‘Labyrinths’ Podcast Tells Stories Of People Finding Meaning In The Struggle

In the midst of this seemingly never-ending pandemic and an election cycle that feels like it’s consuming us all, it can be comforting to know that other people are going through things at the same time.

Our own problems come to feel like a journey that we’re lost in and the new iHeartMedia original podcast Labyrinths
IHRT
out today from veteran authors and podcasters Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson tells some of those stories with guests like Andrew Yang, Malcolm Gladwell, Jon Ronson, Dave Navarro, and LeVar Burton.

The tagline of the show is “Everyone is navigating their own personal maze, complete with winding paths, dead ends, short cuts, and Minotaurs.” The intimate journeys they go on with their guests may bring you to tears and lead you on a path to discovering your own way out.

Along the way, the hosts become part of the story and weave in a bit of their own labyrinths. Amanda has a harrowing story of years trapped in an Italian prison for a crime she didn’t commit, and later wrote a New York Times
NYT
bestselling memoir about it called Waiting to Be Heard. When she met Christopher, he was experiencing a personal high having just published a book, War of the Encyclopaedists, but underneath the surface he was crumbling from the dissolution of a five-year relationship and was writing near-suicidal sonnets.

Having just been exonerated by the Italian supreme court, Amanda was back in America and wrote a review of Christopher’s new book. She went outside for a walk and saw a flier advertising a book reading of that same book and she went to the reading, met Christopher, and they ended up talking into the night and have been collaborating creatively ever since.

The first episode of Labyrinths is called “Lost at Sea” and is about the worst cruise related travel story you’ve heard told by Chapmagne Huges.

Amanda and Christopher were on a cruise together where fun seemed to be forced and manufactured, so when they noticed a fellow passenger with a buoyancy level well below normal they realized something was off and asked if they could interview her.

“Boy have I got a story for you!”, Chapmagne told them.

She told them of missed flights and long delays and missed connections on her cruise and being left behind and ultimately how the experience changed her and what she learned from it.

Her story is a reminder that as Christopher says, “We’re less in control of the grand moments, but more in control of our own reactions, and getting to that place can be healing.”

“Everyones walking through a different maze,” Amanda says, “everyone is on their own journey of arriving at an idea.”

It’s been said that everyone is going through something you can’t see and that the problems they tell you about can be like an iceberg where from the outside you can only see a tiny portion of it. Labyrinths is all about revealing those icebergs as they are warts and all, and Christopher and Amanda are careful to let their guests tell their own stories.

So how do people get out of their own labyrinths? “Well”, Amanda laughed, “They don’t.” Guest LeVar Burton said, “you don’t get out of the labyrinth it changes and evolves and the minotaur dissolves and theres always a new one.”

But along the way, the show gives room to the listener to hear other people’s stories and ask themselves, “am I making meaning in my life?”

And sometimes we may find that the minotaur at the end of the maze isn’t what we thought. Guest Dave Navarro, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, spent his entire life living with the trauma of his mother being murdered and he had a narrative built up about facing her murderer, and how that encounter would take place, and in the moment it may not have been what he thought. Not all monsters stay monsters.

“You don’t always get to choose your labyrinth,” Amanda says, “but there’s catharsis in hearing someone make it through.”

The stories that Labyrinth tells and the questions it asks feel vital and relevant in this time of trauma for all of us when we don’t know what our future holds.

The first episode “Lost at Sea” is now available on all your podcast platforms to transport you into someone else’s life and leave you feeling relieved that you made it to the other side.