My efforts to make this a monthly blog where I review podcasts have so far failed. Nevertheless, better occasional than never. So here’s a few of the podcasts I’ve listened to over recent months that I enjoyed for one reason or another.
MOI Global – This Week in Intelligent Investing
Format: Conversational/Roundtable
The stock market is in an interesting place. While last year saw a recession and of course a pandemic, the government and federal response effectively reversed the bear market and sent stock to new all-time highs by last summer, a run that continued through the start of 2021. That, along with a lot more time on people’s hands, stimulus dollars going to people who didn’t need them quite as much or who wanted to gamble/have fun, and many other entertainment options shutting down led to a ton of new investors in the market.
There have also been a ton of new podcasts as well, as people look for guidance or entertainment along with their investing. Podcasts also fit in well to business models that are relevant in financial content, whether subscriptions, memberships, communities, or what have you.
This Week in Intelligent Investing launched last summer, and not having remembered that, I am surprised it’s only been around that long. Hosted by John Mihaljevic, chairman of Manual of Ideas (MOI), the show is sort of like the old ESPN Sports Reporters program for the markets. Mihaljevic hosts, both organizing the episodes and contributing with his take, while the panel of guests each bring a topic for discussion. These are not off the cuff efforts, and it’s clear each host has prepared for what they want to say. It gives enough structure to anchor each episode while also affording room for each person on the episode to respond, riff, etc.
One thing interesting from an investing perspective is that the host/guests are all investment professionals in some form or another, and the takeaway I usually infer from the episodes I listen to is that investing isn’t easy, i.e. there’s a great deal of uncertainty out there and investors have to manage that. I would imagine its audience skews towards professional or fuller-time investors, and the conversation is suited for it. Mentioning that because the next show takes a different approach.
7investing – The 7investing Podcast
Format: Conversational/Roundtable
7Investing launched in March 2020; again, I’m surprised it’s a new podcast as the host/panel seems to be very comfortable in the format. That format is also a roundtable conversation. The host – usually Dan Kline – does more of the work in terms of introducing the topics, and the conversations are more quick hit, pass the mic around affairs. It’s enjoyable, and targeted more towards people in the beginning of their investing careers. Which is interesting in part because part of the dynamic over the last year or two is that beginning investors who are picking fast growing companies are doing well, no matter how expensive those companies become (in relative terms to how much money they make).
7Investing has a subscription service, and brings that to the forefront of their show somewhat regularly, in the place of having an advertiser. They do occasional interviews, but more of the episodes I’ve heard are in the conversational format. Some of the shows appear to be livestreamed – they publish almost daily, as far as I can tell – and are useful as a way to build community among their subscribers.
My sense from listening is that 7Investing’s their aim is to make investing appear approachable and simpler than it seems. Which, there is something to that – if you are looking to control your own finances, have money saved that you can invest, are looking to a longer-term horizon, can be patient when things go bad, etc., investing can be relatively simple. The recent period has been a weird one that has rewarded just about every sort of investor, and there’s a risk (likelihood?) that some of them – including new ones – will be hurt as the environment changes.
But, I guess part of why I’m lining these two podcasts up is to highlight the value of figuring out/cultivating one’s audience, and making sure the content matches that audience.
Futuro Media – In the Thick
Format: Conversational
Speaking of conversational…In The Thick is produced by Futuro Media – which also produces Latino USA, a public radio stalwart and one of the first ‘podcasts’ I started regularly listening to a few years ago. In the Thick is a more casual affair. I started listening in the wake of the election, looking to confront or dissipate the disappointment over the mixed result for Democrats and get context on all the discussion around the Latin@ vote. The perspective both from the hosts – Maria Hinojosa, a legend herself and a leading journalist, and Julio Ricardo Varela – and guests who held local insight in places like Arizona and Georgia – was very valuable in that context and just in general. Living out of the states, and being in mostly white or conventional liberal bubbles when I’m there, I find myself sort of perceiving ‘The Discourse’ without really being immersed in it (which, by the way, it has always been such a privilege to be able to exist in the world without running into cable TV news randomly on). I’d like to get beyond the Twitter bubble, and I’m not always sure In The Thick steps out of that, but at the very least it’s informing the listener from a different angle.
And, just as relevantly, it’s always entertaining as well. Can’t miss the no pendejas (no bullshit) segment.
Sway
Format: Interview
Kara Swisher is another one of the biggest names in journalism, and this is a power play, literally. The ambit of the show is to explore power, and it allows her to do a bunch of timely news things, like speaking to the CEO of Parler – in an interview cited in Amazon’s letter booting Parler off of Amazon Web Services – or more cultural zeitgeist topics, like interviewing Brene Brown. It’s hard to break fresh ground with a lot of these figures, because they have what they want to say hardwired into their brains, but it’s still a model of interviewing all the same.
And what’s interesting to note about this is the role a podcast can play in our media landscape. In the past you might have magazine profiles, or television interviews – Katie Couric or the weekly programs like those hosted by Barbara Walters come to mind – but relatively long and substantive conversations with important people from all fields, it’s perfect for the podcast format and also sort of amazing that it’s happening on a podcast. I don’t know what the listenership is like, though a New York Times home page spot is not a bad top of funnel to get ears for a show, and the types of guests she’s had – I’ve listened to episodes with Killer Mike, Nancy Pelosi, Lina Khan, Dara Khosrowshahi, and John Fetterman – show that at least her guests are taking this seriously.
The Promise
Format: Documentary/Reporting
I listened to season 1 of the Promise in September, right around the same time I listened to Nice White Parents and Fiasco. That timing was a coincidence; I was interested in The Promise because I was looking for local city reporting, not necessarily public education. But Season 2, which came out this fall, was on public schools in Nashville, leading to it being lumped in with the other two shows. I finally got around to listening to Season 2 towards the end of the year.
Season 1 focuses on the renewal efforts for the Cayce housing projects, a public housing neighborhood in East Nashville, a gentrifying part of a gentrifying city. Someone I know recently bought a house nearby and that was enough of a hook for me. I found the show fascinating, full of surprise turns, interesting issues, and colorful characters.
It raised questions to, on a production level. On the one hand, there is a gap between the quality of production on Nice White Parents and Fiasco, though that’s not that important. I found the perspective more challenging, and I say this imagining myself in the same challenging spot were I to host a show like this. Meribah Knight comes off as a well-meaning, earnest reporter, earlier in her career than not, and white, reporting on a Black neighborhood. All that’s fine, and I think she does a good job, but there are times where people got set up as characters, such as Big Man or Miss Vernell, and seemed to fill ‘classic’ roles or types. It’s part of the tension of telling a story about real people, but also there is something about the dynamics of who is telling the story and how.
That said, season 2 is a big leap, the way that, say, a band will release a promising debut and then follow it up with a fantastic second album. The production is more polished both in sound/music and in telling the story. But even more, Knight seems much more confident in how she tells the story. She takes on a clear viewpoint. Her perspective as a parent who will face decisions about where her child goes to elementary school may invest her with more of a stake. And then within the broader (presumably coincidental) context of the other education/integration-oriented podcasts, this provides a well-reported, historically rooted context and example on how integration is falling apart in a U.S. city. And then to have an episode on the COVID period makes it all the more relevant and powerful.
There are touches of awkwardness around constructing a story, mostly in the elevating of people into the role of characters, like BJ, the 4th grader who was putting it together in school before the pandemic hit. But Knight makes clear that it’s not just her who’s worried about someone like BJ, it’s the adults around him.
Moby Dick Energy
Format: Deep dive/Conversational
I live outside of the U.S., and have for many a year. I dreamed once of being a journalist, and to my surprise I’ve had a career that is sort of adjacent to journalism, but I’m not quite sure I can call myself a man of the pen, or the keyboard, or even the microphone. And beyond that, I live outside of whatever bubble I might aspire towards, whatever social circles or networks. Not that I can claim a full lament, I’ve been very lucky in many ways, but sometimes I look across the ocean, digital or physical, and think of what is out there, what might have been, if I had dared in other ways.
In this pandemic year, above keeping ourselves safe and virus free the hierarchy of needs has flowed to how to stay sane and then how to spend the time that we weren’t spending in the world, with other people, or otherwise. One of the things many people did – I did – was read classic books, like Moby Dick. Another of the things many people did – I did – was launch podcasts. Finding solace in our own and others’ voices, and in the tales of yore, it’s a common ground, an escape and a reminder of the mess we find ourselves in at the same time.
Moby Dick Energy, a podcast hosted by another leading journalist, Talia Lavin, is a study in what a podcast can be. It is, for one, not always of high fidelity, except for its theme song which is of the highest quality one can ask for (the cover art is pretty great as well). The sound of the conversation quakes, there are pauses and filler words kept, there is – at least in the first six episodes, which I confess is all I have gotten through so far, in part because I’m not sure whether it’s best to re-read the newly read Moby Dick, or whether it even matters – a sense of Lavin still working out how she wants to lead or direct a conversation, with left turns away from the guest’s momentum, or restatements of a point.
And yet, all of these surface level things don’t matter, because at its heart, the podcast demonstrates what a podcast can be. Digressive, silly, profound, patient, and stretched out, it dives into one of the foundational works of American literature and exposes it for its relevance and also for how funny and weird it is. It’s sort of like how everybody talks about Kafka laughing when he read his work in public, and how no, actually, you’re not smart enough for not getting the humor; except that in this case everyone is in on the joke except maybe Melville, and it makes the book’s (and thus the podcast’s) ambition even grander for tackling a whaling voyage to the depths.
Lavin is also connected to other smart people and many of them; I chortled throughout the first episode with the David Roth of Defector, and scanning the guest list to come, I find a number of impressive heads, err, names that she has managed to bring on. A sense of community, of embarking on a voyage together from around the world, isn’t that the best of what a podcast does? And most remarkable, perhaps, is that the show set off before the pandemic hit, even though it seems like the most perfect response to the pandemic in its way.
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That’s it for the full reviews. I hope you check some of them out and enjoy them and maybe get some ideas for how to make your own podcasts, or how to make them better. A few other shows I’ve listened to recently and have enjoyed / am enjoying include KRCW’s Lost Notes, iHeart Radio’s Forgotten: The Women of Juarez, Chicano Squad, and Anything for Selena. I might go over them next time, we’ll see.