Crash Course iHeartPodcasts and Bloomberg

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.”
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Last year – ten years after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut – one of the country’s biggest gunmakers, Remington Arms Co.,the manufacturer of the Bushmaster assault weapon used in the murders, agreed to pay $73 million to settle a lawsuit some victims’ families filed against it. It was a landmark settlement that opened a gap in the formidable legal and financial armor that had long allowed gunmakers to avoid both culpability and accountability for all of the other massacres that preceded Sandy Hook. It was rough justice, but the Remington case offered a roadmap for challenging the 2nd Amendment. Josh Koskoff was the attorney who represented the Sandy Hook families in the Remington case, and he’s now part of a team of lawyers representing families of some of the victims of a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. 
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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. 
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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/id1685258534
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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.
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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. 
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