Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Microsoft Excel

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Jason Pargin explore why Microsoft Excel is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Microsoft Excel, known for being spreadsheets, famous for being business. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Microsoft Excel is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Yes. Hi. It's me. it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Yes. Hi, it's me. It is. Living life, living large.

I don't know why living large hit me so hard. I hadn't heard that phrase in a while. Great. It's been a minute since that's been in the parlance of the day. Yeah. You know what else has been a minute? Our wonderful guest returning to the show. Amazing writer and amazing video creator and a full-time novelist. His next novel recently announced on the way. It's called I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. And we are so happy to be rejoined by Jason Pargin. Jason, hey.

As I know I say every time, each time you talk about how it's good to finally have me back on again. And in my mind, I was just on the show. And then I always look and realize it's been like seven months. Oh, sure. Because time is a blur. I just imagine you go into sort of a standby mode between podcast recordings. You just like kind of gaze into the distance motionless until you're activated by podcasting. Yeah, it is the way time moves.

I do. I feel like a slight Dr. Manhattan. And I think it's partly because I sort of sit like he does on that rock, you know, on Mars. I'm like, oh, yeah, time did a thing. Interesting. Yeah, I'm a very upbeat, less blue Dr. Manhattan. It's pretty cool. You're like, I'm never tired of these people and their problems. Never tired of their lives. I actually enjoy it more now than before. Yeah. Heck, I love these people and their lives.

And we got an absolutely wonderful topic suggestion this week from the Dan on the Discord with support from JCR Dude and others. We always start by asking the relationship to the topic or opinion of it. And I thought we'd start with you, Katie, and then Jason, how do you feel about Microsoft Excel? I mean, if you want time to go more slowly, want time to go more slowly. It is a good utility for that. You know, I don't hate it. I guess I usually use, what is it, spreadsheets on Google now. It's been a while since I've actually used Excel. Yeah, Google Sheets, I think is Google's. Yeah. Google Sheets. Yeah. And I enjoy making all the little rules. Like if I type in a certain word, it can like turn green or whatever. That's all cool.

It's all fun. Making little happy faces out of blacked out squares. You know, hey, it's Excel. What are you going to do about it? That's their tagline. It's Excel. What are you going to do about it? And Jason, how about you? How do you feel about Microsoft Excel? Well, first of all, I was in, I think, community college when they made

me take a course in Excel. And I remember sitting there thinking, when am I going to use this? And the answer is every single day for the rest of my life, every job I've had has used Excel somewhere, either as their calendar or as their accounts calculation or as something. Even now, as an author, I manage all of my podcast appearances, all the publicity stuff, my commission payments, everything's done in Excel or Google Sheets, which is literally just a theft of Excel that they pasted into the cloud. If you're using Google Sheets, you're using Excel. You can literally just download one into the other.

But after having depended on it for all of my adult life, for everything in the world, and realizing that every corporation is doing the same thing, including at Cracked, we did everything on Excel, I realized that, for example, if you try to do too big of a math in Excel, it just gives you the wrong answer. It doesn't give you an error message. It just gives you the wrong answer. For example, there is a math party trick. If you go to the type of parties where people get out their math tricks and show each other, where you can take the number- Too much cocaine at those parties for me. I don't feel comfortable. If you take the number 111,111,111, 111, nine times by itself, the answer you get is 12 septillion something, but the digits as read out is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 is your final answer.

Unless you put it into Excel, where it just ends in a couple of zeros, because Excel, if you put too big of a number into it, it just rounds it off and puts zeros in place of those last few digits. It does not tell you that it has done that. It does not give you an error message to say, hey, note, this is actually not the answer you asked for. This is just the most we could come up with. And it couldn't fit into our brain. It doesn't tell you that at all. You have to find a bigger computer. That shook my faith in Excel quite a bit. Because again, I am very confident that somewhere there's a spreadsheet where if you enter a single semicolon into a single cell, it will cause all of NASA's satellites to fall out of space.

That's Excel's other tagline, like, Excel, we did the best we could. Yeah. And what I perceive as their only job, which is numbers. You would think it would just keep doing a number, but no. Smaller number, I could have done it myself. I would need the computer. It's not just numbers, it's cells. Numbers in cells. Yeah.

And I perceive the cells as being so infinite, but they're like, you want to put that in what? It's like you made a mover mad when you're moving house. Like you want to put the couch in there is how they feel about numbers in cells. Why do you have so much stuff? Right? We didn't know you're going to have all this stuff when you hired us. Don't many books. We're not moving them for you. Yeah. That's what I've always been told about books. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Choose five books. Just you don't need 30. Choose five. That's how much we're going to move. Only they don't say that. You just show up at your new place and the books aren't there. And they just, well, no, of course.

They just ripped out some of the pages to make them way less. They've just ripped out some of the pages to make them way less. And I love that you showed us that formula too, because I think I wouldn't have believed it. But you're right. Excel just stops. And with this topic, so many SIF topics are gigantic. And so in particular, if you out there know an Excel hack or an Excel function that you love, there's a bajillion of them. So just share them on Discord with us. That'd be great. There's not space in a podcast for all of them. And also this significant digits issue, I'll link various tips about trying to get around it. There's some kind of thing where you can go into the settings of Excel and categorize all your

data as text rather than numbers, and then it will keep going. But they do stop if they think the number is math. They think, oh, after 15 digits, we'll just put zeros on the end. And this is a particular problem for people making Excel sheets of credit card numbers, because most credit card numbers are 16 digits. So unless that last digit is a zero, it just won't work right for that, apparently. Fun. Great. 15 digits seems like a low cutoff. Yeah. Like I would get maybe like after like 100 digits, they're like, okay, calm down. We don't need this many. But 15? And there's some sort of a hardware limitation, apparently, where it's like the number of bytes that it occupies to explain a number that big.

It just can't fit into the hardware somehow. It was explained to me. But the problem is when I told people about this issue on Twitter, I immediately got answers like, well, no, of course not. It's a number that huge. That's a ridiculous number. And they tried to explain it. But it's like, I'm fine with it having a limitation, but I just want it to let me know. Instead of just trying to pass off.

It's the same thing. People are working for me. If I'm their supervisor, if they make a mistake, I want them to just say they made the mistake. I don't want them to just try to pass off know, because they're afraid I'll yell at them. It's like Excel, just admit you're not finance. Like, no, this is the answer. Maybe you're wrong. It's gaslighting.

It's toxic gaslighting. As you say this, I'm realizing this is Clippy's job, right? Like this should be when Clippy shows up to say, hey, heads up. I'm the herald of things that happen in the Microsoft Office suite. And I can't do this number. Sorry. It's just it's too many numbers. I know that we said this is just all about numbers, but it's too many numbers this time.

Yeah. And of course, with this topic, we have many numbers and statistics. And we've already kind of done some, but let's get into more. And this week that is in a segment called... It just takes some stats and numbers, girl, you're in the middle of the stats And everything, everything will beat CivPod Everything, everything will beat MomApp, MomApp Everything, everything will be more math, more math.

The first number this week is two dimensions. And it goes with what we were talking about before with limits. The dimensions are 1,048,576 rows. And the other dimension is 16,384 columns. I know no one can hold that in their head, but it's a little more than a million rows and a little more than 16,000 columns. And according to Microsoft, that's the maximum size of one worksheet in Excel. Why fewer columns than rows? I think the assumption is that the columns is categories of data and the rows is the list of data.

Right. And so that's going to be longer. So they figured there by nature would be fewer categories because like here's all the criteria and then here's all the five million people in town. Well, you can't put five million, but here's all the employees and here's all of their metrics at the top. And there may be, you know, 200 different metrics you're measuring, but then all of the employees will be under that. But that is a million rows by 16,000. That is the spreadsheet they make you work on in hell. Yeah. Each row is one of the donuts they fed Homer.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. And they have just decided to set that limit based on what they think software and computers can do. And I did just quick multiplication of those two numbers. That adds up to over 17 billion cells. In your head, Alex? Not in Excel. I guess I used the software called Calculator on my MacBook.

The number 17 billion is only 11 digits. I guess I could have done it in Excel, but they've definitely built Excel on the premise that, okay, we could pile a bunch into one cell, but people are going to do more than one cell. They're going to do like 17 billion cells. So we need to rein in the amount of digits, rein in the rows, rein in the columns. Like there's a lot of guardrails on what the builders of Excel think your machine can do. They're trying to protect your machine from exploding is the fake way I'm describing it. It seems like they should have then a non-math

cell. You click a cell and you're like, don't worry, this is not used for math. So you can just like, you know, in the case of credit cards, you know, just write down 15 digits where it's like, don't worry, you're not going to have to math this. You can. You simply have to reformat that cell as text. The problem is a cell with digits in it that is formatted as numbers and a cell with digits in it that is formatted as text looks completely identical. And you will not know how it is classifying that cell because oftentimes it will make that decision on its own in the background without telling you. Nice. I like that. Yeah.

I like that more and more Excel sounds like a controlling partner. You don't need to have this many digits. Let me do that for you. Just deciding how many digits you need. Oh, I'm sorry. If I've not made it clear this far into the show, Excel is a freaking nightmare of a piece of software. You can ask anyone who has ever used it. We'll get into it.

It is a nightmare. With the individual cells, I love all our numbers for limits here. The next number is 32,767. 32,767 is the character limit for a cell in Microsoft Excel. So even if you make it functionally text, you can only put over 32,000 characters in. So for example, you can't paste a novel into an Excel cell sheet. It's a lot more characters than that. Yeah. I mean, that seems a little bit reasonable. can't, I'm trying to imagine a situation in which you would want to paste a novel into an Excel spreadsheet. Stealing from the library. Oh, no, that's true. Library crimes.

I didn't think of library crimes. Yeah, it is unnecessary. And the other ones feel along those lines. Like another limit here is 65,530 hyperlinks. So that's very specific. You can put a bunch of link text in it, but an Excel sheet will stop linking off somewhere else after 65,530 different hyperlinks. You can't embed more internet links than that. And one more limit here. It turns out there's a limit to how many non-contiguous cells you can select when you're operating an Excel sheet. You can apparently select all the contiguous cells you want if they're next to each other. But if you go around selecting non-contiguous cells,

the limit of how many you can select is 2,147,408,3648. So you can select over 2.1 billion cells that are not necessarily next to each other or grouped. And then after that, the program will just stop letting you do that because, okay, sure. There goes my plans for the weekend. Frankly, any more than that is pervert behavior. Yeah. Right. Cutting you off like a bartender.

Do you think, like, not to perv shame on this show, but do you think there is like an Excel fetish out there? There must be. We'll talk about an eSport later that suggests yes, but I don't know. If it's, you know, if it's an eSport, it's also a pornography. There's, there's a rule out there that. I'm always worried. I'm going to say something to like offhand, like, like out of left field for Alex. And he's like, oh yeah, we're going to talk about that later.

I'm amazed myself with that one. Like Excel perverts, I guess I kind of know based on what we found. Yeah, okay, great. Yeah. And the next number here is 750 million. 750 million is an estimate of Microsoft Excel users as of 2020, like specifically using one of the versions of Excel software. And the source there is Wired Magazine. There's also a bigger estimate directly from

Microsoft. They claim 1.2 billion Excel users and another 200 million subscribers to the Microsoft Office 365 commercial suite. But either way, Excel has been the state of the art since the early 90s. Another number is 1989, because that's when the full Microsoft Office suite was made available for Apple computers. So since then, basically everybody's used Excel or a recent knockoff like Google Sheets. That was in 1989? Yeah, 1989. That's when I was born. Coincidence? Probably. Yes, but also fun, you know?

What happened when you were born? Well, the entire Excel office suite became available on Apple computers. But this is the right here is where the rubber meets the road on this. Because earlier I referenced the whole world running on Excel. It is no exaggeration whatsoever. This is like something out of one out of every seven human beings on Earth use Excel. But every business I've worked for cracked, used it for everything, used it for our editorial calendar, for scheduling everything, assignments to freelancers. It was either a Google Sheet or an Excel file. Either way, it was all done on a spreadsheet. Every job I've had when I worked at that insurance company before I worked for Crack, every job has used Excel for 18 different things because you can make it into anything.

You can make it into a calendar. You can make it into a calendar, you can make it into a scheduler, you can calculate payments, you can do your budget on it. And it sounds like I'm doing an ad for Excel. Again, I want to make it clear, it does not do any of those things well. And when you try to make it too complicated, it has a heart attack. Specifically, when you're trying to link sheets together and want to grab data from another sheet and put it into this sheet because I want to do a separate calculation here. It is very finicky. And so when we say that the whole world runs on Excel, we do not mean that in a good way at all. It's sort of like saying the world runs on

Duncan. It's like, well, that's not good. It is what it is. Not good. We're just stating a fact here. We wish the world ran on vegetables. It doesn't. It runs on this. It's not our fault. We make Super Bowl ads in funny track suits for like a bowl of grape nuts and a glass of water. Like, oh, no, that's not as popular. And yeah, this is a topic I didn't

know a lot about it going into researching it. And I came out of this less respectful of the topic for sure. Because our- Secretly incredibly bad. Like it's amazing how less respectful I am of Excel now. It's incredibly fascinating how terrible it is. The next number is 90%. Nine zero. That's one computer scientist's estimate of how many large Excel worksheets

have at least one mathematical error. And he's specifically studying Excel sheets from organizations and used for functions in society. And it's from a few years ago, the estimate. It's Raymond Pankow, professor of IT management at the University of Hawaii. In a 1998 study and a 2005 follow-up, he examined sets of spreadsheets that went through a commercial auditing process. And we'll link off to a Wired UK article about one example of many organizations that do regular Excel audits. There are whole businesses that just audit Excel sheets because of their problems. Professor Pankow compiled various audit results

altogether and estimated about 90% of the sheets had meaningful errors. Not just, oh, something looks funky, like it is miscalculating something because of an error. That's good. That's comforting. You know, because we're all human, right? Poe buddies nerfect, as they say. And that statistic of 90% have errors, that is shocking to everyone except people who

use Excel. Which is roughly everyone. Yes, it is. If you have everyone who has had daily experience with it has found an error that has been in there for eight straight years and then no one has caught it until today because it happened to either give a result that you weren't cross-checking in any other way. And this is secretly the issue. Is it because Excel is the only, I don't know what the competing programs for Excel are, again, other than Google Sheets, which is just Excel.

Yes, re-skinned Excel. Yeah, if you're using that for all of your calculations and you're not separately calculating on a different machine, then yeah, it is incredibly difficult to find errors. And if people out there are wondering, well, what kind of effects would those errors have on us, the general public? We are getting to that. But the answer to, as a spoiler, is they are devastating. Uh-oh. Yeah. And yeah, and we'll also talk later about why Excel is the dominant one because Sheets exists and my Mac computer came bundled with a free program called Numbers that is a knockoff. But for a couple of decades, it's been just Excel. And this kind of software,

there are a few reasons why it's extremely easy to make errors on it. According to Raymond Pankow, the most common mistake is misusing a formula, just getting a wrong answer by doing the formulas wrong. So like the program, it's the program that does the formula wrong or the human user? The human user miscodes it basically, like they improperly input the formula they want to do or the cells to put in it. I see. Okay.

So it's human's fault. We shouldn't be blaming Excel. Because there's a whole language to learn to do formulas on it. And a lot of us are just like in a hurry at a job, maybe not a job we're passionate about. And so, you know, it just doesn't. Sounds like you're making excuses for human imperfection. And we should probably hand the reins of society over to, I don't know, AI robots? I'm just saying. I'm a human.

And then another common error is typos, of course. And then the most difficult to detect error is an omission, which is like accidentally leaving out some cells of data in a formula or leaving out a whole formula you needed. Also like copy and pasting from one Excel sheet to another and the formula doesn't come over properly. It's very hard to look at an Excel sheet, which is already snorifying, and then keep looking at it and find the errors specifically. snorifying and then keep looking at it and find the errors specifically. I was a victim of spreadsheet malfeasance because I once got an alarming letter from the IRS that I owed roughly $6,000 in unpaid taxes because I had not reported $30,000 that I had earned from the Wall Street Journal. The same thing happened to me.

Really? Yes. What? Like precisely Wall Street Journal and that amount. Oh my gosh. We need a support group. I've never told anybody about this. It was like the past, for like a year and a half, I was working on solving it and finally

Did we just form a support group? And the Wall Street Journal did that to a bunch of people. Don't work for the Dow Jones Company. Please don't. Jason is horrified, by the way. I don't want to get off on a tangent because I know time is tight, but we could spend the rest of the episode talking about this. I'm fascinated. It's why the Wall Street Journal.

Did you do work for the Wall Street Journal? Yeah. I did $300 of work. And when they reported it to the IRS, they left off the decimal point. Yes. And they did this to hundreds of freelancers. And all of us had the IRS banging on our door. Yeah. Yeah. And it worked out okay in the end. It was just horrible. But yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, worked out okay in the end. It was just horrible. But yeah. Wow. Okay. Well now we learn, look, we're always finding out we have cool things in common as co-hosts and getting screwed by the Wall Street Journal seems to be one of them. I also love that it was the Wall Street Journal because that publication in particular, I can imagine some bookkeeper looking at that like, yeah, $30,000 for a freelance article. That sounds about right.

Yeah, for a writer on an article, that's a normal amount of money. You walk into a shoe store, 300 bucks, you buy one shoe. Of course it's not 300. What are you talking about? How much can a freelance article cost, Michael? $30,000? Like their spreadsheets won't calculate numbers that small because, well, why would we even worry about it for $300? What is that? Anyway. Yeah. So speaking of data errors, apparently the other big reason this happens, Raymond Pankow says that the biggest reason we screw up spreadsheets is that nobody checks their work, right? Like they just figure Excel works. I plugged in the stuff. I don't need to check what I did. And he compares building a spreadsheet to building a computer

program. But with computer programming, people do a lot of bug checking and stress testing, or at a minimum, they know they're supposed to. And if they ship it without doing that, they're panicking. But with spreadsheets, organizations often use the first draft. Somebody puts in the formulas and then runs the entire thing on it. And so that's the biggest reason. It's the way we view them and perceive them. It's so ubiquitous, right? And so, quote unquote, user friendly that it does seem like one of those things that is like, well, this is, you know, anyone can use Excel, right? Like it doesn't take any expertise. You know, you train on it for 10 minutes and then you start pumping out sheets and stuff. And I think that's kind of the attitude that like you just like basically everyone needs to know. But there's not really any emphasis on training you how to do it well,

right? Like it's like any program where you need some time and training and stuff to be able to actually to do something that is good and without errors or with minimal errors. But yeah, that is not necessarily our corporate philosophy. I'm watching the notes here, and I know that this next factoid is going to hit Katie like a truck. I'm excited. Based on what she just said. Yeah. Takeaway number one.

Microsoft Excel is an amazing program until we over rely on it and mess with the global economy. Yay. It turns out there's like a lot of examples of this that we'll cover briefly. But the one big one that we'll cover in detail is that we recently sort of invented a global recession a little bit in the 2010s by pushing austerity programs that were not necessary, probably. Oh, that was a good time for me. I feel like I'm learning that so much of my hardships have been caused by Excel. Yeah, a lot of us, turns out, yeah. Yeah. This affected billions of people. Billions. But me being the most important one of those billions is my point, Stacey. Today, we are all Katie.

And there's a lot of sources here, including an Ars Technica piece by Kevin Purdy, a piece for Theconversation.com by John Borwine and David H. Bailey, another conversation.com piece by Simon Thorne. All those conversation folks are university professors or lecturers. The story here is something that's since been named the Reinhardt-Rogoff error, because two Harvard economists named Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff published a set of papers in 2010 and a bestselling nonfiction book in 2011, all based on a premise that was based on one Microsoft Excel error. Whoops, sorry. Really, they said there were at least three big errors in their document, but especially one of them caused them to mislead every global government. So, oh well. Well, that's a little bit of a goof them up. So my husband is an economist

and I get a little behind the scenes peek at like him working and he's like, his screen is always just like numbers, codes. It's like he's doing some kind of matrix thing, you know? From what I understand, what he has to do is like a lot of stress testing of his calculations, right? And he's like constantly finding things and trying to correct them. And he'll go like, oh, I found this thing. And it's annoying because I have to redo all this stuff because it's like, you know, it was a problem. And, you know, like when things don't make sense, it's like, huh, maybe I should take a closer look at this, right? Like, so I feel like in general, there is an idea in economics research that one should double check one's work.

He's going to get into it, but this basically told all governments that if you don't cut your debt, like we have an Excel spreadsheet that basically proves if you don't cut your debt, like we have an Excel spreadsheet that basically proves if you don't cut your deficits and your debt, here's the exact point at which your economy will collapse. So you have to slash your budget, slash welfare, slash healthcare spending, slash that stuff now, or else your system is going to fall apart based on this spreadsheet. Now, what you're probably thinking is that all of the conservative politicians who heard this news, they themselves probably sat down with their own data to confirm it. It doesn't sound like they did. Yeah. I thought that the politicians probably opened up Stata and was like, let me double check these numbers.

opened up Stata and was like, let me double check these numbers. Yeah, let me dig into it. Give me your raw numbers. Let me recreate it myself, says Donald Trump or the equivalent. I'm guessing this data was not, was this published in any journal or was it just these economists saying like, hey, we found this thing? It was published in two big papers and a few others. And yeah, exactly like Jason said, they did a sheet where they said, hey, if we look at 20 countries, their economy just stops growing if debt reaches a certain level. And their magic number was if debt is 90% of GDP, your country will have a 0.1% decline in real economic growth.

Folks don't need to remember or understand those exact numbers, but basically if your debt hits a certain level, your economy will decline by 0.1%, which in capitalism is death. You can't basically even out. So they passed this around. They said, look at this, these 20 countries, the data proves it. And it turns out their formula didn't select all 20 countries in the sheet. And they only selected 15 of them. They were specifically leaving off five whole countries and they were leaving off Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, which is just obviously the first five in the alphabetical list. Somebody didn't just drag all the way or select all the right rows. And so including these countries would have

shifted the results significantly. Yes. If you include those five countries, that same debt number that they said is death, that actually averages a growth rate of positive 2.2%. Oh, okay. And folks might think plus 2.2 versus minus 0.1 doesn't sound like a lot, but plus 2.2 is not just healthy growth. It's healthy and sustainable growth. It's pretty much where you want your economy to be if you're the mindset of big capitalist countries right now. Right. So it would be fine to do that, actually. right behind publishing papers is that you uh other people look at your work and like try to you know see if you if you made a mistake but it's obviously not uh infallible uh there was a recent case where uh there was a paper published a medical paper published i think in Frontiers and it had AI. It was an AI paper and it had like an AI image of a rat that had an enormous, well, an enormous penis. And it was definitely, yeah, yeah. And it had

labels like, you know, scrumulus or whatever, you know, just made up organs for this rat. It was all AI generated and somehow it got published and it was not a good journal, but it was a journal. So like, you know, but one would think that in like good journals, right, like that they would have a robust peer review process that would catch this kind of thing. But, you know, I mean, it's, I guess if there's like, it's like one formula in Excel, maybe people aren't checking that. Now, people did eventually check, but some other things happened before it was checked. Yes. Alex. Oh, they published this in papers and books in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan cited that number in a

proposed federal budget. The opposing party had to pivot and make their budget based on that. The European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, a Finnish banker named Ali Renn, also cited that. And pretty much every other country followed the U.S. and the European Union's lead. And then after that, a postdoctoral graduate student at UMass Amherst, just for grad school homework, they said, everybody go replicate a famous economics paper. He picked Reinhardt and Rogoff, even though you would think it would replicate. And then it didn't. And then he and two professors looked into it and got a hold of the Excel sheet and found the problem that no one

noticed until after every world government did austerity policies and slashed funds and budgets and things for billions of people. But again, you would think that the world's economists and all the people who heard this, if not the politicians themselves, like you would think that the world's economists and all the people who heard this, if not the politicians themselves, you would think that Mitch McConnell would turn on his own laptop and say, OK, give me the raw numbers and let me look at these. of just tiny digits flowing through a screen. He would eventually shake his head and say, this doesn't add up, guys. I'm sorry, it doesn't. But they don't.

It turns out when they just hear something like this, it kind of confirms what they already wanted to do. They just immediately declare it wholly ripped and move forward, even though this fails the common sense test. Like Donald Trump has way more debt than me. He has way more debt versus his belongings, his assets than I have. And yet, he has a much bigger house and many more private jets than I do. Because we are not in the same situation.

The United States can manage a whole bunch of debt because what are you going to do about it otherwise? Well, here's the thing, Jason. Your mistake is thinking that tabletop economics, what they're talking about is like if you're not rich and this is a program for you, we have to make cuts to these kinds of things, just like you have to make cuts. But when it comes to, say, like military expenditures and stuff, or like tax cuts for the wealthy, then the tabletop economics no longer apply for some reason. It's weird. Exactly right. They didn't see this number and say, we need more taxes on rich people to fix it, too.

That's also a problem beyond Excel. That was not their conclusion. No. Since then, also, we have learned that this was flawed, but a lot of the policies stayed in place. Reinhart and Rugoff acknowledged that there was a coding error, but defended their overall idea and claimed they never made the argument that people made from this and they're still both leading economists uh once at harvard one was recently chief economist of the world bank and it and it seems like part of that is

because people who know how bad excel is are like yeah well everybody makes massive excel errors that spin the world around like sure why why would we fire these two people who did it? You know? The other show we could make if we wanted to is a monthly, if not weekly podcast of major Microsoft Excel goof ups that moved around millions or billions of dollars. Because Jason found an amazing one just the week we taped this, which is that there's a longstanding Formula One racing team called Williams Racing. And they brought in a new position as team principal named James Vowles. And he tried to just go over their information for how they build and run the car and found out it's in a gigantic and terrible Excel document, which is missing most of the

necessary info. And they were using that to build F1 cars that cost upwards of $12 million to construct. It's a very expensive project and they used a terrible Excel doc for it. Did the cars go vroom or not? It seems like they went vroom, but if anything went wrong, it was extraordinarily difficult to fix. It was missing most of the cost info and supply info for any of 20,000 car parts that go into it. Ah. It's great. Look, there's nothing like a little bit of spit shine and a lightning bolt can't fix on a race car.

can't fix on a race car. And just other ones, this is less monetary, but in August, 2023, the police service of Northern Ireland, they had to fulfill a freedom of information request by sharing an Excel document, but they didn't notice that there was a second worksheet in it. And so they released the personal details of 10,000 current officers. They just publicly doxed 10,000 officers because they didn't see the second worksheet tab in Microsoft Excel. Man, how much paid leave did that guy get for that goof up? Seems like it might've been a whole week of paid leave for that big mistake-o. Seems like it might have been a whole week of paid leave for that big mistake-o. Moving to security services in 2011, Britain's MI5 intelligence agency, you know, like James Bond-ish stuff?

Yeah. They discovered they were surveilling 134 people by accident. And the reason was that they did a spreadsheet of the phone numbers they wanted to track. Oh, and yeah, we've talked about problems with numbers. It's like that exact first number we talked about. It reformatted the last three digits of a lot of the phone numbers to be three zeros because it just stops. And so whatever phone number that results in is what they tracked. And they just surveilled a lot of randos and missed over a hundred people they really wanted to track. It's great. Really good.

But this is, anybody out there using Excel knows exactly how this happened, because he classified it as a number instead of text. Here, even though it is numbers, you wanted it to treat it as text, not as numbers to do math with. And if you have ever had a giant row of numbers, like say a row of salaries for people in your organization, you add it all up and it's lower than what you pay out. You're trying to figure out why, because my numbers are exact. You've gone cell by cell.

All of the numbers are exact. It's because one of those numbers is formatted as text. So it is not adding it into the math, even though it looks exactly the same. And when it decides to format a cell as text or as something other than whatever, it chooses that for you in the background using its machine learning, whatever. So you put the data in and then it decides, is this text? Is this a number? Many times you will type in a number like, oh, this guy, we paid this guy $12,250.

And you'll type that in and it will pop up as a date. It will pop up as December 25th. Oh, yeah, I've had that happen. 2000. And you're like, why did I call that a date? So you highlight the cell and go up to the top and say, I don't want this as a date. I want this just as a number. You will click number and then it will give you a row

of nonsense because it will not revert back to the data you typed in because it doesn't remember that. It's like, you want to convert December 25th, 2000 to a number? We'll try. It's like, no, I want the thing I typed in. Don't you remember what I typed in 30 seconds ago? And the answer is no one does not. Now trying to convert concept of Christmas time into number error, error, emotional error. Just Santa morphing into that streams of code from the matrix where it goes down the screen, like help, help. And again, this is the kind of thing that is annoying when you have one cell that's misbehaving like that. But if you paste it in a spreadsheet of, say, 5,000 cells, as I have done before, and you know that things aren't adding up because somewhere

in that massive row of cells is a number that is wrong. And that information, the thing that's wrong about the cell is invisible to you unless you highlight the cell and look closely at the code at the top. And that has occupied entire weeks or even months of some people's time in accounting departments or whatever, where many small businesses have one little old lady who does all of their accounts receivable and all that. And it's all done on an Excel spreadsheet that they probably trained her to use in three hours. And this has caused more misery than you can possibly calculate. I am not a super user of Excel at all. I barely know a few formulas and I understand every one of these errors because they're so just

few formulas. And I understand every one of these errors because they're so just dumb and straightforward and goofy. And the last ones here are all from financial organizations. And in 2021, the cryptocurrency service, Crypto.com, they received a customer request to withdraw $100. And due to a spreadsheet error, they paid out 10.5 million dollars uh which is fun and then regular banks did the person have to pay it back like what happens with that yeah apparently crypto was able to get it back but many weeks later and they like pursued the person the person was like trying to get onto a flight to a different country where they thought they couldn't be pursued. That is what you do, right? Like you accidentally get like $10 million.

Is that what it was? Yeah. Yeah, $10.5 million. Yeah, you try to get to Luxembourg as fast as possible. Yeah, whatever the most faraway, obscure country feels like, you buy a ticket. Yeah. And it's also so very funny that the entire concept of crypto is that it's supposed to be like no governments, no central governments,

no interference from anybody else. Untrackable. But the moment they accidentally send somebody too much money, it's like, government, go use your monopoly on power to get this money back.

Go threaten these people with violence. Mommy, I spilled my juice box. Help me. It's like, we're tired of the nanny state doing the banks. It's like, nanny state, help me. Yes, our entire premise was to avoid paying taxes and not having to report this. But we want to use your tax-funded authority to go get this money back for us. Yeah. It's, again, could be an entire episode. And I realized that I started laughing

the moment you said the word crypto, even before you explained the error that alone brought me. I was delighted by the fact that it was crypto.com that suffered the error, even before I knew the details. And if I were the FBI and they called me, I'd be like, well, are you sure you can't use the blockchain to stop him? I was told it was the future. Use one of those board apes to help you. Can you not use your NFTs to stop his flight somehow? Of what value are they then?

Like, here's an NFT of a picture of me caring about this. And whoever's clutching their ape in an upset fashion right now, we have some regular bank mistakes, too. Clutching their ape in in 2022 a state-run icelandic bank misformatted spreadsheet data about their stock value and based on that proceeded to make erroneous foolish stock share sales worth about 20 million u.s dollars next number is that in 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost about $6 billion US. Oh, no. I know, JPMorgan Chase. And they did that in a trading error that was global news.

It got nicknamed the London Whale. And it turns out the error partly sprang from employees copy-pasting information from one Excel sheet to another without double checking that the formulas were copy pasted correctly. Which is an incredibly common and kind of not visible error, except that you can check. So you got to check. Yes, you can take a spreadsheet created in Excel, copy it, paste it into another empty sheet in the exact same version of Excel on the exact same machine. And the data will come out as a garbled nightmare, as if this new sheet is saying, what is this? How did you, what is this? It's like, it's data from your program that I made yesterday. I just want another copy of it. And you try to paste it in. It's like,

what? What in the world? It seems like there should be some kind of like standard heuristic kind of checks, right? Where it's like playing with it a little bit to check to make sure it's still working. It seems like there should be some, either you can do that or like the program can do that. Like running some kind of like, figure out the typical errors people make and then have the program be like, one of your cells out of like 2000 is formatted as letters. Like, is that what you wanted? Yeah, every one of these errors, theoretically, the combination of humans and the software could get it all right. But that's theoretical. That's not how the world works.

That's not how it goes. It's much like autocorrect on your phone. Yes. Only if the autocorrect could accidentally make $6 billion evaporate. In a moment's notice. I pulled at the top of the show saying, like, what are you going to do? I pulled that out of my butt. I don't know why I even came up with that, but it's becoming more and more just like really, truly, that seems like that should be the tagline of Excel. Like, what are you going to do

about it? I don't know. This is my favorite area. It's another, the way Excel functions, massive financial disaster. It's 2008 and there's already been a series of disasters. And so Barclays Capital is buying up the defunct financial organization Lehman Brothers. The Great Recession has begun and this is one of the big first steps in it. And so Barclays Capital is buying up Lehman Brothers, but then they need to do a lawsuit to try to change the deal, and this lawsuit fails. Because due to an Excel error, Barclays' agreement to buy up Lehman included 179 worthless

contracts that are just debt that Barclays explicitly did not want to buy. And when they found out, like, why did we buy a huge amount of terrible things, like pay money for things we don't want? The reason is Microsoft Excel. And what happened is an employee used the function where you hide a column. You put in a whole column in the Excel doc and then you just hide it visually. So it is still there. It's just not visually there anymore. still there. It's just not visually there anymore. They hid a column of every contract they specifically did not want. And then they converted the Excel document into a PDF and printed it out and signed the contracts. And in the process of making a PDF and printing it, the hidden column got included. And then they signed the contract with a pen on paper. And so

the lawsuit failed. It was like, you signed a contract with all this stuff on it. Like, that's how it works. That's just how it works, man. We could do a separate, even longer episode about PDFs and Adobe Acrobat and the absolute hellish nightmare that is that piece of software. If you have ever had to actually try to edit a document in Acrobat, a piece of software that I swear is like four gigabytes to display a black and white document that's two pages long. And it is so finicky and it is so weird and it is so difficult to work with any other piece of software

that the idea of having to export an Excel spreadsheet into PDF is an alien versus predator type situation where one of them is going to get you. It's, yeah. I think it's interesting, though, because it's like nobody read this contract uh before they signed it right uh in detail i feel like some of our listeners who previously had thought that everybody at the top of our world economic systems all kind of knew what they were doing i'm sorry to let you know that no they're getting the stuff and they're glancing at it and then they're signing it and then they're going to lunch. And it's like that all the way up at the very, very top. You don't find a bunch of ethereal geniuses up there operating above humanity.

It's just, yep, this looks good. The world is too complicated for the human mind to comprehend, and that does tend to create some problems now and then. And like we said, folks, this could be a constant podcast of this kind of thing. It's just the major Excel errors that have been reported and noticed by somebody and compiled by me for the show. So it's an extraordinary thing about this generally okay software that we've just loaded with every important system in the world and all of our human availability. So, whoops, it's amazing. And that's all our numbers and a huge takeaway.

We're going to take a quick break and then come back with one more takeaway about how Microsoft Excel spread across the world and changed it too. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever

you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back and we're going way back in computer history for our other main takeaway, the main show, because takeaway number two. The forerunner of Microsoft Excel is one of the biggest reasons any of us use computers day to day. Excel is one of the biggest reasons any of us use computers day to day. It turns out that Microsoft Excel did not invent the spreadsheet editor that came from a previous program called VisiCalc, which pretty much made Apple a company capable of selling computers and then made PCs a thing

business people use too. And Microsoft Excel is based on this original spreadsheet editor that changed the world. So like, was this the first sort of iteration of a spreadsheet or were there analog spreadsheets long before this program? Yeah, there was bookkeeping by hand. And that might be in graph paper or paper with, you know, subdividing lines in it. But it was truly an invention to say, let's do the equivalent of word processing, but for bookkeeping by hand. I see. Where you can just change the numbers in the cells instead of, you know, bookkeeping by hand.

If you got one step of it wrong, you had to scribble and erase and rewrite all of your math. It was difficult, you know. Yeah. Like a ledger is what you're describing. But that's the thing that I find fascinating about this. Because for one thing, in the world of tech, it's never the inventor that gets famous. It's always the company that ripped off the inventor that becomes the dominant thing. So it does not surprise me that Excel was not the foundational piece of software.

The fact that I had not heard- You mean innovating, Jason. You mean innovating. Disrupting. Someone else. Silicon words. Disrupting, exactly. Being an innovative disruptor, synergizing the field.

That I had not heard of VisiCalc until today is really incredible because, and I do feel like we've been hard on Excel, but the reason Excel is in a position to doom the world in the way that it does is because it is so useful that it's hard for me to imagine the concept that it was invented. Like I can't imagine life without it because I use it for so many different things. And to be able to quickly get a row of numbers and a row of data and a row of people and put that up there and visualize it and see it and instantly have it do the math like that's so common to my everyday life i don't remember how i did it before computers were in around or common because i'm that old that i remember when we did not have a computer in the house but it makes

sense that visit calc was the killer app that was going to sell computers because lots of people had typewriters and word processors but this is like no everyone can use this this thing these blocks with the data in it that does the math for you and it's crazy I think that at one time this is like people talked about this the way they talk about AI now like, this is going to be a game changer. And it was. 100%. Avoiding math has driven so much of our technology, right? Avoiding having to do arithmetic, I think, is just such a major driver of technology. Yes. It's nice. And yeah, and exactly. This is a thing I still like to have for myself, even though we just described it crashing the world over and over again. And yeah, Excel is a copy of a copy of VisiCalc. It's basically the third generation of spreadsheet editing. And yeah, I too had never heard of VisiCalc. It premiered in 1979. That is when the world changed software-wise. It's before and after spreadsheets, 1979. Wow.

by WGBH Boston. In the interview, he described the early days of Apple trying to sell its first computers. And he told the interviewer, quote, spreadsheets propelled the industry forward. VisiCalc propelled the success of Apple more than any other single event. If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be interviewing somebody else right now end quote and the iphone wouldn't exist the ipod wouldn't exist the apple to see what it wouldn't like the entire lineage of it was the it was this piece of software that drove adoption of those computers back in the early early days and that capital allowed them to continue as a company and allowed them to. But yeah, as he said, if they had sold it to some other company, then Steve Jobs would still be in a garage somewhere tinkering with stuff. He also said in that quote, I overbought black turtlenecks from Gap, so be expecting me to wear those for the next few decades.

Right. Before VisiCalc, you couldn't budget your turtlenecks. You'd just be buying turtlenecks, wondering. No, I messed up in my ledger. I accidentally bought 2,000 black turtlenecks, so that's all I'm going to be wearing for a while. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase just wearing 1,000 turtlenecks. He can't move his arms. We've had another error with our... Yeah, and it was that choice that just the guys who came up with VisiCalc coded it for the Apple II computer. It's called the Apple II. And this was invented by two people.

The first one to start thinking of it was a guy named Dan Bricklin, who changed the world and no one's heard of him. In the 1970s, he was a computer programmer working on word processing software. He worked for a company where he helped newspaper staffs convert writing work to word processing rather than typewriters or handwriting. And he saw them marvel at how convenient word processing was. And then he went back to school for an MBA at Harvard Business School. It's a very Harvard heavy episode. And so one day Dan Bricklin was daydreaming in his MBA class and remembered also his father doing bookkeeping by hand for his father's small printing business. And that

combination of circumstances that was going to happen to somebody, you'd think. Bricklin said, hey, what if there's word processing for bookkeeping? That was the germ of VisiCalc and then Excel was just what if we can do word processing for numbers? And then Bricklin and his friend Bob Frankston built VisiCalc.

They coded it by renting time on a computer and borrowing Harvard systems. I need five more quarters. I've almost gotten to the columns part of the program. Got any more quarters? Basically. Yeah, like Tron logic. Like, oh, I need to pump quarters into that Simpsons game where it's like bullet hell, but for enemies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cannot emphasize enough that really not very much before my lifetime, having access to a computer was like having access to a helicopter. Yeah. So when you talk about like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, those guys having access to computers in college, it's like, no, they were at one of the three colleges in the world that had.

It was a whole room. Yeah. You know, it's you don't understand the privilege of him. It was like someone who was a revolutionary pilot or whatever, because they had their parents owned a jet they could fly around in every weekend. Like this was not something that you that just everybody had. Yeah. And yeah, and they because they they like made the most of this extremely limited time on a computer, they came up with VisiCalc. Their key insight was to program cells.

Like you can put different formulas in different cells and then a computer can run those formulas without needing too much horsepower and without losing track of things. And Bricklin's initial test of the software was to just use it for a business class project. And he blew his professor's mind with how much stuff he modeled out. They were like, how did you do all this in the week between classes? This is nuts. And he was like, oh, you know, I just worked hard. And then they put together a business and sold VisiCalc and premiered it at a computer expo in Manhattan in 1979. Yeah, Bricklin has a TED Talk, which is very fun. And he shows off the first VisiCalc product package, which I'm very excited for people to see because this was so early in

business software that they sold VisiCalc in a leather three ring binder, like a leather bound binder to make it look businessy and official and like business software didn't really exist yet. So they had to sell it that way. And it looks awesome. It looks really dated and good. It's like, look, look, I know computers is a new concept, but you know, you know about binders, right? Yes. People were like binders. Sure. Okay, great. Because people did not have computers if they were businessmen. That was not a thing yet, really. No. And they were selling this to a whole bunch of executives and business owners who had the thought, had the visionary thought, well, right now my books are kept by a whole room full of experts who have

spent years studying the numbers and understand exactly what they mean. But this piece of software, I can train any idiot in two hours. They just have to read the numbers off a sheet and type them into these cells. It does the math for you. I can't wait to fire those eggheads. You don't need to know. And it's just as good, if not better. So there doesn't need to be anybody involved who actually understands the numbers. The computer understands them. It's so much better. This is the future.

Yeah, yeah. I can't wait for it. I can't. By the way, guys, I can't wait for like AI surgery. It's going to be, it's going to be fire. Yeah. The ultimate egghead is a trained surgeon. Forget it. Don't like it. Can't wait to fire all these doctors. Took a lot of years. Stupid. Get robots, robots on the job.

Exactly what you said. Like the businessmen were so excited about this. It made VisiCalc a hit product and made computers a hit product, like buying a computer for doing work at a business. VisiCalc sold so well, they just immediately sold more than a million copies between 1979 and 1983 and accidentally made Apple computers financially viable because Bricklin and Frankston, when they made VisiCalc, they could have made it for any computer, but there just weren't that many computers for sale at the moment. And so they picked the Apple II. And then businessmen started buying a $2,500 Apple II so they could run their $100 VisiCalc software. It's like they invented

steering wheels, which popularized cars or something. It's an amazing progression. So they could fire the $100,000 a year accounting department and replace it with this $2,500 machine. That's how the math worked out on that. Because of the finances, then it made businessmen say, oh, like a work computer. That's a concept I should think about. And so this has the knock-on effect of popularizing IBM PCs and popularizing the whole idea that if you have a desk at an office, there should be a computer physically located on it rather than maybe one mainframe that we use some of the time or no computer at all. Total sea change because of

VisiCalc. And then at this very moment, hordes of chiropractors lifted their heads from the mud pits from which they emerged. Right. They were fish and then they evolved into chiropractors. They walked on land. They kind of lurched out of the swamp going, I sense my services may be needed. Yeah. And from there, there's basically two thefts that bring us from VisiCalc to Excel. And the first one is from within the VisiCalc company, because this is a separate company from Apple. An employee named Mitchell Kapoor basically skillfully prints out contract documents. What he does is he negotiates a buyout to end his employment and depart the company

and includes a one-page description of a new software product that he would like to take with him. And then from that one page, he legally steals all of the VisiCalc ideas and makes a program called Lotus 1-2-3, which is for IBM computers. And so suddenly businessmen are spending five grand on an IBM PC so they can run the $495 Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet editor. So they can run the $495 Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet editor. There was a time in the world when a product was called something like cornmeal or steel or iron or black tea.

Sure, lumber. It actually described what the thing was. It actually described what the thing was. And then at some point, technology advanced to the point where we started calling things like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Would you like to buy Lotus 1-2-3? What in the possible hell is that, sir? Why is it an accounting software? Okay, then why is it not called accounting software version one? What's cornmeal?

I don't know what, you mean like cornify? Just as at one time beverages had flavors like grape or strawberry. And now it's like C4 lightning bomb, Arctic extreme. Yeah, but what does it taste like? It tastes like Arctic extreme, you fool. Why? What are you asking? It tastes like drink. It tastes like drink.

I'm on board with everything you've said, but if we start denigrating Baja Blast, I'm going to have to leave the taping because that's the nectar of the gods. Tell me that Baja does not have a taste, a flavor that blasts you. That's right. Yes. You could give that to a pilgrim in the year 1504 and say, drink this. Tell me what flavor it is. They're going to say, this, sir, is Baja Blast. I don't know what those words mean, but my tongue is telling me this is Baja Blast somehow.

It tastes like a ranch. No, wait a minute. A cool ranch. Also, I am now dead. Right. I am a skeleton. Yeah. And so now Lotus 1-2-3.

Lotus 1-2-3 means Vizicalc tries to sue Kapoor. They failed because he included that one page in his buyout, and that's that. And then the software is such a hit, IBM buys the entire company making Lotus. Now that's just something they package and sell themselves. And then both those softwares get copied by Microsoft. And Microsoft, as recently as 1979, was making software for just one type of computer, a computer called the Altair 8800. Everybody knows Altair, the big computer company now. And Microsoft's basically big insight for themselves was to make just software for lots of computer types. And so they initially are a word processing leader with Microsoft Word. As soon as 1985, they build and release an Excel

spreadsheet editor to run on Apple. They start offering it with their new Windows operating system in 1987. And in 1989, they start selling a suite of products called Office for both Windows and Apple. And that is the killer offering. It's every program you need to do business and work and maybe creative stuff like writing in one package for most computers. And that makes Microsoft a huge company that does it. And Excel is one of the pillars of it. huge company that does it. And Excel is one of the pillars of it. That's great. I mean, I love that that has sort of transformed our offices into like sort of a den where we're all hunched over, trusting, so trusting of these programs. And they really, really didn't invent what Excel does. Like there's even a big Excel thing that Excel fans know called pivot tables. And that's just something they borrowed from the later versions of the Lotus spreadsheet editor that the Lotus people were making. They basically just skillfully and in a well-coded way took everything that other spreadsheet editors did and became the market leader. And to the point where less than

20 years after VisiCalc came out, Microsoft is under antitrust proceedings for being too big and for crushing other companies. You mean being really good at disrupting the industry. So like, I mean, has there been like that many innovations since like, you know, 1989 in terms of Excel? Because it seems like maybe there's a little extra window dressing and stuff, but it doesn't seem like there's many like fundamental changes to the software. The one is pivot tables. I have not learned anything new about how Excel works since I think I had Office 2003 or something like that. It's the same codes. It's the same methods.

Because in my first job out of college, I had to use Excel to manage. It was a law office. They had to manage like a client list. It's the exact same codes, exact same errors, exact same frustrations. None of them have been ironed out in the 20 some years since. So no, I don't think it's changed very much. It's the only one. What are you going to do? Sure, go with one of our competitors if you can name one. Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, did we take pivot tables? Whoops. Whoopsie daisy. Oh, did we make it so you don't have any other options?

Yeah. And like, yeah, that's part of why, you know, maybe someday we need to update this episode with, and then this software came along and replaced Excel. But for now it is the landmark of all of this. And there's a key Microsoft employee named Charles Simoni, who's a Hungarian engineer, moved to America. And after working at the Xerox company on their first PCs, became the office software guy at Microsoft and made so much money doing that. He became one of the first spaceflight tourists. I'll link his NASA spaceflight participant bio. He's a philanthropist. Not even the Bill Gates,

Paul Allen level, just like other people at Microsoft have become fantastically wealthy from building this dominant thing. And meanwhile, people who have heard this podcast are some of the main people who have heard of the guy who really invented this. And in 1999, 20 years after the release of VisiCalc, Harvard put up a commemorative plaque in the lecture hall where Dan Bricklin daydreamed this idea, which he deserves. It changed the world. But it's a very quiet process that happened in 20 years. I think I saw that in a dusty basement somewhere. to change the world. But it's a very quiet process that happened in 20 years. I think I saw that in a dusty basement somewhere. Yeah, no lecture hall looks like amazing. And he posted a picture in his TED Talk. It's like,

okay, yeah. But yeah, that is a lot of why a lot of us have computers. The element where Apple exists because of this is part of why podcasts exist. It's a really foundational thing of our entire digital world is the progenitor of Microsoft Excel, VisiCalc. Yeah. If Excel hadn't crashed the global economy and caused the recession in the early 2010s, I wouldn't have taken a job where management felt like they could overwork us because we were too scared of quitting. And so I wouldn't have gotten burnt out and then made a drastic shift to comedy because I was burnt out and then got laid off from that and then started doing podcasting. I would be probably doing something

different. Like, I don't know. Beekeeping. We would all be we would all be beekeepers. That's right. We would all be beekeepers. We'd all have apiaries instead. Yeah. When I was a tiny baby, I was walking toward a beehive and then suddenly a Microsoft Excel distracted me. And that was that. That was the path. But I feel like the key takeaway is every single person listening to this, at some point in your life, I can almost guarantee statistically that something bad has happened to you due to an Excel error somewhere. You just don't know that's why it happened. There was an error in your paycheck. There was an error in your insurance claim got denied. Something happened behind the scenes that mystified you. And they came back and said, oh, it was an error. But they did not say it was an

Excel error that an employee put a single semicolon in a single formula in a single cell. And that decided that your tax return instead of being $1,200 should be $12. I wonder if there is an afterlife, if we will get some kind of accounting of all the times we've been screwed by an Excel error. It's that Egyptian one where they're weighing the feather, but they put the wrong feather in the spreadsheet. So this says... Oops, you're going to Egyptian hell?

I don't actually know. Sorry, Anubis eats you? Yeah, I don't even know what it is, but... When we picture in our minds a creator and a deity that makes sure that justice is done and that has total knowledge, all we're really imagining is a universe in which the Excel spreadsheets have no errors. Right. That's beautiful. That's beautiful.

I'm for Clint. That's the most beautiful for this week. And I want to say another thank you to Jason Pargin for hanging out and for joining us, especially because he is a full-time novelist. He needs hours of the day to write entire novels, of which he has written many, many of which are New York Times bestsellers. And he has a new novel on the way. It's a standalone. It's not part of his other two incredible hit series that he has going at the same time. This is a whole nother standalone book. It's called I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. That's the title. I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, because Jason remains the best at titles's the title. I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom because Jason remains

the best of titles in the business. As I hope you know from hearing from Jason or from any of the many other authors that have been on this podcast or other podcasts, pre-orders are kind of the entire thing. You need to sell your book before its publication date in order to keep writing books at all. And the good news with Jason is he has a slam dunk stone cold lock to write a good book. So pre-order that book because it's going to be great. You're all set. While you're working on that, check out the outro of this podcast. It's got fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways.

this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Microsoft Excel is an amazing program until we over rely on it and mess up the global economy. And takeaway number two, the forerunner of Microsoft Excel is one of the biggest reasons any of us use computers. is one of the biggest reasons any of us use computers. And that's just the takeaways. This was a very stats and numbers heavy episode in the best way. All kinds of humongous amounts of financial mistakes and silly goof ups with Microsoft Excel. Also the parameters of the limits of Microsoft Excel,

the timeline of it coming along as a program and all sorts of other fun. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the ways Microsoft Excel is a gaming console, as well as a new eSport and an artistic medium. medium. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 16 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows, and stuff we made for the recent Maximum Fun Drive. And if you are a supporter,

you'll get the next things we make from goals we hit in the process of doing that. It's all special audio. It's all just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include studies done by Professor Raymond Pankow of the University of Hawaii, further scholarly writing by mathematics professor Jonathan Borwine of the University of Newcastle, David H. Bailey, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, senior lecturer Simon Thorne of Cardiff Metropolitan University,

and a lot of amazing digital material, in particular from Ars Technica and from Wired. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Jason taped this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Ts'ahtsayaha peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in mynee, Eastern Cherokee, and Ts'ahtsayaha peoples. And I want

to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is a recent one, episode 178. That's about the topic of the great wave off Kanagawa.

If there's a picture of it in your head, it's a Japanese woodblock printing of a big wave. It's a print by the artist Hokusai that partly happened because Hokusai got struck by lightning. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend the podcast Big Feats, where Jason Pargin and our other buddies Robert Brokway and Sean Baby break down the amazing, wacky television show Mountain Monsters. Jason's also on TikTok. He's at Jason K. Pargin. I also recommend Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is

by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then.