Looking Back and Moving Forward

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Emma Varvaloucas: For the first time, research has shown that levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons, I love that word.

Zachary Karabell: Can you say it 10 times fast.

Emma Varvaloucas: Hydro fluoro. No. hydro. I have to read it. Hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of the Progress Network, joined by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of the Progress Network, and this is What Could Go Right, our weekly podcast where we try to look at, yes, what could go right in the world, in a world full of daily and seemingly constant questions about what could go wrong. And while there is much that could go wrong and there is much that is going wrong, we believe that we have a collective obligation to consider the possibility that we are focusing too much on all that is going wrong and can and could in the future and not considering the possibility that we are underestimating the positives and overestimating the negatives.

And this is the final episode of our podcast for the 2024 season, which is winding down where we are recording this in early December, just after Thanksgiving and before Christmas. So as we have done in past seasons, we’re going to do a bit of a what went right during the year and a bit of a roundup of our favorite moments from the season and some of the people that we interviewed during the year. So, Emma, let’s talk first about some things that went right globally and generally, in 2024.

We’ve been highlighting these a bit in our shorter podcast, The Progress Report, where we try to draw some attention to news that all of us may have missed in the sea of news of bizarre Trump appointments, or wonderful Trump appointments, depending on which side of the political spectrum you find yourself.

But we will also, I think, try to look at what went right during the year. So, what say you, Ms. Varvaloucas?

Emma Varvaloucas: Okay, I’m going to start with my favorite one in my list of the best things that happened in the United States this year. I’m gonna start with my favorite because it was new to me. No substitute for novelty here.

And I thought that some of the details on this were really kind of fun and fantastic. So, I think people will very much so remember the Fight for 15. Kinda, I associate, for whatever reason, I associate that with the rise of AOC. I guess those were all around the same time. There was a very strong movement to get the minimum wage in various states to 15 dollars per hour.

In 2024, we did indeed have 22 states that raised their minimum wage. This is from legislation that was passed, you know, in 2023 went into effect in 2024. We also had Alaska and Missouri vote in November to increase the state’s minimum wage to 15 per hour. And Oxfam actually did a recent report on how dramatically and quickly this landscape has changed.

Of course, if you look at the original Oxfam report, it’s like, people in the U. S. aren’t being paid enough, this is a crisis. And I think there’s certainly an argument to be made that there are lots of places where it’s still not 15 an hour, depending on where you live, 15 an hour really might not be cutting it.

That’s certainly a discussion to be had. However, things really have changed very quickly, very fast. 13 percent of U. S. workers now earn under 15 per hour, which is a much smaller figure than I think a lot of people would expect. Because that is down from nearly 32 percent in 2022. So that is a massive percentage shift between 2022 and 2024.

Of course, we have to account for inflation here as well, but still, wages have been, have been rising apace. So there has been so much progress. This is from an Axios article. I love this detail. There’s been so much progress in the Fight for 15 that the advocacy group called Fight for 15 actually changed its name.

They’re like, all right, this is, the fight is over, I suppose. They are now Fight for a Union, which I can definitely get behind. I can definitely support, but the 15 per hour movement really succeeded. And I feel like they deserve a lot of credit for that, that they are not really receiving.

Zachary Karabell: For those of you who are rolling your eyes, who are devotees of Hayek and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and feel like this whole.

Minimum wage actually creates economic problems. I mean, there’s a whole free market economic argument against a mandated free weight, a minimum wage. And we’re not going to get into those here. I’m just genuflecting in the direction of those who roll their eyes about this. It is quite fascinating if you think about a place like Missouri, where you used to think these were partisan things, right?

That this would divide on Democrat, Republican divisions. And I guess traditionally this was seen as more of a left liberal statist move of guaranteeing a minimum wage and all the free marketers who used to be Republicans would have opposed this vociferously. And then you have a state like Missouri, which goes for Republicans in the state house, the president, Senate races by double digit margins, but also passes a minimum wage floor and a right to choose referendum.

So like, all these things are getting muddled in the American political context where people are perfectly comfortable voting, in this case, kind of rock ribbed Republican, but at the same time for a woman’s right to choose and a minimum wage. And obviously that poses, if you’re a Democrat, that poses challenges because that traditional breakdown is clearly not anymore in place and has in fact broken down.

I understand the theoretical arguments against the minimum wage, that, you know, it crowds out other labor, it makes it harder for teens to work, it hurts small businesses that would otherwise, I guess, be able to hire people more inexpensively, and we could segue from this now to, you know, a topic that we’ll talk about later, which is this whole question of immigration, illegal immigration, or undocumented immigration, which has been one way people deal with the minimum wage is to hire people who are not subject to the same laws.

But as a, just purely like there is a minimum amount that human beings need to be above the poverty level, an amount that’s probably too little, meaning the statistical poverty level probably should be higher given what the cost of living is in most places. This kind of salutes that.

I don’t know that I agree with the unionization. I think there’s a lot of positive role for unionization in larger companies in traditional contexts, and it’s a much more questionable need and or utility in non profits and other kinds of organizations where I’m not sure the union laws either help the workplace dynamics or are necessary given the nature of the work.

But all that being said, that is something I would certainly celebrate this year.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’ll make one point about the unions and then we can move on. I think there’s certainly a lot of context where unions do not need to play a role, especially in like really small workplaces. But I did find out a fun fact recently from an article in the Christian Science Monitor that was about women in the trades, which, you know, the number has gone up from something like 800, 000 to 1. 3 million. So there’s been some, some introduction of women to the trades, which is what the article was about. But as an aside, the fun fact that was in the article is that the gender pay gap in the trades is almost non existent. It’s 96 cents to the dollar versus like 84 cents to the dollar. And I’m, they didn’t say why, but I feel like it’s, must be because of unions.

Like, there just must be a really strong, because the negotiation is the same across all people and they’re being bargained through the union. Like, I, I just feel like that must be it. I mean, I don’t see what other explanation there could really be.

Zachary Karabell: And of course, we did do that episode earlier in the year with Natalie Foster, who wrote the book, The Guarantee.

A lot of that was about a universal basic income. Some of that was about a minimum wage. Some of that was about just what the whole suite of minimum things that any American worker or any American citizen should have in an affluent society.

Natalie Foster: The thing we know about economic security is that it works.

That people, when they have it, are able to have so many more options, are able to start the business, participate in democracy, be part of their family. What is the cost of not investing in families, of not guaranteeing economic security in America?

Zachary Karabell: So what else? What else has gone on in during the year that has piqued your interest as, wow, that’s awfully good in a year where people don’t often think of things as having gone well.

Emma Varvaloucas: I do want to give some flowers to the European Union because their greenhouse gas emissions fell 8% in 2023. And I’m sure people know this, but there’s a lot of delay on data.

So we’re counting this for 2024 news, even though it was from 2023. And we’ll in 2025, we’ll know about what happened in 2024. But what’s cool about this is that drop is so steep that it’s close to the one that happened during the pandemic during COVID when everything shut down.

So this is actually a sustainable change. It’s not like an anomalous change because of something crazy like the pandemic. Spurred on a lot by the Ukraine war and the switch to renewable energy. So the region as a whole has actually cut their emissions 37 percent from 1990 levels and their target is to get to 55 by 2030, which might actually happen.

So the EU is sort of like a shining light of success in this climate change picture where success is hard to be found. I would like to give them some credit for that and also, I think address some of the fears that people have about the United States and the incoming Trump administration, you know, reversing all of our climate change progress.

He can certainly slow it down, but it’s not going to stop entirely. A lot of that stuff is already baked into the states.

Zachary Karabell: And of course, the European decline is even more notable in the face of there was some transition for European energy supply to, to go back to coal, particularly in Germany, because of the absence of Russian natural gas.

So it’s even more striking that there was actually an increase in some, I guess what we call dirty energy consumption by necessity, right? You needed to heat homes during winter. And Germany in the past 15 years had come to rely even more on Russian natural gas because they had shut down their nuclear plants after Fukushima in Japan in 2011.

So the fact that you had some. backsliding in terms of emissions from energy consumption, but the net effect in the European Union overall was to decrease emissions is pretty extraordinary. Like that number would have been even better without that negative headwinds. And as we’ve, you know, we have talked about for the past couple of years, particularly the work of someone like Andrew McAfee, who’s a Progress Network member, who has shown and documented that in spite of the rising concern, along with rising temperatures, Most developed societies, particularly the United States, EU, Japan, are seeing just lower emissions overall as the economy becomes both more digital and more energy efficient.

So these things are kind of happening within the free market system. I think people often underestimate that. I mean, there is a, there is a, a strain of climate activism that sees capitalism is essentially the caus, the negative causal factor in more emissions. And that’s actually been true. But what you’re seeing in the past 10 years is that capitalism is also a lot of the causality of greater energy efficiency and reduced emissions, partly, again, because of the digitization of so much and partly because look, companies, if they can control their input costs and renewables are one way they can do so, they can more predictably generate the margins they want to generate.

And that filters down throughout the entire system. So there’s kind of a, a massive move toward more efficiency, which lowers global emissions or at least lowers emissions in the more developed economies of the world, which is why, I mean, as we’re recording this, there was a climate agreement in the past couple of weeks to transfer 300 billion from developed nations, to less developed nations, to help build out the infrastructure for greater energy efficiencies. And that is part and parcel of an awareness that most of the emissions problem going forward is in the quote unquote developing world. I mean, we probably need better terms and not in the EU, United States, East Asia, parts of the world.

So that data kind of supports that reality.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I just saw this, that Japan, per your point, has updated their target to cutting emissions 60 percent by 2035. So like, yeah, the richer countries are really moving. The U. S. and China moving perhaps more slowly than others. Well, China, China moving very fast in both directions.

That’s a problem. They’re actually moving very fast in the renewable energy direction and in the coal direction.

Zachary Karabell: Right. Basically, they, they just, they just need more power. So they’re going to take it wherever they get it. And as you said, they’re going to, China’s going to build more coal plants, but they’re also building more solar, more electric EVs, more electric vehicles, more wind, more nuclear, right?

Nuclear is a big push in China to these small pebble bed, more contained reactors. So China’s doing everything from clean to dirty.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. China’s doing the most. But I actually am, I’m probably going to get clocked over the head by climate change activists and people in the, in the realm, but I am kind of excited to see what happens in 2025 plus, like 2025 through 2030.

I think it’s going to be a really interesting time for climate change, especially as you’re saying that, you know, that the conversation about renewable energy needs to be the economically viable option and we need to wait until that technology is there. So we can, you know, have these things play into the market.

That was a conversation that was occurring not that long ago. And now we are actually there where it makes sense to choose renewable energy because it really is the cheapest. And I think we’re going to see the effects of that pretty soon.

Zachary Karabell: Indeed.

Emma Varvaloucas: So let’s do a couple more really quick environmental ones and then we can move on.

We think the world has probably passed peak pollution this year. Not a sexy environmental topic, but pollution kills a lot of people and we could cut down on a lot of deaths, particularly in low and middle income countries by cutting down on pollution. So that’s exciting. And the other exciting thing that happened this year was with the ozone hole.

For the first time, research has shown that levels of hydrofluorofluorocarbons, I love that word, which eat away at the ozone, they have been falling, we figured out. Since 2021, we didn’t think that that was going to occur until 2026, but it has started early, and the ozone is healing itself. And a hooray for that.

Zachary Karabell: Can you say it 10 times fast?

Emma Varvaloucas: Hydrofluoro No. I have to read it. Hydrochlorofluorocarbons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Yeah. I have to look at it. But off the top of my head, no.

Zachary Karabell: Everyone can sing that along with 12 Days of Christmas when it gets too annoying. Just pipe, pipe in that one.

Emma Varvaloucas: So environment, and then let’s talk about tech a little bit.

Let’s, like, hit tech and public health quickly, and then we can move on. Lots of very exciting technological firsts this year. We know that we have the first mRNA lung cancer vaccine trials, those have started. And the first mRNA vaccine against norovirus, those trials have started. We have made human blood stem cells in the lab for the first time.

And in China, they successfully transplanted a genetically engineered pig liver into a man for the first time. Um, so we also had the first private spacewalk in history. Thanks, Elon. I’m pretty excited about the malaria vaccine rollout that the routine rollout started this year. It’s going to be really big for those malaria numbers in the next few years.

And we had the WHO, the director general of the WHO come out this month and put his name on the aspirational goal of cervical cancer being the first cancer that humanity could eliminate. And for those not paying attention, That’s because of the HPV vaccine. So controversial when it was first introduced early 2010s, they have found that it’s so effective if you give it to girls before they’re sexually active, that there is a particular study, I think in Scotland, where rates of cervical cancer were basically zero.

So the WHO feels that, okay, of course, this is not going to happen tomorrow, but it actually is within the realm of possibility. So we’re so good with the vaccine and screening for cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is one, if you can screen it, you know, if you have regular screening, you can catch it pretty fast.

That would be amazing. So I’m pretty, pretty pumped about that.

Zachary Karabell: And we still have the two astronauts stuck up at the space station, even with the Elon spacewalk. So that’ll be an interesting one.

Emma Varvaloucas: Are they still stuck up there? I didn’t even realize that.

Zachary Karabell: They’re still up there. They’re just like, they’re becoming an inadvertent study of health effects of being in space for a long duration, which I think was not intentional, but probably will augment some of the knowledge that we have as, as Elon tries to get us to Mars by 2027.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: A goal that is so feasible, along with the 2 trillion dollar cut in federal spending. So Mars in 2027, 2 trillion dollars less in federal spending. Of course, we’ll need 2 trillion dollars to get people back and forth to Mars, but that’s a whole other.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Let’s not open the Doge can of worms on the podcast right now, I guess.

The Trump administration is so odd to me that I was thinking about this, when you were talking about the realignments of, you know, the minimum wage and left and right, and it’s such an interesting time with the right being as populous as it is because so interesting things are happening, right? Like, I’m not against the idea of cutting government inefficiency.

I’m not against the idea that, like, maybe somebody should peep into the FDA and look at this transfer of people between the FDA and Big Pharma, FDA and Big Pharma, right? It’s just that the methods that are being employed to do that are questionable.

Zachary Karabell: Challenging.

Emma Varvaloucas: Challenging.

Zachary Karabell: Although Bernie Sanders had a well publicized tweet, no one has replaced the word tweet yet even with X, supporting Elon and Doge and the whole cutting of efficiencies. So strange bedfellows, right?

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, populists are populists, I guess.

Zachary Karabell: Oh, that’s well put. Populists are populists are populists. There’s that, they know. They know no party, they know no regime.

Emma Varvaloucas: Those are some of my faves from good things that happened this year.

There’s a lot more, so if people are interested, they can, they can sign up for the newsletter and receive the full list for both the globe and the United States, but maybe we can remember some of those instead of all the terrible things. And there sure have been a lot of terrible things that happened in, in 2024.

Zachary Karabell: We’re all acutely aware of what’s a problem, and we’re all acutely aware of all the negative implications of all the things that are a problem. We’re just not as acutely aware of all the things that are being done to, to mitigate those problems, alleviate those problems, or solve those problems. And there’s a lot of people at every given moment that are doing just that.

And we talked to a bunch of them this year in a way that I, you know, obviously found interesting. I hope all of you who are listening found interesting. So let’s, uh, what are our greatest hits from our 2024 What Could Go Right season? I think we both really, really liked the episode we did with Zeke Hernandez, who is a scholar at Wharton University of Pennsylvania, who’s written a lot about immigration.

Zeke Hernandez: We give a million green cards a year. Two thirds of those, of those green cards go to people that are coming for family reunification. Only 15%, actually less than 15 percent are employment based green cards, right? And so, and so if you’re running a business in this country, it is impossible to hire all the, all the talent that you need.

Zachary Karabell: I think one thing that was acutely meaningful in that episode was just the awareness of how broken the immigration legal system is and how kind of no matter what’s going to go on. And I’m sure we will be focusing a lot on this post January, as we see just what it means to deport a lot of people in, in a particularly aggressive militaristic fashion, that all of this is the legacy of a system that has not had much congressional input in 30 years and was not really designed, meaning our legal framework around immigration has not caught up with the global realities of immigration. Either our need for more skilled workers, you know, the whole HB1 visa system is also broken.

So there’s like a, there’s a brokenness to our legal system, there’s a brokenness to how we deal with asylum, how we deal with undocumented, all of it, and then the funding and then the ability because of that of administration X and administration Y to completely change the nature of how we enforce these laws, because again, Congress has been inert and inept in bringing our laws up to date and the executive can simply interpolate or interpret. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen with Trump. There’s going to be a lot of attempts to use different codes and different parts of the law to cobble together a legal framework to deport a lot of people.

And, you know, we also talked about with Zeke, this is, this is a problem that is not a Trump problem. It is an us problem that has had a whole series of ebbs and flows and, you know, we forget that at our peril.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, any Democrat listening to this will, will say, But Zachary, the reason why Congress has been inert is because Trump killed the bill that was going to go through.

And whatever year that was, so.

Zachary Karabell: In that episode also, you know, criticized that bill as being way too heavy on enforcement. I mean, part of his point was no matter how draconian you get with enforcement, you’re still going to have a problem with undocumented and you’re also going to have a problem just with the immigration system.

Emma Varvaloucas: You know, what I’ve been thinking a lot about to tie in this immigration episode with Zeke Hernandez is our conversation with Jiore Craig, where we talked about mis and disinformation.

Jiore Craig: We really are online for as long as possible, and they are wanting us to be in that sort of passive brain. So when you’re scrolling online, you’re sort of pushed into this passive state and it doesn’t incentivize you to explore or question or wonder about who’s behind the content you’re seeing.

Emma Varvaloucas: And she kind of changed the whole way that I look at misinformation. I think a lot of people, when they think about it, they think about it as literally just like false information, right? You’re believing something that’s false and incorrect. And her point was just basically like, that’s not wrong, but the way that she looks at it is like taking up space on the shelf in the conversation, right? And that’s what the right has done in media, in politics, very, very well, is take up space in the conversation about immigration. And the hard thing about it is that it’s a conversation that does deserve to take up space, right? Like there is a lot of stuff that we need to fix, which, you know, we talked about was the, it’s just that the direction that we’re coming at it from, you know, the direction of deporting people who have criminal activity.

Again, it’s not that I’m really against that, you know, which they say that that’s how they’re going to start. Okay. It’s just not really going to fix any of these longstanding issues. So, there’s a lot, there’s a big fear factor, I think, for a lot of people going into the Trump administration. I’m just sort of like curious.

I mean, the Trump administration in some level must be aware of how much of the economy is supported by people who are undocumented or illegal or whatever vocabulary you choose to use. I mean, they, they so far have not, there’s been rhetoric, but like when you actually, when they started giving interviews recently about what they’re going to do, that’s not what they’re.

Zachary Karabell: They’re still focusing on basically what Obama focused on, which is criminal records, clearly identified people who skipped court dates for asylum hearings. Those like very specific categories, which you would refer to and I suppose crassly as low hanging fruit. I mean, you don’t want to refer to human beings as low hanging fruit, but the point being, even the Trump administration or the soon to be Trump administration seems to be talking in terms of those categories of people, which is in the millions and was exactly the categories of people that the Obama administration went after very, very aggressively 2009 to 2011, hence the Obama moniker of Deporter in Chief.

We talked about with, with Jiore Craig, the kind of disinformation. We also talked about this with Jonathan Haidt about, the whole, you know, increasing maelstrom about social media and what it’s doing politically, what it’s doing socially, what it’s doing personally, what it’s doing emotionally.

Jon Haidt: What we have since 2012 is random weirdos on the internet selected by algorithm for their emotional extremity.

And so kids are spending, you know, five, some are spending 10, half of our kids say they’re online almost constantly. So even if you think that they’re talking to you, they’re not really present. They’re actually thinking about what’s going on online.

Zachary Karabell: He’s kind of won the 2024 argument. I mean, if anybody’s won the 2024 argument, Jonathan Haidt has, and you’re seeing this in terms of, you know, New York State banning cell phones in schools, that’s an increasing movement around the country of kids needing to like leave their cell phones in a little baggie at front. You’re seeing this with Australia in the past weeks passing a social media ban on anyone under the age of 16. I mean, obviously enforcement of that’s going to be challenging.

I mean, but, but the whole idea being this has gone too far and it’s, it’s exerting a hugely negative price on particularly the young in multiple societies. Part of our attempt has been also to say, to look at that critically as well. You know, don’t just assume social media, the world of internet information, is an unmitigated negative for social discourse and adolescent development.

Like that’s I think also the wrong, the wrong knee jerk.

Emma Varvaloucas: I will say, I think you and I disagree a little bit on this. I’m pretty pro these school restrictions. I don’t think there’s really any reason that kids need to have access to their phone unless you want to make the very particular case about school shootings in the U. S.

Why do kids need to have like this distraction in their pockets all the time?

Zachary Karabell: I think I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m being persuaded of that one. Are you? I’m probably, because again, it’s like from nine to three, so you don’t have your phone and you’re forced to focus on. Class is a good thing. So I’m not as negative as I was on that.

I’m I was more negative on the, this is all toxic and bad message that might come with that as opposed to don’t use your phone during a date, don’t use your phone at a family dinner, don’t use your phone at any dinner with people, right? Meaning engage when you are in a social context to engage and don’t have the phone be a barrier to that engagement.

I’m all in favor of, but this is bad, toxic, it’s going to ruin your mind, make you depressed, make you suicidal, fray the bonds of democracy, like that. lattice of critiques, I think can go too far. So as long as it’s more in the context of, it is a device that distracts attention when there are absolutely times where attention should be given to, you know, other things other than your screen, I’m all in favor of.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I, I, I’m, I’m with you generally that I think that sometimes the criticism is unnuanced when it comes to social media and TikTok in particular. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I met someone recently who will remain unnamed that came, that came to government, trying to keep this as general as possible.

They came to government recently to fight for a TikTok ban and over the course of researching it decided that they thought a ban was a terrible idea and that it shouldn’t do that. So just like you, you know, just to give an example of somebody that actually came with a policy decision in mind, realized that a lot of the data concerns around TikTok exist with basically any other social media platform that we have in the United States, and are perhaps worse because the US government can’t get their hands on them. He completely reversed what he thought was, was the wise course of action there. But I, yeah, I think, I think that we, I think forget how little time humanity has had with social media and the harms deserve to be studied.

The harms are certainly there, but there are a lot of positives. I highlighted one of them in, in the newsletter a few weeks back about Hurricane Milton and how much sharing information there was, people coming to each other’s aid. It can really be a force for good and we definitely do risk these overreactions of ban this, you know, ban that, get rid of it entirely.

Zachary Karabell: We also talked about some of these issues with Gloria Mark in another episode about attention and the effects of it. So, you know, my, my general thing as people probably have figured out by now is more striving for balance about all of this rather than oscillating between extremes. And so that, you know, the bans on cell phones in schools has an element of balance as long as you’re not then acting like cell phones or screens or social media is heroin, right?

Like, nobody would say it’s okay for kids to shoot up in class, but to make phones and social media the digital equivalent thereof, that’s where I think we have a problem. And there’s a little bit too much of the, and even in the language, for instance, of, of, the New York state bill that Hochul signed, there’s a bit of the piling on demonization of these devices rather than the balance of there’s a time and there’s a place and there’s an amount that is healthy and there’s an amount that’s not.

It’s like, you know, shouldn’t drink four Big Gulps a day. Not so good in terms of sugar content. And part of the Gloria Mark episode we did was about some of the effects on attention, which I think all of us feel, you know, it’s to sit quietly and focus on reading a book, for instance, if you are constantly cell phoned or digital or social media’d.

Emma Varvaloucas: She did bring that up, and she did say that she was also worried about the fracturing of our attention. But she also was very like don’t guilt and shame yourself for going onto your phone during periods of the day and that in fact like having a break on your phone where you’re just kind of doing a rote activity can rest your mind. It’s really just you know her perspective was it’s really about ways to do this wisely rather than, you know, this kind of utopia that doesn’t exist where we’re just like okay we’re throwing away our phones and you know that’s never going to be reality we, we have passed the point of no return with that.

And there’s nothing necessarily bad about going on your phone and scrolling, you know, for a few minutes during the day. If you need a little bit, a bit of a break, that’s fine. It’s really when it starts to control you, rather, you control it. And I will say I have noticed that there is an algorithmic difference on TikTok in particular in the United States versus in Europe.

I will add that to the conversation. It’s remarkably more stupid here.

Zachary Karabell: Emma, that may be just a reflection of our tastes. And not the algorithm, because the algorithm, from what we know, simply feeds you what you want. So it may be that what we want is just a little more stupid.

Emma Varvaloucas: My theory about this is, and I don’t know if this is correct, but my theory is that because there are so many more users in the United States and there’s so much more choice, it actually narrows down TikTok’s algorithms because it just, it gives you like the same sound like over and over and over again because there’s so much to pick from.

So it’s just like, This is like, okay, I need to, I need to choose from this bucket. Whereas I’ve noticed in places that are smaller, like the market is smaller in Greece, you just get a wider variety of just like stuff. You don’t feel like you’re in a, in a particular, um, bubble or alley or something like that.

In the U.S. I’m very much, I’m like, Oh, I’m on like the liberal side of TikTok. Like this is a really strongly liberal side of TikTok. And I wish you would stop giving me the same stuff over and over and over again.

Zachary Karabell: And apparently it may not stop, one of the effects of Trump’s victory is that it may be that TikTok indeed lives to see another day in the United States, rather than facing the ban.

I guess we’ll see how that plays out, but I would be surprised if we are TikTok less come 2025 in a way that we might’ve been TikTok less in the United States come 2025, had Biden Harris agenda led to that.

And we did on the podcast during the year, have a number of episodes where we did look at, you know, what’s going on in the world beyond our borders, not just Greece, you being our resident expert thereof. But we, we talked to Steven Cook about the ongoing crisis between Hezbollah, Hamas, and Israel.

Steven Cook: I stayed within sight of an Arab village on the West Bank on the other side of the green line, wondered out loud, how many Hamas supporters are in that village?

And then I’m sure the people in the village wonder what would happen one day if the Israeli army came there. It is hard to grasp that there isn’t a resolution to this conflict.

Zachary Karabell: We talked to Fareed Zakaria about the evolution of democracy and how that’s played out globally. We talked a bit to Noah Feldman about the nature of Judaism, particularly in a world where that is, once again, troublingly in focus.

And we talked to Ravi Agrawal, the editor of Foreign Policy, about the Indian elections, which At the time that we had that discussion in June was still freshly surprising, you know, a huge democracy where the exit polls and the results just didn’t follow what most people, especially the ruling party, the BJP and the prime minister, Narendra Modi expected, you know, it was a real setback there.

And we did obviously reflect on the heels of the U. S. presidential election that almost every party that had been in power kind of COVID post COVID in an inflationary economic, globally tumultuous time, suffered electoral setbacks in 2024. So, you know, there was a degree to which that was true in India, certainly a degree to which that was true in the United States, it was true in France, it was true in the UK, it was true in Brazil.

I mean, it was true almost everywhere in the world. So, except for Mexico, right? That was the one, that was our one exception where the Mexican ruling party continued its, its dominance.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, you know, people seem to have forgotten a little bit. There’s a lot of coverage at the start of 2024 about this being the year of the election, like the mother of all election years, because 2024 was the year in history with the largest number of people going to the polls.

And there’s a lot of like, Expect volatility. And there was volatility in the sense that you’re saying, Zachary, there was a lot of government changeover. But there was a lot of like, government changeover for the good, particularly in Africa, there were some really interesting results in various countries.

Right now, we do have those protests going on in Georgia. Bangladesh was a, was a huge story that occurred this year where protests really landed. Um, and they seem so far to have avoided any really big catastrophic fallout from that. So there, there was a lot going on.

Zachary Karabell: And in Bangladesh, you had what, I mean, it wasn’t a dictatorship, but it was essentially an elected or a semi elected autocracy overthrown.

And, you know, Muhammad Yunus, who had been Microfinance, Nobel Prize, suddenly becoming the interim prime minister. I mean, that was a real massive change in Bangladesh’s political fortunes in a way that was largely peaceful. I mean, it wasn’t peaceful, but it wasn’t, you know, incredibly brutal and chaotic, and did not descend into mass violence, so.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Not a story that we paid a lot of attention to, but clearly an important one there.

Emma Varvaloucas: But a big one. Yeah. And to circle back to India too, since we did have that conversation about India at the start of our season, when you mentioned that, that surprising kind of pushback against Modi and the election results, the Supreme Court also came down recently in India on what’s called bulldozer justice, where they were basically just bulldozing the people’s homes that they didn’t like.

They would say that they were accused of a crime and then just bulldoze their property essentially to deal with political enemies or people that they didn’t like. So there’s been a little bit of checks coming down on Modi this year. And I would also like to throw in one more good news item for India in particular, which is that this year they did eliminate extreme poverty within their borders, which is huge.

I mean, the number of people that affects is huge. I will say the extreme poverty level is quite low. It’s a dollar and 90 cents. So, you know, a bunch of people have ended on $2. 50 rather than $1. 90, but still.

Zachary Karabell: It’s all relative.

Emma Varvaloucas: It is all relative.

Zachary Karabell: So yeah, so we had a, we had a bunch of pretty fascinating episodes during the year, which in your holiday time and months while we are not doing new episodes, you’re more than welcome to go back and listen to.

We encourage you to do so. Most of them are at least evergreen ish, you know, that we, there, there are a few that were more about kind of the news du jour. We did one with Evan Osnos at the time when Kamala Harris seemed to have a lot of wind at her sails, which is probably interesting to listen to as a, as an artifact from an earlier time.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: We did one with Bret Stephens, again, on kind of the politics du jour. So, you know, there are definitely episodes during the year that were more pegged to news of the moment. And then there are others that were more, that will be evergreen, were evergreen. The one we did with Oshan Jarow about psychedelics.

Clearly, if you have a mind to do some sort of vision quest between now and the next season, maybe listen to his episode. We did one with Kevin Davies about CRISPR and the Onward March of Science and Technology. Also not one that was particularly news or, you know, time bound, so.

Emma Varvaloucas: We missed one of our faves though, I’m realizing with, with our guy Musa.

Zachary Karabell: Very good, and his book is out. Musa al-Gharbi’s new book is out.

Musa al-Gharbi: I talk about this a little bit in the book, the purpose of a school like Columbia. They’re not just elite schools. They’re schools for elites. They choose. And it’s not a secret that schools like these basically select who gets to be Congresspeople, senators, presidents, Supreme Court justices.

They overwhelmingly hail from the small number of schools. 80 percent of tenure track professors come from the top 20 percent of schools.

Zachary Karabell: Very relevant, probably prescient about the election. I mean, we didn’t really talk about any election predictions, but a lot of the themes that we talked about, kind of the revolt against the elites and the degree to which many of the seeds of self destruction were sown by those elites, certainly that was a theme that was clear on Election Day and its aftermath in a way that I think Musa totally anticipated, but has a much more rich kind of intellectual history of how, how that ethos came to be, particularly within the academy. And that’s going to be clearly an issue in 2025 as we, the kind of blow back against the academic left and what, how that’s going to play out politically, how that’s going to play out in terms of universities and endowments and credentializing.

I think most of that will come to nothing except hot air from Washington and antagonism, but it’s clearly going to be a 2025 issue. So yeah, go back and listen to Musa al-Gharbi’s episode and his new book, which has been getting lots of positive attention, as it should.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, which is called We Have Never Been Woke.

And if you’re one of those people that is constantly making the joke as I am, this is why the Democrats lost the election about anything that anyone says that’s vaguely irritating. Um, it would be a great book for you to read.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely. So I think with that, we will wrap up our season. We want to thank you all so much for your attention, for your time.

We don’t take that for granted. We live in a world of expanding possibilities and infinite potential, but we do live in a 24 7 world where your choice of how to spend your A half an hour or an hour is a zero sum individual choice, even though we don’t really think it’s quite the same as a collective choice.

But all of you listening are making individual choices, not collective ones, and so we want to thank you for taking the zero sum time where you are spending your time with us and not spending that time doing all the infinite other things you might be spending your time doing. And we hope to earn that attention going forward.

Please send us your thoughts, as always. Please do the survey that we would like you to do about listener surveys so we can provide the content in a way that is most meaningful to our listeners. And there are quite a few of you, so please do give us your thoughts, send us your ideas. I want to thank the Podglomerate for producing the show throughout the year, I want to thank the staff of The Progress Network for all the work scouring the planet for interesting stories and feeding our social media channels, our TikTok channel, our Instagram channel, our X channel, our Facebook channel, our YouTube channels, all of it with interesting, constantly revolving content. And I certainly want to thank Emma Varvaloucas for her work leading the Progress Network and for co hosting this. And to those of you who have supported us in various and sundry ways, thank you as well. We certainly want to wish you a happy, healthful, and hopeful holiday season.

And we will be back with you in 2025.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everybody for listening. Thanks always to Zachary and Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, all the happies. And yeah, we’ll see you next season.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? is produced by The Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. 

To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. 

Thanks for listening.