Vox Media Podcast Network
134 episodes listed below
Brené Brown's long-form conversations linking grief, caregiving, politics, and nonviolence to her vulnerability research.
Unlocking Us is a reflective conversation show moving between family loss, democracy, leadership, public health, and moral courage. Its best moments feel close and unscripted, with room for pain, humor, disagreement, and careful second thoughts.
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Unlocking Us is a one-on-one (occasionally two-guest) interview show hosted by Brené Brown, a researcher known for her work on shame, vulnerability, and connection, and episodes typically run 50 to 70 minutes. Brown frequently opens with a personal framing segment, 'On My Heart and Mind,' where she reflects on grief, family, or the news before introducing her guest. Recurring themes include grief and loss, caregiving for aging or ill parents, shame resilience, US politics and leadership, gun policy viewed through race and gender, American history and democracy, and international conflict resolution through nonviolence. Guests include family members (her sisters Ashley and Barrett Brown, discussing caregiving for their mother through dementia), political figures (Vice President Kamala Harris), authors and cultural commentators (Roxane Gay), historians (Heather Cox Richardson), and activists working on Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation (Ali Abu Awwad, Robi Damelin). Conversations tend to move from a guest's public work into more personal or emotional territory, connecting policy and history to grief, courage, and connection. The show mixes narrative, reflective episodes with more issue-driven interviews on politics, gun culture, and international conflict. Listeners drawn to Brown's research background will recognize her framing vocabulary — shame resilience, courage, 'stand your ground,' coalition building — applied across otherwise varied subject matter. The production style is conversational and largely unscripted, with Brown positioned as both interviewer and active participant sharing her own experiences. It suits listeners interested in psychology-informed conversations about difficult personal and civic topics rather than a strict self-help or news format.
Made for: Listeners interested in psychology-informed conversations that connect personal grief, family caregiving, and civic issues like politics and gun policy to themes of vulnerability and connection.
What sets it apart: Combines Brown's shame/vulnerability research framing with hard-news adjacent topics — sitting politicians, gun policy, international conflict — rather than staying within a conventional self-help interview format.
I’ve spent over 20 years studying the emotions and experiences that bring meaning and purpose to our lives, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: we are hardwired for connection, and connecting requires courage, vulnerability, and conversation. I want this to be a podcast that’s real, unpolished, honest, and reflects both the magic and the messiness of what it means to be human. Episodes will include conversations with the people who are teaching me, challenging me, confusing me, or maybe even ticking me off a little. I'll also have direct conversations with you about what I’m l...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Unlocking Us makes leadership, organizational pressure, and financial strain legible through candid conversations about public life and personal loss.
Brene Brown treats leadership as an emotional and civic practice, using guest conversations and a family discussion to connect public decisions with private experience.
This is the show that puts grief beside democracy and asks you to stay curious through both.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Harris on the Venn diagram she drew for her goddaughter and what it says about coalition leadership.
The final conversation in Brene Brown's eight-part On My Heart and Mind series is about leadership -- the coalition kind, not the loyalty kind. Brown sits with Vice President Kamala Harris, and the hour moves at the show's usual pace.
Three sisters, one absent mother, and grief that gets through by laughing.
Grief sits differently when the people carrying it are also making each other laugh. Brene Brown's sisters Barrett and Ashley join her to talk through their mother's decline -- the assisted living, the COVID chaos, the financial pressure.
Richardson makes the case that authoritarian movements run on manufactured narrative -- and the argument keeps working the more history you know.
Richardson's argument with Brown starts from a plain premise: people understand their lives through story, which makes them susceptible to manufactured ones.
Two cultural thinkers dismantle their own assumptions about guns before they get to anyone else's.
Roxane Gay's essay 'Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America's Gun Problem' gives the conversation its engine, and both women arrive with more personal history than the title suggests.
Grief, nonviolence, and the harder work of staying human when history keeps reopening.
This sits at the far end of Health & Fitness -- grief, moral injury, and what people build from pain that never quite resolves. Brene Brown returns from personal leave and a public controversy, then hands the floor to Ali and Roby, both bereaved parents in the Parent Circle…
Stephen Dubner tests bourbon economics, Alzheimer's research, and money advice against hard data.
Daily business news with Kai Ryssdal, tracking Fed policy, oil shocks, and private credit.
Galloway rotates Office Hours Q&A, Raging Moderates politics, and China Decode geopolitics weekly.
Joel and Matt answer listener money questions weekly in the show's Ask HTM segments.
Economist Tyler Cowen cross-examines one scholar's book per episode, claim by claim.
A final installment turns toward public courage.
Brené Brown hosts her two sisters, Ashley and Barrett, for a conversation about their mother's death on Christmas morning 2023 following a four-year dementia journey in which all three sisters were primary caregivers.
Brené Brown sounds lit up here.
Brené starts close to home.
Brené begins in grief, with a careful explanation of why people wanted her to speak.