January 9, 2024 • 23 mins
It’s been one year since Crash Course launched, 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. That’s a key part of Crash Course: we want to learn something new in every episode. So to mark the one year anniversary of Crash Course, Tim 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.
The full episodes mentioned in this episode include:
- Elon Musk vs. the Twitterverse
- Putin’s Russia vs. Ukraine
- Sam Bankman-Fried vs. the Crypto Grift
- Trump vs. The Law
- Israel vs. Hamas
- Silicon Valley Bank vs. the Fed
- Fox News vs. The Big Lie
- Mother Nature vs. Life As We Know It
- Pity City vs. The Workplace
- Artificial Intelligence vs. Humanity
- Barbie vs. The Men, and The Real World
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:27):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I think that.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
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
(01:44):
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
(02:06):
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
(02:30):
to is set in stone until he decides that it is.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
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
(02:55):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
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
(03:29):
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
(03:50):
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.
(04:12):
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
(04:35):
to resolve this criminal aggression against Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
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
(05:01):
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.
(05:22):
Here's what Hannah learned in her reporting.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
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
(05:45):
is an industry still finding its legs, and these bad
actors are just hobbling things.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
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
(06:15):
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.
Speaker 6 (06:35):
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
(06:57):
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.
(07:18):
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
(07:39):
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.
(08:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
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
(08:31):
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,
(08:54):
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.
(09:14):
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.
Speaker 7 (09:24):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
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.
(11:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
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
(12:01):
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
(12:21):
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.
Speaker 8 (12:35):
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
(12:56):
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
(13:17):
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
(13:38):
Times or NBC or the Associated Press too, depending on
the circumstances and the nature of the judges who are
hearing such cases.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
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,
(14:10):
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,
(14:31):
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.
Speaker 9 (14:44):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:52):
what happened if we don't do anything. What we're spending
to avoid that stuff is an investment and a better future.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
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
(16:25):
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
(16:46):
changes in office culture since the pandemic. Here's what Sarah's learned.
Speaker 10 (16:52):
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
(17:15):
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.
(17:37):
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
(17:57):
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.
Speaker 11 (18:18):
Right.
Speaker 10 (18:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
My own experience of Artio has taught me that the
work world has changed, perhaps permanently, and managers are going
to have to.
Speaker 9 (18:43):
Change with it.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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.
Speaker 12 (19:09):
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
(19:31):
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,
(19:52):
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
(20:15):
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.
Speaker 8 (20:30):
It's not a.
Speaker 12 (20:30):
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
(20:52):
out in the wild.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
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
(21:17):
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.
Speaker 11 (21:30):
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
(21:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
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.
(22:34):
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
(22:56):
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,
(23:20):
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
(23:42):
new episode of Crash Course.
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
(00:27):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I think that.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
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
(01:44):
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
(02:06):
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
(02:30):
to is set in stone until he decides that it is.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
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
(02:55):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
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
(03:29):
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
(03:50):
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.
(04:12):
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
(04:35):
to resolve this criminal aggression against Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
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
(05:01):
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.
(05:22):
Here's what Hannah learned in her reporting.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
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
(05:45):
is an industry still finding its legs, and these bad
actors are just hobbling things.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
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
(06:15):
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.
Speaker 6 (06:35):
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
(06:57):
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.
(07:18):
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
(07:39):
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.
(08:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
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
(08:31):
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,
(08:54):
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.
(09:14):
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.
Speaker 7 (09:24):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
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.
(11:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
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
(12:01):
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
(12:21):
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.
Speaker 8 (12:35):
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
(12:56):
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
(13:17):
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
(13:38):
Times or NBC or the Associated Press too, depending on
the circumstances and the nature of the judges who are
hearing such cases.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
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,
(14:10):
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,
(14:31):
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.
Speaker 9 (14:44):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:52):
what happened if we don't do anything. What we're spending
to avoid that stuff is an investment and a better future.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
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
(16:25):
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
(16:46):
changes in office culture since the pandemic. Here's what Sarah's learned.
Speaker 10 (16:52):
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
(17:15):
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.
(17:37):
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
(17:57):
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.
Speaker 11 (18:18):
Right.
Speaker 10 (18:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
My own experience of Artio has taught me that the
work world has changed, perhaps permanently, and managers are going
to have to.
Speaker 9 (18:43):
Change with it.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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.
Speaker 12 (19:09):
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
(19:31):
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,
(19:52):
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
(20:15):
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.
Speaker 8 (20:30):
It's not a.
Speaker 12 (20:30):
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
(20:52):
out in the wild.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
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
(21:17):
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.
Speaker 11 (21:30):
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
(21:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
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.
(22:34):
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
(22:56):
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,
(23:20):
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
(23:42):
new episode of Crash Course.
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