What The Frock

Some episodes follow a carefully planned outline. Others begin with a single news story and quickly veer into territory no one could have anticipated. This week’s episode of What The Frock? falls squarely into the second category.

Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod set out to discuss one topic, only to discover that the week’s headlines seemed determined to prove that common sense has become an increasingly rare commodity.

The conversation begins with tourists who ignored warnings not to climb an active volcano because they wanted to create social media content. Predictably, nature reminded everyone that volcanoes do not care about views, likes, or followers. From there, the discussion takes an even more unexpected turn.

An interview featuring actor Elliot Page introduced the image that became the running theme of the episode: a troop of baboons without its alpha males scavenging through a garbage dump. The image quickly evolved into the perfect metaphor for a world that often appears to have misplaced its sense of reason. Before long, “baboons on the road” had become a humorous way to describe the increasingly bizarre stories dominating the headlines.

That metaphor carried naturally into a discussion of the latest controversy surrounding the WNBA, Sophie Cunningham, and the continuing debate over biological sex in women’s athletics. Rather than simply reacting to the controversy, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod examined the contradictions surrounding the issue and explored a question that receives surprisingly little public attention: if the arguments are truly consistent, why are there no openly transgender players competing in the WNBA?

The second half of the program shifts from sports to technology and publishing, focusing on reports that AI companies are purchasing printed books, removing their bindings, scanning every page, and destroying the originals to train language models. For anyone who values books, history, or the preservation of knowledge, the practice raises unsettling questions. What is lost when physical works become disposable training material? Can digital copies ever truly replace the artifacts themselves? And who safeguards the integrity of those texts once they exist only as editable data?

The episode concludes with a look at another growing problem: the willingness of modern media to mistake internet jokes for legitimate news. From infamous television blunders to recent examples of news organizations broadcasting obvious memes as authentic photographs, the discussion highlights the increasing pressure to publish first and verify later.

Viewed individually, each story is amusing. Taken together, however, they reveal something more significant about the culture. Social media rewards spectacle over wisdom. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the future of books and publishing. News organizations struggle to separate fact from parody. Public debate often generates more heat than light.

Throughout it all, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod find humor in the absurd while asking serious questions about the direction of modern society.

Some weeks demand careful analysis. Other weeks simply leave everyone wondering how the world became so strange.

This episode of What TheFrock? manages to do both, reminding listeners that sometimes the best way to understand the week’s headlines is to follow the baboons.