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Things I've Been Thinking About
Things I’ve Been Thinking About is the audio companion to jonrodebaugh.com — essays, investigations, historical deep dives, and occasional rabbit holes about history, technology, privacy, politics, culture, business, travel, theology, and the systems that shape the world around us. The topics change, but the questions remain: How did we get here? Who made the decisions? What incentives were at work? And does the story we’ve been told match the record? No daily outrage. No filler. Just things…
Episodes
- Things I've Been Thinking About
The Man I Was Taught to Fear Part 3 - The Case Against Gaddafi
The Man I Was Taught to Fear — Part III: The Case Against Gaddafi Muammar Gaddafi challenged Western oil companies, expelled foreign military forces and…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Birds of a Feather? — Everything the West Assumed About Muslims in Britain, and What the Data Actually Showed
Britain has spent years combining two very different stories into one argument about Muslims, immigration, and crime. In this episode, I examine the evidence…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
The Man I Was Taught to Fear Series: Part II — The Revolution Was About Sovereignty
In Part II of The Man I Was Taught to Fear, Jonathan Rodebaugh follows Muammar Gaddafi’s revolution into the struggle that would define Libya’s early years…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
The Fine Print of Freedom
Javier Milei came to power promising to free Argentina. In February 2026 his government signed a trade agreement with the United States, and one sentence in…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
The Man I Was Taught to Fear - Part 1 - The Man I Was Taught to Fear
For most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, Muammar Gaddafi arrived prepackaged as a villain: the dictator in the sunglasses, Reagan’s “mad dog of the Middle…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Ukraine: The War I Thought I Understood
Jon Rodebaugh runs a rubber hose plant in Ohio. In late 2019 he traveled to Kyiv, Dnipro and Lviv on a state-funded export trip, hired a translator for the…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
How I Know What I Think I Know
Before publishing more investigative history, I wanted to put my method on the record. This episode lays out the standard: where a worldview legitimately…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
DEATH TO AMERICA The History Behind the Chant Part VII - The Ledger
Death to America, Part VII: The Ledger Seven months into a war Congress never authorized, this is the accounting. On March 2, 2026, the Secretary of State told…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
The AI State That Wasn't There
Javier Milei came to power promising to take a chainsaw to the Argentine state. But while parts of the traditional bureaucracy were being dismantled, something…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
DEATH TO AMERICA The History Behind the Chant Part VI - The War Nobody Voted For
In Part VI of DEATH TO AMERICA: The History Behind the Chant, the story begins with fifteen-year-old “Nayirah,” whose testimony about Iraqi soldiers removing…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Stakehoder Capitalism: The Trojan Horse Nobody Voted For
Stakeholder capitalism begins with an appealing idea: corporations should consider employees, customers, communities, the environment, and society—not just…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
They Asked To Be Stopped
AI leaders went to the UN Security Council asking for standards, verification, reporting, and constraints on the race they are helping build. Then I dug into…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
DEATH TO AMERICA The History Behind the Chant Part V - Death to America
In Part V of DEATH TO AMERICA: The History Behind the Chant, we finally confront the phrase at the center of the series. What does “Death to America” actually…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You (ISO 9001:2026 Follow Up Post)
ISO 9001:2026 is finally here, so it is time to grade my predictions. Some of my concerns did not materialize. Others did, especially around stakeholder…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
AI Will Kill Everyone. What If the Crazy Part Isn’t the Warning
Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, believes the development of artificial superintelligence could end with human…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
DEATH TO AMERICA: The History Behind the Chant Part IV – The Deal
Part IV of DEATH TO AMERICA: The History Behind the Chant enters one of the strangest periods in the entire U.S.-Iran relationship. The American hostages are…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
ISO 9001:2026 or GSO 9001:2026? When a Quality Standard Stops Being About Quality
I’ve worked with ISO 9001 since 1997 and have seen firsthand how much a good quality system can improve a business. In this episode, I examine why the 2024…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
You Are Now A Person Of Interest
What happens when perfectly reasonable security measures begin connecting into something much larger? In this episode, we examine the emerging infrastructure…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Death to America - The History Behind the Chant - Part 3 - The Ayatollah
In Part III of DEATH TO AMERICA: The History Behind the Chant, we move from the documented 1953 coup to the much murkier revolution of 1979. The question is…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Enshittification Part III - We Did This to Ourselves
DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub take an already weakened fast-food model and somehow make it worse: more expensive, slower, colder, and dependent on another…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Death to America - The History Behind the Chant - Part 2 - The Coup
August 16, 1953: The coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had failed. The Shah fled the country. Mosaddegh remained in power. Three days…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Why I’m Only Buying Cars Made Before 1993
Modern cars are faster, safer, quieter, and more technologically advanced than anything we had thirty years ago. I still increasingly want nothing to do with…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Death to America - The History Behind the Chant - Part 1 - Who Owns Iran
Before the revolution, before the hostage crisis, before “Death to America,” there was a much older question: Who owns Iran? In Part I of Death to America: The…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
Enshittification and You
Everything gets worse — and somehow costs more. In this episode, I look at the slow enshittification of everyday life: subscriptions for features we already…
- Things I've Been Thinking About
The Not Yet is Now
For years, we talked about the surveillance state as something that might eventually arrive. The problem is that somewhere along the way, “not yet” became…