Podcast

This episode examines the political debates around public health and public health policy. It is a perfect case study to illustrate so many of the principles covered in earlier podcasts, such as capitalism, externalities, risk, paranoia, and the dumbing down of America. Public health policy is a particularly odd political topic, because in a completely […]

Welcome to The Boiling Frog reboot! The first 26 episodes were examinations of general topics,  such as understanding capitalism, how social psychology belies the principles of capitalism, and how this all shapes political dialog. The new podcasts will look at specific policies of the new administration and use those as case studies to illustrate the

This podcast is all about labor unions – why they exist, their history in the U.S., a brief comparison with unions in other countries, the pros and cons of unions, and the larger political implications of their existence. This is a controversial topic in U.S. politics, with many voters (and most elected officials) falling squarely

Building off the prior podcast on learning from the past, this discussion is all about success and failure. We all know the common wisdom that we all learn more from failure than from success, but of course we don’t strive to fail all of the time! Defining success and failure is not as simple as

We all spend a lot of time thinking about the past, often when we’re trying to make a decision in the present. Sometimes that reflection ends up complicating our decision-making. Why is that? And if we want to avoid repeating past mistakes while also not

What makes someone an expert? And how is expertise different from intelligence? This podcast is all about expertise, how we acquire it, how do people view others’ expertise, and the notion of expertise transference from one domain to another. We touch on

This podcast is the sequel to Greenbacks, where we discussed why we have taxes, the different types of taxes, and the pros and cons of each type. In this podcast, we delve into the evolution of the tax system and look at the debates surrounding the level

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Benjamin Franklin

This podcast is the first in a two-part series on taxes. This episode is meant to be an overview of why we have taxes, the landscape of both taxing agencies a

For the tenth episode, your favorite pond dwellers decided to take a break from the normal, big-picture, topic-based discussions and instead shared their personal pet peeves, including both important as well as some silly issues.

This twentieth episode

This episode is a deep dive into the foundational requirement of a democracy – having elections and voting. Despite the founding (and often touted) principles of American democracy, it is shockingly inconsistent how we implement it. All U.S. citizens do n