Heavyweight

Heavyweight is a Gimlet Media podcast created and produced by American-Canadian humorist Jonathan Goldstein where he helps people try to resolve a moment from their past that they wish they could change. Goldstein told The New Yorker that the name "Heavyweight" is meant to suggest the emotional burdens that we carry around, as well as "the connotation of the boxer juxtaposed with the connotation of me . . . the non-boxer.” Podcast format In each episode, host Jonathan Goldstein attempts to help a guest—typically an ordinary person, not a celebrity—find closure for an unresolved question in their lives. The New York Times described it this way: "Jonathan Goldstein climbs inside the stories that shape people’s lives to see if he can help them create better endings." The Atlantic described the podcast by saying, "Each episode finds the host Jonathan Goldstein moderating a fraught moment intensified by years of distance: a time when someone broke a promise, or another person’s heart. The hurt is still there—sometimes for everyone, sometimes for just one person who can’t let something go. Goldstein leads special-ops soul-searching missions, seeking common ground between the aggrieved and the blissfully ignorant." As described in the Financial Times: "The first episode featured Goldstein’s 80-year-old father, Buzz, and his estranged brother. When he got them talking you could feel the temperature plummet. The second episode revolved around Goldstein’s friend Gregor, who once loaned the pop musician Moby a box of CDs. In this collection, Moby found the songs that he sampled for his mega-selling 1999 album, Play. Now Gregor wanted his CDs back, along with the life he thought he could have had."