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Aug. 26, 1998 - Art Bell
02:30:57
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Ed Yourdon - The Y2k Problem
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Good morning, or good morning, as the case may be, and welcome to yet another edition of the Best in Live Overnight Talk Radio.
Also the biggest.
From the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands, off west eastwards, the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the pole, and worldwide on the Internet, thanks to broadcast.com, this is Coast to Coast AMI Mar-Tel.
Good morning!
Great to be here.
This hurricane has done the worst thing.
As far as I can see, it's still doing it.
It's just sort of barely on shore.
And for almost the entire day, I'm sure you've seen it.
The hurricane at 14 miles an hour, then 10, then 8, then 5, now 0.
Essentially.
I walked right up to the North Carolina coast with half of the eye on land and half of the eye over water.
It's the worst thing that can occur.
And then on top of that is stationary.
And so what a hurricane does, of course, is it feeds off the water.
That's how it gains its energy.
And once wholly upon land, a hurricane quickly loses its poop.
And this is the worst of all scenarios.
It just sits there, half in, half out, dumping water relentlessly on North Carolina.
So let me first tell you that there are thousands of people, many, many thousands of people,
let's try 240,000 people, 240,000 people out of power.
The winds remain in excess of 100 miles an hour.
Roofs are blowing off.
Maybe your prayers worked.
So far, no immediate reports of death or injury.
Serious injury.
Forecasters are saying this storm could linger over North Carolina for a day or more, bringing up to 20 inches of rain.
That's way too much.
So, in the first hour, I've got Ed Yorden on next hour.
And I debated whether we should go ahead with this or not, but I think we should go ahead with Ed Jordan's appearance.
But believe me, in this first hour, when I tell you I'm closing off the lines to everybody on all my lines, except the people in North Carolina, there are some that may have phones left.
There are some who may be able to tell us what's going on.
And how they're faring.
And we can report to them as they're able to hear us.
It may be their local stations have gone into the emergency broadcast mode.
That probably would be my guess.
But we are certainly reaching the people of North Carolina through various, very long distance signals, although I must tell you, that's another item that I do, I want to get out.
Let me read to you, please.
From Reuters News.
Solar eruption causes geomagnetic storm on Earth.
Solar wind blowing at more than a million miles per hour hit the Earth's magnetic field on Wednesday, sparking what U.S.
government scientists say could be a significant geomagnetic storm.
The U.S.
Geological Survey said charged particles from a solar eruption hit the Earth's magnetic field around 3 a.m.
Eastern And the resulting fluctuations in the field could cause power outages, satellite failures, disruption in communication, and aurora borealis.
Auroras are usually seen only in northern latitudes, but may become visible in the continental U.S.
during this geomagnetic storm.
In other words, we might see it even down here.
That's the kind of storm we're getting slammed with.
So, uh, you may see the sky turning green, blue, even red.
A severe storm in March of 89 caused the collapse of the Hydro-Quebec power system in Canada, left 6 million without power.
So, this is a very serious solar storm, and By the way, I'm getting an awful lot of feedback on the sun.
There really is an unusual amount of activity going on in the sun.
I want to read you a couple of faxes I've got and tell you a little bit about that.
Arden, keeping with the stories of solar activity on your program, I noticed last night two major networks reporting encouraging people to wear sunglasses.
Continental US folks.
Or some kind of eye protection to protect one from the cumulative effects of UV radiation.
Maybe this is just synchronistic, but it could also be the media and government beginning to warn us.
Or this, aren't my ham radio pals and I have been discussing the unusual intensity and whiteness, underlying whiteness, of the sun these afternoons on the FM commute.
I've never seen the sun in a context where I cannot even bear to look at it for an instant without actual pain in my eyes.
Now, he goes on, its radiance is felt through the glass hotter than when I lived in the Mojave Desert.
What is going on?
Do you have similar reports coming in?
Someone said the sun received a hit and produced ejecta recently after two comets spiraled in.
True or not?
Well, yes, true.
Not the current level of activity going on the sun.
But, let me tell you what I did when I got this email earlier today.
This is very unscientific, and you're going to have to be very careful.
Don't do what I did, but I went out and I held my hand in front of my eyes and just produced a tiny little slit between two fingers, and I looked at the sun.
And it's different in my judgment.
I didn't see any yellow component to the sun as this person who emailed me suggested.
I didn't see any yellow component and normally you do.
The sun was bright white only.
Now that's to my eyes and I might be cockeyed in the way I'm seeing this.
However, I called My friend, my boss, Alan Korbis, and I said, hey, Alan, don't take a look at this for me.
You know, I read him that same thing, and he went out and did the old trick with a box.
You can knock a little hole in a box and project on a piece of white paper the sun.
You know, people do that.
You can't look directly at the sun.
People do that when there are eclipses so they can see the sun.
I did it a dumb way with my hand, but same effect, almost.
The box is much safer.
You put a little pinhole in the box, and then hold the paper in front of the box, and it will project an image of the sun.
But, you know, he went out, along with one of our engineers, and they both took an eyeball in that way of the sun, and they said the same thing.
They said, my God, it's all white.
So, it's just, this isn't science, it's just an observation, based on people sending me email, and based on my own eyes.
And not... Then one more note, I'm getting increasing numbers of emails on compass deviations.
That may be due to the severe electromagnetic storm going on.
I don't know.
There's another hurricane out there, Danielle.
I've got the article here, Associated Press says, Danielle follows in Bonnie's footsteps, and probably that's what she's going to do.
Hurricanes tend to do that.
They establish a track and somehow or another... Well, this one could even... As well as a software engineering consultant, daredevil, parachutist, alligator trainer, sword swallower, Himalayan mountain climber, rockin' tourer, advisor to Hollywood stars, of ill repute.
And he has a sense of humor.
And he's written a bunch of books, including The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.
That has a catchy title.
The Rise and the Resurrection of the American Programmer.
And, uh... The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
His latest 1998 book is, of course, Time Bomb 2000.
What the year 2000 computer crisis means to you.
From time to time, especially when embarking upon new software development projects, He walks on water, leaps tall buildings in a single bound, is quiet and demure most of the time, knows that the men in black are armed and vigilant, and that such aberrant behavior might cause him to be sent back home.
Poor old Elvis.
And is widely known by mainframe dinosaurs, aging cobalt programmers, and Fleetwood Mac fans, as well as one or two outcasts in Redmond, Washington, As the lead developer of the Structured Analysis Design Methods of the 1970s.
He denies all rumors that he wrote most of Bob Dylan's songs.
Ed Yorden is the man we need on tonight.
He's the programming side.
We heard from Gary North.
Gary's an economist.
Gary comments on the social implications of Y2K Ed Yorden is a programmer, so tonight we're going to talk about that aspect of it and probably all the rest of it.
Ed, welcome to the program.
Oh, it's good to be here.
Really good to have you.
And I hope I set that up right.
In other words, Gary North came on and more or less scared the hell out of everybody and amazed me with what he said was going to occur with Y2K.
You told me on the phone, see if you stand by this, that if Gary North is a 10 on the scariness scale, you're maybe 7.5, 8, something like that?
I think that's pretty accurate, yeah.
So, for the, believe it or not, there's a lot of people out there that are just now slowly, it's hard to believe, I know, but slowly coming to awareness about the whole Y2K thing and beginning to believe Some of the press that it's finally beginning to get.
So, if you wouldn't mind, give everybody the 101 quick overview on what is Y2K.
Well, I'm happy to do it.
I think the even bigger problem is that nobody or very few people are connecting the textbook explanation to their own lives and businesses.
Oh, we'll get to that.
Don't worry.
Yeah, the 101 explanation is fairly simple.
Almost 50 years at this point, certainly 40 years, when computers were a lot more expensive and bigger and slower than they are now by roughly a factor of a million to one.
We deliberately pulled every trick we could think of to squeeze computer programs into the least amount of storage space.
This really goes back to even the punch cards, right?
Yeah, it actually does go back that far, so it even predates modern computers.
But where it really started causing problems was in the late 50s and early 60s, when banks and government agencies first began using computers as we now know them.
And one of the most obvious tricks that we could pull to eliminate a bit of storage space was to chop off the first two digits of the year, because everybody knew it was 19-something-something.
And as a result, we now have an unbelievable amount of software That was developed originally in a very deliberate fashion to keep track of the year.
It's just the last two digits.
So this is 98, next year is 99.
And of course the problem is that the year after that is 00.
And while humans understand automatically that we really mean 2000, a lot of computers have been programmed in such a way that they're going to assume it's 1900 and begin misbehaving in a variety of ways.
Okay.
All right, so that's the basic, that's the genesis of the problem now.
How culpable are you?
I just read your, boy, in fact, I should have read the whole thing to the audience, but it's very long.
Your bio, it's got a lot of humor, it's really cool.
Did you write that yourself?
Yes, I did.
That's excellent.
You obviously were a Cobalt prober, so I'm kind of wondering, in your years back toward Fleetwood Mac and so forth, How culpable are you?
When did you recognize this problem?
Were you actually back there programming two digits yourself?
Not so much.
I actually started off as a so-called systems programmer.
I've got a math degree from MIT and my early jobs were writing the computer programs to calculate times and cosines and logarithms and things like that.
Later on, I I got involved in a few business applications where I was actually writing computer programs, and I'm sure that I've created at least a few of these year 2000 bugs, as have most computer programmers over the years.
That have been around for a while.
Yeah, I've been around for about 35 years, but the scary thing is that this is still going on even today.
When did you discover, when did it dawn on you that there was going to be a problem?
1972.
Really?
Well, you see, this is part of the folklore of the computer field.
Everybody knew that things like this might someday cause problems.
We didn't make much of a fuss about it because in 1972, the end of the millennium was still almost a lifetime away.
But in those days, I was teaching some advanced programming classes and trying to come up with examples to convince computer programmers not to They get themselves into this kind of trouble.
You know, I said someday we're going to run out of area code, and they all went, you know, good fall, good fall.
Well, we have now.
Someday we're going to run out of social security numbers, and they're going to have to add another couple of digits.
That's really going to mess up a lot of computers.
And the other obvious example, even in 1972, is that someday the two-digit year representation was going to get us into trouble.
But if you were talking to a young programmer in 1972, you know, half of them thought they'd be dead by now.
And the main assumption that all of us made was that since the computer hardware was obviously advancing very rapidly from a technological perspective, we all assumed that most of the software we wrote in those days would be replaced within a matter of three, four, five years, so that anything that had turned out to be a poor choice, such as that programming decision, could be redone.
And that turned out to be, unfortunately, a bad mistake.
Yeah, bad mistake.
The next most important thing to ask you is one of the first questions that I ask Gary North, and I think this is critical.
If everybody gets really freaked out and concerned and scared, and they apply all of the resources they can muster, beginning now, will we finish in time?
According to the best software engineering so-called metrics guru, the answer is no.
There's a fellow by the name of Capers Jones, who's one of three or four people in the computer field whose entire career is keeping track of statistics about software and so on.
And according to his work, and he's written a whole book on this, we went past the point of no return, so to speak, basically at the beginning of this year.
If at that point we had assigned roughly 80-85% of all the computer programmers available to work non-stop, full-time on this problem, we might have had a chance of finishing.
We didn't do that, though.
We didn't do it, and we still are not doing it.
One of the very interesting things about this whole mess is that even though it's now beginning to be described in somewhat crisis-oriented terms, the average American company is only devoting about 25% of its resources That's the big companies.
I really should emphasize that the Fortune 500 companies, roughly 75% of the small businesses are not doing anything whatsoever, nor do they plan to.
But if you look at the Fortune 500 companies, 25% of their programmers are working on this problem.
And of course, that means the other 75% are doing something else, building new internet, Java applications, and so on.
So it's clearly not yet being recognized as a true national emergency, notwithstanding all the talk.
But even if that were to change tomorrow, it's now too late.
And even if we finish, the other significant thing that we know from 30 years of history in the computer field is that even if we did finish, we'd end up with an enormous number of bugs, of software errors, that wouldn't really become evident until after the clock rolls over.
Because no matter how much testing we do, This stuff is so complex that we always miss something.
All right.
It's a little like trying to forecast a hurricane, but you're saying we're still not doing what we should be doing.
And this is now almost September of 98.
You know, this is as for a social forecast, but I mean, do you think the crisis will deepen enough?
That they will begin doing the level of work that they should be doing, that it's already now really too late for anyway, soon?
Or do you think we're going to come right up to nearly the year 2000, as the ball drops in New York, and it still hasn't really gotten underway large scale?
Well, the level of public awareness has been going up steadily.
If you just look at the number of newspaper articles and so on.
But that's on how businesses run things.
Most businesses, of course, I have annual budgets for all the various things they're doing.
And as I said a moment ago, we're now spending about 25% of this year's computer budget in most of the big companies.
The surveys I've seen suggest that by the beginning of 99, most companies will ramp it up to about 50% in this country.
I don't know about Europe and South America.
They're generally much further behind than we are.
But in terms of corporate expenditures, it'll probably take a pretty big jump at the beginning of 99.
But what's really going to change things, in the opinion of several of us, is that we're going to go from speculative opinion, which is really all we have available today, to objective reality.
And this is a term Gary North likes to use as well.
On April 1st, April Fool's Day next year, is the beginning of the financial year for Japan and Canada and New York State.
That's only 217 days away now.
And at that point, all of their financial computer systems, the pension systems, tax systems, anything that involves a fiscal year, is either going to work or not work.
April 1st, they're going to get a full test of the kind, only it's not a test.
It's a dress rehearsal, in a sense.
And so far, the information that's been coming out of New York State is that they'll be lucky to get half of their mission critical systems finished.
Um, if legislature has not allocated enough money, the state has had trouble hiring enough programmers, all the usual problems.
Uh, we have less information available about Canada and Japan, but I suspect they won't make it either.
Well, I was gonna ask you about, uh, we'll get to the international thing.
Russia, for example, um, really, uh, is taking this seriously, and their statement about Y2K was, well, what we're gonna do is wait until January 1st, 2000, and see what happens.
That was the Russian Minister of Atomic Energy, by the way.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, that's got to rank up there with the top ten incredible statements of all time.
Oh, no, no!
That's also the strategy of a lot of American utility companies.
The official term for this is fix on failure.
The thing is, we don't have enough time, we don't have enough money, we can't even find a lot of these so-called embedded systems, so we'll just wait and see what happens.
We expect the failure rate to be fairly small, and besides, we have no alternative, so that's what's going on in this country as well as Russia.
In the case of Russia, it's a little bit more obvious.
From a mid-level executive in any company, all the way up to the CEO, I know how American companies are.
They're short-sighted.
They're short-term, profit-oriented.
And what's going on here is that anybody would be foolish enough to be brave enough to go in and order a gigantic budget in their company to be put toward this effort, the next quarter, of course, they'd be down and he'd be out.
And that's what's going on, huh?
Well, that's how we got ourselves into this position.
You asked a moment ago, When I and other programmers became aware of this, well, basically it was at the beginning of this decade that a lot of computer maintenance programmers could see that this was now a problem looming ahead of them.
And they began going to their bosses in the 91, 92, 93 period, which unfortunately was a period of recession in this country.
And they'd say to their boss, you know, we really ought to get around to fixing this stuff.
It's going to cost two or three million dollars.
And the boss would say, where's the return on investment?
Where's the profit?
Where's my bonus?
And that was it.
And now, of course, it's getting to the point where the big companies realize they have no alternative.
I mean, Citibank is spending, let's see, they just raised their estimate up to $650 million.
But the alternative is no bank whatsoever.
The small businesses are still going through this denial activity that you mentioned a moment ago, where Any suggestion that might be made to spend the money now is going to get deferred until next year.
Alright, we're going to get into some specifics, but I want to tell you a story.
A few months ago, there was a comet or an asteroid that couldn't be stopped, that was going to hit Earth and destroy all life.
And a lady called me, and we were saying, I wonder what the credit card companies would do in this case.
And so the next day this calls her credit card company, and sincerely asks them, What they would do, and she's put on hold, and she actually gets up the chain of command, um, the pecking order in this, uh, I don't know if it was Mascard or Visa, one of the big companies.
And they actually came back and gave her an answer, and they said, what we would do, ma'am, is we would continue to allow you to use your credit card up until the very last moment based on the following.
If the comet hits, It's all over anyway, and we're out of business and all dead.
If the comet misses, we're in great shape, because you've just put yourself in debt to the hilt.
So the answer is, we would stay in business, and you could use your credit card.
Well, there's an obvious application of that to year 2000, and I suspect that is the psychology in some companies right now.
All right.
Good.
Stay right where you are.
We're now at the bottom of the hour, which of course we reached very quickly.
Edward Yorden.
Oh, I said I wouldn't say that.
Ed Yorden is my guest.
His book is Prime Mom 2000.
And we'll get back to them right after the break.
And when it's all right and it's all been told, we gotta get right back where we started.
I'll tell you who's done who's wrong, we gotta get right back where we started.
I'm in a rush and I'm eager, when you first came my way.
I don't want to take your place.
Just to be together, you can do all the little things I say.
Every day, because of the show I do, which is fully national in every major U.S. city.
city, I get fax after fax and email, and these things say, Y2K problems solved.
Silver bullet.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
I bet I've had 200 emails and texts asking me to have a bullet to fix this thing.
What do you say to all that?
Well, the same thing that all the other Year 2000 programmers are saying, which is it is never going to happen.
Some of these announcements, and some of them are important, some of them are picked up by the media because the media would love to have kind of a Hollywood ending to this story.
Sure.
But it's not going to work primarily because of the variety of computers and programming languages that we're dealing with out there.
If it were just COBOL as one programming language and one kind of computer from IBM, then perhaps we could come up with a more or less silver bullet.
But there are roughly 500 programming languages and dozens if not hundreds of different kinds of computers Particularly when it comes to these embedded systems.
So the sad news is that there is no silver bullet.
There are various partial solutions for certain kinds of programs, but that's about the best we're ever going to do.
So when people out there read in newspaper articles that somebody's claimed to have a silver bullet to fix all of Y2K, it's BS?
It's BS.
It may be innocent BS or deliberate misleading, but unfortunately it's BS.
Yeah, I thought so.
The most important thing that I, and you already mentioned it, that I think people want to know now, at least the ones who listen to me and are kind of caught up on what's really going on virtually, as opposed to what the media is telling the rest of the masses, is how it's going to affect them.
How is it going to affect them?
What do you think, in reality, is going to occur?
Actually, not on that day, it's going to occur before that day, but on the big day, what's going to be happening?
Well, I think it's crucial that everybody realize that it's going to have a different impact on every one of us, depending on where you live in the country, what your health situation is, and all the other personal details.
But for most everyone, there are three critical things that we depend on.
We usually refer to them as the Iron Triangle in the year 2000 field.
That's utilities, telecommunications and banking.
If you wake up on New Year's morning and find that the lights are out, the phones are down and the banks are closed, then most everything else is going to be pretty secondary.
So those are the fundamental three that we're all worried about.
Now, for some people, there may be health issues.
If the hospitals are closed, if you don't have access to critical pharmaceuticals, that's going to be a real problem.
You're going to have different kinds of problems, depending on whether you live in Minneapolis or Miami.
The temperature's pretty different, and so on.
But again, it starts with those critical three.
Let's get them again.
Lights, or in other words, power.
Banking.
And what else?
Phones.
That's right.
Phones.
All right.
One at a time.
Power.
Well, the problem with power and really most everything else you start looking at is that we're not talking about just one power company where, again, you might imagine the Hollywood miracle through the combination of genius and extremely hard work and so on.
Maybe they'd fix it.
In the case of power, we're dealing with roughly 7,300 utility companies in the United States, of which 108 are nuclear power plants, and of which zero, none whatsoever, are year 2000 compliant at the moment.
What?
No, how about the... No, silly!
You think the Atomic Energy Commission would have had the nuclear plants definitely Y2K compliant, above and beyond all else?
Nope.
Nope.
When my daughter and I started researching our book, we found that the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had posted an advisory notice up the internet at the end of 1996 saying, you know, of all you nuclear power plants you might want to be aware of.
This doesn't constitute regulations or instructions or requirements.
It's just, you know, we thought you might want to take a look at it.
Now they're beginning to tighten up and putting a lot more pressure on the plants, but it appears that they do not have the resources to actually physically examine every single nuclear power plant, not that they're all that.
They're going to do a random sample and audit a couple dozen.
They are very heavily computer dependent though, aren't they?
Well, all of them are, yeah.
The problem with all the power plants is that They've got typically in a range of 10 to 20,000 so-called embedded systems, little microchips, monitoring both the production and also distribution of power.
And within that fairly large number of 10 or 20,000, the failure rate is going to be fairly small, probably on the order of 1 or 2 or 3%.
The trouble is you don't know which ones are going to fail.
So the power plants, on average, I have got a task ahead of them that is going to take on the order of two years.
And guess what?
We don't have that time in the last two years.
And 20 or 30 million dollars to travel these things down.
And the reason that computer people like me are very worried about all this is because, again, we're not just talking about one utility company, but 7,300.
Statistically, this goes back to some of the data from people like Capers Jones and a couple of others.
We know from the last 30 years in the computer field that about 15% of all projects, all software projects, whether it's something going on at Microsoft or anywhere else, 15% of them are going to be late.
Not just by a day or two, but by an average of six or seven months.
So if you take 15% of the power plants, they may still be working on it, you know, come New Year's Eve in 1999.
Right.
Same thing with the banks.
There are 11,000 banks in the United States.
Before we even leave banks, the big western power failure.
You just moved to... You're in Albuquerque?
Actually, I live in Taos.
Oh, Taos.
Even farther removed.
Where did you live before Taos?
New York City.
New York City, alright.
I assume, and I've heard, the rumor has been that you moved from New York City to Taos because of what you see coming.
Is that true?
It's partially true.
I've gotten to the point where I don't even go into much detail about my personal plans anymore because there's a tendency, at least in the newspaper media and television reports, to boil it down to black and white soundbites.
I know, but that's not us.
We've got all the time in the world.
Okay, well, let me give you the relatively short explanation.
One of the things that I think you can do at this point is Look at year 2000 as an approaching hurricane, the way the North Carolina people did a few days ago, and say, all right, I see it coming.
I better factor this into my plans without panicking.
In my case, it turns out that completely aside from year 2000, the youngest of my three kids is heading off to college this fall.
My wife and I are now in the empty phase stage of our life, and we had thought probably two or three years from now we'd sell our apartment and get a smaller place in New York and spend more time out west, which I love.
Because of year 2000, we simply decided to move up the timetable.
The real estate market is really great right now, so it just was a good time to do it.
Originally, I had thought maybe we'd spend New Year's weekend of 1999 down in Florida, perhaps on the beach, and then I thought, well, maybe I'd better give it a week, and then maybe a month, and then a couple of months, and then the more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd better be someplace where I could stay indefinitely if need be, depending on just how bad things might be.
And in a city like New York or Boston or Chicago, I think it could get pretty bad.
Yeah.
Questions are to the U.S., including Canada and Mexico.
It has gone down now, actually, but once particularly, I recall, because I was on the air.
And ostensibly at the end of the entire investigation, They said that the grid went down because one company in Idaho somewhere went down.
And it took everything down like so many dominoes.
Now that's one little power company.
And I always thought the whole idea of the grid was to isolate an outage and continue to provide service to the rest of the country.
And the grid seemed to work in a backwards fashion then.
But if 15% of them go down, What chance is there for the grid, even portions of it, to remain up?
Well, we're obviously talking about life and death questions here, and it's one thing to have a casual conversation about it on the air tonight, but that very same question was raised by Senator Robert Bennett in the Senate two months ago.
That's right.
Of the top experts.
I mean, I don't spend my career working in the utility industry, but Bennett raised the same question, and the answer was, we don't know.
We don't know?
We do not know.
They said they think the odds are small, but as you said a moment ago, we have experience both in the western states, that was the summer of 96 that happened, and also back east in New York and on the east coast.
We've seen cases where big chunks of the grid go down.
We think, many of us think, it's going to be exacerbated with this year 2000 thing because the utility industry is going through a big deregulation activity right now.
Which raises the possibility that some of them are going to avoid putting money into year 2000 repairs because they're trying to save money or unload some of their plants or whatever.
Great.
Great.
So, we have to instate it's entirely possible on that day we'll be out of electricity.
I think it's entirely possible.
And the real question, of course, which, you know, our friends in North Carolina are going through right now, is not so much whether we'll have a fatal crisis when the lights go out, but rather how long will it take to get them back on again?
Well, I was about to use that analogy.
In other words, this damn hurricane is sitting there like a dummy, just picking up rain and dumping rain on land.
It's horrible, it's sick.
Is Y2K going to sit on us like that?
Are we going to have like a one or two day, or even a week, or a month worth of problem?
Or what, or how long is this thing going to circulate over our heads?
Well, again, the honest answer is we don't know, and the best experts in the world don't know.
And everybody's got to plan accordingly.
The common experience that all of us citizens have is that even if there's a hurricane, the lights are rarely out for more than a couple of days.
But the folks up in Montreal can give you some different answers to that.
Because of that ice storm back in January, in the suburbs around Montreal, they were without power for a month.
A month.
And that makes it a whole different situation, especially if it's in wintertime.
Same thing has been happening in Auckland, New Zealand, through a combination of problems back in February.
The entire city of Auckland went down in terms of power for a month.
A couple days, you know, we can all get through that.
That's not a big deal.
Well, actually it is.
It's almost unimaginable.
I can't imagine being without power for a month.
Oh, no, no.
A month is bad.
A couple days is bad.
You know, if somebody tells you there's a blizzard or a hurricane and the lights might be out for a day or two, you know, you get some candles and some bottled water.
I mean, basically what the folks in North Carolina are doing, and it's unpleasant.
And in some rare cases, it might be life-threatening, but most everybody gets through it.
In fact, as you saw in the TV report, some people thought it would be a good chance for a party.
If it goes on for a month, it's not a party for anybody.
That's pretty obvious.
And beyond a month, well, actually, even beyond a few days, but certainly when it gets to a month, you have some other terrible consequences, particularly the second major form of utility, which is water.
If you live in a city, you turn on a water faucet and clean water comes out from where?
From a water purification plant which is powered by electricity.
One of the great advantages I have here in New Mexico is that I've got my own well in my backyard.
So the folks in the cities have the additional risk of water contamination if the power stays out for more than a few days at a time.
Yeah, with the power would go the water.
And it would, I guess, if the power stayed out, there would be very quickly cascading events in all kinds of arenas.
Things that would begin to ground to a halt.
And at some point, in the worst case, the whole thing would feed on itself, wouldn't it?
And it would get exponentially worse quickly.
Well, that's, I think, one of the things that we computer people worry about the most.
We have enough trouble tracking down and fixing a computer problem when it involves an isolated failure.
Now here, by definition, every single computer that has any date sensitivity to it is going to roll over at the same time, and then all of these problems begin interacting with each other and becoming compounded, so to speak.
Again, it's particularly troublesome if we lose electricity for more than a couple of days.
The Montreal people found this out.
You know, a lot of the hospitals and police stations and so on had diesel generators to keep them going, but they were never intended to be used for more than a few days at a time.
At the end of a month, you run out of diesel fuel, you've burned out the generators, and you're out of luck at that point.
And that seems to be true throughout the country, that The hospitals, schools, emergency operations are pretty well prepared for short-term problems.
Everybody expects this hurricane in North Carolina is going to eventually move away, but if it were to sit there for three weeks or so, it'd be pretty hard for anybody to keep going at that point.
It really would, and if you were to have to make a guess, and that's all it can be right Based on what you know about the programming and power companies, what do you think is going to happen?
What do you think?
I mean, this is asking for a personal opinion now.
A personal opinion?
I believe we're going to have regional blackouts.
Again, I'm not quite as pessimistic, perhaps, as Gary North.
I don't see the entire country going black for weeks at a time, necessarily.
But at least a handful of the major cities and other regional areas, including this area of New Mexico that I live in.
Following that, I foresee the possibility of dirty power, for lack of a better phrase.
Spikes, brownouts, surges, just noise for possibly several weeks until the entire grid stabilizes.
Well, that's very damaging.
Certainly to electronics, personal computers, any kind of delicate electronic equipment.
And again, Montreal was a good example of that.
Oh look, I'm three computers down over the last year and a half.
Thank you very much.
Power spikes.
Yep.
It's something we've already had experience with.
And again, if you have that kind of instability in the power grid of regional blackouts, there's bound to be some after effects as things start coming back online again.
It's going to be a big celebration, you know, that night going into January 1st.
And a big celebration.
It sounds to me like people are going to wake up with more than one headache.
I think there's a good chance.
I really do.
You may find some of these celebrations getting canceled as we get closer in and people begin to realize just how bad it can be.
But again, if you look at the hurricane in North Carolina, there are people having parties, even as we speak.
Well, I think the more prudent people are boarding up their windows and trying to get out of town.
Well, that's correct, and you're right about the partiers.
In a very imperfect world, which it'll be on that day possibly, they won't last real long.
Those people will be probably the first to go.
Quite possibly.
I guess at least they can take a...
That's a personal position that they partied right to the end.
Yeah, they may watch the ball drop in Times Square and then watch all the lights go out and then after that it may not be quite as much fun anymore.
You know what I tell people?
I tell them, hey, you want to know what it's going to be like?
Go out in front of your house to where the big breaker box is, wherever your big breaker box is, and just throw your mains off.
And then go back in the house and walk around for a while.
Then you'll know how much you're going to... I mean, there are a lot of places where people take electricity utterly for granted.
Period.
Well, certainly in the major cities across the country and throughout Western civilization, yeah.
I mean, it has...
Well, actually, one of the interesting things about this for America is that we've got reliable infrastructures that we've always taken for granted.
You pick up the phone, you always get a dial tone.
You turn on the light switch, you always get the lights on.
You turn on the water faucet, you always get clean water coming out.
Certainly, throughout my lifetime, that's been the case.
Well, in that case, then, people should remember these days now.
Finally, shouldn't they?
All right, we're at the top of the hour.
Hold on, Ed.
You've got a good break here.
We'll be right back.
Ed Yorden is my guest.
A logical follow-on to Gary North.
I'm Art Belch.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
♪♪ And I'm considering changing my career to the computer
networking field.
In light of your appearance and the whole Y2K thing, would you please comment on the type of job skills that might be useful after Y2K?
And I was tempted to say something like perhaps stonemason.
Well, it's going to depend a lot on how serious this Y2K problem turns out to be.
If it's only moderate, There's going to continue to be an enormous demand for software people to fix all the things that didn't get finished in time or to fix all the bugs that we weren't aware of.
And even without Y2K, there was already a shortage of about 300,000 programmers in this country because it's just a booming industry.
And because of all the resources that have to be applied to year 2000, An awful lot of work that would otherwise be done.
New computer systems and so on have been put on the back burner.
So that if we manage to get through all of this, which obviously all of us hope will be the case, it's going to be a terrific career.
On the other hand, if everything does fall apart and the worst scenario develops, you might even see a Luddite reaction where all the programmers are hung from the nearest tree.
Uh, and then as you say, perhaps it would be better to become a farmer or a stonemason or something along those lines.
Well, by the way, that's really a good question.
Um, if things go really wrong, which you seem to be leaning toward and Gary certainly does, um, would there be, could there be really a witch hunt like that?
Um, uh, such a terrible reaction against, um, computer programmers?
I frankly really doubt it.
It's more likely that you're going to see the witch hunt taking place between the politicians and business leaders and so on, who are going to be visibly blaming each other for having allowed this to happen.
But it is something that we computer people occasionally joke about, that if it's really bad, you might not want to admit what career you've been in for the last 10 or 20 years.
Let's talk about banking for a second.
Now, money makes the world go round, as the old saying.
And if money makes the world go round and there's no money, does the world stop going around?
I mean, what's going to happen with banking?
Well, I think there's a fairly good consensus that if anybody does make it, if any industry sector makes it, it'll be the banks and financial institutions.
They're at the front of the list.
And at the back of the list are state and local governments and hospitals and so on.
But in terms of banking, there are roughly 11,000 banks in the United States that are under enormous pressure, both self-imposed and even more importantly imposed by the Federal Reserve System, to get everything finished by the end of this year.
So the Fed is at least doing the right thing?
As best they can.
As best they can.
I mean, there's a shortage of properly trained inspectors and auditors and One could argue that they should have gotten all of this started two or three years earlier, but that's all water under the bridge.
They are working on it.
The banks have got the money, they've got the people, they've got the sense of urgency.
That doesn't necessarily guarantee that they're going to finish.
And again, one of the things that I worry about, as not only a computer programmer, but also a software engineering consultant, We're not really very good at large, complex projects.
Whether it's the Denver International Airport that got such a lot of bad press, or Microsoft being a couple of years late with any one of its products.
We just don't do very well on big projects.
So when you hear that the Bank of America, for example, just to pick one random example, has got a thousand programmers working on their year 2000 project, that sends shivers up and down my spine.
I very much hope they make it.
But, you know, the conventional wisdom is that if anyone's going to make it, it'll be the big banks.
And if anyone's going to be in trouble, it'll be the little banks.
Well, that may be true, but there's some big money involved here.
Citibank is spending $650 million.
Most of the major U.S.
banks are spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
And you have to cross your fingers and hope that they'll do it.
Now, the biggest risk I think that they all run is not Not necessarily within their own computer systems, but rather their connections to everything else.
They're just as vulnerable to the lights going out as everyone else is.
And where was it?
In the New York Times last October, there was a report from Chase Manhattan Bank as just a typical example of a big American bank.
They identified and enumerated all of their external interfaces, Interfaces with other banks and government agencies and so on.
2,950.
These are external organizations or external computer systems over which they really have very little control.
What they have to do and what every American business is now doing is you go out to your suppliers, your vendors, your customers, and you think about that in terms of a bank.
If your biggest customers go bankrupt, What's it going to help you if you fix all your computer systems?
You're still dead in the water.
You'll be waiting for somebody to make a deposit who is not going to be making it.
That's right.
In fact, the biggest problem with all of this stuff is our growing awareness of exactly how interdependent we are.
Most of the banks are finding that they've got several thousand vendors and suppliers and so on to deal with.
They're not going to be able to operate if the phone lines are down or the lights are out.
So again, the good news is that if anybody is going to make it in terms of getting their own house in order, it probably will be the banks.
The bad news is that they are not completely in control of their own destiny.
And of course, the scariest thing for them is that in the literal sense of the word, they're running a con game.
Confidence.
If we lose confidence, the game is over.
Alright, let me start you.
Anticipation of that, by the way.
America, Australia and New Zealand are the first three thus far.
Whose governments have already announced that they're printing extra currency in case the bank runs bankrupt.
That's exactly where I was going.
We're printing, what, a couple hundred billion dollars or something in currency?
We are, according to the Fed, raising the amount of cash that will be available from $150 billion to $200 billion.
So it's an additional $50 billion, apparently, that's going to be printed.
That means that they anticipate The possibility, and we're way off on sensitive ground here, I know, they anticipate the possibility, obviously, of bank runs.
One would imagine so.
One also has to wonder why have they announced it now in August of 1998, 16 months before the big day?
You can either take an optimistic or pessimistic outlook on this and say, well, maybe they're trying to persuade people early that there's no need to fear because they're printing all this money.
If you do the arithmetic, and this is where an economist like Gary North is really in his home turf.
Yes.
Do the arithmetic and you find out that that doesn't go very far if you divide that extra $50 billion amongst 260 million Americans.
That's right.
If everybody tries to take out even a month's worth of cash, we run out.
Yeah, I know.
And we all have to be very careful here because I don't want to add.
I really don't want to add to the possibility of, you know, panic in bank runs and do what Y2K wouldn't do by causing a panic.
So... Well, I would argue, though, that if that was going to happen, it would have happened already.
If you take a look at very sober articles and speeches and statements from everybody from Clinton and the British Prime Minister to Alan Greenspan to Articles in Business Week and the New York Times.
I mean, if people looked at all of that and were in the mood to take it seriously and panic, they would have done so already.
Well, I'm going to argue with you there.
Look, I can have the most important guest in the world coming on and I can promo that tonight.
You know, next week so-and-so is going to be on.
Should be tremendously exciting, but because it's next week, People just go, okay.
You know, they get very excited the day before the appearance of some magnificent guest, but a week before, they don't even think about it.
Well, I guess that's my point.
We could be saying almost anything and making predictions about bank runs today and no one's going to pay attention because that's next year.
And particularly next year when we hit not only the April 1st date that I mentioned, but a few others like July 1st when 46 more states begin their fiscal year.
That's when we move from subjective, speculative opinion about what might or might not be going on with the banks to reality.
Now, if it turns out that half the states collapse and cannot send out monthly pension checks, then there is a risk, obviously, which none of us want to contribute to, but I don't think we're going to be a factor at that point.
If people are convinced, say, that Russian citizens seem to be today that things are not going well.
They're going to be down at the bank trying to get their money out.
Well, alright.
Let's approach it this way.
What have you done, without giving me specifics, what have you personally done to prepare Have you taken steps to personally prepare financially?
I've taken some.
I'm still up in the air about some others because the options are not easy and obvious.
I'll tell you the simple obvious thing that I have done, which is simply to get out of the stock market.
Which, again, like some of the other decisions I've made and other people are making, are driven not entirely by year 2000.
The stock market's crazy enough anyway, and you look at it and think, well, Y2K or the Asian crisis or any number of other things could turn out to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
So I'm out of the stock market, out of mutual funds, everything's in a money market account.
That was easy.
A no-brainer.
The hard part, which I have not decided what to do, is how to deal with my retirement funds.
If you try to take money out of your IRA or PO or 401K... You get penalties.
You betcha.
In fact, I mean, I have it easy because I'm a self-employed consultant.
I can do whatever I want, except for the penalties.
But if you're an employee with a 401K plan, you can't get your money unless you quit.
That's right.
So, you know, that's not a trivial decision.
I guess all I can say there is that whatever decisions I really want to make in that area, I'm going to try to do by the end of this year because I think I'll still have all my options available to me.
People can take their cue from that.
Fine, thank you.
I joked earlier about the credit card companies.
What about credit card companies?
And credit.
And do you advise people to be out of debt?
Or will it make any difference?
In other words, if things begin to collapse, how are they going to collect a mortgage from you?
Well, you realize that you're now asking economic questions of a computer geek, but as just, you know, an ordinary intelligent person, I've looked at this whole thing and I've said, well, the first piece of common sense is don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Don't bet the farm on any one particular scenario because there are so many unknowns.
And the second thing that occurred to me was simply that in the face of uncertainty, I'd like to be as liquid and as flexible and as unconstrained as possible.
So, you know, lots of debt and so on.
I mean, you can certainly imagine some scenarios where you might actually do very well by virtue of having a lot of debt, hyperinflation and so on.
But from my perspective, I want to have as many options open and avoid as many serious risks.
You know, if I end up being unemployed and we have a serious deflation and I'm sitting on a big mortgage, that doesn't sound like a very good scenario to me.
No, nor to me.
Um...
Yeah.
I've got to be so careful in this area because I really don't want to contribute to a problem that I see coming.
When do you think, here's a good question for you, when do you think it's possible that the American people, in fact the world's people, will suddenly be what they aren't right now and that is
suddenly aware that, hey, this is real.
When will that dawn on them? When will the lightbulb go on?
Because that'll be an important moment.
Well, that's an area of enormous concern for all of us working in this area
because we're afraid that it may flip overnight from today's version of total denial or obliviousness
to a reaction of complete panic and that's obviously the worst of all scenarios.
Um, I...
I think that there's going to be a steadily rising level of awareness, but there won't be a connection to action for quite a while.
Everybody's heard about year 2000 in one form or another, but it just sort of goes into the general category of bad things that might happen sometime in the future.
My biggest concern is that unless the government takes a very strong, active leadership role, as they are, for example, in Australia and England with television ads and the whole works, unless our government does that, it may be this April 1st scenario we were talking about where we wake up in the state of New York and find that the government of New York is unable to pay any of its bills.
That'll get on the television.
That might do it.
That might do it.
Well, New York State and Japan and Canada all on the same day.
But see, that's a terrible way to subtly make the American public take this seriously.
I think it's very discouraging, for example, that the President Clinton gave a fairly serious speech about year 2000 on July 14th.
It wasn't even televised.
I know.
The text is available, and I had some criticisms about some of the things he said, but at least there was some public statement from the country's leader that could have been, I think, given a lot more publicity.
Well, you know, everybody's worried about Monica.
We'll be right back.
Ed Yorden is my guest.
His current book is Timebomb 2000.
You're going to want to read it.
And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM, from the Kingdom of Nye, with Art Bell.
It is.
My guest is Ed Yorden.
He is the, in a way, the counterpart to Gary North.
Ed is the computer guy, the technical guy.
Gary is the economic guy.
He's one of my favorite lines.
Thank you.
Ed Yorden will be right back.
Are you thinking, in your category of expertise, says, would it be possible for a company like Microsoft that has a programming team in place capable of writing complex programs with over 25 million lines of code, could they come up with a silver bullet?
Well, you know, the Common rumor is that Bill Gates has already done it.
He's got the solution in a vault somewhere waiting to unveil it sometime next year.
The answer is no.
Unfortunately.
First of all, you have to remember that the attempts that Microsoft has made to develop 25 million lines of code have been as late and as screwed up as everybody else's.
They're not perfect.
They happen to be among the richest and most powerful.
They've got enough work just to get their own house in order.
Which they're late on arriving at because, like everybody else, they didn't really take it seriously for quite a while.
They're going to have enough trouble just getting their own house in order, and they certainly don't have much to offer the rest of the world.
I mean, they could conceivably come out and help people get their PCs fixed if they were interested in doing so, but they have no particular expertise in the area of mainframes or embedded systems.
And that's certainly where a big part of the problem is going to be.
What do the mainframes run?
Give people a sense.
I mean, what are the mainframes and these embedded chips in systems, what do they run typically?
What do they do?
Power companies?
Yeah.
Well, the mainframes are in the large Fortune 500 kinds of organizations, the banks, the insurance companies, the government agencies, and the power companies.
You know, the local power company that has to print a million bills a month is going to have a big fat mainframe.
So it's a phone company.
So those are the ones that are dealing with the... that have the oldest software, because they've been printing phone bills for the last 30 or 40 years, as opposed to Silicon Valley that's got a whole lot of sexy stuff, but they've only been around for two or three years.
If Ed's projections are correct, This calls for a social comment, which you don't have to make.
What's your best guess where this event will find its place in human history?
Well, I hope that it's no worse than the Great Depression, frankly.
If you listen to the worst kinds of scenarios from the Gary Norris, it could be like the Black Plague.
You know, civilization continued on, but it was Pretty bad period of time.
What we're going to have is absolute chaos for no more than a couple of days, maybe a week.
And that unfortunately represents optimism when compared to Gary North.
I'm hoping that that will be followed by no more than a couple of months of moderate chaos where we'll have something more equivalent to a third world economy where The phones work sometimes, but not always.
The lights work sometimes, but not always, until things really stabilize.
But if we have those two things to begin with, then I don't see how we can possibly avoid a major recession, if not depression.
And that's what people are predicting in a variety of different forms.
Gary North's scenario is kind of the worst end of the scale.
People like Dr. Edward Yardeni, the chief economist at Deutsche Mark and Grenfell, is also predicting a 70% chance of a national recession, a global recession, actually.
Good.
Alright.
I guess we, in a way, this is the right time for this question.
Please ask, Ed, if everything goes down, January 1st, 2000, worst happens, Due to the problem not being fixed and you say it can't be fixed in time.
And then finally, at some later date, they fix it.
Six months, a year later.
Can everything start back up again and business run as it once was?
Or is there some possibility it virtually will simply stay down?
I don't want to say forever, but for a good portion of our adult lifetimes.
How about that?
Well, I think we're completely in the range of speculation there, but it depends, I think, on just how long a period and how pervasive a form of disruption we have.
You know, when I've said that it cannot be fixed in time at this point, I want people to realize that we're not really talking about an all-or-nothing proposition.
We will manage to get probably 75% of the computers in this country fixed.
You know, it's a question of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty.
And it's a question of whether we get 75% or 80% or 90% because that'll have a lot of impact in terms of this question you've just raised.
If we manage to get all but 10% of the utilities fixed and running and all but 10% of the banks, etc., then I would imagine a period of chaos followed eventually by a return to normal with, as I was saying earlier, nothing worse than A great depression.
If we only get 75% or 60% or 50% of the banks and the utility companies and the phone companies repaired, there is clearly some risk that we might not get back for the rest of our lifetime.
I'm hoping very much that that won't be the case, but there's no way that I can prove it one way or the other.
All right.
I just heard an ad, maybe even I ran it, I don't know.
They said 30 million people will join the Internet.
This year, the Internet is a really, really important arm of telecommunications.
What is likely to occur to the Internet?
Well, one of the ironies about the Internet is that it was designed, as you may know, to withstand nuclear attack.
The Internet used to be ARPANET.
It was the brainchild of the Defense Department of a communications approach uh... that would uh... manager reroute messages around any
local outages right i would just rate now the problem though is that uh... it's
grown far beyond what the military originally uh... thought of it as soon as you're
and uh... the internet is vulnerable on about four different levels uh...
first of all if you don't have a doubt on you don't get on the internet
Right?
At least I don't.
I don't know about you.
That's right.
There are a few people out there who manage to get in by microwave shots, but they are a teeny-weeny minority.
Right.
So the basic phone system is a big part of the equation.
Second problem is that the Internet is serviced, so to speak, by a vast collection of servers and routers and gateways and hubs and switches and all kinds of things that, in many cases, are running on old equipment.
You know, your internet file server is often a leftover 386 or some other kind of hand-me-down machine that's sitting in the closet.
Yep.
The hardware and the network operating systems and a lot of the basic software has got problems that nobody is paying much attention to because the internet community is, in my opinion, kind of intellectually arrogant and they believe that none of this applies to them.
The third problem is that even with the newest, sexiest stuff on Java, There's nothing to prevent you from having your 2000 problems.
The internet log routine on my website is non-compliant.
On your website?
Well, because I'm using standard software from an internet service provider and they provide a standard utility that I can use to find out how many hits I have on my website.
That has the year 2000 problem in it.
So what's going to happen to your website?
Well, I mean, assuming that nothing else goes wrong, it just means that all the little reports I print out about how many people come to visit my site may be scrambled up.
The last thing to keep in mind... If anybody's coming to visit at all.
Yeah, if anyone's coming at all.
The last thing to keep in mind is that the primary justification or use of the Internet for a lot of big businesses these days is to support e-commerce.
Sure.
Which means that they want customers like you and me to dial up on the internet and access, it turns out, their back-end mainframe computers.
Right?
You can order something over the internet and you're dealing with a web browser and all this really new technology, but at the end of the chain, you're hooked into the company's mainframe production database.
Absolutely.
So that if that goes down, I mean, you and I might still be able to send email to one another, The commercial aspect of it is very vulnerable to the old legacy mainframe system.
In other words, I couldn't buy anything?
Right.
For example, my wife has learned the art of getting cheaper airplane tickets by ordering them through the internet.
It's a great way to do it.
That's the kind of thing that would suddenly be non-functional?
Yeah, I mean, assuming the phone lines are still up and assuming that, you know, we didn't have these other problems, In order for your wife to be able to buy a plane ticket, she's interacting with the American Airlines Sabre system, or whichever one it is, and that's 30-year-old mainframe legacy software.
Right.
Front-ended by all of this new internet stuff.
Alright, the phone system itself, we haven't, we've just barely touched that one.
You're right, I mean, everybody in America, especially in America, you go to foreign countries and sometimes you don't get a dial tone.
But here, you always get a dial tone.
Phones work. I mean even sometimes when power's out and other things go wrong, phones work.
And so what's liable to occur with the phone system? What do you see technically occurring there?
Well, as with everything else, it's the complexity and diversity that's part of the problem here.
You know, when you think phone system, you may think first and foremost AT&T or the baby bells.
Right. But in fact, there are, you know, a couple of dozen of the major telecommunication
firms that probably represent, in fact I read it somewhere, on the order of 98% of all the phone
traffic. You know, there's a lot of people that are in the phone system that are in the
Each of those companies, EDI, Sprint, AT&T and so on, have got massive projects.
In the case of AT&T, I think it's a $500 million project to get their systems, their switches, their software ready.
And again, we have a pretty miserable track record of accomplishing those sorts of things on time.
But I think we're going to probably make it in terms of the big telecom companies in this country.
We're still vulnerable to the small telecom companies, you know, the mom and pop phone company in East Oshkosh.
That could conceivably inject non-compliant or corrupt data into the system.
Again, that's an area where we simply don't know enough about what will happen and what might not happen.
But, you know, the biggest problem there is probably going to turn out to be not in the major telecom companies, but rather in small businesses.
If you've got a, for example, a near radio station, a PBX switchboard, That you bought from some reputable vendor three or four years ago, it's probably non-compliant.
90% of the ones built before 1996 are non-compliant.
God, I just thought of that.
I do the show from my home, so I don't have a radio station.
I'm just on radio station.
But you know what?
I've got an automatic phone system here that is computer operated.
That just occurred to me.
And if the computer didn't work, you and I wouldn't be talking right now.
That's right.
You know, and what we're most worried about is the small businesses across the country that have 30, 50, 100 people or whatever.
So big enough so that they've bought one of these PBX boxes from Bucent or from Nortel or from, you know, perfectly reputable vendors that they bought them three or four years ago.
It doesn't occur to them that there might be some problems.
And even if you tell them, they don't have the money available right now to just casually go out and spend another $50,000.
So that may turn out to be where, you know, the biggest problems are.
We're also going to have problems with international calls.
If you want to make a call to South America or Africa, you're not going to have much of a chance of doing that for the first couple days or weeks or months of 2000.
Yeah, you keep going exactly where I was going to go.
I mean, the phone system is really international.
And I remember the Galaxy satellite that went down a few months ago.
Oh, we couldn't draw money out of our automatic teller machine here in Pahrump.
Um, it was down.
When the Galaxy satellite went down, all the pagers went down, doctors weren't, blah, blah, blah.
It was just a little teeny-weeny taste of what could occur in telecommunications, huh?
One satellite.
One satellite.
And by the way, that one was particularly interesting because it was a hardware problem.
The main computer in the satellite went down, and there was a backup computer that should have taken over, and it didn't.
It didn't.
Right.
So, you know, this gets back to the point that I was making before, that a lot of the systems that we have throughout this infrastructure have got some degree of redundancy and backup already built in, but they're not really prepared for serious problems.
In this case, one satellite goes down, and look what it did.
If you imagine all the satellites going down, or some large number of Parts of the infrastructure going down, it's very scary.
And that could happen?
I think so, unfortunately.
Alright, well, for example, the program that you and I are doing right now, let me see, one, two, three, there are three satellites involved in a chain in getting our voices to radios across America and beyond.
There's three satellites.
And some landline connections.
So, give it to me straight here.
As a broadcaster, how much chance is there that on January 1st, I'm going to be on the air?
I plan on taking a month to kick in, seriously.
Are you serious?
Actually, this is very serious.
I mean, you look at this situation and you think, well, if I'm lucky, it's only going to be messed up for a couple of days.
But, you know, it could be a month.
Gee, it could even be a year.
I mean, there's only two ways.
This signal has to go from here to Oregon, Oregon, back to New Jersey, New Jersey, up to what they call Big Bird, and then down to radio stations, which wouldn't be broadcasting without electricity anyway.
Right.
So your answer to me as a broadcaster is, plan a vacation?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that this is a prudent form of insurance.
There's no guarantee that any of this is absolutely going to go wrong, but I think there's enough of a chance that, you know, this is the equivalent of putting on seatbelts and getting airbags and making sure that your insurance policy is paid in up-to-date.
By the way, you know what the backup is for me getting my signal to the uplink Point, New Jersey?
What's that?
The phone system.
Okay.
Oh, God.
Um, I had a young man call me, and this is probably, again, kind of away from your field of expertise, a couple of
nights ago.
And he's blind, not sighted.
And he's scared to death.
Now, that brings up the whole specter of people who are disabled.
People who are blind or cannot hear or, you know, there's a whole spectrum of people medically dependent out there.
What about them?
Let's see, where did I hear the number about hospitals?
Senator Robert Bennett had a hearing on the medical and health industry on July 23rd.
I believe there are 8,000 hospitals in this country.
The hospitals, unfortunately, have been just about at the end of the list in terms of industries working on this
problem.
Uh, your typical hospital has got, uh, three or four thousand different kinds of medical electronics devices, uh, that they've got to check out, plus all the other kinds of computer systems for billing and Medicare and so on.
I mean, is it possible that x-ray machines, that CAT scan machines, that, you know, I could go on without forever, that these machines might not work?
Absolutely!
Uh, and the scary part is that they are so complex That the hospitals themselves usually don't have the expertise to check them out and decide, determine whether they're going to work or not.
They've got the same problem I was mentioning earlier with the banks.
They are suddenly realizing that they are not in control of their own destiny.
They've got to essentially write letters to the x-ray vendor and the CAT scan vendor and the pacemaker vendor and all these companies to say, is this device of yours going to work?
I was about to say, I wonder if they're getting letters back.
I wrote to my bank, you know, after I did this.
Gary scared the hell out of me.
The scary thing is that they're finding that they're being stonewalled by a good senator.
I was about to say, I wonder if they're getting letters back.
I wrote to my bank, you know, after I did this.
Gary scared the hell out of me.
So I wrote to my bank and I got a letter back, very nice letter.
And essentially it said, we are surely aware of the problem.
We have a task force working on it and we have every confidence that we will be compliant
by uh... january first russia they get some other day prior to that
But basically I regarded that letter as A bunch of crap.
It didn't tell me anything for sure.
It said, we're aware of the problem, and we're working on it.
Thank you very much.
We enjoy you as a customer, I think they added.
It's pretty scary, isn't it?
Now, this is what's going on all across the land right now.
General Motors has 100,000 suppliers, and they've sent a similar letter out, and only half of their suppliers have even answered.
And of the ones who did, something like 25% provided Totally unacceptable answers along the lines of what you said.
Don't worry, be happy.
We're thinking about it.
Oh yeah!
By the way, are cars gonna start?
Well, I'll give you the direct answer to that as best I know, but that really is not the right question.
Alright, well then, hold on, because I love just hanging people up while I'm still broadcasting here, so we're at the top of the hour.
We'll address that one when we get back.
Ed Yorden is my guest.
It should be obvious to you what we're discussing.
And after a couple of more questions, the cars, you know, I want to ask about cars.
And then I want to ask about the fourth major category.
Power, banking, phones, but there is another.
Can you imagine what that might be?
Well, I'll be asking about it when we get back and then we're going to get on the phone lines and let you ask Ed questions.
Tell me.
Are you beginning to be a believer?
To get a copy of this... And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Mind.
I'm going to change the order of things around, but that's real selfish on my part.
Um, Ed, I asked you a question about cars just before the break, and I guess I asked the wrong question.
I said, well, will our cars start?
And so I'll ask it again and be wrong again.
Will our cars start on January 1st?
Well, the simple answer is probably yes.
But I want you to think about several other things because you face the same issue with cars as you do with any other appliance or device or product or service.
The first question you need to think about is who should such a question be aimed at?
I'm not going to be around on January 1st if the answer I give you turns out to be wrong.
And if you think about it, there are, let's say, 10 or 20 different automobile companies, each of whom has 10 or 20 models, which they've been producing for 10 or 20 years.
Right.
Add all that up, you've got somewhere between 1,000 and 8,000 different specific combinations of makes and models and years.
Right.
For any one person to say with one sweeping answer, yes, all 8,000 different kinds of cars on the road are going to work, you've either got to be very, very smart or pretty glib.
So the serious point here is that that's a question that ought to be aimed at your auto company, not at a guy who happens to have read a book, written a book.
And you want to get it in writing.
You don't want it from your salesman.
You want it from a vice president or officer of the company.
Then you want to think about what kind of a priori assumptions you're going to make about the truthfulness of the answer you get.
Another very interesting thing about American culture is that we automatically assume that people are innocent until proven guilty.
Yes, I know.
And maybe we're going to have to rethink that assumption for year 2000.
Frankly, you probably don't want to trust the car salesman because he's got a vested interest in giving you the answer that... I don't know.
I don't even trust him when I'm buying a car.
The third question you want to ask yourself is, what are the consequences of that answer that you've gotten being wrong?
Now, I would say that your car is probably going to be okay, but I don't think you really want to be driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour at midnight, because it's a form of Russian roulette that there's just no need to expose yourself to.
And that leads to the last question you want to think about, not only with cars, but everything else, and that is, how do you protect yourself?
That is, how do you minimize the chances of being harmed by getting the wrong answer?
And I'll tell you how I did it.
Very simple.
I just got a new car a few months ago, a 1998 Jeep.
Probably going to work.
But rather than buying it, I leased it, and I got it on a two-year lease that expires in February of 2000.
Okay?
So January 1st of 2000.
It's certainly not going to be out on the road midnight of New Year's Eve, but on On the next morning, I'm going to go out and turn on the ignition, and I assume I've got a 99.9% chance that everything is going to be fine.
But if it isn't, then I'm not going to be terribly worried.
I'll pick up the phone, if the phones work, and I'll call the car dealer, and I'll say, you've got a dead car in my garage, in my driveway, come take it away.
And if they say, no, no, no, it's your car, I'll say, well, maybe for another two months, we can argue about those last two months of lease payments, but after that, it's your car once again.
And I made that decision deliberately because I figured I wasn't going to get a straight answer.
I wouldn't trust the answer anyway.
And I didn't want to be exposed to the possible liability of spending $20,000 or $30,000 of my own hard cash to buy a product that might not work.
So I think those are the things you want to think about whether it's a coffee maker or a car or a TV.
I mean, all you really want to know is, is it going to work?
If it doesn't work, can I bring it back and I get a refund or a replacement or whatever?
But do you trust the answer you're going to get?
In many cases, actually in many cases today, you won't get any answer to your questions as you learn from your bank.
Yeah, nothing that you can trust.
Right.
You know, I read this commercial from North American Trading, it's one of my sponsors, and they refer here to the speech by Senator Robert Bennett.
You talked about that earlier?
And the commercial begins.
Can you imagine getting up in the morning and finding that your electricity, water, phone, television, and radios don't work?
Your car may not start, public transportation not running, banks, post offices, most public and private offices closed, credit cards and checks not accepted.
Is all of that, as Bennett said in his speech, is all of that possible?
Yeah, I think the odds of all of those things simultaneously failing is probably fairly low, but the odds of having at least some disruptions in some subset of those infrastructure services, I think, I mean, it's high enough that as a prudent adult, I figure I want to have some insurance.
I hear that.
All right, well, let's say your Jeep starts up just fine, which it probably will.
The next question is, Where are you going to get the gas?
Good question.
Yeah, if the fuel distribution services are disrupted, the gasoline trucks or the pipelines, or the oil tankers which are non-compliant, or the oil fields in Texas or Saudi Arabia aren't working.
As long as it's a long chain.
Yeah, well that's the problem with year 2000.
It's like an onion.
You keep peeling off a layer and there's another layer below it.
So, the odds of it all working smoothly and reliably, as we now take for granted, I don't think it's very high.
Especially because every single one of those steps in the chain, so to speak, has got to make sure that its computer systems are repaired and tested and working properly.
Here's another tough one.
Even if we get our act together, almost completely, which you now say is impossible anyway, Uh, the rest of the world lags, I am told, it is rumored, far, far behind.
Now, our banking system, our telecommunications system, is not just national by a whole long shot anymore, it's international.
So, even if we got our own act together, which say we can't, what would the effect from the rest of the world be on us?
It's obviously going to vary from country to country and industry to industry, but here's some scary things to keep in mind.
England, Canada, and Australia and a couple of other countries are doing fairly well, but generally speaking, Europe is about a year behind us.
Generally speaking, Latin America and Africa are sound asleep.
And generally speaking, Asia uh... is uh... very preoccupied with uh... with its immediate problems you know when the riots broke out in uh... jakarta a couple of months ago i i don't think that they were busy uh... working on their year two thousand projects uh... at the time so uh... and those are the obvious places uh... there is a statistic from uh... the fellow in charge of year two thousand at the united nations that over half of the member nations of the u n have no
uh... national you're going out there and if you don't mean charge
at the third world countries that i i or an interesting combination of good news
and bad news the good news is that most of the computers are concentrated in the hands
of government government runs the phone company in the airlines the banks
and so on so you know where all the computers are as compared to the
u s where It's everywhere.
We don't even know where half the computers are.
The bad news, unfortunately, is the governments generally are bureaucratic and slow and don't have enough money and so on.
The good news is that the third world countries don't have as many computers as we do, but the bad news is that it's all older computers.
Much more vulnerable to your 2000 problems.
If we just go down the list, I think we're going to have some serious disruptions.
In the case of raw materials, a lot of our manufacturing companies depend on Africa and South America, whether it's mining materials or bananas or coffee beans.
The possible vulnerabilities in terms of global banking and global telecommunications and so on is actually pretty scary to think about.
Even if we get all 11,000 of our banks working, If the Japanese banks aren't ready, if the German banks aren't ready, and so on, there are going to be some very serious consequences.
The Japanese hold an awful lot of our bonds.
That's right.
An awful lot of our bonds.
But then on the other hand, if everything closes down, they can't really very well demand money because nothing's going to be going through the pipeline.
The possibility of a global depression is pretty high on the list.
Well, again, you're asking economics questions of a computer geek.
What I can contribute to the conversation is the following.
Some Japanese companies are under the illusion that they don't have to worry about this because a lot of their calendars are based on the year of the emperor.
They have a relatively new emperor.
So they don't think they're going to be exposed to the 2000 problem.
Except for the fact that they're using American computers with American hardware clocks down at the bottom.
So they are exposed.
Now, the interesting thing about Japanese banks in particular, and generally speaking, Japanese companies, is that a lot of their computer systems are customized with specific idiosyncrasies, whereas in the United States, most of our banks Especially the smaller ones are using packaged software.
So that as long as the packaged vendor gets his software year 2000 compliant, your problem is taken care of.
The Japanese, I think, are likely to find that they've got a lot more work to do than we do.
Alright, here's a fact.
Your guest is addressing three problems which will affect the average person, but there is a fourth.
Would you ask him about it, please?
It's the government and public safety problems.
In other words, Fire departments, police departments, sheriff's departments, ambulance services, blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff.
And of course, the government itself, and I've got another question about the government, but all of that infrastructure is something unto itself, virtually.
Affected by all these other problems you and I have talked about, but... Public safety.
Sure.
Public safety, especially at the local level, is an issue.
There was a survey, I think this spring if I remember correctly, to see what the reaction or attitude about all of this was at the municipal level, at the level of towns and cities and counties and so on.
And well over half, about 55% of these municipalities, believe that the year 2000 problem is not going to affect them in any way and therefore they're not doing anything about it.
And if you think about it for a moment, based on everything we've talked about, they are very much exposed.
Modern day fire engines and emergency ambulances and so on have got embedded systems in them that are very data sensitive.
If the 911 communication system goes down, if the lights go out, if the town happens to be located near a chemical plant, I mean, the list goes on.
Yeah, I mean, I know you're going to want to ask about big government, but if all of this stuff causes trouble, the first concern that an average citizen is going to have is, you know, what's going on in my neighborhood?
Oh, yeah.
If a fire breaks out in my house, can I assume that the police department or the fire department will be there?
If I have a heart attack, can I assume the ambulance will be there?
Now, we know that even with normal emergencies like this hurricane in North Carolina, It often takes two or three days or a week or so for FEMA or some of the national emergency centers to show up.
One of the other things that you really have to keep in mind about this whole year 2000 problem is that it's pervasive.
Our emergency response and disaster relief organizations and so on are all predicated on single point failures.
There's only one hurricane that we have to deal with right now.
So FEMA can rush down to North Carolina?
Not only FEMA, but volunteer organization Red Cross Country will pitch in and help.
That's part of our culture.
If a hurricane hits every town at the same time, you've got a different situation.
That's for damn sure.
Alright, before I get to my other government question, well really this is, what about our military now?
We live in really strange times.
Terrorism, the big, uh, the bad, uh, thing waiting on the horizon for us.
People threatening to attack us and all the rest of it.
Um, our military.
How's our military doing on Y2K?
Missiles, ICBMs, uh, cruise missiles, blah, blah, blah, right on down the line.
Uh, pretty computer dependent, our military, our defense, right?
Very much, uh, computer dependent.
Uh, the Defense Department probably has the largest single collection of, uh, computer systems of any branch of the, uh, government.
Much of which is extremely old, written in very arcane computer languages 20 or 30 years ago.
And I should say that I have no access to any confidential information, but the Defense Department itself is expressing concern about this.
Secretary Cohen, Defense Department, Defense Secretary Cohen wrote a memo, which is publicly available on the Internet on August 7th, to the Undersecretaries of Defense and all the other bigwigs saying that He was extremely concerned about the inadequate rate of progress in getting the problems fixed.
Weapon systems, logistics systems, payroll systems, the whole works.
And of course, it's not just our military that has potential problems in this area, but every military around the world, including, interestingly, the Russians.
There has apparently been, this is based on public testimony to Congress, some high-level exchanges between our military and theirs, In which our military folks have said to the Russians, by the way, if your computer systems stop on January 1st, don't think that it's a malicious attack on our part.
Please don't push the button.
Did you know that there was a launch, an announced launch from Scandinavia not long ago, which caused the Russians to come within about two minutes or less of a full retaliatory strike against us because, for some reason, They hadn't been notified of the launch, and they saw this as something coming over toward them from us.
Well, there's a long history of glitches, problems, accidents, and so on.
One of the early stories about our missile defense software is that it detected the moon as an incoming missile.
Really?
So, I mean, even under normal circumstances, things are problematic.
And obviously, this raises the stakes quite a lot.
I think the biggest concern of all that the military seems to have, though, is the opportunity this might present for either terrorist attacks or low-tech countries like Iraq and China exploiting the situation, not necessarily attacking us.
But you know, if I were Saddam, I might well be sitting there thinking, all I gotta do is hang on for another 492 days, and then I can march right down to Saudi Arabia and no one's gonna stop me.
That's what it is, 492 days and counting, huh?
I believe so.
Maybe 491, but it's somewhere in that range.
I'll run my little program here and tell you if you want, but yeah, it's less than 500 days now.
491 days, 21 hours, 32 minutes, and 45 seconds.
Oh my, you do keep track, don't you?
Well, it's... No doubt with a computer, huh?
Yeah, all of us, your 2,000 people, have got one of these little screen savers or little programs that... Counting down.
...count down for us.
Yeah, so our military's in trouble, and so when they talk about January 1st, 2000 as a drop-dead date, it might have further implications than just the metaphor, huh?
It could conceivably, yes.
All right.
Hold on, Ed.
We'll come back in a moment.
I have, I think, one other question.
I'm sorry to be dominating so much of Ed's time.
And then we'll go to the phones, and you can ask the questions you want, and if you're one of the Downing Thomases, or people say, oh no, this is Silver Bullet, then you're going to want to call for sure.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast, baby.
This is our happy future, baby.
We're gonna make it, baby, we're gonna make it, baby.
We're gonna make it, baby, we're gonna make it, baby.
Oh, yes, we make it.
Copy of this program.
We have an election coming up in 2000.
And, you know, we have election machines now, and we have computers,
and that's how we count up the votes in many, many, many cases.
Would you imagine that there would be a problem with the election?
Well, I think if there are problems, they're going to predate November 2000.
I mean, if some combination of all these bad things happen, there's going to be martial law in the major cities and who knows what else.
That was my next question.
But in fact, the election thing, you know, we haven't been running computerized tabulating and so on all that long.
And I think that if there were Okay, now sort of an ultimate government question.
or so of of two thousand uh... and we were still have a normal election
uh... i i i have a feeling we could go back to the old manual clockers that
uh... that we've been using for a long time you might not have the uh... the t.v. studios uh...
being able to make their uh... their predictions as as easily as they can now
but it is around here if you're on here right now
okay now uh... sort of an alternate government question you mentioned
that president clinton did indeed make a pretty much unnoticed uh... speech or
comments set of comments about why two k
Is there a time, do you think, and this is speculative of course, but is there a time when the government, surely the NSA and, you know, agencies like that, they're aware of what could happen and was probably going to happen, and they're going to at some point Push on the politicians, and at some point, there's going to have to be a more dramatic speech or announcement by whoever's in charge, President Clinton, whoever, to the nation about this, isn't there?
And when is that likely to come, do you think?
Well, it goes back to the date that we mentioned earlier.
If we manage to get through April 1st without having New York State collapse, and if we manage to get through July 1st without having another 46 states collapse, And then August 22nd when the GPS satellite system rolls over.
And the most interesting date of all is October 1st of 1999.
That's when the federal government begins its new fiscal year.
If we were to get through all of that without it having any problems, then perhaps the government might try to keep it very quiet until the very end.
But I suspect that there are going to be enough dress rehearsal things that cannot be avoided or hidden or explained away that Sometime next year, I think we're going to see some more serious conversation from the government.
But this is the big question that all of us have.
Presumably, they know what's going on.
Presumably, they have a sense of how serious it is.
But whether they still think the problems can be solved, well, that seems to be the optimistic public posture thus far.
Those who have a more skeptical view of government may be thinking conspiracy theories and so on.
I have no way of knowing what exactly is going on in the mind of Bill Clinton right now.
Nobody does.
Along with all the other things we've seen and heard about.
You mentioned GBS and then, to the most for sure, GBS.
A lot of things run by these global positioning satellites.
Are they compliant?
Well, we don't think so.
The problem that has been discussed most commonly It's not a year 2000 problem, but simply a quirk.
The satellites keep track of how long it's been since they were launched.
That's their way of keeping track of the time.
And by coincidence, after 1,024 weeks since the date of launch back in 1980, their internal clock rolls over to zero, very much like the odometer on a car.
It happens to be the weekend of August 22, 1999.
The satellites will keep running just fine, as best we know.
The question is, what about the 10 million civilian devices down on the ground?
Oh, yeah.
In cars and ships and planes and whatnot.
Right.
That may not have been programmed properly for it.
Now, there's the second question of whether the satellite systems are going to work properly on December 31st, 1999.
And that has not been discussed as openly.
And in fact, I don't have any personal information about that.
What do you hear?
Pardon me?
What do you hear?
I hear that there are Your 2000 vulnerabilities, specifically with December 31st of 1999, in addition to the August 22nd 1999 problems.
Bad day to fly?
Well, I don't think you're going to have a chance.
Even if the FAA makes it, which is highly doubtful, we've got 500 and some odd airports that are non-compliant.
We've got 290 commercial airlines, each of which have an average of 10,000 to 15,000 suppliers, including airplanes that are not compliant.
And at the very end of that chain, you've got the insurance companies.
There was something that popped up on the internet this morning from Australia, indicating that the Australian aircraft insurance companies are thinking of withholding insurance.
Oh, you know, actually, I'm glad you mentioned that, because there are articles running now, kind of behind the scenes, saying that U.S.
insurance companies are Quietly now notifying their customers that they are not going to insure them against any Y2K problem.
Have you been hearing about that?
Oh, sure.
And where it's going to get really interesting, this again is where you'll start to see more visibility next year, is that they're putting in year 2000 exclusions in the so-called D&O policies.
Directors and officers of publicly traded companies ...are protected against shareholder lawsuits and so on by DNO policies.
But the insurance companies are very quietly pointing out that when these policies get renewed, they all come up for renewal next year, it's not going to have a year 2000 coverage.
So if you happen to be a director or officer of a publicly traded company, all of a sudden you face personal exposure to shareholder lawsuits and so on, you're going to see a lot of rats jumping off the ship before it sinks.
And there'll be a bunch jumping on the ship.
What about the lawyers?
The lawyers are forming into two camps.
Everybody has heard about the severe likelihood of lawsuits, punitive damage lawsuits and so on.
The estimates of that cost are well over a trillion dollars at the moment.
But it's also important to point out that there are defense lawyers Helping their clients get prepared on the theory that some of them, like say an IBM, no matter what IBM does, it's going to get sued.
You know, it's a professional company.
They're doing their very best to not only fix their own computers, but get their customers ready.
It doesn't matter.
They're going to get sued.
It's just that's the way it's going to go.
So the big companies, the IBMs and the General Motors and all the big savvy companies are getting their defenses ready now.
And that's another army of lawyers.
uh... trying to make sure that uh... that that their clients are behaving
properly and doing the very best thing they can do that at least they can avoid the kind of the triple damage punitive
lawsuits even if they do get sued for breach of contract or
uh... non functioning products and so forth can the government step in and somehow
uh... stop all litigation uh...
somehow stop all litigation from from occurring in uh... you know and and prevent all of this because that
alone there are so many things that if they go the wrong way
are going to be catastrophic The litigation alone could be catastrophic.
Well, and not only catastrophic cost-wise, but it could paralyze the legal system and put out of business the very companies that we have to save, you know, the IBMs.
You don't want to sue them into bankruptcy.
The irony, though, is that so far the legislation has been of an entirely different nature.
Twelve states thus far have passed legislation protecting themselves.
The state government itself is now protected against lawsuits.
Lawsuits?
Yep.
That's right.
They're going to protect themselves first.
There are apparently rumors and proposals and discussions behind closed doors at the federal level to pass so-called safe haven legislation in this area that we've been discussing, but as far as I know, it has not yet reached the point of formal legislation.
The only thing that has come out is the proposal from President Clinton that he introduced in his speech back in July, the so-called Good Samaritan Law that says if, as a company, you disclose your year 2000 compliance status, if you say, for example, my products are okay, and it then turns out you're wrong, As long as you've made a due diligence kind of best effort attempt at it, you cannot be sued for having disclosed information that such as when they turned out to be wrong.
They're already doing that then.
All right, let's try the phones.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Art Bell and Ed Jordan.
Good morning, where are you?
Good morning, I'm Rolando, I'm calling from New York.
New York City?
Yes, sir.
Okay, that's Ed's old home.
Yep, and I would like to share something with you that appears on the Daily News about five days ago.
All right.
About the Federal Reserve.
It says the Federal Reserve is planning to have extra cash on hand in case Americans want more cash in their pocket.
Yes, oh yes.
For the new millennium.
Yes.
By the end of the new year, $200 billion in currency will be stored in government vaults up On the $150 billion normally held in reserve.
Yes, we've already covered that earlier in the show.
That's absolutely correct.
But, unfortunately, that represents an extra $50 billion.
And, Ed, you may want to repeat to them what that means if people go down and want to withdraw their money.
Well, just to be realistic, $200 billion, take all of it, Divided by 260 million American citizens, that's a little under $1,000 a person.
The average income per family in the United States is about $36,000.
But the average family spends about $3,000 a month just on normal living expenses.
If the average family decides that they'd like to have a month's worth of cash under their mattress, I suspect that the government won't have enough cash.
The fact that they're announcing these plans now is interesting. You know, one has to wonder why are they
talking about this now rather than next year.
But in any case, the United States is doing it. Australia is doing something similar.
New Zealand has made a similar announcement within the last few days.
So presumably, they're trying to persuade the population that,
you know, that should there be a demand for cash, that they'll be ready.
And it's all psychology. It's all psychology.
Well, our entire economic system is all psychology, isn't it?
Yeah. So, well, yeah, confidence game. Yeah, that we have confidence.
And so that's probably why they're making the kind of announcement that they're making now.
They're listening to you now in New York City, in Tentley of course, and that's where you moved from.
I take it New York City is not exactly the place you'd want to be Maybe in the middle of Times Square, we'll open it up with a group, huh?
On January 1st, 2000?
Well, you know, the biggest concern that I think we have to have here is not just New York City, but all of the cities across the northern belt of North America.
So it's Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, all the Canadian cities have the obvious dilemma that if things go wrong, it's going to be in the middle of winter.
It's going to be very cold.
You know, New York is a terrific city.
I lived there for 30 years.
Uh, and New York has managed to put up with a lot of problems, but only usually one problem at a time.
You know, the subway's going straight, well, you know, people get along with.
But, uh, but if we have this combination of problems all occurring simultaneously in any of the big cities, uh, well, I, I lived in New York in 1977 in July when, uh, the lights went out and, uh, uh, the looting began about five minutes later.
Yeah, I know.
I was in Newark.
I saw them go out.
Yep.
Uh, you know, if it's really cold and the lights are out for a day or so, you know, things will get back to normal.
But, uh, but if the airport's shut down, the hospitals are closed, the subway's stopped, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, for more than a few days, and whether it's New York or Boston or Minneapolis, I think you're going to be facing some really severe social problems.
People are going to get hungry.
People are going to be cold.
People are not going to be able to flush their toilets.
I mean, you know, it just goes on and on.
You're going to be in bad tempers, huh?
I never even thought about the toilets.
My God.
That alone, that's an ugly thought.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ed Jordan and Art Bell.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, hi.
Where are you?
Oh, hi.
I'm in Sacramento.
Okay.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Ed.
I have a couple of questions.
One, I have a money market account and I had been I have been hesitant about doing any kind of investing.
My thought was just to withdraw the money and stick it in a safe deposit box until everything blew over.
Ed, what are you going to do?
Well, that's not exactly a fair question.
I'll give you a general answer.
This gets back to some discussion we had earlier.
What I am going to do is make sure that I don't have all my eggs in one basket.
I want to have all my money in one bank or one safety deposit box or one form of asset.
I won't put it all in gold or all in cash or all in mutual funds because the risks that we face here are so varied and so unknowable that no matter how clever you think you might be in terms of choosing one strategy, you might be blindsided.
I'm going to do my best to sprinkle it around and make sure that I've got it in several different forms and several different places without any debt as best I can.
It's easy to say that, but as we were chatting earlier, there are some areas where it's not at all easy to put this into practice, especially if you're talking about retirement accounts.
You don't even have the option of keeping that in your own physical control.
If you decided you wanted to have all that money in the form of gold, you have to keep it, generally speaking, at some financial institution, which then puts it at risk.
My money is liquid right now.
I have a money market account and I have a Roth IRA.
You know, something else I have noticed, I've talked to several bankers, several big institutions, and most of them have been quite evasive, with this real plastic smile, and you know, it's a sugar coating, and I figured that, you know, I'm not going to walk in ignorance, there's no way.
I've been obtaining information, talking with others, and you know what, I have noticed Most of my friends are really in denial about this whole thing, and for me, personally, I plan on making a prudent reserve financially, food-wise, you know, because what's the worst that can happen?
At least I have food in case there's a disaster.
It's just going to happen.
Actually, you've been hearing, thank you, a lot of the worst that can happen.
I mean, social unrest.
There was, uh, I talked to Gary about this.
There's a movie making the circuit right now on the HBO's of the world called The Trigger Effect.
You saw that movie?
I haven't seen it, but I've heard about it.
I know the theme.
What happened to the lights go out and where's Los Angeles, I think?
Well, they stay out for, you know, a fairly protected period of time.
Uh, somewhere past two or three days or something.
And for the first day or two, people are pretty cool.
And then things start going to hell real quick.
And I don't know if that's Hollywood portraying something that's real inaccurate, or I have a sinking feeling it probably is real inaccurate.
You feel the same way?
Not having seen the movie, I really can't comment, but I think most serious people would agree with you that if the lights stay out for more than a few days, it starts causing all kinds of problems.
First and foremost, possible water contamination.
You know, you don't want to have cholera, dysentery, and typhoid spreading around on top of everything else.
I never thought that the toilets might not flush, but they might not, huh?
Well, if the toilet's not flushing, I mean, I had that experience in 1977 living in a high-rise apartment building.
You need electricity to power the pumps.
You get the water up to flush the toilets.
uh... et cetera and if the uh...
our goes out of the water purification plant uh... again for any urban
better this is a serious problem what are you doing in new mexico uh... before that
eventually i happen to live in an area of new mexico where uh... every
house has its own well
for any particular reason is just that uh...
is uh... an aquifer that's uh... readily available I'm in the process of installing solar panels on the roof right now as well, which a lot of people are doing.
So you're really living what you're preaching, aren't you?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
I take it, and I pray, that you are good to go for the final hour here.
Yes, I can make it.
Excellent.
All right.
Stay right there.
Ed Yorden is my guest.
And if you didn't, uh, digest what Gary North told you, maybe you're going to digest what Ed Jordan is telling you.
If not, you should go to the doctor and have your system...
...or a dentist.
Make them worry what's wrong with them.
Our disks were so colored, too.
Four digits are extravagant.
So let's get by with blue.
Yes, let's get by with blue.
I suppose the 1990s are over.
The programmers did say...
...unless we rewrite before that...
...we'll all go away.
We all will go away.
I'm all for the old way.
And that it meant that not to prove...
...this works fine now, you bet.
A rewrite is a straight X...
...and we won't do that just yet.
So we'll leave and we'll go.
Now, when 2000 holds a crown...
...it all goes straight to...
...oh, well.
For zeros less than 99...
...as anyone can tell.
Yes, as anyone can tell.
But a male will bring your 50 in...
...and they'll be fed to you...
...when you're no longer 68.
I'm gonna find a man who can love me...
I'm sure you get the idea.
It's called Two Digits for a Date.
It was done for us.
Ed, your book Timebomb 2000, the latest one, very provocative title.
I assume, and I probably shouldn't, but I assume people can get that in bookstores pretty much across the country?
They should be able to, yeah.
It's in all the Barnes & Noble stores and Borders and Benjamin bookstores, basically everywhere at this point.
Or you can get it off the internet at Amazon.
Or in any other online bookstores.
All right.
And we, of course, have links up to you, so folks, you can go to my website.
Just go down and see the name Ed Jordan.
Click on that.
Here's a fact from Jenny in Boston.
Kind of flip.
She says, Art, just thought, ask Ed, why does the U.S.
government hire Bill Gates to solve the year 2000 problem?
Surely, let me finish, surely he knows how to fix it.
Of course, since Reno pissed him off, perhaps they could not afford his services.
The problem is that some people are serious about that.
They really think that Bill can wave a magic wand and do it.
Yep.
He can't.
No.
No.
Alright, and one other fact, and then back to the phones.
And this is from Napa Valley, California.
Natural gas.
Dear Ed, you know, I've known about the electricity going out for some time now, but my home is heated by natural gas, PG&E.
Will the gas flow likely stop?
Are they in trouble too, or is that a better bet?
That area has not been covered and researched as widely.
I don't think Senator Bennett, for example, has had any hearings on that.
There was a conference a couple of months ago of natural gas suppliers and distributors and so on, who seem to be expressing more concern about hackers and terrorist attacks than they are about year 2000 problems.
I have to assume that they are subject to the same vulnerabilities that we've been talking about with everything else.
The gas pipelines, the distribution mechanism, there must be embedded systems, but I don't have the specific details.
Okay.
Honest answer.
And I've had this before, but you're the right guy to ask, because you're the technical guy.
It says, Dear Art, since no one has asked this obvious question, please ask.
If the power grid and other critical system computers simply can't reset their internal clocks to a pre-2000 date until they can be fixed, if date-critical applications like billing are being run on the system, they can be removed and moved to compliance systems until the problem is fixed.
So can people just When the time comes, not go to 2000, but set their computers back to some other date until it gets fixed.
Yeah, the term that is used for that within the Year 2000 community is encapsulation.
You have to be a little careful about it.
You might think of just turning the clock back a few years for the heck of it, but one of the things that we're facing with this whole rollover problem is that Monday, January 1st of 2000 is, in fact, I'm sorry, it's a Saturday.
It's a Saturday.
January 1st of 1900 was a Monday.
2000 is the leap year.
1900 wasn't.
So you've got to be a little bit careful about this.
If you have any computer system that cares what day of the week it is, That cares whether or not it's leap year, whether or not February 29th is a legitimate date or not.
So it turns out that, and I didn't know this before I got involved in the field a couple of years ago in this particular area, the cycle of days of the week and leap years repeats every 28 years.
So if you set the clock back to 1972, then you preserve those cycles, which is terrific, except for a few little problems.
This is really true throughout the year 2000, Phil.
The devil is in the details.
The intellectual nature of this problem is trivial, but it's all in the details.
You cannot set a PC running DOS back before 1980.
So it's a terrific strategy for some mainframe systems, but not for PC systems, and not for computer systems that might have some other hard-coded dates embedded within them.
You know, it's one more silver bullet that's been proposed and that may turn out to be a useful solution in some limited cases, but it won't solve everything everywhere all the time, unfortunately.
Alright, now here's something I thought just blew me away.
We had a prospective client that was going to come on the air for I Know They Still May, and they had a test program to see if your PC was compliant, your 2000 compliant, and I raged back at the salesperson who was negotiating the CR.
I said, you're out of your mind, because of course brand new PCs are compliant.
And you know what?
I was so wrong.
I was so embarrassed.
The fact of the matter is, we've got PCs rolling off the assembly line right now that are not compliant, don't we?
Right, right, right.
That's insane.
Yeah, this came to light last October when NASA bought 600 PCs from Compaq, a reputable, leading firm.
I've got one of their laptops.
I love it.
You know, and I don't intend any criticism of them at all, but it turned out that NASA was one of the very first organizations to decide that they really ought to test every single one of their machines, and they found that roughly half of them were defective, and these were Vintage, you know, fall 97 machines.
Now, this is defective from a Y2K perspective, right?
Yeah, it was defective at the hardware level.
The thing that people need to keep in mind about their PCs is that you can have problems at about four different levels.
Actually, Microsoft is now quoting seven levels, but the first question is whether the hardware works correctly, and then the second level is whether the operating system works correctly.
Windows 3.1, for example, is not compliant.
Windows 95 is sort of compliant.
The Mac operating system has always been compliant.
Then there's a third level of application programs.
If you're running an old version of Quicken, it may not be any good, even if the hardware is okay.
I am, Dan.
The fourth level on top of that is stuff that you may have written, for example, in the spreadsheet program.
Maybe you're doing your own kind of stock market portfolio analysis.
There's nobody necessarily preventing you from creating your own Year 2000 problems.
But anyway, the stuff that's come out of the PC hardware companies has been Usually because they recycle the parts from older machines.
So that you may have a nice vintage 1998 PC, but it might have some old stuff inside.
Disk drives, BIOS chips, and so forth.
Yeah.
And then one last thing.
The applications themselves.
I have a really neat program in one of my PCs.
It's got a UHF receiver.
In it, it's a full-size card, one of the old big full-size cards.
And I've got an antenna on my house, and I receive direct NOAA satellite photographs on my PC and then process them, just like a TV station does.
Right here at the house.
And it is incredibly time and date sensitive because, of course, satellites have got to be over you.
It's got to be looking at a certain frequency at a certain time.
As the satellite comes over, it paints the weather picture and I'd almost be willing to bet that's gone and is not compliant.
Well, the standard answer for something like that is find out who developed that software.
and hopefully they're still in business. Call them up and...
Call them, well actually you should be able to get on the internet.
If they're a reputable company, they've got a website, they've got a little year 2000 section and they'll have
information in there. You know, if you're lucky it'll say this software
has always been compliant because we're smart guys. If you're not
quite so lucky they'll say, well if you're using anything more recent
than version such and such it's okay.
Otherwise, you have to upgrade for $25.
And, or if you get a letter from them saying, we have a committee working on the problem.
Yeah, right.
Right.
All right.
First Time Caller Line, you're on the air with Ed Yorden.
Good morning.
Hello, you're on the air.
Hi Ed, hi Art.
This is Marcia from Dallas.
Dallas, yes Marcia.
I had a question for Ed.
A few times tonight he kiddingly referred to himself as a computer geek when we've been asking him some questions.
I wanted to call upon that area of his expertise to help explain the concept to some of us who are pretty, well, should I say computer ignorant?
Sure.
It's easy enough to understand how date dependency, the date dependency thing, can affect the average household in terms of billing problems.
Say, from the water company, phone company.
But how does the date dependency issue come into play relative to the actual delivering of the water to our house?
Okay, yeah, good question.
Yeah, I mean, we keep throwing around this whole... No, there's a fine... No, you'll get a fine answer.
Just pause for a second.
Okay.
Well, whether it's water delivery or electricity or anything else, the thing we're concerned about, generally speaking, is that a lot of these devices and systems, manufacturing, distribution systems, and so on, have got these little microchips.
The same kind of thing that you've got in your digital watch or in your microwave oven.
It's literally a little chip, you know, the size of your thumbnail, that has computer logic to do whatever the designers wanted it to do.
One of the common functions is that they keep track of how long it's been since the device was calibrated.
Or how long it's been since it coordinated the date and time with some other device.
Or when it's supposed to open a valve or close a valve.
Or how long it's supposed to keep the valve open.
So, you know, a lot of these little microchip things are very much aware of date and time.
And if they suddenly think that it has become January 1st of 1900, Depending on how they were programmed by the original engineers, they may decide that they've gotten out of sync with another device that they're communicating with, or that it's been 98 years since the device that they're attached to was last calibrated, or they may think, as I was saying earlier, that it's Monday, January 1st of 1900, so in the case of an elevator for an office building, you know, the whole question about whether they're supposed to be running on their weekday schedule or weekend schedule gets out of whack.
So that, in general terms, is the problem, that they've got clocks built in for a purpose.
Where it really gets devious is the case where the embedded system has no obvious, logical, well-advertised date function, but the programmer made use of the internal clock anyway, just for his own devious purposes, and never documented it.
Does that answer your question?
Well, yes it does, and I emailed it.
Yesterday I told him that I threw this around with a lot of my friends and that's pretty much what I hear back from them is, oh well, big deal, so your bills will be screwed up.
I mean, it's much more far reaching than that.
It's just that I don't have any kind of an explanation to give back to them.
The really important thing to note is that if you're not being delivered any water, then the bill is sort of academic.
All right, thank you very much for the call.
Take care and good luck.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Ed Yorden.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
Hello, Art and Ed.
This is Harry from St.
Louis.
Yes, sir.
I think that my question may have been answered in the beginning of this segment, but I'd like to ask it again anyway, just to make sure I can get some details.
Sure.
It's probably a dumb question, but some other people might be thinking about it.
What would happen if the leaders of the world got together and just decided that they were going to rename 2000-1900?
Yeah.
Well, you're right.
It just got answered.
Is there any other way to answer it other than the way you just did, Ed?
Well, I think it does need to be emphasized that There are lots of computers that have been programmed to behave appropriately depending on whether it's a weekday or a weekend.
And certainly there are lots of computers that really need to know whether this is a leap year or not.
So if the leaders of the world arbitrarily decide that this is 1900 all over again, you know, that's not going to change or fix the computer logic necessarily.
But would the damage be as catastrophic?
It's hard for me to say.
I think the problem here, once again, is that you're searching for a single silver bullet solution that just isn't going to happen.
even if we could agree that this is technologically possible, the chances of getting all the world
leaders to agree on anything, as you know, is seriously zero.
And then, you know, actually tracking down all these computers where there are some hard-coded
dates inside of it where the computer says, I know that everything I've done has taken
I mean, that's the way the hardware is designed on every Intel PC.
As far as it's concerned, the origin of time is January 1st, 1980, period.
How do those computers deal with anything before that period?
The programs...
You know, it can be programmed to deal with earlier dates.
But when you boot up the hardware, as far as the hardware is concerned, you know, the current date, today's date, has got to be something after 1980.
And that's going to, I think, continue to be a problem.
Okay, well, I'm going to take that remote viewing course from Carl Zanes and get busy on the problem.
All right, thank you very much.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ed Jordan and Art Bell.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Ed.
This is Marcia in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Hi, Marcia.
Listening on KWHN 1320 AM.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
One quick word of advice for you, Art, before I ask Ed his question.
Buy a bag of lime.
Yes.
For the toilets.
Oh, really?
About half a cup for each use ought to do it.
Oh, good advice.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Ed, I saw on the news the other day where a university, I believe it's back east, is offering a Y2K technician course.
In seven weeks they are teaching programmers COBOL.
and then they're turning them loose and Marsha Marsha Marsha I'm going to stop you because we're
near the bottom of the hour I want to hold you over you're asking a really good question so
Marsha hold on we'll be right back to you and hold on Ed Jordan is my guest if you've missed
this program um well too bad But I'm ready
I'm Art Bell.
Final segment.
Me too. I'm Art Bell.
I'm Art Bell.
I'm supposed to tell you I've been racking my brain.
Final segment, you're not used to staying up this late, are ya?
Not since I was a younger fellow programming all night long, no.
Haha, well I thank you for doing that.
I used to do that, too.
As a matter of fact, programming is like an addiction, actually, isn't it?
It can be, yeah.
It was for me for years.
I cut my teeth on the old Commodore 64 and used to program in BASIC and compile programs.
It was like I would go until I couldn't go anymore and then I'd fall into bed and sleep for copious amounts of time and get up and do it again.
It was sick.
Alright, first time calling the line.
You're on the air with Ed Yorton.
Hi.
Hi, this is Harold in Vegas.
Hello, Harold.
Hi.
I was wondering about the airplanes, like Airbus and Boeing.
Are they compliant yet?
Boeing has put out some press releases indicating that they have found minor problems on some of their planes.
They claim that none of them would make the planes unsafe to fly and that all of the problems will be fixed by the end of December 1998.
You can take that at face value.
There are rumors that Airbus may have more problems.
I don't know any details about that.
I've gotten email from pilots of various airplanes, some of whom say everything's fine, and others who say that there's no way that they're going to fly a plane.
My guess is that the planes will probably be okay.
Certainly, all the airlines are putting pressure on the aircraft manufacturers.
Certainly, companies like Boeing are working on it.
Boeing and Airbus and McDonnell Douglas and so on, those are obviously very...
Well-organized engineering companies whose software has typically been subject to a lot more scrutiny and regulation than your average run-of-the-mill software has.
So, of the entire range of things that may bring commercial air traffic to a halt, I think the aircraft systems are probably the least worrisome or the least vulnerable.
How about air traffic control?
That's at the top of the list, yeah.
The debate continued to rage on that.
Up until a couple of months ago, every report from GAO and OMB and so on was giving the FAA a grade of F. It started to attract a lot of public attention back in January of this year when it came out that, in public, it was in the Times and in congressional hearings, that IBM had formally notified the FAA in writing that the Forty mainframe computers that are used for air traffic control were guaranteed not to work, and that IBM could not and would not fix them because they had stopped selling these machines ten years ago.
Now, more recently, the FAA hired two retired IBMers as consultants to take a look at the hardware, and the public statement from the FAA was that they've decided that that hardware will work, and they've also made public announcements, this is from a The new director, the head person of the FAA, that they will, by God, be ready.
But even more recent than that, this is all within the last week or so, some of the progress statements that the FAA was making have been severely disputed by the GAO auditors.
Now, this is an organization whose track record when it comes to large, complex systems, modernization programs over the last 15 years, has been utterly abysmal. They've cancelled at least one
major modernization program.
So, you know, if you're a gambling person, I've written a little essay on my website saying,
you know, what if year 2000 was like a game of baseball? If you are putting your life savings
on the line based on whether a pitcher or batter was going to save the game, you at least ask for
No, no, no.
know what your batting average. The FAA's batting average is pretty pretty miserable.
Okay, Golan. Yeah, yeah, my major part was that everybody's talking about planes
falling out of the sky at midnight our time. No, no, no, no.
The planes won't fall out of the sky, but if there were any risk of the planes having that level of
problem, it would be discovered by Boeing and other companies well in advance.
However, have you ever seen the air traffic pattern over Kennedy?
It's a mess.
All right, well, that'll do for that call.
And, you know, I'm neglectful here.
I'm sorry, Marsha.
You're back on the air again with Ed Yorden.
Good.
No problem with that.
Very interesting conversations.
Anyway, this university is evidently going to be turning out seven-week wonders, Y2K technologists trained in COBOL.
I had already heard on a Senate hearing that for every four and a half lines of code that are scrubbed, an error is introduced into the system.
What's going to happen when these new people start working?
Okay, it's the University of Maryland you're talking about.
It's the only one back east that has that particular program.
And like everything else, it's better than nothing.
It's not clearly going to be the ultimate solution to anything, but it'll provide a few more COBOL programmers.
That is not really where we have the problem at the moment.
We've got more tools and automated helpers and things like that for the COBOL programs than anything else.
We really need people who can fix old assembly language programs and some of the other more arcane languages.
But you raised a very interesting point.
If it's a relatively young, inexperienced person who's gotten a seven-week crash course, he's not going to be a heavyweight programmer.
I don't care how smart he or she might be.
And one of the problems with a lot of this non-compliant software is that, as I said at the very beginning of the program, it was written 20 or 30 years ago.
In a period where you had to pull every trick in the book, write the most intricate, squeeze down tight logic to make it work, it's not the sort of thing that a 21-year-old kid with seven weeks of training is going to be able to get in and fix without introducing, as you were saying, a lot of brand new bugs.
It's not one out of four, by the way.
It's more like one out of a hundred or one out of a thousand, but even so.
That's still enough to cause a lot of trouble.
With billions of lines of code to be scrubbed.
700 billion lines of code.
That's the global inventory of software.
One other question.
Southwestern Bell and its subsidiaries, including Nevada Bell, aren't, are using the 60-40 approach to their correction.
their system will begin recognizing the digits 0 through 59 as belonging to the year 2000
and 60 through 99 as belonging to the year 1900.
Well that's that's a common strategy.
I mean, the particular choice of numbers varies a lot, but the fundamental strategy is known as windowing.
The whole point is that if you've only got two digits, then you can only deal with 100 years, but you can think of it as a window that looks into some arbitrary period between 1900 and 2099.
The problem is not so much what Southwest Bell is doing with its own computer systems.
That may work perfectly fine.
The real problem is that if they have to exchange data with anybody else, you have to have compatible windows or some reasonably intelligent so-called bridge programs that can translate your windows into my windows without causing any trouble.
That's where the problem is.
The reason we're doing this windowing approach, by the way, is that in addition to fixing all the computer programs, Which is hard enough.
You've also got to make fixes, in some cases, to the database information.
You know, a phone company has got billing records going back umpty umpty years, and if you decide to expand the dates to a full four digits, then you have to go and expand all the dates on your database records.
Uh, which is logistically impossible for most of these big companies.
They just can't do it.
It's too late.
Okay, Marcia?
Okay, thank y'all very much.
Right, thank you, and hold on just a moment, and I'm sorry to have to do this to everybody, but I ran a couple wrong things, my fault, so I'm gonna catch up here.
The idiot who programs it, in this case, me, programmed the wrong thing into it, and I ended up with more commercial time because of that.
So I'm the idiot, and that's the way it works pretty much with computers.
They're only as good as the people that are behind them, the human beings.
And in this case, the human beings have been sort of out to lunch on this issue for, well, since the beginning, really.
Alright, now...
Let's go here.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Ed Jordan and I'm Art Bell.
Hi, Art.
It's Joe.
Persistence pays off.
Where are you?
In the Boston area.
I'm the blind man you wrote about.
Oh, that's right.
Here's the man who's blind, Ed.
What is your question?
I have a story, and I hope, Art, you'll get in touch with me.
Ed, we had an experience up here, two stories, actually, in Boston with the MRI machines.
One of the technicians did a test.
He rolled his date over to the year 2000, and can you guess what happened?
It probably stopped.
No, he ruined the drive.
Oh, okay.
You're kidding.
No, I'm not.
They have to replace the drive.
That's the first thing.
Now, the telephone company, they had a problem up here, too, with one switch, I think it was a year ago, in New Jersey.
This one little program that failed, and it took 8 to 15 hours.
We couldn't make long-distance calls out of the Boston area.
That's how bad this thing is, and I ought to know.
I'm a blind person, and Art, you are the only broadcaster who's decent to my people, and I hope you will get in touch with me soon.
I hope you got my fax.
I did.
I have your fax.
How do I give you my cat, my picture?
How do I get the picture to her?
You.
I want you to see her.
Well, the mail.
The mail.
I mean, you send it.
Can I fax it?
No, don't.
Pictures do not come out.
In facts.
Oh, it's something I didn't know.
See?
No, no, no.
They're lousy.
They come out black and you can't really see them.
So, send me a picture in the mail.
Well, God bless you and I hope you call because you're the only one of the few less decent men.
Oh, one thing, Ed.
I spoke to my Radio Shack.
Oh, sorry.
My folks who... That's right.
A Radio Shack owner and she says, I don't care about Y2K.
I'll just go in the woods.
I'll drink out of my pool.
I'm serious.
These people are sick up here.
We have six societies.
They don't care one bit.
Yeah, thank you.
We are kind of a strange... Americans are kind of a strange breed, Ed, in that it's like we've always been a people who say there is nothing that we can't do.
No emergency, no crisis we can't meet if we apply ourselves to it.
Except apparently this one.
Well, that's one of the very frustrating things about this.
I mean, I'm all in favor of positive thinking and banding together and so forth.
As we've just heard, there are a lot of people who refuse to accept that there's any problem
at all.
There's also an enormous debate going on within the Year 2000 community as to whether we should
essentially admit failure and begin doing contingency planning now or whether we should
pretend that everything is going to continue to be okay if we just work hard enough.
I mean, here's a guy who, I can tell you, he doesn't have sight.
He has been ostracized by his family.
He lives alone as a sightless person.
And even if you had all your faculties fully intact, this is one scary damn thing that lies ahead of us.
But can you imagine?
Can you imagine the plight of somebody like this man, probably depending on a social agency, barely getting by?
And this thing looms ahead for him.
It's unimaginable.
Well, it takes something a bit less extreme.
People who are on major medicine, diabetics are a good example, have to have insulin.
Insulin has to be refrigerated.
There are people who have tracked down the very interesting statistic that one company in Denmark produces 50% of the world's supply of insulin.
So if Denmark goes down, you're going to have insulin shortages, if electricity drops out, Within a short period of time, the insulin loses its effectiveness.
So, I mean, blind people and diabetics and a number of people who are very dependent on the infrastructure running properly really ought to be quite concerned about this.
So, like always, the poor, the sick, the third world nations, they're all going to be the first to suffer at the most.
I'm afraid so, yeah.
Hello, this is Richard from Alabama.
Hi Richard.
This kind of fits in with that.
A couple of months ago in a little town I live in, at a local housing project on the third of the month, the mail lady was about 30 minutes late getting to the mail, and by that time a crowd had developed around the boxes, and the crowd's response was to beat the crap out of the mail lady.
What?
I think that's what you're going to see.
For being late with the mail?
Right, because the, um, Social Security comes out on the third.
Oh, thank you.
It's way out of your area of expertise.
And I don't know whose area it is in, but civilization really does seem to hang by kind of a thin thread, Ed.
Well, that's the, uh, you know, the pessimistic view, and I think we all have our pessimistic moments.
The optimists who say that when things get rough, people pull together, as I'm sure they are in North Carolina right now, to help each other out.
And, you know, I hope that does turn out to be the case, but we may be facing a level of problem very different and more pervasive than anything we've had to face before, and that's going to try people's patience.
By the way, you're also going to find people using year 2000 as an excuse for problems they're having.
This is already beginning to happen as well.
Yeah, I'm sure that's true.
I would have gotten my check in the mail to you except that my poor old computer broke down because of that nasty old Y2K problem.
That's already beginning to happen.
Well look, you are a real trooper to have stayed with us through the night.
We could do another 25 hours on this or something.
As with Gary North, I think somewhere down the line between now and some kind of drop-dead
date we're obviously going to have to have you back on the air again.
But just a wonderful program.
Listen, is there a lot of information on your website?
Yeah, there is.
One of the things we're putting up here now are the draft versions.
You've got a link to me, I think, from your site.
We do.
Otherwise, what is your web address?
It's www.yordan.com.
My pleasure.
I hope I've gotten some people alerted.
to me I think from your site. We do. Otherwise, what is your web address? It's www.yordan.com.
Well, thanks a lot for being here. My pleasure. I hope I've gotten some people alerted to
something everybody has to realize is that all this stuff is out in the open. Get on
the internet and type Y2K on your search engine and you're going to hit more than 50,000 people
there that time. Thanks Ed.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Good night, my friend.
That's Ed Yorden.
To get a copy of this program, call, when you can get through, 1-800-917-4278.
That's 1-800-917-4278.
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