Jonathan Goldstein on Wild Card

0:06Pushkin.

0:10Hello, everyone. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hi. Here we all are in the studio. Yes, indeed. And today we've got something a little different. Oh, but Kaylee, I don't like different things. Well, Jonathan, you might just have to give it a chance, because sometimes trying new things can be scary, but... Rewarding. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, here comes the choo-choo train of listening. What do we got here? Recently, you were a guest on a show called Wild Card. Do you remember that? Of course I remember. How can I forget? I was interviewed by Rachel Martin. How did it feel, Jonathan, to be in the guest seat? It felt...

0:53I didn't like it. It was a tremendous loss of control, I have to say. It was like the spider had become the fly or something. But, you know, here's the incredible. This is nuts. It doesn't even make sense to me. I'm just looking at their past episodes, okay, of Wild Card. You know who was on two weeks ago? Who? Someone that's so famous, they're known by one name. Cher. Adele. It wasn't Cher or Adele. Someone more, actually, dare I say, maybe someone more famous. Obama. I'm going to say as famous as Obama may be more famous. What? All right, I'll just tell you. Oprah. She interviewed Oprah. Last week she interviewed Melinda Gates.

1:38She's got more money than you. Oprah has more money than me. Let's see who else has more money than me. I would say almost every guest is probably richer than you. You know, honestly, so I'm on her website right now on the wildcard website and I'm scrolling and I'm like, I'm looking like Melinda Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Harrison Ford. I mean, crazy. And then I saw my name and I got nervous. I thought like that's a mistake. Do you think they had someone fall through that week? Well, it's funny. Okay, so I did ask her that. Like, why am I on the show, basically? And I thought, you know, the answer would be something like, oh, what are you talking about?

2:13Like, of course you, you know? But she was honest. She was like, well, you know how it is. Like, sometimes you do, like, a biggie and then sometimes you just do a small one or something like that. I don't know. I think she was more complimentary than that. I don't know if she called me a small one. It sounds like she just wanted to talk to you, which is really nice. It is. Who wouldn't? Thank you. That is very nice. You know, me and Stevie usually are in on like the, you know, we're producing the conversations you have. This is one that we got to come to just as listeners. We just heard the edited version at the end and I really enjoyed it.

2:49I felt like it covered a lot of territory beyond just the typical like, how did you come up with the show? Like, I felt like you guys kind of went deep in a really interesting way. I got an interesting text from my mother-in-law after she had listened to it. She said that she had never had anybody express something about life and death that she had always felt. Whoa. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And after I got the text, I told my wife, I said, Emily, you married your mother. Congratulations. Yeah. So we're going to listen to that episode. I think listeners will really enjoy it. Yeah, we did.

3:31And if you don't, we'll send you a check returning your full purchase price. If you don't, try the Oprah episode, you know, maybe you'll like that more. Try the Oprah episode. God. But first, a word from our sponsors. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. There's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life. Apple Card is one of those things. It can be applied for right in the wallet app on iPhone, and approval can happen in minutes. So it's ready to use immediately with Apple Pay. I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet, fishing out the credit card, using it, putting it back in my wallet, or oops, maybe I use cash.

4:23Where's the ATM? Enough. The first time I used Apple Pay on my phone with my Apple Card, I was like, this is the future. There's no going back. With Apple Card, purchases earn daily cash up to 3 % with no points to track and no waiting for rewards. It's simply daily cash back that I earn on every purchase. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. Because Apple Card lives in the Wallet app, it's always accessible on iPhone and can be used with Apple Pay at over 85 % of merchants in the US.

5:07And the security of Face ID and Touch ID prevents unauthorized purchases, whether using iPhone or Apple Watch. To explore it yourself, you can apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval, savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sox Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, member FDIC, terms and more at applecard.com. Hey, everyone. When Heavyweight returned last year, we were so encouraged by the heartfelt messages from you, our dear listeners. I can safely say that without you, Heavyweight wouldn't exist today.

5:46So, thank you. And if you want to take your valuable support to an even higher invaluable level, consider signing up for Pushkin Plus. It makes us look good to our bosses, and you'll get to listen to Heavyweight ad-free, because you'll be the sponsor. Plus, and this is what really puts the plus in Pushkin Plus, you'll also get bonus material. If you want to get 25 % Send off an annual Pushkin Plus subscription. Head to pushkin.fm slash plus and use the code HEAVY25. Thanks for your support. Just a heads up, this episode does have some strong language. Do you think people can really change? Oh, yes.

6:30I mean, I have to believe that. I mean, even if I don't believe it, I have to believe that. And I think, like, that's the struggle. It's like the paradox. I mean, like, we are who we are. But I think as long as we're alive, we're able to change. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is Jonathan Goldstein. I was writing, and no one was buying what I was selling. I just couldn't get anywhere.

7:10And I just kept doing it because I felt compelled to do it, like a spider spinning a web. Jonathan Goldstein believes in closure, which is what his massively popular podcast Heavyweight is all about. Helping people move on from some kind of unfinished business in their lives. Maybe that's helping someone make amends, or to say thank you to a stranger, or to help a person turn a page on a traumatic experience. And yes, the word heavy is in the title, but it doesn't feel that way. In large part because Jonathan is very funny. And he's also got this lightness about him. He's the kind of guide who makes it clear no matter what happens around the next bend, he'll be there rooting you on.

7:52I am so very happy to welcome Jonathan Goldstein to Wildcard. Hi! Hi, thank you so much. It would have taken me about 10 tries to get that. And so much editing. I don't believe you. It is. It's true. And yet it's true. Mm-hmm.

8:11I'm going to hold up three cards. You pick randomly. One, two, or three. Okay. First three cards. First three cards. Now, one is on my left. I tend to think of one being this on my right. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's my left. Okay. I'm trying to make this as confusing as possible for myself. because I'm hoping, I guess my subconscious wish is that you're just going to say, you know what, forget it. We're going to do a rerun this week. Okay, sorry. It doesn't matter. You know what? I get the impression as a child magician that you're trying to force the number two card. It's poked out a little bit more.

8:51Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay, now you're forcing the one and the two. I just want to please you. I'll take the number two. I'm not pushing, I promise. Although I do like this question. Okay. Look what happened there. Okay. What's an ordinary place that feels extraordinary to you because of what happened there?

9:18Okay. You see, it's very difficult for me to talk about places because I'm not very place aware. Oh. Really? I live so much of my life up in my head. And for many years, I thought of it as like internal. And then like through therapy, I've begun to see it as disassociative possibly. I will say broadly, movie theaters are kind of like, I think Pauline Kale called them like her church. And I think that's a little bit the way that I feel about movie theaters. And there's one particular, I live in Minnesota, Minneapolis. and there's an old mid-century theater that used to be walking distance from my house.

10:01And I would just go see anything that was playing there and always sit way, way, way back in the back row because I like to take it all in. By yourself? By myself, yeah. I like going there with people, but if I had my druthers, it was by myself. And that just felt like my place in the dark, looking up at this big screen, feeling like a baby being held by somebody, you know. Maybe that's a part of it. I don't know. What was the extraordinary part of that experience? I think this particular theater, because it's mid-century, I had the experience last Christmas of going to see It's a Wonderful Life there.

10:47and I found it to be a very emotional experience uh like it it's just I mean it's just a room but it I don't know all of this stuff sounds very corny I mean my father used to watch these black and white movies and refer to it as like a time machine and it is kind of like that um there is this feeling of um the past kind of erasing and you're kind of existing in all times at once beyond that it's probably just pretty banal um it just yeah there's just something extraordinary about in this day and age being able to kind of like turn your phone off and shut out the world for a couple of hours. I mean, thank God.

11:38Hold on. There's one sound on here I need to make sure goes away. Is it my voice? You figured out the one thing that's dragging down this podcast?

11:53Okay, three more cards. I'll take one this time. Were you intimidated or excited about leaving your parents' house? leaving my parents house i have to say and you know and this is kind of like you just don't know what you don't know back then but i was nothing but excited um i didn't enjoy my childhood very much and the idea of being able to make my own rules uh was very exciting and i remember when i now i hearken back to it now that i got a kid i think about how sad my mother was how she was sitting on the edge of my bed and yelling at me for what she called dismantling my room for the stuff that I was taking, you know, like I, and all I was taking was these milk crates.

12:42I didn't even have like a bookshelf. It was just like, I kept my books and stuff in milk crates. And she was like very upset that I was taking them. Um, and I remember I wore cowboy boots, uh, which were a very impractical thing to wear in the summer when you're moving boxes, but there was something about it that felt very romantic. I had these cowboy boots that I only wore like once a year. Yeah. And it felt like that was an occasion. Yeah. For the cowboy boots, even though they were slippery. Where were you going to? Where were you moving from and to? So I was living in Montreal. That's where I grew up.

13:16And I was moving to a very cheap part of town called Point St. Charles. Yeah, it was probably no more than like a half an hour car drive. Yeah, but it can be a whole world away. Yeah, it felt great. There was a$5 liter of apple wine that they sold at the corner store, and there was all these like$1.99 breakfast places. Wow. It was like 1934. It was, yeah, this is back in the 30s. Yeah, I could listen to all the jazz music I wanted. Yeah, no, I don't know. It was just, yeah, it was just the feeling of being free. It really, yeah, it felt free. Yeah.

14:06Last one in this round. One, two, or three? I guess three. Oh, I feel like I'm putting all these place questions to you. What details do you remember about your childhood bedroom?

14:22The milk crate, the wall-to-wall posters of David Bowie. Nice. Very big David Bowie fan. To this day, my father will call me up on the phone if David Bowie's on TV, and he'll say, oh, your buddy's on TV. He just didn't get it. No, but I love that he knows that you like him and he's like trying to connect with you. Yeah. Yeah, just a lot of like pictures taken out of magazines and newspapers and it must still be the same way for kids. But it was like your whole personality was splayed across your bedroom walls. Like if it wasn't on your bedroom wall, then you weren't in the world properly. You had to lead with all of these things on your wall.

15:12I had this little card table with an electric typewriter that I wrote on. What were you writing at the time? Such junk. I remember when I applied into the creative writing program at the university in Montreal, Concordia. with such high hopes. Because from a very young age, I was always writing and making plays and making radio plays and forcing my friends into performing in them. And I applied, put together what I thought was my best work, and I applied to this creative writing program. And the guy, the professor running the program, rejected me, and I couldn't understand why, and I made a meeting with him.

16:01And he said that someone that wrote the way that I did needed a therapist more than they needed a creative writing program, which was probably true. But it was still like a very heavy thing to hear at like 18, you know. Yeah, not helpful guidance. But it was all like nuts. I mean, like young men are – or at least me and my friends, I mean, we were just nuts. We were just really pushing boundaries and, you know, loved Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. I mean, there's nothing – no offense, but there's nothing extraordinary about that. That doesn't signal depression. That's just being an angst-ridged – No, I was just depressed on top of that.

16:39Oh, oh. Yeah, that was just a whole other side project. Truly? Yeah, in various dark places, you know, very caught up in, like, what's it all about. I had like during my teen years like a foray into becoming religious

17:03and then kind of losing my faith and feeling that that brought on a really heavy depression oh that'll do it I wanted to believe and I just couldn't figure my way into it and yeah, just like from a very young age, just very caught up in the big questions, I guess. Not that that's necessarily a formula for depression, but for me, I don't know, there was something very dire and desperate about it. I remember asking my father at a very, very young age where God came from and that feeling like a very basic question because God was a given, but like, okay, so then where does God come from? And I remember him telling me that I should look it up.

17:44And I had these child's encyclopedia set and looking up God. What did you look up? Under G? Yeah, like God. And I thought, oh, well, I'm going to get to the bottom of this in two seconds. The answer's definitely going to be here. And it wasn't, I remember looking at the Bible and thinking like, oh, it must be before Genesis. But there's no preface. There's no... Right, yeah. There's nothing there. It just starts with the big bang and that's it. But I don't know. It was probably also more banal. Like I probably couldn't meet any girls, you know. Yeah, that's a big existential stew of things. Yeah.

18:26Yeah. Very profound. Very, yeah. Schopenhauer-esque. Is that a word? Sure, it is now. Yeah. Yeah. But I think dealing with that, the uncertainty of life at that age is hard. Yeah, but I know, you know, it's still something that I struggle with. I mean, I just want to really let go and give myself over to life. But I don't know, there's always just been this feeling of like, if you're not totally invested in it, it'll make death easier. You know, like if you live your life as though like you're kind of, you know, here's life and here's death and they kind of are side by side adjacent to one another on a shelf, it'll be more of a lateral move.

19:16Good night, folks. It's not too late to like run the rerun.

19:24I'm just trying to understand it. It means putting as much effort into the thinking about death as the thinking about life and they are equal experiences and so then it's a lateral move. Yeah. If you're sort of like braced for death from a young age, you know, if you don't fully, you know, throw yourself into the whole life thing, then when the carpet is yanked out from under you, you're going to be braced for your fall. No, I get it. I like do this in my own mind. I am the worst case scenario person. It is how I live my life is to prepare for the worst things. And so I practice not being around anymore.

20:03It's dark. And you don't want to model that for your children. I have two of them. I don't think that's a great way to live. But it actually doesn't bring me down. I don't get bummed about it. Oh, that's wonderful. I just go there for a little bit. I try it on. And then I come back. And I'm like, everyone was okay. Everyone – when I was gone in my imaginary death, everyone grieved and then they lived beautiful lives. And then it was fine. Oh, that's wonderful. So you're thinking about your own absence from the perspective of those you love. Yeah, I guess. That's the mark of a superior human being.

20:42That's not how I was thinking about it. I was thinking more fuck all y 'all. No, no, no. I'm just kidding.

21:01This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. There's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life. Apple Card is one of those things. It can be applied for right in the wallet app on iPhone, and approval can happen in minutes. so it's ready to use immediately with Apple Pay. I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet, fishing out the credit card, using it, putting it back in my wallet, or oops, maybe I use cash, where's the ATM? Enough. The first time I used Apple Pay on my phone with my Apple Card, I was like, this is the future, there's no going back. With Apple Card, purchases earn daily cash up to 3 % with no points to track and no waiting for rewards.

21:47It's simply daily cash back that I earn on every purchase. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. Because Apple Card lives in the Wallet app, it's always accessible on iPhone and can be used with Apple Pay at over 85 % of merchants in the U.S. And the security of Face ID and Touch ID prevents unauthorized purchases, whether using iPhone or Apple Watch. To explore it yourself, you can apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval, savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility.

22:33Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, member FDIC, terms and more at AppleCard.com. Have you ever wondered what it's like to be buried in an avalanche? Weird foreign feeling of despair. Or how it feels to crash a skydive? I remember hearing a thud, feeling my body hit the ground. Or how you would react if you were being attacked by an alligator? At the end of my leg is this huge alligator head on my leg. These are the stories you'll hear on the podcast called What Was That Like? True stories told by the actual person who went through it. You'll hear from a victim of an attack.

23:13Dragging me into the bathroom and saying, I'm going to kill you. Now you're going to die. You'll hear from a man who discovered a baby. How could this be? How could there be a baby on the ground? And you'll hear actual 911 calls. Clanky County 911. There's a man at my back door. He's trying to get in. What Was That Like is a podcast about real people in unreal situations. search for what was that like on any podcast app or at what was that like.com

23:47let's talk about your show for a few minutes because it is a wonderful thing it is a wonderful thing that you have made thank you heavyweight been nine years over nine years yeah yeah we're doing our ninth season yeah there was a little break the show was canceled yeah at the end of 2023 and then it found new life and and it's as a listener i think this is a wonderful thing um i'm sure when it was canceled you were like maybe maybe i'm gonna do something else lean into my writing and you know but but you were given this other shot What do you love about making this show? Well, the simplest is that I like having a job.

24:36I found out when the show was canceled that I wasn't very good at not having a job. I had been kind of on various deadlines. Like before this, I had a show in Canada on the CBC for 11 years. It had been just kind of like 20 years of deadlines. This is wiretap, right? Wiretap, yeah, that's right. I found not having a job difficult and being back at it has given me a renewed appreciation. But I love, I think I love, it is a way for me to feel things and like live, interact with people and life in a way that for me is preferred, I guess. There's a certain kind of safety about being alone in the attic studio a lot of the time and thinking things through in a way that I can't in real time.