You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. Hey, Carol, you remember y two k right, really really good? You were actually working here at Bloomberg.
Yeah, I think I had just started. And one of the things that we were thinking about big time was what happens when we go from nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and apparently that can be somewhat difficult, sophisticated, complicated when it comes to technology and computing devices, Like what does that mean?
Right?
You go from a year that you specified right with two digits to office and you really needed all four?
Yes?
Can I just tell you that we were all of us in the news team. We went home, We were given walkie talkies and everything because we thought in case the phones don't work, and we had to be ready for when in I guess Asia, or whenever it struck two thousand around the globe first for like the world to come undone, and I got to sell Unlike I remember, like we're waiting, we're waiting, nothing.
Happened, Nothing happened. Well, in new HBO documentary takes us back to that time. It's called time Bomb y two K HY two K, what doesn't mean using two digits rather than four made good economic sense.
But when workers advanced clocks to the year two thousand, the world can melt down.
Our systems are broken, and we've got a problem with a couple of digits.
This has to be solved.
All right. That was a clip just from time Bomb y two K, new documentary on HBO, taking us back to the years ahead of Y two K and all the chaos and prepping and fears about power grids failing, nuclear arsenals being at risks, planes falling out of the sky. People were very worried. Carol Well, Brian Becker and Marley MacDonald are the documentary filmmakers and producers behind time Bomb y two K. They join us on Zoom from New York.
Good to have you both with us this afternoon. Brian, I want to start with you, why make a documentary about Y two K twenty four years later?
So when Marlee and I first thought of this idea and started looking into it, it was the summer of twenty twenty and the first images you see when you google back YTK are shots of empty grocery store shelves and people checking out palettes of water and toilet paper at the supermarket and people in line at the gun store, and those images felt awfully familiar to us, as given the reality we were living through in the depths of
the pandemic. We knew there was a countdown, We knew from our research that there was extensive footage and media coverage of the event, and kind of living in that moment of the pandemic made us realize that it wasn't just a countdown, It wasn't just something that we lived through and then had mostly forgotten about. It also had we thought lessons for our present moment.
Well, I gotta say, Marley, I just remember doing interviews, you know, leading up to it. In every conversation, certainly if it was even just a general market and interview, it was like, okay, so how are you guys planning for Y two K? And concerns that you know, if things come undone and you know, we can't track investments or market stone, you know, work properly. Having said that, when you and Brian went to pitch this where people like, wait, wait,
what was Y two K? Because it's a long time ago.
Definitely, Well, everyone who lived through it remembers it, which definitely works in our favor when pitching this around and was a really special part of making this project. When you tell someone you're working on a movie about why do You Kate, everyone has to tell you what they were doing New Year's Eve nineteen ninety nine, But.
I just tell you one of my producers I think was in kindergarten, so that kind of like at home. Anyway, continue, please, Yeah, Brian and.
I became historians of what everyone was doing on New Year's Eve nineteen ninety nine. But when we first started looking into the project, you know, the first question that comes up is was this a joke or was this real? And you know a lot of people remember why two K as a hoax? And it took us months of research to come to the conclusion that it was a
very real problem that was solved. And we did that by talking to a lot of computer programmers and talking to a lot of people who actually worked on the issue, and so we knew we could kind of reclaim this narrative in this movie and shine a light on all the work and labor that went into actually fixing this very real problem.
Mart Marley, can you talk about the style here. I enjoyed. I enjoyed the film, but I was surprised to see the way that the documentary was structured in the sense that there's no narrator, and it's nobody looking back or remembering or or there are no recollections. It's purely based on archival footage on videos that were sold at the time, news reports, home videos talk a little bit about building it in that sense.
Yeah, So we knew we wanted to do it all archival from the jump, because one, there was just enough footage. There was a lot of footage, and when we first started working with the material, we realized that, you know, everything was sort of there, and that if we kept it in the world of all archival, we could really kind of make this countdown feel more present, tense, feel like a time capsule of that actual moment. And Brian is an archival producer and found, you know, along with
our team all of that footage. We ended up with over seven hundred hours of footage, and as far as the structure of the film goes, we knew that we wanted to sort of replicate the way that Y two K worked in the world. So starting with the technical problem, watching it sort of radiate out of cubicles and into the social consciousness and then follow that to sort of the fringes of America. And we knew we had to get to midnight at.
Some point as you went through the footage and you guys were gathering at Brian, I mean, what was it that kind of jumped out? Was there certain things that like, oh my god, Like it was just kind of interesting because there was real nervousness about how does my play out?
Yeah, I mean there's a certain attraction always to footage that is kind of unbelievable to watch in the present, whether it be you know, a tape made by a militia titled why to K Why Should I Care? I don't even on a computer. But I think what we really started looking for most specifically in the footage were moments that could clearly tether us from present to past. Because we didn't include interviews with individuals in the present day. We were looking for kind of moments of emotion or
introspection or relevance between them and now. But of course, you know, when Matt Damon is recorded speaking about the nuclear arsenal and his fear of the nuclear arsenal, potentially shutting down. You kind of have to also include things like that in your movie.
A very young Matt Damon promoting at the time the talented mister Ripley. I should note, Hey, Brian, did you hear Have you heard from any of these folks who were featured.
In this Yes?
Thanks for asking that we actually have relationships with all of the individuals who we built scenes around in this film. It didn't feel fair for us to include their historic likenesses in our feature without talking to them first to gauge what y TK meant to them. So, for example, Peter Diager, who is one of the first individuals who kind of brought y t K to the public's attention, I spent two days in his basement with him outside
of Toronto. He just published a new book focused on computer management, and we just appeared on Peter's podcast about why, which I can plug here. Candace Turner, who in the film calls herself farmer Jane. I emailed with Candace this morning and I went to her farm in Sarcoxi, Missouri. She moved there and she lived there in events in the lead up to YTK, and she still lives on
that very same farm. I went to her mud room and came back to New York with some VHS tapes of hers toscin ins in d C. So we do have relationships with these people.
I want to get back to Brian Becker and Marley McDonald. They are the documentary filmmakers and producers behind the new HBO documentary Time Bomb y two K. They join us on Zoom from New York.
You know, it's interesting, Brian and Marley that it's been a week where Tim and I have been talking a lot about the risks in twenty twenty four. We certainly did at the end of last year and into the new year, but this week, you know, some of the concerns were big time. The November elections and basically the US against itself geopolitics certainly came up, and it made Tim and I think about how your documentary kind of ends up. We're essentially just before midnight in the US
December thirty first, nineteen ninety nine. You have Boris Yeltsin, right, conceding power to Vladimir Putin, who would take over to lead what was then what the Soviet Union, right.
It was just Russia. Yeah, and there's this ominous sort of moment from the newscaster that says, you know, Putin wants this to be a strong Russia, but has no ambitions beyond like for expansion and to get bigger.
Here we are twenty four years later, and we know that that's very different. But I do wonder how you guys are thinking about having gone through this process, about some of the risks and the concerns that are out there today, and coming off a global pandemic that really made us all realize whoa our life can change dramatically, and our life vibes are at risk.
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting thing. So our movie actually premiered at a festival last March, and during the Q and a's at that time, a lot of the questions were relating our film to COVID. Then sometime over the summer, the question started to become about the threat of AI. And so it's interesting to kind of see how this movie moves through the world as it continues,
you know, going through different existential threats. And that's I think what we wanted to do with this film is really examined the ways in which America faces existential threats and kind of the focus on how interconnected and dependent we are on each other and really highlighting that aspect of getting through things like Y two K or COVID.
Every time I think that we collectively go through an experience that will somehow bring us closer together as citizens, I turn out to be wrong. I felt this way to in COVID. That's sort of like everybody was in this together and it would be in this uniting force. And I look at the landscape right now, Brian, and I think that we've never been more divided ever than we have been right now.
Yeah, I mean I feel the same too, Tim. Why two K almost feels like this dry run in which we actually did succeed in solving a problem and then, of course, in very American fashion, quickly dismissed it as a joke or as a hoax after we went through it. It almost feels as if we worked on it so well and solved it to an extent that we would have learned more if more things went wrong after the
clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve nineteen ninety nine. Instead, we kind of missed this opportunity to think so much about how our lives had come to depend upon technology and also on each other tune.
You know, it's kind of interesting on a day where safe to say, we all got fooled about the approval by the SEC of a spot bigcoin etf where a headline crossed on Twitter from the official SEC account, and then ten minutes later the chair of the SEC comes out and said, Nope, that's not correct. They have not received approval and that the SEC Twitter account was compromised.
You just realize how quickly and how vulnerable we are and reliant on technology, and how things can be misconstrued got wrong, and you just, I don't know, when you start to extrapolate that, you just wonder kind of tim where we could go with this.
Yeah, and also, you know, it was so interesting to see that the way technology is shifted, and you know, it's been a quarter century roughly since since this time period, but the technology shifts that we've seen have been absolutely massive.
Yeah.
Reliance, Yeah, reliance is and it's and there's this picture there was a picture painted Barley in the nineteen nineties about the optimism about technology. And I'm wondering if you think that the optimism that these folks in the nineties talked about and alluded to about school children being able to access information at any time, has actually manifested in
something that looks optimistic or looks you know, scary. I mean, there's there's talk about parents being concerned about TikTok, mental health and social media, government controlled this stuff. I mean, what are your thoughts there?
Certainly, I'm very concerned with the state of our relationship to technology, and I think that was something that we really wanted to sort of capture that techno optimism of the nineties in our film. You know, this was the first time that people were really welcoming computers into their lives. You know, it was at their office or in their
home for the first time. But I think what YGK revealed is just how dependent we actually already were on computer systems that we weren't seeing, you know, to get on the train or how we get the news in the morning. Like everything had our already been kind of operated by these giant systems, but we hadn't come face to face with that. So I think y g Q was an interesting moment for kind of deconstructing our reliance
on technology. But yeah, as far as where we've come today, you know, we've only gone deeper in that hole, Mike. Brian says, it could have been a moment where we had pivoted and maybe taken a different route. But because we did get in front of the problem and solve it, we've just gone further and further down this road. And if something like this were to happen today, you know the same questions would arise.
Hey, we only have about thirty seconds left, Brian, but I want to give you the last word. What's the next thing you guys are working on.
I'm working on a film about the rise and fall of the American enclosed shopping mall, and Marle opensity to describe.
What you're working out I'm working on. I'm developing a film based on the archives at the Museum of Natural History and the origins of natural history museums. Very cool.
Big thank you to both of you for joining us. Everybody check out the new film. It's on HBO. It is all about y two K. It's called time Bomb y two K. A big thank you to our guests Brian Becker and Marley McDonald, the documentary filmmakers and producers behind Time Bomb.