Crash Course

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.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.