Crash Course

Former President Donald Trump will walk into a federal courtroom in Miami today and face criminal charges for the second time in as many months. The indictment handed up last week charges Trump with misappropriating classified federal documents containing nuclear and military secrets, and obstructing government efforts to both collect them and investigate their disappearance. It’s an utterly devastating account, filled with evidence that Trump knew what he was doing was wrong and he did it anyway. Trump orchestrated the alleged crimes according to the indictment — he wasn’t a bystander. US v Trump is a case that invites a robust discussion, so Tim invited George Conway to Crash Course. George, a graduate of Yale Law School, is an accomplished lawyer and conservative activist who Trump once considered for senior legal roles in his administration. His wife Kellyanne was an adviser to Trump, and George is an acute observer of our shambolic political era. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Robert Netzly is an Evangelical Christian trying to realize his values and stay true to his own beliefs while working in investing – and he personifies a bigger war going on in the investment world and American politics over a little acronym called ESG. In the last year, there’s been a Republican backlash to the trillions of dollars committed to investing practices that take environmental, social, and governance concerns (such as climate change and gender inequalities) into account. Saijel Kishan is an ESG reporter for Bloomberg News, and she wrote a fascinating piece last fall called “What Would Jesus Buy: Investor Charts Course for $2 Billion Fund.” In today’s special episode of Crash Course, she shares more of that story, which is a tale of two conflicts, in a way. Should there be biases in the investing world, be it faith-based or social activism? And should ESG exist at all?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The media business has been home to experiments ever since the invention of paper. It’s hard to make money from those experiments, fuel the experiments with the right blend of content that attracts audiences, and turn those experiments into enterprises that can survive for years. Six prime experiments from digital media’s modern era all debuted in close proximity to one another in the early 2000s – Gawker, Facebook, Twitter, HuffPost, Politico and Business Insider. All were trailblazers in an innovative and unforgiving technological ecosystem that ultimately flattened local newspapers and spawned other closely-watched and lavishly-funded media start-ups, Vice Media and BuzzFeed among them. Some of the new entrants have faced the same fates as local news. What makes this so hard? What’s at stake? And what have digital media disruptions taught us? Joining Crash Course to make sense of all of this is Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the author of “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The podcast discusses a landmark case where Sandy Hook families sued gunmaker Remington, highlighting the vulnerabilities of gunmakers. It explores the challenges in holding gun manufacturers accountable and the tactics used by the gun industry to stall legal proceedings. The connection between marketing practices and the Sandy Hook shooting is also examined, revealing the promotion of high-powered weapons as a symbol of masculinity. The episode concludes with the reflection on the power of the court system in driving gun control change.

Artificial intelligence has arrived courtesy of ChatGPT, the large language model software that already has more than 100 million users. ChatGPT’s debut signals that any number of jobs could be disrupted (and replaced) by bots, including money management – the science and art of successful investing for institutions and individuals. Investing has already been transformed over the last several decades by computers; an avalanche of ubiquitous global market, corporate, and financial data; oceans of liquidity; stronger risk management tools; and evermore probing and state-of-the-art quantitative analysis. AI promises to up the ante further. Aaron Brown and Nir Kaissar are both contributing columnists for Bloomberg Opinion and successful investors – Aaron is the former chief risk officer for one of the world’s largest hedge funds, AQR Capital Management, while Nir is the founder of Unison Advisors, an investment firm specializing in multi-asset portfolios. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coming soon: When nerdy gamer Sam Bankman-Fried rocketed to fame as the world’s richest 29-year-old, he pledged to donate his billions to good causes. But then his crypto exchange FTX collapsed Billions of dollars were missing, and Sam was in handcuffs. Those who knew him were left wondering — who was Sam really? A well-meaning billionaire who made a mistake? Or a calculating con man? From Wondery and Bloomberg, the makers of The Shrink Next Door, comes a new story of incredible wealth, betrayal and what happens when “doing good” goes really really bad. Learn more here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spellcaster-the-fall-of-sam-bankman-fried/id1685258534See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Name a flashpoint in the US culture wars – and then think about how it intersects with education – and you’re sure to find Florida. The state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a devoted and ubiquitous culture warrior who has put the public education of Florida’s children, teenagers, and college students on the front lines of a battle over what is and isn’t appropriate for the classroom. The stakes, as DeSantis has defined them, involve preserving parents’ prerogatives, curtailing harmful discussions of race, gender and historical injustices (or “wokism,” in his description), and reasserting the state’s right to be an educational arbiter. DeSantis’s critics, including Tim, say Desantis’ policies are retrogressive and benighted – and undermine students’ understanding of their own bodies, minds, histories and place in the world. Today we’re going to focus on contentious debates around how two subjects are taught: African-American history and sex education. Marlon Williams-Clark is a high school social studies teacher in Florida, and Lisa Jarvis is a science columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andi Owen, the CEO of MillerKnoll, recently went viral for telling employees not to ask about bonuses during a company-wide meeting, adding, “You can visit pity city, but you can't live there.” The company said Owen’s comments were taken out of context and that she is committed to her team. But in a still newly post-Covid world and workplace, Owen’s advice about traveling to Pity City struck a nerve. There are so many tensions still at play in blue-collar and white-collar workplaces: work-from-home, wages, and balancing work and gratification – all in the shadow of a pandemic that took about seven million lives globally. Sarah Green Carmichael has written about work culture, including the “Pity City” boss, childcare, and the merits of hybrid work as a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Supreme Court justices get lucrative book deals, luxe travel junkets, and the freedom to invest in almost anything they want – all with limited and forgiving disclosures. And one justice, Clarence Thomas, has routinely offered evidence of some of the Court’s most glaring conflicts of interest. ProPublica recently revealed a goldmine of gifts and financial favors Thomas has received from a prominent Texas businessman, Harlan Crow. Thomas also has a spouse who makes a living advocating for conservative causes that have also found their way to the court. How disinterested can the justices be ruling on weighty matters like corporate power, business competition, and the future of democracy when their own wallets are involved? Gabe Roth is the founder and executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan advocacy group pushing for various court reforms, including new ethics guidelines.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fox News – at least the part represented by the network’s powerhouse evening talk shows – is often an unfettered disinformation machine. It has propagated myths, far-right talking points, and conspiracy theories with unencumbered gusto. Until that is, it helped circulate the Big Lie about electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. It placed two voting machine companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, at the center of a scam…that wasn’t a scam. That invited both companies’ wrath and they have sued Fox for libel. A Delaware judge, Eric Davis, recently allowed Dominion’s claim to proceed to trial – opening arguments were supposed to start this week but have been delayed. In moving the case along, Judge Davis indicated that he believed Dominion’s claims had substantial merit and Fox’s defenses might be built on sand. Joining Crash Course is David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for National Public Radio and the author of “Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.