That’s a long answer to say that, yeah, some of them have been ongoing for years. That is hopefully, it’s still a little up in the air, but hopefully, it’s going to be a part of this season. So now it’s one of those nightmares where you have to go back to school, and she had to try to go to class to gain the high school math equivalency, and she just put it off and put it off. And Marie-Claude and I had gone to high school together, and we were both terrible at math and were kind of math-phobic. She never really had a career and she wanted to become a real estate agent and she had passed all the criteria except for the grade 11 math equivalency. We were childhood friends, and a couple years ago, she decided, the kids were grown up. The story of my friend Marie-Claude, for instance. The difficulty is that you’re dealing with people that have been putting things off for years, and that’s a part of the story, so it’s going to be baked into the actual trick of getting things in on deadlines. So some of the stories in this season have been incubating for several years. But even beyond that, there were a couple stories - actually, almost half the stories, at least three of the stories - were stories that weren’t ready last season for various reasons, just because they were more of a long-term commitment. When last season ended, literally the next day, we were going over our story pitches, the things that had come into us.

How long have you been working on these episodes? This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The fourth season premieres this week, so I spoke with Goldstein about his process for creating the show, what he looks for in guests, and, of course, whether he buys this idea that we’re all living through the “golden age of podcasts.” I need it! On the show, host Jonathan Goldstein assists his guests in confronting unresolved past conflicts, which can range from genuinely traumatic experiences to smaller spats. It’s funny, well-scripted, and surprising. I love the podcast series Heavyweight, which started as a Gimlet Media show in 2016 and is now part of Spotify’s podcast empire.

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