Welcome to Listen for REAL — a podcast where we expand our perspectives and connect more deeply through earthy conversation, curiosity, and soul-level revelations.
I’m Jen Oliver — a woman shaped by a lifetime of privilege, inherited beliefs, and an echo chamber that once kept my limited worldview comfortably intact.
That way of living (and viewing others) no longer works for me. It kept me performative, judgmental, and disconnected from the fullest expression of my truth — and distanced from other people.
This podcast began as the antidote to that echo chamber. A space to lean into conversation with others whose world view, lived experience or belief system differed from my own.
And now, in this new season, the show is evolving.
We’re doubling down on the practice of truth-telling - I ask my guests to share a moment of truth or personal revelation that pushes past the more palatable things that we have been trained to say.
Each episode brings unfiltered conversations, raw human honesty and courageous storytelling you can't get from scripted media. In addition, you will hear coaching, inner-work tools, and my own admissions to help us all step into a more honest, liberated, expansive way of being.
There is no quicker way to pry open my mind than by telling me your truth —- Join the conversation.
Staci Berkovitz reconnects with a man she'd all but forgotten, three dates and five years ago, and it turns into something real. Until it doesn't. Twice.
A coach's line that still hasn't let Jen go, and a gut feeling Staci spent weeks trying to talk herself out of. We go there on both.
4 Aug 2026
Dad. Hollywood. If he were alive, how would he feel about me saying this?
Jeromy Zajonc sat in the hot seat this episode, or as close to it as a chair across from an old friend can get. Jen asked him the question she asks every guest: name a moment you had to tell the truth. He came back with two.
The first goes back to his dad. Big personality, bigger reputation, a helicopter stunt pilot for Hollywood’s biggest films and Kona Ironman finisher and he raised Jeromy along with his brother. Everyone who knew his dad saw the legend. Few saw the temper that turned physical. For many years, Jeromy grappled with which parts of his father's story were safe to tell out loud. This episode, for the first time, he told the rest of it. Some takeaways that will stay with you: loving someone and telling the truth about them are not opposites and waiting until someone is gone to say the real stuff may be the most honest timeline available.
Jeromy’s second truth goes back to Hollywood where he spent decades building the kind of career most people spend a lifetime trying to break into. He walked away from it to build Running Water Coaching instead, and it took him years to hit send on the email that made it official. Nine minutes of terror later, the response he got was the opposite of what he feared.
4 Jun 2026
No One Judges You Harder Than You
She was discovered hitchhiking on a busy interstate. Barefoot. Tasmanian devil boxer shorts. Ripped t-shirt. Her dog — off leash — right beside her as cars raced past them.
That's the story Michele Capots told her 16-year-old nephew over dinner. The nephew who had just ghosted her after finding out she'd been hospitalized for severe depression.
This episode is about what happens when you finally stop protecting people from your truth — and what it costs you when you don't. Michele is a mental health advocate, speaker, writer and coach who has lived experience with bipolar disorder, multiple hospitalizations, and the thing she calls self-stigma: the moment we take society's cruelest beliefs about mental illness and turn them on ourselves.
It is soul-crushing and most of us have no idea we're doing it.
That story is the entry point into a much bigger conversation about what self-stigma actually is, why it's far more dangerous than the stigma we receive from others, and how it quietly (and not so quietly) steals our sense of worth, shrinks our expectations of ourselves, and keeps us in the same place long after the crisis has passed.
We also get into:
-What to actually say to someone who tells you they've been in a psych ward or are managing a mental illness. Spoiler: you don't have to have the perfect words. You just have to stay.
-Why mental health and mental wellness are not the same thing, and why collapsing that distinction actually does harm.
-The difference between the "I" in illness and the "we" in wellness — one of the most memorable lines you will hear this year.
-Why self-compassion isn't soft or optional — it is the thing that dissolves self-stigma, full stop.
Michele is the kind of person who makes you feel less alone just by being honest about her own life. This episode is a gift for anyone who has struggled, love someone who struggles, or ever stood there not knowing what the hell to say which is basically all of us.
Find Michele on Instagram and read her Substack, The Magic of Mental Wellbeing.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
14 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
7 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 37 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
53
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
51
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