Stuff You Should Know - Y2K: Much Ado About Something

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

Y2K was a special time when we all thought nothing bad would really happen at the stroke of midnight, but secretly worried the world would end. Turns out the mitigation efforts worked and we hardly noticed.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff You Should Know. This is a really good one too. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because we haven't recorded it yet, but I think this is going to be pretty good because it's very interesting and surprising and still kind of unresolved.

Yeah. What city were you in, you have to tell me what you were doing, but what city were you in on December 31st, 1999 at 11.59 p.m.? I was in Hot Lanta. What about you? Okay. I was there too. Okay.

That's when I lived in the big warehouse on the west end and we had a big party, probably the biggest New Year's Eve party I've ever thrown and it was one of those parties where people come that don't know you and all of a sudden it was like, all right, here we go. That kind of party. It's like weird science or 16 candles or something. Yeah. It was great. The guy from the Hills Have Eyes showed up on a motorcycle.

The one who was also in Goonies. That wasn't the guy from the Goonies. Are you sure? Oh, no, no. You're right. No, it was. I think it was. He was just in makeup.

The guy from the Goonies was a football player, John Matuzak. Right. Same guy. Oh, that's the guy from the Hills Have Eyes? No. I don't know. I'm just trying to end up right. You're really digging a hole.

Yeah, I am. Yeah. So that's what I was doing. I was throwing a big old party and not worrying too much about the Y2K bug or my bank account being empty because I didn't have much in it anyway or being stuck in an elevator or falling out of the sky in a plane. Yeah, it was a good time to be young because you didn't really care that much. You didn't have as much to lose as if you were like some, I don't know, middle-aged

fat cat or something. You were probably sweating it a little more than you were like in your 20s at the time. Probably so. Probably a lot of people who are listening to this right now are like, you guys just said Y2K bug, what is that? And well, let Uncle Josh and Uncle Chuck tell you all about Y2K because it was one of the weirdest times to ever live through. And Chuck, you and I were Cold War kids.

We lived through a time where people thought we could go to a nuclear apocalypse with the Soviet Union at any given moment. It could just happen, everybody. That's how we lived. And the Y2K bug still managed to stand out from that backdrop. Yeah, so the idea was, and we'll get more specific, but the one sentence descriptor is, elevator code in early days was written with just two digits, not 1950, whatever. Just 50, whatever.

And the idea was that was going to cause a lot of problems when the calendar flipped to 2000 and that anything, like I said, from elevators being stuck to Wall Street going down to elevators being stuck, there were all kinds of crazy scenarios that you might or might not have worried about as that date approached. And that was the Y2K bug or the millennium bug. And some people really, really freaked out. And some people took advantage of people freaking out. And some people didn't worry at all.

And we're going to tell you all about it. Yeah, that was a really great elevator falling down pitch. Thanks. So, the thing about the Y2K bug is that if you hear about it today, you're going to hear a couple of different responses potentially. And probably the more prevalent of the two is that it was all just a big hoax, a sham. Maybe a big money suck. It was a bunch of people just being paranoid.

And whether that was rightfully so or the paranoia was justified or not, because of the situation or the context that this was happening in, we'll talk about that later. But every once in a while, you'll run into somebody and these are the people you should probably listen to who say, no, it was actually a really big deal or it had the potential to be a really big deal. And the reason it wasn't a big deal is because the world, I should say smart people in the world got behind solving this issue, came together and solved this issue. And that it was only people who weren't really paying attention who saw nothing happen and

said that was all just a hoax or a sham. And it's really interesting because to this day, depending on what media coverage you read in, I'm not even talking like left and right. I mean, just like the author, it can change from author to author. Those two different approaches to the explanation will be used depending on who you're reading. And I just find that fascinating that we still haven't resolved it fully. Oh yeah. Like you could go to any party, any dinner party and bring this up and get probably equal

amount of those reactions, I bet. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. All right. So I said that it has to do with computer programming. And in the early days of programming, like I said, they were not using the first two numbers of the year because they weren't just lazy. Those computers didn't have a lot of computing power.

They had about one or two kilobits of memory and it requires eight bits or one byte to represent a single alphanumeric character. So if you could save 16 bits per operation that you're running by just not using 19, then you're saving a lot of memory, like well-needed memory. Yeah. I mean, like this is at a time where like those bits were vital. Today we're just like drowning in RAM and gigs. Yeah.

And bytes. You saw somewhere that like somebody went down the list of what a mainframe, a mainframe, like just those huge room, yes, basically, but like where there's a whole room full of whoppers, that those things maybe had two gigabytes of storage and just like some paltry amount of RAM. And so just, you know, it's such a cliche to say now that like, you know, there's more data storage and like a calculator that we use today than they use to go to the moon, but it's absolutely true.

And so to save that amount of data made a lot of sense. But then the other thing that kind of legitimized that decision is that these people were writing code in like the 50s and the 60s and they're like, this stuff is going to be gone, like it'll have been wiped out and like rebuilt from scratch by the time this becomes a problem in the year 2000. And they were really, really wrong with that idea, which it makes sense that they would think that, but it turned out that it was really wrong because a lot of the software in the world that was running really important stuff like things like financial markets or

things that monitored drinking water purity or things that ran freezers that kept small pox from thawing out, you know, like these were all run on software in a lot of cases that were built and kind of tar papered over with fixes and patches and expansions that were originally created in like the 50s or 60s. And that's not a good thing to figure out when you're like five years out from the millennium when this problem is going to actually happen. Yeah. And it also was complicated by the fact that these programmers weren't all aligned on how

to even enter dates in a uniform way. Some people used the Julian format, which is the two-digit year and then the three-digit account of the days in the year. So January 1st, 1997 would be 97001, but not everyone did it that way. So it's not like you could just go through and say, you know, 19.220, I don't know, nothing about coding, right? You know, just some simple line of code that just basically changes everything in a uniform manner.

No. And so even in like the software itself, like even if one piece of software did use the same kind of date throughout that one piece of software, that software, that code was written to accommodate, you know, X number of bits for a date. So if you just went in and added two extra digits for the date field, that could throw off everything else in the software without you having any way of predicting what it will throw off. So if you went in and made that fix, it could create even bigger problems than if you just

didn't make the fix to begin with as far as the software operating was concerned. Right. And the other thing we need to point out is that the fact that it was the millennium didn't matter. It mattered and we'll get to the sort of cultural hysteria that kind of followed. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that it was a millennium, but it could have been 1800 to 1900 as far as the software knew and it would have presented the same problem. Exactly.

That it was just the prefix was changing and what the big concern was is that when it turned over to 00, the computers hadn't been taught that that meant now the 21st century, now 2000 technically not the 21st century, don't at me, but that they were going to go back to 1900, which is what they were programmed to think and that that could cause all sorts of cascading events, everything from Chuck's fabled falling elevator to aircraft computers powering down mid-flight and just planes falling out of the sky. Yeah. Or computers.

I had the idea that computer systems were just going to go and smoke would come out of them and everything would just shut down. Power would go out, your cable would go out, like just nothing would work anymore. That was the way that everybody was touting it and talking about it, it wasn't even worse than that. People talking about nuclear warheads launching themselves or blowing up in their silos and that kind of stuff. There was a real apocalyptic vibe to the public idea about it, but even to the sober level-headed

people who were actually working to solve the problem, there's a big problem with an airline computer resetting itself because it thinks it's 1900 while the plane's in the air. Planes weren't around. Right. Exactly. Doesn't compute. Must crash.

The other problem too, Chuck, is that they weren't sure if the computers reset themselves and shut down if they would have any way to get in there and start them back up again. Right. So it's not like, I saw somewhere, it's not like it was going to fix itself once it got like a couple seconds past midnight on 2000, that wasn't necessarily a given. So they also, the other thing that really drove this, so there were two things that happened. The public was panicking.

The people working against it were concerned and actively managing it, but for the people who were actively managing it and who were concerned, another thing that was driving it was, well, actually it was driving it for everybody, yeah, I'm going to settle on that. We had no idea how widespread the problem was. Even by the mid to late 90s, there were like 40 billion microchips out there in the world doing their thing. We had no idea what percentage were going to be affected by the Y2K bug. We had no idea what missile guidance systems or what satellites or what ATM machine systems

were going to be affected. So we had to dive in and figure out once people started getting this point across like, guys, this is actually a thing. And apparently people were raising the flags or at least one person was raising the flags as far back as the 60s and 70s, I think, right? Or the 70s and 80s. Yeah. Why don't we talk about him and some others right after this?

Okay. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week

to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Patrick curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. There's a skyline drive in the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. All right. So you mentioned a light in the darkness, a man on a mountain proclaiming this could be an issue, and that man in the 1970s was Bob Bemmer, or Bob Beamer. And he really played a big role in the creation of ASCII code. And he was the first person, and this was in the 1970s, like I said, to actually write in papers like, hey, this could be a problem down the road, this is something we should probably take a look at.

If you're a blockbuster video, you're probably not going to really try and get ahead of this too much. You can probably start working on this in like 1997. If you are the financial sector and you're Wall Street, you're going to start working on this in the 1980s because there's just so much more at risk. Somebody's late fees running up is not a very big deal. You can correct that, but the financial market not being open or available or crashing is a really big deal.

So they started throwing a lot of money at this in the late 1980s in the financial sector to try and correct this ahead of time. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, we'll see later on in the after effects, they credited this basically the upgrade that the New York Stock Exchange dedicated itself to in the face of the Y2K bug as the same reason why the global financial markets didn't, like their systems didn't collapse after September 11th because of this. Pretty cool.

Yeah. So if Bob Beamer was the first old Hermit prophet who came down from the hills to warn everybody, Peter de Yeager was the guy who got all the press for it. He was the one who really basically dedicated his life to making sure that everybody was good and scared about this. The public, but also the people who were like pulling the levers of government, the people who were running the corporations, the people who were running the financial markets. He met with a lot of different people, gave a lot of different scary presentations.

I saw that he would, it wasn't just some Pat presentation he gave everywhere necessarily too. I saw he met with the Canadian government and was trying to get across like, this is a really big deal and it's a really big problem and you're not equipped to deal with this as it stands now. This is a new thing for you. And he pointed out that the Canadian government meets its deadlines, its deadline goals for projects 16% of the time.

He said, this cannot happen. You can't miss this goal, this deadline. So he would kind of go in and make it apparent to each group based on their own needs or their own desires or their own perspective. But he did that. He also gave lots of interviews, he was on 60 minutes and he made a bunch of money during, I think during 1998 he made in today's dollars something like $2.5 million consulting and giving speeches and lectures.

But from what I understand, and he gets a lot of guff today as we'll see, but from what I understand he was a true believer who in some ways maybe saved the world from some really big problems that we will never fully understand because we didn't experience them. Yeah. This is hard one to judge in retrospect. It's like, how do you judge the thing that didn't happen? Right, exactly. Is it a cry wolf or was it, or did we slay the wolf?

So Peter Yeager kicked the whole thing off of the 1993 article called Doomsday 2000. And in his defense, his editor probably came up with that, not him. You think? I, editors typically write the headlines, so it's possible. Who knows? He could have suggested it. He was that much of a doomsayer for sure that he would have been totally comfortable with that.

Yeah. And this is where the American public, like eventually it made its way to 60 minutes and once Morley Safer is on there on a Sunday night talking about it, then you know the American public is going to get on board. And they did and it brought out some, some kooks. It brought out people, preppers and survivalists. There were a lot of internet scams going around at the time. There was a lot of religious, religiosity sort of really heated up like sort of doomsday

preachers and stuff like that started coming out of the woodwork a little bit more. Some that thought that they could make money off of this thing through fear kind of came out of the woodwork. And you know, when something like that's happening, you've got that on one side and then you've got a lot of people on the other side just thumbing their nose at it and saying, this is all a big scam. This is all a hoax. Look at all these kooks that are trying to get, you know, separate us from our money.

It's just a big scam and we don't have anything to worry about. It's weird. It sounds familiar in some weird way to what we've been experiencing on. Yeah. This is definitely like, it was a peek behind the curtain of what could, what could come. Although it was not nearly as stark, although I don't know, maybe I wasn't paying as much attention than as I am these days, but it didn't, it didn't seem like, you know, there was anything approaching the incivility and just outright like anger that, that we experienced

today, especially, you know, in America compared to them, but there were, there were definitely two sides to this issue and they definitely were entrenched against one another. It just wasn't like neither side hated the other. They just thought the other one was dumb. Right. And you know, one of the big reasons that it was such a big kerfuffle culturally was that this, it sort of, it was all about timing at the calendar flip aligned at a time where we were, computers were really becoming super, super entrenched in everyone's daily life.

Of course, you know, people have been using computers for a while, but as far as like really everyday stuff, like running your bank through there and paying your bills and credit cards and acting as your own travel agent in the government, everything was reliant on computers by this point, kind of for the first, you know, this was the first big wave. So as far, and Ed made a good point in here, as far as your average person on the street knows, is their computer comes to him in a box and they take it out and it's just a little magic machine that runs on fairy dust and we know nothing about how it works or how it should work.

And so all of a sudden everyone has got these little magic boxes that they don't really understand that they're super reliant on and there are people out there saying things are about to get really bad with your magic box. Yeah. And a lot of people are just like, all right, I guess it's time to freak out a little bit. Yeah. I mean, people definitely did freak out. And I think it also, I think part of that freak out is kind of like you were saying,

like the Y2K bug is the first time it was revealed to us, just how dependent on computers we become. We, we never really saw that before, but you know, before up to this point, it was all like, gee whiz, you know, like my insurance claim went through 50 times faster than it would have five years ago. Instead now it's like, you know, we're, these, all these things that we're dependent on are about to pull the rug out from our civilization. And that, that, that really kind of got people scared, even if people weren't sitting there

analyzing it. I mean, we're analyzing it in hindsight. At the time people were just scared, freaked out, nervous, angry, upset. But then the fact that this was taking place already during a major calendar, calendar change, not just from, from, you know, the 1900s to the 2000s, but like a new, a new millennium, you know, that, that really kind of had people already primed. So just the weird timing of the whole thing, like, you remember how big the X files were? Yeah.

Imagine the X files now, it'd be like a ho hum. Some people would watch it, some people would be really into it, you know, it might make a little splash there for a little bit, but the X files were one of the biggest TV shows in the world, at the very least in the West, because it was super tapped into this millennial and not the, not the generation, but just like the, the end of this era or the new era, that this angst that everyone was carrying around to some degree, whether you were aware of it or not, you were worried, some small part of your brain was worried because the calendar is about to change over to the year 2000.

Yeah. I think the show that does that best now is Black Mirror. Definitely. I loved me some X files, but I'll, I'll take Black Mirror over X files every day. Oh man. Yeah. It's really tough to rival Black Mirror. It is.

And I know people, boy, X files, people are going to be so upset. I loved X files. I did. Yeah. I just watched them the other day. It still holds up. Yeah. It was a great show.

It was a lot of fun, but a show of its time. Right. Exactly. And those overcoats they wear were gigantic. They were big. Oh my God. Shoulder pads. Yes.

They were so, everybody's walking around like David Byrne and stop making sense. Yeah. It was a little weird. So the cost of this thing was going to be pretty big and ended up being pretty big. It depends on who you ask. If you see numbers on the internet of $500 billion, that is probably not true. That probably came from people that were consulting saying, you know, it may cost up to $500 billion to fix all this and all over the world, but they were spending tons of money.

There are like, I think there's an article from the 1999 Washington Post that talked about General Motors spending about 625 mil X on about a quarter of a mil, I'm sorry, a quarter of a billion Procter and Gamble, 90 million. So then the federal government has to spend a ton of money on their own systems. So it added up to many, many, many billions, tens of billions of dollars. Let's just say that. Yeah. Also, I don't want to let this opportunity pass by without shouting out contemporary

journalism. One other thing, Chuck, the US Senate conducted a special committee investigation into spending on the Y2K bug. And it came up with what I can tell is the most widely accepted number at the time. This is 1999, $2,000, $100 billion were spent in the United States alone. And that about 8.4 billion of that was by the US government. And that, again, that's in $2,000, so it would be substantially more today. And that the US is almost certainly the largest spender on this issue, because we were also,

at the time, the most dependent country on computers or the country that was the most dependent on computers in the entire world. So we had the most to lose. We had the most to gain by spending this money. And the Senate report concluded, even within three months afterward, that it was money well spent. Yeah. Well, there you have it, case closed.

Case closed. Although I should probably say that to the end. In 96, the Congressional Research Service said, you know what, we need to do something about this. And Senator Daniel Moynihan's went to Bill Clinton and said, hey, we need to do something about this. So Clinton launched the Council on Year 2000 conversion. Congress passed the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act.

And all this sounds very fancy, but Ed is quick to point out and we are as well that, you know, the government can't get in there and just fix all the bugs of all these companies. They got to take care of it themselves. So a lot of it was just, hey, you got to get on this, like you got to get ahead of this. You're on this right stock market and you're on this General Motors, aren't you? And sharing information for sure. But a lot of it was just kind of cheerleading. Yeah.

And I mean, that worked, like getting people, you know, kind of snapped in line and saying, like, hey, the U.S. government is telling you this is a real problem and you need to do this by this time or else you're going to have some big troubles. That gets people's attention for sure. So you know, in a lot of senses, that was enough. But the government also had all of its own systems and software to look at and go over and make sure that it was in working condition or fixed if it needed to be fixing. And then they reached out and helped other countries too.

I saw that I think starting in 1996, they started an exchange program with Russia to make sure that nobody was going to accidentally nuke anybody else. And as a matter of fact, on the turn of the millennium, there were U.S. observers and Russian observers in one another's countries just basically to work together to make sure that this got all worked out. But I think also it's just kind of a show of faith, like, you know, we're not going to nuke you or we're not going to let you get nuked to our own people or their kind of thing too, which I thought was kind of cool.

Yeah. Other countries took a little more strict approach. The Dutch central bank said if you, we won't loan money to companies who weren't compliant. Nina said, you know, at all the top airline executives have to take flights on January 1st. And, you know, so you better make sure your stuff is running correctly. Yeah. Think about that.

The nation or the government ordered airline executives to be in the air at midnight or they would, I guess, probably go to jail. Yeah. And that sounds harsh and it is, but I think it is an interesting incentive to say the least. It's pragmatic at least. You know, make sure your stuff works, everybody. But the Y2K compliance is what I was talking about.

That was, like, you could buy products around that time that said Y2K compliant. Like, it could be a clock radio that says Y2K ready. All kinds of products were labeled Y2K compliant, certainly anything to do with computing. Yeah. And there was actually nobody watching to make sure that that certification was actually accurate. There was, I think the defense department put out some, like, some guidance on what to do to be Y2K compliant, but they were, like, find it, fix it.

All good were the steps. Like, they were that vague. Yeah. There was nobody certifying it. And to me, yes, cheerleading from the U.S. government and raising awareness and maybe lending aid financially, that was some really good roles that it played. But I feel like also it could have said, hey, if you're running this kind of operating software or you're producing dates using this time, here's a good fix you might be able

to use or to create some sort of Y2K compliance guidance or steps. I feel like it could have done a little more in that respect. But there was nobody, like, you could have bought anything and it could have had that sticker on it. And it really didn't necessarily mean anything. That's right. And Chuck, there were some other governments had different responses. I saw that Canada had 13,000 troops ready on high alert just in case the S went down.

Yeah, that was part of Operation Abacus. Yes. There's a really great Globe and Mail article called Y2K, the Strange True History of How Canada Prepared for an Apocalypse That Never Happened, but changed us all. It was a really good article. It was good. One of the other things that Canada did was the CBC sent a pair of engineers to a remote broadcasting station with like some video, which I would love to get my hands on.

I couldn't find it anywhere. They were to broadcast instructions on how to survive post-apocalypse, basically. That was their job. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, everybody's sitting there ready and waiting and it's finally December 31st, 1999 and whether you're ready or not, it's all about to click over, right, Chuck? That's right.

So, we'll take another break here and we'll talk about what happened on December 31st, 1159 p.m., 1999, right after this. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So, I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for

her travel. So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll

never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. What happened, man? I've been on pins and needles for 120 seconds. Not much.

Not much stuff did happen, but for the most part, nothing really happened. I mean, for you or me or just about anybody else out there, the millennium came and went and the Y2K bug fizzled out like a dud. That's right. I remember waking up late in the day on January 1st, hungover. Everything worked. My phone worked. My power was on.

There were no planes falling out of the sky. I would row that elevator up and down all day long. But some things did happen. And like I mentioned, video stores, sometimes there was one in Albany, New York that had assessed a late fee of over $90,000 to a customer. For the general's daughter, no less. Oh, is that what it was for? The movie?

Yes. That was the rental. Oh, boy. I think I actually saw that for some reason. Yeah. It was Travolta, right? Yeah. Yeah, Travolta.

That was in the post-pulp fiction boom. Let me see. There was a national laboratory nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee, had some malfunctions. I think there was some other nuclear malfunctions in Japan, but nothing big, obviously, it would have been catastrophic. But really, mostly minor things happened. Yeah. There was like 30,000 cash registers in Greece that were all running the same software, showed

that the year is 1900 on receipts. Nothing particularly bad. I think in the US, the most jarring thing that happened for the government was some spy satellites where they went offline for three days. But for the most part, people were able to see what the problem was, deal with it, figure out a solution or a patch, and then bring the thing back online with minimal interruption or problems. And the fact is that these, the interruptions that did happen were typically pretty small,

pretty inconsequential, and were dealt with pretty quickly. Yeah. In England, in Sheffield, England, the National Health Services came under fire because there was a misreading of the age of pregnant mothers, I believe 154 women in the program were affected and they were getting testing, like prenatal testing to see if there was a chance that their baby could have Down syndrome. And it led to two pregnancy terminations and four births of children with Down syndrome. And for the life of me, I couldn't find out if there were lawsuits or what.

I just saw articles that talked about penalties against the NHS, and it's one of those things that was really hard to find in any kind of follow-up. That was not one of the inconsequential ones I mentioned. No, obviously not. So the fact that, and from what I could tell, Chuck, that was far and away the most consequential outcome. Everything else was usually pretty, you know, either inconvenient or aggravating, comical, like the guy who got the $91,000 late fee for his video tape.

But the fact that, you know, aside from the NHS issue, the fact that it was generally small stuff that happened, for some reason made the public say, oh, well, this was all just a hoax. It was all just a scam to suck money out of our preppers' pockets and get us all riled up and scared and probably control us with George Bush's new world order that ministry talked about. And that the whole thing was all just howy, that we were all riled up for nothing, which I think goes to show that the public, by and large, is a dumb, dumb.

Yeah, I think we're seeing that now. Because Ed makes a great analogy here. He says, hey, if the Y2K bug had been a flood, and we spent hundreds of billions of dollars in countless work hours building a dam to hold back the flood, when that flood arrived and the dam held, you wouldn't say, well, I didn't get wet, so the whole thing must have been a hoax. And that that is almost a perfect analogy for what happened in retrospect with the Y2K bug, a crisis that would have been potentially really huge and catastrophic, was averted.

And rather than saying, hooray, we did it, we pulled together, people just kind of said, you guys got me all upset for nothing, nothing happened. Yeah, I mean, let's say it was all just minor problems that they didn't bother to fix beforehand. And all of a sudden, instead of a few minor annoyances and aggravations, there are thousands of those. And those compound on one another somehow and create sort of a domino effect. It's not just that they corrected the main systems like the financial markets and the nuclear codes and all those things that they needed to correct, they corrected a lot of

stuff that had a downstream effect, just to make our lives a little less disrupted. People looked at Italy at the time, they were a country that didn't do a lot, and they didn't have a big fallout, but other people who were a lot smarter and don't make knee-jerk reactions said, yeah, but you know what, Italy's really small compared to us. They weren't nearly as computer-reliant at the time as we were. And America was fixing their stuff, which helped fix stuff for all of the world because they were reliant on us and our systems. That's right.

So there's a pretty good argument you can make for all those people who are like, no, it's totally fine. See, those people didn't do anything. They got a free ride, basically, because so much of the software that America was fixing is used around the world. That's a really, really important point because that's a point that a lot of people make, they'll point to countries. Surprisingly, like Japan, I can't believe it, but Japan did very little to deal with

it. And like you said, there were some minor problems at some of their nuclear plants, but the fact is a lot of them benefited, a lot of those countries benefited from the US leading the way on this. Yeah. And one of the strategies that other people who didn't think we should be pouring all this money into it beforehand was called fix on failure. They said, why don't we just wait and see what happens, and then we'll start to correct

things as needed. But that's just not a very, like we didn't know what we didn't know, like you said earlier. We had no way of knowing what it was going to cause, and so fix on failure was not a viable option because trying to patch something that is in chaos all of a sudden is not the best way to work. No. I mean, like this is about to date this episode, but the Spirit Airlines problems of like the last week or so is a really great example.

I haven't heard what's going on. There was some problems with shifting crews around because of weather, and all of a sudden some flights started being ready without the crews, and then that led to more crews being shifted around. And it was just this cascade of flights where they were every day canceling 50, 60% of their flights and just leaving people stranded. And it was a really great example. That, the, what was the name of the pipeline that got cyber attacked for ransomware?

That was a really great example of just these people waiting in line for gas around the whole southeast and the east coast for a week, more than a week, like at the time at Y2K, the idea that like we could have just fixed this stuff really kind of shows our naivety for how embedded, or how we didn't really understand how embedded we already were with computers and how dependent we were on them. And you can't fix a nuclear missile guidance system after it fails. You need to do that ahead of time. So that fix on failure idea was a pretty bad idea from the get go.

It was, you mentioned, you know, one of the good things that came out of this was the fact that post 9 11, our financial markets didn't crash because largely because of a lot of the work they did for Y2K and making those systems more robust and updated. And that happened kind of across the board, like the investment that a lot of people, I think a lot of people and companies are like, well, I guess now is a good time as any to really just sort of update everything and to get our systems, you know, more, you know, up to snuff for today's, you know, some of the stuff was still running on code from the 70s that have been built on and built on.

So that really helped drive the tech boom in a lot of ways in that companies were investing a lot more for the first time in tech. And also they, you know, there were hundreds of thousands of new developers that were trained and hired to deal with this. And they were all of a sudden were looking for jobs and some of them didn't find jobs. So they got creative and started writing apps and writing code for other programs. And it really fueled not only here in India, I know it was a really big deal that their IT industry now compared to where it was then is just like night and day because of everyone

that got hired to help with Y2K. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Like they make the case that the tech boom was a result of people coming into this industry who wouldn't have otherwise been there. And also the spending, the spending was just ridiculous because not only were people hiring IT people to fix their software, like some companies were like, forget this, we're just going to completely upgrade our systems. Yeah, these systems could have kept hopping along or hobbling along for another 10, 15

years, say, and then that system would have had to have been replaced. And then some other company does it another five years earlier, five years later. Rather than that, the United States and actually in a lot of ways, the world's computer systems got upgraded all at once and that kind of laid that foundation with, you know, the industry being flush with tech workers to just really take off, which is great. I saw in that same article about that Senate report, Chuck, that said it was money well spent. Somebody estimated that for every dollar spent on fixing the Y2K bug, it led to a return

on investment of about six or seven dollars. Whoa. And that was an estimate in 2000. Now today in hindsight, if the Y2K bug drove the tech booms that started in the early 2000s, late 90s, like it's just, it's countless. It's probably in the trillions of dollars worth of value that it led to totes. So I think we kind of busted that myth in a way, didn't we? Kind of like the world of the world's radio broadcast.

I think so. As usual, GeneX is correct. Go GeneX. If you want to know more about how GeneX rules, you can go onto the internet and look at this thing that we built called the internet and learn some more stuff. What do you think of that? I think it's great. And since I said learn some more stuff, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this bobbin girls from our child labor podcast. Hi guys. I'm Amanda Maroussars. I'm a longtime listener and love everything you guys do in your child labor episode. You mentioned you were unsure of the dangers of working as a bobbin girl or boy. Well, let me tell you, I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts, where they claim the Industrial Revolution was born. If you're from this area in elementary school, you visit the Boot Cotton Mill Museum for

school field trips. We learned about the history of and cotton weaving processes of the time. Something that always stuck with me being a little girl at the time of these trips was the bobbin girls. They were a side list of horrors that these child laborers went through from getting their fingers snapped off in the weaving machine crevices to getting their hair caught and essentially getting scalped. Man, I knew it.

So do we have it. I totally knew it. It's going to be something really horrific about it. Just wanted to polish off your episode with the most graphic details that seven-year-old me could remember being plagued by. That is from Amanda Maroussars. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Amanda.

That's exactly what I assumed was out there, so thanks for filling in the blanks for us. I love it. If you want to get in touch with us like Amanda did, especially if you love everything we do, like she says, we love hearing from people like that. If you can get in touch with us via email at stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones from the Bobby Cast. We are Nashville's most listened to music podcast, in-depth interviews with your favorite country artists, plus the biggest songwriters and producers in Nashville, all from the comfort of my own home, so it gets a little more laid back. They're sharing stories behind the biggest songs in country music and personal stories

that you will not hear anywhere else. So if you love country music, I think you will love this podcast. Listen to the Bobby Cast on iHeart Radio, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.