's it's again

00:30:46.820 going back to the well and none of these reboots are can match the original no they can't but they

00:30:54.100 are capturing the cultural zeitgeist i mean in such an intense way in that i mean also let's talk

00:31:02.740 about the fashion for a little bit grunge and doc martens and baggy jeans and slip dresses

00:31:10.240 are coming back full freaking force yeah i also you know re-watching sex in the city

00:31:16.880 looking at all of the like fashion magazines have lost their relevance but fashion newsletters are 0.72

00:31:25.080 all about shopping and the and sort of the fashion internet exists as a like um a very detail

00:31:33.700 oriented pulling apart small things and examining them and talking about them at ad nauseum which

00:31:40.220 really is um is connected the the beginning of that was sex in the city not necessarily the

00:31:49.000 first season with those weird sort of turn to the camera moments but like after the second season is

00:31:53.860 where that show began to talk about the minutiae of fashion like this Mary Jane heel this Manolo

00:31:59.040 heel and that really set the tone of how we discuss fashion now in this in this like look

00:32:06.240 at this buckle where did this originate from this like never-ending fascination with the details and

00:32:14.320 who got it and this craving right now that everyone has for originals or one-offs or you know vintage

00:32:20.100 which is not new necessarily as an interest,

00:32:22.460 but this idea of not having it be mass produced.

00:32:25.160 And you can see that way of discussing clothes and style

00:32:29.040 has come out of Sex and the City.

00:32:31.860 Because did you know what Manola was or Birkin was?

00:32:33.960 No, I had no idea.

00:32:34.700 Speaking of Marissa's book.

00:32:35.700 I had no idea.

00:32:36.440 Yeah.

00:32:38.000 And yes, and baggy jeans.

00:32:39.420 I feel like we cycle through,

00:32:41.480 we do cycle through this sort of,

00:32:44.600 although, I mean, you called it with Trad Wives, right?

00:32:47.620 We're in, what was the recent cover of Vogue

00:32:49.680 with the cowboy country dresses that um is it gigi i forget the model's names it's gigi yeah

00:32:56.560 yeah yeah or bella right it's a hadid it's a hadid it's a hadid yeah but you can see like

00:33:03.600 when you it's funny to think of like we all we are talking about style in a way that originated

00:33:11.540 then and then sort of disappeared and has re-emerged with newsletters and instagrams like

00:33:16.740 it's it's it's like we keep saying it's incredible but it's fascinating to behold as particularly

00:33:24.940 having lived through the first version of it watching all these slip dresses emerge in the

00:33:29.160 last time like i was there for the first round of slip dresses i still own some of them i still

00:33:33.220 own some of them i still have my doc i still have my doc martens and my mary jane doc martens

00:33:38.360 exactly oh god mary jane doc martens or like keith mcnally's book coming out this year

00:33:42.720 Graydon Carter's book coming out this year, but particularly Keith's. I remember clearly when

00:33:47.540 Balthazar opened and sneaking in one night, and it was the biggest deal because it had only been

00:33:53.220 open for two months and it was impossible to access. And still seeing the holds that has

00:33:57.900 on everyone. And Balthazar is still around. The abiding nature of all of these, be it culture,

00:34:04.020 institutions, or style. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, yes. I do not think we are going to get away

00:34:11.660 from the 90s anytime soon I will say when I was in Tokyo we were visiting all of the vintage stores

00:34:17.640 and they were chock full of 90s street style yeah yeah yeah 90s street style is huge huge in Tokyo

00:34:25.100 you know what uh Rachel Tashjian who writes for the Washington Post I believe wrote about this

00:34:30.280 that the quality of say the stuff we bought at Club Monaco in the 90s is superior to what you

00:34:38.560 would find in like high-end labels like even you know ysl or gucci like that and one of the reasons

00:34:45.740 you're seeing it now in is not just culturally it's just like it actually and i still have my

00:34:49.980 clothes from the 90s i'm like oh i guess this club monaco is vintage now um yes it is actually

00:34:54.880 right right for sure uh yeah yeah i think we've just scratched the surface of it i actually think

00:35:02.760 we've just scratched the surface of of of being of like revisiting all of this um that is so

00:35:09.720 interesting to see where it might go because no one no one gets tired of it like no one gets tired

00:35:14.440 of it no one gets tired of it and so you know i just wrote a book that i set in 96 uh the parisian

00:35:21.340 heist which is apparently going to be available for sale next week which is insane to me oh i know

00:35:27.100 I know craziness but I said it in 96 because it's a heist book and kind of kind of a mystery

00:35:35.580 and I didn't want to deal with cell phones yeah okay I there there are a couple flip phones that

00:35:41.280 very very rich people have but they're not ubiquitous and there's not smartphones and no

00:35:46.440 it was might have been beepers there was only beepers oh there were oh there were yeah I had

00:35:51.020 a beeper in 96 my friend I still have it I still have that beeper um I found it when I cleaned out

00:35:55.580 mom's house. But the joy of having a character who can't know everything immediately

00:36:01.420 is incredible. The joy of a life where you can't know everything immediately. I know. I know. I

00:36:07.240 know. Exactly. Which I think is what we're seeing so many people crave, right? I think because it's

00:36:16.340 a novelty. But it's also how can we capture that? How can you get that feeling? And can we break up

00:36:25.580 with this fire hose of information that is doing nothing good for us literally it's actually it's

00:36:32.300 nothing okay yeah it's not doing anything do you feel there are days you know i was on an island

00:36:37.100 like the last week of august where my phone my phone gets terrible service in paris for whatever

00:36:43.940 reason you're always saying this when you call me and it doesn't go through it's like i don't like

00:36:47.540 that i don't know when i can't get you uh verizon whatever deal they have with the satellites over

00:36:52.120 here is hit and miss, but it's such a relief when I get cut off. We all know this though. We don't

00:36:57.640 actually want to be this tuned in. And also I remember like, remember that the magazine store

00:37:03.240 in Spring Street and Bowery had the magazines a day earlier than everyone else. And like the

00:37:07.860 excitement of going down to that store and seeing what they had and then opening Vogue and looking

00:37:13.780 at the party pictures and the street style pictures and those first pages was just, it was

00:37:18.760 like it was like a contact high because you actually found interesting things and you were

00:37:24.040 seeing people's visions and it was so added it was it was there was tastemakers and I think

00:37:28.460 part of what people are craving right now maybe not the same tastemakers maybe not wealthy white

00:37:33.160 people as tastemakers but this idea of tastemaking of seeing someone's vision I think I haven't seen

00:37:39.660 the new um Leonardo DiCaprio maybe Paul Thomas Anderson but I think that you're what people are

00:37:43.940 responding to my sense of it is like a director's vision same with sinners like we're looking for

00:37:49.420 we're looking for uh some sort of unity yes yes yes and and yes I mean we're I was just talking

00:37:58.380 to a bunch of uh school moms last night at an event and we're all getting landlines oh that's

00:38:04.760 amazing god I know our landlines yeah I do remember landlines you always had a good connection

00:38:09.420 always right but also like our kids are going to want to talk to each other yeah and they're going

00:38:14.820 to want to you know set up play dates and things like that and I think a landline is a really nice

00:38:20.540 way of doing that if you can get a bunch of people to do it yeah that is so freaking 90s

00:38:25.920 yeah oh it's amazing it's amazing and 90s but definitely I mean getting my own phone

00:38:31.180 the thing I think when we talk about this is I remember my mother and father saying they didn't

00:38:37.860 have TV when they were a kid. And I didn't believe them because I couldn't, like, and I didn't want

00:38:42.880 it. I just thought, thank God I wasn't born when you were a kid. And I think the huge difference

00:38:46.660 right now, and this probably contributes to a lot of the fascination with this time period is

00:38:50.760 people want the things that we took for granted, right? It's very unusual. We can all sort of

00:38:58.620 romanticize history. You know, I was watching an episode of Outlander the other day. I don't want

00:39:04.820 to be sent back. Remember when we stayed in the Highlands? I don't want to be sent back to 18th

00:39:09.480 century Scotland. It's just terrible for women. Or when we did the Wilder podcast. But I actually 1.00

00:39:13.800 think that there is a very visceral, for all of us, including those of us who lived it, to be like,

00:39:19.820 oh, things were not going to make it great again. But there are very fundamental ways we operated

00:39:25.820 that were healthier and better for us. And that I feel empathy and sympathy for young people who

00:39:32.520 look back and say, I wish that we had this. Because I didn't ever look back at my parents

00:39:36.600 and think, I wish I had that. I was kind of like, I can't believe he survived not having a TV or

00:39:42.700 whatever it was. Well, that is where, you know, trad wife nostalgia has tried to capture people.

00:39:47.580 Right. Tried to be like, wouldn't your life be better living like Ma Ingalls? And you and I

00:39:53.280 know better than almost anyone that Ma Ingalls was not a happy woman. 0.94

00:39:56.500 how could anyone be happy living in a dugout under the ground with a dirt roof like how do 1.00

00:40:03.940 you get your period in that situation or have a baby or go to the bathroom or I mean you're in a 0.71

00:40:11.940 dugout you're having sex with your all of your kids sleeping next to you like there's just like 0.97

00:40:15.360 a whole wide array your husband is a consummate business failure right exactly you can't sit still 1.00

00:40:20.720 you never own anything I was like you're living just imagine living in a dugout I just when I

00:40:26.480 I see these, I don't obviously pay as much attention as you do because none of that appeals

00:40:31.500 to me, but knowing the reality of what a traditional life looked like and the physical

00:40:39.400 labor that went into it and how horrible it was.

00:40:42.360 And the misery and the locusts and the fires.

00:40:45.880 This is not something to aspire to. 0.81

00:40:50.340 None of us would be happy on the freaking prairie. 0.96

00:40:52.780 No. And also this fantasy of, I'm just here doing this and my husband takes care of everything. When you know in the reality, even back then when women couldn't leave these marriages because of laws and that all of the responsibility was still falling on them, right? 0.77

00:41:11.380 Like there's no fantasy in which a woman is not shouldering so much unrecognized, unpaid labor, be it emotional and physical.

00:41:21.280 And so that fantasy, I mean, the whole thing is, and, and, you know, this is where I get careful about fantasy of the nineties, but the, but the truth is some of the things we're craving in the nineties were actually were like that.

00:41:32.180 Like that we, there are certain realities to that, that I recognize why we're craving and they really did exist.

00:41:37.260 We're not sort of.

00:41:37.960 They really did exist.

00:41:38.580 No, this is a craving for the 90s is much more rational than a craving for the 1890s.

00:41:45.480 I think we'd all go into shock to not have our phone.

00:41:48.000 But, you know, this is my theory that Gen X at some point is going to save the day when the grid goes down because we still do know how to read street signs and maps, you know, and like find our way around and talk to people on the phone and, you know, have real life conversations.

00:42:03.240 Yeah, no, we we can function in the world when when the grid goes down.

00:42:07.480 like we've got like i said casey and i found a bar okay we just found a bar like the night before

00:42:11.980 my book launch what was that crazy bar jack what was it um oh jake jake's dilemma no i don't know

00:42:20.140 jake's something maybe it's all jake it's all jake it's all jake it's all jake yeah um yeah i

00:42:27.680 really you know nostalgia as a general thing does not interest me and so that's why i'm like i'm so

00:42:31.580 fascinated by our cultural obsession with this air because i don't think it's nostalgia necessarily

00:42:36.300 I think it has a different undertone to it, particularly since we're living with so many

00:42:41.660 of the same people that undercuts the fantasy when they're all still present in a way.

00:42:49.440 They're all still here.

00:42:50.420 Noah Wiley, Gwyneth Paltrow, Leo DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston.

00:42:53.980 They're all still dominating.

00:42:56.480 The president, you know what?

00:42:58.500 Chuck Schumer went into office in 1999.

00:43:01.060 Hillary Clinton left first lady duties in 1999.

00:43:04.540 it's just it's so with us and not with us at the same time so it there's a different

00:43:11.800 it's it's different from this straight up nostalgia in um in complicated fascinating

00:43:19.320 ways and still so still so much more to unpack and I really I really wish someone would do that

00:43:26.640 actually I wish someone if only could put that all together in a book for me be great yeah maybe

00:43:33.980 they will maybe maybe maybe maybe goodness mcnichol it was such a joy to talk to you today

00:43:39.420 i can't wait for us to be in the same room i can't wait for you to come home come yeah come home yes

00:43:44.160 oh i i look i look like a new yorker in their pajamas in a different country and you look

00:43:49.920 like a parisian and parisian yeah yeah we're gonna do a switcher i love you goodbye

00:44:03.980 Thank you.

00:44:33.980 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - October 02, 2025

I Miss the 90s. What I Really Miss is Real Life

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