So Many Podcasts, So Little Time (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

The podcasting universe keeps expanding, and keeping my podcast subscriptions curated is as hard as limiting my purchases at a Trader Joe’s. (Yes, I’m excited about the new TJ’s in Little Rock.) I’m still listening to some of the podcasts I’ve recommended in the past — Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History,” “Stay Tuned with Preet [Bharara],” “Political Gabfest” and “The Lawfare Podcast.”

I’m still faithful to “The Bulwark,” which honored me with an invitation to join the podcast in July to talk about the race massacre at Elaine in 1919. (You can listen to me umm and uhh at Podcast.TheBulwark.com.) My nervous system needs a regular infusion of Never Trump conservatives lest I forget that conservatism hasn’t always been synonymous with appeasing dictators and protectionist trade wars.

Earlier this month TheBulwark.com, a refuge for conservative pundits displaced by the closing of The Weekly Standard late last year, introduced a second podcast: “Beg to Differ.” It seems promising, with host Mona Charen and regular panelists Linda Chavez, Bill Galston and Damon Linker.

Lawfare, a blog and podcast traditionally focused on national security issues, has produced a limited-series podcast called “The Report,” which turns the Mueller report into an easier to digest narrative. Highly recommended, even for those of us who actually read nearly 450 pages.

“Trump Inc.,” a podcast project of ProPublica, has spent a year and a half digging around in President Trump’s businesses since he, unlike his predecessors, felt no need to either divest from his private business interests or to be transparent about them. Even if you aren’t worried about his conflicts of interest — like the one he said he had in Turkey, long before he decided to do Turkish President Erdoan a favor by abandoning our Kurdish ISIS-fighting allies in northern Syria — the episode about Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is a mind-blowing story that would interest anyone in business. Every small-business owner could use the lightning-strike of spectacular good luck that Parscale got.

On the other extreme is “Spectacular Failures.”

Over the summer, this podcast from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management recounted reversals of business fortune past (like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker’s Heritage USA and Schlitz Beer) and present (Movie Pass and Toys R Us).

There might even be a worthwhile moral to some of those stories.

Politics and business obviously occupy a lot of my time and my podcast bandwidth, and the former can be especially stressful and even depressing. That’s why I’m glad I took Malcomb Gladwell’s advice and subscribed to a new podcast from his production company. “The Happiness Lab” is the podcast I needed right now, and I don’t think I’m alone.

The host, Laurie Santos, is a psychology professor at Yale University, where in the spring semester of 2018 she began offering a class called “Psychology and the Good Life.” Rather than the 35-or-so students she expected to enroll, 1,200 signed up. Her lectures on the science of happiness were posted online for thousands more to view, and now she’s repurposed the material in podcast form.

As Santos drills into every lesson — at this writing, four episodes had been posted — what we think will make us happy is often at odds with what science has proven over and over. Most of us understand that money can’t really buy happiness — and that it can, in fact, create great misery — yet we still tend to think that we aren’t quite at the optimum income for maximum happiness. (Spoiler alert: After our basic human needs are met, more money really doesn’t increase life satisfaction.) Money is not the only thing we commonly seek even though it won’t make us happier and may, in fact, make us less happy. The Oct. 7 episode, called “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude,” begins with the invention of the ATM, meant to avoid the common annoyance of standing in a slow-moving bank teller line. From there, Santos dives into the scientific evidence that humans in general are happier if we have regular interaction with other humans — even total strangers. Yes, even self-identified introverts are genuinely happier if they engage in brief conversations or work on small tasks with other people on a regular basis. Oh, and here’s another spoiler: Winning isn’t everything.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.