You're Wrong About - The Y2K Bug

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Mike tells Sarah how an obscure technical glitch became a nationwide mobilization. Digressions include Twitter beefs, “The Net” and VHS pricing. We spend much of the episode roasting our own work from the relatively recent past.Correction: It seems the women in Britain didn't terminate their pregnancies due to the false positive test results. We were wrong about this and we're sorry! Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseContinue reading →Support the show

You're talking up the awfulness of this episode so much that people are going to want to hear it and it's going to be like the like lost show like that holocaust movie that Jerry Lewis made. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we go to the year 2000. I believe in keeping it simple. It's funny how that still sounds magical 20 years later. Yeah, well it is magical because it's the distant past. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about and we're on PayPal

and we sell cute t-shirts and our listeners have been making incredible designs for us and as usual it's quarantine. We know it's tough out there and so don't feel remotely pressured. It's tough in here also. Yes. And it's tough on the insides and the outsides. It's tough everywhere. I would like to give a special shout out to all of our listeners who are listening to this show on one earbud right now because they have children. Oh, yes. We love you guys. And today we're talking about Y2K, the Millennium Bug. Yes, I'm excited. This is a throwback episode although our listeners probably don't know that that

this was the first episode we ever recorded when we were first doing the show almost exactly two years ago, May 2nd, right? Well, that was when we started releasing the show but we recorded this in like early March of 2018. So, yeah. A little over two years ago and it was so bad that we to this day have never released it and whenever we tell people that they always think that we're being modest, like, oh, I'm sure it's fine. No. Really bad. I listened to it this week. Well, I haven't listened to it since we regularly edited it. Thank you. I choose to believe that you're being modest but I also choose to not attempt to confirm that independently which speaks for itself. I bet it's like the pilot episode of 30 Rock where

there's like a lot of weird long silences and you're like, what is the show like normally? Like, what's the secret sauce that happens later that I can't identify but which I know isn't here? But we thought it would be a good idea to wait a while so that Sarah would forget everything I told her. Yeah, we thought we decided we would wait two years and two months. Yes. And then we would take another crack. Yes. And there's actually been a lot of new weirdly, a lot of new academic research on Y2K between 2018 and now. So there's actually some like a bunch of new stuff that we're going to talk about. So this is not all going to be familiar to you. I probably won't remember anything. Okay, good. Well, I think now is a good time to return to Y2K because

Y2K has become this weird thing that people only bring up when they're talking about something else. Right. And I feel like it comes up as a metaphor for like something that didn't happen. Yes. Like something we all thought was going to happen but then ha ha we overreacted. When we're talking about climate change, people will bring up like, oh, we were worried about Y2K too and that turned out to be a hoax. And somebody else will respond to that by saying no, Y2K is an example of us coming together and fixing a problem. Both of those arguments are kind of detached from what really happened in Y2K. And since we have now had two years of doing this show since then, I am able to extrapolate that perhaps the answer is no one

is right. Yes. Okay. Both of those arguments are correct in some ways and both of them are incorrect in other ways. Right. Because they contain elements of truth that don't grasp the truth. But so now is the point in the show where ordinarily I would ask you what you know about Y2K so I can myth bust you. But we have tape, we have live footage of Sarah describing this two years ago. So I thought I would just play you the clip. Oh my God. And you can decide, A, how bad you want to tell me the editing is, B, if you want to add anything to your description. Oh, I was in my 20s then. Let me send you this thing. Can you see it? A little Skype machine. Yes. Three, two, one. So tell me about what you what you know about Y2K. The fear of it was that like all of the

computers and like automated things and electronic things would break and then all of our system is would fall apart and then we would just not have a grid anymore. The amazing thing about that is that your understanding now is about as good as like the U.S. Senate's understanding back then. 1999 was kind of like the beginning of dot com stuff. Yeah, it's got that weird grading quality. Yes. The podcast that people put no effort in. Whereas we put in minimal effort. I did this thing in our first couple episodes where when one of us would say a joke and the other would laugh, I would turn down the volume on the laugh really low. So it sounds like you're all of a sudden like 60 feet away and laughing at one of my jokes. I don't know why I did that. Yeah, it's like a

little late with Lilly Singh. It's like one person laughing their ass off far away. Eerie. But do you want to add anything to your explanation of what your understanding of the Y2K bug was? I don't know if I could add anything to what I said. I was 11 when we reached the year 2000 and I remember understanding that people were concerned about the fact that basically the machines that ran society were programmed using dates that gave you only three digits and therefore when it reached the year 2000, they would all go to 000 or something. It was two digits. Yeah, two digits. Two digits. Okay. And because of that, everything would break. Yes. And it would be like Jurassic Park, basically. Yes. Yeah. But so the first myth to bust is that

the millennium bug was not a bug. Was it an arachnid? It was a design choice. It was a way of saving space. We've completely, of course, forgotten about all this now, but in the early days of computing, back when there were like punch cards and when computers took up an entire room. Which is what? Like the early, mid-60s? Yeah, 60s to 70s, basically. I interviewed a researcher about this and one of the things he said is that in these old programming languages, they very easily could have had the date at eight digits and had all four digits of the year in there, but it would have taken up too much space. Right. And if you're trying to put dudes on the moon, you need all the space you can get. Exactly. I mean, one of the things I cannot get over,

the original Super Mario Brothers from 1985 is 40 kilobytes. Wow. And this file that you just sent me that I listened to is 681 kilobytes. Yeah. There just was not space for anything extraneous. So they made the choice that we're only going to do dates in six digits. So like year, month, day. Okay. Yeah. So year, year, month, month, day, day. Okay. Yeah. And there were people in the 70s writing papers in magazines saying like, this might be bad. Like let's proceed with caution here, guys. This might not be such a great idea, but then everybody was like, whatever, it's 30 years away. Right. Everyone, as everyone always does, said whatever. That's a problem for like our kids or something. Exactly. Which is

whatever generation says. And they're like, why aren't our kids buying real estate? And it's like, maybe because you made choices that we're dealing with right now. And so it was only in 1993 with the publication of an article called Doomsday 2000 that the country started to get worried about this. That sounds like a movie where Robert Duvall is on a death race across the American Southwest. One of the quotes from it is, we and our computers are supposed to make life easier. What we have delivered is a catastrophe. Doomsday 2000. So this was the beginning of people starting to get nervous about it. And it wasn't actually that all of the software would crash. It was actually more about the hardware. So the phrase that became really important in the panic about Y2K was embedded

systems. So the idea is that all of the infrastructure of modern life has chips within it. Most of these chips have like a little clock inside of them. Like they have very basic, very rudimentary systems inside to just like make the thing work. Like clock radios have little chips in them with like the dates in them. This is a list from one of the articles that came out in 1999 of all of the things that have these embedded systems in them in these ways that are like kind of murky and kind of difficult to sort out. So personal computers, surveillance equipment, lighting systems, entry systems, barcode systems, clock-in machines, vending machines, switchboards, safes and time locks, elevators, faxes, production line equipment, ATM machines, military command control systems, IRS

tax computations. Vending machines and military command control systems would be concerned about. And so the idea was basically that everything from, you know, traffic lights to like MRI machines have these chips embedded in them. And it wasn't clear at the time sort of what it would take to fix it because you don't even really know what the problem is. Like you don't really know like, well, is my clock radio going to stop working? Or is it just going to think that it's 1900 for the rest of its natural life and who cares? Well, and my understanding as an 11-year-old was that the clock radio would think it was 1900 and be like, oh my god, I shouldn't exist. Yes. And then it would like burst into flame or something. Yeah, like back to the future, it would start to disappear

like I don't exist yet. Yes. That's what I thought would happen. So this is an excerpt from a really interesting oral history that was published a few years ago. This is a quote from the guy that wrote the Doomsday 2000 article. So what he says is most people didn't seem to understand the depth of the programming we depend on. It's not unusual for a bank to have an excess of 50,000 programs. So when you say we have a two-digit problem, why don't you just expand it to four digits? Okay, fine. Where are they? In which databases? And by the way, which ones are you going to fix first? To fix this one, you have to fix that one. And to fix that one, you have to fix the other one. And to fix the other one, you have to fix the vendor. And so another one of the phrases that

went around at the time was this idea of cascading faults. If one of these systems breaks, well, all these other systems are dependent on that one system. So a really interesting example of this, by one of these guys in this oral history of a computer researcher at the Cointelligence Institute, he talks about how this was in the mid-90s, he was riding an Amtrak train and the train stopped in the middle of the tracks and it sat there for four hours. And it turned out that the computer system that runs the Amtrak train had to reboot for some reason. And in rebooting, it also shut down the air conditioning system. And in shutting down the air conditioning system, it also shut down the ventilation system. So people are sitting there in the heat in these cars with like bathrooms

in them. And it's starting to get smelly and it's starting to get stuffy. And you can't open the windows. Yeah. And people are getting really on edge. And so there was this realization that like, first of all, Amtrak trains have computers. Right. I know. I would not have guessed that. It's a QQ train. That's as far as my thinking goes on the matter. I guess it's not a QQ train though. There's no QQ on it. There's a bleep bloop. Yes. So these were the kinds of stories that went around that it's like, guys, computers are everywhere. Computers are in cars now. Computers are in airplanes. And we don't really understand the architecture of these systems. Computers are in hot dogs. You guys didn't know that hot dogs are going to stop working. I also think a really

important statistic from the time was that only 50% of the population had personal computers. So it's like computers were normal enough that people had them, but they were also new enough that people didn't really understand how they worked. I've been thinking lately about the fact that it's very interesting that millennials have been branded like the first generation online. Millennials are also the last generation with any living memory of what it was like before the internet had taken over American infrastructure and before online reality was as real as meat space reality. And that weird transition period too, where computers weren't everywhere yet, but they were like here. The like existence period. Like people didn't really know what

to be afraid of, right? Like the net comes out. There's also the thing, and this is a way that the net is silly, but it's a way that every mid 90s movie was forced to be silly. Also Mission Impossible really jumps to my mind where they're like, okay, we're using computers as a plot element, but everyone knows that a computer is this like weird, slow, dusty thing that comes and it can barely play games at like overheats if you play Mist on it. But Tom Cruise is going to hack into the CIA in about five minutes from a dial up internet connection in Europe. And so Dylan Mulvin, who's this one of the only researchers who specializes in Y2K, he's writing a book and I interviewed him. He said what was interesting about it was Y2K had a

definite deadline. Like we knew exactly when the Y2K bug was going to happen, but it had indefinite effects. So we knew that like these embedded systems were everywhere, but we didn't know what was going to be affected or how. And that was one of the things that drove a lot of the paranoia about what was going to happen. So would it be accurate to say there are a lot of unknown unknowns? Yes. Yeah. It's like the thing where Pablo Escobar buys hippos for his private zoo and then they go feral and now they just live in Colombia and they just start there. It's like, what are the Escobar hippos in this scenario going to be? Like we don't know. And so it basically became this thing that anything you could imagine wasn't like totally outside the realm of possibility.

Right? It's like it might be all of the traffic lights stop working or it might be all of the traffic lights turn green. What's going to happen to all the audio animatronics at Disney World for the love of God? And I remember this being an item of significant national concern. Like I remember people talking about this a lot. Oh yeah. And for a long time. And so is that like me being in kind of a liberal bubble? Like is this a bipartisan concern also? I mean it's actually one of my conclusions about this is that it's like the last example of like all of us coming together and doing something. And then concluding that it wasn't worth it. Exactly. And we shouldn't have bothered. Yeah. But it didn't really take on a partisan valence. But it was a huge deal. So

it was only really in 1996 that people started to get nervous about it. Like that's when the government efforts ramped up. That's when the corporate efforts ramped up. And between 1996 and 1999 congressional committees held 100 hearings. The GAO issued 160 reports like guidance to companies and assessments of how the government was doing. The estimates now are that the U.S. government spent $9 billion on fixing it and the private sector spent around $100 billion. Wow. They put together a task force of CEOs. They passed a law saying that large companies had to be public about what they were doing and had to issue guidance to small companies. Oh wow. They appointed a Y2K czar. Wow. The Federal Reserve started printing a bunch of extra cash

just in case there were bank runs. It was huge. Yeah. It's interesting that this also led to corporate regulation. Like we took this so seriously that we were like the federal government is going to tell the private sector what to do. Yeah. And that was acceptable enough to everyone that it actually happened. Yeah. Because like I'm not shocked when companies are told to stop poisoning children and they're like, but at what cost? One of the members of parliament in the UK called it the greatest mobilization since World War II. Wow. This was also one of the things that Dylan Moven told me is that he figured out that this was one of the first times we got large-scale gig work and large-scale outsourcing. Wow. So millennials have been marked from like the moment

that we started preparing for the millennium. Yeah, man. Wow. One of the vulnerabilities in the US tech sector was that we used an old coding language called COBOL. And by some coincidence, a lot of programmers in India also use COBOL or learn COBOL. And so this was one of the first times that big companies were like, well, we've got like millions of lines of code that we need to update. There's all these people in India that know how to do this. So like let's set up some outsourcing infrastructure. So this was a huge ramp up in outsourcing technical grunt work style labor to developing countries in the tech sector. It was the first time they realized they could do this. Oh, this is outsourcing actual skilled work. Yeah. And so by 1999, 51% of Americans were saying

they would avoid air travel in the months before and after YGK, 42% were saying they would stockpile food and water. And 6% of Americans said they were planning to withdraw all of their money from the bank. And this, this of course, gave rise to all of this weird prepper community. I don't think it was the first time the preppers had like used something as an excuse, but like gun magazines started doing special Y2K issues. I'm like thinking about preppers a lot these days. Oh yeah. I'm interested in the relationship between the prepper mentality where you're like just waiting for the penny to drop so that society can crumble and you can like be in your compound with your ammunition and your canned cling peaches and how that seems to go hand in hand with the sort of

conservative mentality where someone's like stay home please just like watch some shows and get some dominoes and being like how dare you. Do you want me to remind you what you said in our show two years ago because I just listened to it the other day? Yes. You said you get the feeling that some people are sort of looking forward to this that like people want something bad to happen. Well and that was what I thought two years ago and I'm like okay it's happening like why aren't people just like I'm going to stay home. Yeah. Like if you're waiting your whole life for an excuse to not engage with society then why do you get so sad about it changing slightly? I know this is what's so I don't know I just think this was the first cross pollination of the internet

and conspiracy theories and capitalism. But I think alongside this prepper community there's always profiteering. But you think a lot of it is like PT Barnum types. Yeah I mean this is one of the first times we saw websites pop up like Alex Jones style right where it's like one half of the website is like the government is trying to kill you they're poisoning the water and then the other half of the website is like let me sell you supplements that will cure the poison that they're putting in the water. Is this the beginning of supplements as we now know them or like conservative supplements? And like food kits like people were selling like gallon bucket whatever things of food supplies basically so like when like the purge happens on January 1st we'll be ready.

Right. It got so bad poor Bill Richardson the governor of New Mexico had to warn his constituents he's like don't stockpile gasoline because gasoline explodes like don't keep jugs of gasoline in your house because you're more likely to die from that than you are from the actual Y2K. Yeah I was listening to a guy in NPR last night who was like yeah obviously we don't want you to inject cleaning supplies and it's like just just yell at people a little just tell them no. Well I actually think the government I mean if you look at the old government warnings what they all say is they all say don't panic but kind of panic. Right. So a lot of the statements that you read in old newspapers you know journalists of course would call up like the secretary of transportation or

whatever and they'd say like you know we don't expect any negative impact we expect everything to be fine dot dot dot and some traffic lights will probably go out so you should be ready for them. So it's like well if you're telling people not to worry but you're also telling them that traffic lights might go out like a bunch of traffic lights going out is a actually kind of a big deal and b a sign that something much bigger is happening. Right and also it's like as an American you're going to assume that if a traffic light goes out it'll be the one that you are interfacing with. Exactly. I also think as Americans the impulse to think that the government doesn't have your best interests at heart is like not crazy. Right. I think you can disagree with the logic of someone's

misgivings but it's unfair to tell them their perspective is meaningless if it's based on the idea of fearing those in power. Right. Well I mean you're right in that one of the first things to happen is of course conspiracy theories and I'm fascinated by like the structure of conspiracy theories that it's always the same like four arguments just like phrased in different ways. Like the screenplays. Yes. What are the basic arguments of conspiracy theories? Well I mean there's this guy named Mike Adams but he started something called Y2K Newswire that was like of course you know pretending to be like Y2K News but was really just like the panic digest like all he did was reasons that you should be scared. All these descriptions feel like they're from a very

specific and charming moment in history. It's like the Y2K Newswire Tuesday 2000 like I love it. I know. And so he put out a list of 39 quote unquote unanswered questions about Y2K and number 18 is if Y2K is a non-event why did the federal government spend 50 million dollars on a Y2K command bunker? I realize it's tiresome that I continue to draw these comparisons but again it's like the argument that we're seeing and we'll continue to see of like if coronavirus is such a big threat then why haven't more people been dying and it's like presumably because we've been making good choices and should continue to make good choices but yeah it's like the successfulness of any attempt to avert danger will always be used by someone to prove that the

danger wasn't really there. Right. Another one that shows up a lot in conspiracy theories is false premises so see if you can spot the false premises in this. Why are Californians urged to have a two week stockpile of supplies for earthquake preparedness but only a three-day stockpile for Y2K? Oh they're saying the government is misleading Californians. Right. That it's like it's deliberately understating the threat right that we're taking earthquakes seriously but we're not taking Y2K seriously. What people point out when they debunk this is that California doesn't tell people to have a two-week supply of food for earthquakes it says they should have a 72-hour supply so it's like you're literally just making up this thing. Well yeah and I'm sure this guy is like what are you

gonna do ask Jeeves? Are you gonna go on life coasts and wait for 49 minutes to go to four web pages to try in fact check me? No. This is my favorite one. Why is it socially acceptable to buy fire insurance, car insurance, or life insurance but not food insurance by having some extra food stored away? Through what mechanism did the Boy Scout motto be prepared become politically incorrect? Will the Boy Scouts now be called extremists? This is like one of my favorite moves in conspiracy thinking is that you say like this thing that is like kind of on some level reasonable it's like why are you telling me to prepare for things like fires and you're not telling me to prepare for things like Y2K like whatever that's that's relatively reasonable but then it's like in two more moves

he's like the Boy Scouts think I should be prepared why do you hate the Boy Scouts? Right it's like when did you stop beating your wife? Yeah I'm also I wonder about you know with conspiracy theories how much of the work is being done with this kind of emotional hopscotch that happens inside of the person consuming this media or listening to the speech or whatever it's called a dog whistle for a reason you can present a phrase or an idea that puts someone in an emotional state where then it like it doesn't really matter what you say because you've got them kind of nicely whipped up yeah yeah and like at that stage in the emotional recipe it's like well you've gotten whipped now like time to make meringue like it doesn't really matter what kind of argument you

then present to someone because you they've reached this malleable state right once again it's very emotionally based exactly emotionally saturated right thinking this is the classic move right is that all of a sudden you're whipping up anger about like these people won't even let me be in the Boy Scouts or whatever which isn't true but it's like you're fomenting all this this completely meaningless anger what when it's really it's like well all they're saying is that it might not be super prudent for you to stockpile food but also it's not illegal to stockpile food like if you want to go to the store right like no one cares what you're doing no one actually cares but it's like to get people into this emotional state where you can sell them things and you can convince them

of things you have to get them on this much larger distrust of society and distrust of the media and distrust of the government so i feel like there were a lot of Boy Scout related controversies in the 90s like oh my god yeah we spent a lot of time on that we should do an episode about the Boy Scouts yeah also there was um do you want to guess who the person remember this is the late 1990s do you want to guess jesse vancura close do you want to guess who was selling a videotape for 28 dollars called a christian's guide to the millennium book was a jim baker no jerry fallwell close oh okay do you know how much 28 dollars was in 1999 that's so much money for a video it was probably a star wars vhs set at costco yes yes you could have gone to end or in back but instead got jerry

fallwell yelling at you and also i love how christian media goes for these cash grabs of like a christian guide yeah something it's impossible to do in a christian way honestly this isn't explicitly branded as christian but there's also a book called y2k for women how to protect your home and family in the coming crisis no oh is it about how you have to keep putting out sexually even after all the audio animatronics start rampaging through anime and so i couldn't get the text of this but i did find it on amazon and all the reviews are five stars except for one one star review from a guy named jim this is written by a woman called karen anderson so jim says i worked for a large utility on the west coast for y2k and one of my jobs was to answer

the questions of people about the power systems and y2k karen and her band of ardent followers drove us nuts with questions about things that couldn't possibly happen because none of them had any understanding of how power systems worked they also accused us of lying and being part of a vast conspiracy that still exists in their minds as part of a general anti-government sentiment did jim go into any specifics beyond that oh my god i wanted to hear more from jim like what have you been through jim jim we're we're waiting this was a time of like genuine grift bonanza genuine grift bonanza yeah i could all keep you be one of the things i love is jerry fallwell and these other christian rite people started coming up with this idea there's you know of course there's

the divine rapture which we all know is coming but then there's also something that they brand it as the civil rupture what which is like how governments are going to collapse okay of course i mean the why not because they're similar sounding words so that makes sense it's very good there were also a lot of really good scams there was a guy in the uk who was selling people cd roms that he said would make your computer y2k compliant and people checked them later and apparently they literally did nothing like the only thing they did was just like make a window come up they're like bleep bleep bleep it's compliant i bet people got genuine peace of mind from the the bleep bleeps there were also phone scams where people would call up and say hi there i'm calling from your bank we're checking to

see if all the cards are y2k compliant so if you could just read me your credit card number no then i can tell you whether it's compliant or not we'll send you a sticker to put on your card people were like 507 they just started doing it it's like no yeah it's aw sweety 2000 people would call people up and pretend to be banks and say like we're the only ones that have a vault that is like y2k compliant vault so like we want you to move all your money to our bank so like you just transfer your money to some random account wow my favorite one is the australian version of the sec they set up a millennium bug insurance company like as an april fools joke literally they're like we're setting up a millennium bug insurance company come

get millennium bug insurance to like demonstrate how gullible people were like to troll the entire australian population and people deposited four million dollars like people people are offered deposit four million dollars and then they funded an indie movie so before we get into what actually happened on january first 2000 i think it's worth dwelling on like why this became such a big deal you know there's other threats out there right there's like super volcanoes and earthquakes in seattle like why did we focus on this as like the threat that we're going to spend billions of dollars facing so one researcher who works on this named lisa vox her theory is that basically after the cold war we had like a apocalypse deficit like we didn't

have nuclear war anymore so we kind of needed something because there was this vacuum right everyone spent the 90s just like waiting for the other shoot a drop and buying ever greater sizes of khaki there was also i actually think this is a really important reason why it was bipartisan and a really important reason why it got to the size that it did is that fixing y2k for 99.9 percent of people didn't require any trade-offs right you know climate change means that like maybe you don't drive to work anymore like maybe you have to take the bus or like maybe your taxes go up for y2k it was literally just like tech companies have to spend more money and like the government will like give you know small business loans or print some more money but like you don't

have to do anything it's kind of like that thing do you remember as a kid how you would collect the tabs from soda cans oh yeah and there'd be places where you could deposit them or you could like mail them in somewhere and they were supposed to like get people kidneys i don't know i haven't researched it i'm curious about the actual ratio of soda can tabs to kidneys if there was one but it was something that it made sense for people to do because it feels good and it doesn't harm you you're not like oh i had a plan for that soda yeah and also it was this was the middle of the dot com bubble so there were billions of dollars flowing into the tech sector right all that pets dot com yeah but so i mean people were working their asses off to fix this but i mean politics is

basically the art of deciding who will feel pain right like who should be affected in a crisis like should it be renters or should it be landlords should it be workers or should it be owners like should it be people who are accustomed to feeling pain and feel it all the time and know it is a way of life exactly the people who aren't used to it and we'll go out i don't know it just sort of it's like it's the last gasp of like bipartisan cross governmental togetherness but it's also kind of a gimme in that it's not bipartisanship for something hard it's bipartisanship for something extremely easy right it's like we are coming together as a nation to do routine maintenance because we have to so now we get to December 31st 1999 i'm 11 years old i'm super excited

do you remember you did that night yes i remember my parents lived in hawaii so i remember being at the beach that night and i remember a couple having what looked from a distance to be like a romantic moment and i remember screaming it's the new millennium at the moment of midnight and i imagine ruining that moment for them i don't know what i was excited about or why it was exciting it just was like really big yeah it was like one of the times one of the last times maybe of optimism about the future right because we were like entering this new technological golden age and why do k was like the first example of maybe this golden age isn't as gold like there's gonna be some little blips along the way but there was this sense of huge possibility oh yeah there was this

very retro futuristic feel about it yeah and by by retro futuristic i mean the kind of look and feel of like tomorrow land yeah i have an attachment to the kind of nuclear age utopian ideas about technology and what it can do of the 60s where like the atom was going to take us into this clean amazing power that was gonna allow us to live like the jetsons and i feel like the year 2000 felt a little bit like that too because it was like this idea that we had i think that technology would make humanity better yeah because the absolute candy colored optimism of the 60s it feels to me like it's based on on that kind of a belief and now it feels like yeah the t-rex has stomped out of the paddock and eaten enough children that it i i certainly don't feel that way

well one thing i think is so striking about these big technological leaps forward is that every single time we tell ourselves that they're going to be uncomplicatedly good yeah and like it never happens like if it never happens like when tv's first came into homes they thought that would be this era of mass literacy because you could beam yes education into people's homes directly and like oh kids won't even need school anymore people will sit at home and watch shakespeare and that's why old tv is like incredibly boring because it's like alcoa playhouse presents a man for all seasons okay so i'm gonna send you a clip from the bbc on the night of in there first starting to see the little blips of problems i'm excited that are showing up in other time zones

here's this okay okay 25 35 minutes from now we'll know what's happening in this country what's happened over all the rest of the world those bugs are going to crawl all over our computers and make the planes fall out of the sky are they doing it or not well now let's look at our bug watch map here it is and the big threat really seems to be in japan nothing much has happened in southeast asia when you get to japan the bug seems to have struck possibly struck in two places two rather serious incidents at ishikawa and onagawa both of them nuclear power plants at ishikawa and the radiation monitoring system has failed just outside the actual nuclear reactor itself that happened at midnight it hasn't been put right they don't know whether it's bug related

at the onagawa power station alarms sounded after midnight but they seem to have put that right also in japan 38 earthquake seismic sensors seem to have failed since midnight again they can't be sure whether that is bug related or not okay that was stressful to listen to right because he's like a nuclear power plant in japan is having some problems is it related to the y2k bug we have no idea yeah but we're just gonna keep talking about it real fast i think it's a youthful clip because it shows that first of all there were actually like a lot more glitches than we know about like this was not a complete nothing burger but what's really interesting is that he's describing a bunch of glitches that seem like oh my god there's this like avalanche of

glitches happening in like nuclear reactors like it's so bad but then also he's also describing things like the monitoring system has gone down right it's he's like 38 earthquake sensors right so what we get on midnight of january first 2000 is a relatively sizable number of these kinds of glitches but no glitches that are like really consequential there's a senate report that's published in february of 2000 that lists maybe a hundred of these things like all the glitches that they could confirm and so here i'm going to read you a couple of these okay hundreds of noxville utility board bills were printed with incorrect payment due dates either in january 1900 or january 2099 a power outage in carcin city nevada for 30 minutes that's the

only power outage we know of really yeah well medicare payments were delayed one day because of a y2k problem with the electric fund transfer through a bank that handles the transactions 911 systems broke down in north carolina long distance phone service was out in parts of central montana for about three hours godiva chocolate experienced total systems failure including cash registers in its new york store but they were back in operation within three hours this is like weirdly soothing to listen to because it's just like a nice list of like consequentialist problems exactly yes like godiva couldn't run their cash registers for three hours and you're like oh that's nice that the news is about people being inconvenienced yeah there's for whatever

reason a lot of the ones that they mentioned in the senate report are about slot machines yeah it's just nice to have this national epidemic of like very minor problems so there's only one like real problem that's like actually extremely tragic and so let's do it now because it's it's bad okay so the actual worst one that we know of is in the uk the nhs sent out 154 false positive test results to pregnant women telling them that their children had down syndrome oh my god and two women terminated the pregnancy as a result before they figured out that it was a y2k based error that's horrible that's terrible that's the only one we know of that is like tragically awful bad yeah interestingly and i think this is really important three of the glitches that they

mention in the senate report about y2k preparedness are caused by y2k preparedness not by y2k itself and what are those so the district of columbia washington dc replaced all of its software and all of their budget reports basically got like wiped the government listings in the milwaukee white pages were quote so riddled with errors that the publisher has agreed to reprint that section and hand deliver it for free to consumers next month the company updated its software last year to make it y2k compliant but the software had bugs and introduced errors into the system they also this is really weird do you remember lamont's no it was like it was like a whatever nordstrom macy's like any other department store it was in the pacific it was only in the pacific

northwest they went bankrupt in 2000 and the senate report blames their bankruptcy on y2k because apparently they spent 10 million dollars installing new computerized registers to get ready for y2k and that was one of the things that contributed to their bankruptcy but then it's also like if you're a giant department store with 38 stores and you go bankrupt i don't think it's like your new cash registers son like i don't think that's it i don't know how it ended up in the senate report but maybe it salves your wounded pride but i think it's those two categories of glitches i think are important because whenever there's a problem that you're preparing for there's always the possibility that fixing the problem will cause more damage than the problem

itself and so this one senate report which is called y2k a crisis averted is essentially the only assessment that we've ever had of whether this 100 billion dollars that the u.s spent getting ready for y2k was worth it there's never been an independent investigation there's never been a task force basically as soon as it happened nobody wanted to look back for it partly because this whole idea that it was a hoax that it was bullshit all along we didn't have to do anything about it this understanding was already forming i mean i remember feeling like oh i really thought that like something would happen totally yeah like i at least thought the power would go out i mean this is you know since this happened we've basically been locked in this debate of was it a nothing

burger to begin with could we have done nothing or did we fix it like in the same way we're having this debate now of like well are the not that bad effects the result of our preparation or are they evidence that we never needed to prepare in the first place right and so the the rest of this episode is basically walking through the arguments because i think like i mentioned at the beginning like both arguments have merit but both arguments are also i think kind of wrong as always it is truth and falsehood bridge mix yes okay to walk through the argument that it was a hoax to me the closest thing to a compelling argument is that there's essentially only four countries that made any significant effort to solve it america the uk canada and australia there was a

survey in 1999 that in italy only 15 of the population had even heard of the y2k bug so like germany italy japan there was no government efforts there was no funding there was no like stimulus money for this it was just full on like we're just gonna wait for it to happen and then if there's any glitches we're gonna fix them the counter argument to that is always that like well germany and italy are like not advanced as the us so like the us had to do a more of this preparation because we're the center of tech we're the center of the tech boom for whatever reason america also has more of this cobalt coding language because it was mandatory to use it by the military and for government contracts for a really long time so for whatever reason we had like a higher density

of this programming language so that does necessitate more efforts in america but then to me that doesn't explain why like the uk put a billion pounds into fixing this and germany put zero pounds into fixing this and they both essentially had the same number of errors on january 2000 so like even if america is like uniquely poorly positioned for this problem that's not really an argument that the uk was uniquely poorly positioned to there's also the argument that you know the kinds of glitches that happened on y2k those glitches happen all the time you know things like the 911 system going out like that's literally something that happens every day in america like some state some city's 911 system goes down and then gets brought back up again

these casinos where the slot machines turned off and turned back on again they all say they're like yeah this happens like once a month when like dave trips over the cord fucking dave my favorite one is that in 2019 relatively recently a raccoon caused a power outage for 10 000 people in Ohio because it got into one of the circuit breakers and chewed through one of the wires was the raccoon okay it might not have been great for the raccoon i don't know at any given time one percent to two percent of the atms in the country are out of order right little things always go wrong in american like were there even more little things at this moment than there are normally or was it because that we're looking for little things right and i think i mean the senate had a reason to spin this

as a crisis averted because they spend nine million dollars on it no one wants to put out a report afterwards it's like uh we really fucked up here guys and like germany did nothing right this is my theory for why they included the fucking laments bankruptcy in the y2k glitches was like they just wanted any glitches they could find yeah so that's basically like the the it was a nothing burger that we could have done nothing about that's like the argument for it is basically comparing us to other countries and saying like the kinds of glitches that it caused like we could have just waited for the glitches to happen and fix them which is what germany and other countries did they were just like yeah we're just gonna wait and if something happens like we'll just turn

off and on our slot machines and then that argument is like more or less persuasive i think based on what is the potential financial and human cost to waiting for things to go wrong and then dealing with it then and how much can we estimate that and yeah to the extent that we can grasp it how much does it compare to the difficulty of what we would have to do to prepare in advance exactly and like you don't want to wait like if there's a chance of like an airplane falling out of the sky you can't be like working away like there's clearly there's some disasters that you can wait for and there's some that you can't but so now we're gonna do the argument for no it was something that was real and we came together and solved it and so i think the first

and the biggest argument for this is just like talk to anyone who worked in it in the late 1990s and like they will tell you like we worked our asses off we worked overtime the code was janky as fuck all these systems needed to be modernized anyway oh this is interesting so is it like everything was kind of like hanging by a thread in a lot of significant ways but the only way to motivate to update the nation's technological infrastructure was to generate support for this big push yeah around this one specific thing that people could get really worried about i mean that makes sense i feel like the only way to get people to execute routine maintenance work is to scare the shit out of them about what could go wrong at the time a lot of companies had sort of

sleepwalked into having some technology associated with their business one of the articles that i read talks about how very few companies even large companies had chief information officers at the time like someone really high level in the company who's like i'm in charge of all of our technology and so what y2k did was it made ceo's who were like you know dads in sneakers who like didn't really know that much about technology it made them all of a sudden be like wait a minute i'm kind of running a tech company whoever was running amtrak at the time had to be like hang on a minute our trains could shut down at any time because of like weird software shit so like i need to take this stuff seriously well i i feel like it's great that there can have been a phenomenon that forced

people to embrace the complexity of the technology that they were trying to use to generate profit and yeah you know treat that with some respect and the vulnerabilities that they had to yeah what y2k really pushed companies to do was to start testing banks started doing like financial forecasting into the future and we're like okay well let's do something from like 1995 to 2005 and see what the computers do and the computers are like no and then they're like okay we have to fix this we can't be running on this like jalopy ass code anymore that's such a cute computer voice that was my computer voice and they were like oh she's suffering yeah and so one of the things that one of these researchers points out is that in the 1980s British grocery stores were noticing that the

barcodes of some items wouldn't scan and it turned out that they had expiration dates that were in 2000 you know some some products you know have like an expiration date like 10 years in the future and they'll be like bloop and they won't bloop but actually they were catching those things and fixing them long before the public ever found out about okay so wait i want to try and anticipate a twist does it seem as if Germany has done nothing to prevent y2k because they just finished their work early and are sitting quietly under a tree and reading in December 1999 that would be very Germany of them that's like half the answer but we will get there okay so one of the this researcher that i interviewed dylan movin also pointed out to me this is fascinating that for years one of the

most vexing problems in like banking it was fucking leap years that like try explaining to a computer that like once every four years we have this extra day unless it's a century year in which case we don't have the extra day unless it's a century day every 400 years and then we do have it and the computer's like why did you bring me into your illogical world exactly and so famously the year 2000 was a leap year it shouldn't have been because it's a century year but then it should have been because it's a once every 400 century year because the year 1600 was a leap year yes so it's like these kinds of problems especially in financial institutions like you know your entire bank account gets wiped out overnight these kinds of problems were being noticed and being fixed

by bank it people long before the rest of the country was figuring out about this stuff so you know saying it was at this big nothing burger it races all this labor by it people who were like punk we were working on this long before you read that fucking article in 1993 we've known about this it's a thing so a story about what happens if you actually try it turns into a story about how trying is pointless and it's for nerds it's not good it's not good i also find this pretty convincing that like a lot of companies that were testing their systems and finding like massive glitches it's not like they're gonna tell the public about that right like if you're american airlines and you're like oh yeah we tested something and like all of our planes were going to fall out

of the sky just want to let you know right like we're relying on companies to do their own disclosure of what could have happened yes you chuckle heads would have been up the creek without a paddle if a full brain here hadn't caught that line of code well i mean i still find it pretty compelling that some countries spent zero dollars and some countries spent many dollars and that they both had effectively the same number of glitches yeah so i think when it people talk about like you know look we worked our asses off doing overtime fixing these bugs i think you could also look at that and say like well a lot of those banks a lot of those tech companies a lot of those airlines would have done that anyway i mean banks have an incentive for their customers accounts not to go

to zero dollars like airlines have an incentive for the planes not to fall out of the sky i find it pretty convincing that like they might have just solved those problems on their own and we could have spent nine billion dollars like fighting against like the enduring poverty glitch or like other societal glitches that we spend less of our effort on it's interesting to have a story where it seems like the government over responded that isn't war i know and also that work is a constant in our lives like just systems need to be worked on in order to run and the fact that we can't see with our own eyes where that work went exactly doesn't right mean that it went nowhere yeah and so this brings us to our final twist this is basically the answer to the question

why did only four countries fuck with y2k like why these four countries so when i tell you the countries again tell me if anything stands out to you as being in common okay america the u k canada and australia they're english speaking countries yes and i presume that that might have an effect on how we are writing dates oh close okay all right they also have english legal systems so one of the things that's common across all of those countries is that they're really big into legal liability and using lawsuits to fix social problems so one of the major memory hold aspects of y2k was how fucking terrified corporate america was of getting sued so there were articles coming out in 1999 i found a really interesting projection

that said if y2k ends up being a problem corporate america is going to spend one trillion dollars and one decade in litigation over y2k claims and they were like all right let's update some infrastructure as early as 1997 companies were starting to sue each other a produce store sued the manufacturer of their cash register saying we just paid 2,500 bucks for cash register we know from the millennium bug that it's going to be useless in three years so fuck you we want our money back and quicken you know quicken books whatever that budgeting software quick books yeah they had six pending class action lawsuits against them by 1998 wow because people were saying well all of my budget data is going to get lost if this goes down and also like it's a it's a nice thing

to drag CEOs in front of senate questioning before right like you can just see it in your mind just these you know they would have to be some kind of a big business whipping boy yeah task for all this and it could be you right and this is actually the only aspect of y2k that was that was partisan because republicans wanted to pass a law saying let's protect companies from their own customers if something bad happens let's make sure they don't have to pay out anything and damages and democrats who are pretty captured by the trial lawyer lobby wanted to make it easy for people to sue and so they actually ended up passing a law that limited liability for companies but didn't limit it like all the way so there was some red meat in there for lawyers and there was some red

meat in there for companies this is a very meaty episode are you hungry i'm hungry and so as we know from sexual harassment lawsuits as a corporation you don't have to actually prevent something from happening you have to show the court that you tried so if you are american airlines if your planes crash if a thousand people die if you get sued what you can then say to the court afterwards is say well we shouldn't pay any damages because we spent 60 million dollars updating our systems we sat on the task force with the white house look how much we did and so the companies in a place like germany or france or italy that don't have they don't use liability to solve corporate problems the way that we do they use regulation the companies there could have just quietly updated

their systems because they didn't have to say anything about it they have to push off all these lawsuits because they weren't in a relationship with their government the way that children are with their parents and they're like i'm doing my homework now exactly i mean this is in the very bones of america like ben franklin in his autobiography has an anecdote that i love about her when he was running his printing press he would then deliver you know his his pamphlets and things by hand so he knew that people would look at him and go there goes ben franklin pushing his barrow around look at that hard-working man yes doing it all by himself and it's like you can't see the workers that are in the shop that's the point yes and so this was the calculation

that companies in these four english-speaking common law countries made banks in japan might have been having these problems too and they were just like no we just quietly fix them like we quietly fix stuff all the time because we're not going to be fighting off lawsuits because like we have a real government like oh kind of a flex japan yeah i would say that what we can learn from this is that as americans we are more likely to do things that we already need to be doing if there is some kind of urgent reason involving our own safety or comfort yeah we appear also to be inclined after having done that to say well that was a lot of work not enough bad stuff happened i didn't like that and that is perhaps an unhelpful right perspective to

take away from a story from which you could alternatively take the lesson of it's good to update our system so that they are functional and if we have to cook up a reason to compel us to do what we need to do anyway then like maybe that's okay yeah i feel like this is a great example of the sort of gap between logic and emotion for a lot of us as humans we're like we can figure it out intellectually that like if our systems are more functional then that averts the kinds of tragedies that do move us to take action yeah and yet it's harder to accept that as a felt reality of like right bow chick a bow wow like i'm so excited about strengthening our filing systems efficiency like it's it's hard to realize this is why virgos are so important is that another bug

that's how you mean it's a feature it is a virgo feature so that's it that this is uh this is this is the story of white okay this is uh whites we should all stop using it as a proxy indicator for whatever we're actually arguing about on the internet there's some arguments that you can't settle over twitter so sorry are there sarah are there i know this is like news to you i also like when i went to call you to start this show oh i know i know i like didn't pick up and i was like that's weird and then i looked on twitter and i was like oh he's tweeting about corbin i know that i was fighting with somebody about jeremy corbin i know doing the show with you was such a better use of my time i'm sorry i was very i was

like that's that's my guy you were seeing me in my natural habitat that's what it is you're like looking inside the aquarium you're like oh mike's doing what he does yeah like when you go see the iguana eat its little bugs and you're like i don't like bugs but that iguana likes bugs i don't like having twitter arguments about british politics but it's essential to mike's mineral needs