Podcast Roundup (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

It’s time again for another episode of What I’m Listening To.

In the past couple of years I’ve become a slave to podcasts. I rarely listen to music in the car anymore. I have Bluetooth speakers in the bedroom and the kitchen and earbuds in my purse at all times. My husband is … a saint.

In past columns, I’ve recommended several, including Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History,” “Stay Tuned with Preet [Bharara],” and the first season of “Slow Burn,” a podcast about Watergate.

The second season of “Slow Burn,” several months old now, was almost as good. It explored the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which may not have played out exactly the way you think it did. The primary criticism I’ve heard of it locally is that host Leon Neyfakh seemed to have avoided talking to anyone from Arkansas, but that may be provincialism talking.

“The Daily Standard,” hosted by longtime talk radio personality Charlie Sykes, died a sudden death in December, along with The Weekly Standard, the staunchly conservative but Never Trump magazine founded by Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. To my great relief, Sykes regrouped with an essentially identical podcast affiliated with The Bulwark, an online news site that became a gathering place for a number of Weekly Standard refugees.

For left-leaning politics, I get a weekly dose of “Political Gabfest.” (The most popular liberal podcast seems to be “Pod Save America,” but those people give me a headache.) I also like “FiveThirtyEight Politics” and “The Lawfare Podcast.”

I don’t live on politics alone, of course. The podosphere is full of management gurus and sales motivators, but I can’t seem to get interested in those. I have been fascinated by “Business Wars,” multi-episode explorations of infamous competitors — Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Nike vs. Adidas, Coke vs. Pepsi, etc. Thanks to “Business Wars,” I could probably hold my own in a discussion of Marvel vs. DC with an average 7-year-old.

“American Scandal,” like “Business Wars,” is produced by Wondery, one of the largest podcast networks, and they have a similar feel. Some “American Scandal” stories are business-related — the BALCO steroids scandal, the Exxon Valdez oil spill — but has also explored Iran Contra and a bizarre tale that was new to me, “The Hare Krishna Murders.”

True crime is a podcast staple, producing some of the earliest breakout hits like “Serial” and “In the Dark.” “Dirty John,” the story of a successful California businesswoman who married a criminal she believed to be a doctor, is worth a listen. It inspired a TV miniseries.

Overlong (or meticulous, take your pick) but worthwhile is a podcast called simply “Cold.” It recounts the disappearance and presumed murder of a young Utah mother who naively married into a toxic but strangely close-knit family. “Cold” has done a great service by encouraging victims of domestic abuse to get out.

Last week I followed a tweet to a single episode of a podcast I had never heard of. I’m not ready to recommend “behavioral finance expert” Daniel Crosby’s “Standard Deviations” in general, but his interview with business blogger Morgan Housel is worth an hour of your time, whether you are a CEO or a teenager.

The most practical takeaway: You don’t have to be a professional stock-picker to make good investment decisions. Dollar-cost averaging — that is, investing a set number of dollars on a regular schedule, regardless of market conditions — and low-cost index funds over a long period of time will put you in the top quintile of investors or better.

The most thought-provoking: A discussion of “the just-world fallacy,” which is the assumption that wealth is the result of effort or brilliance and poverty is the result of laziness or stupidity. Luck, good and bad, is a real thing.

Crosby and Housel discuss — as Malcomb Gladwell did in his book “Outliers” — the fact that Bill Gates, by sheer luck, had access to a mainframe computer when he was in junior high in the late 1960s. Bill Gross, the billionaire bond fund manager, started his business in time for interest rates to rise into the teens. Would he have the same success if he had started at 2%? Forbes has declared Kylie Jenner, at 21, the youngest self-made billionaire — if you define self-made as not inherited. But would she be a billionaire if she were not the half-sister of the infamous Kardashians?

“All three of those individuals … were very smart and very talented and they deserve to be treated as successful people and viewed as successful people who put in a tremendous amount of effort, and that effort had a contribution to their success,” Housel said.

“But we should not pretend that it was just their effort. There were these elements that were outside their control … And, just as important, it’s true for the majority of poor people as well.”

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