Semiconductors allow for massive, accessible, and ubiquitous computing and they are such stuff as dreams are made on. They’re pivotal components of the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry, and they now power everything from cars and appliances to missile defense systems and nuclear weaponry. Chips are so central to the consumer world, the shape of economies, and national security that they also inform geopolitical maneuvering – and the head-butting between China and the US for global dominance. Chris Miller is the author of “Chip Wars: The Fight for the World’s Most Crucial Technology,” and a historian at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. 

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Every generation produces a financier or businessperson who personifies how easy it can be to part fools from their money, part smart people from their senses, and part the media from skepticism. There’s a long list of exhibits of that genre, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff. Does Sam Bankman-Fried belong in that pantheon? There’s lots of evidence suggesting he does. He – and the crypto-currency empire he built – are the subjects of sprawling fraud and money laundering probes. His company, FTX, is bankrupt and federal prosecutors in New York have indicted the 31 year-old former multi-billionaire for a range of financial crimes. SBF, as he’s known, maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing and he still gets to have his day in court. Hannah Miller covers crypto for Bloomberg News and is the host of a new podcast, “Spellcaster,” about the life and times of SBF. 

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Winemaking may seem entirely glamorous but it’s really just another version of farming: It’s hard, unpredictable work, and farmers everywhere are wrestling with the onslaught of climate change. Climate change may make some of the world’s most fertile wine regions inhospitable to grape production. Winemaking was a competitive and unpredictable business long before climate change’s escalating challenges arrived. Bottling great wine requires as much art as science. During a recent trip to South Africa, Tim visited one of the world’s most spectacular wine regions – the Stellenbosch, outside of Cape Town, South Africa – and one of the area’s oldest vineyards, Rust en Vrede, where he spoke with the owner, Jean Engelbrecht.

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When British voters decided back in June 2016 to end their 43-year membership in the European Union, it seemed the most surreal political and economic event imaginable. The European Union was a statement of purpose as much as a trade relationship: It symbolized European countries putting centuries of hostility and two world wars behind in the interest of economic cooperation, and it represented European countries recognizing they had a more muscular global trade profile competing together rather than separately against powerhouses like the US. Brexit turned that on its head. It revealed the Tory Party as captive to its far right constituency, and put issues like immigration, regulation, globalization, and the identities of both Europe and the UK up for grabs. Joining Crash Course is Adrian Wooldridge, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and an erudite, contrarian, and delightful observer of political economy and England. 

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We all take for granted that nifty little miracle that happens when we flip a switch on our walls or lamps – the lights go on. Electricity is a modern marvel. It’s the juice that fuels much of what people mean when they talk about “civilization.” When we lose access to electricity, we feel the pain immediately. What we’re used to doing collides with what we suddenly can’t do. Now consider South Africa: the second-largest economy on the African continent and home to 61 million people. The entire country has faced rolling blackouts for about 15 years. How can that be? And what does the present and future hold for a country that doesn’t have a reliable source of electricity? During a trip to South Africa, Tim spoke with Paul Burkhardt, an energy reporter with Bloomberg News in Cape Town, and Olga Constantatos, a South African investor who has spent years watching the power crisis escalate in her country. 

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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. 

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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?

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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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