Speaker 1: Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
Speaker 1: social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Speaker 1: Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course, our year in review. It's
Speaker 1: been one year since Crash Course launched in your favorite
Speaker 1: podcast feed, and what a year it's been. From Trump
Speaker 1: to putin, climate change, to artificial intelligence SVB to SBF
Speaker 1: Florida to Gaza, the Supreme Court to Barbie and so
Speaker 1: much more. We covered a lot of ground this year,
Speaker 1: and we learned a lot. Because that's a key part
Speaker 1: of Crash Course. We want to learn something new in
Speaker 1: every episode and share that with you. So to mark
Speaker 1: our one year anniversary, I wanted to listen back through
Speaker 1: the tape and remember some of the key learnings from
Speaker 1: the past year. We'll remember the people, conflicts, and cultural
Speaker 1: moments that made this year one for the history books,
Speaker 1: and we'll link to all of those episodes in the
Speaker 1: show notes so you can listen to each episode in full.
Speaker 1: Let's start with some of the big names we've heard
Speaker 1: about this year, beginning with Elon Musk at Twitter. Our
Speaker 1: very first episode ever was just a few months after
Speaker 1: Musk took over at Twitter, so we called up Kurt Wagner.
Speaker 1: He's a Bloomberg News reporter who spent years covering social media,
Speaker 1: especially Twitter. Here's Kurt's lesson from last January.
Speaker 2: I think that.
Speaker 3: I've just grown a greater appreciation for what can happen
Speaker 3: when someone is very rich and powerful in terms of
Speaker 3: sort of like forcing things that you wouldn't think would
Speaker 3: be possible, and not all good things right, like we've seen,
Speaker 3: for example, he's just sort of ignoring regulatory requirements. He
Speaker 3: signed an agreement to buy this company and then just
Speaker 3: simply said I'm not going to buy it, Like that
Speaker 3: is not something that could normally happen. But he is
Speaker 3: elon Musk, he has infinite resources. He seems to have
Speaker 3: no regard for kind of general rules that most of
Speaker 3: the rest of us play by, And so I think
Speaker 3: for me, it's just sort of like opened my eyes
Speaker 3: to the fact that we think something is supposed to
Speaker 3: work a certain way, and yet that's not set in
Speaker 3: stone or very rigid necessarily, especially when you are a
Speaker 3: very rich and powerful person, which he is. And so
Speaker 3: maybe I was just too naive previously to assume, like, Okay,
Speaker 3: a binding contract means everyone will actually do what they
Speaker 3: say they're going to do, but he's just sort of
Speaker 3: like proved that almost nothing that's even said or agreed
Speaker 3: to is set in stone until he decides that it is.
Speaker 1: Since then, I've learned that Elon Musk was even more
Speaker 1: incapable of running Twitter than I originally thought, and he's
Speaker 1: been more than willing to engage personally in some of
Speaker 1: the platform's most abusive and divisive practices. Next up, Russia's
Speaker 1: President Vladimir Putin. We marked the one year anniversary of
Speaker 1: the Russia Ukraine War last year by speaking with one
Speaker 1: of the foremost experts on Russia, Stephen Kotkin. He's a
Speaker 1: senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Here's what Stephen
Speaker 1: has learned from watching the war unfold.
Speaker 4: Sadly, I've learned many things I already knew that the
Speaker 4: world is full of evil, that war is still a problem. Happens,
Speaker 4: it's not something that is, let's say, rare. I've also
Speaker 4: learned that the West, rather than one world ism is
Speaker 4: the basis of our security and prosperity. So the GAT
Speaker 4: rather than the wto NATO, the EU, and the First
Speaker 4: Island chain rather than Kumbayah. Those are all things that
Speaker 4: I thought before that have been strengthened with this war.
Speaker 4: The biggest thing I got wrong is I expected another
Speaker 4: part of the world to blow up while this was happening.
Speaker 4: I expected other countries to take advantage of the situation,
Speaker 4: whether that would be something happening with Iran, something happening
Speaker 4: with North Korea, with China. I expected maybe it wouldn't
Speaker 4: even be in a place that I was paying attention to.
Speaker 4: So one bad thing happens, and it's not an isolated event.
Speaker 4: It's a potential trigger for other bad things to happen
Speaker 4: in an unraveling. So far, that's not been the case.
Speaker 4: I predicted that that would happen, and I've been wrong
Speaker 4: about that, fortunately, So let's hope I continue to be
Speaker 4: wrong about that going forward, because it's enough already trying
Speaker 4: to resolve this criminal aggression against Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Since that episode aired, I've learned that Vladimir Putin is
Speaker 1: willing to allow massive losses among his own troops to
Speaker 1: continue prosecuting a devastating war that has no end in sight.
Speaker 1: If you didn't already know the acronym SBF, you probably
Speaker 1: learned it in the last few month months. Sam Bankman
Speaker 1: freed once captured the world's attention with his crypto company FTX,
Speaker 1: but then he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. While
Speaker 1: we were waiting for his trial to start, I spoke
Speaker 1: with Hannah Miller, who covers crypto for Bloomberg News and
Speaker 1: hosts the podcast Spellcaster, about the life and times of SBF.
Speaker 1: Here's what Hannah learned in her reporting.
Speaker 5: I think the top thing I've learned is that be
Speaker 5: suspicious of anyone who claims to be a hero, especially
Speaker 5: in this industry, and really question their motivations, look at
Speaker 5: how it benefits them personally, and then I don't know.
Speaker 5: I still think crypto has to figure out what exactly
Speaker 5: it wants to use boxing technology for. You know, this
Speaker 5: is an industry still finding its legs, and these bad
Speaker 5: actors are just hobbling things.
Speaker 1: Since the trial, I've learned that SBF wasn't just your
Speaker 1: average grifter. He was convicted of fraud in a federal
Speaker 1: courtroom for presiding over one of the business world's biggest
Speaker 1: financial scandals. And of course there's Donald Trump. The former
Speaker 1: president faces a total of ninety one charges across four
Speaker 1: criminal cases and he's still the front runner in the
Speaker 1: Republican primary. After his first indictment, I sat down with
Speaker 1: my colleague Noah Feldman to dig into what it all meant.
Speaker 1: Noah is a professor at Harvard Law School and a
Speaker 1: columnist here at Bloomberg Opinion. Here's what Noah learned in
Speaker 1: the aftermath of those first charges being filed.
Speaker 6: The biggest aha for me is that a value that
Speaker 6: we all usually like, namely prosecutors should do things slowly
Speaker 6: and methodically, is actually a disaster when it comes to
Speaker 6: someone like Donald Trump, a politician who has lost an
Speaker 6: election and is planning to run again. I wish that
Speaker 6: you and I were having this entire set of conversations
Speaker 6: eighteen months ago, in the early days of the Biden administration,
Speaker 6: when whatever Trump might say about running for office, it
Speaker 6: was a long way off before midterms, a whole different world.
Speaker 6: And that is a possible scenario to imagine. Notwithstanding what
Speaker 6: you were saying about the charges that the other prosecutors
Speaker 6: in the New York Days Office wanted to bring, and
Speaker 6: I'm happy to talk about that sometime in the future.
Speaker 6: Basically old history. At this point, those were charges that
Speaker 6: were ready at least a year ago, for what it's worth,
Speaker 6: and ditto for the Georgia case. The facts were gathered,
Speaker 6: it took a little bit longer, perhaps in the case
Speaker 6: of the federal prosecution. But the danger that our political
Speaker 6: season keeps expanding in time, and that therefore it gets
Speaker 6: harder and harder to bring charges against someone like Donald
Speaker 6: Trump is a real one. And so my takeaway is
Speaker 6: the thing that I really don't think I fully understood
Speaker 6: before we entered this season. I think I did understand
Speaker 6: that there was going to be a trade off between
Speaker 6: protecting our political process and our democracy seeming to be
Speaker 6: truly objective and being truly objective meaningfully and prosecuting Trump.
Speaker 6: I understand there was a trade off. I didn't fully
Speaker 6: understand the time to mention, and as I see it,
Speaker 6: it fills me with regret that these processes didn't go
Speaker 6: by a lot more efficiently than they seem to have done.
Speaker 1: I've reported on Trump for a long time, and I
Speaker 1: even faced off against him in a court battle of
Speaker 1: my own when he sued me for defamation after I
Speaker 1: published my book Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald.
Speaker 1: The case was dismissed, but I learned a lot about Trump.
Speaker 1: From that experience, watching all of his legal woes this year,
Speaker 1: I learned that Trump is more than willing to sabotage
Speaker 1: public trust in the nation's judicial and law enforcement systems
Speaker 1: in order to save his own hide. And on that note,
Speaker 1: we'll take a break. When we come back, we'll remember
Speaker 1: some of the big events of the past year. We're
Speaker 1: back looking at our first year of learnings here at Crash. Course,
Speaker 1: of course, the show focuses on collisions, and there have
Speaker 1: been a lot of disruptions in big news moments here.
Speaker 1: Most recently, we've seen a war breakout between Israel and Hamas.
Speaker 1: The current conflict is steeped in decades of tension, so
Speaker 1: I knew I needed to have a nuanced conversation with
Speaker 1: my colleagues and Bloomberg opinion about how we got here.
Speaker 1: Mark Champion covers global politics for US, so he traveled
Speaker 1: to Israel to report from the front lines of the
Speaker 1: war zone. Here's what Mark learned on the ground.
Speaker 7: I think I did not understand like the Israelis. I
Speaker 7: think I mean, I was familiar with Hamas, but I
Speaker 7: did not understand how carefully they had been preparing and
Speaker 7: how frankly efficiently they had been preparing for this, and
Speaker 7: they are a more dangerous fighting force than I perhaps
Speaker 7: had expected. One of the things that really intrigues me
Speaker 7: about this is whether what went on in Ukraine would
Speaker 7: have been carefully watched by them. This sort of asymmetric warfare,
Speaker 7: what Hamas did is at a different level to what
Speaker 7: you know. Terrisa always gaged an asymmetric warfare, but this
Speaker 7: was at a different level with you know, sort of
Speaker 7: combined force operations, you know, AirLand and sea, drones, hang gliders,
Speaker 7: et cetera. And just the fact that you know, a
Speaker 7: much smaller force in Ukraine was able to force back
Speaker 7: the second largest military in the world. Who nobody thought
Speaker 7: that was possible. That's one of the questions in my
Speaker 7: mind as to whether you know, we are in an
Speaker 7: era when there is an optimism for smaller forces that
Speaker 7: they can do this type of thing because they've seen
Speaker 7: the Ukrainians do it.
Speaker 1: Since the war broke out, I've learned that a brutal
Speaker 1: conflict in Gaza is unlikely to be solved through diplomacy
Speaker 1: or even the end of the current war. Earlier in
Speaker 1: the year, the banking system was rocked by the failures
Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, Credit Sweese, and more.
Speaker 1: Those crises exposed fault lines running beneath our fragile financial
Speaker 1: ecosystem and called into question the power of the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 1: In the midst of that turmoil, I sat down with
Speaker 1: Paul Davies, a financial columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Here's what
Speaker 1: that episode taught Paul.
Speaker 2: I think the key thing that it's taught me is
Speaker 2: even when all of the fundamentals, all of the foundational
Speaker 2: numbers of the state of an institution, say that it
Speaker 2: sounds and say that it's trustworthy, you can still have
Speaker 2: people turn around and say, ah, I don't like it,
Speaker 2: I'm leaving.
Speaker 1: Since that episode aired, I've learned that maybe things weren't
Speaker 1: as threatening to the entire banking system as everyone seemed
Speaker 1: to think when SVB began teetering. Most US banks now
Speaker 1: seem to be doing just fine. Fox News has been
Speaker 1: at the center of a lot of issues that are
Speaker 1: fodder for crash course, trump mania, culture wars, and misinformation.
Speaker 1: The latter came into focus in a lawsuit brought by
Speaker 1: Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company that Fox erroneously
Speaker 1: claimed had switched votes from Trump to Biden in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: To dig into the implications of that defamation case, I
Speaker 1: called on David Fokenflick, who followed the whole ordeal as
Speaker 1: NPR's media correspondent and the author of Murdoch's World, The
Speaker 1: Last of the Old Media Empires. Here's what David learned
Speaker 1: watching that case shake out.
Speaker 8: You know, each generation, each epic, has its own moments
Speaker 8: in which things like how defamation is defined are either affirmed, reshaped,
Speaker 8: or utterly rewritten. You know, you have three Supreme Court
Speaker 8: justices who, in different ways and from different perspectives, have
Speaker 8: registered themselves over the years as being open to reviewing
Speaker 8: this question and this definition. And there's so concerned, or
Speaker 8: at least there was before all this evidence was developed
Speaker 8: against Fox, but some concern that were Fox to be
Speaker 8: found liable, it would be appealed to the Supreme Court,
Speaker 8: and then the Supreme Court would use that as an
Speaker 8: opportunity to change how restrictive and how difficult that bar
Speaker 8: is for people to meet. I think that Fox is
Speaker 8: raising a question which I think is interesting one, which
Speaker 8: is for all the people who are happy to see
Speaker 8: Fox get a come up and many of them in
Speaker 8: the media, many of them liberals, and some of them
Speaker 8: just deeply scornful and contemptuous of the things that have
Speaker 8: been revealed about the fundamental nature of the way Fox operates.
Speaker 8: You know, it's a careful what you wish for thing,
Speaker 8: because this stuff could be turned against the New York
Speaker 8: Times or NBC or the Associated Press too, depending on
Speaker 8: the circumstances and the nature of the judges who are
Speaker 8: hearing such cases.
Speaker 1: Fox was forced to pay seven hundred and eighty seven
Speaker 1: million dollars to settle that lawsuit with dominion, and then
Speaker 1: changes followed. Rupert Murdoch slept down as the head of
Speaker 1: the company he founded. We did a whole separate episod
Speaker 1: about the end of his reign. But watching Fox unravel
Speaker 1: even more in the past year, I've learned that we
Speaker 1: shouldn't expect Fox to change. It only changes its leadership,
Speaker 1: It never really changes its spots, and the Carneact just
Speaker 1: goes on. In our time of climate change, in extreme weather,
Speaker 1: it was perhaps not entirely surprising that twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: was another year for the record books. So I turned
Speaker 1: to my colleague Mark Gongloff, a columnist with Bloomberg Opinion,
Speaker 1: who specializes in covering the environment and climate change. I
Speaker 1: call him the climates are inside Bloomberg Opinion, and he
Speaker 1: told me there's still time to learn from our climate
Speaker 1: related mistakes and invest in the future of our planet.
Speaker 9: I am learning that the changes are much more complicated
Speaker 9: than I even realized at first. The biggest thing, though,
Speaker 9: I think, is just the energy transitions can be so expensive.
Speaker 9: I mean, Bloomberg and EF I always hate to say
Speaker 9: this number because it's so terrified, but Bloomberg and ef
Speaker 9: estimated the world is going to have to spend two
Speaker 9: hundred trillion dollars to get our emissions down to avoid
Speaker 9: the worst climate disasters. And that sounds like a lot,
Speaker 9: but that is over the next between now and say
Speaker 9: twenty fifty, And then if you start to add up
Speaker 9: the costs that happen. Claudia sam Great Economists, just wrote
Speaker 9: a column for us that said it's going to cost
Speaker 9: maybe three hundred billion dollars a year in lost worker
Speaker 9: productivity due to heat alone by twenty fifty. And so
Speaker 9: you take those little effects and the effects of hurricanes
Speaker 9: and droughts and wildfires and just general health. We haven't
Speaker 9: even gotten into the health effects of climate change, how
Speaker 9: diseases are moving there, are expanding their horizons and moving
Speaker 9: into new areas. All that stuff adds up, and so
Speaker 9: the biggest thing I've learned is to think about these things,
Speaker 9: the transition, the spending on green energy and the like,
Speaker 9: as investments rather than costs, because the real costs are
Speaker 9: what happened if we don't do anything. What we're spending
Speaker 9: to avoid that stuff is an investment and a better future.
Speaker 1: Since that conversation, and I've learned the climate catastrophes seem
Speaker 1: to be the only things that focus the public's attention
Speaker 1: on a world growing dangerously warmer, and even then, people
Speaker 1: still aren't taking the threat seriously enough. We're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break then come back to look at
Speaker 1: cultural collisions. We're back, and we're going to end our
Speaker 1: tour through the past year by remembering some of the
Speaker 1: big cultural moments of the year. After the COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: pandemic popularized working from home, twenty twenty three marked a
Speaker 1: big push in rto return to office. Some companies handle
Speaker 1: the transition better than others, and I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to my colleague at Bloomberg opinion Sarah Green Carmichael about
Speaker 1: changes in office culture since the pandemic. Here's what Sarah's learned.
Speaker 10: I think what I am learning is that the motivational
Speaker 10: model of the last fifteen years was really about a
Speaker 10: specific time and place in economy and when companies were
Speaker 10: competing on talent and not on capital because interest rates
Speaker 10: were really low for a really long time. When companies
Speaker 10: were competing on talent, they really believed in this sort
Speaker 10: of company culture hire great people and set them free
Speaker 10: and have them deeply committed to the work sort of idea.
Speaker 10: And I think what we're seeing now is what happens
Speaker 10: when the economy slows down. When you have convinced employees
Speaker 10: to buy into an ownership culture and that they need
Speaker 10: to act like owners and entrepreneurs. They are going to
Speaker 10: have some ideas on how the business should be run.
Speaker 10: They're going to have ideas and what political causes you support.
Speaker 10: They are going to have ideas and what the remote
Speaker 10: work policy should be. And so I think that this
Speaker 10: shift I'm seeing from sort of fed up executives who
Speaker 10: are sort of like, oh my god, stop complaining, get
Speaker 10: back to work. Don't be such a snowflake. It's a
Speaker 10: little bit like, but you spent fifteen years like telling
Speaker 10: us we should act like owners, like that's what we're doing.
Speaker 10: I think that's where a lot of this tension is
Speaker 10: coming from. And I do not know if motivational model
Speaker 10: that I have seen for the last fifteen years will persevere.
Speaker 10: And in some ways it would be healthy if it didn't.
Speaker 10: Maybe a lot of us could use some more distance
Speaker 10: from our jobs and not identify so much with them
Speaker 10: and have so much of ourselves invested in them. But
Speaker 10: if employees pull back from that, that's when you start
Speaker 10: to have executives worried about quiet quitting.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 10: So I think that there's this sort of dance playing out.
Speaker 10: We kind of all want to have it all. Employees
Speaker 10: want to have high salaries and ownership and work life balance,
Speaker 10: and then I think in some ways managers want to
Speaker 10: have a docile, obedient workforce that they can underpay, but
Speaker 10: who also will work around the clock, and like, we
Speaker 10: can't have all these things.
Speaker 1: My own experience of Artio has taught me that the
Speaker 1: work world has changed, perhaps permanently, and managers are going
Speaker 1: to have to.
Speaker 9: Change with it.
Speaker 1: Returning to the office also looks a little different for
Speaker 1: some workers as the use of artificial intelligence or AI
Speaker 1: has really ballooned. My colleague parme Olsen is Bloomberg epin
Speaker 1: is technology columnists and an AI guru. So I asked
Speaker 1: Parmi what she's learned from the past year of AI
Speaker 1: innovation and disruption.
Speaker 12: Well, I think the thing that really surprised me about chat,
Speaker 12: hept and some of the latest generative AI tools to
Speaker 12: come out in the past year is how creative AI
Speaker 12: seems to be. Because for years and years when people
Speaker 12: talked about AI taking people's jobs, it was about taking
Speaker 12: factory worker jobs and truck driver jobs. But now it
Speaker 12: seems like the real jobs that are at threat are
Speaker 12: the creative classes and professional mark jobs. I didn't want
Speaker 12: to say it, but you did. But the other thing
Speaker 12: I want to say that as a big shortcoming of
Speaker 12: these systems is that they're often inaccurate. I shouldn't say often,
Speaker 12: but often enough that it's a problem. Open AI will
Speaker 12: not say how often these systems get things wrong. I've
Speaker 12: asked it, but my own experience, it's just I think
Speaker 12: it's somewhere between five and fifteen percent of the answers
Speaker 12: that it's given me are factually incorrect. Now, think about
Speaker 12: using that as a search tool. We use search to
Speaker 12: get information, to get facts, and if it's wrong ten
Speaker 12: percent of the time, are people really going to want
Speaker 12: to use it? I think that's going to be a
Speaker 12: real problem for these companies using these systems, for as
Speaker 12: search engine companions.
Speaker 8: It's not a.
Speaker 12: Trivial issue because recently Microsoft and Google had these big
Speaker 12: announcements about their new chat companions, these chatbots that we're
Speaker 12: going to help Bang and we're going to help Google.
Speaker 12: And in both demonstrations there were errors. So if they
Speaker 12: can't even fact check that and get that right, what
Speaker 12: are these systems going to be like when they're actually
Speaker 12: out in the wild.
Speaker 1: My lessons about AI keep mounting since that episode aired.
Speaker 1: AI is everywhere and it's changing everything and we all
Speaker 1: will have to learn to adapt. And I can't look
Speaker 1: back at twenty twenty three without talking about Barbie. The
Speaker 1: summer blockbuster film took the world by storm and generated
Speaker 1: more hot takes than people expected. So I sat down
Speaker 1: with Emma Gray, a pop culture commentator and the author
Speaker 1: of A Girl's Guide to Joining the Resistance. Here's what
Speaker 1: Emma learned from witnessing Barbie mania.
Speaker 11: I think this really drove home for me that you
Speaker 11: really can take a cultural product that is complicated, that
Speaker 11: is controversial, that is not politically perfect, and you can
Speaker 11: use it to say something real and complicated and trigger
Speaker 11: real and complex discourse. And I think that this has
Speaker 11: really redefined for me what I look at as selling
Speaker 11: out and yeah, the ways that you can take a
Speaker 11: cultural product that might seem silly and surface level and
Speaker 11: turn it into a story that has real heart and
Speaker 11: can actually teach us something about ourselves.
Speaker 1: Here's a little song for you. I'm just Tim, but
Speaker 1: I learned a lot from Barbie and the cultural phenomenon
Speaker 1: it sparked. Mostly, I learned that we all need to
Speaker 1: keep our minds, eyes, and hearts open to what all
Speaker 1: the people around us want neat, even if they're bad singers.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this special recap episode of Crash Course.
Speaker 1: Check out the show notes to links to all of
Speaker 1: the episodes mentioned in today's show. Here at Crash Course,
Speaker 1: we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
Speaker 1: and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I was reminded
Speaker 1: that you can learn about a whole bunch of different
Speaker 1: important topics over the course of one year's worth of
Speaker 1: podcast episodes, and I'm excited to keep learning more with
Speaker 1: you in the coming year. What did you learn? We'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. You can tweet at the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien
Speaker 1: using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe
Speaker 1: to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave
Speaker 1: us a review that helps more people find the show.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced as they all were all year long,
Speaker 1: by the indispensable Anna Mazarakus and me, our supervising producers
Speaker 1: Magus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sage Bauman,
Speaker 1: Jeff Grocott, Mike Niitza and Christine Vanden Bilart. Blake Maples
Speaker 1: does our sound engineering as he did all year long,
Speaker 1: and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with a
Speaker 1: new episode of Crash Course.