Morning Brew Daily - 2023 Year In Review: The Biggest Stories and Stories You Forgot

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Episode 224: Neal and Toby reflect on a year of news in 2023 and break down the biggest headlines, most viral moments, and maybe look back at some stories you forgot. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, we hand out awards for the biggest, most viral, and floppiest business stories of the year. Even better, no one has to give an acceptance speech. It's Friday, December 29. Let's ride. So every winter Morning Brew's newsletter asks its readers to vote on the Golden Mug Awards,

which is like the Oscars, but much bigger and for business news. In today's show, we are going to reveal the winners and the runners up in four categories, business, biggest business news story, story you most forgot about, most viral story, and the flop of the year award, and discuss whether, in our opinion, Brew Readers made the right choices. Plus, in each category, Neil and I gave ourselves a captain's pick on a story that we felt super passionate about, and then Chris Rock slap each other if we don't agree. But before we get into the award show, I want to hand out my own award, MBD sponsor Yahoo Finance. Get on up here. you just won the Charlie Bunger Memorial Finance Platform of the Year award. This might have been the least dramatic race in history. Yep, this is like when the Return of the King romps through the 2004 Oscars with 11 wins.

There's just no competing with what Yahoo Finance can offer, from key business news updates to real-time financial data, all in one place. Yahoo Finance wants to thank its family for supporting it through the rough times, but most of all, it wants to thank you, MBD, listeners, for showing them so much love over the past year. So before the music cuts us off, make sure you had to finance.jahoo.com or download the mobile app to see why it's head and shoulders above the rest. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox.

wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.s slash college PC. Now let's get to those awards. Our first award to hand out is the biggest business news story of the year. It's a huge one.

Morning Brew readers picked Chat GPT and AI eating the world for this one. And to me, it is clearly the correct choice. Why? It's simple. Follow the money. Capital flooded into AI development this year. Microsoft invested $13 billion into chat sheet, BT, Creator, OpenAI, Navidia.

Invidia, I'm sorry. I didn't learn anything this year, obviously. The company that makes the chips that power AI systems spiked more than 230% to top a $1 trillion valuation, and four-week-old startups were raising hundreds of millions of dollars without releasing a single product. It is a flat-out gold rush, and it shows that investors truly think generative AI will change everything, how we work, how we communicate, how we communicate, how. how we think of and make art.

But with great opportunity comes great risk. This year, governments across the globe have been racing to create guardrails around this rapidly advancing technology. Major world powers, including the U.S., EU, and China, warned that AI could bring about catastrophic harm to humans if left unchecked. Elon Musk called AI the most disruptive force in history and one that would eventually replace human jobs. Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, signed an open letter warning that unregulated

AI could be the asteroid that wipes out humanity. So it's possible we'll look back at this year, 2023, like we do 1712, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine sparking the industrial revolution. Or it's possible AI won't live up to the hype and we're once again being carried away in a giant tech bubble. I think it's got to be the former and it's not the latter at all because, again, the monetary aspect, but also just the fear you hear in some of these.

voices, like, that's been one of the main discourses around AI is, are we moving too fast? And there's not a lot of technologies that make people discuss it and try to regulate it in the way that it does. So I just think in sheer terms of the money, in sheer terms of how afraid people are, it is not a flash in the pan at all. Yeah, I mean, Google, just one example of how much money is flowing into AI this year and how much is at stake here. It was boosting the stock market for the entire year, and especially the magnificent seven,

which are these seven tech stocks. Google released its chat bot barred, and it got one answer wrong in its premiere, and Google lost $100 billion in market cap because of that one flop. So the expectations are through the roof. And if we just look at Wikipedia as a proxy for what people are interested in, if we're trying to crown the biggest news story of the year, chat chbt was the most viewed article on Wikipedia. So I think it's safe to say that brew readers and brew listeners got this one totally right.

So the runner up in this category for biggest news story of the year was the first. fed hiking interest rates to 22 years highs. Just for some perspective, the last time we got rates as high as this past year, President George W. Bush had just taken office, and we were still jamming out on MP3 players. We withstood 11 rate increases since March of last year as we left the days of zero interest rates far behind, and Jerome Powell desperately tried to get inflation under control. Just a sheer amount of things rate hikes effects lead me to believe that this could have been the number one story of the year. Mortgage rates reached 20-year high. high, Treasury bond yields spike, and there was a general sense that we could slip into a recession

at any moment. Neil, if someone had taken a shot for every time we mentioned interest rates this past year, they'd have been sloshed. Yeah, I think in terms of economic impact to everyone's wallets, there's no question that the Fed raising interest rates to such extraordinarily high levels in such a rapid fashion. I mean, this started back in the spring 2022, and as we're talking now, it seems like they've just stopped. So in terms of, yeah, what affects my wall, what affects my daily life?

I think something, even if it's the Fed, something you don't actively think about, it is just kind of ruling your life from your 401K to how much you pay for a house, to how much you pay for your credit card loan, and all of that stuff. Also, just in my lifetimes or since I can remember kind of paying attention to what's going on in the broader financial market, I lived, I was a zero interest rate phenomenon, baby. I had only known this era of cheap money. So to see these interest rates rising to 22-year highs was something that I had never experienced. And so there was a lot of ripple effects.

My money sitting in a cash account is doing, or a money market account is doing very well, yielding 5.5% right now. We talked about it being the golden age of cash. So, again, if we're talking about what hits people in their wall, it matters most. It could have been number one. And it looks like the Fed may have pulled us off, the soft landing, bringing down inflation from 9%. It's around 3% now. It's on its way back to 2%.

It might be bumpy. But we have not entered a recession yet. And I think we can thank consumer spending and possibly all of the movies and concerts that happened this year. We had a lot of savings and they were willing to shell out for these goods and services. So yeah, maybe the Fed pulled it off. We'll see next year whether we go into a recession or not. Knock on wood. let's get into our captain's picks now for biggest business story of the year.

My captain's pick is Hot Strike Summer. This year was one of the busiest in the 21st century for labor organizing with Hollywood actors and writers, auto workers, pharmaceutical staff, hotel workers, and many others hitting the picket line. As of October, there had been 312 strikes involving about 453,000 workers compared to 180 strikes involving 44,000 workers two years before. And it paid off because. These striking workers secured historic gains.

Auto workers at Detroit's Big Three got a 25% increase in wages. Hollywood creatives got protections from AI. And UPS drivers who threaten to strike stand to make $170,000 by the end of their new contract. Toby, what do you make of all this labor activity? It does seem to go kind of in waves and in cycles because you see one labor organization or the other start to strike. And then others kind of follow suit once they see that they have leverage right now. And workers have had leverage. a very tight labor market.

Unemployment has stayed below 4% all year, which is pretty crazy when you consider the rate hikes that we've been seeing. So it does seem like these things happen in bunches, and great summer overall for labor activity. Okay, my captain's pick is the Ozempic craze. Again, I look for widespread ripple effects, Neil. You know this. And this diabetes medication turned super weight loss drug extraordinaire has those ripple effects.

The snack industry is bracing for a downturn. The airline industry is forecasted to say, They have millions on jet fuel and diet companies are quaking in their boots, all because this class of drug is going to lead to an overall lighter population. So in terms of those ripples, I feel very comfortable picking Ozempic as the biggest business news story of the year. I was just listening to another podcast where Derek Thompson had people come on and present the bull case and the bear case for Ozambic Wagovi, this whole class of drugs.

The bull case is that these are incredible behavioral modifiers. They don't just help you lose weight, but they have numerous ripple effects like we're talking about on the economy. They're going to, because they also serve sometimes as anti-addiction drug. So you're going to crave less alcohol. You're going to crave less snacks and you're going to opt for more veggies and fish. And who knows what kind of ripple effects that will have. There is a bear case. There are serious side effects here that are still being figured out because these are a relatively new class of drug.

And then there's the cost situation. Insurers don't cover it yet. and they may not, we'll see. But that is the big question because right now it is unaffordable. Those are the two big bear cases for me is will people be able to afford it and then will they be able to produce enough of this drug to go around and actually make the impacts that all of these forecasts are kind of foreseen. But there's no doubt it's had huge effects.

I mean, you've had Novo Nordisk, which makes OZempic and Wagovi soar to become the most valuable European company past LVMH and Eli Lilly, which makes Monjaro, the same class of drug is now the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world. Meanwhile, Pfizer, which did so well during the pandemic with its vaccine, has not be able to produce something that has been able to compete with these other ones, and it has completely floundered this year. It's crazy how fortunes can change so quickly in that industry. All right, let's move on to our next category, which is the new story you most forgot about, ironically. And again, you all nailed this one, in my opinion, King Charles III's coronation. This year, there was a full-on procession from Buckingham Palace to

Westminster. Charles was presented with a Scepter and an orb, given a crown worth more than $57 million, and he ascended to a literal throne in front of 2,200 people. And yet, no one remembers it. I think it's because support for the monarchy has just been declining in recent years, especially as Prince Andrew controversy surface, and of course all the Prince Harry and Megan drama. So I think people are just burnt out on the royals, near. Yeah. The only thing I remember about the coronation was that it disrupted Premier League games for a weekend. I was so annoying, especially from a fantasy Premier League perspective. It still does get attention, though.

10.3 million people in the U.S. tuned in. That's roughly 1 million fewer than Queen Elizabeth's funeral, but it's also just a third of the almost 30 million people who watch Prince Harry and Megan's weddings. Everyone still loves a royal wedding. I mean, you forgot Queen Elizabeth died. I know. Well, that's true.

But, hey, listen, there's only so many news stories you can fit in your brain. All right, what's our next thing? The rudder up for the news story you most forgot about is the song, Rich Men North of Richmond. a working class anthem from no-name Virginia artist Oliver Anthony. For a few days in August, this song was all anyone was talking about. It debuted on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and was used by conservative politicians to highlight

how elite liberals were out of touch with the regular folk of America. Anthony later told all the politicians, holding them up as a hero to knock it off. He said, I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and always have. I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own, and I see the left trying to discredit me, I guess in retaliation, that's got to stop. Richmond, North of Richmond, Toby.

Footnote in history or maybe a symbol of American culture in 2023. Yeah, I think it's a snapshot of a specific moment of time. There was just so much grift happening on either side of the song where, again, it was this little-known guy. The song was pretty good. Let's mention that, that the dude can clearly sing, but how it was co-opted by both political parties was just kind of something that really thrust it in the forefront of people's minds, but I don't think there will be any lasting cultural impact from this.

Okay, my captain's pick in this category is the Titan submersible that imploded on its way down to the Titanic. My most vivid memory of this year is sitting at our desk when the report dropped that tapping sounds had been picked up during the search for this missing sub. We eventually learned that the sub had imploded in milliseconds due to a flaw in the whole design. And so while the search was afoot, it was all anyone could talk about. just everything from the hubris of the CEO to building the sub out of carbon fiber to the fact that they were diving the Titanic, all of it combined into a story that was maybe smaller in scope than others we've mentioned, but certainly big enough to remember.

Yeah, the one thing, the one thing that stood out from me, this is, I did not forget this story. So I don't know if people forgot this story, but it was kind of a big deal, and maybe it shouldn't have been a big deal. My most vivid memory is the resurgence of James Cameron, who directed the Titanic, because I didn't know this. going in, but he is a submersible expert. So he was giving interviews all over the place and is one of those most incredible quotes during this whole saga. He said that he's calculated that he spent more time on the ship, the Titanic, than the captain did back of the day. It's such a James Cameron quote. This whole story, people were kind of divided on because at the one point, there was that whole oxygen craze where that's what we were all counting down, was they were

running out of oxygen slowly if they were still stuck down there and unmoored in some way. And so you didn't want to actively kind of root against these people. Yeah, they died. Yeah, it was a very tragic story, but then there was the fact that a lot of them were wealthy and billionaires and that there was like the hubris involved of diving to a Titanic in a submarine designed by the CEO in a way that a lot of people said was just, again, there was a ton of hubris involved. He made it out of carbon fiber. It wasn't, the safety precautions were also designed by him. So it was just all this cluster of emotions that people were feeling around it. And it turns out the whole search was for not because it had imploded seconds.

There was discussion about whether this would maybe reduce or mitigate the rise of extreme tourism of people going to the extreme depths of the earth or up to the highest mountains or into outer space. And I don't think there's been any lasting impact in that regard. Absolutely not. I think it's human nature to strive for the highest mountains and die for the deepest depths. Yeah, there you go. Okay, my captain's pick in the story you most forgot about is the smoke from Canadian wildfires

that blanketed New York and other northeastern cities for a few days this summer. It was really crazy from a sensory perspective to see orange, hazy skies and to smell fire that was burning hundreds of miles away. But also, it took a toll mentally, which I wasn't expecting. All you were thinking about that week was your breathing and whether it was being impacted by the smoke and you just couldn't think about anything else. And for many people in New York, I feel like this was a wake-up, call about climate change and a realization that you're not really shielded from environmental disasters

even in this concrete jungle. Yeah, wake up call was definitely the word for it. I could not believe that I opened up an air quality index that showed global air pollution in New York had the worst air quality of anywhere else in the world. And I'm sitting there reading that while sitting in New York. And so it just was one of those things where you often can look at climate change. You can look at these climate emergencies as something that happens around the world or not a directly affecting you, but when it's literally around you in the air, you can no longer put your head in the same. Yeah, I mean, we got out of the studio that morning. We walk out into our office and it just smells and then you look outside and it's orange and this thing is seeping through the windows

and I don't know, I just, I just remember not being able to concentrate. I was focusing on my breath. I was like, what is going on here? And, you know, people live with that every day in cities where, you know, the air quality is terrible. And so it was just an interesting, interesting wake-up call for us. It was also the memes were outrageous as well because Blade Runner got a lot of shouts. Also Diablo, the video game launched around the same time. So there was this billboard showing Diablo, which is a game that kind of has devilish or hellish undertones. Juxapose against the sky and you're like, that is one of the greatest marketing ploys that you can have. Speaking of marketing, our next category is the viral moment of the year. And it was

Barbenheimer, Neil. Again, Brew readers nailed it. It combined every single ingredient of pop culture into one viral mix. You got A-list movie stars and directors, endless memeability, endless marketing budgets, and a once-in-a-generation juxtaposition of topic matter that may never be replicated again. Neil, how much of you, how much of this do you think was organic hype and how much of it was crafted by Warner Bros. Insane marketing push for-I want to give all the credit to regular people who took this and ran with it. I mean, I don't, you can say that all of the ingredients were there, but I don't think it would have happened unless grassroots online, social media people, kind of took with it and ran

with it and made the memes and made the T-shirts and just drunk and started talking about it. And then only later did maybe the top-down people, executives at Warner Brothers or large media organizations start writing about it. But I really think the driving force of Barbenheimer and really any viral situation is the people who make jokes and create really funny crap. I don't know if I fully agree with that honestly because the amount of marketing that Barbie did was not you can't overlook it remember they did the Airbnb Ken's uh mojo doja kasha house where they completely retrofitted a thing they had the Dubai kind of a R experience where Barbie was like stepping over their tall buildings there was everything was branded pink so much to the point that the world literally ran out of pink bait

but you're right in terms of connecting the two movies that did mostly come from I also think you can't overlook just the name, Barbenheimer, it just rolls off the tongue very well. Incredible name. That may have sparked everything, and Barbie wrote it to $1.4 billion at the global box office. The runner up for the most viral moment was the Chinese spy balloon that floated into our airspace and into our imaginations in early February. U.S. defense officials have said that the balloon did not collect any intelligence, and it appeared to be blown off course by high winds, but it did lead to a full-scale, full-scale, paranoid, freak out that highlighted the deterioration in relations between the world's two great powers,

the U.S. and China, what I'll remember about the spy balloon fiasco is that we took down the Chinese spy balloon and several other suspicious balloons in U.S. airspace with sidewinder air-to-air missiles that cost about $400,000 a pop, and ultimately most of those balloons turned out to be hobbyist weather balloons. So yeah, just to reiterate, we sent F-22 fighter jets to fire a $400,000 missile at balloons released by some weather nerds. There was a school project, if I remember, got their poor balloon shot down by a $400,000 military missile. I remember thinking at the time,

this is a good spy tactic because these balloons were very high up in the atmosphere. They're very difficult to detect. So I understand kind of the scare of, wait a second, these things could be all around us right now. And then I also remember almost the Renaissance painting of them. First one being shot down. They were pulling it out of the water. It was this scene that just had this gravitas to it.

So, again, if you want to combine the things that make something viral, like, you need the imagery associated with it, and Spy Balloon definitely had that. My captain's pick for most viral moment of the year was Drippy Pope. Drippy Pope refers to the viral photo of Pope Francis sporting a stylist, Balenciaga-esque puffer jacket, looking like he marched straight out of Milan Fashion Week. But the image turned out to be an AI-generated deep fake. It went viral A because it looked so dang real. It wasn't so far off that you couldn't believe the Pope actually rocked that coat. And then B, it was still in the earliest innings of generative AI when it comes to images. So people weren't as good at identifying fakes.

Neil, if I remember correctly, you were originally faked out by this. Certainly. I had no idea. I was like, I don't know what the Pope wears. I don't really look. I know he wears the robe, but this was a white overcoat, you know, a little puffy jacket. I mean, it's cold. It gets cold in northern Italy.

So, you know, I didn't know whether it was real or not. and I guess that is the whole idea of it. Right. A lot of kind of web culture writers declared this the first mass-level AI misinformation case. It was, again, kind of in the early part of the year. So people were just coming to terms with how powerful these tools were. And so the juxtaposition of this religious leader and this, it was also part of a trend along that time where people were kind of Balenciagaifying Harry Potter, all these different famous characters. And the two things that did end up saying that.

this, that you could tell that it was fake, is that his crucifix was a little deformed, and then his glasses were kind of melting into his face. So once people looked closer, they did end up realizing that drippy folk wasn't as drippy as people thought. Earlier this month, just to tie this whole story full circle, is the Pope called for global AI regulation. There you go. He's a little late, you know, eight months after, after he went viral. Okay, my captain's pick is all of the crazy airline passengers who went viral this year. There was the marketing executive who had a meltdown on an American Airlines flight claiming someone in the back of the plane was not real.

There were those poor souls on the Delta flight heading from Atlanta to Barcelona that had to turn back two hours later. After, and I'll just quote the pilot here, a passenger had diarrhea all the way through the plane constituting a biohazard. And finally, there was that off-duty pilot in the cockpit of the Alaska Airlines flight that tried to turn off the plane's engines

but was successfully restrained by the captain. Turns out he had taken shrooms a few days earlier and was having a real bad time of it. Overall, the rate of unruly passenger incidents on flights has dropped off by 80% since record highs during the mask mandate days of 2021, but they're still above pre-COVID levels and the skies are busy with crazy people doing crazy things. That's what was crazy about this category to me is that if you just said plain passenger freak out was most viral, you really wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Of those that you mentioned, though, I think the worst one to be a fellow passenger on has got to be the diarrhea well. I think that's unarguable. That would just be an absolute disaster. They called it, yeah, a biohazard at a certain point discussing. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179 like the next grill three-burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard.

Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop Spring Backyard Days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homebopo.com slash price match for details. Okay, our next category and our final category is the WeWork Memorial flop of the year award. Our only brand name category, Neil, so congrats to WeWork for that. But the flop of the year winner was the Mark Zuckerberg versus Elon Musk cage match. That wasn't to be.

The backstory on this one is Elon kicked off the beef by replying to a tweet about meta potentially launching a Twitter competitor by saying, I'm up for a cage match if he is, he being Zuck. Then on Instagram, Zuck responded with a screenshot of the tweet with the caption, Send Me Location. This set off a month's long, will they or won't they

speculation tour, where Trash was talked, training videos were posted, and the world waited for these two billionaire man-children to duke it out in a cage. But that day never came to literally no one's surprise after Elon made a litany of excuses, including injury and scheduling conflicts. You know,

What a waste of time this all was. It was a total waste of time. I try not to get invested. And it was actually pretty easy to not get invested. But to me, it's interesting to talk about because it is an encapsulation of the public perception of how Zuck and Elon have changed this year. It's completely flipped. I feel like in the years leading up to this, Elon was hailed as a visionary, as a big,

as an incredible company builder, incredible entrepreneur who was smart about a lot of things. And Zuck was kind of the punching bag. He was a punchline on many jokes. And I think this year, that completely flipped. Zuck is seen as the adult in the room, someone who can pivot his business. He's been in charge of Facebook since he started it as a sophomore in college in 2004. And, you know, he embarked on this year of efficiency and Meta had a great, great stock run this year. Meanwhile, Elon, you know, I don't know what's going on with him, but he appears to be kind of losing touch with reality a bit.

He told advertisers to go F themselves on X. He spent $44 billion on this platform. that is rapidly deteriorating, and I think without question, he's burnt through tens of billions of dollars acquiring it. So in terms of the cage match itself, yeah, whatever, but I feel like it does kind of tie these two men's fortunes together as they've flipped this year. I can't believe I'm about to say this again, but who do you think would have won? Well, Zuck.

I disagree with that. I'm of the mind that Zuck is so much smaller than Elon. Elon's like 6-1, almost 200 pounds. Zuck is 5-7, around 150. pounds. So size matters in the fight, I think. So Elon did say that if the fight goes anywhere beyond one round, his conditioning would fail. So this also, I think people forget how awful of a fight this would be to watch. Watching an unconditioned person fight is so boring because eventually they just get tuckered out and they just lay there. So I'm glad for our

own sake that we never had to witness this. All right. Maybe that'll be the last time we ever talk about the fight that was not. Okay. The runner-up for flop of the year was Open AIs Board firing Sam Altman. The circumstances around why they sacked Altman or didn't alert anyone beforehand are still murky, but we do know it did not work out well for them. Employees mounted a coup saying they would leave en masse to Microsoft if Altman wasn't reinstated, and ultimately the board capitulated and brought him back. This was just a bizarre situation that had us all reading up on nonprofit governance

and highlighted the profound disconnect between leaders in the AI space. some who think we need to go full steam ahead with the technology and others who worry we should slow down in the name of safety. More details have come out around this, and apparently there's this big WhatsApp group chat that features hundreds of Silicon Valley CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg, Drew, who's the founder of Dropbox and others. I cannot imagine what was happening in that group chat. It must have been popping off to be the person who first sent Sam Altman out of OpenAI. Just the amount of reactions you would have gotten to that. That's going viral in the group chat for sure. And I think what happened from this is Sam Altman, who was maybe a household name to some people before this.

I think completely his image, his persona, I don't know if it was good or bad, but just like the name recognition went through the roof after all this happened. And, you know, we handicapped the Times person of the year. And we said Taylor Swift was kind of on par eight to one odds with Sam Altman. Taylor Swift ended up winning. But Sam Altman was, you know, we said that AI and Chatabit was the biggest business news story of the year. and Sam Altman was and is the architect of that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it shows this was the runner-up in this category.

So clearly it's top of mind for more people than just anyone who's interested in kind of like the tech sector. Okay, my captain's pick for flop of the year is definitely SBF, specifically how all of his former lieutenants and friends turned on him in testimony that ultimately led to his conviction of massive fraud. three former employees, including his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, took plea deals with the government and testified that SBF directed them to commit crimes, showing how his leadership style did not exactly inspire loyalty. But SBF certainly did not help himself during the trial when he took the stand. Discussing SBF's evasive answers in going off script, his lawyer said SBF may be at the very top of the list as the worst person I've ever seen do a cross-examination.

It was brutal. Remember, his whole defense relied on paint. painting himself as this plucky billionaire genius who maybe got in over his head, but the prosecution wanted to use the testimonies of his close friends like Caroline Ellison and his co-founder to kind of show that he knew everything was happening and he was orchestrating everything. And ultimately the buck stopped with him. Although I don't wish your ex-girlfriend going on the stand to testify you against anyone.

Caroline definitely came out of this on top in terms of this. Yeah, I don't know how you can be on the bottom. bottom of Sam. I mean, he was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy and he's going to be convicted or he's going to be sentenced next spring and he could get 100 years in prison. That's insane to think about. Okay, my captain's pick makes me sad to even talk about, but remember the craze around the room temperature superconductor. Scientists in South Korea claimed to have discovered an ambient pressure room temperature superconductor, which was allegedly this highly efficient electrical conductor that can function without the typical low and temperature,

high-pressure environment, modern superconductors need. It was hailed as the holy grail of physics discoveries, and if commercialized, it could have given us widespread high-speed maglev trains, an iPhone that doesn't overheat, and electrical bills that aren't a major monthly expense. The list goes on. But Neil, it turns out that there were some major flaws with the Korean scientist's paper and other attempts to replicate it resulted in failure. I absolutely loved this moment of community and collective science, even though it ultimately

ended up being a flop. Yeah, you can't, it was a flop. And I think in the back of our minds, we knew that it wasn't true. But the fact that it sparked so many regular people to conduct experiments of their own and showed just maybe the best part of social media, which is regular people doing, like Barbenheimer, regular people doing cool stuff and sharing it with others, getting feedback, improving on each other's work. So that whole citizen science angle was so kind of heartwarming to see. And, you know, maybe the real superconductor is the one, the friends we made along the way. Absolutely.

I remember, especially there was this one Moscow-based Twitter account who had this anime profile picture and she was apparently the first one to have replicated this floating substance that proved that there was a superconductor. So there was a while where the two foremost authorities on it were these South Korean scientists

and a random anime profile picture person on Twitter and you're like, this is how science was meant to be. It wasn't meant to be though. Stay tuned for the award show in 2020. 24 when discovering a room temp Superconductor is going to be the biggest new story over the year. Man, let's do it. Okay, Toby, it was great reminiscing about all of these stories with you and everyone

listening. It's crazy to think, but this was our last episode of the year. What a year it's been. Can't thank you all enough for tuning in, and I'm super excited to pick things up again in 2024. As always, feel free to send your thoughts on the show or say hello at our email address, Morningbrood Daily at morningbrewd.com. Let's roll the credits one last time for 2023.

Emily Miliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Velas and Raymond Lue are associate producers. Eugenwa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup won the award for Huri Kiddin. Most days taken off this year. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back next year.