If you're enjoying the show and can't wait to hear more episodes, you can binge-listen the entire season. Add free. Right now, on Stitcher Premium, for a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to Stitcher Premium.com/Hedlong and use promo code "Hedlong". I've been looking for someone for a while now. I don't know his name, or where he lives, or what he does for work. I got wind of him in a forum on the internet. So we made an offhand comment, just one sentence, about this guy, who truly believed the apocalypse was coming at the millennium, January 1st, 2000. And he prepared for the end in a way that was so out there, it was almost unbelievable. We've been looking for months, and we finally found not him, but the next best thing. My name is Mark. Mark. You know, just call me Mark, and I live in Kansas. In the late 90s, Mark from Kansas was running a shop that sold lead acid batteries. The guy I'm looking for was a customer, who became his friend. There was a guy that you know with hamsters? That's exactly right. Otis, yeah. Otis just, he was just a different guy. Like a lot of people then, Otis believed a computer book, called the Millennium Book, or the Y2K Book, would be unleashed at New Years. And society would break down, and resources would run out quickly, and he was going to be ready. That was his plan, was to have fresh meat forever. So what was the plan? How did it work? I mean, he came in one day, and he was telling me that he had it all figured out that the conception, gestation, birth rate, growth rate, and reproduction rate of hamsters was going to keep him and whoever else in fresh meat forever. In fact, Otis bought 200 hamsters, half of the male, the other half female, to live in his bunker with him when the shit went down. He would breed them and eat them. Of course, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, "Whoa, you know, this is over the top, man." Yeah, no kidding. It's crazy. But you also have to admit, it's pretty freaking genius. With a little hamster food and some water, you've got a self-sustaining, adorable food supply. But you can't just call this prepping. You don't buy 200 hamsters just in case. Otis with the hamsters had total certainty about what would happen on January 1st, the year 2000, and that afterwards, nothing would ever be the same again. And Otis, he was most definitely not the only one. The Central Intelligence Agency has recently begun to assess the readiness of the world's computers for the year 2000, and the news is bad. As a third millennium got closer, people started to freak out a little. When the year switches from 1999 to 2000, computers should simply process the new date. Only they can't. Which threatens to reduce our computer-based society to chaos. And what started as an undercurrent, grew louder. It was a particularly large global disaster in the making. And stranger. Your security systems, the lights, if you go out to drive. Oh, Jacqueline's prey to think of this mix. And a lot of us thought shit really was going to go down. Mandatory gun background checks this month are up 20% from last December. A enormous invitation for terrorists, criminals, and crazies, if you will. What'll happen to Russia's nuclear missile? Haven't you heard that midnight every computer in the world is going to collapse? And then? The world doesn't end. The lights don't go out. So Americans breathing easier, returning purchases of emergency supplies. And all those people who were swept up in it, they feel misled, even disappointed. Maybe a little dumb. Some are even asking if all that preparing was necessary. And then, we all just drop it, moving on to the next thing to worry about. Like none of it ever happened. But here's the thing. Me? I think about that time, that day, almost every day. I never dropped it. Because I busted through that third millennium banner, like a big dumb tiger mascot on fire, spectacularly and painfully. Frankly, it nearly did me in. And I almost ruined somebody else's life in the process, egg-donned by the new millennium. The biggest day won, and he of us would ever get to see. And I've always wondered, who else? Or who else did the journey to the year 2000 change everything? For this season of Headlong, we are telling the story of the millennium, of millennialism, how humans do crazy things when the clock makes it all the way around and starts again. We're going to meet the people who expected the end of the world as we know it. Some even wanted the end. They couldn't wait to wash away what was and start over. But none of them. None of us really got the ending that we were expecting. Which brings us back to Otis with the hamsters. He lived for the apocalypse. I mean, it was, you know, the black helicopters were coming to get him. And Otis took it all to heart. I mean, I don't want to talk bad about him. I mean, he was a good guy and he's gone now and died young. Do you mind if I ask how he died? Alcoholism took him. I'd like to have met Otis with the hamsters. Just a compare notes about that time and that feeling. But I'll settle for Otis being the beginning of this whole journey, the inspiration to meet the others you were about to meet. And it's a journey that'll take us to tunnels under Jerusalem and Apache scout pits in Mexico. There's hostages taken at gunpoint and two babies born just milliseconds apart. There's conspiracy theories and and times religion. Plus there's dogs and sweatshirts and freshly born kittens and my producer Henry. Popies, kittens and Henry and the apocalypse. I'm Dan Tabersky and this is Headlong, surviving Y2K. Episode 1. Millennium approaches. So first things first, let's just define what we're talking about here. Y2K is a concoction, a freaky coincidence really, with two main ingredients, the millennium and a computer bug. We'll start with the bug. It's 1996 in the UK. British scientists have cloned a sheep and the spice girls hit. So you know, an uneasy time. On his way to his job as a computer coder is 26 year old Andrew Oakley. Well, I mean I started using computers pretty much from when I was about five or six years old. He works at the Royal Bank of Scotland. He's the overnight IT guy basically, a part time job. I was a DJ at nightclub in the evenings and I'd kind of get in at half past two in the morning and then I'd get a phone call at three o'clock and kind of like, oh, crikey. Wait, describe your look for me. What kind of guy are you? Now I am a, a, a, a portly middle aged dad of three, very boring looking. Back then I was a goth. Did you say goth, a goth? Yeah, I must admit. I, I didn't look entirely in place at a bank. Andrew, do you have a picture of yourself at the time? I want to see your hair. Oh, what? My hair. Oh, I almost certainly do. Should I email you something? Do you have it like right now, like on your phone? Yeah. Yeah, hang on. Let me. All right. Um, there you go. Holy hell. If I ever make a secret lives of computer coders coffee table book, he is my centerfold. That is amazing. Is that a crimping? Yeah. Did you use a crimping iron? Oh, yeah, the crimping. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found Andrew the goth in the online comment section of the BBC News website arguing with people about why 2k. Banging away at my keyboard, telling people, you know, you're wrong. You're being very wrong on the internet. Insisting the year 2000 wasn't nothing. And he would know because he was there, a coder at the beginning, when it became clear that computers and the approaching millennium were about to collide. And it happens like this. In 1996, Andrew the goth is working for a big bank with their mortgages division. 30 year fixed rate stuff like that. And people like me would be paid to be on call. To fix any computer problems that came up overnight. It would usually be a fairly easy problem and it would take sort of half an hour, an hour to fix. But this one night, it didn't get fixed. The whole thing had just stopped, it had crashed, it had given an error message. And as bosses, they are freaking out. We had managers screaming at us down the phone, wise it's not fixed. We just couldn't figure it out. And when they finally did, they found a glitch. What was the problem? So the problem was, we had a mortgage that was, uh, had a term of 125 years. Which is weird, right? Mortgages are usually like 20 or 30 years. And you think so? We couldn't believe it because we thought surely nobody has a mortgage that lasts 125 years. And we really.
that this is some kind of charity, I think it was in Manchester. And this charity had a fantastically de-kenzian Victorian name, it's something like the gently benevolent home for fallen women or something like that. And somebody had given them a building in return for paying a mortgage at something absolutely tiny, like, you know, a pound or two dollars a year, something like that. So why do we care about 125-year mortgage? Because that's what tipped them off to this colossal problem buried in their code. And this thing had ticked over finally from year 1990, year 100, and that threw everything out, because we had only allowed for two digits in the year. Only two digits for the year. So when the 99th year in the mortgage turns to the 100th, the computer only sees the last two digits, 0-0. And it doesn't know what year it is. So it doesn't know what to do. And this made Andrew the Goth think about the rest of the date fields in their code in a whole lot of computer code, in fact, all two digits for the date instead of four. Year 2000 is only three or four years away. Vani is going to be like this, but a million times worse. Because when 99 turns to 2000, the computer won't see 2000, it'll see 0-0. And it'll think it's 1900 or year 0. And it won't know what to do. That's it. That's the millennium book. You would go to your ATM and it would not work. Your salary would not be paid. And it wouldn't just have been this one bank, it would have been pretty much anywhere that dealt with dates. It's about the day-to-day fabric of society completely failing. Yikes. And Goth computer coders around the world are discovering the very same problem Andrew is. There is no simple fix. Billions of lines of computer code must be examined and changed one by one. And it wouldn't take long to go from there to here. The flaw is everywhere. This is 1998, another sticky summer in Washington, D.C. Yes, it's in computer programs, software programs. It's also embedded into those micro computers that we call CHIMPS. This is a senator that heads the special committee, formed to deal with the bug. Today Y2K is kind of a joke, right? This thing that everyone was afraid of but that never happened. Well, the language here, just the tone of it, it's no joke. And the estimates we get in our committee are that between two and possibly 5% of those CHIMPS will fail. And you don't know which two to 5% they are, and you don't know where they are. It's a little like announcing that we are at war. I believe we're going to win. I think that civilization, as we know, it is not going to come to an end. It's possibility. Possibility if Y2K were this weekend instead of 76 weekends from now, in what? And here's the thing. It could have been like the 1997 bug, right? Or the Thursday bug. Instead, by total chance, this existential threat was set to go off on a date that was already going to be pretty freaky to begin with. The numbers on the calendar are not mere numbers. At age 70, Hillel Schwartz has spent a lifetime studying millennialism. He's the kind of guy who writes 600 page books on an electric typewriter in a mobile home. Our minds are looking for significant markers when you see odometer going from 999 to 10,000. The kids want to see that change still to this very day. And still to this very day, it's more important to turn 40 than to turn 39. That's how it works. And when these markers appear, when 99s turn to zero zeros, everything takes on extra meaning. When the year 1300 hit, 200,000 people flooded into Rome, begging the Pope to erase their sins for when Jesus shows up at any moment. The approach to 1900 got its own name, the fantasy Eccla. And the belief that civilization itself was decaying, ripples through the great works like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. 40 years ago, in Tehran, whispered start spreading that the face of the Ayatola Commanding himself appeared in the full moon right before they sweep him into power in the revolution. The year is 1979, but on the Muslim calendar, it's 1400. And those were all centuries, 100 year markers. So the year 2000, the end of a millennium, and now on top of that, along comes a computer bug that will be triggered at that exact same moment. And then humans created ourselves, it just feels right, doesn't it? Hello, shorts again. Some anticipate the turn of the millennium to be a turn toward heaven on earth. Some anticipate then a transformation that is personal, social, political, toward what is most desired. And some believe that all of the signs are of the bleakest sort. And if we do not repent, if we do not change our ways, then we are destined to disappear. That mixture of the bug and the millennium, it would trigger something. And me and all the people will follow in this series through New Year's Eve. After the break, we'll meet the first two. One guy who tried to scare the world into saving itself. And another guy who tried to scare the world into saving itself from that first guy. That's after this. [Music] Hey Dan, where are we right now? We're headed to see David Eddie. David Eddie of www.y2ktimebomb.com. You excited? I am. I'm ready to. he's spicy. My producer Henry and I are at Babson College in Massachusetts. We're here to meet a guy named Dave Eddie. Damn, good to meet you. Henry, how do you know? How do you know? Well, this isn't too loud for you guys, right? If you want to understand the Y2K bug and how we react to it, you have to talk to Dave Eddie. Who immediately puts me to work. Out the door, go left, don't go away. Go back out that door. Go left down the. the thing and there's a gold Honda. Okay, trunk. It's not gonna be like a dead body in there, is there? Dave Eddie is 71 now. He's a big guy. Or maybe he just acts big and loud. He's the kind of guy who seems like he'd be hard to kill. Okay, here we go. I get the old file box from his trunk. [Music] His Y2K box, it turns out. And judging by the weight of it, he's got a lot to say. Is this. for you guys? This is homework. Documentation, never enough. Documentation to prove he is the reason we call Y2K, Y2K. He is the source of the river. Dave Eddie. In your packets, there is the email where I totally accidentally, absentmindedly, lazily coined Y2K. Started calling it year 2000 in paragraph one and by paragraph three or four, it's Y2K because I'm lazy because it's 67 percent more efficient. And it's that type of efficiency that actually got us into this trouble in the first place. Yeah, I'm interested in the concept of the Y2K bug. I'm interested in the concepts that. It was not a bug. Never was a bug. It was a conscious, correct design compromise. All designs are compromises. It was absolutely categorically not a bug. To why do they call it a bug? Uh. It's much easier to describe life, you know, in very simple superstitions. What Dave Eddie is getting at here is that calling the Y2K bug a bug implies mistake, an error that no one realized. The truth is it wasn't a mistake. We created this thing on purpose. In the 60s and 70s, computer memory was impossibly slight. Gigabytes and terabytes, that was practically science fiction. So every character in the code was precious. And so using two-digit dates made perfect sense. Every year started with 19, so why bother writing it? And every once in a while, someone would say, "You know, this is going to be a problem when the year 2000 comes around." And then everyone else would say, "Go away nerd, we'll all be cyborgs on jetpacks by then anyway." But we weren't. We were just a little older, with different haircuts. It's stuck with a computer bug that's not a bug. And trying to figure out how to figure it out.
And that is where Dave Eddie comes in. But before we get into that, can I just say, you know my secret lies of Coder's coffee table book? It's a really good idea. Oh, I can show you pictures of the before and after. There's the before. We recognize instantly recognizable, right? It's a shot of Dave on a motorcycle. His name's stitched in the back of his leather jacket. Before becoming a computer coder, he raced bikes. And what motorcycle are you riding? There's only one choice. Is it a Harley? Bmw. Okay. Bmw. It's just feel like there's more. No, there's only one. If you're doing that, Harley Harley made it 10, ride it out and push it down. With age and lack of a death wish, motorcycles give way to computers. Dave Eddie becomes a coder, learning the ins and outs of computer languages. By the 90s, he works for a small company that makes software for mainframes. And business was drying up. But then, the Y2K bug pokes its big head out of its go-for-hole. And where some saw fear, Dave Eddie, he saw his luck changing. You weren't running for the hills, you saw an opportunity. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He would become, in effect, a Y2K salesman, selling the bug as a problem and something to be very afraid of. You know, the money was going into building this new product. I didn't have two nickels to rub together. I had my button to chair and a phone. And T uses both to sell this new Y2K-focused software. What did that software do? Can you pitch me your Y2K pitch? I assume you've heard the phrase "Lines of Code." Completely meaningless. There are 50, 50, major software languages. There are 1,500 minor languages. And a new language is introduced at the rate of one a month. Wow. Exactly. And with all those languages piling up over the years, most big computer systems had become like an old house, renovated one too many times, with pipes that lead nowhere and switches, that you God knows what, and no blueprints. And that's what Dave Eddie's product does. It inventory is your software. So you can find the bug and fix it. Find the bits and bobs that need four spaces instead of two. And is technique to sell you on that software? To scare the hell out of you. I would sell the problem, not the solution. I would not sell that we have a solution. I'm pitching, it's a problem, it's a problem, it's a problem, till the mark admits they have a problem, there is no problem. So your job is to get people to admit it's actually a problem. It's a problem. It's a problem, you got to admit there's a problem. He's good, right? And also, he's right, right. It is a problem, isn't it? Well, in the late 90s, Russia's entire nuclear weapon system is rigged to launch a strike if it even thinks it's being attacked. How would those computers react to the bug? What about your Social Security check? Unemployment, food stamps. If federal computers wig out, the lives of millions are disrupted. Or how about this scenario? Texaco, the oil company. Supplying the country with fuel they palm through thousands of miles of pipeline. And all along the pipeline, there are tiny little computer chips that measure the time, date, and how much oil is flowing. New years comes and 99 switches to 0-0 in the code. And little chip doesn't know if it's 2000 or 1900 or what. The whole thing shuts down. The oil stops pumping. We can't heat our homes. Every American north of Texas dies frozen in place like Jack Nicholson and the Shining. Or not. Maybe nothing would happen. We've never been here before, so no one really knows for sure. We are at the mercy of the experts. And most of them think like Dave Eddie does. That we're headed for a Y2K shit storm. But some don't. This was the perfect scam. My name is David, Robert LaBla. But no need for formalities here. You probably know him as something else. Assuming you were following Saskatchewan politics in 1982. That's when I ran for the mayor of my city here. Yeah. And I was unsuccessful. He's 22 at the time. So I just ran as my, you know, my middle name is Robert. So I just went as Bob LaBla. Bob LaBla. Bob LaBla. Not to be confused with the arrest and development character with the same name. I was going to stay in my office tonight and work on my law block. Of course. The Bob LaBla, Bob LaBla. Wow. You, sir, are a mouthful. But that's TV, make believe. I found this Bob LaBla, the original Bob LaBla, because of a website. His website. About Y2K. Still up online, unchanged from 18 years ago. With this irresistible message on the homepage post script. This website was frozen on December 31st, 1999 as a permanent document on how all of us acted and reacted to the Y2K myth from 1997 to 1999. There will be no updates. 1996 Saskatchewan, Canada. You forget how exciting the 90s were for the internet. Bob LaBla gets really into computers. Oh, yeah. I remember the first time I was connected to the ARPANET. That was a precursor to the internet. Tiny little computer. I remember being so excited and yelling at my wife. Come in here. Look at this. I'm connected to a library in Finland. And I was so excited. And he becomes good at it. And Lance's dream job as a coder for the Canadian government. Me, my wife, they moved me right to Ottawa. And for this fantastic job, my salary tripled. We're going to do all of this great stuff. Web-based items for the federal government. So I was right at national headquarters of computer systems of the government of Canada. I was so excited about this. This is going to be so big. The internet is going to be so big. Oh, this is my career. This is my life. I was so excited. That excitement? It lasts about six months. And then the Y2K circus came into town, set up their tent, and everything stopped. And they were knocking out this massive section of this federal building. And the size of a shopping center that it was going to be converted all to the year 2000 command center. And Bob LaBla just couldn't understand why. It was a computer problem. Something they had to fix. Fine. Everyone knew that. But this? This was too much. And the first time I saw it, when I opened it, I looked at it, opened the doors. And it was almost like a science fiction movie. You know, when you finally go to the secret lab and they open the door. And there's all these computers and people and army people running around. They had massive amounts of endless desks and computers. And it was this huge command center. And I still remember just looking at all of my colleagues and everyone's like, "What is going on here?" Now, let me give you a little context about where we were with computers around this time. May 6, 1998. I'm really pleased to report to you today that Apple's back on track. Steve Jobs is on a stage and he's wearing a suit, no turtleneck. Yeah, the 90s were weird. From the marriage of the excitement of the internet with the simplicity of Macintosh. He's announcing the first iMac. In fact, it's the first iAnything. The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys, by the way. And then. Also, 1998, this commercial hits the airwaves. Hey, what do you got today? The point is that 20 years is a long time when it comes to technology. And the comfort with computers, just the language of it that we have today. For most of us, it's just not the most important thing to do. And the comfort with computers is just the language of it that we have today. For most of us, it's just not there yet. And now smart people, people who would know are saying it turns out our computers are time bombs. Would you blow them off? The further you were away from the coding and the computer systems themselves, the more scared you were. Bob-Bob-Bob again. They were probably telling their underlings you better fix this. Because if anything happens on December 31st 1999, you're in such big trouble. So the higher you went up, the more panic you were and to save your own skin so you put more and more and more and more money. I think the Army- Davidi again. Initial Army sale number one was like $25,000. Thank you very much, American taxpayers. We do appreciate that. Your first sale was to the Army? Yeah. They have the problem in spades. That's quite a first sale. Yeah, it was fun. And to make those sales numbers for his Y2K software, he has been stoking the fire for months with speeches and conferences and published articles. So here I have an inventory. It's a six-page inventory, 111 articles. More from the Magic Y2K box. Can I read some titles? Go right ahead. Don't blame the programmers. Which Riyadh let's be prepared. The Millennium Cancer.
I'm a Paul Revere kind of thing. That was my basic role. You got a problem, you got a problem, you got a problem, and then you then you shift from Paul Revere to salesman. Can I challenge you for a second? What you just described is that you sound the alarm, your Paul Revere you're saying here's a problem and then with the other hand you see here's a solution. That's the hallmark of a scam. You're fully entitled to believe that. It's not. I've never heard anything less genuine than that. Less genuine. That was so. Well, it's not a good sales technique to say you're full of shit. You don't want your ass from your elbow. Just because, you know, some idiot thinks it was a hoax, that's their problem. It's not my problem. You're an idiot. Point taken. Meanwhile, government coder Bob Lobla is in his cubicle in Ottawa with smoke coming out of his ears. I was going out of my mind because it's got bigger and bigger and bigger and everything else the stuff Bob Lobla came to Ottawa to do helping to build the brand new internet. It got pushed aside. The Y2K bug had become the bug in Bob Lobla's plans. And so he decides to fight back. He decides to become two people. By day he would be Bob Lobla, government coder working tirelessly to save Canadians from the Y2K bug. But by night at home. So you started this website and the website, what was it called? The title was Year 2000 computer bug hoax. Got it. So you are coming out strong on the it's a hoax side. Entirely, yeah. And remember, in 1998 starting a website is hard. In fact, it was so novel then that printed directories came out every year that actually listed the restaurants and agencies and people who had websites like old-timey phone books. Or even uploading a little update to the website took one to three hours sometimes and they would just sit there. It was all by phone. There was no collaxial cable or anything. So it was had to dial up and sometimes halfway through updating my website. My wife would pick up the phone to phone a friend and that would knock out my internet. So I'd have to hang up the phone. I'm on the internet and I had to start again. His website becomes the clearinghouse for Y2K skeptics on the web. Articles, links, forums, a lot of venting. I loved it. That's all I did. I ran home from work and you know got in the computer and oh my god, I got 71 emails. And in building the site to vent his own anger, he kind of solves his own problem. Now he is part of the brand new internet, making stuff and getting a response. I mean, I've never been this popular in my life and never will be that popular in my life. And reading all the emails, I said, this is exciting and a little dangerous even. And it was thrilling. Remember, he is doing all of this anonymously. During the day, he works for that same government. He says is wasting millions of dollars. Canadian. I mean, you essentially became, it's a, I mean, a whistleblower or you were trying to blow the whistle. In a way, I've always, I've never been able to really how to define what I was because there was no whistle to blow. Everyone was on one side and it said, this is going to happen. I was trying to tell people about something that wasn't going to happen. And you can't do that. It doesn't go anywhere. Like I can't say I'm not going to be hit by a bus tomorrow. And I was like, well, you could be. And then that's a while. It's so highly unlikely. But then there's that little sliver in your brain. What if, and that's what the whole essence of the white UK hoax was, that little sliver like, but, but what if you couldn't stop it? What if, what if, Davidi and Bob LaBla didn't know each other them. They still don't. But if they did, I bet they would love hating each other. They'd go at each other like road runner and wily coyote. Over who was right, this was the perfect scam. And who was wrong? You're an idiot. And right up until the last possible minute, they were both sure they were the right one. What, what, what did you do under your teeth? We went down to Sturbridge Village. Sturbridge Village. It's like Colonial Wemesburg, but in Massachusetts. People churning butter and candle dipping, shoe cobbling, you know, 1800s stuff. And we figured that, you know, if all the electricity was going to turn off, be nice place and people would know how to cook over a fire. Get out of here. But you went to the joke. No, I just wanted to weigh it out. I thought there would be issues. You did. Oh yeah. And Bob LaBla up in Canada. So I had a giant room in my, in my apartment that computers everywhere. And just look like a little mad scientist room. I was just pretty much sitting in front of all my computer screens all day and all evening. You know, I was checking the news and I think I opened up a beer with that, okay. I don't know. I was just so excited to January 1st, 2000 to stand up and say, look at me. I was right and everyone was wrong. So what happened when the millennium arrived? Not what they expected. Not even close. Turns out, whether the apocalypse came or not is beside the point. It's the expectation of it. That's what sets the giant raiders of the lost arc-sized ball rolling. Not just for Dave Eddie and Bob LaBla, but also for the rest of the people you'll meet here. As we follow all of them to New Year's Eve and after. This season on Headlong Surviving Y2K. In our wildest dreams, it was really going to crash and we were going to go out in the woods naked with a knife. As New Year's creeps closer, the disaster that many fear, some, they can't wait. The arc of the covenant is the center of the Holy of Holies. We felt like it was key in the end days. You guys were looking for it. We were really confident we would find it. Did you go too far? Did you become an insect? Insane? Absolutely. We're not out of the woods yet. The shit's coming. And where some saw the end, others saw a new beginning. Myself included. You went from zero to 60 real quick. I'm sorry if this is really graphic and I'm just going to go for it, right? I mean in your life. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like holy motherfucking shit. I was in love with this woman and she was in Berlin and I was going to like kidnap her. I'm already rooting for you. And when New Year's Eve finally arrives, every eye is on the ball at six minute and 40 seconds to ball drop. Well, you'll never say nothing happened on Y2K ever again. She said you are going to have the millennium baby. And I was like, whoa. That must have gave you the chills. It legit creeped me out. At one point she says, okay, you all need to call your family and tell them to cancel your New Year's Eve plans. Yeah, no kidding. And stood with the gun door ahead while we made the phone call. I'm a long way friend. Yeah, listen, I have a color that's being held hostage. Then I'm going to keep my color. Two, one. Headlong, surviving Y2K, is produced by Henry Milowski. And me, I'm Dan Tabersky. Our associate producers are Maddie Spron Kaiser and Ben Falen. Ben also does our research and fact checking. Joel Lovell is our editor, Original Music by Mark Gordon and John Hancock. Our theme song is Burns by George Fitzgerald, courtesy of Domino Recording and Publishing Company. In this episode, you also heard hand clapping song by the meters, courtesy of BMG and the Warner Music Group, additional music by Danny Sullivan, music clearance by Dan Konishkoe. This episode was mixed by Martin Johnson at Soundtelling in Sweden. Jenna Westberman and Max Linsky are the executive producers at Pineapple Street. The team at Topic Studios is Lita Malod and Lisa Lungang. And a special thank you to Adam Pinkis. You can also find headlong on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, follow us and check out more podcasts from
[email protected]/podcasts. Also, quick favor. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a quick rating and review on iTunes. It means a lot and it's also a nice way to let other people discover the show. Thanks. And finally, what's your Y2K story? We set up a special voicemail for you to tell us. Call us at 949-639-9Y2K. Leave a message and tell us a story and we may just use it on the show. That's 949-639-9925. Episode 2 is out right now and the millennium is only months away. If you're enjoying the show and can't wait to hear more episodes, you can binge listen the entire season. Add free. Right now on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to Stitcher Premium.com/Headlong and use promo code Headlong.
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