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 real-life impact of those general concepts.We start with tariffs, a word that Donald Trump loves and is already deploying across multiple sectors and trading partners. The principles we examine go back to two earlier podcasts – our very first one, Laissez Frog, which was about capitalism in general, and our 21st episode, Greenbacks, which was about taxes.
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29:02
Jimmy Hoppa
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 into the “pro-union” or “anti-union” camp. But as with most issues, the truth is much more nuanced and complicated. Labor unions in the U.S. formed – and largely still exist – because of failures in market capitalism. As discussed in our very first podcast, capitalism is based on a number of principles to ensure resources are most efficiently allocated, but in real life those principles are rarely met. This is particularly pronounced in the labor market, which is fraught with friction and often monopsony employers.
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37:02
Jump for Joy
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!
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29:16
The Toad Not Taken
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 preventing ourselves from taking new paths, what's the proper way to use our knowledge of the past?
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33:40
Polliwog Polymath
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 a number of psychological phenomena, including the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate that ability.
South Africa