Crash Course

A smart and fun chat show about all things business. Hosted by award-winning business and economics journalists Max Chafkin (author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power) and Stacey Vanek-Smith (former co-host of NPR’s Planet Money and reporter for Marketplace), Everybody's Business is powered by the unparalleled sources and reporters who bring you Busine...

Just as mobile banking revolutionized our relationship with our money and led to a plethora of new tools for management and investing, the proliferation of crypto and blockchain technologies have opened up all manner of new investment opportunities that go far beyond what early Bitcoin adopters could’ve imagined. This episode is sponsored by Coinbase. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...

In this limited series, Odd Lots explains some of the thorniest issues facing the US economy through the medium of … chicken. Chicken occupies a unique position in the US diet, but issues facing the poultry industry illustrate wider points about the development of the US economy and the decisions being made about how it's structured and who benefits from it. So why has the chicken industry evolved...

Taylor Swift embodies a rare cultural presence and moment – and she’s everywhere. She inhabits her presence (amid an unusual amount of glare) with an unusual amount of grace. But now, a lot of weird conspiracy theories from Fox and conservative commentators have attached themselves to her. Nevertheless, Taylor Swift has kept her wits about her when everyone else is losing theirs. Emma Gray co-writ...

Joe Biden secured a victory in the Democratic primary in 2020 after Rep. Jim Clyburn threw his support, and that of his Black constituents in South Carolina, behind the candidate. Black voters – and young Black voters in particular – appear to be much less enthusiastic about Biden these days. They’re the most unenthusiastic they’ve been about a Democratic president in decades. Republicans have als...

Latinos represent the US electorate’s second fastest-growing voting group, with about 36.2 million Latinos expected to vote in the 2024 presidential election. Latino voters have tended to have low turnout rates in elections, but this hefty increase in that electoral pool is due to the mobilization of enthusiastic and engaged younger and US-born Latino voters. Latino voters have strong regional dif...

The first act in the Republican Party’s presidential primary season, the Iowa caucuses, has come and gone. Other contests in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan, and the collection of 15 Super Tuesday states all lie ahead. Donald Trump registered a resounding win in Iowa and if polls are to be believed, he is situated to easily continue his sprint to the GOP nomination – the flagbearer of a pa...

In early 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a sprawling, brutal follow-up to his land-grab of Crimea in 2014. The war initially produced an international show of support for Ukraine and its embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – after all, the broader fate of Western Europe hung in the balance, a consequential geopolitical reality for the United Stat...

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 C...

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,...

Remember the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns when, practically overnight, it seemed that every shop closed its doors? Do you remember how all of those small businesses you might have taken for granted – the ones that gave life and an identity to your community – suddenly felt essential to you? Tim watched lots of small businesses in his small town in New Jersey struggle, including his favorite lo...

Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York is drawing to a close – testimony recently ended – and sometime in early 2024 a state judge will rule on the case. It’s within the judge’s power to impose a fine of as much as $250 million on Trump and permanently ban him and his company from ever doing business in New York again. The state where Trump grew rich may send him into financial exile. The Ne...

Bloomberg News Now is a comprehensive audio report on today's top stories. Listen for the latest news, whenever you want it, covering global business stories around the world.        on Apple: trib.al/Mx9TCh1      on Spotify: trib.al/T4BG8s4      Anywhere: trib.al/O4EX6BA See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After many years of reassuring declines, some crime rates, like homicides and violent assaults, soared nationwide during the Covid-19 pandemic. These trends weren’t geographically or politically specific: Residents in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all suffered through that shift, and it didn’t matter if they lived in a city run by a Democrat or a Republican – more murders, the data showed, plag...

OpenAI, which you may have heard a lot about lately, is the company that developed ChatGPT, a wildly popular AI bot which you most certainly have heard of. OpenAI’s board of directors recently purged the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and various stakeholders – employees, investors, Microsoft – saw to it that Altman was reinstated. The board itself then faced a purge. This particular collision has it...

Digital disruption is knock knock knockin’ at the music industry’s door, 20 years after the MP3 and Napster made CD collections obsolete. Artificial intelligence is now filling playlists with ambient music and making pitch-perfect copies of human stars like Grimes, who Bloomberg Opinion columnist Lionel Laurent interviewed for this special episode of Crash Course. He dives into the risky race to m...

Donald Trump’s political speeches of late are chock full of warnings about “the threat from within” posed by his myriad opponents – those he decries as “vermin” out to destroy the US and the American Dream. He routinely promises to crush his critics and “make America great again.” As always with Trump, there’s a method to his madness. Historian Heather Cox Richardson argues that Trumpism claws at...

Speech has probably never been freer in the world than it is today: Multiple venues – especially social media – allow people’s perspectives to take flight fluently, globally, and frequently. The culture of free speech is also under steady and ever more sophisticated assaults, perhaps because its ubiquity is threatening to any person or institution that holds an opposing viewpoint. The very thing t...

At Bloomberg, we’re always talking about the biggest business stories, and no one is bigger than Elon Musk. In this new chat weekly show, host David Papadopoulos and a panel of guests including Businessweek’s Max Chafkin, Tesla reporter Dana Hull, Big Tech editor Sarah Frier, and more, will break down the most important stories on Musk and his empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. See omn...

China is home to 1.4 billion people (about 18% of the planet’s total population), it has the world’s second-largest economy, and its geographic footprint covers more than 3.6 million square miles. China is home to a thriving technology sector, has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, and has also built a formidable military capacity featuring a world-class navy, air force, nuclear missiles, a...

Alaska has been an object of fascination, exploration, and exploitation for nearly two centuries, but its most inhospitable reaches – those that creep toward the Arctic Circle mile by frozen mile – have managed to hold on to their secrets for a very long time. Ice, plunging temperatures, and brutal tundras have kept outsiders at bay. That’s all shifting now: Climate change has warmed the Arctic’s...

Gaza is now a war zone. In the wake of Hamas’ recent grisly attack that left more than 1,400 Israelis dead and about another 200 taken hostage, Israel’s military forces appear poised to occupy Gaza to try obliterating the Islamist terrorist group. Ancient religious and cultural animosities and contemporary geopolitical jockeying are the backdrop for this conflict, but this newest iteration appears...

Polling – the very inexact science that is the lifeblood of political analysis and guesswork – is very much with us. Built upon a series of queries that asks respondents, essentially, “What do you think about X,” polling aims to make the intangible, concrete. It is the stuff from which predictions are made, the data that fuels a political marketplace aiming to artfully respond to voter’s preferenc...

“We White Christians no longer represent the majority of Americans,” writes Robert P. Jones, a White Christian. “We are no longer capable of setting the nation’s course by sheer cultural and political dominance. But there are more than enough of us to decisively derail the future of democracy in America.” That’s from Jones’ new book, “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,” an exploration of the his...

There are no such things as alternative facts. We can disagree about how to interpret facts, but there they remain. Stubborn things. When stubborn people collide with stubborn things – when the likes of Rupert Murdoch assembles a media empire largely designed to embrace and disseminate disinformation – you have the makings of a Crash Course episode. Murdoch, the 92-year-old progenitor of the Fox N...