Podcasts for the New Year

If you’ve spent any time with me this winter, you’ve heard me go on about the podcasts I’be been binge listening to. With the new year now in full swing, I wanted to share these two podcasts that I believe can inspire us to work through and let go of the past, and to begin building our future. This article is adapted from Caroline's Notes: January 2018.

Heavyweight

What if you could spend all your time getting “closure” for yourself, friends, family and even strangers, so we can all move forward and begin living our lives fully? This funny, poignant podcast, Heavyweight, is hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, a This American Life contributor. He helps folks revisit an event or memory in their lives that they can’t seem to get past. Jonathan has so much EQ that it seems impossible for him to keep just to himself.

In one episode, he convinces his 80-year-old father to visit his estranged older brother in Florida. The brothers hadn’t spoken in over 20 years. In another episode, he accompanies a friend to get a box of CDs he lent to Moby -- yes, the bald musician from the 90s and my dog’s namesake! He believes (and I agree!) these CDs helped propel Moby's phenomenal success. In a particularly moving and beautifully written episode, Jonathan helps a young man who became disabled in a bicycle-on-car crash to meet the driver of the car. In my favorite episodes, I cringe at just how wrong things could go, hold my breath and root for this awkward, kind man as he tries to change the world for better, one person at a time. 

Here are a few of my favorites including the ones I mentioned above: 

• Buzz — This is the episode about Jonathan’s father Buzz and his brother Sheldon, both in their eighties.
• Gregor — Moby and Gregor’s CDs!
• James — A man’s dying wish to have his ashes spread at the 18th hole of a fancy golf course. His son, James, embarks on a golf heist to make this wish a reality.
• Jesse — A cyclist wants to meet the driver that struck him…to thank him.
• Christina — A woman wants to ask her foster mother why she made her quit basketball in high school.

What past experiences do you want to work through, so that you can get unstuck and really move forward this year?

How I Built This

There’s something my mother likes to say whenever we walk by a crowded market. She says this in Korean, but this is the gist.

Markets are energizing and life-giving… Seeing people at the stalls yelling and haggling... The smells and the sounds… Old people say that if you feel down and directionless, you should go and hang out at a market for a few hours. Other people’s will to survive, the rough tumble energy to make money and take care of their families…you can’t help but feel energized and motivated to live, too.

That’s kind of how I feel about How I Built This, a podcast about “innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and movements they built,” hosted by Guy Raz.

Here are a few of my favorites focused on women and one immigrant man. (Notice how I chose episodes about men for Heavyweight? That’s because I especially loved listening to grown men talking about their feelings. So now I make up for that with equal representation.) Almost all episodes in the two seasons to date are so fun, inspiring and energizing.

• Bumble — Whitney Wolfe was on the startup team of Tinder, the swiping dating app that even those of us matched for decades know about. She then started Bumble, an incredibly successful dating app focused on women’s choice and protection, after a challenging and humiliating personal and professional experience. 
• Carol’s Daughter — I first learned about this line of products from my beautiful and stylish black and brown women friends in Brooklyn in the late 90’s. I loved learning about how Lisa Price began mixing her beauty potion in her apartment. She built a natural product company that was valued at 27 million dollars when she sold it to L'Oréal in 2014. I love, love, LOVE the origin of the name.  
• Dry Bar — This is about a stay-at-home mom who decided it was time to go back to work. Need I say more? Alli Webb began her now giant company by driving to other moms’ houses to do their hair.
• Edible arrangements — My friend Waine Tam, an entrepreneur himself who is building an ed tech company, Get Selected, sent me one of these “bouquets” when I had my first baby in 2006. So strange and so delicious! This episode tells the modern-day rags-to-riches story of how Tariq Farid, an immigrant boy, bought and ran his first flower shop as a teenager and built a multi-million-dollar franchise. This was my kids’ favorite episode. 

Reddit, Lyft, BET, Spanx...there are so many more episodes I love. I hope you start listening next time you are folding your laundry or are on your way to work. The energy is infectious.  

What would you like to build in 2018 at home and at work? 

If you are interested in seeing what other podcasts I love, please read “Four Podcasts To Make You Smarter, Kinder Hopeful,” originally published in The Clyde Fitch Report.