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Hosted by Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O'Brien, Crash Course will bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic business and social upheavals occur. Every week, Crash Course will explore the lessons to be learned when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power -- on Wall Street and Main Street, and in Hollywood and Washington.


Crash Course

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.

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Evolving Money: Building Bridges with Bitcoin (Sponsored Content)

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 Businessweek magazine’s headlines and the stories behind them. The show gives listeners a window into the discussions happening in boardrooms, Zooms and group chats in power centers around the world. From interpreting Fed meetings to the business of wolf cloning, each week Max, Stacey and their friends at Bloomberg Businessweek guide listeners through what really went on during the last week from Wall Street and Main Street. Because what’s happening with money and markets is everybody’s business.

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Introducing: Everybody's Business

Hosted by Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O'Brien, Crash Course will bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic business and social upheavals occur. Every week, Crash Course will explore the lessons to be learned when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power -- on Wall Street and Main Street, and in Hollywood and Washington.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Introducing: Crash Course

Twitter was a pivotal force in debates about information, disinformation, the media, celebrity, politics, and all sorts of other issues. Then along came Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX’s innovative magician and chief loudmouth. He said he wanted to buy Twitter, then he said he didn’t, then the courts made him reconsider, and then he bought it. His brief three-month tenure as Twitter’s owner and new CEO has been chock full of calamity: tragicomic mismanagement, mass layoffs, censorship, and personal histrionics. 
 
To dive into all of this, Crash Course had to talk to Kurt Wagner, a Bloomberg News reporter who’s spent years covering social media, especially Twitter – he has boatloads of knowledge on how the platform handles what gets poured into our eyes and ears. He’s also working on a book about Twitter.

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Elon Musk vs. the Twitterverse

Tim O’Brien is not a scientist. But he is a user of Covid-19 vaccines. He thinks they’re miracles, and the single biggest reason the pandemic wasn’t more devastating. But if that perspective makes you erupt, please relax: Crash Course is focusing today on the companies that make the vaccines, not the science. And Tim has a question: Have those amazing innovators – those life-savers – played fairly when it comes to sharing the financial spoils of their miracle drugs? And they were miracles. Just about nine months after the US went into lockdown in March 2020, the first vaccine jabs were available. There are a handful of marquee companies that won that race, Pfizer, BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca among them. But today, for purposes of a lively discussion about innovation and avarice, Crash Course will focus on Moderna, which is a useful proxy for examining how a groundbreaking vaccine was unearthed – and who got control of its uses. 
 
To do that, Crash Course has invited Dr. Monica Gandhi, a leading virologist and epidemiologist who also teaches at the University of California San Francisco, to join our podcast.

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Covid-19 Vaccines vs. The Bottom Line

Imagine you’re Bob Iger. You relinquish Disney’s CEO suite in 2020 with a sterling legacy intact. Smart, game-changing acquisitions. A good culture. Steady, imaginative leadership. Soaring profits and a jumbo stock price. And a sort of bet-the-ranch move into streaming that puts profit-making aside in favor of reinventing the entertainment platform your business rests upon. All is going swimmingly when you turn things over to your successor, Bob Chapek. You title your autobiography “The Ride of a Lifetime.” What a way to go. Then, boom. Covid lockdowns hit just weeks after you step down. Disney’s business sputters. Chapek alienates your team and the board. And that streaming bet unravels. What do you do? You roll back in as CEO less than three years after you left the company. Chapek is pushed out. How often does something like that happen? Like, never. Even Steve Jobs waited 11 years to make his roundtrip as Apple’s CEO.
 
There are lots of collisions to sort out here. That’s why I rang up my pal at Bloomberg Opinion, Beth Kowitt. Beth’s a veteran business writer and she spends a lot of time thinking about the mysteries of corporate America. 

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Disney vs. the Battle of the Bobs

Crash Course is all about disruption and Tim O’Brien can’t imagine a more disruptive politician than Donald Trump. After rolling down a Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to declare what became his first successful presidential bid, Trump proceeded to upend and warp political, civil, and legal norms, and he forced Americans to examine myths they’ve told themselves about tolerance, progress, and shared values and goals. This has spawned an array of disruptions and learning moments – including Trump’s collision with the GOP, the Republican Party’s collision with itself, and the ongoing polarization of Republicans and Democrats. We are in a chaotic political era, and the fact pattern and clarity are our friends in moments like this. That’s why Tim is happy to welcome Maggie Haberman to today’s show. Maggie is a senior political correspondent with The New York Times, one of our savviest Trump-watchers, and the author of a new bestseller: “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”

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Donald Trump vs. the Republican Party

If it hasn’t already, sports gambling is coming to your town, your living room, and your cell phone. Americans bet about $450 million on sports every day! That’s one of those numbers Tim O’Brien doesn’t even know how to comprehend – it’s so huge! – but, of course, gamblers lose a lot of that money. That’s how the industry pulled in $44 billion last year, and it looks like betting is going to keep on exploding. To better understand that boom, Tim spent time with somebody who’s really good at navigating all of the ups and downs of gambling: Blair Montgomery, one of the industry’s super users. He gambles every day, and he’s making more money betting than he does from his day job. 
 
This is the first of three episodes about the past, present, and future of the multi-billion-dollar sports betting boom, and its impact on games, fans, and society. The series will take you from Chicago to London to the tribal lands of Connecticut to learn more about the rise of mobile betting and match fixing, and the future of tribal casinos.

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Inside the Digital Sports Betting Boom: Part 1

Americans bet about $165 billion a year, but here’s something Tim O’Brien worries about: When there’s billions of dollars on the line, how likely is it that your favorite sport is going to get corrupted? Gamblers and criminals have been trying to rig games since the Olympics first began – it still goes on all the time if you look for it. Enter SportRadar, where former intelligence operatives, police detectives, journalists, and computer geeks track 500,000 sporting matches around the world every year, on the hunt for potential fixes.
 
This is the second of three episodes about the past, present, and future of the multi-billion-dollar sports betting boom, and its impact on games, fans, and society. The series will take you from Chicago to London to the tribal lands of Connecticut to learn more about the rise of mobile betting and match fixing, and the future of tribal casinos.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part 2: Sports Gambling vs. Match Fixing

Native Americans now run about half of the national gambling market – or about $40 billion in casino revenue – but the threat the digital boom poses to Native American tribes is often overlooked. The Mashantucket Pequot tribe has overcome a daunting history: genocide, expropriation, financial crises, and public health threats to find themselves now contending with digital upheaval. Can they survive this latest threat?
 
This is the third of three episodes about the past, present, and future of the multi-billion-dollar sports betting boom, and its impact on games, fans, and society. The series will take you from Chicago to London to the tribal lands of Connecticut to learn more about the rise of mobile betting and match fixing, and the future of tribal casinos.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part 3: Tribal Casinos vs. Digital Sports Gambling

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 preferences and priorities. But polling, via its siblings – “focus groups” and “messaging” – also aspires to shape voter’s preferences; to, in the best interpretation, understand and serve them with greater clarity. In the worst interpretation, messaging makes voters more malleable, more easily swayed. Frank Luntz is a political and communications strategist and pollster who has spent most of his career working for Republicans and specializes in leveraging the emotional content of language to win campaigns.

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Polling vs. The 2024 Election

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