When Dan Taberski began putting together Surviving Y2K, his new podcast about the millennium bug, he ran into a problem. “I was trying to get some of the bigger players to talk to me, to do due diligence,” he explains over the phone. “People who worked for years and years on the Y2K bug, heads of committees and so on. Those people are really reluctant to talk, because they feel really burned. They feel like they spent years of their lives to try to solve a problem that everybody said after it was over: ‘Oh you just made it up.’ It’s a thing that people think is kind of a joke now: the disaster that never happened.”

While it might seem a source of embarrassment 18 years later, at the time the millennium bug was an emergency that consumed the globe. A minor glitch relating to the way computer programs processed dates ending in the digits “00”, it was predicted by some experts to cause a cataclysm, bringing down financial markets, power grids and critical national and international infrastructure. Governmental committees were formed and enormous expenditure was raised to tackle the crisis. And, what’s more, this potential doom coincided with the millennium, a date fraught with symbolism and portents. “That confluence that really scared the bejesus out of people,” says Taberski. “And made them do things that they wouldn’t have normally done.”

Surviving Y2K Headlong Podcast. Photograph: Publicity image

Surviving Y2K sees the former Daily Show producer and host of last year’s smash-hit (if arguably problematic) podcast Missing Richard Simmons, recount the wild tale of the millennium bug through the perspectives of those people who prepared for a disaster that never came. He speaks to the scientists who made their names arguing for or against the likelihood of apocalypse; the evangelical family who travelled to Israel to await the second coming of Christ; the survivalist who planned to live on meat from underground hamster farms. As Taberski notes, “something like Y2k can really trigger you to take gambles that you would never normally take”.

Among those gamblers was Taberski, whose life was spiralling out of control as the millennium approached. Without getting into the specifics affectingly recalled as the podcast progresses, he was someone for whom the prospect of armageddon was beginning to actually feel enticing. “It was, for me, a pivotal moment in my life,” he remembers. “So the podcast was a great opportunity to go back and see what the rest of the world was doing when I was completely, totally involved in my own apocalypse.”

This tendency towards the highly personal will be familiar to anyone who listened to Taberski’s previous podcast. Missing Richard Simmons sought to discover what became of the celebrity fitness instructor and philanthropist, who receded suddenly from public life earlier this decade. At the time of his disappearance, Taberski was attending an aerobics class run by Simmons, and the podcast explored the centrality of the lycra-clad exercise guru to the lives of those taught by him, as well as the burden that this might have placed on Simmons himself.

Dan Taberski. Photograph: Andrew Zaeh

Told in the manner of a Serial-style true crime podcast, with Taberski teasing out clues from Simmons’s social network pages and even visiting his house, Missing Richard Simmons proved hugely successful, but was criticised by some as an invasion of its subject’s privacy. “As Mr Taberski digs deeper into Mr Simmons’s personal life, the question becomes not ‘What happened to Richard Simmons?’ but ‘Is it any of our business?’, wrote a critic in a scathing review for the New York Times. The podcast and its attendant popularity prompted Simmons to release a statement denying that he was “missing” and put his absence from public life down to being “a little under the weather”.

Taberski, for his part, has defended the podcast, arguing that it asks complex but necessary questions about notions around celebrity. “So many people reached out to me, talking about empathy and how being empathetic like he was for so long could exhaust somebody like that,” he says. “I struck up a relationship with an evangelical pastor in Texas, who reached out and said he understood it from the point of view of a clergy person. I helped him write a sermon at one point about the issue. It struck people in ways that really touched me.”

Surviving Y2k, which has been bundled up with Missing Richard Simmons into a new anthology series titled Headlong, is less likely to attract the scorn its predecessor received, not least because – unlike the ongoing mystery around Simmons – it’s very much settled history in the public imagination. The apocalypse didn’t come to pass; the naysayers were proved right. Or were they? That, says Taberski, is one of the central tensions of the podcast. “One explanation was that it wasn’t really a problem, the other explanation was that the world got together to solve this existential problem that really would have affected modern society for ever.”

And for all the snark over the bug that never bit, that teamwork is something we could do with more of today, the podcast host argues. “When you think about things like global warming and climate change and the fact that we can’t fucking get two senators together to do something about it, much less the entire world, which is what needs to happen obviously to solve this problem, we could use a bit of that global cooperation thing that Y2K exhibited.”