Hit podcast 'Heavyweight' launches new season

NINA MOINI: Roughly 10 years ago, a podcast host named Jonathan Goldstein and his friend Gregor flew to Los Angeles. Jonathan was there to help his friend confront the famous musician Moby over a set of CDs he'd borrowed and never returned.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Insofar as me coming here with you, how do you feel about me as an interlocutor?

GREGOR: I'm actually full of dread, mostly because of that.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: What is that supposed to mean?

GREGOR: Because I recognize that I need an interlocutor--Roughly I did say that, and I do believe it. I think that you're going to be a lousy interlocutor.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: What do-- you think I'm going to embarrass you in front of your famous friends?

GREGOR: Yes, yes, yes.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: That's what you're afraid of?

GREGOR: Yes.

NINA MOINI: Well, it turns out that Jonathan Goldstein is, in fact, a really good interlocutor. And he created a hit show out of helping people talk through troubling moments from their past-- it's called Heavyweight-- that clip we heard was from.

The second episode released back in 2016, and Goldstein now lives here in the Twin Cities, and today, he and his team are launching a new season that's been a long time coming. He joins me on the line now. Thanks so much for your time today, Jonathan.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

NINA MOINI: I'm excited to talk about this. I was listening to some of your episodes earlier, and I really just connected so much with just the everydayness of what's going on, even in your exchange there with your buddy Gregor. It's just the everyday things that we do that are so significant.

And so you've been on this two-year hiatus now. And now you're back, you're with a new company, Pushkin. How does it feel to have this relaunch moment today?

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: It feels-- well, it's really nerve-wracking, but overall, it's just felt great. The time away has, I think, really helped me to appreciate how much I missed it and how much I liked doing this kind of thing.

NINA MOINI: Why does it feel nerve-wracking, I wonder.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: The nerve-wracking, I think, is just like we're in the midst of production and just worried about-- we're juggling a whole bunch of different episodes at the same time.

NINA MOINI: Sure.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Just trying to make them as good as we can, I think.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And so Gregor, who we talked about there, the episode, way back in the beginning he was with you, but today, he's also a part of the story for your newest episode. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what it's about?

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, sure. Well, it's an episode that was five years in the making. Gregor and I had begun having conversations some years back about another problem that he was having, which is one that, just in terms of what you're saying about the everyday lifeness of the stories, this one is really something that I think a lot of us, if not all of us, go through, which is he was grappling with trying to move his parents, who, at the time, were pushing 90, out of their very cluttered Victorian three-floor home. And that was becoming an emotional drama.

And, again, after all my success with getting his CDs back from Moby, volunteered my efforts. And a lot of cockamamieness ensues.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And I really like that some of your earlier episodes, it seems like, and I think throughout, were mostly about people that you do you know, like friends, family, your mother, all these people. But then you also have, of course, talked to people that you don't. Does it feel any different in those two scenarios for you?

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, it felt very different because-- so like you're saying, yeah, the first season was friends and family and people who I generally felt comfortable with. And then you've quickly run out of those people and those stories, and then we needed to open the gates to our listeners.

And it kind of flipped the whole paradigm on its head in a way in that-- like, in the first season, I was starting off with people that I really loved and cared about. And in the second season, it was strangers. And I grew to really care about them.

And it was-- the thing that I couldn't have anticipated, too, was that I was being regarded as a kind of expert in this field that wasn't really a field at all. Like, the thing that I was doing with them was something that I'd kind of concocted. But the look of hope and expectation and trust and all of that they were looking towards me with was, like, I really just felt like I had to rise to the occasion.

NINA MOINI: I think you have. I mean, you have such a dedicated fan base. People were so excited for the new episodes and for you to be back out there. I understand there's a whole subreddit devoted to the show where people have made starter lists of their favorite episodes.

You know what I really like about it, too, is that in this day and age of maybe more of self-helpy types of podcasts-- I'm not a podcast expert, but there's a lot of people trying to fix something or tell you really outright, here's your attachment style or here's your this or here's your that.

And I feel like what you're doing is you're helping to heal people in a way that is just through storytelling that's so relatable, not that that's the only way that people should-- please still seek therapy, but you know what I mean? It's these everyday lessons, and you walk away thinking, I didn't really outright learn something, but I really feel like I learned something.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. I like the way that you put that. Yeah, that's apt. Yeah, it's that-- I think, in a lot of cases, people don't get the thing that they were setting out in search of. In fact, actually, with the Gregor story, in truth, he never really got those CDs back from Moby.

But had he gotten them back, the episode might have been like five, 10 minutes long. But I think it's the struggle with a lot of these episodes oftentimes a thing that people are looking for in the episodes, whether it's CD collection or the return of-- in one story, someone lost a parrot decades earlier. Another one was like someone lost a family heirloom, a gun that had been captured by Nazis from their grandfather.

And a bit of a MacGuffin, the Maltese Falcon kind of thing, like where it's the process, I think, of getting there. It's the object that we're seeking that releases the emotion. I think it's the release of emotion that really is the thing that ultimately we're trying to get at.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, that idea that something that was unresolved is maybe not resolved, but at least it's out there in the open and it's talked about. Do you ever have moments-- I listened to one episode with your mother where she really was reluctant for five days-- I think for several days to come out with that. And that's your mom.

So I wonder, how do you warm up to people and build enough of a rapport for them to say, hey, this is something unresolved that I've buried for years, but I'm going to tell you about it and you're going to record it?

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Right. Yeah, it's funny. Eventually I started to realize that, oh, there was something about just the business model of creating a podcast based on things that people don't want to do that they've been deferring, in some cases, for decades.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, that is difficult, and sometimes it just really takes a lot of time. There was one episode that was with a Minnesotan family here. It was just before I actually moved here, and it was with-- it involved the subject's mom, who needed to write a letter, a very important one.

And just to get her to sit down and do it took years. But once she sat down, she did it. So I think patients-- some of our episodes end up sitting on the shelf for years because as important as it is for us, or as difficult it is as it is for us to produce, it's the subjects who are really putting themselves out there, and we're demanding a lot of them in terms of their time and emotion and effort. So sometimes we just have to do it on their clock.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, yeah, for sure, because that's the only way it's going to be authentic and bring them, hopefully, what it is that they're needing. I wonder, too, since the podcast has been around for so long now, how it's evolved over time, or maybe with this new season or this new chapter, is there anything you're, again, pushing yourself to go for? Or what can people expect this season?

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: I think the range of stories. There's, there's one story that's about a 14-year-old bank robber. There's another one that's about 102-year-old woman who rediscovers a box of old letters from her past, from a fiancee, and she finds herself falling in love again at the age of 102.

So, I don't know. I think it's the range. I think because we were on hiatus for as long as we were, we have some stories that needed endings or key people that we needed to talk to that ended up coming through. So some of these stories have been like a few years in the making.

NINA MOINI: Sure. Well, I'm so excited for you, Jonathan, and thank you so much for your work and for coming by Minnesota Now.

JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.

NINA MOINI: Of course. All the best to you. Jonathan Goldstein is the host and creator of the podcast Heavyweight. He lives in Minneapolis.