Y2K: Much Ado About Something

But what city were you in on December thirty feet? I was in hot Atlanta? What about you? Okay, I was there too. Uh. That's when I lived in the big warehouse on the West End and we had a big party, probably the biggest New Year's Eve party I've ever thrown. And it was one of those parties where people come that don't know you, oh wow, and all of a sudden it was like, all right, here we go. That kind of party. It's like weird science or sixteen

candles or something. Yeah, it was great. By the guy from the Hills Have Eyes showed up on a motorcycle who's also in goonies. That wasn't the guy from the Are You sure. Oh no, no, you're right, you're right, you're right. No, it was I think it was. He was just in makeup. No, the guy from the Goonies was football player John Matuzak, right, same guy. Oh that's the guy from the Hills have eyes. No, I don't know. I'm just trying to end up. Yeah. Yeah, so that's

what I was doing. I was throwing a big old party and uh, not worrying too much about the Y two K bug or my bank account being empty because I didn't have much in it anyway, or being stuck in an elevator or falling out of the sky in a plane. Yeah, it was a good time to be young because you didn't really care that much. You didn't have as much to lose as if you were like some I don't know, middle aged fat cat or something. You're probably sweating it a little more than you were,

like in your twenties at the time. Probably a lot of people who are listening to this right now, we're like, what you guys just said, why to K bug? What

is that? And uh well, let Uncle Josh and Uncle Chuck tell you all about why two K because it was one of the weirdest times to ever live through and Chuck, you and I were Cold War kids, like we we lived through time where people thought, like, you know, we could go to a nuclear apocalypse with with the Soviet Union at any given moment, it could just happen everybody. That's how we lived, and the Y two K bugs

still managed to stand out from that backdrop. Yeah. So the idea was, and we'll get more specific, but the one sentence descriptor is, computer code in early days was written with just two digits, not nineteen fifty whatever, just fifty whatever. And the idea was that was going to cause a lot of problems when the calendar flipped to two thousand and anything, like I said, from elevators being stuck,

to Wall Street going down to elevators being stuck. I mean, there were all kinds of crazy scenarios um that you might or might not have worried about as that date approached. Uh. And that was the Y two K bug or the millennium bug. And you know, some people really really freaked out, and some people took advantage of people freaking out, and some people didn't worry at all. And we're gonna tell you all about it. Yeah, that was a really great

elevator falling down pitch. Thanks so um. The thing about the Y two K bug is that if you hear about it today, you're gonna hear a couple of different responses potentially, and probably the more prevalent of the two is that it was all just a big hoax, a sham, maybe a big money suck. It was a bunch of people just being paranoid, um. And whether that was rightfully so, the or the paranoia was justified or not, you know, um, because of the situation or the context that this is

happening in. We'll talk about that later. But every once in a while you'll run into somebody and these are the people you should probably listen to, who say, no,

it was actually a really big dealer. It had the potential to be a really big deal And the reason it wasn't a big deal is because the world, i should say smart people in the world got behind solving this issue, came together and solved this issue, and that it was only people who weren't really paying attention who saw nothing happened and said that was all just a hoax or sham. And it's really interesting because to this day, depending on what media coverage you read. And I'm not

even talking like left and right. I mean just like the author. Uh, it can change from author to author. Um that those two different approaches to the explanation will be will be used depending on who you're reading. And I just find that fascinating that we still haven't resolved it fully. Oh yeah, Like you could go to any party, any dinner party, and bring this up and and get probably equal amount of those reactions. I bet, yeah, get

everybody really riled up. Um. All right, So I said that it has to do with computer programming, and in the early days of programming, like I said, they were not using the first two numbers of the year um because they weren't just lazy. Um. Those computers didn't have a lot of computing power. They had about one or two killer bits of memory. And it requires eight bits or one bite to represent a single alpha numeric character.

So if you could save sixteen but sorry, sixteen bits per operation that you're running by just not using nineteen, uh, then you're saving a lot of memory, like well well needed memory. Yeah. I mean like this is at a time where like those bits were vital. To day, we're just like drowning in in um RAM and yeah and bites.

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

to to go to the moon. But it's it's absolutely true. And so to save that that that amount of data

made a lot of sense. But then the other thing that kind of legitimized that decision is that these people are writing code and like the fifties and the sixties, and they're like this stuff is going to be gone, like it'll have been wiped out and like rebuilt from scratch by the time this becomes a problem in the year two thousand and they were really really wrong with that, you know idea, which it makes sense that they would think that, but it turned out that it was really

wrong because a lot of the software in the world that was running really important stuff like things like financial markets, or things that monitored drinking water purity, or things that

ran freezers that kept smallpox from thawing out. You know, like these were all run on software in a lot of cases that were built and kind of tar papered over with fixes and patches and expansions that that were originally created and like the fifties or sixties, and that's that's not a good thing to figure out when you're like five years out from the millennium when this problem

is going to actually happen. Yeah, And it also was complicated by the fact that these programmers weren't all aligned on how to even enter dates in a uniform way. Some people used the Julian format, which is the two digit year and then the three digit account of the days in the year, so, uh, January one would be nine sevens or zero one. But not everyone did it

that way. So it's not like you could just go through and say, you know, the nineteen point to twenty I don't know nothing about coding, right, but you know, just some simple line of code that just basically changes everything in a uniform manner. No, and so even even in like the software itself. Like even if one piece of software did use the same kind of date throughout that one piece of software, Um, that software, that code was written to accommodate you know, X number of bits

for a date. So if you just went in and added two extra digits for the date field, that could throw off everything else in the software without any without you having any way of predicting what it will throw off. So if you went in and made that fix, it could create even bigger problems then then, uh, than if you just didn't make the fix to begin with as far as the software operating was concerned, right, Uh. And the other thing we need to point out and is

that the fact that it was the millennium didn't matter. Um, it mattered, and we'll and we'll get to the sort of cultural um hysteria that kind of followed. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that it was a millennium, But it could have been eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred as far as the software new, and it would have presented the same problem exactly that

it was just the prefix was changing. And what the big concern was is that when it turned over to zero zero the computers hadn't been taught that that meant now the century now two thousand, technically not century, don't at me um, but that they were going to go back to nine hundred, which is what they were programmed to think, and that that could cause all sorts of cascading events, everything from Chuck's fabled falling elevator too, air

aircraft computers powering down midflight and just planes falling out of the sky. Yeah, or computer just I had the idea that a computer systems were just gonna go and like smoke would come out of them and everything would just shut down. Power would go out, your cable would go out, like just nothing would work anymore. And that was the way that everybody was touting and talking about.

It wasn't even worse than that, people talking about nuclear warheads launching themselves or blowing up like in their silos and that kind of stuff. Like there was a real apocalyptic vibe to the to the public idea about it, but even to the sober, level headed people who are actually working to solve the problem. You know, there's a big problem with an airline computer, you know, resetting itself because it thinks it's while the planes in the air

or um planes weren't around the right exactly. Does the other a problem to Chuck is that they weren't sure if the computers reset themselves and like shut down, if they would have any way to get in there and start them back up again. So it's not like you know, I saw somewhere. It's not like it was going to fix itself once you know, it got like a couple of seconds past midnight on two thousand, that that wasn't necessarily a given. So they also the other thing that

really drove this this I don't want. So there were two things that happened. The public was panicking. The people working against it were like concerned and and and actively managing it. But for the people who were actively managing it and who were concerned, another thing that was driving it was actually it was driving it for everybody. Yeah, I'm gonna settle on that. Um that we had no

idea how widespread the problem was. Even by the mid to late nineties, they were like forty billion microchips out there in the world doing their thing. We had no idea what person standage we're going to be affected by the white two K bug. We had no idea what missile guidance systems or what satellites or what, um, you know, a t M machine systems, We're going to be affected. So we had to dive in and figure out once people started getting this point across, like, guys, this is

actually a thing. And apparently people were raising the flags or at least one person was raising the flags UM as far back as the sixties and seventies I think, right, or the seventies and eighties. Yeah, why don't we talk about him and some others right after this? Okay, all right, so you mentioned a light in the darkness, a man on a mountain proclaiming this could be an issue. And that man, uh in the nineteen seventies was Bob Behmer or Bob Beemer, and he was he really played a

big role in the creation of askey code. And uh he was the first person and this is in the nineteen seventies, like I said to to actually write in papers like, hey, you know, this could be a problem down the road, This something we should probably take a look at. Um. You know, if you're a UM a blockbuster video, you're probably not gonna really try and get

ahead of this too much. You can probably start working on this in like, if you are the financial sector and your Wall Street, You're gonna start working on this in the nineteen eighties because there's just so much more at risk. Somebody's late fees running up is not a very big deal. You can correct that. The financial market not being open or available or crashing is a really big deal. So they started throwing uh a lot of money at this in the late nineteen eighties UH in

the financial sector to try and correct this ahead of time. Yeah, and as a matter of fact, later we'll see later on in the after effects, they credited this, um, basically the upgrade that the New York Stock Exchange dedicated itself to in the face of the Y two K bug, as the same reason why the global financial markets didn't like their systems didn't collapse um after September eleven. Yeah,

that because of this. Yeah. So UM if bob Biehmer was the first old hermit prophet who came down from the hills to war and everybody, Um, Peter de Yeager was the guy who got all the press for it. Um. He was the one who really basically dedicated his life to making sure that everybody was good and scared out this the public, the public, but also you know the people who were like pulling the levers of government, the people who are running the corporations, and the people are

running the financial markets. Like he he met with a lot of different people. Um gave a lot of different scary presentations. UM. I saw that he would like it wasn't just some pet presentation. He gave everywhere necessarily too. I saw he met with the Canadian government and was trying to get the get across like this is a really big deal and it's a really big problem and you're not equipped to deal with this as it stands now. This is a new thing for you. And he pointed

out that the Canadian government meets its deadlines. It's it's deadline goals for projects six percent of the time. He said, this cannot happen, Like, you can't miss this goal, this deadline. UM. So he would like kind of go in and like make it apparent to each each group based on their own needs or their own desires or their own perspective. UM.

But he did. They also gave lots of interviews. He was on sixty minutes UH and he made a bunch of money during I think during he made in today's dollars something like two and a half million dollars consulting and giving speeches and lectures. But from what I understand, and he gets a lot of guph today, as we'll see, But from what I understand, he was a true believer who in some ways maybe saved the world from some really big problems that we we will we will never

fully understand because we didn't experience them. Yeah, this is a hard one to judge in retrospect. It's like, how do you judge the thing that didn't happen right exactly? Is it a cry wolf? Or was it uh? Or did we slay the wolf? So Peter Yeager kicked the whole thing off of the article called Doomsday two thousand and in his in his um defense, his editor probably came up with that, not him. Editors typically write the headline,

so it's possible. Who knows he could have suggested it he was He was that much of a doomsayer for sure that he would have been totally comfortable with that. Yeah, and this is where you know, the the American public like eventually it made its way to sixty minutes and once Morley Safer is on there on a Sunday night talking about it. Then you know the American public is going to get on board. And they did, and it brought out some some cooks. It brought out people, uh

preppers and survivalists. Uh. There are a lot of internet scams going around at the time. There was a lot of religious religiosity, um sort of really heated up, like uh, sort of doomsday preachers and stuff like that started coming out of the woodwork a little bit more. Anyone that thought that they could make money off of this thing, uh through fear kind of came out of the woodwork.

And you know, when something like that's happening, you've got that on one side, and then you've got a lot of people on the other side just thumbing their nose at it and saying, this is all a big scam, This is all a hoax. Look at all these kooks that are trying to get you know, separate us from our money. Um, it's just a big scam, and we don't have anything to worry about. It's weird, It almost

sounds familiar in some weird way. Yeah, what we've been experiencing a Yeah, this is definitely like it was a peek behind the curtain of what could what could come, although it was not nearly a stark although I don't know, maybe I wasn't paying as much attention then as I

am these days. But it didn't definitely, it didn't seem it didn't seem like, you know, there was anything approaching the incivility and just outright like anger that that we experienced today, especially you know in America, um, compared to them, But there were there were definitely two sides to this issue, and they definitely were entrenched against one another. It just wasn't like neither side hated the other. They just thought

the other one was dumb, right, uh. And you know, one of the big reasons that it was such a big kerfuffle culturally was that this it sort of it was all about timing and the calendar flip aligned at a time where we were computers were really becoming super

super entrenched in everyone's daily life. Um. Of course, you know, people have been using computers for a while, but as far as like really everyday stuff like running your bank through there and paying your bills and credit cards and acting as your own travel agent, and the government everything was reliant on computers by this point kind of for the first you know, this was the first big wave so as far, and it made a good point in here as as far as your average person on the

street knows, is their computer comes to them in a box and they take it out, and it's just a little magic machine that runs on ferry dust, and we know nothing about how it works or how it should work. And so all of a sudden, everyone has got these little magic boxes that they don't really understand that they're super reliant on. And there are people out there saying things are about to get really bad with your magic box. Yeah, And then a lot of people are just like, all right,

I guess it's time to freak out a little bit. Yeah. I mean, people definitely did freak out, and I think it also, I think part of that freak out is kind of like you were saying, like the Y two K bug is the first time it was revealed to us just how dependent on computers we've become. We we never really saw that before. But you know, before up to this point, it was all like ge whiz, you know, like my insurance claim went through fifty times faster than

it would have five years ago. Instead now it's like, you know, we're these all these things that were dependent on are about to pull the rug out from our civilization, and that that that really kind of got people scared, even if people weren't sitting there analyzing and I mean we're analyzing it in hindsight, at the time, people were

just scared, freaked out, nervous, angry, upset. But then the fact that this was taking place already during a major calendar calendar change, not just from um, you know, the nine hundreds of the two thousands, but like a new a new millennium, you know, um, that that really kind of had people already primed. The weird timing of the whole thing, Like you remember how big the X Files were. Imagine the X Files now would be like a whole hum Some people would watch it, some people be really

into it. You know, it might make a little splash

there for a little bit. But the The X Files one of the biggest TV shows in the world, at the very least in the West, because it was super tapped into this millennial and not the not the generation, but just like the end of this era or the new era that this ants that everyone was carrying around to some degree, whether you were aware of it or not, you were worried, some small part of your brain was worried because the calendar is about to change over to

the year two thousand. Yeah. I think the show that does that best now is Black and Mirror. Definitely. I loved Meet some X Files, but I'll take Black Mirror over X Files. Yeah. It's really tough to rival Black Mirror, it is, and I know people, boy, X Files people are gonna be so upset. I loved X Files. I did Ye Molder and Scully. I just watched them the other day. It still holds up. Yeah, it was a great show. It was a lot of fun, but a show of its time, right exactly. Those overcoats they wear

were gigantic. They were big, Oh my god, shoulder pads. Yes, they were so everybody's walking around like David Byrne and stopped making sense. It was a little weird. Um. So the cost of this thing was gonna be pretty big and ended up being pretty big. It depends on who you ask. If you see numbers on the internet of five billion dollars, that is probably not true. That probably came from people that were consulting saying you know, it may cost up to five billion dollars to fix all

this and all over the world. Um, But they were spending tons of money. They're like, I think there's an article from the on Washington Posts that talked about General Motors spending about six hundred twenty five mill x in about a quarter of a mill I'm sorry, quarter of a billion, Proctor and Gamble ninety million. So and you know, then the federal government has to spend a ton of money on their own systems. So it added up to many, many,

many billions, tens of billions of dollars. Let's just say that. Yeah. Also, I don't want to let this opportunity pass by without

shouting out contemporary journalism. One other thing, chuck, though, the US Senate conducted a special committee investigation into spending on the Y two K bug, and it came up with what I what I can tell is the um the most widely accepted number at the time, this is this dollars A hundred billion dollars were spent in the United States alone, and that about eight points yeah, about eight

point four billion of that was by the US government. UM. And that again, that's in two thousand dollars, so it would be substantially more today, and that the US is almost certainly uh the largest spender on this issue because we were also at the time the most dependent country on computers for the country that was the most dependent on computers in the entire world. So we had the most to lose, we had the most to gain by spending this money, and the Senate report concluded even within

three months afterward, that it was money well spent. Yeah, well, there you have a case closed. Case closed, although I should probably say that to the end UM. In nineties six, the Congressional Research Service said, you know what, we need to do something about this, and Senator Daniel moyna Hans went to Bill Clinton and said, hey, we need to

do something about this. So Clinton launched the Council on Year two thousand conversion UH Congress Past the Year two thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, and UM all this sounds very fancy, but UH ED is quick to point out and we are as well that you know, the government can't get in there and just fix all the bugs of all these companies. They gotta take care of it themselves. So a lot of it was just hey, you gotta get on this, like you gotta get ahead

of this. You're on this right stock market and you're on this general motors, aren't you? And um sharing information for sure, but UM a lot of it was just kind of cheerleading yeah UM, and that I mean that worked like getting people, you know, kind of snapped in line and saying like, hey, the U. S. Government is telling you this is a real problem and you need to do this by this time or else you're gonna

have some big troubles. That gets people's attention for sure, So you know, in that in a lot of senses, that was enough. But the government also had all of its own systems and UH software to look at and go over and make sure that was um UH in working condition or fixed if it needed to be fixing. And then they reached out and helped other countries to UM I saw that. I think starting in they started an exchange program with Russia to make sure that nobody

was going to accidentally knuke anybody else. And as a matter of fact, on the the the turn of the millennium, there were um US observers and Russian observers in one another's countries just basically to work together to make sure that this this got all worked out. But I think also it's just kind of a show of faith, like, you know, we're not gonna nuke you, or we're not gonna let you get new to our own people are there kind of thing to which I thought was kind

of cool. Yeah. Other country countries took a little more strict approach. Uh. The Dutch Central Bank said if you we won't loan money to companies who weren't compliant. China said, you know what, all the top airline executives have to take flights on January first, um, and you know, so you better make sure your stuff is running correctly. Yeah. I think about that the nation or the government ordered airline executives to be in the air at midnight um,

or they would I guess probably go to jail. Yeah. And that sounds harsh and it is, but I think it is an interesting incentive to say the least, it's pragmatic. At least, you know, make sure your stuff works everybody. Um. But the the Y two K compliance is what I was talking about. That was like you could buy products around that time that said Y two K compliant, Like it could be a clock radio that says Y two K ready. Um, all kinds of products were labeled Y

two K compliant, certainly anything to do with computing. Yeah, And there was actually nobody watching to make sure that that certification was actually accurate. There was there, I think the Defense Department put out some like some guidance and on what to do to be Y two K compliant, but they were like find it, fix it all good were the steps like they were that vague. There was nobody's certifying it. And to me, yes, cheerleading from the

US government and raising awareness and maybe lending aid financially. Um, that was some really good roles that it played. But I feel like also it could have said, hey, if you're running this kind of operating software you're or you're producing dates using this time, here's a good fix you might be able to use or to create some sort of Y two K compliance guidance or steps. I feel

like it could have done a little more in that respect. UM, but there was nobody Like you could have bought anything and it could have had that sticker on it, and it really didn't necessarily mean anything. And chuck, there were some other governments had different responses. I saw that UM the that Canada had thirteen thousand troops readied UM on high alert just in case the the S went down. Yeah,

that was part of Operation Abicus. Yes, there's a really great Globe and Mail article called Y two K The Strange True History of How Canada prepared for an apocalypse that never happened but changed us all. It was a really good article. And then one of the other things that Canada did was the CBC sent a pair of engineers to a remote broadcasting station with UM with like some video which I would love to get my hands on. I couldn't find it anywhere that would that They were

to broadcast instructions on how to survive post apocalypse. Basically that was their job. Oh wow. Yeah. So everybody's sitting there ready and waiting, and it's finally December thirty one, and whether you're ready or not, it's all about to click over, right, Chuck, that's right. So we'll take another break here and we'll talk about what happened on December one pm right after this? All right? What what happened? Man? I've been on pins and needles for a twenty seconds.

Not much. Actually, some stuff did happen, but for the most part, nothing really happened. I mean for for you or me, or just about anybody else out there. The millennium came and went in the Y two K bug fizzled out like a dud. That's right. I remember waking up late in the day on January one, hung over. My everything worked, my phone worked, my power was on. There were no planes falling out of the sky. I would rode elevator up and down all day long. But

some things did happen. Uh. And like I mentioned video stores, you know sometimes there was one in Albany, New York that had an assessed a late fee of over ninety thousand dollars to a customer for the general's daughter. No less. Oh is that what it was? One the movie? Yes, that was the rental Oh boy, I think I actually saw that for some reason. There's Travolta, right, yeah, the a Trivolta that was in the post pulp fiction boom. Uh. Let me see. There was a National Laboratory nuclear weapons

plant in Tennessee had some malfunctions. I think there was some other nuclear malthfunctions in Japan, but nothing big obviously, or you know, it would have been catastrophic, but really mostly minor things happened. Yeah, there was like thirty thousand cash registers in Greece that we're all running the same software showed that that the year's nine hundred on receipts, like nothing particularly bad. I think. In the US, the most jarring thing that happened for the government was some

spy satellites were they went offline for three days. But for the most part, people were able to see what the problem was, deal with it, figure out a solution or a patch, and then bring the thing back online with minimal interruption or problems. And the fact is that these the interruptions that did happen were typically pretty small,

pretty inconsequential, and we're dealt with pretty quickly. Yeah. In England, in Sheffield, England, the National Health Services came under fire because there was a misreading of UH the age of pregnant mothers. Believe a hundred and fifty four women UH in the program were affected, and you know they were getting testing, like pre natal testing to see if there was a chance that their baby could have Down syndrome.

And it led to two pregnancy terminations and four births of children with Down syndrome, and for the life of me. I couldn't find out if there were lawsuits or what. I just saw articles that talked about penalties against the NHS And it's one of those things that was really hard to find in any kind of follow up. Right, that was not one of the inconsequential ones I mentioned. No, obviously not so. Um. The fact that, and from what I could tell, Chuck, that was far and away the

most consequential outcome. Everything else is usually pretty um, you know, either inconvenient or aggravating comical, like the guy who got the dollar late fee for his video tape. Um. But the fact that, you know, aside from the NHST issue, the fact that it was generally small stuff that happened for some reason made the public say, oh, well, this

was all just a hoax. It was all just as scammed as suck money out of our preppers pockets and um get us all riled up and scared and probably control us with George Bush's new world order that ministry talked about, um, and that the the whole thing was was all just just who we that we were all riled up for nothing, which I think goes to show that that the public by and large is a dumb, dumb. Yeah, I think we're seeing that now because Ed makes a

great analogy here. He says, hey, um, if if the Y two K bug had been a flood, and we spent hundreds of billions of dollars in countless work hours building a damn to hold back the flood, when that flood arrived and the damn held, you wouldn't say, well, I didn't get wet, So the whole thing must have been a hoax. And that that is almost a perfect analogy for what happened in retrospect with the Y two K bug. A crisis that would have been potentially really

huge and catastrophic was averted. And rather than saying poray we did it, we pulled together, people just kind of said, you guys got me all upset for nothing. Nothing happened. Yeah, I mean, let's say that they um, let's say it was all just minor problems that they didn't bother to fix beforehand, and all of a sudden, instead of a few minor annoyances and aggravations, there are thousands of those, and those compound on one other another somehow and create

sort of a domino effect. It's not just that they they corrected the main systems like the financial markets and the nuclear codes and all those things that they needed to correct. They corrected a lot of stuff that had a downstream effect just to make our lives a little less disrupted. Um. People looked at Italy at the time. They were a country that didn't do a lot and they didn't have a big fall out. But other people

who were a lot smarter and don't make knee jerk reactions. Yeah, but you know what, Italy is really small compared to us. They weren't nearly as computer reliant at the time as we were, and America was fixing their stuff, which helped fix stuff for all of the world because they were reliant on us and our systems. That's right. So so there's a pretty good argument you could make for all those people are like, no, it's totally fine. See, those

people didn't do anything. They got a free ride, basically because so much of the software that America was fixing is used around the world. That's a really really important point for because that's that's a that's a point that a lot of people make. They'll point to countries surprisingly like Japan. I can't believe it, but Japan did very little to deal with it, and like you said, there were some minor problems that some of their nuclear plants,

but the fact is a lot of them benefit. A lot of those countries benefited from the US leading the way on this. Yeah, And one of the strategies that other people who didn't think we should be pouring all this money into it beforehand was called fix on failure. They said, why why don't we just wait and see what happens and then we'll start to correct things as needed.

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

week or so, it's a really great example. Oh man, there was some problems with shifting cruise around because of weather, and all of a sudden, some flights um started being ready without the cruise, and then that led to more cruise being shifted around, and it was just this cascade of flights where they were every day canceling fifty six

of their flights and just leaving people stranded. And it was a really great example that um the what was the name of the pipeline that got cyber attacked for ransomware? That certain that was a really great example of like just these you know, people waiting in line for gas around the whole southeast and the East coast for a week,

more than a week. Like it's it's like at the time at y two k um the idea that like we could have just fixed this stuff really kind of shows their naivety for how how embedded, how we didn't really understand how embedded we already were with computers and how dependent we were on them. And you can't fix nuclear missile guidance system after it fails. You need to do that ahead of time. So that fixed on failure ideas. It was a pretty bad idea from the get go.

It was you mentioned, you know, one of the good things that came out of this was the fact that post nine eleven, our financial markets didn't crash because largely because of a lot of the work they did for Y two K and making those systems more robust and updated, and that happened kind of across the board, like the investment that a lot of people, I think a lot of people and companies were like, well, I guess now as a good time as any to really just sort

of update everything and to get our systems, uh, you know more um, you know, up to snuff for today's you know, some of the stuff was still running on code from the seventies that have been built on and built on. So that really helped drive the tech boom in a lot of ways in that companies were investing a lot more for the first time, uh in tech.

And also they you know, there were hundreds of thousands of new developers that were trained and hired to deal with this, and they were all of a sudden, we're looking for jobs, and some of them didn't find jobs, so they got creative and started writing apps and writing code for other programs. And it really fueled not only

here in India. I know, it was a really big deal that um their I T industry now compared to where it was then, it's just like night and day because of everyone that got hired to help with Y two K. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Like they make the case that the tech boom was a result of people coming into this industry who wouldn't have otherwise been there.

And also the spending. The spending was just ridiculous, because not only were people hiring I T people to fix their software, like some companies were like, forget this, We're just going to completely upgrade our systems. And these systems could have kept hopping along or hobbling along for another ten fifteen years, say, and then that system would have had to have been replaced, and then some other company does it another five years earlier, five years later, rather

than that. The United States and actually in a lot of ways, the world's computer systems got upgraded all at once, and that kind of laid that foundation with you know, the industry being flush with tech workers to just really take off, which is great. I saw in that same article about that Center report, Chuck, that that said it was money well spent. Somebody estimated that for every dollar spent on fixing the Y two K bug, it led to a return on investment of about six or seven dollars.

And that is an estimate in two thousand now today in in hindsight, if the the Y two K bug drove the tech booms that started in the early two thousand's late nineties, like, it's just it's it's countless, So it's probably in the trillions of dollars worth of value that it led to toats. So I think we kind of busted that myth in a way, didn't We kind of like the world of World's Radio broadcast. I think

so as usual, gen X is correct. Go jen X. If you want to know more about how gen X rules, you can go onto the Internet and look at this thing that we built called the Internet, and um, learn some more stuff. What do you think of that? I think it's great. And since I said learn some more stuff, it's time for a listener maw. I'm gonna call this Bob and Girls from our Child Labor podcast. Hi, guys, I'm Amanda Marus Sars. I'm a long time listener and

love everything you guys do. In your Child Labor episode, you mentioned you were unsure the dangers of working as a Bob and girl or boy. Well, let me tell you. I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts, where they claim the Industrial Revolution was born. If you're from this area in elementary school, you visit the boot Cotton Mill Museum for school field trips. We learned about the history of h and cotton weaving

processes of the time. Something and always stuck with me, being a little girl at the time of these trips was the Bob and Girls. They were cite a list of horrors that these child laborers went through, and getting their fingers snapped off in the weaving machine crevices, to getting their hair caught and essentially getting scalped. Man, I knew I have it. I totally knew if there was

gonna be something really horrific about it. I just wanted to polish off your episode with the most graphic details that seven year old me could remember being plagued by. That is from Amanda Maru's Stars. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Amanda. That's exactly what I assumed was out there, So thanks for filling in the blanks. Forest. I love it. If you want to get in touch of this like Amanda did, especially if you love everything we do like she says, we love hearing from people like that. You can get

in touch with those via email. It's Stuff podcast at I Heart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H