The Friday Podcast

Leila S. Chudori has spent years telling stories at the intersection of history, politics, and journalism. In her novel Laut Bercerita, she revisits the disappearance of student activists in 1998 through fiction rooted in real history.With its film adaptation set to premiere on October 29, 2026, we sat down with Leila to discuss the responsibility of telling sensitive stories, how journalism shapes her writing, and why the events of 1998 still resonate amid today’s political anxieties.---------------Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

Membuat festival di kota besar saja sudah sulit. Membuatnya dari third city, dengan sumber daya yang serba terbatas, jelas bukan perkara mudah. "Specialist in hope". Selama masih ada kemungkinan kecil, akan tetap dikejar, walaupun harus merangkak.Prinsip itu yang membawa Partilibur dari tongkrongan di Lumajang, ke gigs kecil di kafe-kafe, sampai ke festival dengan 9 panggung di Batu, Malang. Ini adalah documentar tentang melampaui keterbatasan dan mimpi yang dikerjakan bareng-bareng.

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Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

There is a man in Indonesian comedy who is now spreading his wings to other ventures. In music he could've been the next big musical export from Indonesia but he chose to be a villain to some of the industries biggest name (Harusnya banyakin temen bang hip, malah nyari masalah 😔), and next he claims to be an action star and vouched that his scene is the one to watch in the upcoming movie GJLS: Berapi-Api (Lagi-lagi ngaku paling terbaik 😔) So we sat down with him to figure out the inner workings of his mind.Catch him live at Showcase Album Jalan Kaki Bersama Teman-teman, Bandung on October 3rd, Jakarta 10th of October, Yogyakarta on the 30th of October. And of course the upcoming film GJLS: Berapi-api is in cinemas from 4 November. Padet juga jadwalnya bang @hifdzikhoir.---------------Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

Abigail Limuria has spent years facilitating people how to think about the country. So we opened with the question nobody asks her: who is she when nobody asks her opinion?Turns out the answer is the same person, just quieter. She doesn't stop having opinions when the mic goes off and after almost a year of protests, outrage, and demands for change, the one she keeps coming back to is that we are in a crisis of competence.We sit down with Abigail Limuria to unpack the 17+8 demands and what became of them, the frustration of watching a country move without improving, and why so much happening can leave you with so little to show for it.

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Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

Everyone says 'in this economy' like there was ever a good one, this is a conversation on tweaking our financial/success mindset in these modern times.

We sit down with Hani Kusumowardhani, she’s a Chief Compliance Officer at a leading financial services company, and we expected to be told to save more. That's not what happens. She grew up without much of it but she put the extra effort until she studied on a full Putera Sampoerna Foundation scholarship, earning her MBA in Sydney, and her insight isn't a budget, but a different measuring stick.

Her advice is stranger and more generous than expected: spend deliberately, keep moving, and stop treating saving as the whole plan. We get into why spending is necessary, why the coffee-versus-property argument misses the point entirely, and why she thinks the real problem was never how young people spend.

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Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

Cara Riantoputra, CEO & Co-Founder of Teach First Indonesia, left a “great job” great pay, great culture, great trajectory because she realized none of it would matter if she disappeared tomorrow. So she built a movement instead: recruiting the country’s most competitive graduates to go teach in classrooms that don’t have any.

Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: the best teachers rarely end up where they’re needed most. We centralize talent in cities and call the gap in the villages a “resource problem,” when it’s really a decision problem.

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Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!

Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube.

Twitter: @maknatalks

Instagram: @maknatalks

Business: [email protected]

Indonesia is rewriting its own history for only the third time since independence and Prof. Susanto Zuhdi is the one holding it together. Now, at the center of a 10 volume, 123 writer rewrite of the nation's official history, he's fielding the hardest questions: what counts as fact, what gets left out, and questions about political interference conflict of interests. In this episode, he talks candidly about all of it, the process, the politics, and the parts that have already sparked national debate.---------------Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

Today we have another podcast host as a guest, this time Tiara sits as the person who answers the question and not asking them. Tiara grew up asking the kind of questions most kids don't get real answers to. Almost a decade later, she's still asking just professionally now.In this episode we talked about what it's actually like to build a career around curiosity, the interviews that changed how she sees life, and we also got into what it takes to build a media outlet that deliberately chose depth over virality.---------------Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

22 years, 7 albums, same five guys (the only substitutions ever made were for medical reasons, not creative)In an industry where bands are becoming the exception rather than the rule, Tria Changcuters sat down with us to talk about what actually keeps a band alive that long. From a crowd that barely noticed them to strangers in London singing their songs back to them, Tria walks us through two decades of a friendship and work that just... never stopped.---------------Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]

Meet Deo Mario, founder and creative director behind Post and Beam System and the reason our podcast set has looked this good all season. Trained at Bauhaus in Germany, a school that never claimed to manufacture architects but simply triggered creativity and let you figure out the rest, Deo came home to a different reality, back then architects here are often seen as glorified draftsmen rather than people entrusted with vision, part of why he never actually practiced architecture in Indonesia. If you love architecture, arts, and history this episode will get you hooked!---------------Thank you for watching, don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications on these videos to be the first to know our next episodes. Also, if you're reading until this section, comment down below your favorite part from this podcast!Makna Talks is available on Spotify and Youtube. Twitter: @maknatalksInstagram: @maknatalksBusiness: [email protected]