The Dave Bowman Show

A map is supposed to help you find your way. Unfortunately, the latest attempt to “Correct the Map” may tell us more about modern politics than it does about geography. In this episode of What the Frock?, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod examine the campaign against the Mercator projection, the familiar world map that makes Greenland look enormous, stretches Antarctica toward infinity, and leaves Africa a...

I love college football. I’m just not sure today’s college football is the game I fell in love with. NIL has turned recruiting into an auction. The transfer portal resembles free agency. Major programs purchase 51–0 “games” from schools that need the money, while smaller colleges face declining enrollment, rising costs and possible financial collapse. The football powers will survive, but will col...

There was once a useful boundary between public conduct and private conviction. You could buy bread, order coffee, or enjoy a pint without first demanding a political confession from the person behind the counter. That boundary is rapidly disappearing, particularly when activists can search public records, identify a business owner’s political contributions, and organize economic punishment withou...

Congress has managed to discover socialism. This might seem encouraging until you remember that the national debt has reached $40 trillion, the federal government still lacks a genuine budget, and lawmakers apparently have plenty of time for nonbinding resolutions designed to produce campaign advertisements. House Resolution 1490 was presented as a condemnation of socialism. It could not create a...

Washington has always been skilled at confusing an announcement with an accomplishment. President Trump’s new Venezuelan oil agreement sounds impressive: American control over billions of barrels, lower gasoline prices, and new supplies for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Then reality intrudes. Venezuelan crude resembles tar more than Texas oil, the country’s infrastructure is collapsing, and its...

Government loves a list. It loves categories, identification numbers, demographic boxes, databases and tracking systems, each created with assurances that the information will be used responsibly and only for its stated purpose. Sometimes those systems genuinely improve accountability. Sometimes they reveal that the government has developed a remarkable ability to count things it cannot competentl...

Radio has supposedly been dying for decades. The towers are still standing and the signals are still broadcasting, but the audience is no longer trapped inside the range of the transmitter. Corporate consolidation stripped away local voices while podcasts and livestreaming gave those voices somewhere else to go. The personalities escaped the station, the listeners followed them, and the dashboard...

There are bad arguments, and then there are bad arguments whose consequences stretch far beyond the case in which they were made. The defense of Lindsay Clancy, accused of murdering her three young children, raises precisely that kind of problem. If postpartum hormones and psychiatric distress can diminish criminal responsibility, where does compassion end and accountability begin? More importantl...

Canada spent years insisting that historical names could be changed when modern values demanded it. Streets, universities, public buildings, and monuments were renamed or removed, while Canadians were assured that changing a name did not erase history. Then President Trump called Lake Ontario “Lake America,” and suddenly names became sacred vessels carrying centuries of history. In this episode, D...

What happens when the map is wrong, the river runs out, and the plan that brought you across a continent can take you no farther? In August 1805, the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the Continental Divide expecting to find a practical water route leading west toward the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. Instead, the Corps of Discovery encountered mountain ranges stretching across the horizo...

The internet was supposed to give us access to the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Instead, it may be making it harder to agree on what is true. This week on What The Frock?, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod wrestle with a question that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: What happens when the device in your pocket doesn't merely provide information, but begins shaping the way you understand t...

American independence was declared in the summer of 1776. Whether the new nation could survive long enough to make that declaration mean anything was another matter entirely. By the autumn of that year, George Washington's Continental Army had suffered a succession of defeats around New York. The British had the larger army, the Royal Navy controlled the surrounding waters, and General William How...

Why does everything on the internet eventually become about us? This week on What The Frock?, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod dive into Bean Soup Theory, the wonderfully simple idea that explains an astonishing amount of what happens on social media. Someone posts a recipe for bean soup, and instead of deciding whether they want bean soup, people start demanding substitutions, alterations, and entirely n...

Polls tell us who's ahead. Until they don't. Pollsters sample voters, weight responses, model turnout, account for undecideds, and then confidently tell us what Election Day is going to look like. There's just one problem: Election Day hasn't happened yet. There is only one poll that actually matters. It's the one where people show up, cast their ballots, and we count the votes. Everything before...

Most Americans know Benedict Arnold for one thing: treason. But that's only the final chapter of his story. Long before he became the most infamous traitor in American history, Arnold was one of George Washington's most daring and effective battlefield commanders. In the desperate autumn of 1776, with the Continental Army driven from New York and the failed invasion of Canada leaving the northern...

Sometimes the biggest story isn't what happened. It's what people do when they're challenged to defend what they claim to believe. This week on What The Frock?, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod dive into a series of stories that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated. A celebrated Cambridge professor resigns after questions emerge about his remarkable résumé. Candace Owens and the culture of perpetua...

For most Americans, the story of September 1776 begins and ends with Nathan Hale. We remember the young schoolteacher turned patriot spy, the gallows, and the words that have echoed through American history: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." But Hale's final days unfolded against the backdrop of an even larger drama. Just two months after the Declaration of Independe...

This week on What The Frock?, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod discover that the best-laid plans never survive first contact with the morning news. What begins with tourists ignoring warnings and climbing an active volcano quickly spirals into one of the strangest conversations the show has ever produced. Before long, they're discussing baboons digging through garbage, social media's obsession with creati...

What happens when the greatest legacy of a Founding Father isn't his own life, but the life of a grandson he never knew? In this episode of Dave Does History, we celebrate the 280th birthday of Thomas Heyward Jr., one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence whose story deserves far more attention than history has given him. Born into one of the wealthiest families in colonial America, He...

Have you ever wondered if your greatest contribution to humanity might be... accidentally training artificial intelligence? That bizarre question launches one of the funniest and most unexpectedly thoughtful episodes of What The Frock? After a sudden spike in podcast traffic revealed that a surprising amount of the audience may actually be AI scraping bots, Rabbi Dave finds himself questioning eve...

Welcome to another episode of What the Frock?, where the conversations are made up and the rabbit trails definitely matter. This week, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod somehow manage to connect Homer, the King James Bible, Christopher Nolan, international soccer, airline seating, and the greatest tragedy of the modern age: the disappearance of McDonald's fried apple pies. The adventure begins with a surpr...

Welcome to Dave Does History with Dave Bowman and Bill Mick! On this July 14th, as France celebrates the iconic flyovers and parades of Bastille Day, we are diving deep into a history that is far more complex than the legends in our schoolbooks. Most of us recognize the storming of the Bastille as the dramatic, bloody spark of the French Revolution. We think of starving peasants, Marie Antoinette,...

Welcome to another episode of What the Frock?, where Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod once again prove that no topic is too serious, too ridiculous, or too completely unrelated to become part of the same conversation. This week begins with a trip to the movies, but not the one everyone is talking about. Instead of debating Hollywood's latest attempt to "improve" Homer's The Odyssey, the guys discover that...

What if the machines do not destroy us because they are too smart, but because they follow bad instructions perfectly? This week on What the Frock?, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod start with sports, World Cup drama, penalty kicks, instant replay, and the strange modern belief that every human mistake can be fixed by one more camera angle. From VAR to NFL replay, the question becomes bigger than sports....

In this Independence day episode of Liberty 250 on the Florida Round Table, historian Dave Bowman explores how John Dunlap's overnight printing operation, the first public readings in Philadelphia, and the celebrations that followed transformed a congressional declaration into the voice of the American people. Along the way, listeners will witness George Washington's army hearing the Declaration f...