Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1: This is a really good one too. I don't want
Speaker 1: to I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because
Speaker 1: we haven't recorded it yet. But I think this is
Speaker 1: going to be pretty good because it's very interesting and
Speaker 1: surprising and still kind of unresolved. Yeah, what city were
Speaker 1: you in? You have to tell me what you were doing?
Speaker 1: But what city were you in on December thirty feet?
Speaker 1: I was in hot Atlanta? What about you? Okay, I
Speaker 1: was there too. Uh. That's when I lived in the
Speaker 1: big warehouse on the West End and we had a
Speaker 1: big party, probably the biggest New Year's Eve party I've
Speaker 1: ever thrown. And it was one of those parties where
Speaker 1: people come that don't know you, oh wow, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden it was like, all right, here we go.
Speaker 1: That kind of party. It's like weird science or sixteen
Speaker 1: candles or something. Yeah, it was great. By the guy
Speaker 1: from the Hills Have Eyes showed up on a motorcycle
Speaker 1: who's also in goonies. That wasn't the guy from the
Speaker 1: Are You sure. Oh no, no, you're right, you're right,
Speaker 1: you're right. No, it was I think it was. He
Speaker 1: was just in makeup. No, the guy from the Goonies
Speaker 1: was football player John Matuzak, right, same guy. Oh that's
Speaker 1: the guy from the Hills have eyes. No, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to end up. Yeah. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: what I was doing. I was throwing a big old
Speaker 1: party and uh, not worrying too much about the Y
Speaker 1: two K bug or my bank account being empty because
Speaker 1: I didn't have much in it anyway, or being stuck
Speaker 1: in an elevator or falling out of the sky in
Speaker 1: a plane. Yeah, it was a good time to be
Speaker 1: young because you didn't really care that much. You didn't
Speaker 1: have as much to lose as if you were like
Speaker 1: some I don't know, middle aged fat cat or something.
Speaker 1: You're probably sweating it a little more than you were,
Speaker 1: like in your twenties at the time. Probably a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are listening to this right now, we're like,
Speaker 1: what you guys just said, why to K bug? What
Speaker 1: is that? And uh well, let Uncle Josh and Uncle
Speaker 1: Chuck tell you all about why two K because it
Speaker 1: was one of the weirdest times to ever live through
Speaker 1: and Chuck, you and I were Cold War kids, like
Speaker 1: we we lived through time where people thought, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we could go to a nuclear apocalypse with with the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union at any given moment, it could just happen everybody.
Speaker 1: That's how we lived, and the Y two K bugs
Speaker 1: still managed to stand out from that backdrop. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the idea was, and we'll get more specific, but the
Speaker 1: one sentence descriptor is, computer code in early days was
Speaker 1: written with just two digits, not nineteen fifty whatever, just
Speaker 1: fifty whatever. And the idea was that was going to
Speaker 1: cause a lot of problems when the calendar flipped to
Speaker 1: two thousand and anything, like I said, from elevators being stuck,
Speaker 1: to Wall Street going down to elevators being stuck. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were all kinds of crazy scenarios um that you
Speaker 1: might or might not have worried about as that date approached. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that was the Y two K bug or the
Speaker 1: millennium bug. And you know, some people really really freaked out,
Speaker 1: and some people took advantage of people freaking out, and
Speaker 1: some people didn't worry at all. And we're gonna tell
Speaker 1: you all about it. Yeah, that was a really great
Speaker 1: elevator falling down pitch. Thanks so um. The thing about
Speaker 1: the Y two K bug is that if you hear
Speaker 1: about it today, you're gonna hear a couple of different
Speaker 1: responses potentially, and probably the more prevalent of the two
Speaker 1: is that it was all just a big hoax, a sham,
Speaker 1: maybe a big money suck. It was a bunch of
Speaker 1: people just being paranoid, um. And whether that was rightfully so,
Speaker 1: the or the paranoia was justified or not, you know, um,
Speaker 1: because of the situation or the context that this is
Speaker 1: happening in. We'll talk about that later. But every once
Speaker 1: in a while you'll run into somebody and these are
Speaker 1: the people you should probably listen to, who say, no,
Speaker 1: it was actually a really big dealer. It had the
Speaker 1: potential to be a really big deal And the reason
Speaker 1: it wasn't a big deal is because the world, i
Speaker 1: should say smart people in the world got behind solving
Speaker 1: this issue, came together and solved this issue, and that
Speaker 1: it was only people who weren't really paying attention who
Speaker 1: saw nothing happened and said that was all just a
Speaker 1: hoax or sham. And it's really interesting because to this day,
Speaker 1: depending on what media coverage you read. And I'm not
Speaker 1: even talking like left and right. I mean just like
Speaker 1: the author. Uh, it can change from author to author.
Speaker 1: Um that those two different approaches to the explanation will
Speaker 1: be will be used depending on who you're reading. And
Speaker 1: I just find that fascinating that we still haven't resolved
Speaker 1: it fully. Oh yeah, Like you could go to any party,
Speaker 1: any dinner party, and bring this up and and get
Speaker 1: probably equal amount of those reactions. I bet, yeah, get
Speaker 1: everybody really riled up. Um. All right, So I said
Speaker 1: that it has to do with computer programming, and in
Speaker 1: the early days of programming, like I said, they were
Speaker 1: not using the first two numbers of the year um
Speaker 1: because they weren't just lazy. Um. Those computers didn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of computing power. They had about one or
Speaker 1: two killer bits of memory. And it requires eight bits
Speaker 1: or one bite to represent a single alpha numeric character.
Speaker 1: So if you could save sixteen but sorry, sixteen bits
Speaker 1: per operation that you're running by just not using nineteen, uh,
Speaker 1: then you're saving a lot of memory, like well well
Speaker 1: needed memory. Yeah. I mean like this is at a
Speaker 1: time where like those bits were vital. To day, we're
Speaker 1: just like drowning in in um RAM and yeah and bites.
Speaker 1: So I saw somewhere that like somebody went down the
Speaker 1: list of what a main frame a main frame like
Speaker 1: just there was huge room, yes basically, but like where
Speaker 1: there's a whole room full of whoppers that those things
Speaker 1: maybe had two gigabytes of storage and just like some
Speaker 1: paltry amount of of RAM. And so just you know,
Speaker 1: it's such a cliche to say now that like, you know,
Speaker 1: we we like there's more there's more data storage and
Speaker 1: like a calculator that we used today than they used
Speaker 1: to to go to the moon. But it's it's absolutely true.
Speaker 1: And so to save that that that amount of data
Speaker 1: made a lot of sense. But then the other thing
Speaker 1: that kind of legitimized that decision is that these people
Speaker 1: are writing code and like the fifties and the sixties,
Speaker 1: and they're like this stuff is going to be gone,
Speaker 1: like it'll have been wiped out and like rebuilt from
Speaker 1: scratch by the time this becomes a problem in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand and they were really really wrong with that,
Speaker 1: you know idea, which it makes sense that they would
Speaker 1: think that, but it turned out that it was really
Speaker 1: wrong because a lot of the software in the world
Speaker 1: that was running really important stuff like things like financial markets,
Speaker 1: or things that monitored drinking water purity, or things that
Speaker 1: ran freezers that kept smallpox from thawing out. You know,
Speaker 1: like these were all run on software in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases that were built and kind of tar papered
Speaker 1: over with fixes and patches and expansions that that were
Speaker 1: originally created and like the fifties or sixties, and that's
Speaker 1: that's not a good thing to figure out when you're
Speaker 1: like five years out from the millennium when this problem
Speaker 1: is going to actually happen. Yeah, And it also was
Speaker 1: complicated by the fact that these programmers weren't all aligned
Speaker 1: on how to even enter dates in a uniform way.
Speaker 1: Some people used the Julian format, which is the two
Speaker 1: digit year and then the three digit account of the
Speaker 1: days in the year, so, uh, January one would be
Speaker 1: nine sevens or zero one. But not everyone did it
Speaker 1: that way. So it's not like you could just go
Speaker 1: through and say, you know, the nineteen point to twenty
Speaker 1: I don't know nothing about coding, right, but you know,
Speaker 1: just some simple line of code that just basically changes
Speaker 1: everything in a uniform manner. No, and so even even
Speaker 1: in like the software itself. Like even if one piece
Speaker 1: of software did use the same kind of date throughout
Speaker 1: that one piece of software, Um, that software, that code
Speaker 1: was written to accommodate you know, X number of bits
Speaker 1: for a date. So if you just went in and
Speaker 1: added two extra digits for the date field, that could
Speaker 1: throw off everything else in the software without any without
Speaker 1: you having any way of predicting what it will throw off.
Speaker 1: So if you went in and made that fix, it
Speaker 1: could create even bigger problems then then, uh, than if
Speaker 1: you just didn't make the fix to begin with as
Speaker 1: far as the software operating was concerned, right, Uh. And
Speaker 1: the other thing we need to point out and is
Speaker 1: that the fact that it was the millennium didn't matter. Um,
Speaker 1: it mattered, and we'll and we'll get to the sort
Speaker 1: of cultural um hysteria that kind of followed. I think
Speaker 1: that had a lot to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: it was a millennium, But it could have been eighteen
Speaker 1: hundred and nineteen hundred as far as the software new,
Speaker 1: and it would have presented the same problem exactly that
Speaker 1: it was just the prefix was changing. And what the
Speaker 1: big concern was is that when it turned over to
Speaker 1: zero zero the computers hadn't been taught that that meant
Speaker 1: now the century now two thousand, technically not century, don't
Speaker 1: at me um, but that they were going to go
Speaker 1: back to nine hundred, which is what they were programmed
Speaker 1: to think, and that that could cause all sorts of
Speaker 1: cascading events, everything from Chuck's fabled falling elevator too, air
Speaker 1: aircraft computers powering down midflight and just planes falling out
Speaker 1: of the sky. Yeah, or computer just I had the
Speaker 1: idea that a computer systems were just gonna go and
Speaker 1: like smoke would come out of them and everything would
Speaker 1: just shut down. Power would go out, your cable would
Speaker 1: go out, like just nothing would work anymore. And that
Speaker 1: was the way that everybody was touting and talking about.
Speaker 1: It wasn't even worse than that, people talking about nuclear
Speaker 1: warheads launching themselves or blowing up like in their silos
Speaker 1: and that kind of stuff. Like there was a real
Speaker 1: apocalyptic vibe to the to the public idea about it,
Speaker 1: but even to the sober, level headed people who are
Speaker 1: actually working to solve the problem. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: big problem with an airline computer, you know, resetting itself
Speaker 1: because it thinks it's while the planes in the air
Speaker 1: or um planes weren't around the right exactly. Does the
Speaker 1: other a problem to Chuck is that they weren't sure
Speaker 1: if the computers reset themselves and like shut down, if
Speaker 1: they would have any way to get in there and
Speaker 1: start them back up again. So it's not like you know,
Speaker 1: I saw somewhere. It's not like it was going to
Speaker 1: fix itself once you know, it got like a couple
Speaker 1: of seconds past midnight on two thousand, that that wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily a given. So they also the other thing that
Speaker 1: really drove this this I don't want. So there were
Speaker 1: two things that happened. The public was panicking. The people
Speaker 1: working against it were like concerned and and and actively
Speaker 1: managing it. But for the people who were actively managing
Speaker 1: it and who were concerned, another thing that was driving
Speaker 1: it was actually it was driving it for everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna settle on that. Um that we had no
Speaker 1: idea how widespread the problem was. Even by the mid
Speaker 1: to late nineties, they were like forty billion microchips out
Speaker 1: there in the world doing their thing. We had no
Speaker 1: idea what person standage we're going to be affected by
Speaker 1: the white two K bug. We had no idea what
Speaker 1: missile guidance systems or what satellites or what, um, you know,
Speaker 1: a t M machine systems, We're going to be affected.
Speaker 1: So we had to dive in and figure out once
Speaker 1: people started getting this point across, like, guys, this is
Speaker 1: actually a thing. And apparently people were raising the flags
Speaker 1: or at least one person was raising the flags UM
Speaker 1: as far back as the sixties and seventies I think, right,
Speaker 1: or the seventies and eighties. Yeah, why don't we talk
Speaker 1: about him and some others right after this? Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: so you mentioned a light in the darkness, a man
Speaker 1: on a mountain proclaiming this could be an issue. And
Speaker 1: that man, uh in the nineteen seventies was Bob Behmer
Speaker 1: or Bob Beemer, and he was he really played a
Speaker 1: big role in the creation of askey code. And uh
Speaker 1: he was the first person and this is in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, like I said to to actually write in
Speaker 1: papers like, hey, you know, this could be a problem
Speaker 1: down the road, This something we should probably take a
Speaker 1: look at. Um. You know, if you're a UM a
Speaker 1: blockbuster video, you're probably not gonna really try and get
Speaker 1: ahead of this too much. You can probably start working
Speaker 1: on this in like, if you are the financial sector
Speaker 1: and your Wall Street, You're gonna start working on this
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties because there's just so much more
Speaker 1: at risk. Somebody's late fees running up is not a
Speaker 1: very big deal. You can correct that. The financial market
Speaker 1: not being open or available or crashing is a really
Speaker 1: big deal. So they started throwing uh a lot of
Speaker 1: money at this in the late nineteen eighties UH in
Speaker 1: the financial sector to try and correct this ahead of time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and as a matter of fact, later we'll see later
Speaker 1: on in the after effects, they credited this, um, basically
Speaker 1: the upgrade that the New York Stock Exchange dedicated itself
Speaker 1: to in the face of the Y two K bug,
Speaker 1: as the same reason why the global financial markets didn't
Speaker 1: like their systems didn't collapse um after September eleven. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that because of this. Yeah. So UM if bob Biehmer
Speaker 1: was the first old hermit prophet who came down from
Speaker 1: the hills to war and everybody, Um, Peter de Yeager
Speaker 1: was the guy who got all the press for it. Um.
Speaker 1: He was the one who really basically dedicated his life
Speaker 1: to making sure that everybody was good and scared out
Speaker 1: this the public, the public, but also you know the
Speaker 1: people who were like pulling the levers of government, the
Speaker 1: people who are running the corporations, and the people are
Speaker 1: running the financial markets. Like he he met with a
Speaker 1: lot of different people. Um gave a lot of different
Speaker 1: scary presentations. UM. I saw that he would like it
Speaker 1: wasn't just some pet presentation. He gave everywhere necessarily too.
Speaker 1: I saw he met with the Canadian government and was
Speaker 1: trying to get the get across like this is a
Speaker 1: really big deal and it's a really big problem and
Speaker 1: you're not equipped to deal with this as it stands now.
Speaker 1: This is a new thing for you. And he pointed
Speaker 1: out that the Canadian government meets its deadlines. It's it's
Speaker 1: deadline goals for projects six percent of the time. He said,
Speaker 1: this cannot happen, Like, you can't miss this goal, this deadline. UM.
Speaker 1: So he would like kind of go in and like
Speaker 1: make it apparent to each each group based on their
Speaker 1: own needs or their own desires or their own perspective. UM.
Speaker 1: But he did. They also gave lots of interviews. He
Speaker 1: was on sixty minutes UH and he made a bunch
Speaker 1: of money during I think during he made in today's
Speaker 1: dollars something like two and a half million dollars consulting
Speaker 1: and giving speeches and lectures. But from what I understand,
Speaker 1: and he gets a lot of guph today, as we'll see,
Speaker 1: But from what I understand, he was a true believer
Speaker 1: who in some ways maybe saved the world from some
Speaker 1: really big problems that we we will we will never
Speaker 1: fully understand because we didn't experience them. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a hard one to judge in retrospect. It's like, how
Speaker 1: do you judge the thing that didn't happen right exactly?
Speaker 1: Is it a cry wolf? Or was it uh? Or
Speaker 1: did we slay the wolf? So Peter Yeager kicked the
Speaker 1: whole thing off of the article called Doomsday two thousand
Speaker 1: and in his in his um defense, his editor probably
Speaker 1: came up with that, not him. Editors typically write the headline,
Speaker 1: so it's possible. Who knows he could have suggested it
Speaker 1: he was He was that much of a doomsayer for
Speaker 1: sure that he would have been totally comfortable with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is where you know, the the American public
Speaker 1: like eventually it made its way to sixty minutes and
Speaker 1: once Morley Safer is on there on a Sunday night
Speaker 1: talking about it. Then you know the American public is
Speaker 1: going to get on board. And they did, and it
Speaker 1: brought out some some cooks. It brought out people, uh
Speaker 1: preppers and survivalists. Uh. There are a lot of internet
Speaker 1: scams going around at the time. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of religious religiosity, um sort of really heated up, like uh,
Speaker 1: sort of doomsday preachers and stuff like that started coming
Speaker 1: out of the woodwork a little bit more. Anyone that
Speaker 1: thought that they could make money off of this thing,
Speaker 1: uh through fear kind of came out of the woodwork.
Speaker 1: And you know, when something like that's happening, you've got
Speaker 1: that on one side, and then you've got a lot
Speaker 1: of people on the other side just thumbing their nose
Speaker 1: at it and saying, this is all a big scam,
Speaker 1: This is all a hoax. Look at all these kooks
Speaker 1: that are trying to get you know, separate us from
Speaker 1: our money. Um, it's just a big scam, and we
Speaker 1: don't have anything to worry about. It's weird, It almost
Speaker 1: sounds familiar in some weird way. Yeah, what we've been
Speaker 1: experiencing a Yeah, this is definitely like it was a
Speaker 1: peek behind the curtain of what could what could come,
Speaker 1: although it was not nearly a stark although I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe I wasn't paying as much attention then as I
Speaker 1: am these days. But it didn't definitely, it didn't seem
Speaker 1: it didn't seem like, you know, there was anything approaching
Speaker 1: the incivility and just outright like anger that that we
Speaker 1: experienced today, especially you know in America, um, compared to them,
Speaker 1: But there were there were definitely two sides to this issue,
Speaker 1: and they definitely were entrenched against one another. It just
Speaker 1: wasn't like neither side hated the other. They just thought
Speaker 1: the other one was dumb, right, uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the big reasons that it was such a
Speaker 1: big kerfuffle culturally was that this it sort of it
Speaker 1: was all about timing and the calendar flip aligned at
Speaker 1: a time where we were computers were really becoming super
Speaker 1: super entrenched in everyone's daily life. Um. Of course, you know,
Speaker 1: people have been using computers for a while, but as
Speaker 1: far as like really everyday stuff like running your bank
Speaker 1: through there and paying your bills and credit cards and
Speaker 1: acting as your own travel agent, and the government everything
Speaker 1: was reliant on computers by this point kind of for
Speaker 1: the first you know, this was the first big wave
Speaker 1: so as far, and it made a good point in
Speaker 1: here as as far as your average person on the
Speaker 1: street knows, is their computer comes to them in a
Speaker 1: box and they take it out, and it's just a
Speaker 1: little magic machine that runs on ferry dust, and we
Speaker 1: know nothing about how it works or how it should work.
Speaker 1: And so all of a sudden, everyone has got these
Speaker 1: little magic boxes that they don't really understand that they're
Speaker 1: super reliant on. And there are people out there saying
Speaker 1: things are about to get really bad with your magic box. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then a lot of people are just like, all right,
Speaker 1: I guess it's time to freak out a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, people definitely did freak out, and I think
Speaker 1: it also, I think part of that freak out is
Speaker 1: kind of like you were saying, like the Y two
Speaker 1: K bug is the first time it was revealed to
Speaker 1: us just how dependent on computers we've become. We we
Speaker 1: never really saw that before. But you know, before up
Speaker 1: to this point, it was all like ge whiz, you know,
Speaker 1: like my insurance claim went through fifty times faster than
Speaker 1: it would have five years ago. Instead now it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're these all these things that were dependent
Speaker 1: on are about to pull the rug out from our civilization,
Speaker 1: and that that that really kind of got people scared,
Speaker 1: even if people weren't sitting there analyzing and I mean
Speaker 1: we're analyzing it in hindsight, at the time, people were
Speaker 1: just scared, freaked out, nervous, angry, upset. But then the
Speaker 1: fact that this was taking place already during a major
Speaker 1: calendar calendar change, not just from um, you know, the
Speaker 1: nine hundreds of the two thousands, but like a new
Speaker 1: a new millennium, you know, um, that that really kind
Speaker 1: of had people already primed. The weird timing of the
Speaker 1: whole thing, Like you remember how big the X Files were.
Speaker 1: Imagine the X Files now would be like a whole
Speaker 1: hum Some people would watch it, some people be really
Speaker 1: into it. You know, it might make a little splash
Speaker 1: there for a little bit. But the The X Files
Speaker 1: one of the biggest TV shows in the world, at
Speaker 1: the very least in the West, because it was super
Speaker 1: tapped into this millennial and not the not the generation,
Speaker 1: but just like the end of this era or the
Speaker 1: new era that this ants that everyone was carrying around
Speaker 1: to some degree, whether you were aware of it or not,
Speaker 1: you were worried, some small part of your brain was
Speaker 1: worried because the calendar is about to change over to
Speaker 1: the year two thousand. Yeah. I think the show that
Speaker 1: does that best now is Black and Mirror. Definitely. I
Speaker 1: loved Meet some X Files, but I'll take Black Mirror
Speaker 1: over X Files. Yeah. It's really tough to rival Black Mirror,
Speaker 1: it is, and I know people, boy, X Files people
Speaker 1: are gonna be so upset. I loved X Files. I
Speaker 1: did Ye Molder and Scully. I just watched them the
Speaker 1: other day. It still holds up. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: great show. It was a lot of fun, but a
Speaker 1: show of its time, right exactly. Those overcoats they wear
Speaker 1: were gigantic. They were big, Oh my god, shoulder pads. Yes,
Speaker 1: they were so everybody's walking around like David Byrne and
Speaker 1: stopped making sense. It was a little weird. Um. So
Speaker 1: the cost of this thing was gonna be pretty big
Speaker 1: and ended up being pretty big. It depends on who
Speaker 1: you ask. If you see numbers on the internet of
Speaker 1: five billion dollars, that is probably not true. That probably
Speaker 1: came from people that were consulting saying you know, it
Speaker 1: may cost up to five billion dollars to fix all
Speaker 1: this and all over the world. Um, But they were
Speaker 1: spending tons of money. They're like, I think there's an
Speaker 1: article from the on Washington Posts that talked about General
Speaker 1: Motors spending about six hundred twenty five mill x in
Speaker 1: about a quarter of a mill I'm sorry, quarter of
Speaker 1: a billion, Proctor and Gamble ninety million. So and you know,
Speaker 1: then the federal government has to spend a ton of
Speaker 1: money on their own systems. So it added up to many, many,
Speaker 1: many billions, tens of billions of dollars. Let's just say that. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: I don't want to let this opportunity pass by without
Speaker 1: shouting out contemporary journalism. One other thing, chuck, though, the
Speaker 1: US Senate conducted a special committee investigation into spending on
Speaker 1: the Y two K bug, and it came up with
Speaker 1: what I what I can tell is the um the
Speaker 1: most widely accepted number at the time, this is this
Speaker 1: dollars A hundred billion dollars were spent in the United
Speaker 1: States alone, and that about eight points yeah, about eight
Speaker 1: point four billion of that was by the US government. UM.
Speaker 1: And that again, that's in two thousand dollars, so it
Speaker 1: would be substantially more today, and that the US is
Speaker 1: almost certainly uh the largest spender on this issue because
Speaker 1: we were also at the time the most dependent country
Speaker 1: on computers for the country that was the most dependent
Speaker 1: on computers in the entire world. So we had the
Speaker 1: most to lose, we had the most to gain by
Speaker 1: spending this money, and the Senate report concluded even within
Speaker 1: three months afterward, that it was money well spent. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there you have a case closed. Case closed, although I
Speaker 1: should probably say that to the end UM. In nineties six,
Speaker 1: the Congressional Research Service said, you know what, we need
Speaker 1: to do something about this, and Senator Daniel moyna Hans
Speaker 1: went to Bill Clinton and said, hey, we need to
Speaker 1: do something about this. So Clinton launched the Council on
Speaker 1: Year two thousand conversion UH Congress Past the Year two
Speaker 1: thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, and UM all this
Speaker 1: sounds very fancy, but UH ED is quick to point
Speaker 1: out and we are as well that you know, the
Speaker 1: government can't get in there and just fix all the
Speaker 1: bugs of all these companies. They gotta take care of
Speaker 1: it themselves. So a lot of it was just hey,
Speaker 1: you gotta get on this, like you gotta get ahead
Speaker 1: of this. You're on this right stock market and you're
Speaker 1: on this general motors, aren't you? And um sharing information
Speaker 1: for sure, but UM a lot of it was just
Speaker 1: kind of cheerleading yeah UM, and that I mean that
Speaker 1: worked like getting people, you know, kind of snapped in
Speaker 1: line and saying like, hey, the U. S. Government is
Speaker 1: telling you this is a real problem and you need
Speaker 1: to do this by this time or else you're gonna
Speaker 1: have some big troubles. That gets people's attention for sure,
Speaker 1: So you know, in that in a lot of senses,
Speaker 1: that was enough. But the government also had all of
Speaker 1: its own systems and UH software to look at and
Speaker 1: go over and make sure that was um UH in
Speaker 1: working condition or fixed if it needed to be fixing.
Speaker 1: And then they reached out and helped other countries to
Speaker 1: UM I saw that. I think starting in they started
Speaker 1: an exchange program with Russia to make sure that nobody
Speaker 1: was going to accidentally knuke anybody else. And as a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, on the the the turn of the millennium,
Speaker 1: there were um US observers and Russian observers in one
Speaker 1: another's countries just basically to work together to make sure
Speaker 1: that this this got all worked out. But I think
Speaker 1: also it's just kind of a show of faith, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're not gonna nuke you, or we're not
Speaker 1: gonna let you get new to our own people are
Speaker 1: there kind of thing to which I thought was kind
Speaker 1: of cool. Yeah. Other country countries took a little more
Speaker 1: strict approach. Uh. The Dutch Central Bank said if you
Speaker 1: we won't loan money to companies who weren't compliant. China said,
Speaker 1: you know what, all the top airline executives have to
Speaker 1: take flights on January first, um, and you know, so
Speaker 1: you better make sure your stuff is running correctly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think about that the nation or the government ordered
Speaker 1: airline executives to be in the air at midnight um,
Speaker 1: or they would I guess probably go to jail. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that sounds harsh and it is, but I think
Speaker 1: it is an interesting incentive to say the least, it's pragmatic.
Speaker 1: At least, you know, make sure your stuff works everybody. Um.
Speaker 1: But the the Y two K compliance is what I
Speaker 1: was talking about. That was like you could buy products
Speaker 1: around that time that said Y two K compliant, Like
Speaker 1: it could be a clock radio that says Y two
Speaker 1: K ready. Um, all kinds of products were labeled Y
Speaker 1: two K compliant, certainly anything to do with computing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there was actually nobody watching to make sure that
Speaker 1: that certification was actually accurate. There was there, I think
Speaker 1: the Defense Department put out some like some guidance and
Speaker 1: on what to do to be Y two K compliant,
Speaker 1: but they were like find it, fix it all good
Speaker 1: were the steps like they were that vague. There was
Speaker 1: nobody's certifying it. And to me, yes, cheerleading from the
Speaker 1: US government and raising awareness and maybe lending aid financially. Um,
Speaker 1: that was some really good roles that it played. But
Speaker 1: I feel like also it could have said, hey, if
Speaker 1: you're running this kind of operating software you're or you're
Speaker 1: producing dates using this time, here's a good fix you
Speaker 1: might be able to use or to create some sort
Speaker 1: of Y two K compliance guidance or steps. I feel
Speaker 1: like it could have done a little more in that respect. UM,
Speaker 1: but there was nobody Like you could have bought anything
Speaker 1: and it could have had that sticker on it, and
Speaker 1: it really didn't necessarily mean anything. And chuck, there were
Speaker 1: some other governments had different responses. I saw that UM
Speaker 1: the that Canada had thirteen thousand troops readied UM on
Speaker 1: high alert just in case the the S went down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was part of Operation Abicus. Yes, there's a really
Speaker 1: great Globe and Mail article called Y two K The
Speaker 1: Strange True History of How Canada prepared for an apocalypse
Speaker 1: that never happened but changed us all. It was a
Speaker 1: really good article. And then one of the other things
Speaker 1: that Canada did was the CBC sent a pair of
Speaker 1: engineers to a remote broadcasting station with UM with like
Speaker 1: some video which I would love to get my hands on.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find it anywhere that would that They were
Speaker 1: to broadcast instructions on how to survive post apocalypse. Basically
Speaker 1: that was their job. Oh wow. Yeah. So everybody's sitting
Speaker 1: there ready and waiting, and it's finally December thirty one,
Speaker 1: and whether you're ready or not, it's all about to
Speaker 1: click over, right, Chuck, that's right. So we'll take another
Speaker 1: break here and we'll talk about what happened on December
Speaker 1: one pm right after this? All right? What what happened? Man?
Speaker 1: I've been on pins and needles for a twenty seconds.
Speaker 1: Not much. Actually, some stuff did happen, but for the
Speaker 1: most part, nothing really happened. I mean for for you
Speaker 1: or me, or just about anybody else out there. The
Speaker 1: millennium came and went in the Y two K bug
Speaker 1: fizzled out like a dud. That's right. I remember waking
Speaker 1: up late in the day on January one, hung over.
Speaker 1: My everything worked, my phone worked, my power was on.
Speaker 1: There were no planes falling out of the sky. I
Speaker 1: would rode elevator up and down all day long. But
Speaker 1: some things did happen. Uh. And like I mentioned video stores,
Speaker 1: you know sometimes there was one in Albany, New York
Speaker 1: that had an assessed a late fee of over ninety
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to a customer for the general's daughter. No less.
Speaker 1: Oh is that what it was? One the movie? Yes,
Speaker 1: that was the rental Oh boy, I think I actually
Speaker 1: saw that for some reason. There's Travolta, right, yeah, the
Speaker 1: a Trivolta that was in the post pulp fiction boom. Uh.
Speaker 1: Let me see. There was a National Laboratory nuclear weapons
Speaker 1: plant in Tennessee had some malfunctions. I think there was
Speaker 1: some other nuclear malthfunctions in Japan, but nothing big obviously,
Speaker 1: or you know, it would have been catastrophic, but really
Speaker 1: mostly minor things happened. Yeah, there was like thirty thousand
Speaker 1: cash registers in Greece that we're all running the same
Speaker 1: software showed that that the year's nine hundred on receipts,
Speaker 1: like nothing particularly bad. I think. In the US, the
Speaker 1: most jarring thing that happened for the government was some
Speaker 1: spy satellites were they went offline for three days. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, people were able to see what
Speaker 1: the problem was, deal with it, figure out a solution
Speaker 1: or a patch, and then bring the thing back online
Speaker 1: with minimal interruption or problems. And the fact is that
Speaker 1: these the interruptions that did happen were typically pretty small,
Speaker 1: pretty inconsequential, and we're dealt with pretty quickly. Yeah. In England,
Speaker 1: in Sheffield, England, the National Health Services came under fire
Speaker 1: because there was a misreading of UH the age of
Speaker 1: pregnant mothers. Believe a hundred and fifty four women UH
Speaker 1: in the program were affected, and you know they were
Speaker 1: getting testing, like pre natal testing to see if there
Speaker 1: was a chance that their baby could have Down syndrome.
Speaker 1: And it led to two pregnancy terminations and four births
Speaker 1: of children with Down syndrome, and for the life of me.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find out if there were lawsuits or what.
Speaker 1: I just saw articles that talked about penalties against the
Speaker 1: NHS And it's one of those things that was really
Speaker 1: hard to find in any kind of follow up. Right,
Speaker 1: that was not one of the inconsequential ones I mentioned. No,
Speaker 1: obviously not so. Um. The fact that, and from what
Speaker 1: I could tell, Chuck, that was far and away the
Speaker 1: most consequential outcome. Everything else is usually pretty um, you know,
Speaker 1: either inconvenient or aggravating comical, like the guy who got
Speaker 1: the dollar late fee for his video tape. Um. But
Speaker 1: the fact that, you know, aside from the NHST issue,
Speaker 1: the fact that it was generally small stuff that happened
Speaker 1: for some reason made the public say, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: was all just a hoax. It was all just as
Speaker 1: scammed as suck money out of our preppers pockets and
Speaker 1: um get us all riled up and scared and probably
Speaker 1: control us with George Bush's new world order that ministry
Speaker 1: talked about, um, and that the the whole thing was
Speaker 1: was all just just who we that we were all
Speaker 1: riled up for nothing, which I think goes to show
Speaker 1: that that the public by and large is a dumb, dumb. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we're seeing that now because Ed makes a
Speaker 1: great analogy here. He says, hey, um, if if the
Speaker 1: Y two K bug had been a flood, and we
Speaker 1: spent hundreds of billions of dollars in countless work hours
Speaker 1: building a damn to hold back the flood, when that
Speaker 1: flood arrived and the damn held, you wouldn't say, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't get wet, So the whole thing must have
Speaker 1: been a hoax. And that that is almost a perfect
Speaker 1: analogy for what happened in retrospect with the Y two
Speaker 1: K bug. A crisis that would have been potentially really
Speaker 1: huge and catastrophic was averted. And rather than saying poray
Speaker 1: we did it, we pulled together, people just kind of said,
Speaker 1: you guys got me all upset for nothing. Nothing happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, let's say that they um, let's say it
Speaker 1: was all just minor problems that they didn't bother to
Speaker 1: fix beforehand, and all of a sudden, instead of a
Speaker 1: few minor annoyances and aggravations, there are thousands of those,
Speaker 1: and those compound on one other another somehow and create
Speaker 1: sort of a domino effect. It's not just that they
Speaker 1: they corrected the main systems like the financial markets and
Speaker 1: the nuclear codes and all those things that they needed
Speaker 1: to correct. They corrected a lot of stuff that had
Speaker 1: a downstream effect just to make our lives a little
Speaker 1: less disrupted. Um. People looked at Italy at the time.
Speaker 1: They were a country that didn't do a lot and
Speaker 1: they didn't have a big fall out. But other people
Speaker 1: who were a lot smarter and don't make knee jerk reactions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know what, Italy is really small compared to us.
Speaker 1: They weren't nearly as computer reliant at the time as
Speaker 1: we were, and America was fixing their stuff, which helped
Speaker 1: fix stuff for all of the world because they were
Speaker 1: reliant on us and our systems. That's right. So so
Speaker 1: there's a pretty good argument you could make for all
Speaker 1: those people are like, no, it's totally fine. See, those
Speaker 1: people didn't do anything. They got a free ride, basically
Speaker 1: because so much of the software that America was fixing
Speaker 1: is used around the world. That's a really really important
Speaker 1: point for because that's that's a that's a point that
Speaker 1: a lot of people make. They'll point to countries surprisingly
Speaker 1: like Japan. I can't believe it, but Japan did very
Speaker 1: little to deal with it, and like you said, there
Speaker 1: were some minor problems that some of their nuclear plants,
Speaker 1: but the fact is a lot of them benefit. A
Speaker 1: lot of those countries benefited from the US leading the
Speaker 1: way on this. Yeah, And one of the strategies that
Speaker 1: other people who didn't think we should be pouring all
Speaker 1: this money into it beforehand was called fix on failure.
Speaker 1: They said, why why don't we just wait and see
Speaker 1: what happens and then we'll start to correct things as needed.
Speaker 1: But that that's just not a very like we didn't
Speaker 1: know what we didn't know, Like you said earlier, we
Speaker 1: had no way of knowing what it was gonna cause,
Speaker 1: and so fixed on failure was not a viable option
Speaker 1: because trying to patch something that is in chaos all
Speaker 1: of a sudden is not the best way to work. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, like this is about to date this episode,
Speaker 1: but the Spirit Airlines problems of of like the last
Speaker 1: week or so, it's a really great example. Oh man,
Speaker 1: there was some problems with shifting cruise around because of weather,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, some flights um started being
Speaker 1: ready without the cruise, and then that led to more
Speaker 1: cruise being shifted around, and it was just this cascade
Speaker 1: of flights where they were every day canceling fifty six
Speaker 1: of their flights and just leaving people stranded. And it
Speaker 1: was a really great example that um the what was
Speaker 1: the name of the pipeline that got cyber attacked for ransomware?
Speaker 1: That certain that was a really great example of like
Speaker 1: just these you know, people waiting in line for gas
Speaker 1: around the whole southeast and the East coast for a week,
Speaker 1: more than a week. Like it's it's like at the
Speaker 1: time at y two k um the idea that like
Speaker 1: we could have just fixed this stuff really kind of
Speaker 1: shows their naivety for how how embedded, how we didn't
Speaker 1: really understand how embedded we already were with computers and
Speaker 1: how dependent we were on them. And you can't fix
Speaker 1: nuclear missile guidance system after it fails. You need to
Speaker 1: do that ahead of time. So that fixed on failure ideas.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty bad idea from the get go.
Speaker 1: It was you mentioned, you know, one of the good
Speaker 1: things that came out of this was the fact that
Speaker 1: post nine eleven, our financial markets didn't crash because largely
Speaker 1: because of a lot of the work they did for
Speaker 1: Y two K and making those systems more robust and updated,
Speaker 1: and that happened kind of across the board, like the
Speaker 1: investment that a lot of people, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people and companies were like, well, I guess now
Speaker 1: as a good time as any to really just sort
Speaker 1: of update everything and to get our systems, uh, you
Speaker 1: know more um, you know, up to snuff for today's
Speaker 1: you know, some of the stuff was still running on
Speaker 1: code from the seventies that have been built on and
Speaker 1: built on. So that really helped drive the tech boom
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways in that companies were investing
Speaker 1: a lot more for the first time, uh in tech.
Speaker 1: And also they you know, there were hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of new developers that were trained and hired to deal
Speaker 1: with this, and they were all of a sudden, we're
Speaker 1: looking for jobs, and some of them didn't find jobs,
Speaker 1: so they got creative and started writing apps and writing
Speaker 1: code for other programs. And it really fueled not only
Speaker 1: here in India. I know, it was a really big
Speaker 1: deal that um their I T industry now compared to
Speaker 1: where it was then, it's just like night and day
Speaker 1: because of everyone that got hired to help with Y
Speaker 1: two K. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Like they make the
Speaker 1: case that the tech boom was a result of people
Speaker 1: coming into this industry who wouldn't have otherwise been there.
Speaker 1: And also the spending. The spending was just ridiculous, because
Speaker 1: not only were people hiring I T people to fix
Speaker 1: their software, like some companies were like, forget this, We're
Speaker 1: just going to completely upgrade our systems. And these systems
Speaker 1: could have kept hopping along or hobbling along for another
Speaker 1: ten fifteen years, say, and then that system would have
Speaker 1: had to have been replaced, and then some other company
Speaker 1: does it another five years earlier, five years later, rather
Speaker 1: than that. The United States and actually in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, the world's computer systems got upgraded all at once,
Speaker 1: and that kind of laid that foundation with you know,
Speaker 1: the industry being flush with tech workers to just really
Speaker 1: take off, which is great. I saw in that same
Speaker 1: article about that Center report, Chuck, that that said it
Speaker 1: was money well spent. Somebody estimated that for every dollar
Speaker 1: spent on fixing the Y two K bug, it led
Speaker 1: to a return on investment of about six or seven dollars.
Speaker 1: And that is an estimate in two thousand now today
Speaker 1: in in hindsight, if the the Y two K bug
Speaker 1: drove the tech booms that started in the early two
Speaker 1: thousand's late nineties, like, it's just it's it's countless, So
Speaker 1: it's probably in the trillions of dollars worth of value
Speaker 1: that it led to toats. So I think we kind
Speaker 1: of busted that myth in a way, didn't We kind
Speaker 1: of like the world of World's Radio broadcast. I think
Speaker 1: so as usual, gen X is correct. Go jen X.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about how gen X rules,
Speaker 1: you can go onto the Internet and look at this
Speaker 1: thing that we built called the Internet, and um, learn
Speaker 1: some more stuff. What do you think of that? I
Speaker 1: think it's great. And since I said learn some more stuff,
Speaker 1: it's time for a listener maw. I'm gonna call this
Speaker 1: Bob and Girls from our Child Labor podcast. Hi, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm Amanda Marus Sars. I'm a long time listener and
Speaker 1: love everything you guys do. In your Child Labor episode,
Speaker 1: you mentioned you were unsure the dangers of working as
Speaker 1: a Bob and girl or boy. Well, let me tell you.
Speaker 1: I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts, where they claim the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: was born. If you're from this area in elementary school,
Speaker 1: you visit the boot Cotton Mill Museum for school field trips.
Speaker 1: We learned about the history of h and cotton weaving
Speaker 1: processes of the time. Something and always stuck with me,
Speaker 1: being a little girl at the time of these trips
Speaker 1: was the Bob and Girls. They were cite a list
Speaker 1: of horrors that these child laborers went through, and getting
Speaker 1: their fingers snapped off in the weaving machine crevices, to
Speaker 1: getting their hair caught and essentially getting scalped. Man, I
Speaker 1: knew I have it. I totally knew if there was
Speaker 1: gonna be something really horrific about it. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to polish off your episode with the most graphic details
Speaker 1: that seven year old me could remember being plagued by.
Speaker 1: That is from Amanda Maru's Stars. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Amanda.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I assumed was out there, So thanks
Speaker 1: for filling in the blanks. Forest. I love it. If
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch of this like Amanda did,
Speaker 1: especially if you love everything we do like she says,
Speaker 1: we love hearing from people like that. You can get
Speaker 1: in touch with those via email. It's Stuff podcast at
Speaker 1: I Heart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know is
Speaker 1: a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts My
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H