Time might not heal all wounds, but Jonathan Goldstein can take care of some of the rest. As the host and creator of Heavyweight, 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 fifties wants to find the one person who was kind to him when he was accidentally shot thirty years ago. One guy just wants Moby to give his CDs back. The show’s magic lies in the bittersweet unpredictability of its journeys, which, much like life itself, rarely resolve the way you expect.
Launched in 2016, Heavyweight was one of Gimlet Media’s crown jewels and the 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 — a Brooklyn-born Canadian radio producer who spent a decade making CBC’s Wiretap and later produced for This American Life — 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’s most gifted operators.
But recent years have been unkind. Spotify has since largely abandoned the narrative format. Gimlet has since died. The platform officially cancelled Heavyweight at the end of 2023 and laid off Goldstein and his team, which included the 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.
Now, the show returns on September 18 with a new 10-episode season, at least eight of twitch 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 Holdstein. He isn’t opposed to the podcast world’s tilt toward video and chat, but he’s clear-eyed about himself. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know what my strongest suits are,” he told Vulture. And those suits are straightforward: making stories, well-told, about people and the lives they live.
The show finally comes back in a few weeks. How do you feel at this stage?
Nauseous. Unenthusiastic. Just high-anxiety. The episodes aren’t done yet. We’ve got about four at various stages of completion, four we haven’t even gotten into. All the recordings are in, though sometimes you realize you’re missing something and have to get more, but right now we’re in the writing and tape-cutting phase.
Given that you’re still in the thick of it, are you able to talk about what we should expect?
Oh yeah. I’m only being slightly facetious when I say I’m nauseous, but I’m excited for the episodes to exist in the world. I’m not always enthusiastic about the work to make it so, but we’re realizing because of the year-long gap — due to the show’s cancellation and us getting laid off — 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.
Time is at the core of Heavyweight, between the long histories your subjects carry and the years your team sometimes spend chasing leads that don’t pan out. But time has become a scarce commodity in this business, and I’m wondering if your process shifted since that first season.
Sure. Early on, we’d juggle twenty or thirty leads. We’d do interviews for them. We’d carefully consider them. This time, maybe because I’d been out of the game and had a renewed appreciation for the work, I was saying yes to more leads in a way I think was surprising to my producers.
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’s 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 producers to think differently, and that’s often where the emotion comes from. It gives it a nice dynamic. I don’t have a very enthusiastic personality, and maybe in the absence of that, a kind of flailing desperation takes its place — and that’s what has me saying yes to the world and to possibility.
Has your approach to finding stories changed over time?
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’s usually a better idea if they come to us.
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's no real rule. Things have come in all kinds of weird ways. Time is a wonderful luxury, but serendipity is also really beautiful. It's that feeling of reaching into the slush pile and finding something that has a real magic to it that can get the listeners on board. That was a component of S-Town 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.
During COVID, I had time to have conversations with people I normally wouldn’t have indulged in the same way. That’s how we got the Barbara two-parter. My wife said, “Hey, give my mom a call. She might have something for you.” 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're not a murdery type show, but that presented itself in a way that was fluky. So luck plays a role too.
What has your experience been like since joining Pushkin?
It’s been good. Pretty similar to how we've always worked, but with some new perks. I’d already been remote well before the pandemic — we moved to Minnesota in 2019 — so the team dynamic hasn’t 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.
Do you feel any pressure to adapt to the modern podcast economy? Like doing stuff with video, perhaps?
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's going to compromise the ability to achieve some sort of excellence. We’re doing some shorter episodes, like one about me quitting drinking that I don’t think I would’ve done otherwise. Maybe I’ll have more to say about this at the end of the season, but right now we’re trying to do what we do as we have. I'm not averse philosophically to doing video or chatty stuff, but I've been doing this long enough to know what my strongest suits are. Though, who knows — again, desperation breeds all kinds of hitherto unknown talents.
Back when I was in Canada, I did a show called Wiretap for eleven years. I was on contract for 10 months of the year, and I made twenty-six half-hour episodes with another producer plus maybe a part-time producer. That’s almost 300 episodes over eleven 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 felt, “This is the thing I never got a chance to do before. It’s exciting, and this feels like the form I’m probably the best at.”
It’s hard not to welcome Heavyweight back and not think about how it’s 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 went to Gimlet when I was already in my mid-forties, 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've been when I first met you when you came by the old office.
I remember that office. Very narrow. Lots of brick.
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’re at the end of something. So I look back on it with fondness.
Did you ever think it could have lasted so much longer?
I don't know. I’ve never had the 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 who were reuniting in their eighties, so it wasn’t like, “This is how we’re going to make a killing. It’s going to capture so much of the sought-after octogenarian market.”
It always just felt like I was doing what I wanted to do, and I was supported. That was cool. I don't know if it could have gone on. Even when the show was canceled at Spotify, I felt like, “Oh, this probably went on longer than I thought it would.” And I was grateful for it.
You went a while without making the show. During that time, did you pursue another project?
I tried to write a YA novel, but the publisher was sort of like, “This doesn't seem like a good book for kids. It doesn't seem to have very good values.” But it’s 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't.
So I was writing more prose. Are you familiar with Joe Frank?*
Oh yeah.
I’m 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’d done a book of short stories, so I asked him, “Do you regret not focusing more on writing books?” He said no. The opposite, actually. Publishing the one book he did was a mistake, because his talent lied 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.
Speaking of legacy, it was striking how Heavyweight never really felt like it went away even after Spotify cancelled it. People still bring it up whenever podcasts are discussed. The subreddit remained fairly active. Do you ever lurk there, or otherwise peek at how the show lives on?
I mean, I'll lurk in anything that I could possibly lurk in. It's really hard for me to wrap my head around stuff like that. I was having breakfast some time ago with someone who works in TV. They wanted to meet. I was like, “How do you know about the show?” And they were like, “Well, the show's popular. People do know about it.” It's hard for me to tell. I just did an interview with someone for a German newspaper who referred to it as being a “household name,” and I don't know what the households are like in Germany, but that surprised me.
I had an experience a couple weeks ago. I was with my son at Target. He likes these little toys called “NBA Ballers.” I feel like an old man saying this, but they're just overpriced balls of plastic. And I was shocked by how much they cost, so I was soft negotiating, I guess, with the cashier about the price. There aren't a lot of things that are beneath my dignity, but this probably was beneath it. I was like, “Are you sure that this is the price?” God, this is such a dumb story. Anyway, it was a very petty moment and I was done and I paid for it, and then the guy who was waiting in line behind me turned to me and said, “I'm really looking forward to the new season of Heavyweight.” That was really embarrassing to be seen and to be recognized in this really less than stellar moment of my life.
I guess what I’m saying is that I don't know. I’m just keeping my head down and thinking about the next show to get out.
*Frank was a pioneering radio artist known for surreal, darkly comic, and deeply personal monologues that blended fiction and reality. His late-night pieces on stations like KCRW influenced generations of radio producers, including Goldstein, Ira Glass, and Jad Abumrad, among others. Frank died in 2018.
