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