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The Worst Mistakes Ever Made by Humans · The Mind of a Man

0:00
Speaker 1: Leaded gasoline disaster. So imagine you're a scientist, smart guy,
0:05
Speaker 1: degree on the wall, lab coat, the whole thing. And
0:08
Speaker 1: you discover something that stops car engines from knocking. Great, wonderful.
0:13
Speaker 1: You're a hero. Except the thing you discovered is lead.
0:16
Speaker 1: And you decide to put it in gasoline. And then
0:19
Speaker 1: everyone puts it in gasoline. And then the entire planet
0:22
Speaker 1: breathes lead for about 70 years. That guy was Thomas
0:26
Speaker 1: Midgley Jr. And before you feel too bad for him,
0:29
Speaker 1: hold on because we're coming back to him. Spoiler, he
0:33
Speaker 1: also invented CFCs, the same man, one person, responsible for
0:39
Speaker 1: arguably the two worst chemical disasters in human history. At
0:43
Speaker 1: some point, the universe should have just taken his chemistry
0:45
Speaker 1: set away. Leaded gasoline started in the 1920s. General Motors,
0:51
Speaker 1: Standard Oil, they all knew pretty quickly that lead was toxic.
0:56
Speaker 1: There were workers dying in the refineries. People called the
0:59
Speaker 1: factories houses of butterflies because workers would hallucinate before collapsing.
1:04
Speaker 1: That's not a great sign. That's not the kind of
1:07
Speaker 1: thing you put in a press release. And yet, somehow,
1:10
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline stayed in use until the 1970s and 80s
1:13
Speaker 1: in most countries, and some places kept using it until 2021. 2021.
1:19
Speaker 1: There are people alive today who were born after the
1:22
Speaker 1: moon landing and grew up breathing lead. The consequences. researchers
1:28
Speaker 1: estimate that leaded gasoline lowered the average IQ of an
1:31
Speaker 1: entire generation. Not one person. Not one city. An entire
1:36
Speaker 1: generation of humans across the whole planet, just slightly less
1:40
Speaker 1: intelligent than they could have been, because someone in a
1:42
Speaker 1: suit decided the knocking sound in a car engine was
1:44
Speaker 1: more annoying than poisoning the atmosphere. And Thomas Midley Jr.,
1:49
Speaker 1: just to close the loop on this man, died in
1:51
Speaker 1: 1944 tangled in a system of ropes and pulleys he
1:54
Speaker 1: invented to help himself get out of bed after contracting polio.
1:59
Speaker 1: The ropes strangled him. He was killed by his own invention.
2:03
Speaker 1: History has a dark sense of humor. Chernobyl. April 26th, 1986. Ukraine.
2:13
Speaker 1: It's the middle of the night, and the engineers at
2:14
Speaker 1: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are running a safety test.
2:18
Speaker 1: A safety test. To make sure the reactor would be
2:21
Speaker 1: safe in an emergency. You already see where this is going.
2:25
Speaker 1: The test had been delayed all day. The operators were tired.
2:29
Speaker 1: They were working with a reactor that had been specifically
2:32
Speaker 1: warned against running at low power for exactly the conditions
2:35
Speaker 1: they were about to create. The reactor design, the RBMK-1000,
2:39
Speaker 1: had a flaw. A fundamental catastrophic flaw. When the reactor
2:44
Speaker 1: ran at low power, it became unstable. More heat meant
2:48
Speaker 1: more steam. More steam meant more reaction. More reaction meant
2:52
Speaker 1: more heat. Positive feedback loop, The thing that's supposed to
2:56
Speaker 1: stop a nuclear reaction was actually making it worse. And
2:59
Speaker 1: the operators didn't fully know this, because the Soviet government
3:02
Speaker 1: hadn't told them. Because telling workers about a design flaw
3:06
Speaker 1: in a Soviet nuclear reactor would mean admitting the Soviet
3:09
Speaker 1: Union had made a mistake, and that was apparently worse
3:11
Speaker 1: than the alternative. At 1.23 a.m., the reactor power surged
3:17
Speaker 1: to about 10 times its maximum capacity in three seconds.
3:21
Speaker 1: The steam explosion that followed blew the 1,000-ton reactor lid
3:24
Speaker 1: clean off the building, then a second explosion, then a
3:28
Speaker 1: graphite fire that shot radioactive particles two kilometers into the air.
3:33
Speaker 1: The firefighters who arrived first thought it was a normal fire.
3:37
Speaker 1: They picked up pieces of graphite from the reactor core
3:39
Speaker 1: with their bare hands. Some of them were dead within weeks.
3:43
Speaker 1: The Soviet government's initial response was to tell people it
3:45
Speaker 1: was fine. It was not fine. The city of Pripyat, 50,000 people,
3:51
Speaker 1: wasn't evacuated until 36 hours after the explosion. They told
3:55
Speaker 1: residents to pack for three days. Most of them never
3:58
Speaker 1: went back. The cloud of radiation drifted across Europe. Sweden
4:02
Speaker 1: detected abnormal radiation levels on a worker's shoes and initially
4:06
Speaker 1: thought their own plant had a leak. It hadn't. It
4:10
Speaker 1: was Chernobyl, from hundreds of miles away. The total death
4:14
Speaker 1: toll is still debated. Official Soviet figures said 31 people.
4:20
Speaker 1: The actual number accounting for cancer deaths, long-term health effects,
4:24
Speaker 1: and the catastrophic impact on communities across Belarus, Ukraine, and
4:29
Speaker 1: Russia runs into the tens of thousands or higher, depending
4:32
Speaker 1: on the study. The exclusion zone around the reactor is
4:36
Speaker 1: still uninhabitable. It will be for another 20,000 years. All
4:41
Speaker 1: of this because of a safety test. Gone wrong. On
4:46
Speaker 1: a reactor with a known design flaw that nobody was
4:49
Speaker 1: allowed to talk about the Amazon. Here's a mistake that
4:54
Speaker 1: isn't one dramatic moment. No explosion, no mushroom cloud, just
4:59
Speaker 1: a slow, steady, catastrophically bad decision that's been happening for
5:03
Speaker 1: decades and is still happening right now. The Amazon rainforest
5:08
Speaker 1: covers about 5.5 million square kilometers. It produces roughly 20%
5:13
Speaker 1: of the world's oxygen. It houses about 10% of all
5:15
Speaker 1: species on Earth. It regulates weather patterns across an entire continent.
5:21
Speaker 1: It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most
5:23
Speaker 1: important things on the planet. We've destroyed about 17% of it.
5:28
Speaker 1: Some scientists think we're close to a tipping point, somewhere
5:31
Speaker 1: between 20 and 25%, where the forest will no longer
5:35
Speaker 1: be able to generate its own rainfall and will start
5:37
Speaker 1: converting itself into savanna. Not because of anything else humans
5:42
Speaker 1: do after that point. Just on its own. because the
5:45
Speaker 1: system that sustained it will have been broken past the
5:47
Speaker 1: point of recovery. And why? Agriculture, cattle ranching, soy farming,
5:53
Speaker 1: illegal logging. In some cases, the land cleared isn't even
5:56
Speaker 1: used productively. It's just cleared because clearing is profitable. Trees
6:01
Speaker 1: are worth more dead and sold than alive and filtering
6:03
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. The Amazonian countries have made promises. International agreements
6:09
Speaker 1: have been signed. There have been genuine efforts. And then
6:12
Speaker 1: there have been governments that actively encouraged more clearing and
6:16
Speaker 1: called environmentalists enemies of progress. The economic incentives to destroy
6:21
Speaker 1: it are enormous. The economic incentives to preserve it are
6:25
Speaker 1: abstract and long-term, and don't show up in quarterly earnings reports.
6:30
Speaker 1: This is arguably the most expensive mistake in this entire video,
6:34
Speaker 1: because we won't know how bad it is until it's
6:36
Speaker 1: already too late to fix. The ozone crisis. we need
6:41
Speaker 1: to come back to Thomas Midgley because the leaded gasoline
6:44
Speaker 1: thing was bad, but this man wasn't done. In the
6:48
Speaker 1: 1920s and 30s, refrigerators used refrigerants like ammonia and sulfur dioxide.
6:53
Speaker 1: These were toxic. Refrigerators occasionally leaked and killed people in
6:57
Speaker 1: their homes. This was clearly a problem. So Midgley developed
7:02
Speaker 1: a new class of chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, non-toxic, stable, non-flammable,
7:10
Speaker 1: worked perfectly. A genuine improvement. The problem is that stable
7:15
Speaker 1: in chemistry means doesn't break down easily. And when CFCs
7:19
Speaker 1: eventually drifted up into the stratosphere, the ultraviolet radiation up
7:23
Speaker 1: there did break them down. And the chlorine atoms that
7:27
Speaker 1: were released, each one of them could destroy up to 100,000
7:31
Speaker 1: ozone molecules. The ozone layer, the thing that protects every
7:35
Speaker 1: living thing on Earth from ultraviolet radiation, started developing a hole.
7:40
Speaker 1: By the 1980s, scientists discovered a hole in the ozone
7:44
Speaker 1: layer over Antarctica, the size of North America. Skin cancer
7:49
Speaker 1: rates were rising. Ecosystems were being disrupted. The good news,
7:54
Speaker 1: and this is one of the few stories in this
7:56
Speaker 1: video with actual good news, is that humanity responded. The
8:00
Speaker 1: Montreal Protocol, 1987, 197 countries agreed to phase out CFCs.
8:07
Speaker 1: It is the most widely ratified treaty in United Nations history.
8:11
Speaker 1: The ozone layer is slowly recovering and is expected to
8:14
Speaker 1: return to 1980 levels by around 2060. So we made
8:18
Speaker 1: a catastrophic mistake, we noticed it, we cooperated internationally, and
8:23
Speaker 1: we're fixing it. Which proves we're capable of doing that.
8:27
Speaker 1: Which makes some of the other things on this list
8:29
Speaker 1: even more frustrating. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. August 6, 1945. A
8:38
Speaker 1: single American bomber, the Enola Gay, flew over Hiroshima, Japan,
8:43
Speaker 1: and dropped a bomb called Little Boy. The explosion was
8:47
Speaker 1: equivalent to about 15,000 tons of TNT. The temperature at
8:52
Speaker 1: the hypocenter reached approximately 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. An estimated 70,000
8:58
Speaker 1: to 80,000 people died instantly. By the end of 1945,
9:04
Speaker 1: the death toll had risen to somewhere between 90,000 and 166,000
9:11
Speaker 1: from burns, injuries, and radiation sickness. Three days later, a
9:16
Speaker 1: second bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki. Another 60,000
9:21
Speaker 1: to 80,000 dead. The debate over whether the bombings were necessary,
9:28
Speaker 1: whether they shortened the war, whether they ultimately saved more
9:32
Speaker 1: lives than they took, is one of the most contested
9:34
Speaker 1: moral questions in modern history, and this isn't the place
9:37
Speaker 1: to resolve it. What is inarguable is that two cities
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Speaker 1: full of civilian human beings were erased in a matter
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Speaker 1: of seconds, and that the weapons used were the product
9:47
Speaker 1: of a crash scientific program involving some of the greatest
9:50
Speaker 1: minds in the world, working as fast as they possibly
9:53
Speaker 1: could to build the most destructive thing ever created. Now
9:57
Speaker 1: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. And then
10:01
Speaker 1: humanity spent the next several decades building more of them.
10:05
Speaker 1: Lots more. By the 1980s, the United States and the
10:09
Speaker 1: Soviet Union had roughly 60,000 nuclear warheads between them. 60,000.
10:14
Speaker 1: The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima would barely count as a
10:17
Speaker 1: minor weapon in that arsenal. There have been at least
10:20
Speaker 1: a dozen close calls since then. False alarms, technical errors, miscommunications,
10:25
Speaker 1: moments when someone had their hand near a button based
10:28
Speaker 1: on information that turned out to be wrong. In 1983,
10:32
Speaker 1: a Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov received a warning that
10:36
Speaker 1: the United States had launched five nuclear missiles at the
10:39
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. Protocol said he should report it up the chain.
10:43
Speaker 1: He decided, based on a gut feeling that five missiles
10:46
Speaker 1: didn't make sense as a first strike, that it was
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Speaker 1: a false alarm. He was right. The system was malfunctioning.
10:53
Speaker 1: One person's gut feeling. That's what stood between that moment
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Speaker 1: and a nuclear exchange. We built a machine capable of
11:02
Speaker 1: ending civilization, and then we trusted it to not go
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Speaker 1: off by accident for 80 years and counting. And so far,
11:09
Speaker 1: so good. But so far so good is doing a
11:13
Speaker 1: lot of work in that sentence. Great leap forward. Between
11:18
Speaker 1: 1959 and 1961, somewhere between 15 and 55 million people
11:23
Speaker 1: died in China. The range is that wide because the
11:26
Speaker 1: Chinese government suppressed data and the full scale of what
11:29
Speaker 1: happened is still being pieced together by historians. Mao Zedong,
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Speaker 1: the leader of the People's Republic of China, launched a
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Speaker 1: campaign called the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The goal
11:41
Speaker 1: was to rapidly transform China from an agricultural society into
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Speaker 1: a communist industrial superpower. in a few years, which is
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Speaker 1: not how industrialization works. But nobody told Mao that. Or rather,
11:54
Speaker 1: they tried and things didn't go well for them. Part
11:58
Speaker 1: of the campaign involved Mao's Four Pests Initiative, which declared
12:02
Speaker 1: war on rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows. Because sparrows
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Speaker 1: ate grain seeds and grain seeds were valuable. So hundreds
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Speaker 1: of millions of people were mobilized to kill sparrows. They
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Speaker 1: banged drums. played instruments, shook trees, did whatever they could
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Speaker 1: to keep sparrows in the air until they died of exhaustion.
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Speaker 1: It is estimated that about one billion sparrows were killed.
12:28
Speaker 1: Here's the problem. Sparrows don't just eat grain seeds. They
12:32
Speaker 1: also eat insects, specifically locusts. And when you remove a
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Speaker 1: billion sparrows from an ecosystem, the locust population explodes. And
12:41
Speaker 1: locusts eat crops, the crops that hundreds of millions of
12:44
Speaker 1: people depend on to survive. At the same time, Mao
12:48
Speaker 1: was exporting grain to the Soviet Union to pay off debts,
12:52
Speaker 1: insisting to foreign governments that China was thriving, while local
12:56
Speaker 1: officials were so afraid of reporting bad news to Beijing
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Speaker 1: that they fabricated harvest figures. Mao believed the fabricated figures,
13:04
Speaker 1: kept exporting food, ordered more steel production instead of farming.
13:09
Speaker 1: People were pulling up railroad tracks and destroying tools to
13:12
Speaker 1: meet steel quotas, meaning fewer tools for the farms that
13:15
Speaker 1: were already struggling. The result was the deadliest famine in
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Speaker 1: recorded human history. Entire villages were depopulated. And because information
13:24
Speaker 1: was suppressed, because admitting failure was politically dangerous, the policies
13:29
Speaker 1: continued for years after the death toll was clearly catastrophic.
13:34
Speaker 1: Thalidomide scandal. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a drug
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Speaker 1: called thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant women in Europe, Canada, Australia,
13:44
Speaker 1: and other countries to treat morning sickness. It worked well
13:47
Speaker 1: for that. What it also did, which the manufacturers either
13:51
Speaker 1: didn't test for or chose not to highlight, was cause
13:54
Speaker 1: severe birth defects. Specifically, it interfered with limb development in
13:59
Speaker 1: developing fetuses. More than 10,000 children were born with severe malformations.
14:05
Speaker 1: Many had shortened or absent limbs. Many others were stillborn
14:09
Speaker 1: or died shortly after birth. The reason the United States
14:12
Speaker 1: largely escaped this disaster was a single FDA reviewer named
14:16
Speaker 1: Frances Kelsey, who repeatedly refused to approve thalidomide for American
14:21
Speaker 1: use because she wasn't satisfied with the safety data. The
14:24
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical company pressured her. Her superiors received complaints. She held firm.
14:30
Speaker 1: She was right. The thalidomide scandal transformed drug regulation worldwide.
14:35
Speaker 1: The idea that drugs needed to be tested for safety
14:38
Speaker 1: in pregnant women the idea that pharmaceutical companies needed to
14:41
Speaker 1: provide extensive safety data rather than just effectiveness data. A
14:46
Speaker 1: lot of modern drug regulation exists because of this catastrophe.
14:51
Speaker 1: Another case where the lesson was written in tragedy. Invasion
14:55
Speaker 1: of Iraq. In March 2003, the United States, the United Kingdom,
15:02
Speaker 1: and a coalition of allies invaded Iraq. The stated justification
15:07
Speaker 1: was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed
15:11
Speaker 1: an imminent threat to global security. The weapons of mass
15:15
Speaker 1: destruction did not exist. The intelligence was wrong. Or rather,
15:20
Speaker 1: it was gathered selectively, interpreted through a lens of pre-existing conclusions,
15:25
Speaker 1: and presented to the public with a confidence that the
15:27
Speaker 1: underlying data absolutely did not support. Analysts who raised doubts
15:33
Speaker 1: were sidelined. Inconvenient findings were buried. What followed was a
15:37
Speaker 1: war that lasted years, cost over a trillion dollars, killed
15:42
Speaker 1: somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqi civilians depending on the
15:48
Speaker 1: methodology used to count them, killed nearly 5,000 American and
15:52
Speaker 1: coalition troops, destabilized an entire region, contributed to the rise
15:58
Speaker 1: of ISIS, created a humanitarian catastrophe that's still unfolding. and
16:03
Speaker 1: fundamentally altered international trust in American and British intelligence assessments
16:07
Speaker 1: for years afterward. The people who made the decision mostly
16:11
Speaker 1: faced no significant consequences. Several wrote books. One gave a
16:16
Speaker 1: famous speech at a funeral that people found moving and
16:19
Speaker 1: briefly forgot about the war. The Iraqis who died stayed dead.
16:24
Speaker 1: The Dust Bowl In the 1930s, a combination of drought
16:28
Speaker 1: and catastrophically bad farming practices turned approximately 100 million acres
16:34
Speaker 1: of American and Canadian Great Plains into a wasteland. Massive
16:38
Speaker 1: dust storms, some so large they were visible from airplanes
16:41
Speaker 1: at altitude, rolled across the Midwest. One storm in 1935,
16:46
Speaker 1: Black Sunday, turned the sky completely black and deposited enormous
16:51
Speaker 1: amounts of debris as far east as Washington, D.C. and
16:55
Speaker 1: New York. Here's the thing. The Great Plains grasslands had
16:59
Speaker 1: evolved over thousands of years to hold the soil in place.
17:03
Speaker 1: Deep root systems, drought-resistant grasses, the whole ecosystem was adapted
17:08
Speaker 1: to the climate. When settlers arrived, they plowed all of
17:12
Speaker 1: it up. Every bit. Because grass wasn't wheat, and wheat
17:16
Speaker 1: was money. Then a drought came. Because droughts happen on
17:20
Speaker 1: the Great Plains. They always have. The deep root systems
17:24
Speaker 1: of the native grasses could survive it. the shallow roots
17:27
Speaker 1: of wheat crops couldn't. So the crops died, and there
17:30
Speaker 1: was nothing holding the soil down, and the wind took it.
17:34
Speaker 1: An estimated 3.5 million people were displaced. The Okies, farmers
17:39
Speaker 1: from Oklahoma and surrounding states, streamed west to California looking
17:43
Speaker 1: for work, finding mostly hostility and misery. John Steinbeck wrote
17:48
Speaker 1: The Grapes of Wrath about it. The New Deal introduced
17:51
Speaker 1: conservation programs. Farmers were paid to plant shelter belts of trees.
17:56
Speaker 1: Soil conservation methods were developed, and then decades later, in
18:00
Speaker 1: parts of the world, people plowed up grasslands and planted
18:03
Speaker 1: crops without adequate water management and over-extracted groundwater from aquifers.
18:09
Speaker 1: Because the lesson was available. But lessons you don't personally
18:13
Speaker 1: experience are easy to not learn. The Aral Sea. In 1960,
18:19
Speaker 1: the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world.
18:22
Speaker 1: By 2007, it had shrunk to 10% of its original size.
18:27
Speaker 1: Ships that once sailed it now sit rusting in the
18:29
Speaker 1: middle of a desert, miles from any water. The Soviet
18:33
Speaker 1: Union decided in the 1950s and 60s to massively expand
18:37
Speaker 1: cotton and rice production in Central Asia. The Aral Sea
18:41
Speaker 1: was fed by two rivers, the Amu Darya and the
18:44
Speaker 1: Sir Darya. Soviet planners diverted those rivers for irrigation. The
18:49
Speaker 1: rivers stopped reaching the sea. The sea started shrinking. Nobody
18:53
Speaker 1: stopped it, because stopping it would mean admitting the irrigation
18:56
Speaker 1: program was a failure, and the Soviet Union didn't do that.
19:00
Speaker 1: Local officials reported the sea's decline upward, but nothing changed.
19:05
Speaker 1: The fishing industry collapsed. The climate around the sea changed
19:08
Speaker 1: as the moderating effect of a large body of water disappeared.
19:12
Speaker 1: Salt and pesticide residue from the exposed seabed blew across
19:16
Speaker 1: the region. Cancer rates spiked. Infant mortality rose. The local
19:22
Speaker 1: ecosystem was essentially destroyed. It is one of the worst
19:26
Speaker 1: environmental disasters caused directly by human decision-making, notable not just
19:31
Speaker 1: for the scale of destruction, but for the completeness of it.
19:35
Speaker 1: There wasn't even a period of uncertainty where maybe it
19:38
Speaker 1: might recover. The trajectory was visible from the beginning to
19:41
Speaker 1: anyone paying attention. Boston molasses. Flood. Okay. Brief change of pace.
19:50
Speaker 1: Because history is also absurd. January 15th, 1919. Boston, North End.
19:57
Speaker 1: A storage tank containing approximately 2.3 million gallons of molasses failed. Catastrophically.
20:04
Speaker 1: The molasses wave was estimated to be 8 to 15
20:07
Speaker 1: feet high and traveled at 35 miles per hour, which
20:10
Speaker 1: is faster than you can run, especially when you're about
20:12
Speaker 1: to be hit by a wave of molasses and have
20:14
Speaker 1: not been warned this was going to happen. 21 people died.
20:19
Speaker 1: 150 were injured. Buildings were destroyed. Horses were trapped and drowned.
20:26
Speaker 1: The cleanup took weeks. Witnesses reported that the area smelled
20:30
Speaker 1: of molasses on hot summer days for years afterwards. Why
20:34
Speaker 1: did the tank fail? Because the company that owned it,
20:36
Speaker 1: the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, built it in a
20:40
Speaker 1: hurry during World War I to meet demand for industrial
20:43
Speaker 1: alcohol used in munitions production, used substandard materials, and ignored
20:48
Speaker 1: the fact that it was visibly leaking from the moment
20:50
Speaker 1: it was built. Locals reportedly collected leaked molasses off the
20:54
Speaker 1: ground for personal use. The tank groaned and creaked. It
20:58
Speaker 1: had never been properly tested. The company initially blamed anarchists
21:02
Speaker 1: for blowing up the tank. Sabotage. There was no evidence
21:06
Speaker 1: of this. The disaster was entirely structural failure caused by
21:10
Speaker 1: shoddy construction and no meaningful oversight. It resulted in one
21:14
Speaker 1: of the first major product liability cases in American history
21:18
Speaker 1: and contributed to the development of engineering standards and building codes. Great. Excellent.
21:25
Speaker 1: Glad 21 people drowned in syrup so we could learn
21:28
Speaker 1: that lesson. Bank Yao. While Chernobyl gets most of the
21:32
Speaker 1: attention as a Soviet-era infrastructure catastrophe, the Banqiao Dam failure
21:36
Speaker 1: in China in 1975 deserves to be mentioned in the
21:40
Speaker 1: same breath, except that it's barely mentioned at all. The
21:45
Speaker 1: Banqiao Dam in Henan province failed during Typhoon Nina in
21:48
Speaker 1: August 1975. The dam had been built in the early 1950s.
21:54
Speaker 1: A Soviet advisor who helped design it reportedly had concerns
21:57
Speaker 1: about safety, but was dismissed as being too conservative. Warning
22:01
Speaker 1: gauges failed during the storm. Radio equipment was broken. Emergency
22:06
Speaker 1: messages warning of the dam's imminent failure couldn't get through.
22:10
Speaker 1: When the dam failed, it created a wave 10 kilometers
22:12
Speaker 1: wide and 3 to 7 meters high, traveling at 50
22:16
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour, destroying dozens more dams downstream in a cascade.
22:21
Speaker 1: The death toll estimates range from 85,000 to 240,000 people.
22:27
Speaker 1: The disaster was classified as a state secret by the
22:29
Speaker 1: Chinese government for nearly two decades. Most of the world
22:33
Speaker 1: had no idea it had happened. 85,000 to 240,000 people.
22:38
Speaker 1: One damn failure. That most of the world still doesn't
22:41
Speaker 1: know about. The Titanic. The Titanic story is famous enough
22:47
Speaker 1: that you know the basics. April. 1912. Ship hits iceberg. Sinks. 1,500
22:52
Speaker 1: people die. movie, Celine Dion, etc. But the mistake isn't
23:01
Speaker 1: really there was an iceberg. The mistake is a collection
23:04
Speaker 1: of smaller decisions that turned a survivable disaster into a
23:08
Speaker 1: catastrophic one. The ship was going too fast for the
23:11
Speaker 1: ice conditions. Other ships had sent ice warnings. The warnings
23:14
Speaker 1: were received and largely ignored because there was a schedule
23:17
Speaker 1: to keep. There was a reception happening on board. Nobody
23:21
Speaker 1: wanted to slow down. The ship carried 20 lifeboats, capacity
23:25
Speaker 1: for about 1,178 people. There were 2,224 people on board,
23:31
Speaker 1: and even the lifeboats that were available were launched half-empty
23:34
Speaker 1: in the early stages of the sinking, because officers didn't
23:37
Speaker 1: believe passengers would fill them, or because there wasn't a
23:40
Speaker 1: clear system for loading them. The nearby ship Californian was
23:44
Speaker 1: close enough to have rendered assistance. Its radio operator had
23:48
Speaker 1: gone to sleep. He'd been trying to warn the Titanic
23:51
Speaker 1: about ice conditions earlier in the evening and had been
23:53
Speaker 1: brusquely told to stop interrupting because the Titanic's operator was
23:57
Speaker 1: busy sending passenger telegrams. The Californian's crew saw the distress rockets.
24:03
Speaker 1: Woke the captain. The captain couldn't make up his mind
24:06
Speaker 1: about what to do. By the time assistance came, it
24:09
Speaker 1: was too late. The Titanic disaster led directly to new
24:13
Speaker 1: maritime safety regulations. Enough lifeboats for everyone became mandatory. 24-hour
24:19
Speaker 1: radio monitoring became required. But as with all of these stories,
24:23
Speaker 1: the question is why it took the disaster to make
24:25
Speaker 1: those things happen. The information that ships needed more lifeboats
24:29
Speaker 1: was available before the Titanic sank. Someone had just decided
24:33
Speaker 1: it wasn't necessary. The Y2K story. Here's a mistake that
24:39
Speaker 1: almost happened and didn't and then got mocked for not happening,
24:44
Speaker 1: which is arguably also a mistake. In the early days
24:47
Speaker 1: of computing, programmers stored years using two digits instead of four.
24:53
Speaker 1: 1985 was stored as 85. Simple, efficient, and it saved
24:57
Speaker 1: precious memory when memory was expensive. The problem is that
25:01
Speaker 1: when the year 2000 arrived, computers would read 00 and
25:05
Speaker 1: might interpret that as 1900. Systems that calculated dates, which
25:09
Speaker 1: by the 1990s meant virtually every significant piece of infrastructure
25:14
Speaker 1: in the world, banks, power grids, Hospitals, air traffic control
25:19
Speaker 1: might fail or produce catastrophic errors. People began noticing this
25:24
Speaker 1: in the late 1980s and raised alarms through the 1990s.
25:29
Speaker 1: Governments spent hundreds of billions of dollars globally fixing their systems.
25:34
Speaker 1: Companies audited and updated software. There was an enormous international
25:39
Speaker 1: effort to patch the problem before it hit. The year
25:42
Speaker 1: 2000 arrived. Very little went wrong. Some minor glitches. Some
25:47
Speaker 1: small failures, nothing catastrophic. And then a significant portion of
25:51
Speaker 1: the population concluded that Y2K had been a hoax, a
25:56
Speaker 1: scare story, nothing to worry about. Rather than understanding that
26:00
Speaker 1: the problem had been real and had been averted through
26:03
Speaker 1: enormous coordinated effort, people decided the effort had been unnecessary
26:07
Speaker 1: because the problem didn't materialize. This is like concluding that
26:11
Speaker 1: seatbelts are useless because you didn't die in a car crash.
26:15
Speaker 1: The Y2K preparedness effort is actually one of the best
26:18
Speaker 1: examples of humanity successfully identifying a risk and responding to
26:22
Speaker 1: it before catastrophe struck. We promptly learned no lessons from
26:26
Speaker 1: this and continue to be terrible at acting on