The Y2K Bug
00:00You're talking up the awfulness of this episode so much that people are going to want to hear itand 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
00:47and we sell cute t-shirts and our listeners have been making incredible designs for usand 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 showon 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
01:22this was the first episode we ever recorded when we were first doing the show almost exactly twoyears ago, May 2nd, right? Well, that was when we started releasing the show but we recorded thisin like early March of 2018. So, yeah. A little over two years ago and it was so badthat we to this day have never released it and whenever we tell people that they always thinkthat 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 thatindependently which speaks for itself. I bet it's like the pilot episode of 30 Rock where
02:11there'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 Itold her. Yeah, we thought we decided we would wait two years and two months. Yes. And then wewould take another crack. Yes. And there's actually been a lot of new weirdly, a lot of new academicresearch on Y2K between 2018 and now. So there's actually some like a bunch of new stuff thatwe're going to talk about. So this is not all going to be familiar to you. I probably won'tremember anything. Okay, good. Well, I think now is a good time to return to Y2K because
02:54Y2K has become this weird thing that people only bring up when they're talking about somethingelse. 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 tothat by saying no, Y2K is an example of us coming together and fixing a problem. Both of thosearguments are kind of detached from what really happened in Y2K. And since we have now had twoyears of doing this show since then, I am able to extrapolate that perhaps the answer is no one
03:36is right. Yes. Okay. Both of those arguments are correct in some ways and both of them areincorrect 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 Y2Kso I can myth bust you. But we have tape, we have live footage of Sarah describing this two yearsago. So I thought I would just play you the clip. Oh my God. And you can decide, A, how bad you wantto tell me the editing is, B, if you want to add anything to your description. Oh, I was in my 20sthen. 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
04:24computers and like automated things and electronic things would break and then all of our systemis would fall apart and then we would just not have a grid anymore. The amazing thing about thatis 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 thingin 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 suddenlike 60 feet away and laughing at one of my jokes. I don't know why I did that. Yeah, it's like a
05:12little 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 2000and I remember understanding that people were concerned about the fact that basicallythe machines that ran society were programmed using dates that gave you only three digits andtherefore 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
06:01the millennium bug was not a bug. Was it an arachnid? It was a design choice. It was a wayof saving space. We've completely, of course, forgotten about all this now, but in the earlydays 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 researcherabout 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,
06:41the 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'reonly 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 magazinessaying like, this might be bad. Like let's proceed with caution here, guys. This might not be such agreat idea, but then everybody was like, whatever, it's 30 years away. Right. Everyone, as everyonealways does, said whatever. That's a problem for like our kids or something. Exactly. Which is
07:24whatever 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 withthe 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 havedelivered is a catastrophe. Doomsday 2000. So this was the beginning of people starting to get nervousabout it. And it wasn't actually that all of the software would crash. It was actually more aboutthe hardware. So the phrase that became really important in the panic about Y2K was embedded
08:13systems. So the idea is that all of the infrastructure of modern life has chips within it. Most of thesechips have like a little clock inside of them. Like they have very basic, very rudimentarysystems inside to just like make the thing work. Like clock radios have little chips in them withlike the dates in them. This is a list from one of the articles that came out in 1999 of all of thethings that have these embedded systems in them in these ways that are like kind of murky and kindof difficult to sort out. So personal computers, surveillance equipment, lighting systems, entrysystems, barcode systems, clock-in machines, vending machines, switchboards, safes and time locks,elevators, faxes, production line equipment, ATM machines, military command control systems, IRS
08:59tax 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 machineshave these chips embedded in them. And it wasn't clear at the time sort of what it would take tofix 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 forthe rest of its natural life and who cares? Well, and my understanding as an 11-year-old was thatthe clock radio would think it was 1900 and be like, oh my god, I shouldn't exist. Yes. And thenit would like burst into flame or something. Yeah, like back to the future, it would start to disappear
09:40like I don't exist yet. Yes. That's what I thought would happen. So this is an excerpt from a reallyinteresting oral history that was published a few years ago. This is a quote from the guy that wrotethe Doomsday 2000 article. So what he says is most people didn't seem to understand the depth ofthe 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
10:19went 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 stoppedin the middle of the tracks and it sat there for four hours. And it turned out that the computersystem that runs the Amtrak train had to reboot for some reason. And in rebooting, it also shutdown the air conditioning system. And in shutting down the air conditioning system, it also shutdown the ventilation system. So people are sitting there in the heat in these cars with like bathrooms
11:04in them. And it's starting to get smelly and it's starting to get stuffy. And you can't open thewindows. Yeah. And people are getting really on edge. And so there was this realizationthat like, first of all, Amtrak trains have computers. Right. I know. I would not have guessedthat. It's a QQ train. That's as far as my thinking goes on the matter. I guess it's not a QQ trainthough. There's no QQ on it. There's a bleep bloop. Yes. So these were the kinds of stories thatwent around that it's like, guys, computers are everywhere. Computers are in cars now. Computersare in airplanes. And we don't really understand the architecture of these systems. Computers arein hot dogs. You guys didn't know that hot dogs are going to stop working. I also think a really
11:45important statistic from the time was that only 50% of the population had personal computers. So it'slike computers were normal enough that people had them, but they were also new enough that peopledidn't really understand how they worked. I've been thinking lately about the fact that it'svery 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 beforethe internet had taken over American infrastructure and before online reality was as real asmeat 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
12:31to be afraid of, right? Like the net comes out. There's also the thing, and this is a way thatthe net is silly, but it's a way that every mid 90s movie was forced to be silly. Also MissionImpossible 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 canbarely play games at like overheats if you play Mist on it. But Tom Cruise is going to hack intothe 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
13:18definite deadline. Like we knew exactly when the Y2K bug was going to happen, but it hadindefinite effects. So we knew that like these embedded systems were everywhere, but we didn'tknow what was going to be affected or how. And that was one of the things that drove a lot ofthe paranoia about what was going to happen. So would it be accurate to say there are a lot ofunknown unknowns? Yes. Yeah. It's like the thing where Pablo Escobar buys hippos for his privatezoo 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 basicallybecame this thing that anything you could imagine wasn't like totally outside the realm of possibility.
14:01Right? It's like it might be all of the traffic lights stop working or it might be all of thetraffic lights turn green. What's going to happen to all the audio animatronics at Disney World forthe love of God? And I remember this being an item of significant national concern. Like I rememberpeople talking about this a lot. Oh yeah. And for a long time. And so is that like me being inkind of a liberal bubble? Like is this a bipartisan concern also? I mean it's actuallyone of my conclusions about this is that it's like the last example of like all of us comingtogether and doing something. And then concluding that it wasn't worth it. Exactly. And we shouldn'thave bothered. Yeah. But it didn't really take on a partisan valence. But it was a huge deal. So
14:49it was only really in 1996 that people started to get nervous about it. Like that's when thegovernment efforts ramped up. That's when the corporate efforts ramped up. And between 1996and 1999 congressional committees held 100 hearings. The GAO issued 160 reports like guidance tocompanies 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 bepublic 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
15:36just in case there were bank runs. It was huge. Yeah. It's interesting that this also led tocorporate regulation. Like we took this so seriously that we were like the federal governmentis going to tell the private sector what to do. Yeah. And that was acceptable enough to everyonethat it actually happened. Yeah. Because like I'm not shocked when companies are told to stoppoisoning children and they're like, but at what cost? One of the members of parliament in the UKcalled it the greatest mobilization since World War II. Wow. This was also one of the things thatDylan Moven told me is that he figured out that this was one of the first times we got large-scalegig work and large-scale outsourcing. Wow. So millennials have been marked from like the moment
16:21that we started preparing for the millennium. Yeah, man. Wow. One of the vulnerabilities in the UStech 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 firsttimes that big companies were like, well, we've got like millions of lines of code that we needto update. There's all these people in India that know how to do this. So like let's set up someoutsourcing infrastructure. So this was a huge ramp up in outsourcing technical grunt work stylelabor to developing countries in the tech sector. It was the first time they realized they could dothis. Oh, this is outsourcing actual skilled work. Yeah. And so by 1999, 51% of Americans were saying
17:04they would avoid air travel in the months before and after YGK, 42% were saying they would stockpilefood and water. And 6% of Americans said they were planning to withdraw all of their money from thebank. And this, this of course, gave rise to all of this weird prepper community. I don't think itwas the first time the preppers had like used something as an excuse, but like gun magazinesstarted doing special Y2K issues. I'm like thinking about preppers a lot these days. Oh yeah. I'minterested in the relationship between the prepper mentality where you're like just waitingfor the penny to drop so that society can crumble and you can like be in your compound with yourammunition and your canned cling peaches and how that seems to go hand in hand with the sort of
17:54conservative mentality where someone's like stay home please just like watch some showsand get some dominoes and being like how dare you. Do you want me to remind you what you said inour show two years ago because I just listened to it the other day? Yes. You said you get thefeeling that some people are sort of looking forward to this that like people want somethingbad to happen. Well and that was what I thought two years ago and I'm like okay it's happening likewhy aren't people just like I'm going to stay home. Yeah. Like if you're waiting your whole life foran excuse to not engage with society then why do you get so sad about it changing slightly? I knowthis is what's so I don't know I just think this was the first cross pollination of the internet
18:38and conspiracy theories and capitalism. But I think alongside this prepper community there'salways profiteering. But you think a lot of it is like PT Barnum types. Yeah I mean this is one of thefirst times we saw websites pop up like Alex Jones style right where it's like one half of the websiteis like the government is trying to kill you they're poisoning the water and then the otherhalf of the website is like let me sell you supplements that will cure the poison thatthey're putting in the water. Is this the beginning of supplements as we now know them or likeconservative supplements? And like food kits like people were selling like gallon bucket whateverthings of food supplies basically so like when like the purge happens on January 1st we'll be ready.
19:21Right. It got so bad poor Bill Richardson the governor of New Mexico had to warn his constituentshe's like don't stockpile gasoline because gasoline explodes like don't keep jugs of gasoline in yourhouse because you're more likely to die from that than you are from the actual Y2K. Yeah I waslistening to a guy in NPR last night who was like yeah obviously we don't want you to injectcleaning supplies and it's like just just yell at people a little just tell them no. Well I actuallythink the government I mean if you look at the old government warnings what they all say is theyall say don't panic but kind of panic. Right. So a lot of the statements that you read in oldnewspapers you know journalists of course would call up like the secretary of transportation or
20:05whatever and they'd say like you know we don't expect any negative impact we expect everything tobe 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 trafficlights might go out like a bunch of traffic lights going out is a actually kind of a big deal andb a sign that something much bigger is happening. Right and also it's like as an American you'regoing 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 yourbest interests at heart is like not crazy. Right. I think you can disagree with the logic of someone's
20:50misgivings but it's unfair to tell them their perspective is meaningless if it's based onthe idea of fearing those in power. Right. Well I mean you're right in that one of the first thingsto happen is of course conspiracy theories and I'm fascinated by like the structure of conspiracytheories 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 meanthere's this guy named Mike Adams but he started something called Y2K Newswire that was like ofcourse you know pretending to be like Y2K News but was really just like the panic digest like all hedid was reasons that you should be scared. All these descriptions feel like they're from a very
21:30specific 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 number18 is if Y2K is a non-event why did the federal government spend 50 million dollars on a Y2Kcommand bunker? I realize it's tiresome that I continue to draw these comparisons but againit's like the argument that we're seeing and we'll continue to see of like if coronavirus is such abig threat then why haven't more people been dying and it's like presumably because we've beenmaking good choices and should continue to make good choices but yeah it's like thesuccessfulness of any attempt to avert danger will always be used by someone to prove that the
22:19danger wasn't really there. Right. Another one that shows up a lot in conspiracy theories is falsepremises so see if you can spot the false premises in this. Why are Californians urged to have a twoweek 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 deliberatelyunderstating the threat right that we're taking earthquakes seriously but we're not taking Y2Kseriously. What people point out when they debunk this is that California doesn't tell people tohave a two-week supply of food for earthquakes it says they should have a 72-hour supply so it's likeyou're literally just making up this thing. Well yeah and I'm sure this guy is like what are you
22:57gonna do ask Jeeves? Are you gonna go on life coasts and wait for 49 minutes to go to four web pagesto try in fact check me? No. This is my favorite one. Why is it socially acceptable to buy fireinsurance, car insurance, or life insurance but not food insurance by having some extra food storedaway? 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 conspiracythinking is that you say like this thing that is like kind of on some level reasonable it's likewhy are you telling me to prepare for things like fires and you're not telling me to prepare forthings like Y2K like whatever that's that's relatively reasonable but then it's like in two more moves
23:47he'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 withconspiracy theories how much of the work is being done with this kind of emotional hopscotch thathappens inside of the person consuming this media or listening to the speech or whatever it's calleda dog whistle for a reason you can present a phrase or an idea that puts someone in an emotionalstate where then it like it doesn't really matter what you say because you've got them kind ofnicely whipped up yeah yeah and like at that stage in the emotional recipe it's like well you'vegotten whipped now like time to make meringue like it doesn't really matter what kind of argument you
24:32then present to someone because you they've reached this malleable state right once again it's veryemotionally based exactly emotionally saturated right thinking this is the classic move right isthat all of a sudden you're whipping up anger about like these people won't even let me be inthe Boy Scouts or whatever which isn't true but it's like you're fomenting all this this completelymeaningless anger what when it's really it's like well all they're saying is that it might not besuper prudent for you to stockpile food but also it's not illegal to stockpile food like if youwant to go to the store right like no one cares what you're doing no one actually cares but it'slike to get people into this emotional state where you can sell them things and you can convince them
25:11of things you have to get them on this much larger distrust of society and distrust of the mediaand distrust of the government so i feel like there were a lot of Boy Scout related controversiesin the 90s like oh my god yeah we spent a lot of time on that we should do an episode about the BoyScouts yeah also there was um do you want to guess who the person remember this is the late 1990s doyou want to guess jesse vancura close do you want to guess who was selling a videotape for 28dollars called a christian's guide to the millennium book was a jim baker no jerry fallwell close ohokay do you know how much 28 dollars was in 1999 that's so much money for a video it was probably astar wars vhs set at costco yes yes you could have gone to end or in back but instead got jerry
26:00fallwell yelling at you and also i love how christian media goes for these cash grabs of likea christian guide yeah something it's impossible to do in a christian way honestlythis isn't explicitly branded as christian but there's also a book called y2k for womenhow to protect your home and family in the coming crisis no oh is it about how you have to keep puttingout sexually even after all the audio animatronics start rampaging through anime and so i couldn'tget the text of this but i did find it on amazon and all the reviews are five stars except for oneone star review from a guy named jim this is written by a woman called karen andersonso jim says i worked for a large utility on the west coast for y2k and one of my jobs was to answer
26:50the questions of people about the power systems and y2k karen and her band of ardent followers droveus nuts with questions about things that couldn't possibly happen because none of them had anyunderstanding of how power systems worked they also accused us of lying and being part of avast conspiracy that still exists in their minds as part of a general anti-government sentimentdid jim go into any specifics beyond that oh my god i wanted to hear more from jim like whathave you been through jim jim we're we're waiting this was a time of like genuine grift bonanzagenuine grift bonanza yeah i could all keep you be one of the things i love is jerry fallwell andthese other christian rite people started coming up with this idea there's you know of course there's
27:32the divine rapture which we all know is coming but then there's also something that they brand it asthe civil rupture what which is like how governments are going to collapse okay of course i mean thewhy not because they're similar sounding words so that makes sense it's very good there were also alot of really good scams there was a guy in the uk who was selling people cd roms that he said wouldmake your computer y2k compliant and people checked them later and apparently they literally didnothing like the only thing they did was just like make a window come up they're like bleep bleep bleepit's compliant i bet people got genuine peace of mind from the the bleep bleeps there were alsophone scams where people would call up and say hi there i'm calling from your bank we're checking to
28:16see if all the cards are y2k compliant so if you could just read me your credit card number no theni can tell you whether it's compliant or not we'll send you a sticker to put on your cardpeople were like 507 they just started doing it it's like no yeah it's aw sweety 2000people would call people up and pretend to be banks and say like we're the only ones that have a vaultthat is like y2k compliant vault so like we want you to move all your money to our bankso like you just transfer your money to some random account wow my favorite oneis the australian version of the sec they set up a millennium bug insurance company like as anapril fools joke literally they're like we're setting up a millennium bug insurance company come
29:02get millennium bug insurance to like demonstrate how gullible people were like to troll the entireaustralian population and people deposited four million dollars like people people are offereddeposit four million dollars and then they funded an indie movieso before we get into what actually happened on january first 2000 i think it's worth dwelling onlike why this became such a big deal you know there's other threats out there right there's likesuper volcanoes and earthquakes in seattle like why did we focus on this as like the threat thatwe're going to spend billions of dollars facing so one researcher who works on this named lisavox her theory is that basically after the cold war we had like a apocalypse deficit like we didn't
29:48have nuclear war anymore so we kind of needed something because there was this vacuum righteveryone spent the 90s just like waiting for the other shoot a drop and buying ever greater sizesof khaki there was also i actually think this is a really important reason why it was bipartisanand a really important reason why it got to the size that it did is that fixing y2k for 99.9percent of people didn't require any trade-offs right you know climate change means that likemaybe you don't drive to work anymore like maybe you have to take the bus or like maybe your taxesgo up for y2k it was literally just like tech companies have to spend more money and like thegovernment will like give you know small business loans or print some more money but like you don't
30:30have to do anything it's kind of like that thing do you remember as a kid how you would collectthe tabs from soda cans oh yeah and there'd be places where you could deposit them or you couldlike mail them in somewhere and they were supposed to like get people kidneys i don't know i haven'tresearched it i'm curious about the actual ratio of soda can tabs to kidneys if there was one butit was something that it made sense for people to do because it feels good and it doesn't harm youyou're not like oh i had a plan for that soda yeah and also it was this was the middle of the dotcom bubble so there were billions of dollars flowing into the tech sector right all that petsdot com yeah but so i mean people were working their asses off to fix this but i mean politics is
31:14basically the art of deciding who will feel pain right like who should be affected in a crisis likeshould it be renters or should it be landlords should it be workers or should it be owners likeshould it be people who are accustomed to feeling pain and feel it all the time and know it is a wayof life exactly the people who aren't used to it and we'll go out i don't know it just sort of it'slike it's the last gasp of like bipartisan cross governmental togetherness but it's also kind ofa gimme in that it's not bipartisanship for something hard it's bipartisanship for somethingextremely easy right it's like we are coming together as a nation to do routine maintenancebecause we have to so now we get to December 31st 1999 i'm 11 years old i'm super excited
32:02do you remember you did that night yes i remember my parents lived in hawaii so i remember being atthe beach that night and i remember a couple having what looked from a distance to be like aromantic moment and i remember screaming it's the new millennium at the moment of midnight and i imagineruining that moment for them i don't know what i was excited about or why it was exciting it justwas like really big yeah it was like one of the times one of the last times maybe of optimismabout the future right because we were like entering this new technological golden age andwhy do k was like the first example of maybe this golden age isn't as gold like there's gonna be somelittle blips along the way but there was this sense of huge possibility oh yeah there was this
32:52very retro futuristic feel about it yeah and by by retro futuristic i mean the kind of look andfeel of like tomorrow land yeah i have an attachment to the kind of nuclear age utopian ideas abouttechnology and what it can do of the 60s where like the atom was going to take us into this cleanamazing power that was gonna allow us to live like the jetsons and i feel like the year 2000felt a little bit like that too because it was like this idea that we had i think that technologywould make humanity better yeah because the absolute candy colored optimism of the 60s itfeels to me like it's based on on that kind of a belief and now it feels like yeah the t-rex hasstomped out of the paddock and eaten enough children that it i i certainly don't feel that way
33:50well one thing i think is so striking about these big technological leaps forward is that everysingle time we tell ourselves that they're going to be uncomplicatedly good yeah and like it neverhappens like if it never happens like when tv's first came into homes they thought that would bethis era of mass literacy because you could beam yes education into people's homes directly andlike oh kids won't even need school anymore people will sit at home and watch shakespeareand that's why old tv is like incredibly boring because it's like alcoa playhouse presents a manfor all seasons okay so i'm gonna send you a clip from the bbc on the night of in there firststarting to see the little blips of problems i'm excited that are showing up in other time zones
34:35here's this okay okay 25 35 minutes from now we'll know what's happening in this country what'shappened over all the rest of the world those bugs are going to crawl all over our computers andmake the planes fall out of the sky are they doing it or not well now let's look at our bug watchmap here it is and the big threat really seems to be in japan nothing much has happened in southeastasia when you get to japan the bug seems to have struck possibly struck in two places tworather serious incidents at ishikawa and onagawa both of them nuclear power plants at ishikawaand the radiation monitoring system has failed just outside the actual nuclear reactor itselfthat happened at midnight it hasn't been put right they don't know whether it's bug related
35:17at the onagawa power station alarms sounded after midnight but they seem to have put that rightalso in japan 38 earthquake seismic sensors seem to have failed since midnight again they can't besure whether that is bug related or not okay that was stressful to listen to right because he'slike a nuclear power plant in japan is having some problems is it related to the y2k bug we have noidea yeah but we're just gonna keep talking about it real fast i think it's a youthful clip becauseit shows that first of all there were actually like a lot more glitches than we know about likethis was not a complete nothing burger but what's really interesting is thathe's describing a bunch of glitches that seem like oh my god there's this like avalanche of
36:05glitches happening in like nuclear reactors like it's so bad but then also he's also describingthings like the monitoring system has gone down right it's he's like 38 earthquake sensors rightso what we get on midnight of january first 2000 is a relatively sizable number of thesekinds of glitches but no glitches that are like really consequential there's a senate reportthat's published in february of 2000 that lists maybe a hundred of these things like all theglitches that they could confirm and so here i'm going to read you a couple of these okayhundreds of noxville utility board bills were printed with incorrect payment due dates eitherin january 1900 or january 2099 a power outage in carcin city nevada for 30 minutes that's the
36:53only power outage we know of really yeah well medicare payments were delayed one day becauseof a y2k problem with the electric fund transfer through a bank that handles the transactions911 systems broke down in north carolina long distance phone service was out in parts of centralmontana for about three hours godiva chocolate experienced total systems failure includingcash registers in its new york store but they were back in operation within three hours this islike weirdly soothing to listen to because it's just like a nice list of like consequentialistproblems exactly yes like godiva couldn't run their cash registers for three hours and you'relike oh that's nice that the news is about people being inconvenienced yeah there's for whatever
37:37reason a lot of the ones that they mentioned in the senate report are about slot machinesyeah it's just nice to have this national epidemic of like very minor problems so there's only onelike real problem that's like actually extremely tragic and so let's do it now because it's it'sbad okay so the actual worst one that we know of is in the uk the nhs sent out 154 false positivetest results to pregnant women telling them that their children had down syndrome oh my god andtwo women terminated the pregnancy as a result before they figured out that it was a y2k basederror that's horrible that's terrible that's the only one we know of that is like tragicallyawful bad yeah interestingly and i think this is really important three of the glitches that they
38:30mention in the senate report about y2k preparedness are caused by y2k preparedness not by y2k itselfand what are those so the district of columbia washington dc replaced all of its softwareand all of their budget reports basically got like wiped the government listings in the milwaukeewhite pages were quote so riddled with errors that the publisher has agreed to reprint thatsection and hand deliver it for free to consumers next month the company updated its software lastyear to make it y2k compliant but the software had bugs and introduced errors into the systemthey also this is really weird do you remember lamont's no it was like it was like a whatevernordstrom macy's like any other department store it was in the pacific it was only in the pacific
39:18northwest they went bankrupt in 2000 and the senate report blames their bankruptcy on y2kbecause apparently they spent 10 million dollars installing new computerized registers to get readyfor y2k and that was one of the things that contributed to their bankruptcy but then it'salso like if you're a giant department store with 38 stores and you go bankrupt i don't think it'slike your new cash registers son like i don't think that's it i don't know how it ended up in thesenate report but maybe it salves your wounded pride but i think it's those two categories ofglitches i think are important because whenever there's a problem that you're preparing forthere's always the possibility that fixing the problem will cause more damage than the problem
40:02itself and so this one senate report which is called y2k a crisis averted is essentially the onlyassessment that we've ever had of whether this 100 billion dollars that the u.s spent gettingready for y2k was worth it there's never been an independent investigation there's never been a taskforce basically as soon as it happened nobody wanted to look back for it partly because thiswhole idea that it was a hoax that it was bullshit all along we didn't have to do anything about itthis understanding was already forming i mean i remember feeling like oh i really thought thatlike something would happen totally yeah like i at least thought the power would go out i mean thisis you know since this happened we've basically been locked in this debate of was it a nothing
40:47burger to begin with could we have done nothing or did we fix it like in the same way we're havingthis debate now of like well are the not that bad effects the result of our preparation or are theyevidence that we never needed to prepare in the first place right and so the the rest of thisepisode is basically walking through the arguments because i think like i mentioned at the beginninglike both arguments have merit but both arguments are also i think kind of wrong as always it istruth and falsehood bridge mix yes okay to walk through the argument that it was a hoax to methe closest thing to a compelling argument is that there's essentially only four countriesthat made any significant effort to solve it america the uk canada and australia there was a
41:39survey in 1999 that in italy only 15 of the population had even heard of the y2k bug so likegermany italy japan there was no government efforts there was no funding there was no likestimulus money for this it was just full on like we're just gonna wait for it to happen and thenif there's any glitches we're gonna fix them the counter argument to that is always that like wellgermany and italy are like not advanced as the us so like the us had to do a more of this preparationbecause we're the center of tech we're the center of the tech boom for whatever reason america alsohas more of this cobalt coding language because it was mandatory to use it by the military andfor government contracts for a really long time so for whatever reason we had like a higher density
42:22of this programming language so that does necessitate more efforts in america but then to methat doesn't explain why like the uk put a billion pounds into fixing this and germany put zeropounds into fixing this and they both essentially had the same number of errors on january 2000so like even if america is like uniquely poorly positioned for this problem that's not reallyan argument that the uk was uniquely poorly positioned to there's also the argument thatyou know the kinds of glitches that happened on y2k those glitches happen all the time you knowthings like the 911 system going out like that's literally something that happens every day inamerica like some state some city's 911 system goes down and then gets brought back up again
43:11these casinos where the slot machines turned off and turned back on again they all say they're likeyeah this happens like once a month when like dave trips over the cord fucking dave my favorite oneis that in 2019 relatively recently a raccoon caused a power outage for 10 000 people in Ohiobecause it got into one of the circuit breakers and chewed through one of the wires was the raccoonokay it might not have been great for the raccoon i don't know at any given time one percent to twopercent of the atms in the country are out of order right little things always go wrong in americanlike were there even more little things at this moment than there are normally or was it becausethat we're looking for little things right and i think i mean the senate had a reason to spin this
43:56as a crisis averted because they spend nine million dollars on it no one wants to put out a reportafterwards it's like uh we really fucked up here guys and like germany did nothing right this is mytheory for why they included the fucking laments bankruptcy in the y2k glitches was like theyjust wanted any glitches they could find yeah so that's basically like the the it was a nothingburger that we could have done nothing about that's like the argument for it is basically comparingus to other countries and saying like the kinds of glitches that it caused like we could have justwaited for the glitches to happen and fix them which is what germany and other countries didthey were just like yeah we're just gonna wait and if something happens like we'll just turn
44:30off and on our slot machines and then that argument is like more or less persuasive i thinkbased on what is the potential financial and human cost to waiting for things to go wrongand then dealing with it then and how much can we estimate that and yeah to the extent that wecan grasp it how much does it compare to the difficulty of what we would have to do to preparein advance exactly and like you don't want to wait like if there's a chance of like an airplanefalling out of the sky you can't be like working away like there's clearly there's some disastersthat you can wait for and there's some that you can't but so now we're gonna do the argument forno it was something that was real and we came together and solved it and so i think the first
45:11and the biggest argument for this is just like talk to anyone who worked in it in the late 1990sand like they will tell you like we worked our asses off we worked overtime the code was jankyas fuck all these systems needed to be modernized anyway oh this is interesting so is it likeeverything was kind of like hanging by a thread in a lot of significant ways but the only way tomotivate to update the nation's technological infrastructure was to generate support for thisbig push yeah around this one specific thing that people could get really worried about i mean thatmakes sense i feel like the only way to get people to execute routine maintenance work is toscare the shit out of them about what could go wrong at the time a lot of companies had sort of
45:56sleepwalked into having some technology associated with their business one of the articles that iread talks about how very few companies even large companies had chief information officers at the timelike someone really high level in the company who's like i'm in charge of all of our technologyand so what y2k did was it made ceo's who were like you know dads in sneakers who like didn'treally know that much about technology it made them all of a sudden be like wait a minute i'mkind of running a tech company whoever was running amtrak at the time had to be like hang on a minuteour trains could shut down at any time because of like weird software shit so like i need to takethis stuff seriously well i i feel like it's great that there can have been a phenomenon that forced
46:40people to embrace the complexity of the technology that they were trying to use to generate profitand yeah you know treat that with some respect and the vulnerabilities that they had to yeah whaty2k really pushed companies to do was to start testing banks started doing like financial forecastinginto the future and we're like okay well let's do something from like 1995 to 2005 and see whatthe computers do and the computers are like no and then they're like okay we have to fix thiswe can't be running on this like jalopy ass code anymore that's such a cute computer voice that wasmy computer voice and they were like oh she's suffering yeah and so one of the things that oneof these researchers points out is that in the 1980s British grocery stores were noticing that the
47:29barcodes of some items wouldn't scan and it turned out that they had expiration dates that were in2000 you know some some products you know have like an expiration date like 10 years in the futureand they'll be like bloop and they won't bloop but actually they were catching those things andfixing them long before the public ever found out about okay so wait i want to try and anticipatea twist does it seem as if Germany has done nothing to prevent y2k because they just finished theirwork early and are sitting quietly under a tree and reading in December 1999 that would be veryGermany of them that's like half the answer but we will get there okay so one of the this researcherthat i interviewed dylan movin also pointed out to me this is fascinating that for years one of the
48:16most vexing problems in like banking it was fucking leap years that like try explaining to a computerthat like once every four years we have this extra day unless it's a century year in whichcase we don't have the extra day unless it's a century day every 400 years and then we do have itand the computer's like why did you bring me into your illogical world exactly and so famouslythe year 2000 was a leap year it shouldn't have been because it's a century year but then it shouldhave been because it's a once every 400 century year because the year 1600 was a leap year yesso it's like these kinds of problems especially in financial institutions like you know your entirebank account gets wiped out overnight these kinds of problems were being noticed and being fixed
49:05by bank it people long before the rest of the country was figuring out about this stuff so youknow saying it was at this big nothing burger it races all this labor by it people who were likepunk we were working on this long before you read that fucking article in 1993 we've known aboutthis it's a thing so a story about what happens if you actually try it turns into a story abouthow trying is pointless and it's for nerds it's not good it's not good i also find this prettyconvincing that like a lot of companies that were testing their systems and finding like massiveglitches it's not like they're gonna tell the public about that right like if you're americanairlines and you're like oh yeah we tested something and like all of our planes were going to fall out
49:47of the sky just want to let you know right like we're relying on companies to do their own disclosureof what could have happened yes you chuckle heads would have been up the creek without a paddle ifa full brain here hadn't caught that line of code well i mean i still find it pretty compellingthat some countries spent zero dollars and some countries spent many dollars and that they bothhad effectively the same number of glitches yeah so i think when it people talk about like you knowlook we worked our asses off doing overtime fixing these bugs i think you could also look at thatand say like well a lot of those banks a lot of those tech companies a lot of those airlineswould have done that anyway i mean banks have an incentive for their customers accounts not to go
50:32to zero dollars like airlines have an incentive for the planes not to fall out of the sky i findit pretty convincing that like they might have just solved those problems on their own and wecould have spent nine billion dollars like fighting against like the enduring poverty glitch or likeother societal glitches that we spend less of our effort on it's interesting to have a storywhere it seems like the government over responded that isn't war i know and also that work is aconstant in our lives like just systems need to be worked on in order to run and the fact that wecan't see with our own eyes where that work went exactly doesn't right mean that it went nowhereyeah and so this brings us to our final twist this is basically the answer to the question
51:21why did only four countries fuck with y2k like why these four countries so when i tell you thecountries again tell me if anything stands out to you as being in common okay america the u kcanada and australia they're english speaking countries yes and i presume that that might havean effect on how we are writing dates oh close okay all right they also have english legal systemsso one of the things that's common across all of those countries is that they're really biginto legal liability and using lawsuits to fix social problems so one of the major memory holdaspects of y2k was how fucking terrified corporate america was of getting suedso there were articles coming out in 1999 i found a really interesting projection
52:15that said if y2k ends up being a problem corporate america is going to spend one trillion dollarsand one decade in litigation over y2k claims and they were like all right let's update someinfrastructure as early as 1997 companies were starting to sue each other a produce storesued the manufacturer of their cash register saying we just paid 2,500 bucks for cash registerwe know from the millennium bug that it's going to be useless in three years so fuck you we wantour money back and quicken you know quicken books whatever that budgeting software quick books yeahthey had six pending class action lawsuits against them by 1998 wow because people were saying wellall of my budget data is going to get lost if this goes down and also like it's a it's a nice thing
53:07to drag CEOs in front of senate questioning before right like you can just see it in your mindjust these you know they would have to be some kind of a big business whipping boy yeah task forall this and it could be you right and this is actually the only aspect of y2k that was thatwas partisan because republicans wanted to pass a law saying let's protect companies from their owncustomers if something bad happens let's make sure they don't have to pay out anything and damagesand democrats who are pretty captured by the trial lawyer lobby wanted to make it easy for people tosue and so they actually ended up passing a law that limited liability for companies but didn'tlimit it like all the way so there was some red meat in there for lawyers and there was some red
53:56meat in there for companies this is a very meaty episode are you hungry i'm hungry and so as we knowfrom sexual harassment lawsuits as a corporation you don't have to actually prevent somethingfrom happening you have to show the court that you tried so if you are american airlines if yourplanes crash if a thousand people die if you get sued what you can then say to the court afterwardsis say well we shouldn't pay any damages because we spent 60 million dollars updating our systemswe sat on the task force with the white house look how much we did and so the companies in a placelike germany or france or italy that don't have they don't use liability to solve corporateproblems the way that we do they use regulation the companies there could have just quietly updated
54:46their systems because they didn't have to say anything about it they have to push off all theselawsuits because they weren't in a relationship with their government the way that children arewith their parents and they're like i'm doing my homework now exactly i mean this is in the verybones of america like ben franklin in his autobiography has an anecdote that i love abouther when he was running his printing press he would then deliver you know his his pamphletsand things by hand so he knew that people would look at him and go there goes ben franklin pushinghis barrow around look at that hard-working man yes doing it all by himself and it's like youcan't see the workers that are in the shop that's the point yes and so this was the calculation
55:29that companies in these four english-speaking common law countries made banks in japanmight have been having these problems too and they were just like no we just quietly fix themlike we quietly fix stuff all the time because we're not going to be fighting off lawsuitsbecause like we have a real government like oh kind of a flex japan yeah i would say thatwhat we can learn from this is that as americans we are more likely to do things that we alreadyneed to be doing if there is some kind of urgent reason involving our own safety or comfort yeahwe appear also to be inclined after having done that to say well that was a lot of work not enoughbad stuff happened i didn't like that and that is perhaps an unhelpful right perspective to
56:17take away from a story from which you could alternatively take the lesson of it's goodto update our system so that they are functional and if we have to cook up a reason to compel us todo what we need to do anyway then like maybe that's okay yeah i feel like this is a great example ofthe sort of gap between logic and emotion for a lot of us as humans we're like we can figure itout intellectually that like if our systems are more functional then that averts the kinds oftragedies that do move us to take action yeah and yet it's harder to accept that as a felt realityof like right bow chick a bow wow like i'm so excited about strengthening our filing systemsefficiency like it's it's hard to realize this is why virgos are so important is that another bug
57:09that's how you mean it's a feature it is a virgo featureso that's it that this is uh this is this is the story of white okay this is uh whites we shouldall stop using it as a proxy indicator for whatever we're actually arguing about on the internetthere's some arguments that you can't settle over twitter so sorry are there sarah are therei know this is like news to you i also like when i went to call you to start this showoh i know i know i like didn't pick up and i was like that's weird and then i looked on twitterand i was like oh he's tweeting about corbin i know that i was fighting with somebody about jeremycorbin i know doing the show with you was such a better use of my time i'm sorry i was very i was
57:54like that's that's my guy you were seeing me in my natural habitat that's what it is you're likelooking inside the aquarium you're like oh mike's doing what he does yeah like when you go see theiguana eat its little bugs and you're like i don't like bugs but that iguana likes bugs i don'tlike having twitter arguments about british politics but it's essential to mike's mineral needs
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