Headstone with Pete Wright

This is the last conversation of my first season, and I almost didn’t finish it. Chris Schembra came to me the way the best guests do, as a name pressed into my hand by someone I trust. Aliza Kline told me I needed to talk to him, and Aliza is rarely wrong about people. What I didn’t expect was how quickly the conversation would stop being about him. On paper, Chris is the gratitude guy: the 7:47...

Sometimes at fifteen, sometimes much later, we finally stop running from ourselves. We sit down and ask the quiet but impossible question: Who do I want to be? This conversation begins with a name. I first knew him as Michael — the professional veneer that felt safe, pronounceable, uncontroversial. But today he is Nachi, reclaiming the Hebrew name that always held the truer story of identity. That...

Some people study chaos because they have to. Others because they can’t look away. James Ochoa has spent his life inside both camps—born into a noisy, loving, impossibly crowded family, raised amid the unpredictable rhythms of mental illness and grace, and shaped by a series of accidents and near misses that could have ended him. Instead, they gave him a reason to begin again. For more than three...

Aliza Kline has built her life around connection—the kind that happens when people gather around a table, or descend beneath the surface of the water, or find themselves saying “yes” to something unexpected. For over two decades, she’s created institutions that made those moments possible: Mayyim Hayyim , the reimagined mikveh in Boston, and OneTable , the social platform that’s helped more than a...

Step into Rob Kubasko’s office and you’ll find a reliquary of light and story: Iron Man’s helmet, a model of the USS Enterprise, a Phantom of the Opera music box. To the untrained eye, it’s a collection of toys. To Rob, it’s a theory about how humans work: that play isn’t the opposite of seriousness, it’s the method for reaching it. This week, Rob opens up about the moments that shaped that worldv...

History is often written in bold type. We remember the wars, the inventions, the big cultural shifts that announce themselves with headlines. But Glenn Fleishman has been spending his time reminding us that the things history forgets—scraps of type, obsolete tools, obscure printing processes—are often the very things that shape us the most. They make up the invisible machinery of culture. Glenn’s...

When Srdjan Injac was a kid, he was small. Picked last for dodgeball small. Picked on. Smacked around. Defended by others on the playground small. He carried a condition called pectus excavatum that made his chest cave inward, and for years he hid it under shirts, and shame, and silence. Then war broke out in Sarajevo. What follows is not a tale of overnight triumph, but something far more compell...

What happens when the people you’ve spent years working alongside suddenly aren’t there anymore? For Kyle Olson—writer, podcaster, audio dramatist, and inveterate storyteller—grief arrived not as a single storm, but as a pair of Thursdays. This week, Kyle shares the sudden losses of two important figures in his life and reflects on what it means to grieve not just family, but work kin: the people...

There’s a moment in every western where a lone figure walks into a dusty town. They are anonymous—neither good nor evil, simply unknown. They solve a problem, provoke a conflict, heal a wound, and just as quickly, disappear. What if legacy isn’t about how long you stay, but how fully you show up? This week on Headstone , Pete Wright invites his long-time friend and co-host Seth Nelson into a very...

In 1888, Alfred Nobel read his own obituary. A clerical error, yes—but also a mirror, a reckoning, a chance to see what his legacy might become. The Merchant of Death is Dead , the headline read. It haunted him. It changed him. Most of us—thankfully—don’t get that kind of theatrical heads-up. But the question still lingers: How will we be remembered? And maybe more urgently, how do we live a life...

Before the granite. Before the eulogy. Before someone says your name for the last time. Headstone is a podcast about legacy—not just the kind carved into stone, but the kind we leave in the lives we touch, the stories we tell, and the memories others carry forward. In this trailer, host Pete Wright shares the haunting idea that inspired the show: the three deaths we all experience, and why the fin...