Nebula tried to make Second Thought take a "both sides" stance as regards the Palestinian genocide. If Nebula hadn't done that, I would have kept my subscription. This is unfortunate because there is plenty of good content there, but the site simply can't be trusted from an ethical standpoint.
Brilliant parallel between Edmund Fitzgerald who was never the same after his ship sank, and John Roth who was completely unaffected after he sank his ship.
It's sickening that there are so many people out there who truly feel no remorse or empathy because they genuinely believe "I was just following the rules" is an excuse.
@@ekki1993right imagine a game of monopoly. You play honestly and I blatantly steal from the bank and fake my rolls I will "win" every time. So having no morality is a requirement to even "play" their game. The good guys never even get started.
That and the astounding brutality of the firing process, how they begin dehumanizing things and even being proud of crushing people's lives... Yeah, system is broken. But system is made of individuals. I'd add : "individuals are made of cells, cells are made of atoms, and these individuals atoms were all atoms of shit." But I'm drifting off topic.
@@slurker3788 Speaking of bonuses, did you see that Guaranteed Rate (mortgage company) had offered 100k signing bonuses to new hires in 2021, during the booming "sight-unseen, I'll take it for 50% above ask" market. Now they're taking the money back since real estate is slowing, lol. They started firing people a month before they'd be able to keep the money. Supposedly it's legal, but there (should be) a special place in hell for whomever pulls that kind of crap!
The number of big shot CEO's who have gotten away with this kind of crap makes me sick to my stomach. I get a lot of people who want to argue with me when I say "with enough money and clout, you can buy your way straight through just about any country's criminal justice system. America might just be leading the world in this.
@@DeathMetalDerfthe entire point of companies is to take the fall for their executives dubious action, this isn’t “buying your way out of the legal system” its the capitalist system working as designed
"No one broke the rules" is the takeaway. All of this, the CEO bonuses and the casual workers losing their life savings - is the system functioning as intended.
It's why my stepfather continuing to believe in the myth of trickle down economics makes me want to slam my head against my desk repeatedly. He genuinely believes that the rich getting more makes the rest of us better off.
@Manowarmx3 What do you mean? Are you saying that in an ideal system the rich would transfer funds to the poor and that would mean encouraging a wealth imbalance is just? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the poor to generate a larger income for themselves to begin with, eliminating the need for a bureaucracy to ensure this transfer of wealth? Especially considering said bureaucracy is vulnerable to abuse by rich individuals misrepresenting figures or sending money to parties that give them benefit at the expense of others. Am I missing something from your argument? Because even if a perfect scenario could be achieved where trickle down economics somehow works it would be a waste of resources and make less sense than a more productive working population.
@@ianrau6373 I am saying that a burreaucracy needs to protect the working class from abuses like the one showed in thrle nortel case. I think a perfect world is where the tax is paid the same by the rich and the poor in %. I pay 47% income tax and make around 140k a year. I simply think that the ultra rich should pay a similar percentage.
"Even the prestigous Bell Labs was embroiled in scandals, as one of its physicists was accused of faking dozens of Nobel-worthy research papers" Ah yes, the Bobby Broccoli Cinematic Universe
I'll never forget, working at mcdonalds as a teenager, reading the newspaper, thinking about the future, and debating investing in the stock market. Nortel was at or around $121 at the time, and I gave real serious thought about putting a few hundred in by somehow getting a few shares. I decided to not do so in the end, and by my next shift, the stock collapse had started.
Someone I knew remortgaged their house and put the proceeds into Nortel shares at $124. Didn't work out well. Similarly, a colleague at Nortel had their investment plan in 100% Nortel shares. First rule of finance is to diversify your risk!
@@pgbrandon When I finished my MSc in Canada, Nortel came to campus to recruit. Even went to Ottawa for second interview. They were hiring some 1/3 of all science grads from Canadian university then. Sure glad I didn't go to Ottawa. Joined the oil business instead.
1:26:12 “They wanna shake your hand and tell you how sorry they are, but they also want you to hate the game and not the player. I assure you: I’ve got more than enough energy to do both.” God that line resonates.
One thing one may rely on: There is always a fool when you need one. This guy probably thinks the bible is interesting. Although his picture makes me wonder is it is not the koran. Care to translate the stupid video into arabic?
When he revealed how the people on long term disability were fucked, I just started crying. My dad has been on LTD for a while, and my family has been extremely fortunate in our savings, but for the people who need that it’s so important. I just really feel for them
Because I've never been affected by the need for LTD, I didn't even notice this part of the video - it just blended in with the rest of the tragedy and evil. Thank you for commenting and highlighting this. Also, does anyone have the timestamp for the part of the video where he talks about long term disability? I want to rewatch that part but its a bit of a long video lol
I just got done with the video. Unless I missed something, he didn't mention long term disability. He went into detail about pensioners who were screwed out of their money, though. That was at 1:05:15@@sammyjones8279
Using Edmund Fitzgerald Sr.'s reaction at the beginning to contrast John Roth's callousness is such a gut-wrenchingly effective dramatic device - the realisation was so horrifying when the penny finally dropped for me...
It always disgusts me when executives pay out their own bonuses instead of providing for their employees, especially when they claim “we can’t do it”, as if that 190M in bonuses wouldn’t have help lessen their employee’s pain in severance. Especially when considering that they’ve been receiving 20-30M in bonuses each year up to that point.
Ah, but think of the precedent that giving away even part of an executive bonus sets! Workers all over would be demanding all sorts of funds in their pensions and long-term disability that would otherwise go to the needy, humble executive! /s
John Roth gets to basically forget whatever happened with Nortel and brush it off as 'ancient history' and that's because it didn't affect him at all- he walked away with his millions and is living his dream life. On the other hand thousands of ex-employees' pensions and compensations were erased, and their (+families') lives were altered for the worse, probably forever for some. I know this is what always happens, but hearing that Roth 'seemed puzzled why people are still interested in this' made my blood boil.
It never even occurred to these men to *voluntarily* donate even a portion of their golden parachutes to their laid off employees. It might even have been a useful PR boost, for Nortel and the government both. The idea of surrendering their "right", what they were "legally entitled to", was baffling to them. What empty hearts that speaks to.
In a just society, lack of empathy would be something that requires a lifetime of work to build. Under ours, it is rewarded with exorbitant wealth and called "business acumen."
That's because the job they are hired to do is make the company (read that as the shareholders) the biggest amount of money possible. They view the workers as an impediment to that goal, since wages are cost that makes profitability more difficult. It's nearly impossible to work in that job and be a person who cares about the well-being of the people below them working at the company. This is why you should never trust business owners or executive managers acting on behalf of business owners to do the right thing when stuff like this happens.
That’s the story of today isn’t it? No one can feel they are doing good for themselves unless they actively make or perceive other people do worse. Now even our own neighbors defend these people like they have been completely blind to what every company has done ever for the entire history of the usa
1:26:15 - "... they want you to hate the game, not the player. I assure you, I've got more than enough energy for both." This line hit me hard. I love it.
The players can exist without the game. The game cannot exist without the players. Players telling me to hate the game is the biggest blame avoidance move in the whole game.
Statements like "44 billion dollars is just gone" is insane to me: that 44 billion never existed, it was as sepculation, a dream a bunch of suits in highrises thought up as they promised a bunch of really talented, hard working engineers and scientists a salary those executives knew they couldnt deliver. Sickening, downright vile, and this stuff happens all the times.
Both my father and uncle worked at Nortel during the tele-com boom, my dad described Nortel as "the place programmers went to hide, you could literally not know what you were doing or write a line of code and stay on for years." and "We wrote more documentation about code we were about to write, than we ever did code." He quit in 1998.
@@salvadormuro7346 My dad moved to a startup company with some of his coworkers from nortel who were fed up with not doing anything, my uncle stayed for a little while longer, and eventually moved on to verizon iirc Fortunately both of them were over-qualified for their work at Nortel, and they ended up much happier and fulfilled after.
While somewhat true, nortel had some very, very smart people. I know i worked with a lot of them. The documentation production was out of this world but thats because nortel were trying to be iso compliant and extensive (and brutal) code reviews were mandatory. There were time swhen i had to print out multiple lots of 500 pages of code to be reviewed. As you might imagine nortel had the best printers… those things could do everything from duplex to binding, all in one machine.
@@probablynotmyname8521 Yeah, but so does Microsoft. But I assure you, there are also plenty who are utterly inept but they get away with it because of corporate bloat and nepotism. The company is so big that it just throws money at departments with no oversight. I worked on a new database for Xbox LIVE for three years. My job was overseeing the migration of user data from the old system to the new one. The number of people who refused to get their tasks done each day was infuriating. Work was slow. Then one day the company fired us all, saying they weren't going to use the new database, they'd just try to shore up the old one. Three years and millions of dollars, thrown out like it was nothing. And sure enough, that year Xbox LIVE crashed.
I’d personally love to see a documentary about Yoshitaka Fujii, the most retracted scientist of all time. There’s honestly very little I’ve been able to find about him outside of Wikipedia.
"I was too young to realize what had happened at the time, when my mom got laid off the 2nd time I was just happy that now she could come pick us up after school." God that's so relatable. Like, finding out little details that you didn't think much of as a kid were actually due to something sad or worrying that your parents just didn't tell you about because they wanted you to be as happy and carefree as you could for as long as possible. It's not until you get older and you start thinking about different dates that things line up.
@@Shiro642 The day one of our grandparents died, a neighbor picked us up from school, bought us new pjs, took us to Mcdonalds, and just in general we had a really good evening. When we finally got back to our house, my mom and dad told me what happened figuring I was old enough to know (I was 9), but I found out recently that my brother, who was 5 at the time, was not told and in fact did not find out connection between the neighbor picking us up and the death in the family until much later when he was like 15 or so, and even then, that was an accident from my mom and I talking about it when I was walking about some slippersocks i got.
Yeah this whole documentary was an eye-opener for me in that regard. My dad worked for Nortel in Ottawa up until 2009, so all of this was going on right around me for like, my entire childhood, but I had no idea. I was 11 when it went under. He ended up getting out and getting another good job just before it ended, so it turned out fine. But he did lose some pension money.
1:26:04 "This is the part that really gets me. They're not satisfied with just their millions. They want to shake your hand, tell you how sorry they are. But they want you to hate the game, not the player." Absolutely nothing I could add to this bit to make it more perfect than it already is. Stellar work as always, man.
This seems weird to say about a video documentary series, but that drop-off moment at 35:53 is one of the most-powerful climaxes I've experienced in my entire life. This isn't your first video where you've demonstrated total mastery of narrative buildup, but it's by far your best. Absolutely spine chilling. Bravo.
it probably helps that he likely uses a script that can directly be pasted in but aligning all the captions for a 90 minute video still takes a lot of work
Pretty sure my Dad lost his parents inheritance and his job during this event. Thank you so much for covering this topic, it's been so eye-opening to see how this bubble popping may have affected my family and my early life without me ever knowing. This will be a hard conversation with my dad should I choose to have it, but I thank you for showing me how dire this situation was for Canada and why this was so important.
If you choose to have that conversation and if your father permits would you share the highlights of it? And maybe your father’s reactions to these videos. I’m especially curious about your father’s thoughts on the lawsuits against Dunn and his execs.
"Somehow, this is not the first time where I've covered a topic where a retired U.S. admiral is brought in to save a multi-billion dollar enterprise." Loved your references to your past videos, from Watkins to Hendrik!
If I had a nickel for every time I watched a multi-hour long documentary about a multi-billion dollar project that brought in a retired US admiral in a bid to save the entire enterprise, I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.
The Canadian government giving 13B to foreign companies and refusing to give a Canadian company 1B is truly mind-boggling. The amount of wealth, knowledge, and resources Canada lost with that decision will haunt it for generations. All of that history, just to enrich Apple and others.
They made their money from Apple. They would have lost money with Nortel. They could have chose to not give money to either, but to throw money away out of pride isn't a smart move.
@@Joker-no1uh You have no actual understanding of industrial policy, Canada has now regressed back to being a US branch plant economy plus exporting raw materials. Oh, and now importing masses of immigrants to become a low wage economy.
I just want to point out, the reason why a 0.01$ underperformance led to such a big drop is because the market was expecting an overperformance. You see this a lot, investors don't pay close attention to the company's internal numbers because they have their own numbers that they track. So if they are predicting a 0.10$ beat, but it is actually an underperformance, then that can cause the stock price to plummet. Most recently, this happened with Meta (Facebook) last year. They didn't actually underperform by that much, but the entire market had priced in a beat on the earnings.
These days, turning in a performance that is not within the "guidance", minus OR plus, will tank a stock. If a company's performance cannot be predicted, it's future value is unreliable, and you cut it off like a diseased limb...
As a native Ottawan, this uncorked some deep emotions in me that I wasn't expecting. I was fairly young when this all went down and my Dad was only a contractor for Nortel and so fairly insulated. But still, the pain and anxiety was palpable. This video brought our a wave for sadness for my city that I thought I had long moved past. Thank you Bobby for shedding a light on one of our city's darkest times.
As usual in these sorts of stories, the people who have it the worst are the people at the bottom. Family breadwinners, independent workers, longtime loyal employees and young workers entering the workforce with a seemingly nice job, all screwed over by some rich assholes who played the system and jumped ship before they could suffer the consequences. Absolutely sickening to hear how the pensions and disability payments were gutted
@@oculometricand that doesn't stop. It won't stop. No matter how poor the poor are, they will get poorer to make the rich richer. They won't stop when you can't afford vacations. They won't stop when you can't buy a home. They won't stop when you can't make rent. They won't even stop when you're homeless and stealing to survive. They won't stop till everything of any sort of value is theirs and theirs alone. Like a spoiled toddler refusing to share their toys.
@@Mr.Sparks.173 But it's better than the alternative, where the top earners are limited to only 10x the cash they could ever spend in a lifetime just so some "human beings" with "a basic moral right to not die from preventable causes" can have their needs met.
Some things never change. I watch Coffeezilla, and half his stories are the people on top getting out with their money and leaving everybody else on the bottom fucked
@@beardedemperor There are many alternatives, or do you think humanity is that stupid to come up with only two economic systems? There are piles upon piles of research on this. There are gazillions of renditions of the same even. So much so that even capitalism is different country to country. The problem is, capitalism is a dead end. Once you fall into it, you never get out and that's exactly what you have already substantiated by your wilfully ignorant statement. You simply cannot think of changing, you are willing to characterize humanity as stupid, dumb buffoon, those hundreds of thousands of research professionals' research as piles of dust. You do not want change, you do not want a better system, you want to be one of those richer getting richer, why would you want to change when there is a glimmer of hope to that utopia? The gardens that tease you every day? So what if they are built on your sweat and blood of others, you are not dying now are you? How exhilarating it would be to squeeze someone else while being praised for it, now wouldn't it?
35:49 This. This is horror. BobbyBroccoli, I don't know how you pulled it off, but you made every hair on my body stand upright. And I'm not even a financebro.
@BobbyBroccoli the way you can break down these topics was incredibly helpful in making the Nortel story very understandable, confirmed I didn't need to be a financebro 😭
Watched this on Nebula two weeks ago. This is easily by a landslide the best documentary you have ever made. I love how despite the reasons behind Nortel's collapse already having been established, the tone is intentionally kept positive for the first thirty minutes instead of focusing on the compay's slow downward spiral, so that the weight of everything that's happened hits the viewers like a truck just as it did those in the company. It's a perfect way to show how Nortel's miseading figures and good news barage hid the truth from not just those on the outside, but those on the inside as well. And the way Nortel's forecast change was visualised by the -20c bar literally hitting the floor of the graph was _brilliant._ I'm so used to seeing tiny little charts nested inside other charts that when you have to zoom in that far to see one, I sort of just assume it would never make any kind of impact on the larger scale. So seeing it take up the same amount of space as Nortel's maximum stock value is a perfect way to show _very literally_ how all of their success has been completely undone. This is just absolutely outstanding, through and through.
I would never have thought that a two-part, long-form documentary on Canadian technology finance issues would pique my interest so much, but your approach, incredible sense of storytelling, and being able to break down a very complex tale into easily-understood parts is unparalleled. This was fantastic. Thanks for posting.
I've been in tech for forty years and I am very glad to read comments by people who aren't so much who are still impressed with this documentary. I would have thought that much of this would be eye-glaze material.
The fact that I just watched a 3 hour documentary film for free (apart from the YT premium subscription) which eaasily rivals a multimillion dollar netflix series is astonishing. All the work, research, effort, and care you put into these videos is beautiful. I've watched all of your documentaries 2-3 times at least, and will watch them more in the future. They are all exeptional pieces and you deserve all the praise in the world. Good job and keep making them till the end, we will watch them.
Whenever I hear this kind of bankruptcy story I think about how there was someone at the company who was the last to find out. Some poor working class sod who was the last person to find out that they, and in fact nobody, would ever work for the company again. The stories of those who saw the end coming and jumped ship are always told - what about the stories of those who are the last to be laid off?
What's so cool to me is not only this series, but all the commenters who themselves used to work at Nortel, able to see the entire story told in such a great fashion. Fantastic vids as always
My eyes didn't glaze over when you said "Earning From Operations", they narrowed in immediate suspicion. I remember Enron and their "Mark To Market Accounting", the accounting method they used where they'd report unrealized future gains from deals as profits to make the company look more profitable than it was. Drastic changes to financial reporting and accounting systems is a massive red flag for potential fraud and market manipulation down the line.
This two part documentary just blows my mind. I started working at Nortel in 1997, and was there until 2009. Even as all of this unfolded around us those that managed to keep their jobs just kept on working. I guess we were the orchestra that continued to play as the ship sank. I finally jumped ship and ended up at Alcatel-Lucent, but my wife survived and continues to work with Ericsson to this day. To me, telecomm was and will always be a fascinating and challenging industry. Nortel will always hold a special place in my heart as my first real long term job. I still think ATM was awesome.
I got so used to not getting a hang of anything until 2/3 end of the video that I didn’t realize this is part 2 until I read your comment (I am 1 minute away from this video’s ending)…
Beginning with the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy and showing the Nortel share price graph when mentioning the freak waves has got to be one of the most ominous openings I've ever seen in a UA-cam documentary. And the fact it managed to link back around as well? Masterful. I always enjoy your documentary content, and this was no exception. The audible gasp I made when I saw the -20$ come up and the sudden realization of the millions of lives about to be shattered in those numbers; it's a top tier documentary that manages to immerse and grip me in that way.
Mate, I was enthralled. As an Aussie, this saga really has no bearing on my life. But its given my great insight into my father in law, as he was at Cisco during this time. This was an absolutely massive video(s). Really well researched, amazingly edited, and really enjoyable to watch. Thank you
Combined with the music choice (an absolutely phenomenal one btw), 35:45 is the first in forever I’ve ever felt my heart sink so low from a video. Really helped sell just how screwed Nortel was
So basically, Frank Dunn was actually helping to turn the company around, but got screwed by overzealous auditors and an incompetent board, which in turn screwed over all the employees and investors in the process. Crazy to think of what would have happened if they never would have alleged that, if Nortel would have ended up surviving to-date.
It was actually the opposite. Frank and his CFO proposed a bonus system where basically every single employee would get a bonus if they made a profit. The board pushed back on that and so Frank and his CFO said they'd withhold their personal bonuses until they made back-to-back quarters of profit. The board then approved the plan.
It sounds like people are obsessed with placing the blame entirely on a few individual names, while most of the real responsibility actually belongs to... the entire board of executives. They're the ones who voted unanimously for chapter 11, they're the ones who immediately fired the CEO on shaky evidence just when things were turning around, they're the ones voting for the bonuses and for ditching the pensions/severance. They were also the ones completely ignoring how bogus the in-house numbers were. While the CEOs were making a lot of bad and possibly malicious decisions, every single thing the board did was just completely and entirely incompetent. Every single member of that board deserves the blame, and none of them deserves to ever be working in a management position again.
@@kneau True, but they also managed to all remain anonymous, keep their jobs and reputations, and place all blame solely on the CEOs. And most of the public seems to have gone along with it.
Pretty sure the corruption and cronyism at the TSE and the decade of elbow rubbing and deregulation played more of a role than anyone within the company did.
When i worked there (late90s) there were a lot of complaints from staff that there was never any advertising of the company. We were huge but nobody knew who we were. So the higher ups licensed “come together” and produced a completely baffling ad that made zero sense and seemed to suggest we were all stoned or serial killers. We didnt have the best management.
Starting this by using the Fitzgerald story and the wave that sank it as a parallel for Norton riding one of the biggest technical/financially driven waves ever was such a creative and effective intro to a sequel Doc!
Its kind of crazy to hear this as an American, especially over the past six years or so when people were looking at Canada as some kind of promised land. The idea that there was such a massive hole in the law for peoples pensions blows my mind with how people in the States talk about Canadas social systems.
I know right?? Canada seems to have this image worldwide that it’s a wealthy social safety net country where any immigrant can easily join the middle class with a bit of dedication. But in reality is has abismal predatory capitalistic practices and has financial loopholes that favors the top 5% and an ever increasing wealth class disparity.
The Canadian Healthcare System tried and failed to kill my father-in-law three times. Of course, the Germans, the Russians, the North Africans, and the French tried and failed to kill him, too. So a few bureaucrats in Ottawa and Toronto were seriously outmatched. He lived to be 100; we've got a nice note from Trudeau to that point, even through his Government would not let us into the country to visit him on that day because of their COVID policies.
Our social systems and our state assets have been steadily dismantled for years to the point they are either privatized or have been flipped into a for profit model. Which is even worse. Our health care system is so anemic now emergency rooms are shutting down in remote areas.
It's mostly the abysmally high tax rates to pay for too many overpriced services that don't allow individuals to set aside a decent amount of money for a rainy day and retirement. Only those top 5% you mentioned are left with enough cash to have the safety net. @@DoritoBot9000
35:50 This moment is…hard to describe watching it happen. Knowing that 1-2 cents difference devastated share prices waiting to see something like 6 cents that still shows growth, but a good chunk slower, just to see it become a negative number all together is insane. A lot of the mechanics still goes over my head but the impact isn’t lost on me. I can’t imagine being a trader in that moment the news is announced
My jaw actually dropped. I may not have been there, but it gave me the same feeling of dread as getting a test back you think you didn't do well on but are cautiously optimistic about. Then you flip it over and your whole semester is fucked lol
With Earnings per share, it’s exactly what it sounds. The net earnings divided by the amount of shares available. So if you have 5 million shares, a loss of a cent means you lost $50,000. Now recall how Nortel was just printing shares like crazy? Divide that number by 5 (20c is a fifth of a dollar) and that’s the net loss Nortel took.
You mentioned that many companies have gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and emerged intact, including some well known names like General Motors. However, as was the case with General Motors, the stock always gets wiped out because the creditors (debt holders) are legally first in line, and stock holders are at the bottom. Everyone that owned GM stock at the time was taken down to zero, and GM had to have a new IPO for its stock when it came out of bankruptcy. I point this out because even if Nortel had not been liquidated and it managed to survive the Chapter 11 reorganization, the original stock owners would still have been wiped out.
Well, yeah. That's the difference between debt and equity. Debt take less risk because it gets paid first, but it makes less because its return is capped. Equity takes more risk, but it has the opportunity for more upside because there is no cap on its return - it is the ultimate owner of the company.
@@igrowfaster There was still a chance of retaining the IP and some of the core business divisions, which could have allowed Canada to have a somewhat significant stake in the tech sector in the 2010s.
The laser guy story in the Red Ink Chapter at 37:13 really hits home for me because I used to work in a similar place where I was the newbie. The vibe in those environments was full of paranoia and helplessness, and there was always this thing with people hoarding knowledge and being all conspiratorial. Dealing with all that really messed with my mental health, so I ended up having to take anti-depressants and go to therapy for help. Thankfully, I've moved on from that job and now I work in non-profit tech, which has really turned my outlook on life around for the better. (The company laid off 16% of its staff after I left...)
It's not exactly the same but it reminded me of my close call with that sort of scenario. Now I had seen it plenty when I was working a job at a defense contractor, real niche divisions that did specific jobs for the company and anyone who got into one of those niches would fill it and metaphorically grout the niche smooth into the organization's foundations so that they wouldn't try and patch in any new hires to disrupt their place in the system. And then after having spent months trying to work into a group I actually wanted to be in, here comes a manager with a tale to tell: some wizened literal old greybeard had created such a perfect little job for himself and his wife over the decades, where they were the two keepers of some arcane knowledge on running some special program they had developed for the company decades prior, to do something that today is trivially common in desktop software, but which had all of the legacy formatting, coding, and propriety and top-secret information already punched in to do the job specifically the way the company had wanted it. Due to security and reliability and other reasons no-one was interested in migrating this work to new software for decades as this team had been doing it well enough. They once, during a time of expansion, apparently fully trained another person on the software, maybe in the mid 90's, who then left 5 years later. But anyone else sent down there was given absolutely nothing. Time and time again those students would be moved elsewhere. Indeed they jealously hoarded mastery of that unique software like a dragon to themselves. But then the wife, the only other person who knew how it worked, apparently went onto medical retirement. The old man was left alone, and wanted to also retire, but needed a protégé. There was interest in finding some young buck, such as myself at the time, to go into that dude's literal time capsule lair and study under the old man's tutelage for about a year, so that he could finally retire in peace. The job would come with a pay bump, an enhanced security clearance, invites to many significant meetings, 1 hour of real work per day tops, and a private office in the bowels of some building where I'd be bothered maybe once a week with a visitor, who likely was simply lost. And no expectation to train anyone else as they assured me I'd simply be working to fill in the gap, eventually they could get new software online to do the job on Windows machines. I had little interest in this work, but some of the perks sounded compelling. I sat down and met a manager to discuss the logistics of it all more. And then I left the company a few weeks later. I had other irons in the fire, and I saw before me two roads. And I saw what I might become. I still 6 years later am not sure if I took the right road, but, that would have been the wrong one.
At first, I thought calling someone a “Nenderthal accountant” was pretty insulting, but then you learn about the accountant and you find out that it was insulting for the Neanderthal.
Why? We do as we are told? I am committing fraud at work because if I don't, the girl next office will be, and I'll be sent home. Hate the people in the Lamborghinis, not the Toyotas
The shock of seeing that arrow drop reminded me of the Shapeland & Alex Lasarenko reveals in Defunctland's Fastpass & Disney Channel theme videos. Absolutely bonkers
Due to watching several of these videos, my brain now associates some of the music with scientific fraud and the periodic table; but watching this video in the middle of the night, that music, paired with that drop, freaked me out more than an EAS alarm system going off would have.
Absolutely. I had no understanding of how any of the stuff related to the stock market worked before watching this video, but the explanations were so comprehensive that when I saw that arrow, my jaw dropped.
@@stephaniel63 that really vibed hard for me with creepy music from TV shows from my childhood, namely, the X-Files intro song (which I still can't listen to) and some TV show about real crime that my grandmother always watched and had even creepier soundtracks (which coupled with the entire theme of mass murderers chopping up people and raping everyone always sent me hiding under the bed, behind the couch, lol just anywhere possible to escape and hide). The latter one didn't traumatize just me, my aunt also has a bad reaction to it. Thanks grandma!
Was a BNR / Nortel employee for 20 years 1990-2010 experiencing the excitements of the major growth of the 90s and the roller coaster ride the following 10 years. This video brings out the emotions.😥
The Frank Dunn firing is tragic. To think the company was actually getting back on its feet properly after the bubble had burst, only to commit suicide on apparently pretty flimsy allegations.
7:07 As a Calgarian and Flames fan, I can confirm that getting tickets to Sharks games is indeed quite a hilarious joke. They’ve only been a decent team a few times in their history. They mostly exist as a place for Canadians to go play hockey at where there’s no pressure to win, and a nice warm climate to boot. Massive difference between Albertan winters and Cali “winters”, if you can even call them that.
Ehh I don’t really know what to say other than during the 2000s and 2010s the SJ sharks had been a good team, just unbelievable chokers who most certainly could not live up to the talent they had in Thornton, Couture, pavelski, and Marleau.
I didn't think I would be invested in this story as it's so Canada/US-centric, whereas all the scientific dramas are more universal, but I've been waiting with baited breath to learn more about this!
I didn't think I'd care about canada either but the tale of mismanagement is so intense I can't stop watching. It's like watching a child with a lighter stumble closer and closer to a puddle of gasoline.
i come back to this video every once in a while and i just want to say that the effort you put into these videos are amazing. you are literally the jon bois of science and the story telling and writing that goes into these videos. i know how long it takes. the animations i know take literal days to get right. this is all seriously impressive and you are literally doing gods work. even if the views aren’t always there, these videos should really be getting 10s of millions of views. but they will stand the test of time. people will continue to watch them because of how great they are. good job
When I heard about Edmund Fitzgerald in the first video, it reminded me about the ship itself. The intro immediately had me hooked and wanting to finish this crazy ride. Thanks Bobby for making these!
I was like, "Hmm, wonder if he's related to the one from the shipwreck," not expecting that to be answered. I love things that lead to little questions in the back of my head that get answered soon enough.
"I have enough energy for both" is exactly my mood about these companies. Did everything wrong but nothing illegal enough to land all of them in prison? It's either a big failure of the governments of both US and Canada or the entire system needs to be rebuilt to stop this nonsense. Edit: I vote both.
It's why I never understand people who say 'Blame the system, not a few bad apples or those who managed to hack it' like that same system isn't upheld and sustained by those 'bad apples'. You have enough energy to be mad at both.
My mother works for Cisco. Honestly, it's a great company. They've been through so many market shakeups now that they've kind of built themselves and internal system to absorb the shock. I know my mom got laid off for a little bit from the financial recession of '08 but eventually they hired her back on and now she's in a managerial role. She also started the wounded warriors project and the integration of engineers from the Marines into Cisco as they were leaving.
Very well done. I worked at BNR and then Nortel for over 24 years. I remember a lot of this like it was yesterday. I remember very clearly when Paul Stern added "shareholder value" as a core value. Accounting rules have changed a lot since then, but hyper-capitalism, greed have gotten worse. Nortel may be long gone, but the story is far from over.
I have to say, the tone in this is fantastic. Something about how the firing and supposed fraud by the three executives was presented just instantly caught my intention and made me skeptical, and it's brilliant that a supposed disaster was actually the last chance Nortel had being wasted. That peak was only fake in the way that all economic peaks are fake, but it could've lasted, and Nortel panicking and killing their last chance is so profoundly fitting given all their other terrible decisions.
I'm an elder millennial from eastern Ontario and I do work in tech - but when I was making my choices about school I was strongly discouraged from going in to tech (l was a teen obsessed with computers) because it was a field with no jobs. I ended up getting a degree in advertising and by the time I graduated the entire industry had been eaten by digital.... so, right in to tech I went. I'm always shocked at how few people I encounter in my age range, since we should be filling all of those senior / mid management roles these days.
This is incredible , this guy makes documentaries by himself better than media groups with huge budgets and manpower . I can't even imagine the amount of effort and research that went into this . real gem of a channel.
I really love the ship/naval theme throughout both videos and how you do similar things is all your documentaries. Not Canadian, not even in America when all this was going down but it was incredible to learn about. From the comments it sounds like a lot of folks have now recovered (even though it's taken some time) so wishing all them the absolute best. Can't wait for the next topic to be dropped!
The world truly is an unjust place when Frank Dunst got all the blame and the actual man most responsible, Roth, little to none. Frank even almost salvaged the company if it hadn’t been for the board’s idiocy, real Majorian figure
My parents immigrated to Vancouver in 2005, and my parents didn't experience the brink of this nightmare. Honestly, I commend BobbyBroccoli for talking about this because for the longest time I had no idea about any of this. I feel like there's a culture against talking about Canadian failures and pretending everything is fine, which ironically is what delayed the fall and sealed the fate of Nortel itself.
@@wayback1010this, because we aren’t, we are so much worse, and if people keep pointing to minor things wrong with the US and acting smug, then we will die as a nation
I'm not totally surprised to be engrossed by this video, but I'm a little surprised to find myself tearing up at the end. It's unfathomably cruel for CEOs to face no repercussions-- in fact, not even any inconveniences-- while employees' requirements are entirely wiped out
Right? How nice for the sociopathic former CEO that he was able to compartmentalize that "ancient history" into another part of his brain and not think about all the people he screwed over while getting unfathomably rich.
Around Nortel’s peak value my mom had something like 30 000$ worth of shares. She held on to them and they went to zero. Thankfully she hadn’t paid for them because they were obtained from a stock split (my mom owned a bunch of BCE stock). A family friend who worked in Nortel’s accounting department was laid off and ended up becoming a trucker. Most people in the Ottawa area, at least those above 30, will have Nortel related stories.
What an absolutely amazing series. This captures the Nortel story in a way no one has done before. Thank you for doing this @BobbyBrocolli. Just to add; the best example of the terrible consequences of John Roth’s decision making was in my hometown of Belleville, Ontario. Once home to the Meridian Enterprise PBX division (eventually sold to Avaya), John Roth laid-off 950 of the 1100 people working there between 1999-2001. Starting off with outsourcing the manufacturing of the Meridian PBXs, then gutting the “old Nortel” staff, then letting go of everyone else cause the stock crashed. It absolutely shattered the economy since 1/5 families were directly/indirectly employed by Nortel.
My father-in-law worked for Nortel, as did my wife. A lot of employees and retirees also had much of their savings invested in Nortel stock, so not only lost their jobs, but sometimes substantial portions of their life savings. Never keep your life savings in your employer's stock.
If you have an employee purchase plan, just sell, sell now. Your income is tied to your company and likely the value of your house. You don't need more stuff tied to the company.
Your employer can also just up and decide to do mass layoffs if the stock price goes down - even though the company is still hugely profitable and has vast dragon hoards of cash lying around.
I don't know how, but at 35:50 is pure cinema. You laid everything down, you explain what happened, and we all know that s*** is about to happen, but the sheer scale and magnitude, along with your storytelling destroy it, at that moment, I feel as if i'm part of Nortel shareholders on THAT day, the dread and the panic was real. Please never stop cooking.
As a communications major whose unrelated hyperfixation is maritime disasters: this is a masterpiece. I wish the CBC had people like you on their case study teams!!
"They want you to hate the game, not the player. I assure you, I've got more than enough energy to do both." You're so fantastic at cutting through the complexities of the topics you cover to get to the emotional core, it's top-level storytelling.
I graduated into the IT field in Canada back in 2003, and almost everyone I knew from my graduating class could not find work and changed career paths within about a year, just like you described in this doc. I stuck it out, but it took about 3 years for me to find a stable career in the field. I'm blown away now realizing the ripples that were caused by Nortel's fall.
Timestamp 24:30 - Going from 350,000 TB to 15,000,000 TB between 1999 and 2003 is NOT a 10x increase per year, 4 years in a row. It's a 40x increase over 4 years or a 2.5x increase per year, 4 years in a row.
Good point :) It is true though that the marketing story was "exponential growth" of bandwidth demand. Whenever you hear "exponential" outside pure math, you need to run.
“They want you to hate the game. Not the player. I assure you, I have more than enough energy to do both.” 1:26:15 Holy shit. Actually the hardest line.
I worked at Nortel from 1987 to 2002 . All the leaders you mentioned,I remember them very well . I was just a senior manager at the time and was witnessing some shenanigan specially at the end of the year where phony orders were coming in to make the sales number. Trucks with empty shelves were sent away to pretend shipping the order. All of this backed by our glorified president of global operation who was awarded $11M in bonus for screwing up the operation big time with his outsourcing strategy that was a disaster for the company. On top, I wasworking in China beginning of 2000 and witness selling of optical network design to Huawei by ex product managers . these guys were living in Hong Kong . I remember vendors calling me and telling me that they were making Huawei printed circuit board with Nortel logo on it When reported it to our glorified leaders, they were telling me to mind my own business. I suspect they were on the take, just investigate ex product manager working in Nortel Hong Kong and then Huawei to find out how much money they pocketed,
It’s like we all know how the story ends, but the way you build suspense for certain reveals on how bad a situation is amazing!! You’re like, how bad is it gonna get? And it turns out to be twice as much as you expect and it hits like a truck DX Such excellent work!
If anyone is curious, the "creative accounting" practices still aren't illegal in the US. There are much stricter regulations for it, but it still can be. Not great.
In the 1990's my dad came home with a framed poster gifted to him at a company party (Apple Inc.). A picture of him sitting at his desk, arms crossed with the caption, "What part of no don't you understand?" At the time, I thought this was meant to jokingly imply he is very tough on others at work. I've since come to suspect the caption is a tongue in cheek reference to his accounting & the question, "Isn't this illegal?"
Thanks for covering how actually bad it was for the pensioners - its so sad to hear hpw much the exectives walked away and how screwed over the pensioners were
Urgh, the fucking gall of John Roth to call Nortel "ancient history" when he walked away with a billion dollar payout while former employees have to make do with 86% of their intended pension. I can't express how frustrated that made me. Props on the great story telling, Mr Broccoli.
This miniseries has become a quick favorite and a real eye opener, the energy you've brought to talking about the case, the anger there. It's a really striking piece. Fantastic work.
Man this is such an impactful watch. I grew up in RGI housing up until 2014-2015 and hearing you talk about your parents' and your experience in this city because of Nortel is just, deeply relatable. Nortel sits like a scar on our city, and one that still stings. I didn't understand it as a kid but its impact is still felt
Can't believe I lived my best life in Ottawa all while this drama was unfolding. What a time to be alive. Love how you make it perfectly clear the RCMP has a poor record of investigating white collar crime.
Want to directly support me and see videos like this 2 weeks early? Nebula is the best way to do that: go.nebula.tv/bobbybroccoli
love ya bobby
I watched it on Nebula, this video made me get it!! Awesome work Broccoliman!
Nebula tried to make Second Thought take a "both sides" stance as regards the Palestinian genocide. If Nebula hadn't done that, I would have kept my subscription. This is unfortunate because there is plenty of good content there, but the site simply can't be trusted from an ethical standpoint.
@@comradeinternet467
Source?
You were the one that finally tipped me over to CS/Nebula, I now have a subscription. :)
Brilliant parallel between Edmund Fitzgerald who was never the same after his ship sank, and John Roth who was completely unaffected after he sank his ship.
It's sickening that there are so many people out there who truly feel no remorse or empathy because they genuinely believe "I was just following the rules" is an excuse.
@@Sky_Guy
“Good soldiers follow orders” mentality. When you can justify hurting other people as an inconvenience, anything is possible
@@Sky_Guy What's more sickening is that corporativism has a selection bias in favor of that kind of people.
@@ekki1993right imagine a game of monopoly. You play honestly and I blatantly steal from the bank and fake my rolls I will "win" every time. So having no morality is a requirement to even "play" their game. The good guys never even get started.
@@warlordofbritannia😊
"Nobody broke any rules". Damn that line hit so hard. There was no fraud, there was no corruption. It was just how the system worked.
That and the astounding brutality of the firing process, how they begin dehumanizing things and even being proud of crushing people's lives... Yeah, system is broken. But system is made of individuals.
I'd add : "individuals are made of cells, cells are made of atoms, and these individuals atoms were all atoms of shit." But I'm drifting off topic.
Efficiency is to be praised at all costs? If you ever see a job listing that has a bonus for lasting a few weeks or months RUN THE OTHER WAY!!!!
O there was corruption .. the legalised lobbyist channel and pure cronyism and corruption at its "best"...
I really like that bit that was quoted, "They want you to hate the game, not the player. I assure you, I've got more than enough energy for both."
@@slurker3788 Speaking of bonuses, did you see that Guaranteed Rate (mortgage company) had offered 100k signing bonuses to new hires in 2021, during the booming "sight-unseen, I'll take it for 50% above ask" market. Now they're taking the money back since real estate is slowing, lol. They started firing people a month before they'd be able to keep the money. Supposedly it's legal, but there (should be) a special place in hell for whomever pulls that kind of crap!
Ultimately, the person most responsible, John Roth, escaped on a lifeboat while the others ended up sinking on the ship that was Nortel.
A captain he ain't
@@xKroniiqaL no
The number of big shot CEO's who have gotten away with this kind of crap makes me sick to my stomach. I get a lot of people who want to argue with me when I say "with enough money and clout, you can buy your way straight through just about any country's criminal justice system. America might just be leading the world in this.
@@DeathMetalDerfthe entire point of companies is to take the fall for their executives dubious action, this isn’t “buying your way out of the legal system” its the capitalist system working as designed
@@DeathMetalDerfBuying senators is embarrassingly cheap.
"No one broke the rules" is the takeaway. All of this, the CEO bonuses and the casual workers losing their life savings - is the system functioning as intended.
It's why my stepfather continuing to believe in the myth of trickle down economics makes me want to slam my head against my desk repeatedly. He genuinely believes that the rich getting more makes the rest of us better off.
@@dr3dg352I don't blame him - it would be a very nice thing *if* it were real
@@dr3dg352In a social democracy with a balanced government, yes! Trickle down economics work.
@Manowarmx3
What do you mean? Are you saying that in an ideal system the rich would transfer funds to the poor and that would mean encouraging a wealth imbalance is just? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the poor to generate a larger income for themselves to begin with, eliminating the need for a bureaucracy to ensure this transfer of wealth? Especially considering said bureaucracy is vulnerable to abuse by rich individuals misrepresenting figures or sending money to parties that give them benefit at the expense of others. Am I missing something from your argument? Because even if a perfect scenario could be achieved where trickle down economics somehow works it would be a waste of resources and make less sense than a more productive working population.
@@ianrau6373 I am saying that a burreaucracy needs to protect the working class from abuses like the one showed in thrle nortel case. I think a perfect world is where the tax is paid the same by the rich and the poor in %.
I pay 47% income tax and make around 140k a year. I simply think that the ultra rich should pay a similar percentage.
"Even the prestigous Bell Labs was embroiled in scandals, as one of its physicists was accused of faking dozens of Nobel-worthy research papers"
Ah yes, the Bobby Broccoli Cinematic Universe
*insert Leonardo di Caprio pointing meme*
"Hey! I've seen that one!"
Yes! I was waiting for him to make an appearance again!
The way I literally gasped when I heard that
@@jamesnieves5673bit dramatic innit
This whole video is essentially just
“It’s over”
“It’s somehow even more over”
“It’s never been more over”
“Atomic levels of over”
"It's heat death of the universe over"
FR the vibes i was getting from that chart
i was flabbergasted at the 20c loss
😂😂😂😂
its joever... We're bidone...
I'll never forget, working at mcdonalds as a teenager, reading the newspaper, thinking about the future, and debating investing in the stock market. Nortel was at or around $121 at the time, and I gave real serious thought about putting a few hundred in by somehow getting a few shares. I decided to not do so in the end, and by my next shift, the stock collapse had started.
Every science graduate in Canada had a 1/3 chance of working for Nortel in the 1990's. They were hiring everybody.
Someone I knew remortgaged their house and put the proceeds into Nortel shares at $124. Didn't work out well. Similarly, a colleague at Nortel had their investment plan in 100% Nortel shares. First rule of finance is to diversify your risk!
@@pgbrandon When I finished my MSc in Canada, Nortel came to campus to recruit. Even went to Ottawa for second interview. They were hiring some 1/3 of all science grads from Canadian university then. Sure glad I didn't go to Ottawa. Joined the oil business instead.
Huawei's corporate espionage killed Nortel.
@@zombiman_tv SO says Zombi Man. Zombi talk.
1:26:12 “They wanna shake your hand and tell you how sorry they are, but they also want you to hate the game and not the player. I assure you: I’ve got more than enough energy to do both.” God that line resonates.
I unironically want a poster with this quote.
I want a shirt with this quote
This, definitely. It's a sign of just how horrible "the system working as intended" can be, and why we need better systems.
we need a channel rename - i want to quote this without having to tell someone this was said by "bobbybroccoli"
I got fucking CHILLS when hearing that line
“It’s a wonder there is any red ink left in Canada” goes UNBELIEVABLY hard
This is a masterpiece man. Excellent financial journalism, explanations, visualizations. Among the very best on UA-cam ever. Thanks for making.
Someone on Twitter said you watched it, glad you enjoyed it!
One thing one may rely on: There is always a fool when you need one. This guy probably thinks the bible is interesting. Although his picture makes me wonder is it is not the koran. Care to translate the stupid video into arabic?
GLINEMA
This
Glizzy
The sudden Summoning Salt reference at 11:40 absolutely killed me. Well done.
caught me so fucking off guard lol
Absolutely incredible. So recognizable!
was looking for this comment, caught me off guard lmfao
Same here! Completely sunk!
absolutely loved it
As a San Jose Sharks fan, BobbyBroccoli videos were the one place I thought I would be safe from shame and riducule. Turns out I thought wrong
You're a sharks fan bro, nowhere is safe from shame and ridicule. Even your own rink
Cheer up, chum. It could always get more bloody.
If it helps, he didn't know he was dissing you.
When he revealed how the people on long term disability were fucked, I just started crying. My dad has been on LTD for a while, and my family has been extremely fortunate in our savings, but for the people who need that it’s so important. I just really feel for them
Because I've never been affected by the need for LTD, I didn't even notice this part of the video - it just blended in with the rest of the tragedy and evil. Thank you for commenting and highlighting this.
Also, does anyone have the timestamp for the part of the video where he talks about long term disability? I want to rewatch that part but its a bit of a long video lol
@@sammyjones82791:08:28
I just got done with the video. Unless I missed something, he didn't mention long term disability. He went into detail about pensioners who were screwed out of their money, though. That was at 1:05:15@@sammyjones8279
@@sammyjones8279 it's around 1:08:00
@@sammyjones82791:08:25 ish
Using Edmund Fitzgerald Sr.'s reaction at the beginning to contrast John Roth's callousness is such a gut-wrenchingly effective dramatic device - the realisation was so horrifying when the penny finally dropped for me...
What's the song that plays in that moment?
@@erikaitsumi2633 Unheard by Øak Land
@@erikaitsumi2633if you shoot me a time stamp I’ll do my best
@@erikaitsumi2633 Do you love this world by the Westerlies
@@mikhailnazareth8031 thank you so much!
It always disgusts me when executives pay out their own bonuses instead of providing for their employees, especially when they claim “we can’t do it”, as if that 190M in bonuses wouldn’t have help lessen their employee’s pain in severance. Especially when considering that they’ve been receiving 20-30M in bonuses each year up to that point.
Ah, but think of the precedent that giving away even part of an executive bonus sets! Workers all over would be demanding all sorts of funds in their pensions and long-term disability that would otherwise go to the needy, humble executive! /s
@@brandonthesteele people committed suicide
@@TRAMP-oline the "/s" means I was being sarcastic.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. People with actual empathy would never even rise that high in the corporate ladder in the first place.
Exactly@@petersansgaming8783
John Roth gets to basically forget whatever happened with Nortel and brush it off as 'ancient history' and that's because it didn't affect him at all- he walked away with his millions and is living his dream life. On the other hand thousands of ex-employees' pensions and compensations were erased, and their (+families') lives were altered for the worse, probably forever for some. I know this is what always happens, but hearing that Roth 'seemed puzzled why people are still interested in this' made my blood boil.
he's old he wants to retire
@@DylanDkohso did all his employees but they cant do that, because of him.
Literally corporate capitalism. That people still believe in this myth is mind boggling.
Just like the guys from Blackberry, now strutting it around Canada as billionaires.
It never even occurred to these men to *voluntarily* donate even a portion of their golden parachutes to their laid off employees. It might even have been a useful PR boost, for Nortel and the government both. The idea of surrendering their "right", what they were "legally entitled to", was baffling to them. What empty hearts that speaks to.
In a just society, lack of empathy would be something that requires a lifetime of work to build. Under ours, it is rewarded with exorbitant wealth and called "business acumen."
That's because the job they are hired to do is make the company (read that as the shareholders) the biggest amount of money possible. They view the workers as an impediment to that goal, since wages are cost that makes profitability more difficult. It's nearly impossible to work in that job and be a person who cares about the well-being of the people below them working at the company.
This is why you should never trust business owners or executive managers acting on behalf of business owners to do the right thing when stuff like this happens.
They wouldn’t have successfully climbed where they were if they had any empathy
@@transformersloverjon ...and yet, as a technology company, the value is in the workers and their knowledge as opposed to say a resource company.
That’s the story of today isn’t it? No one can feel they are doing good for themselves unless they actively make or perceive other people do worse. Now even our own neighbors defend these people like they have been completely blind to what every company has done ever for the entire history of the usa
1:26:15 - "... they want you to hate the game, not the player. I assure you, I've got more than enough energy for both."
This line hit me hard. I love it.
The players can exist without the game.
The game cannot exist without the players.
Players telling me to hate the game is the biggest blame avoidance move in the whole game.
"it's ancient history" I love how he either does not care or does not fathom that people are to this day suffering because of what happened.
reminds me of that one BoJack episode
Statements like "44 billion dollars is just gone" is insane to me: that 44 billion never existed, it was as sepculation, a dream a bunch of suits in highrises thought up as they promised a bunch of really talented, hard working engineers and scientists a salary those executives knew they couldnt deliver. Sickening, downright vile, and this stuff happens all the times.
Both my father and uncle worked at Nortel during the tele-com boom, my dad described Nortel as "the place programmers went to hide, you could literally not know what you were doing or write a line of code and stay on for years." and "We wrote more documentation about code we were about to write, than we ever did code." He quit in 1998.
Thanks for sharing. What did they do after? Gotta be a weird transition if they went to other jobs coming from that. Just curious
@@salvadormuro7346 My dad moved to a startup company with some of his coworkers from nortel who were fed up with not doing anything, my uncle stayed for a little while longer, and eventually moved on to verizon iirc
Fortunately both of them were over-qualified for their work at Nortel, and they ended up much happier and fulfilled after.
While somewhat true, nortel had some very, very smart people. I know i worked with a lot of them. The documentation production was out of this world but thats because nortel were trying to be iso compliant and extensive (and brutal) code reviews were mandatory. There were time swhen i had to print out multiple lots of 500 pages of code to be reviewed. As you might imagine nortel had the best printers… those things could do everything from duplex to binding, all in one machine.
@@probablynotmyname8521 Yeah, but so does Microsoft. But I assure you, there are also plenty who are utterly inept but they get away with it because of corporate bloat and nepotism.
The company is so big that it just throws money at departments with no oversight. I worked on a new database for Xbox LIVE for three years. My job was overseeing the migration of user data from the old system to the new one. The number of people who refused to get their tasks done each day was infuriating. Work was slow.
Then one day the company fired us all, saying they weren't going to use the new database, they'd just try to shore up the old one. Three years and millions of dollars, thrown out like it was nothing. And sure enough, that year Xbox LIVE crashed.
@@probablynotmyname8521 lmao, code reviews on paper. That is so "90s"
I’d personally love to see a documentary about Yoshitaka Fujii, the most retracted scientist of all time. There’s honestly very little I’ve been able to find about him outside of Wikipedia.
wikipedia says Joachim Boldt is the most retracted scientist but they're both anesthesiologists?? what's going on with that field 😮
@@anny8720 To be fair, Boldt apparently *just* took that title. :P
@@Wote89yoink🤭😹😼
@@Wote89 That makes the narrative for a potential documentary even more interesting.
@@anny8720 Anesthesiology is largely magic.
"I was too young to realize what had happened at the time, when my mom got laid off the 2nd time I was just happy that now she could come pick us up after school."
God that's so relatable. Like, finding out little details that you didn't think much of as a kid were actually due to something sad or worrying that your parents just didn't tell you about because they wanted you to be as happy and carefree as you could for as long as possible. It's not until you get older and you start thinking about different dates that things line up.
Kinda makes you respect your parents more. The fact that they insulated you from their pain
@@Shiro642 The day one of our grandparents died, a neighbor picked us up from school, bought us new pjs, took us to Mcdonalds, and just in general we had a really good evening. When we finally got back to our house, my mom and dad told me what happened figuring I was old enough to know (I was 9), but I found out recently that my brother, who was 5 at the time, was not told and in fact did not find out connection between the neighbor picking us up and the death in the family until much later when he was like 15 or so, and even then, that was an accident from my mom and I talking about it when I was walking about some slippersocks i got.
Yeah this whole documentary was an eye-opener for me in that regard. My dad worked for Nortel in Ottawa up until 2009, so all of this was going on right around me for like, my entire childhood, but I had no idea. I was 11 when it went under. He ended up getting out and getting another good job just before it ended, so it turned out fine. But he did lose some pension money.
1:26:04 "This is the part that really gets me. They're not satisfied with just their millions. They want to shake your hand, tell you how sorry they are. But they want you to hate the game, not the player."
Absolutely nothing I could add to this bit to make it more perfect than it already is. Stellar work as always, man.
This seems weird to say about a video documentary series, but that drop-off moment at 35:53 is one of the most-powerful climaxes I've experienced in my entire life. This isn't your first video where you've demonstrated total mastery of narrative buildup, but it's by far your best. Absolutely spine chilling. Bravo.
I have huge respect for anyone who makes good captions for their videos.
it probably helps that he likely uses a script that can directly be pasted in but aligning all the captions for a 90 minute video still takes a lot of work
The commenter below is correct, I paste in the script and then do manual edits to auto-synch.
@@BobbyBroccoli still a LOT of effort for something most people don't even use
It really isn't that much effort, and according to my stats around 1 in 4 of my viewers use captions. That's millions of views!@@LineOfThy
@@BobbyBroccoli :O
Pretty sure my Dad lost his parents inheritance and his job during this event. Thank you so much for covering this topic, it's been so eye-opening to see how this bubble popping may have affected my family and my early life without me ever knowing. This will be a hard conversation with my dad should I choose to have it, but I thank you for showing me how dire this situation was for Canada and why this was so important.
Sound like a good conversation, granted may be a hard one
If you choose to have that conversation and if your father permits would you share the highlights of it? And maybe your father’s reactions to these videos. I’m especially curious about your father’s thoughts on the lawsuits against Dunn and his execs.
I DON'T KNOW THE AFARICAN TRIBE BUT;---THEIR IS AN OLD AFRICAN SAYING:-----"WHEN ELEPHANTS FIGHT,--IT'S THE GRASS THAT GETS TRAMPELED!!!!!!!!!"
"Somehow, this is not the first time where I've covered a topic where a retired U.S. admiral is brought in to save a multi-billion dollar enterprise." Loved your references to your past videos, from Watkins to Hendrik!
If I had a nickel for every time I watched a multi-hour long documentary about a multi-billion dollar project that brought in a retired US admiral in a bid to save the entire enterprise, I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.
Timestamp?
The Canadian government giving 13B to foreign companies and refusing to give a Canadian company 1B is truly mind-boggling. The amount of wealth, knowledge, and resources Canada lost with that decision will haunt it for generations. All of that history, just to enrich Apple and others.
Don't worry, Apple is currently overinflating their own worth. Give it another 10 years.
@@Veltrosstho I think a lot of big companies are like that honestly. Especially ones who are super invested in new bubble worthy technologies.
They made their money from Apple. They would have lost money with Nortel. They could have chose to not give money to either, but to throw money away out of pride isn't a smart move.
@@Joker-no1uh You have no actual understanding of industrial policy, Canada has now regressed back to being a US branch plant economy plus exporting raw materials. Oh, and now importing masses of immigrants to become a low wage economy.
we have the stupidest government in the entire world
I just want to point out, the reason why a 0.01$ underperformance led to such a big drop is because the market was expecting an overperformance. You see this a lot, investors don't pay close attention to the company's internal numbers because they have their own numbers that they track. So if they are predicting a 0.10$ beat, but it is actually an underperformance, then that can cause the stock price to plummet. Most recently, this happened with Meta (Facebook) last year. They didn't actually underperform by that much, but the entire market had priced in a beat on the earnings.
These days, turning in a performance that is not within the "guidance", minus OR plus, will tank a stock. If a company's performance cannot be predicted, it's future value is unreliable, and you cut it off like a diseased limb...
As a native Ottawan, this uncorked some deep emotions in me that I wasn't expecting. I was fairly young when this all went down and my Dad was only a contractor for Nortel and so fairly insulated. But still, the pain and anxiety was palpable. This video brought our a wave for sadness for my city that I thought I had long moved past. Thank you Bobby for shedding a light on one of our city's darkest times.
saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame
Bobby doesn’t miss
You could not have watched it all yet
@@lukask2597 I watched it on Nebula!
@@lukask2597
Nebula is a thing! Check it out
He doesn't even hit, it's all crits.
@@Theamazingstickboy1Bobby: Pick a god and pray.
As usual in these sorts of stories, the people who have it the worst are the people at the bottom. Family breadwinners, independent workers, longtime loyal employees and young workers entering the workforce with a seemingly nice job, all screwed over by some rich assholes who played the system and jumped ship before they could suffer the consequences. Absolutely sickening to hear how the pensions and disability payments were gutted
capitalism working as intended ;) poor get poorer so the rich can get richer
@@oculometricand that doesn't stop. It won't stop. No matter how poor the poor are, they will get poorer to make the rich richer. They won't stop when you can't afford vacations. They won't stop when you can't buy a home. They won't stop when you can't make rent. They won't even stop when you're homeless and stealing to survive.
They won't stop till everything of any sort of value is theirs and theirs alone. Like a spoiled toddler refusing to share their toys.
@@Mr.Sparks.173 But it's better than the alternative, where the top earners are limited to only 10x the cash they could ever spend in a lifetime just so some "human beings" with "a basic moral right to not die from preventable causes" can have their needs met.
Some things never change. I watch Coffeezilla, and half his stories are the people on top getting out with their money and leaving everybody else on the bottom fucked
@@beardedemperor There are many alternatives, or do you think humanity is that stupid to come up with only two economic systems? There are piles upon piles of research on this. There are gazillions of renditions of the same even. So much so that even capitalism is different country to country.
The problem is, capitalism is a dead end. Once you fall into it, you never get out and that's exactly what you have already substantiated by your wilfully ignorant statement. You simply cannot think of changing, you are willing to characterize humanity as stupid, dumb buffoon, those hundreds of thousands of research professionals' research as piles of dust.
You do not want change, you do not want a better system, you want to be one of those richer getting richer, why would you want to change when there is a glimmer of hope to that utopia? The gardens that tease you every day? So what if they are built on your sweat and blood of others, you are not dying now are you? How exhilarating it would be to squeeze someone else while being praised for it, now wouldn't it?
Your skills as a documentarian and an infographic designer are insane. Major MAJOR props to you!
35:49 This. This is horror. BobbyBroccoli, I don't know how you pulled it off, but you made every hair on my body stand upright. And I'm not even a financebro.
Don't need to be a financebro to realize a lot of people were going to lose their jobs and savings!
@BobbyBroccoli the way you can break down these topics was incredibly helpful in making the Nortel story very understandable, confirmed I didn't need to be a financebro 😭
The music there really worked too
this part was probably my favorite, but I can't find the song that plays there
@@PhelanRichardson Forgotten by Repulsive
Watched this on Nebula two weeks ago. This is easily by a landslide the best documentary you have ever made.
I love how despite the reasons behind Nortel's collapse already having been established, the tone is intentionally kept positive for the first thirty minutes instead of focusing on the compay's slow downward spiral, so that the weight of everything that's happened hits the viewers like a truck just as it did those in the company. It's a perfect way to show how Nortel's miseading figures and good news barage hid the truth from not just those on the outside, but those on the inside as well.
And the way Nortel's forecast change was visualised by the -20c bar literally hitting the floor of the graph was _brilliant._ I'm so used to seeing tiny little charts nested inside other charts that when you have to zoom in that far to see one, I sort of just assume it would never make any kind of impact on the larger scale. So seeing it take up the same amount of space as Nortel's maximum stock value is a perfect way to show _very literally_ how all of their success has been completely undone.
This is just absolutely outstanding, through and through.
I would never have thought that a two-part, long-form documentary on Canadian technology finance issues would pique my interest so much, but your approach, incredible sense of storytelling, and being able to break down a very complex tale into easily-understood parts is unparalleled. This was fantastic. Thanks for posting.
I've been in tech for forty years and I am very glad to read comments by people who aren't so much who are still impressed with this documentary. I would have thought that much of this would be eye-glaze material.
The fact that I just watched a 3 hour documentary film for free (apart from the YT premium subscription) which eaasily rivals a multimillion dollar netflix series is astonishing.
All the work, research, effort, and care you put into these videos is beautiful. I've watched all of your documentaries 2-3 times at least, and will watch them more in the future. They are all exeptional pieces and you deserve all the praise in the world. Good job and keep making them till the end, we will watch them.
Agreed. The quality of this is outstanding.
Whenever I hear this kind of bankruptcy story I think about how there was someone at the company who was the last to find out. Some poor working class sod who was the last person to find out that they, and in fact nobody, would ever work for the company again.
The stories of those who saw the end coming and jumped ship are always told - what about the stories of those who are the last to be laid off?
What's so cool to me is not only this series, but all the commenters who themselves used to work at Nortel, able to see the entire story told in such a great fashion. Fantastic vids as always
My eyes didn't glaze over when you said "Earning From Operations", they narrowed in immediate suspicion. I remember Enron and their "Mark To Market Accounting", the accounting method they used where they'd report unrealized future gains from deals as profits to make the company look more profitable than it was. Drastic changes to financial reporting and accounting systems is a massive red flag for potential fraud and market manipulation down the line.
This two part documentary just blows my mind. I started working at Nortel in 1997, and was there until 2009. Even as all of this unfolded around us those that managed to keep their jobs just kept on working. I guess we were the orchestra that continued to play as the ship sank. I finally jumped ship and ended up at Alcatel-Lucent, but my wife survived and continues to work with Ericsson to this day. To me, telecomm was and will always be a fascinating and challenging industry. Nortel will always hold a special place in my heart as my first real long term job. I still think ATM was awesome.
ATM was awesome, but just like with PCIe vs PCI, switched networks were always gonna lose to packet networks.
I got so used to not getting a hang of anything until 2/3 end of the video that I didn’t realize this is part 2 until I read your comment (I am 1 minute away from this video’s ending)…
Beginning with the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy and showing the Nortel share price graph when mentioning the freak waves has got to be one of the most ominous openings I've ever seen in a UA-cam documentary. And the fact it managed to link back around as well? Masterful.
I always enjoy your documentary content, and this was no exception. The audible gasp I made when I saw the -20$ come up and the sudden realization of the millions of lives about to be shattered in those numbers; it's a top tier documentary that manages to immerse and grip me in that way.
Worse, remember, it was by TWENTY CENTS. 20 cents destroyed Nortel
Mate, I was enthralled. As an Aussie, this saga really has no bearing on my life. But its given my great insight into my father in law, as he was at Cisco during this time.
This was an absolutely massive video(s). Really well researched, amazingly edited, and really enjoyable to watch. Thank you
Combined with the music choice (an absolutely phenomenal one btw), 35:45 is the first in forever I’ve ever felt my heart sink so low from a video. Really helped sell just how screwed Nortel was
That moment was possibly the best storytelling I've seen on youtube. BB does not miss!
So basically, Frank Dunn was actually helping to turn the company around, but got screwed by overzealous auditors and an incompetent board, which in turn screwed over all the employees and investors in the process. Crazy to think of what would have happened if they never would have alleged that, if Nortel would have ended up surviving to-date.
also that made the Canadian government not want to bail them out because the company seemed corrupt
Kind of makes you wonder if he said "no" to the board about the wrong thing
@@VinemapleHe most likely didn't wanna give away money in bonuses and the directors decided to oust him.
It was actually the opposite. Frank and his CFO proposed a bonus system where basically every single employee would get a bonus if they made a profit. The board pushed back on that and so Frank and his CFO said they'd withhold their personal bonuses until they made back-to-back quarters of profit. The board then approved the plan.
@@BobbyBroccoli I imagine you endured many sleepless nights researching this and "wtf"ing so hard.
It sounds like people are obsessed with placing the blame entirely on a few individual names, while most of the real responsibility actually belongs to... the entire board of executives. They're the ones who voted unanimously for chapter 11, they're the ones who immediately fired the CEO on shaky evidence just when things were turning around, they're the ones voting for the bonuses and for ditching the pensions/severance. They were also the ones completely ignoring how bogus the in-house numbers were. While the CEOs were making a lot of bad and possibly malicious decisions, every single thing the board did was just completely and entirely incompetent.
Every single member of that board deserves the blame, and none of them deserves to ever be working in a management position again.
With all due respect - sometimes, "the entire board of executives" really is a few individual names.
@@kneau True, but they also managed to all remain anonymous, keep their jobs and reputations, and place all blame solely on the CEOs. And most of the public seems to have gone along with it.
@@-tera-3345 an excellent point! Though it is possible for a board of executives to be comprised of a few individuals, that is not the case here.
Pretty sure the corruption and cronyism at the TSE and the decade of elbow rubbing and deregulation played more of a role than anyone within the company did.
basically: the bourgeoisie
The moment when it sank in that the cargo ship representing Nortel was the _Edmund Fitzgerald_ - absolutely incredible stuff
One of the most shocking things is the incompetence of the board and what they did just as Nortel stopped the bleeding. What an amazing production
When i worked there (late90s) there were a lot of complaints from staff that there was never any advertising of the company. We were huge but nobody knew who we were. So the higher ups licensed “come together” and produced a completely baffling ad that made zero sense and seemed to suggest we were all stoned or serial killers. We didnt have the best management.
Starting this by using the Fitzgerald story and the wave that sank it as a parallel for Norton riding one of the biggest technical/financially driven waves ever was such a creative and effective intro to a sequel Doc!
Its kind of crazy to hear this as an American, especially over the past six years or so when people were looking at Canada as some kind of promised land. The idea that there was such a massive hole in the law for peoples pensions blows my mind with how people in the States talk about Canadas social systems.
I know right?? Canada seems to have this image worldwide that it’s a wealthy social safety net country where any immigrant can easily join the middle class with a bit of dedication. But in reality is has abismal predatory capitalistic practices and has financial loopholes that favors the top 5% and an ever increasing wealth class disparity.
The Canadian Healthcare System tried and failed to kill my father-in-law three times. Of course, the Germans, the Russians, the North Africans, and the French tried and failed to kill him, too. So a few bureaucrats in Ottawa and Toronto were seriously outmatched. He lived to be 100; we've got a nice note from Trudeau to that point, even through his Government would not let us into the country to visit him on that day because of their COVID policies.
Our social systems and our state assets have been steadily dismantled for years to the point they are either privatized or have been flipped into a for profit model. Which is even worse. Our health care system is so anemic now emergency rooms are shutting down in remote areas.
As a Canadian, I'm considering leaving Canada.
It's mostly the abysmally high tax rates to pay for too many overpriced services that don't allow individuals to set aside a decent amount of money for a rainy day and retirement. Only those top 5% you mentioned are left with enough cash to have the safety net. @@DoritoBot9000
35:50 This moment is…hard to describe watching it happen. Knowing that 1-2 cents difference devastated share prices waiting to see something like 6 cents that still shows growth, but a good chunk slower, just to see it become a negative number all together is insane. A lot of the mechanics still goes over my head but the impact isn’t lost on me. I can’t imagine being a trader in that moment the news is announced
My jaw actually dropped. I may not have been there, but it gave me the same feeling of dread as getting a test back you think you didn't do well on but are cautiously optimistic about. Then you flip it over and your whole semester is fucked lol
The problem of speculative investment and absurd standards for expected returns.
It's hard to describe for you. For me it's very easy: trading is for people who have no brains and is a blight on society
With Earnings per share, it’s exactly what it sounds. The net earnings divided by the amount of shares available. So if you have 5 million shares, a loss of a cent means you lost $50,000. Now recall how Nortel was just printing shares like crazy? Divide that number by 5 (20c is a fifth of a dollar) and that’s the net loss Nortel took.
@@leafmotifs681 oh, I think I get it now…
Thank you for the explanation and the dreading horror I feel for that moment now
“It’s a wonder there’s any red ink left in Canada.” Holy cow, what a sentence.
You mentioned that many companies have gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and emerged intact, including some well known names like General Motors. However, as was the case with General Motors, the stock always gets wiped out because the creditors (debt holders) are legally first in line, and stock holders are at the bottom. Everyone that owned GM stock at the time was taken down to zero, and GM had to have a new IPO for its stock when it came out of bankruptcy. I point this out because even if Nortel had not been liquidated and it managed to survive the Chapter 11 reorganization, the original stock owners would still have been wiped out.
Well, yeah. That's the difference between debt and equity. Debt take less risk because it gets paid first, but it makes less because its return is capped. Equity takes more risk, but it has the opportunity for more upside because there is no cap on its return - it is the ultimate owner of the company.
@@igrowfaster There was still a chance of retaining the IP and some of the core business divisions, which could have allowed Canada to have a somewhat significant stake in the tech sector in the 2010s.
The laser guy story in the Red Ink Chapter at 37:13 really hits home for me because I used to work in a similar place where I was the newbie. The vibe in those environments was full of paranoia and helplessness, and there was always this thing with people hoarding knowledge and being all conspiratorial. Dealing with all that really messed with my mental health, so I ended up having to take anti-depressants and go to therapy for help. Thankfully, I've moved on from that job and now I work in non-profit tech, which has really turned my outlook on life around for the better. (The company laid off 16% of its staff after I left...)
It's not exactly the same but it reminded me of my close call with that sort of scenario. Now I had seen it plenty when I was working a job at a defense contractor, real niche divisions that did specific jobs for the company and anyone who got into one of those niches would fill it and metaphorically grout the niche smooth into the organization's foundations so that they wouldn't try and patch in any new hires to disrupt their place in the system. And then after having spent months trying to work into a group I actually wanted to be in, here comes a manager with a tale to tell: some wizened literal old greybeard had created such a perfect little job for himself and his wife over the decades, where they were the two keepers of some arcane knowledge on running some special program they had developed for the company decades prior, to do something that today is trivially common in desktop software, but which had all of the legacy formatting, coding, and propriety and top-secret information already punched in to do the job specifically the way the company had wanted it. Due to security and reliability and other reasons no-one was interested in migrating this work to new software for decades as this team had been doing it well enough. They once, during a time of expansion, apparently fully trained another person on the software, maybe in the mid 90's, who then left 5 years later. But anyone else sent down there was given absolutely nothing. Time and time again those students would be moved elsewhere. Indeed they jealously hoarded mastery of that unique software like a dragon to themselves. But then the wife, the only other person who knew how it worked, apparently went onto medical retirement. The old man was left alone, and wanted to also retire, but needed a protégé. There was interest in finding some young buck, such as myself at the time, to go into that dude's literal time capsule lair and study under the old man's tutelage for about a year, so that he could finally retire in peace. The job would come with a pay bump, an enhanced security clearance, invites to many significant meetings, 1 hour of real work per day tops, and a private office in the bowels of some building where I'd be bothered maybe once a week with a visitor, who likely was simply lost. And no expectation to train anyone else as they assured me I'd simply be working to fill in the gap, eventually they could get new software online to do the job on Windows machines.
I had little interest in this work, but some of the perks sounded compelling. I sat down and met a manager to discuss the logistics of it all more. And then I left the company a few weeks later. I had other irons in the fire, and I saw before me two roads. And I saw what I might become.
I still 6 years later am not sure if I took the right road, but, that would have been the wrong one.
At first, I thought calling someone a “Nenderthal accountant” was pretty insulting, but then you learn about the accountant and you find out that it was insulting for the Neanderthal.
Why? We do as we are told? I am committing fraud at work because if I don't, the girl next office will be, and I'll be sent home. Hate the people in the Lamborghinis, not the Toyotas
@@ico9750Sounds like the "we were just following orders" excuse
@@Fragrantcanaryya because if you don’t someone else will and you won’t have a job.
@@Lucas_Antar didn't all the employees think that it was easier too quit than continue with that stress?
Did I miss a deleted reply, or are you guys self-reporting for no reason?
35:53 sent chills down my back. Bobby Broccoli has such a knack for making me care deeply about shit I'd never even thought about previously.
The shock of seeing that arrow drop reminded me of the Shapeland & Alex Lasarenko reveals in Defunctland's Fastpass & Disney Channel theme videos. Absolutely bonkers
That moment had my jaw on the floor
Due to watching several of these videos, my brain now associates some of the music with scientific fraud and the periodic table; but watching this video in the middle of the night, that music, paired with that drop, freaked me out more than an EAS alarm system going off would have.
Absolutely. I had no understanding of how any of the stuff related to the stock market worked before watching this video, but the explanations were so comprehensive that when I saw that arrow, my jaw dropped.
@@stephaniel63 that really vibed hard for me with creepy music from TV shows from my childhood, namely, the X-Files intro song (which I still can't listen to) and some TV show about real crime that my grandmother always watched and had even creepier soundtracks (which coupled with the entire theme of mass murderers chopping up people and raping everyone always sent me hiding under the bed, behind the couch, lol just anywhere possible to escape and hide). The latter one didn't traumatize just me, my aunt also has a bad reaction to it. Thanks grandma!
Really leaning into the nautical metaphor with this series was the right course.
I hate that the pun in the praise made me smirk
@@historible6500 Yeah, it really took the wind out of my sails.
I, too, had a groan aboat it.
whatever gives your catamaran buoyancy, friend
Yeah, I was totally on board for it.
Bro your writing is 2nd to none. Your set ups and pay offs were beautiful. Amazing job
Was a BNR / Nortel employee for 20 years 1990-2010 experiencing the excitements of the major growth of the 90s and the roller coaster ride the following 10 years. This video brings out the emotions.😥
The Frank Dunn firing is tragic. To think the company was actually getting back on its feet properly after the bubble had burst, only to commit suicide on apparently pretty flimsy allegations.
It's the board!! Stupid people.
It is tragic, but partly because in the moment it seems so reasonable
wait suicide? WHEN?
@@DylanDkoh as in the company committed suicide.
that was not clear from your initial comment@@flixelgato1288
7:07 As a Calgarian and Flames fan, I can confirm that getting tickets to Sharks games is indeed quite a hilarious joke. They’ve only been a decent team a few times in their history. They mostly exist as a place for Canadians to go play hockey at where there’s no pressure to win, and a nice warm climate to boot. Massive difference between Albertan winters and Cali “winters”, if you can even call them that.
Ehh I don’t really know what to say other than during the 2000s and 2010s the SJ sharks had been a good team, just unbelievable chokers who most certainly could not live up to the talent they had in Thornton, Couture, pavelski, and Marleau.
Calgary gaaaaang whaddup
@@renzibenziagreed. i miss my old sharks 😞😞
As a native Southern Californian, what's winter?
@@vanessaa7602for you? Pants weather. For me? Pain season.
I didn't think I would be invested in this story as it's so Canada/US-centric, whereas all the scientific dramas are more universal, but I've been waiting with baited breath to learn more about this!
in this instance it is “bated breath”
I didn't think I'd care about canada either but the tale of mismanagement is so intense I can't stop watching. It's like watching a child with a lighter stumble closer and closer to a puddle of gasoline.
The power of good storytelling and corporate shenanigans.
@@sparkydoggo8691 Damn, nice catch!
We were at least 20000 Nortel employees in Europe in 2000
i come back to this video every once in a while and i just want to say that the effort you put into these videos are amazing.
you are literally the jon bois of science and the story telling and writing that goes into these videos. i know how long it takes. the animations i know take literal days to get right. this is all seriously impressive and you are literally doing gods work. even if the views aren’t always there, these videos should really be getting 10s of millions of views. but they will stand the test of time. people will continue to watch them because of how great they are. good job
Wow, the payoff that final line "it's ancient history" delivered to explain the cryptic opening of the previous video was fantastic. Well done, sir!
Another fantastic example of what happends when the people who represent us cannot keep large corporations in check.
Spectacular job, Bobby!
@@NPC_NEWS
I saw it on Nebula dude. Check the pinned comment
When you revealed shares dropped 20 cents, it genuinely gave me the feeling that a twist in a movie would. Great video
When I heard about Edmund Fitzgerald in the first video, it reminded me about the ship itself. The intro immediately had me hooked and wanting to finish this crazy ride. Thanks Bobby for making these!
I was like, "Hmm, wonder if he's related to the one from the shipwreck," not expecting that to be answered. I love things that lead to little questions in the back of my head that get answered soon enough.
"I have enough energy for both" is exactly my mood about these companies. Did everything wrong but nothing illegal enough to land all of them in prison? It's either a big failure of the governments of both US and Canada or the entire system needs to be rebuilt to stop this nonsense. Edit: I vote both.
It's why I never understand people who say 'Blame the system, not a few bad apples or those who managed to hack it' like that same system isn't upheld and sustained by those 'bad apples'. You have enough energy to be mad at both.
My mother works for Cisco. Honestly, it's a great company. They've been through so many market shakeups now that they've kind of built themselves and internal system to absorb the shock. I know my mom got laid off for a little bit from the financial recession of '08 but eventually they hired her back on and now she's in a managerial role. She also started the wounded warriors project and the integration of engineers from the Marines into Cisco as they were leaving.
Very well done. I worked at BNR and then Nortel for over 24 years. I remember a lot of this like it was yesterday. I remember very clearly when Paul Stern added "shareholder value" as a core value. Accounting rules have changed a lot since then, but hyper-capitalism, greed have gotten worse. Nortel may be long gone, but the story is far from over.
I have to say, the tone in this is fantastic. Something about how the firing and supposed fraud by the three executives was presented just instantly caught my intention and made me skeptical, and it's brilliant that a supposed disaster was actually the last chance Nortel had being wasted. That peak was only fake in the way that all economic peaks are fake, but it could've lasted, and Nortel panicking and killing their last chance is so profoundly fitting given all their other terrible decisions.
I'm an elder millennial from eastern Ontario and I do work in tech - but when I was making my choices about school I was strongly discouraged from going in to tech (l was a teen obsessed with computers) because it was a field with no jobs.
I ended up getting a degree in advertising and by the time I graduated the entire industry had been eaten by digital.... so, right in to tech I went. I'm always shocked at how few people I encounter in my age range, since we should be filling all of those senior / mid management roles these days.
That would in part require a lot of Gen-X people to retire. I'm a younger millennial though.
This is incredible , this guy makes documentaries by himself better than media groups with huge budgets and manpower .
I can't even imagine the amount of effort and research that went into this .
real gem of a channel.
I really love the ship/naval theme throughout both videos and how you do similar things is all your documentaries. Not Canadian, not even in America when all this was going down but it was incredible to learn about. From the comments it sounds like a lot of folks have now recovered (even though it's taken some time) so wishing all them the absolute best. Can't wait for the next topic to be dropped!
The world truly is an unjust place when Frank Dunst got all the blame and the actual man most responsible, Roth, little to none. Frank even almost salvaged the company if it hadn’t been for the board’s idiocy, real Majorian figure
My parents immigrated to Vancouver in 2005, and my parents didn't experience the brink of this nightmare. Honestly, I commend BobbyBroccoli for talking about this because for the longest time I had no idea about any of this. I feel like there's a culture against talking about Canadian failures and pretending everything is fine, which ironically is what delayed the fall and sealed the fate of Nortel itself.
It's more that there's basically no awareness of Canadian history outside of what you encounter in the classroom
We need to stop acting like we're a way better country than the US
@@wayback1010this, because we aren’t, we are so much worse, and if people keep pointing to minor things wrong with the US and acting smug, then we will die as a nation
I'm not totally surprised to be engrossed by this video, but I'm a little surprised to find myself tearing up at the end. It's unfathomably cruel for CEOs to face no repercussions-- in fact, not even any inconveniences-- while employees' requirements are entirely wiped out
Right? How nice for the sociopathic former CEO that he was able to compartmentalize that "ancient history" into another part of his brain and not think about all the people he screwed over while getting unfathomably rich.
These docs are so insanely good, huge props dude
Around Nortel’s peak value my mom had something like 30 000$ worth of shares. She held on to them and they went to zero. Thankfully she hadn’t paid for them because they were obtained from a stock split (my mom owned a bunch of BCE stock). A family friend who worked in Nortel’s accounting department was laid off and ended up becoming a trucker. Most people in the Ottawa area, at least those above 30, will have Nortel related stories.
What an absolutely amazing series. This captures the Nortel story in a way no one has done before. Thank you for doing this @BobbyBrocolli.
Just to add; the best example of the terrible consequences of John Roth’s decision making was in my hometown of Belleville, Ontario. Once home to the Meridian Enterprise PBX division (eventually sold to Avaya), John Roth laid-off 950 of the 1100 people working there between 1999-2001. Starting off with outsourcing the manufacturing of the Meridian PBXs, then gutting the “old Nortel” staff, then letting go of everyone else cause the stock crashed. It absolutely shattered the economy since 1/5 families were directly/indirectly employed by Nortel.
My father-in-law worked for Nortel, as did my wife. A lot of employees and retirees also had much of their savings invested in Nortel stock, so not only lost their jobs, but sometimes substantial portions of their life savings. Never keep your life savings in your employer's stock.
Never held a share of my company's stock that I purchased, only that which was granted as part of compensation. Never buy your own company's stock.
If you have an employee purchase plan, just sell, sell now. Your income is tied to your company and likely the value of your house. You don't need more stuff tied to the company.
I learned that from friend that got screwed by Enron failure.
Your employer can also just up and decide to do mass layoffs if the stock price goes down - even though the company is still hugely profitable and has vast dragon hoards of cash lying around.
I don't know how, but at 35:50 is pure cinema.
You laid everything down, you explain what happened, and we all know that s*** is about to happen, but the sheer scale and magnitude, along with your storytelling destroy it, at that moment, I feel as if i'm part of Nortel shareholders on THAT day, the dread and the panic was real.
Please never stop cooking.
As a communications major whose unrelated hyperfixation is maritime disasters: this is a masterpiece. I wish the CBC had people like you on their case study teams!!
11:44 The summoning salt reference was so good.
"They want you to hate the game, not the player. I assure you, I've got more than enough energy to do both." You're so fantastic at cutting through the complexities of the topics you cover to get to the emotional core, it's top-level storytelling.
I graduated into the IT field in Canada back in 2003, and almost everyone I knew from my graduating class could not find work and changed career paths within about a year, just like you described in this doc. I stuck it out, but it took about 3 years for me to find a stable career in the field. I'm blown away now realizing the ripples that were caused by Nortel's fall.
Timestamp 24:30 - Going from 350,000 TB to 15,000,000 TB between 1999 and 2003 is NOT a 10x increase per year, 4 years in a row. It's a 40x increase over 4 years or a 2.5x increase per year, 4 years in a row.
Good point :)
It is true though that the marketing story was "exponential growth" of bandwidth demand. Whenever you hear "exponential" outside pure math, you need to run.
@@ronald3836 Unless it's compute power - moore's law held for a long damn time
Also saying terabits when showing TB with a capital B, which should be terabytes.
@@harryg9976 The freak exception that proves the rule ;-)
Haitz's law is still going strong.
“They want you to hate the game. Not the player. I assure you, I have more than enough energy to do both.” 1:26:15 Holy shit. Actually the hardest line.
I worked at Nortel from 1987 to 2002 . All the leaders you mentioned,I remember them very well . I was just a senior manager at the time and was witnessing some shenanigan specially at the end of the year where phony orders were coming in to make the sales number. Trucks with empty shelves were sent away to pretend shipping the order. All of this backed by our glorified president of global operation who was awarded $11M in bonus for screwing up the operation big time with his outsourcing strategy that was a disaster for the company. On top, I wasworking in China beginning of 2000 and witness selling of optical network design to Huawei by ex product managers . these guys were living in Hong Kong . I remember vendors calling me and telling me that they were making Huawei printed circuit board with Nortel logo on it When reported it to our glorified leaders, they were telling me to mind my own business. I suspect they were on the take, just investigate ex product manager working in Nortel Hong Kong and then Huawei to find out how much money they pocketed,
[changes comment after seeing the end] I guess the Huawei story didn't make any difference or not, but that's the only one that I keep hearing.
It’s like we all know how the story ends, but the way you build suspense for certain reveals on how bad a situation is amazing!!
You’re like, how bad is it gonna get? And it turns out to be twice as much as you expect and it hits like a truck DX
Such excellent work!
If anyone is curious, the "creative accounting" practices still aren't illegal in the US. There are much stricter regulations for it, but it still can be. Not great.
In the 1990's my dad came home with a framed poster gifted to him at a company party (Apple Inc.). A picture of him sitting at his desk, arms crossed with the caption, "What part of no don't you understand?" At the time, I thought this was meant to jokingly imply he is very tough on others at work.
I've since come to suspect the caption is a tongue in cheek reference to his accounting & the question, "Isn't this illegal?"
Thanks for covering how actually bad it was for the pensioners - its so sad to hear hpw much the exectives walked away and how screwed over the pensioners were
The way you wrapped this up with the ship symbolizing the beginning and the end of Nortel WITH THE SON AS ONE OF THE PPL AT THE HELM….. *chefs kiss
Urgh, the fucking gall of John Roth to call Nortel "ancient history" when he walked away with a billion dollar payout while former employees have to make do with 86% of their intended pension. I can't express how frustrated that made me. Props on the great story telling, Mr Broccoli.
This miniseries has become a quick favorite and a real eye opener, the energy you've brought to talking about the case, the anger there. It's a really striking piece. Fantastic work.
This is an incredibly well written explanation of an extremely complex topic. You are by far on of the best video essay creators on this site.
Man this is such an impactful watch. I grew up in RGI housing up until 2014-2015 and hearing you talk about your parents' and your experience in this city because of Nortel is just, deeply relatable. Nortel sits like a scar on our city, and one that still stings. I didn't understand it as a kid but its impact is still felt
Can't believe I lived my best life in Ottawa all while this drama was unfolding. What a time to be alive. Love how you make it perfectly clear the RCMP has a poor record of investigating white collar crime.