Making a Killing with Bethany McLean

If there’s a defining feature of upper income life for people with children, it’s school stress. How do you get your kids into the right preschool so they can get into the right high school so they can go to the best college? Paul Tough’s new book THE YEARS THAT MATTER MOST: How College Makes or Breaks Us, reveals why college, which is supposed to be the great equalizer, has become something that depends on and reinforces class and privilege. This is a huge deal for the business world. If we’re losing access to talent, we’re losing more than words can say. It also, of course, is a huge deal for our society. It’s not too grandiose to say that education determines the shape of the society in which we live. So...what shape is that?

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It's easy to take the economic mores of the time in which you live for granted. It's so easy, in fact, that it doesn't occur to most of us to question them. But question them we should. In his new book, TRANSACTION MAN, longtime journalist and Dean Emeritus of the Columbia Journalism School Nick Lemann shows that the beliefs that have shaped our modern world are not inviolable truths, but rather temporary and fragile constructs. In this episode, Bethany and Nick range from the 1950's-era belief that big corporations were the keepers of the social good, to the modern era of profit maximization, and agree that we need to keep questioning economic models and trends...because you never know when you’ll realize, all of a sudden, that they’re wrong.

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Mark Rampolla has been at the forefront of not one, but two industry-making companies. The first was his own ZICO coconut water, which birthed an $8 billion alternative beverage industry. The next saw Mark as an investor in Beyond Meat, which has been leading the plant-based food revolution. In both cases, the pioneering companies were met head on with major challenges. Both companies had to change deeply held biases of their consumers. But then, the minute they started to win people over, competitors came on strong. Is there such a thing as first-mover advantage, and if so, how do you hang onto it? What happens when you literally create an industry, and then the industry tries to cannibalize you? Pun intended!

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From the minute her dad took office, Ivanka and her business affairs have been at the center of controversy. Even though Ivanka removed herself from her Ivanka Trump fashion company when she entered the White House as a formal Adviser in 2017, she was forced to close the brand in Summer of 2018 due to continuing questions of conflicts of interest. Brands such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Gilt dropped her products after a boycott-Trump movement in backlash to the president's policies on... everything. Fair, unfair, for politics to take a toll on her business? To discuss all of this and more, Bethany sits down with New York Times Magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, who also hosts the popular new podcast Tabloid, currently focusing an entire season on trying to understand none other than Ivanka Trump.

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There is so much to understand about Amazon. Given its rate of growth and change, it can feel a little dizzying to keep up. But my main interest is not in whatever the latest, daily headlines are about the company. I’m interested in what all those headlines add up to, taken as a whole. What Amazon has become, what industries it has disrupted and forever changed. If ultimately it’s Amazon’s world, and we just live in it, is that a good thing? Can Amazon be trusted to wield its ever growing power benevolently? Or are we all going to come regret the monster we’ve created? Bethany and team sit down with Seth Godin, who hardly needs an introduction. He’s exactly who we wanted to talk to in order to dive into questions of Amazon and publishing, but also retail and marketing and trust. Seth’s latest book, This Is Marketing, is a New York Times bestseller, and helps us realize that marketing is about more than selling things - it’s about making change.

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