Plausibly Live! - The Official Podcast Of The Dave Bowman Show

In this episode, we wander cheerfully from missed dates and misplaced years into Venezuela, oil, China’s long game, and why shouting slogans is not the same thing as understanding history. We detour through California’s latest attempt to fix humanity by statute, ask whether public health works better with consent than compulsion, and then take a sharp turn into scripture, wisdom, and why King Solomon might not have been the relationship role model people think. And finally, we confront the modern truth. In the digital age, speech is free, but broadcasting requires permission. All we need is 100 followers. That is it. History has survived worse odds.

January 3, 1945 arrived quietly in Texas, but the news that settled over Dallas was anything but. The wire stories spoke with the cautious gravity of wartime language, careful not to say too much and yet saying enough. Commander Samuel David Dealey, one of the most successful submarine skippers in United States naval history, was missing in action. His boat, USS Harder, was overdue and presumed lost. For families who had learned to read between lines, that phrase carried the weight of finality. The Tyler Morning Telegraph ran the story beneath a headline that tried to balance pride and dread, calling Dealey a valiant hero of the Pacific while admitting what everyone already feared, that one of the war’s most aggressive and effective commanders had vanished into enemy waters and silence.

Today we are talking about something older than empires and more stubborn than forgetting. It is the simple act of remembering the people history does not bother to name. Long before textbooks and archives, people poured out libations. Wine, oil, water, a small offering tipped onto the ground to say someone lived, someone mattered, someone was not invisible. We tend to think of that as a strange ancient habit. But the question behind it never went away. Who will remember me. Who will pause long enough to say my name, or at least admit that I was here. History is very good at big stories. Wars, plagues, kings, and generals. It is far less interested in the ordinary people who carried the weight of those stories on their backs. Tonight, we are going to talk about that gap. About what history can do, what it cannot do, and why pouring out the libations of history still matters now.

Good evening and welcome to the *What The Frock* New Year’s Eve special, an annual ritual in which we pause, take stock, raise a glass, and verify that the planet is still here. It is. We checked. Tonight’s episode is titled **AI Did NOT Destroy The World… This Year, Anyway…**, which is both a statement of fact and a quiet expression of surprise. For twelve months we were promised doom by headline, apocalypse by algorithm, and replacement by software. Instead, what we got was confusion at scale, confidence without competence, and machines that talk very smoothly while being spectacularly wrong. In this episode, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod do what they do best. They poke, prod, laugh, and occasionally squint at the future while standing firmly in the present. They talk about artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and the vast and fertile territory in between where most of the trouble still lives. There are stories, there is philosophy, there is champagne, and there is at least one reminder that tools have

The USS George C. Marshall was never built to be admired. She was built to be trusted. Like her namesake, she existed for moments when patience mattered more than drama and restraint mattered more than applause. In the Cold War Navy, that was not a slogan. It was a job description.

George Catlett Marshall is one of those figures whose importance becomes clearer the longer one studies him and more puzzling the more one tries to summarize him neatly. He does not lend himself to slogans or cinematic shorthand. There is no single moment that captures him, no battlefield pose that defines his legacy. Instead there is a long accumulation of decisions, habits, and silences that, taken together, helped shape the American century. He was the only American to serve as Army Chief of Staff, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and he did so without ever behaving as though history owed him attention. That alone should give modern audiences pause.

Granada in the winter of 1066 was not supposed to end like this. If you had asked a court poet, a tax collector, or a Jewish merchant counting bolts of cloth in the souk, they would have told you that the age was precarious but workable, dangerous but dazzling. Al-Andalus still wore the reputation of refinement like a borrowed robe, a land where Arabic verse sparkled, Jewish scholarship flourished, and Christian kingdoms loomed at a safe distance, for the moment. The brochures had not yet been printed, but the legend was already forming. A Golden Age, people would later call it, a time of convivencia, the sort of word that sounds better the further away one gets from the blood.

December 29, 1876, did not begin as a legend. It began as weather, the sort of Lake Erie weather that has always made honest people glance at the window and reconsider their plans. A blizzard rolled in with the hard confidence of something older than railroads, older than schedules, older than the idea that human beings can bargain with nature if they print the timetable in bold type. Snow came in sheets, wind drove it sideways, and the whole landscape around Ashtabula turned into a white blur with sharp edges. The railroad still ran, because that is what railroads did in the nineteenth century. They sold the public speed and certainty, and they sold themselves something even more intoxicating, the belief that steel and ambition could tame the continent.

The USS Woodrow Wilson belonged to a generation of submarines that were never meant to be seen, remembered, or celebrated in the usual way. She was built to disappear, to wait, and to make catastrophe unnecessary by making it inevitable in theory. As a Lafayette-class fleet ballistic missile submarine, she formed part of the original “Forty-One for Freedom,” the silent backbone of America’s sea-based nuclear deterrent during the most dangerous decades of the Cold War.

The first thing to understand about Woodrow Wilson is that he never stopped believing he was the smartest man in the room, and he never doubted that this was a public service. Wilson did not enter politics the way most politicians do, by compromise, instinct, or appetite for power. He entered it as a man convinced that history itself had been waiting for a proper explanation, and that explanation had finally arrived wearing pince-nez and carrying a footnote. If this sounds unkind, it is not meant to be. It is meant to be accurate. Wilson was earnest, brilliant, disciplined, and convinced that moral clarity, once articulated clearly enough, would bend the world into better shape. That conviction carried him astonishingly far, and it carried him just as surely into moral blind alleys he never fully recognized.

In the early winter of 1521, the Protestant Reformation faced a danger far more unsettling than popes or emperors. Its greatest threat came from men who claimed to speak for God directly. With Martin Luther in hiding and Wittenberg without its anchor, three radical preachers arrived from Zwickau insisting that Scripture was no longer enough. The Spirit, they said, spoke straight to them, in visions, certainty, and fire. This episode is the story of the Zwickau Prophets and the first internal crisis of the Reformation. It is not a tale of heroes and villains, but of urgency colliding with restraint, faith colliding with certainty, and reform nearly tearing itself apart from the inside. It is also the moment that forced Luther to define what sola scriptura really meant, not as a slogan, but as a safeguard against chaos.

The morning of December 26, 1825 (O.S.), opened in St. Petersburg the way Russian winter mornings often do, with cold that does not so much bite as settle in and refuse to leave. Senate Square lay hard and white under the sky, the Neva locked beneath ice thick enough to bear cannon and men, or so it seemed until it did not. By midmorning, roughly three thousand soldiers stood assembled in a rigid square, boots planted, muskets idle, breath hanging like unspoken questions. They were members of the Life Guards, the sort of men raised to obey without hesitation, yet here they were refusing an oath. Not to God. Not to Russia. But to a new emperor whose legitimacy had become suddenly uncertain. In that hesitation, in that pause long enough for frost to creep into fingers and resolve, the first Russian revolution revealed itself, not as a roar, but as a held breath.

Every nation has a moment when the story almost ends. For the American Revolution, that moment came in December of 1776. The army was shrinking. The government was running. The public was tired. Even George Washington thought the game might be nearly up. What followed was not a miracle and not a legend. It was a gamble made by exhausted men in freezing darkness, guided by bad maps, worse weather, and a single hard truth. If this failed, there was no Revolution left to save.

Christmas Eve, 1944. The war is supposed to be turning in the Allies’ favor. The lights of France are visible from the deck. Home feels close enough to imagine. Then a single torpedo reminds everyone that war does not care about calendars, carols, or confidence. Tonight on Dave Does History, we are telling the story of the SS Léopoldville, a troopship sunk just five and a half miles from safety, taking nearly eight hundred American soldiers with it. This is not a tale of heroism neatly wrapped in victory. It is a story of confusion, bad assumptions, language barriers, and systems that failed when they were needed most. It is also a story that was deliberately buried for decades, leaving families with silence instead of answers. The Léopoldville disaster matters because it was preventable, forgotten, and human. And because history does not only fail on battlefields. Sometimes it fails quietly, in the dark, while everyone assumes someone else is paying attention.

Every December we return to A Christmas Carol the way we return to familiar music. We know the notes. We know the ending. We know exactly how it is supposed to make us feel. And that is precisely the problem. In this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we pull the story back out of its comfortable holiday wrapping and look at what Dickens was actually doing in 1843. This was not a bedtime story. It was a warning. Dickens was not trying to redeem one grumpy old man. He was indicting a society that had learned how to explain suffering away with respectable words and tidy laws. Scrooge is not a monster. He is lawful, rational, and catastrophically wrong. The ghosts are not magical fixes. They expose. They accuse. They do not excuse. This episode asks the question Dickens intended. Not whether Scrooge changed, but whether we ever do once the lights come up and the book is closed.

Welcome to *What the Frock*, where the holiday cheer comes with footnotes and the goodwill is thoroughly cross examined. In this episode, Dave and Rod wander straight into Victorian England, a place absolutely convinced it had solved humanity, morality, and the correct volume at which joy should be expressed. Spoiler alert, it had not. What starts as a simple question, why Americans say “Merry Christmas” while Brits insist on “Happy Christmas,” turns into a full scale rummage through moral panic, class anxiety, bad history, and the peculiar Victorian talent for turning joy into a character flaw. Along the way, Dickens gets his due, Malthus gets side eyed, and the idea that suffering builds character gets dragged into the light where it does not age well. If you like your Christmas thoughtful, argumentative, slightly irreverent, and allergic to smug certainty, you are in the right place. Say it however you like. Just understand why some people were afraid of the word “merry.”

On the morning of December 21, 1826, a flag went up over the Old Stone Fort at Nacogdoches. It was red over white, roughly made, stitched by hands more accustomed to frontier repairs than nation building. It did not rise to the sound of drums or cannon. It was hauled up on a wooden pole by men who looked over their shoulders as often as they looked at their handiwork. Beneath it stood a small crowd, some curious, some committed, most uncertain. The flag announced the birth of the Republic of Fredonia.

The image is familiar even if the story behind it is not. A fighter plane with shark teeth painted on its nose, a grin aimed straight at history. For decades that image has stood in for courage, swagger, and American defiance before Pearl Harbor. But the real story of the Flying Tigers is stranger, rougher, and far more human than the legend suggests. This episode of Dave Does History walks into that space carefully. Not to knock the myth down, and not to polish it brighter, but to understand what actually happened when a small group of American pilots resigned their commissions, signed civilian contracts, and flew into a war their country had not officially joined. These men were not mercenaries in the simple sense, and they were not knights of the air either. They were professionals caught in a moment when politics, necessity, and survival collided. What you are about to hear is the story of how the American Volunteer Group came together, how they fought, and why they mattered. It is about improvisation u

The winter encampment that Americans reflexively call “Valley Forge” has become a kind of historical shorthand, a single frozen tableau where virtue shivers nobly and emerges purified. That picture is comforting, and like most comforting pictures, it is incomplete. The army that staggered into Valley Forge in December 1777 had been forming, failing, adapting, and nearly coming apart since the summer of 1775. Valley Forge was not the beginning of the story, and it was not even the worst chapter. It was the reckoning.

There are winters when history stands very still, almost as if the world is bracing for something it already knows it cannot avoid. The winter of 1860 felt like that. One can imagine the heavy December air in Washington settling over the capital like a thick blanket that even the most stubborn stove fires could not quite chase away. The legislators walked through the corridors with forced conversations and polite nods, but there was a hollow ring to every greeting. The nation had reached a point where its disagreements were no longer political quarrels but questions about the very structure of its future. Abraham Lincoln had been elected with a firm pledge that slavery would not expand into the territories. To the Deep South, this was something far beyond a routine policy dispute. It sounded like a warning bell. It sounded like a door closing. It sounded, to many, like the first quiet toll of a funeral.