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Speaker 1: Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and

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Speaker 1: social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm

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Speaker 1: Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course, our year in review. It's

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Speaker 1: been one year since Crash Course launched in your favorite

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Speaker 1: podcast feed, and what a year it's been. From Trump

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Speaker 1: to putin, climate change, to artificial intelligence SVB to SBF

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Speaker 1: Florida to Gaza, the Supreme Court to Barbie and so

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Speaker 1: much more. We covered a lot of ground this year,

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Speaker 1: and we learned a lot. Because that's a key part

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Speaker 1: of Crash Course. We want to learn something new in

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Speaker 1: every episode and share that with you. So to mark

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Speaker 1: our one year anniversary, I wanted to listen back through

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Speaker 1: the tape and remember some of the key learnings from

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Speaker 1: the past year. We'll remember the people, conflicts, and cultural

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Speaker 1: moments that made this year one for the history books,

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Speaker 1: and we'll link to all of those episodes in the

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Speaker 1: show notes so you can listen to each episode in full.

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Speaker 1: Let's start with some of the big names we've heard

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Speaker 1: about this year, beginning with Elon Musk at Twitter. Our

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Speaker 1: very first episode ever was just a few months after

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Speaker 1: Musk took over at Twitter, so we called up Kurt Wagner.

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Speaker 1: He's a Bloomberg News reporter who spent years covering social media,

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Speaker 1: especially Twitter. Here's Kurt's lesson from last January.

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Speaker 2: I think that.

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Speaker 3: I've just grown a greater appreciation for what can happen

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Speaker 3: when someone is very rich and powerful in terms of

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Speaker 3: sort of like forcing things that you wouldn't think would

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Speaker 3: be possible, and not all good things right, like we've seen,

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Speaker 3: for example, he's just sort of ignoring regulatory requirements. He

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Speaker 3: signed an agreement to buy this company and then just

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Speaker 3: simply said I'm not going to buy it, Like that

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Speaker 3: is not something that could normally happen. But he is

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Speaker 3: elon Musk, he has infinite resources. He seems to have

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Speaker 3: no regard for kind of general rules that most of

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Speaker 3: the rest of us play by, And so I think

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Speaker 3: for me, it's just sort of like opened my eyes

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Speaker 3: to the fact that we think something is supposed to

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Speaker 3: work a certain way, and yet that's not set in

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Speaker 3: stone or very rigid necessarily, especially when you are a

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Speaker 3: very rich and powerful person, which he is. And so

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Speaker 3: maybe I was just too naive previously to assume, like, Okay,

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Speaker 3: a binding contract means everyone will actually do what they

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Speaker 3: say they're going to do, but he's just sort of

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Speaker 3: like proved that almost nothing that's even said or agreed

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Speaker 3: to is set in stone until he decides that it is.

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Speaker 1: Since then, I've learned that Elon Musk was even more

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Speaker 1: incapable of running Twitter than I originally thought, and he's

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Speaker 1: been more than willing to engage personally in some of

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Speaker 1: the platform's most abusive and divisive practices. Next up, Russia's

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Speaker 1: President Vladimir Putin. We marked the one year anniversary of

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Speaker 1: the Russia Ukraine War last year by speaking with one

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Speaker 1: of the foremost experts on Russia, Stephen Kotkin. He's a

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Speaker 1: senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Here's what Stephen

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Speaker 1: has learned from watching the war unfold.

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Speaker 4: Sadly, I've learned many things I already knew that the

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Speaker 4: world is full of evil, that war is still a problem. Happens,

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Speaker 4: it's not something that is, let's say, rare. I've also

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Speaker 4: learned that the West, rather than one world ism is

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Speaker 4: the basis of our security and prosperity. So the GAT

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Speaker 4: rather than the wto NATO, the EU, and the First

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Speaker 4: Island chain rather than Kumbayah. Those are all things that

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Speaker 4: I thought before that have been strengthened with this war.

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Speaker 4: The biggest thing I got wrong is I expected another

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Speaker 4: part of the world to blow up while this was happening.

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Speaker 4: I expected other countries to take advantage of the situation,

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Speaker 4: whether that would be something happening with Iran, something happening

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Speaker 4: with North Korea, with China. I expected maybe it wouldn't

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Speaker 4: even be in a place that I was paying attention to.

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Speaker 4: So one bad thing happens, and it's not an isolated event.

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Speaker 4: It's a potential trigger for other bad things to happen

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Speaker 4: in an unraveling. So far, that's not been the case.

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Speaker 4: I predicted that that would happen, and I've been wrong

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Speaker 4: about that, fortunately, So let's hope I continue to be

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Speaker 4: wrong about that going forward, because it's enough already trying

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Speaker 4: to resolve this criminal aggression against Ukraine.

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Speaker 1: Since that episode aired, I've learned that Vladimir Putin is

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Speaker 1: willing to allow massive losses among his own troops to

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Speaker 1: continue prosecuting a devastating war that has no end in sight.

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Speaker 1: If you didn't already know the acronym SBF, you probably

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Speaker 1: learned it in the last few month months. Sam Bankman

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Speaker 1: freed once captured the world's attention with his crypto company FTX,

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Speaker 1: but then he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. While

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Speaker 1: we were waiting for his trial to start, I spoke

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Speaker 1: with Hannah Miller, who covers crypto for Bloomberg News and

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Speaker 1: hosts the podcast Spellcaster, about the life and times of SBF.

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Speaker 1: Here's what Hannah learned in her reporting.

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Speaker 5: I think the top thing I've learned is that be

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Speaker 5: suspicious of anyone who claims to be a hero, especially

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Speaker 5: in this industry, and really question their motivations, look at

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Speaker 5: how it benefits them personally, and then I don't know.

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Speaker 5: I still think crypto has to figure out what exactly

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Speaker 5: it wants to use boxing technology for. You know, this

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Speaker 5: is an industry still finding its legs, and these bad

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Speaker 5: actors are just hobbling things.

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Speaker 1: Since the trial, I've learned that SBF wasn't just your

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Speaker 1: average grifter. He was convicted of fraud in a federal

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Speaker 1: courtroom for presiding over one of the business world's biggest

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Speaker 1: financial scandals. And of course there's Donald Trump. The former

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Speaker 1: president faces a total of ninety one charges across four

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Speaker 1: criminal cases and he's still the front runner in the

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Speaker 1: Republican primary. After his first indictment, I sat down with

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Speaker 1: my colleague Noah Feldman to dig into what it all meant.

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Speaker 1: Noah is a professor at Harvard Law School and a

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Speaker 1: columnist here at Bloomberg Opinion. Here's what Noah learned in

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Speaker 1: the aftermath of those first charges being filed.

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Speaker 6: The biggest aha for me is that a value that

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Speaker 6: we all usually like, namely prosecutors should do things slowly

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Speaker 6: and methodically, is actually a disaster when it comes to

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Speaker 6: someone like Donald Trump, a politician who has lost an

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Speaker 6: election and is planning to run again. I wish that

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Speaker 6: you and I were having this entire set of conversations

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Speaker 6: eighteen months ago, in the early days of the Biden administration,

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Speaker 6: when whatever Trump might say about running for office, it

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Speaker 6: was a long way off before midterms, a whole different world.

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Speaker 6: And that is a possible scenario to imagine. Notwithstanding what

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Speaker 6: you were saying about the charges that the other prosecutors

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Speaker 6: in the New York Days Office wanted to bring, and

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Speaker 6: I'm happy to talk about that sometime in the future.

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Speaker 6: Basically old history. At this point, those were charges that

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Speaker 6: were ready at least a year ago, for what it's worth,

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Speaker 6: and ditto for the Georgia case. The facts were gathered,

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Speaker 6: it took a little bit longer, perhaps in the case

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Speaker 6: of the federal prosecution. But the danger that our political

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Speaker 6: season keeps expanding in time, and that therefore it gets

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Speaker 6: harder and harder to bring charges against someone like Donald

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Speaker 6: Trump is a real one. And so my takeaway is

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Speaker 6: the thing that I really don't think I fully understood

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Speaker 6: before we entered this season. I think I did understand

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Speaker 6: that there was going to be a trade off between

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Speaker 6: protecting our political process and our democracy seeming to be

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Speaker 6: truly objective and being truly objective meaningfully and prosecuting Trump.

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Speaker 6: I understand there was a trade off. I didn't fully

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Speaker 6: understand the time to mention, and as I see it,

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Speaker 6: it fills me with regret that these processes didn't go

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Speaker 6: by a lot more efficiently than they seem to have done.

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Speaker 1: I've reported on Trump for a long time, and I

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Speaker 1: even faced off against him in a court battle of

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Speaker 1: my own when he sued me for defamation after I

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Speaker 1: published my book Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald.

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Speaker 1: The case was dismissed, but I learned a lot about Trump.

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Speaker 1: From that experience, watching all of his legal woes this year,

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Speaker 1: I learned that Trump is more than willing to sabotage

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Speaker 1: public trust in the nation's judicial and law enforcement systems

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Speaker 1: in order to save his own hide. And on that note,

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Speaker 1: we'll take a break. When we come back, we'll remember

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Speaker 1: some of the big events of the past year. We're

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Speaker 1: back looking at our first year of learnings here at Crash. Course,

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Speaker 1: of course, the show focuses on collisions, and there have

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Speaker 1: been a lot of disruptions in big news moments here.

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Speaker 1: Most recently, we've seen a war breakout between Israel and Hamas.

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Speaker 1: The current conflict is steeped in decades of tension, so

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Speaker 1: I knew I needed to have a nuanced conversation with

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Speaker 1: my colleagues and Bloomberg opinion about how we got here.

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Speaker 1: Mark Champion covers global politics for US, so he traveled

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Speaker 1: to Israel to report from the front lines of the

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Speaker 1: war zone. Here's what Mark learned on the ground.

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Speaker 7: I think I did not understand like the Israelis. I

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Speaker 7: think I mean, I was familiar with Hamas, but I

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Speaker 7: did not understand how carefully they had been preparing and

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Speaker 7: how frankly efficiently they had been preparing for this, and

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Speaker 7: they are a more dangerous fighting force than I perhaps

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Speaker 7: had expected. One of the things that really intrigues me

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Speaker 7: about this is whether what went on in Ukraine would

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Speaker 7: have been carefully watched by them. This sort of asymmetric warfare,

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Speaker 7: what Hamas did is at a different level to what

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Speaker 7: you know. Terrisa always gaged an asymmetric warfare, but this

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Speaker 7: was at a different level with you know, sort of

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Speaker 7: combined force operations, you know, AirLand and sea, drones, hang gliders,

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Speaker 7: et cetera. And just the fact that you know, a

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Speaker 7: much smaller force in Ukraine was able to force back

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Speaker 7: the second largest military in the world. Who nobody thought

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Speaker 7: that was possible. That's one of the questions in my

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Speaker 7: mind as to whether you know, we are in an

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Speaker 7: era when there is an optimism for smaller forces that

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Speaker 7: they can do this type of thing because they've seen

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Speaker 7: the Ukrainians do it.

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Speaker 1: Since the war broke out, I've learned that a brutal

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Speaker 1: conflict in Gaza is unlikely to be solved through diplomacy

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Speaker 1: or even the end of the current war. Earlier in

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Speaker 1: the year, the banking system was rocked by the failures

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Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, Credit Sweese, and more.

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Speaker 1: Those crises exposed fault lines running beneath our fragile financial

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Speaker 1: ecosystem and called into question the power of the Federal Reserve.

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Speaker 1: In the midst of that turmoil, I sat down with

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Speaker 1: Paul Davies, a financial columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Here's what

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Speaker 1: that episode taught Paul.

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Speaker 2: I think the key thing that it's taught me is

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Speaker 2: even when all of the fundamentals, all of the foundational

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Speaker 2: numbers of the state of an institution, say that it

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Speaker 2: sounds and say that it's trustworthy, you can still have

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Speaker 2: people turn around and say, ah, I don't like it,

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Speaker 2: I'm leaving.

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Speaker 1: Since that episode aired, I've learned that maybe things weren't

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Speaker 1: as threatening to the entire banking system as everyone seemed

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Speaker 1: to think when SVB began teetering. Most US banks now

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Speaker 1: seem to be doing just fine. Fox News has been

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Speaker 1: at the center of a lot of issues that are

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Speaker 1: fodder for crash course, trump mania, culture wars, and misinformation.

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Speaker 1: The latter came into focus in a lawsuit brought by

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Speaker 1: Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company that Fox erroneously

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Speaker 1: claimed had switched votes from Trump to Biden in twenty twenty.

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Speaker 1: To dig into the implications of that defamation case, I

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Speaker 1: called on David Fokenflick, who followed the whole ordeal as

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Speaker 1: NPR's media correspondent and the author of Murdoch's World, The

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Speaker 1: Last of the Old Media Empires. Here's what David learned

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Speaker 1: watching that case shake out.

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Speaker 8: You know, each generation, each epic, has its own moments

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Speaker 8: in which things like how defamation is defined are either affirmed, reshaped,

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Speaker 8: or utterly rewritten. You know, you have three Supreme Court

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Speaker 8: justices who, in different ways and from different perspectives, have

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Speaker 8: registered themselves over the years as being open to reviewing

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Speaker 8: this question and this definition. And there's so concerned, or

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Speaker 8: at least there was before all this evidence was developed

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Speaker 8: against Fox, but some concern that were Fox to be

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Speaker 8: found liable, it would be appealed to the Supreme Court,

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Speaker 8: and then the Supreme Court would use that as an

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Speaker 8: opportunity to change how restrictive and how difficult that bar

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Speaker 8: is for people to meet. I think that Fox is

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Speaker 8: raising a question which I think is interesting one, which

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Speaker 8: is for all the people who are happy to see

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Speaker 8: Fox get a come up and many of them in

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Speaker 8: the media, many of them liberals, and some of them

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Speaker 8: just deeply scornful and contemptuous of the things that have

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Speaker 8: been revealed about the fundamental nature of the way Fox operates.

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Speaker 8: You know, it's a careful what you wish for thing,

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Speaker 8: because this stuff could be turned against the New York

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Speaker 8: Times or NBC or the Associated Press too, depending on

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Speaker 8: the circumstances and the nature of the judges who are

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Speaker 8: hearing such cases.

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Speaker 1: Fox was forced to pay seven hundred and eighty seven

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Speaker 1: million dollars to settle that lawsuit with dominion, and then

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Speaker 1: changes followed. Rupert Murdoch slept down as the head of

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Speaker 1: the company he founded. We did a whole separate episod

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Speaker 1: about the end of his reign. But watching Fox unravel

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Speaker 1: even more in the past year, I've learned that we

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Speaker 1: shouldn't expect Fox to change. It only changes its leadership,

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Speaker 1: It never really changes its spots, and the Carneact just

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Speaker 1: goes on. In our time of climate change, in extreme weather,

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Speaker 1: it was perhaps not entirely surprising that twenty twenty three

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Speaker 1: was another year for the record books. So I turned

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Speaker 1: to my colleague Mark Gongloff, a columnist with Bloomberg Opinion,

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Speaker 1: who specializes in covering the environment and climate change. I

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Speaker 1: call him the climates are inside Bloomberg Opinion, and he

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Speaker 1: told me there's still time to learn from our climate

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Speaker 1: related mistakes and invest in the future of our planet.

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Speaker 9: I am learning that the changes are much more complicated

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Speaker 9: than I even realized at first. The biggest thing, though,

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Speaker 9: I think, is just the energy transitions can be so expensive.

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Speaker 9: I mean, Bloomberg and EF I always hate to say

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Speaker 9: this number because it's so terrified, but Bloomberg and ef

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Speaker 9: estimated the world is going to have to spend two

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Speaker 9: hundred trillion dollars to get our emissions down to avoid

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Speaker 9: the worst climate disasters. And that sounds like a lot,

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Speaker 9: but that is over the next between now and say

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Speaker 9: twenty fifty, And then if you start to add up

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Speaker 9: the costs that happen. Claudia sam Great Economists, just wrote

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Speaker 9: a column for us that said it's going to cost

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Speaker 9: maybe three hundred billion dollars a year in lost worker

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Speaker 9: productivity due to heat alone by twenty fifty. And so

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Speaker 9: you take those little effects and the effects of hurricanes

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Speaker 9: and droughts and wildfires and just general health. We haven't

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Speaker 9: even gotten into the health effects of climate change, how

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Speaker 9: diseases are moving there, are expanding their horizons and moving

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Speaker 9: into new areas. All that stuff adds up, and so

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Speaker 9: the biggest thing I've learned is to think about these things,

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Speaker 9: the transition, the spending on green energy and the like,

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Speaker 9: as investments rather than costs, because the real costs are

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Speaker 9: what happened if we don't do anything. What we're spending

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Speaker 9: to avoid that stuff is an investment and a better future.

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Speaker 1: Since that conversation, and I've learned the climate catastrophes seem

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Speaker 1: to be the only things that focus the public's attention

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Speaker 1: on a world growing dangerously warmer, and even then, people

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Speaker 1: still aren't taking the threat seriously enough. We're going to

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Speaker 1: take a quick break then come back to look at

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Speaker 1: cultural collisions. We're back, and we're going to end our

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Speaker 1: tour through the past year by remembering some of the

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Speaker 1: big cultural moments of the year. After the COVID nineteen

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Speaker 1: pandemic popularized working from home, twenty twenty three marked a

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Speaker 1: big push in rto return to office. Some companies handle

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Speaker 1: the transition better than others, and I wanted to talk

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Speaker 1: to my colleague at Bloomberg opinion Sarah Green Carmichael about

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Speaker 1: changes in office culture since the pandemic. Here's what Sarah's learned.

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Speaker 10: I think what I am learning is that the motivational

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Speaker 10: model of the last fifteen years was really about a

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Speaker 10: specific time and place in economy and when companies were

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Speaker 10: competing on talent and not on capital because interest rates

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Speaker 10: were really low for a really long time. When companies

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Speaker 10: were competing on talent, they really believed in this sort

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Speaker 10: of company culture hire great people and set them free

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Speaker 10: and have them deeply committed to the work sort of idea.

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Speaker 10: And I think what we're seeing now is what happens

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Speaker 10: when the economy slows down. When you have convinced employees

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Speaker 10: to buy into an ownership culture and that they need

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Speaker 10: to act like owners and entrepreneurs. They are going to

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Speaker 10: have some ideas on how the business should be run.

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Speaker 10: They're going to have ideas and what political causes you support.

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Speaker 10: They are going to have ideas and what the remote

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Speaker 10: work policy should be. And so I think that this

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Speaker 10: shift I'm seeing from sort of fed up executives who

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Speaker 10: are sort of like, oh my god, stop complaining, get

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Speaker 10: back to work. Don't be such a snowflake. It's a

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Speaker 10: little bit like, but you spent fifteen years like telling

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Speaker 10: us we should act like owners, like that's what we're doing.

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Speaker 10: I think that's where a lot of this tension is

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Speaker 10: coming from. And I do not know if motivational model

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Speaker 10: that I have seen for the last fifteen years will persevere.

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Speaker 10: And in some ways it would be healthy if it didn't.

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Speaker 10: Maybe a lot of us could use some more distance

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Speaker 10: from our jobs and not identify so much with them

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Speaker 10: and have so much of ourselves invested in them. But

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Speaker 10: if employees pull back from that, that's when you start

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Speaker 10: to have executives worried about quiet quitting.

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Speaker 11: Right.

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Speaker 10: So I think that there's this sort of dance playing out.

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Speaker 10: We kind of all want to have it all. Employees

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Speaker 10: want to have high salaries and ownership and work life balance,

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Speaker 10: and then I think in some ways managers want to

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Speaker 10: have a docile, obedient workforce that they can underpay, but

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Speaker 10: who also will work around the clock, and like, we

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Speaker 10: can't have all these things.

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Speaker 1: My own experience of Artio has taught me that the

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Speaker 1: work world has changed, perhaps permanently, and managers are going

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Speaker 1: to have to.

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Speaker 9: Change with it.

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Speaker 1: Returning to the office also looks a little different for

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Speaker 1: some workers as the use of artificial intelligence or AI

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Speaker 1: has really ballooned. My colleague parme Olsen is Bloomberg epin

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Speaker 1: is technology columnists and an AI guru. So I asked

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Speaker 1: Parmi what she's learned from the past year of AI

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Speaker 1: innovation and disruption.

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Speaker 12: Well, I think the thing that really surprised me about chat,

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Speaker 12: hept and some of the latest generative AI tools to

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Speaker 12: come out in the past year is how creative AI

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Speaker 12: seems to be. Because for years and years when people

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Speaker 12: talked about AI taking people's jobs, it was about taking

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Speaker 12: factory worker jobs and truck driver jobs. But now it

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Speaker 12: seems like the real jobs that are at threat are

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Speaker 12: the creative classes and professional mark jobs. I didn't want

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Speaker 12: to say it, but you did. But the other thing

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Speaker 12: I want to say that as a big shortcoming of

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Speaker 12: these systems is that they're often inaccurate. I shouldn't say often,

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Speaker 12: but often enough that it's a problem. Open AI will

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Speaker 12: not say how often these systems get things wrong. I've

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Speaker 12: asked it, but my own experience, it's just I think

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Speaker 12: it's somewhere between five and fifteen percent of the answers

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Speaker 12: that it's given me are factually incorrect. Now, think about

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Speaker 12: using that as a search tool. We use search to

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Speaker 12: get information, to get facts, and if it's wrong ten

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Speaker 12: percent of the time, are people really going to want

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Speaker 12: to use it? I think that's going to be a

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Speaker 12: real problem for these companies using these systems, for as

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Speaker 12: search engine companions.

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Speaker 8: It's not a.

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Speaker 12: Trivial issue because recently Microsoft and Google had these big

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Speaker 12: announcements about their new chat companions, these chatbots that we're

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Speaker 12: going to help Bang and we're going to help Google.

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Speaker 12: And in both demonstrations there were errors. So if they

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Speaker 12: can't even fact check that and get that right, what

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Speaker 12: are these systems going to be like when they're actually

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Speaker 12: out in the wild.

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Speaker 1: My lessons about AI keep mounting since that episode aired.

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Speaker 1: AI is everywhere and it's changing everything and we all

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Speaker 1: will have to learn to adapt. And I can't look

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Speaker 1: back at twenty twenty three without talking about Barbie. The

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Speaker 1: summer blockbuster film took the world by storm and generated

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Speaker 1: more hot takes than people expected. So I sat down

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Speaker 1: with Emma Gray, a pop culture commentator and the author

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Speaker 1: of A Girl's Guide to Joining the Resistance. Here's what

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Speaker 1: Emma learned from witnessing Barbie mania.

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Speaker 11: I think this really drove home for me that you

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Speaker 11: really can take a cultural product that is complicated, that

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Speaker 11: is controversial, that is not politically perfect, and you can

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Speaker 11: use it to say something real and complicated and trigger

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Speaker 11: real and complex discourse. And I think that this has

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Speaker 11: really redefined for me what I look at as selling

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Speaker 11: out and yeah, the ways that you can take a

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Speaker 11: cultural product that might seem silly and surface level and

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Speaker 11: turn it into a story that has real heart and

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Speaker 11: can actually teach us something about ourselves.

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Speaker 1: Here's a little song for you. I'm just Tim, but

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Speaker 1: I learned a lot from Barbie and the cultural phenomenon

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Speaker 1: it sparked. Mostly, I learned that we all need to

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Speaker 1: keep our minds, eyes, and hearts open to what all

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Speaker 1: the people around us want neat, even if they're bad singers.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this special recap episode of Crash Course.

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Speaker 1: Check out the show notes to links to all of

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Speaker 1: the episodes mentioned in today's show. Here at Crash Course,

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Speaker 1: we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,

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Speaker 1: and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I was reminded

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Speaker 1: that you can learn about a whole bunch of different

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Speaker 1: important topics over the course of one year's worth of

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Speaker 1: podcast episodes, and I'm excited to keep learning more with

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Speaker 1: you in the coming year. What did you learn? We'd

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Speaker 1: love to hear from you. You can tweet at the

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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien

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Speaker 1: using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe

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Speaker 1: to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave

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Speaker 1: us a review that helps more people find the show.

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Speaker 1: This episode was produced as they all were all year long,

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Speaker 1: by the indispensable Anna Mazarakus and me, our supervising producers

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Speaker 1: Magus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sage Bauman,

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Speaker 1: Jeff Grocott, Mike Niitza and Christine Vanden Bilart. Blake Maples

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Speaker 1: does our sound engineering as he did all year long,

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Speaker 1: and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara.

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Speaker 1: I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with a

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Speaker 1: new episode of Crash Course.