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\n \u201cI feel like an outsider artist who just happened to win the lottery,\u201d says Heavyweight host Jonathan Goldstein. \u201cThere was never a formula.\u201d
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Courtesy of Spotify\n <\/p>\n
Time might not heal all wounds, but Jonathan Goldstein can take care of some of the rest. As the host and creator of the podcast Heavyweight<\/a>, he acts as a kind of time-traveling therapist, helping people shoulder regrets that never quite went away: a pain, a mystery, a grievance, a memory. Goldstein and his team chase answers the old-fashioned way, by making phone calls and getting on planes in a bid to literally confront the past. The stories run wide. A woman wants to revisit the people who bullied her as an adolescent. A man in his 50s wants to find the one person who was kind to him when he was accidentally shot 30 years ago. One guy just wants Moby to give his CDs back. The show\u2019s magic lies in the bittersweet unpredictability of its journeys, which, much like life itself, rarely resolve the way you expect.<\/p>\n Launched in 2016, Heavyweight was one of Gimlet Media\u2019s crown jewels and one of the last survivors of the so-called golden age of narrative podcasting. (The other survivor is Science Vs, which continues to publish to this day.) Goldstein \u2014 a Brooklyn-born Canadian radio producer who spent a decade making CBC\u2019s Wiretap and later produced for This American Life \u2014 found in Heavyweight the perfect vessel for his singular voice: wry, dry, melancholic, and affirming all at once. The show is beloved, and its acclaim cemented his place among the medium\u2019s most gifted operators.<\/p>\n But recent years have been unkind. Spotify has since largely abandoned the narrative format. Gimlet has since died. The platform officially canceled Heavyweight at the end of 2023<\/a> and laid off Goldstein and his team, which included producers Stevie Lane and Kalila Holt. For a year, the show hung in limbo, until February, when Pushkin Industries, the company founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg (and now led by Gretta Cohn), stepped in to revive it.<\/p>\n Now, the show returns on September 18 with a new ten-episode season, at least eight of which will be classic Heavyweight narratives. The show has already begun adapting to a new podcast world in its own way, keeping its feed alive with updates from past subjects and short episodes written by Goldstein. He isn\u2019t opposed to the podcast world\u2019s tilt toward video and chat, but he\u2019s clear-eyed about himself. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this long enough to know what my strongest suits are,\u201d he told Vulture. And those suits are straightforward: making stories, well told, about people and the lives they live.<\/p>\n The show finally comes back in a few weeks. How do you feel at this stage? Given that you\u2019re still in the thick of it, are you able to talk about what we should expect? Time is at the core of Heavyweight, between the long histories your subjects carry and the years your team sometimes spends chasing leads that don\u2019t pan out. But time has become a scarce commodity in this business, and I\u2019m wondering if your process shifted since that first season. Photo: Pushkin\n <\/p>\n Part of it was informed by necessity; we have to do more with less time and less manpower. But our desperation is also always a factor. Sometimes it\u2019s useful. It pushes us to make certain stories work, which can mean digging harder in the writing. The richest stories are usually the ones where at some point I get this terrible feeling of What have I gotten us into? Have I made things worse? And then coming out the other end of that is really gratifying. Sometimes not getting the thing you want can force me and the producers to think differently, and that\u2019s often where the emotion comes from. It gives it a nice dynamic. I don\u2019t have a very enthusiastic personality, and maybe in the absence of that, a kind of flailing desperation takes its place \u2014 and that\u2019s what has me saying \u201cyes\u201d to the world and to possibility.<\/p>\n Has your approach to finding stories changed over time? I try to draw from my own life as much as I can. The first season was largely stories from me or my family, but you run out of those quickly. There\u2019s no real rule. Things have come in all kinds of weird ways. Time is a wonderful luxury, but serendipity is also really beautiful. It\u2019s that feeling of reaching into the slush pile and finding something that has a real magic to it that can get the listeners onboard. That was a component of S-Town<\/a> too, which is so great. Part of the magic there is that this guy just wrote Brian Reed, who took it seriously and found the story.<\/p>\n During the pandemic, I had time to have conversations with people I normally wouldn\u2019t have indulged in the same way. That\u2019s how we got the Barbara two-parter<\/a>. My wife said, \u201cHey, give my mom a call. She might have something for you.\u201d It felt like a very small thing, but it led to this long-lost friend of hers who was convicted of murdering her own mother. We\u2019re not a murder-y type show, but that presented itself in a way that was fluky. So luck plays a role too.<\/p>\n What has your experience been like since joining Pushkin? Do you feel any pressure to adapt to the modern podcast economy? Like doing stuff with video, perhaps? Back when I was in Canada, I did a show called Wiretap<\/a> for 11 years. I was on contract for ten months of the year, and I made 26 half-hour episodes with another producer plus maybe a part-time producer. That\u2019s almost 300 episodes over 11 years. And I liked doing that. It was more of an anthology, more experimental. I started doing Heavyweight at a time when Serial had just come out, and it felt like the bar was set at this new height. I thought, This is the thing I never got a chance to do before. It\u2019s exciting, and this feels like the form I\u2019m probably the best at.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard not to welcome Heavyweight back and not think about how it\u2019s among the very last survivors of the original Gimlet Media slate. When you look back on that era, what stands out to you now? I remember that office. Very narrow. Lots of brick. Did you ever think it could have lasted so much longer? It always just felt like I was doing what I wanted to do, and I was supported. That was cool. I don\u2019t know if it could have gone on. Even when the show was canceled at Spotify, I felt like, \u201cOh, this probably went on longer than I thought it would.\u201d And I was grateful for it.<\/p>\n You went a while without making the show. During that time, did you pursue another project? So I was writing more prose. Are you familiar with Joe Frank?<\/p>\n Oh yeah.
Nauseous. Unenthusiastic. Just high anxiety. The episodes aren\u2019t done yet. We\u2019ve got about four at various stages of completion and four we haven\u2019t even gotten into. All the recordings are in, though sometimes you realize you\u2019re missing something and have to get more, but right now we\u2019re in the writing and tape-cutting phase.<\/p>\n
Oh yeah. I\u2019m only being slightly facetious when I say I\u2019m nauseous, but I\u2019m excited for the episodes to exist in the world. I\u2019m not always enthusiastic about the work to make it so, but we\u2019re realizing because of the yearlong gap \u2014 due to the show\u2019s cancellation and us getting laid off \u2014 we actually had more time to sit with some stories. At least three of them cover a longer-than-typical span of time. One spans five years, another three years, another four years. Some of these episodes had been sitting on the shelf, waiting for an ending or certain people to talk. So it feels quite special to have a podcast that can span that much time.<\/p>\n
Sure. Early on, we\u2019d juggle 20 or 30 leads. We\u2019d do interviews for them. We\u2019d carefully consider them. This time, maybe because I\u2019d been out of the game and had a renewed appreciation for the work, I was saying \u201cyes\u201d to more leads in a way I think was surprising to my producers.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/f821588f113b8568bc876ec54460c1994e-heavyweightpodcast.rsquare.w570.jpg\")
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These days it mostly comes from people pitching us, since we really need their buy-in. The stories demand so much of their time, energy, and emotion, so it\u2019s usually a better idea if they come to us.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been good. Pretty similar to how we\u2019ve always worked, but with some new perks. I\u2019d already been remote well before the pandemic \u2014 we moved to Minnesota in 2019 \u2014 so the team dynamic hasn\u2019t changed much. But by the end of our Spotify run, a lot of the people that we used to work with were gone. That was a loss. At Pushkin, we have that back. We invite people from different shows to sit in on table reads and things like that.<\/p>\n
I just want to make work, you know? I want to be able to do enough to make it sustainable, but not such that it\u2019s going to compromise the ability to achieve some sort of excellence. We\u2019re doing some shorter episodes, like one about me quitting drinking that I don\u2019t think I would\u2019ve done otherwise. Maybe I\u2019ll have more to say about this at the end of the season, but right now we\u2019re trying to do what we do as we have. I\u2019m not averse philosophically to doing video or chatty stuff, but I\u2019ve been doing this long enough to know what my strongest suits are. Though, who knows \u2014 again, desperation breeds all kinds of hitherto unknown talents.<\/p>\n
I went to Gimlet when I was already in my mid-40s, so I had a great appreciation for having struggled. I struggled enough to know that it was a really cool time. People talk about being born too late or too early or whatever, but I knew even at the time it was golden. I got to work with friends and people whose work I admired, and it all started off sitting around a table. I think that must\u2019ve been when I first met you, when you came by the old office.<\/p>\n
It felt nostalgic even in the moment, like the beginning of one of those movies. I had just moved from Canada to New York. My kid was just born. I had just gotten married. It felt like a very exciting time, and I felt lucky to have that at a later stage in the game when people often feel like they\u2019re at the end of something. So I look back on it with fondness.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know. I\u2019ve never had a head for the business side or how the industry might shift. Sitting in my Minnesota attic, I feel like an outsider artist who just happened to win the lottery. There was never a formula. The first episode was a story about my dad and his brother Sheldon<\/a> who were reuniting in their 80s, so it wasn\u2019t like, \u201cThis is how we\u2019re going to make a killing. It\u2019s going to capture so much of the sought-after octogenarian market.\u201d<\/p>\n
I tried to write a YA novel, but the publisher was sort of like, \u201cThis doesn\u2019t seem like a good book for kids. It doesn\u2019t seem to have very good values.\u201d But it\u2019s always been a dream of mine to write one. It just turned out to mostly be my thoughts and anxieties in the mouth of a 12-year-old, which I thought might somehow make it seem cuter. Evidently, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m always so curious about his legacy, because he was such a big influence on me. I once interviewed him around the time I was wrestling with whether I should be writing books instead of making radio. Writing prose and books seemed like a loftier calling. I knew he\u2019d done a book of short stories, so I asked him, \u201cDo you regret not focusing more on writing books?\u201d He said \u201cno.\u201d The opposite, actually. Publishing the one book he did was a mistake, because his talent was in telling stories through broadcast. That was good for me to hear. It helped me square things, to focus on appreciating the things you have more aptitude for.<\/p>\n