I've listened to all of that episode, but I must say that I disagreed with a lot of it. But I still want to thank you for linking it! It's good to hear stuff I disagree with, to force me out of my comfort zone

One guest said something like "countries giving lots of free crap, like universal healthcare, to their people" while he was making a point about something else entirely

My point here isn't to defend universal healthcare (I do support it) but to say that the dismissive approach ("crap") isn't very serious or educational. There's a tendency among certain people to pretend that certain things (especially economics topics, but also some cultural and religious topics) are "obvious" and therefore to bully the audience into switching their brain off. And they tend to do it precisely with their weakest arguments

Anyway, about proof of stake. I agree that PoS is bad, but the episode again didn't speak clearly. I had to think deeply myself to fill in the blanks. They just got angry about how crap it is, without calmly explaining.

The way I see it, the problem with PoS is that a group of people with a lot of Ether could collude to very very quickly compute a long chain and force a big reorg, perhaps to do double spending. And it would be quite cheap for them - î.e. minimal electricity cost.

Have I described the PoS problem well?