3 Podcasts

It’s a problem of long standing: what do you do when you’re doing something else—I mean driving, biking, cooking, washing dishes? What do you do, in other words, when your body is occupied with a task but only a portion of your brain? Music has long provided an answer. Music, however, is often pushed into the background of an overactive monkey mind. Recorded books can work, I find, but the prose has to be calibrated just right, compelling but not so dense as to require backing up and rereading. That’s a narrow sweet spot. Most of the books I want to read require more attention than I can give them in the kitchen, in the garden, or behind the wheel.

Now we have podcasts in the mix. Because they seem to be calibrated precisely for activities like the commute, the sweet spot is easier to hit. Talk-show-like podcasts or podcasts that gather experts to chat can be good, but the ones I like most are the highly produced serials. In fact, if I could choose another way to make a living, I’d work on one of these slick podcast series, one dealing with history and ideas.

Here are three that I’ve enjoyed. Chances are, you’ve already heard of them. But if you’re like me, you haven’t gotten around to all the good ones yet and recommendations are welcome.

1. Slow Burn, Season Two (8 episodes, almost 6 hours total, plus extras; Slate Plus). The first two seasons of Slow Burn take on the impeachment of US presidents. Season one is good, about Nixon and Watergate, but it was season two, about Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal, that really unsettled my world. In fact, after about five hours into it, I had to come to a sober re-accounting. Oh, I still found Linda Tripp, Ken Starr, and William Bennett to be self-serving scoundrels. And no, maybe conviction in the Senate wasn’t called for, exactly. But I found myself changing my mind on just about everything else, as well as feeling not a little shame to remember the ways, back in the day, I came to Bill Clinton’s defense. Part of this may be attributed to #MeToo and the general raising of consciousness. But a good deal of it was simply learning things I didn’t know. The podcast format provided both the occasion and a depth of information I wouldn’t have got otherwise.

I usually avoid counterfactuals. Season two of Slow Burn made for an exception here, too. What if Clinton had done the brave thing, the right thing, and resigned? Let Gore take over. We might be doing something about the climate by now. We might not have the disgrace in office we have today.

2. The Dream (11 episodes, roughly 40 minutes each; Stitcher). This series explores the history and institutionalization of pyramid schemes in the United States, in the form of MLMs, Multi-Level Marketing companies. It shows where entrepreneurship meets hucksterism and dianetics-like mind control. The Dream’s non-linear path fits the many ways it approaches its topic—historically, culturally, legally, and as personal experience. Its source documents are delicious, for example, a 1967 motivational recording titled Happiness and Success by William Penn Patrick. Patrick founded Holiday Magic, an MLM, and an organization called Leadership Dynamics. In case you’re looking for something inspirational, perhaps to read to students on the first day of class, here’s an excerpt:

This leads me to the point of the principle which I have discovered as the foundation of my security and happiness, which is success. My first inclination is to do as most men do, that is to confuse the issue by a lengthy analysis of the several specific issues available. A volume of one million pages could be written on the general subject … Since I do not wish to enhance my ego, and since my purpose is to sincerely share with everyone those things that I have discovered to be true, I will only give you the principle, knowing that when you understand the principle, you will then apply it to the many available issues before you.

Avon, Mary Kay, Herbal Life, Amway—what is it about soap, cosmetics, and home products that make them so central to these scams? Here’s one place where the devaluing of the economics of care and the household intersects with women’s history. On this blog, I’ve written about double binds, positive feedback loops, and the absurdity at the center of a growth-addicted economy. From a certain distance, Kuznets Curve, MLMs, and concept of Manifest Destiny take the same shape. We can solve the social and economic problems caused by MLM recruitment, GDP growth, and spatial expansion. All we have to do is grow more, expand westward, and sign up another batch of recruits.

3. Cocaine and Rhinestones (15 episodes, 1.5-2 hours each; independently produced). This one is an outlier, neither a well-resourced, highly produced serial nor a talk show with experts. It consists of a single person reading aloud from his own script. The topic is twentieth century country music and the person is Tyler Mahan Coe, the son of David Allan Coe, an artist of the 70s, Waylon and Willie outlaw era. Tyler was born around the peak of his father’s popularity and was a troubled kid who dropped out of high school. His father taught him guitar and put him in the touring band. The podcast focuses on the lesser-known aspects of the country music genre, on semi-obscure figures such as Spade Cooley, Ralph Mooney, Jeanie C. Riley, and Don Rich.

“I’ve heard these stories all my life,” says Coe in his introduction, and what follows is the result of prodigious effort to find out if the stories are true. Coe has a historian’s soul—an inherent respect for fact and an inherent suspicion of the documents that purport to reveal it. He doesn’t tell stories simply to tell them but to serve a broader interpretation. Although untrained, he understands the apparatus of a research project. To each episode he adds an additional segment, a discussion of sources and methodology, which lasts the better part of an hour. He isn’t doing this because a dissertation committee or a university press requires it, but simply to head off the hate mail of angry listeners who challenge his work. Untrained, too, in voice-over, his style of delivery is off-putting at first but eventually endearing. The word emphatic comes to mind.

Coe’s hard work has paid off. The podcast he produced in his hours off from his current tech job has become an unexpected hit. Season two is in progress and has likely drawn sponsors. Even better, he’s been offered full access to the archives at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. All this makes me smile. It also tempts me to revise in emphasis the sentence above about alternative employment.