My Unofficial Investigation of Male Podcasters (Solo Episode)

Listen now (48 mins) | For November’s solo episode, listeners mostly asked me about the larger spiritual moment we might be part of at this moment in time—so I’m sharing some thoughts on that...

You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. Hi. Hi. I am back for my next solo.

This is, it seems going to be a recurring fifth episode a month every Monday the last week of the month for those of you who are counting, and this has been fun. I have to say they're not necessarily the most listened to episodes of all the episodes, but they are certainly the ones that I'm getting the most direct feedback from. And to that end, I love feedback and those of you who follow me on Instagram, I'm @eliseloehnen, know that I sometimes solicit guest ideas and questions for episodes, but you can also drop them into the Apple Podcast rating and reviews. I'll see them there. You can also come to eliseloehnen.substack.com and leave comments there as well, and I will gather them. I really appreciate the feedback and it's very helpful to know what's needed or what's resonant or who you would like to hear from.

And I do a pretty good job of intuiting that or feeling into it, but there are many people I haven't heard of or whose work I don't know. And sometimes it's really interesting to see the themes. And so I'm going to get to some questions at the end. There were a lot of questions about the larger spiritual moment that we might be part of at this moment in time, and I have some thoughts about that and other interesting questions, more in the realm of politics and whatnot. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the election. I'm going to talk a bit today about the mantle, which is a brilliant word to describe this idea of panels that are all men. And I'm also specifically going to talk about the podcast world, which is really the bro cast world. I also just saw a hilarious word on Instagram, which is the oligarchy, which I think describes another segment emerging in our culture.

So those of you who read my substack or have been listening to me for a while know that one of the things that I have been tracking or commenting on is what's happening in the world of podcasts and specifically the top of the podcast funnel. Podcasts are an interesting world in the sense that nobody has really resolved or solved discovery for podcasts. It's very hard to be found. It's very hard to market shows. And really the only way to grow if you don't come out of the gate really high is to go on other people's shows and network around and whatnot. But it's very difficult to crack. And one of the things that if you are a longtime podcast listener, you may have noticed, is that back in the day, it felt more equal in terms of shows that had significant listenerships, but certainly now, and it seems to be only going in this direction, it has become extremely male dominated and it dovetails with politics in a way that's not surprising.

To those of you who are listening, I know you know the impact of people like Joe Rogan on the election and that he had, I think Trump Vance and Elon Musk in the week before the election. I think the Trump interview alone was listened to or viewed on YouTube 45 million times. That's essentially more than half of the people who number of votes that he got and Kamala went on call her daddy. But most of the shows are hosted by men, whether it's in entertainment, most of the big shows, there are a few really big shows hosted by women like Call Her Daddy, Mel Robbins has a really popular show. Glennon Doyle show is often up there in the top 100’s. I haven't looked at the charts in the last couple of weeks, but that could certainly get up there. But mostly it's men and it's Joe, certainly it's Stack Shepherd, it's Andrew Huberman, it's Peter Attia, Tim Ferris, Sam Harris, Dan Harris, and then it's the Smartless guys, it's Jay Shetty, it's Lewis Howes, and so on and so forth.

And they really have a stranglehold. And so a couple of years ago, a friend of mine was saying, you should go on such and such guy's podcast. And my immediate response to that was, oh, he would never interview me. I'm a woman. It was just a reflexive response. I didn't really know why. And then I said, is that true? I need to actually look. And so I started this audit process a couple of years ago where I looked at primarily in the wellness space and people who sit in that sort of longevity, wellness, mindfulness, somewhat culture, but not really pop culture space. And I did an audit of their guests and I was looking at again, these podcasts that are hosted by men. And what I found was quite stunning actually, where I think the highest of them had 13% of their guests were women.

And at that point, Andrew Huberman had only interviewed eight women. Peter Attia was at 11%. I want to say he was not good at all. And often it would be the same female guests coming back. And then often those women were relegated to speaking specifically about medical topics that pertain to women, so menopause, sex, et cetera. And this was concerning to me for a number of reasons. The obvious being this is no way to help these women get their workout into the world if you're not interviewing them. And I should also caveat because often what you'll hear in response to prompts about this is, well, oh, there just aren't as many women in these spaces. And that is not true. So not only have girls and women been outpacing boys and men in terms of earning college degrees, I think it might be up to 58 to 42% in favor of women, but these spans extend into advanced degrees, PhDs, MDs, JDs, PhDs in the biomedical space, there are legions of qualified women publishing work and teaching and writing about science and health and wellness and not just in the domain of menopause.

And these men will talk about their research. They won't necessarily interview them. So that was really interesting to me. And alarming was this strong preference for male experts and then putting women in a very specific category or not platforming them at all. And because it persists, it has this impact, this persistence that women aren't really expert and that women aren't as credible or qualified as men. It just promotes that idea. It just continues to cement in our minds that really should ask a man probably a white dude because they're really the only ones who are qualified for these conversations. And this is particularly alarming. I didn't really even do Joe Rogan in the audit because he's definitely prefers interviewing men, but he's also not a pedigreed science person. He's someone who likes to have those conversations and has a lot of curiosity about those conversations and is clearly very smart and very connected to his audience.

And I don't listen to Joe Rogan. I've only dibbled dabbled in some of the conversations about him. And I would say the concern that I can really rally around is that he's a very generous host and platforms, people that maybe he shouldn't platform and doesn't challenge people, et cetera. So it's sort of giving them free reign to an incredibly large audience who really trust him and trust his curiosity and trust his intelligence. But I'm not the person to talk about Joe Rogan because I am not a student of Joe Rogan's, but I'll get to this. Part of what happens is when we get really, really intent about shutting these conversations down, we only fuel people's belief that there's something that we don't want them to hear that has some value or validity. And so that's one of the dynamics that I definitely watch out for because also as a woman, I think we can all relate to the control that comes for us.

You all are lemmings and you'll believe anyone and don't listen to those people and you're fine. So I think anyone can locate in their body what it feels like to be controlled or constrained, and then the minute that that happens, you're like, oh, I don't trust you because you're gaslighting me or keeping me from information that I need to access. So I hate that tactic. I hate that tactic because I do think that if you present information that people theoretically should be able to say, this is relevant to me or this is not. And I think the minute you try and shut that down, you start creating these threads that can become sort of conspiracies. So I don't like that energy at the outset of treating people like they're idiots and they shouldn't listen to this. I don't think it has the desired impact. Anyway, I am getting off topic, unsurprisingly.

So these men as my concern is really particularly in the health and wellness space, and I have a lot of thoughts about the Maha movement and maybe I'll write about them someday. I'm still processing and oh, sigh, a deep sigh there. Not because I don't think that the concerns about the environment and the concerns about health aren't valid, but I don't have any faith in this particular execution of that agenda and I'm concerned. So I'll leave it at that for now, but it's something that obviously I'm thinking about and maybe I'll say one more thing, which is as you're consuming content from people in this space, it's really important to understand their business and what they are trying to sell and what they are trying to build. And I think too often we mistake what is actually a transaction for altruism. And I think that people build their brands off of these conspiratorial or dark threads or they sow fear and anxiety in order to use movements to build their own prominence and position in these spaces.

And they are not, even though I'm sure that they believe that they're doing it for the highest good of all people, they are doing it because they want to be at the center of these movements and they want to be at the center of your lives in part because there's a transaction there for them. There's a lot of money at stake and an attention economy. And so I think anytime you feel pulled, it's so important to say, wait, what does this person get out of this? These people are not operating nonprofits, they're not NGOs. So what's happening here, I think it's really important as we watch this develop to recognize these people are building their brands on the backs of people who are paying attention to them in this economy. And sure, maybe they really want the highest good of all people, but it's a business.

It's a business to them and you are part of that business. So that's all I'll say about that for now. But speaking of business, there's a real, grift maybe is too strong of a word, but you think about the men in this space, and there are women obviously in this space as well, but the really prominent players are men who are building massive businesses off of health and wellness information. And some of it is certainly solid. I'm not suggesting that these guys aren't qualified, but it's a very specific, very masculine view of the world highlighting and focusing and platforming solely on men as the arbiters of health and wellness. Again, and it's interesting because wellness originally was this very feminine enterprise and it was about escaping that and finding something different, finding something more intuitive, something more connected to nature, something that felt more about returning to some sort of balance or homeostasis in the body.

And it wasn't about tracking and hacking and this very masculine take in so many of these spaces. Women often sow the seeds and prepare the ground and create these cottage industries and then men see the opportunity and come in and take it over. And that's definitely what's happened in wellness. It looks very different than it did, at least when I entered the fray a long time ago.

So these men to get back to the manel only really talk to other men only really platform men. And again, it creates this idea that really men are the only ones worth listening to and they're the only ones that we should pay attention to. And then because they're popular and they're relevance and reach only grows, it just reinforces that to us and the women in the space continue to fall by the wayside or really not stand a chance. And I was working on a story before I ended up writing this as a four-part substack series, which I'll link in the show notes and about who gets to be an expert and many of the other factors that are part of this. But I was originally writing this now a year and a half ago, I guess, or maybe even longer for a big newspaper that I was doing an op-Ed about listening patterns and what it shows us or why we should be concerned in part because half of the listeners to these shows are women.

And I don't think most of us are conscious of the fact that we're really only reinforcing a pattern where we're silenced or marginalized. And the op-ed didn't happen because there was a decision up the chain that they didn't want to do anything that could be construed as being critical of the media, which was very interesting to me. And so I ended up sitting on it and then I wrote it on my substack a month before that Andrew Huberman piece came out in New York Mag, which of course I did not know about, I promise. And then it had its moment and I wrote a few more stories. But I've been thinking about it a lot in light of the election and what's happening to media and how it's fracturing. And this is the thing that I think is really important for us to understand, particularly as we try to move forward and reconstitute ourselves and make sure that there are ample voices from women represented.

The first thing is this idea of scarcity. This is a huge factor in the success of these men's brands versus the lack of success amongst women. And that is that these men are really not governed by scarcity. And scarcity is, I'd say just primary in the minds of so many women we're really conditioned understandably to believe that there's only room for one of us, and if she has a successful show, then I can't have a successful show too. Or if someone were to listen to her show, then they wouldn't listen to my show and so on and so forth. And this is obviously not a universal rule, but for the most part there's a lot of scarcity amongst women in terms of opportunity seats on boards all over the place. And again, we see there's reason why we believe this, but when it comes to podcasts amongst these men, there is no scarcity and they have built a massive infrastructure in which they all support each other.

And you will trace the big podcasters back and you'll see that they launch each other, shows they have each other on with a ton of frequency. When something is going on from one of them, like a book or project, they all run each other through their shows for the most part, not all of them. I will say, I had mentioned Dan Harris' name earlier as one of these men who is in this space, but his show is programmed very differently. So he gets major snaps. He is very equitable, highly diverse and representational programming. His producers and Dan are clearly doing a really good job. I think it's because he comes from traditional media and so they recognize that there's a bias and that you have to push against it in order to make sure that your show reflects the world. So hats off to Dan Harris, but most of these guys are not governed by those rules or ideas, but they do really help each other.

They see no scarcity. There's no part of Peter Attia that's threatened by Andrew Huberman success or by Tim Ferris's success. In fact, I think they all live in Texas together as far as I know, and braid each other's hair. But that's a really big difference. I mean, there might be a community, and I don't know about it, but there's no Discernable community amongst women in this space. We don't do that. And I kind of love that about women that we're not organized into media militias to drown out other voices. However, in this moment in time where we recognize how impactful it is to have voices drowning out the voices of others and how critical it is to trust your media sources, it does feel like we really need to address this and fix it and resolve it. And I'm still thinking about we don't have all the data from the election, but it will be very interesting in the long run with even more perspective in terms of time to understand how traditional and untraditional media informed people's decisions and what the impact of those decisions will be.

It's very early. I will say I'm having Courtney Smith, my friend who's a coach, who's been on the show a couple of times on soon, we're working on an episode with tools for those of us who are having trouble dealing with reality, including facts versus stories. So I won't get into that today because we're going to do a whole episode of ways to contend with anxiety and this particular moment. But one of the things I'm certainly thinking about is the media and how it's sourced and how to make credible content that's balanced and sourced well and reported that feel sanctimonious or so guarded in its rightness. And I think that we have a big problem, people like me with that where there's this desire to appear as virtuous and and buttoned up and perfect as possible. I know so many women in particular suffer under this, that we won't take any risks, we won't say anything unless we feel like it's incredibly qualified.

And meanwhile, there's no such impediment for so many of these men. And I wonder if there's something for us to learn there that it's okay to be a little wild, a little less controlled, and maybe that feels like a crazy thing to say at this moment when everything might feel out of control. But I'm just trying to read into the energetics of why these guys are so compelling and what is it that's so mesmerizing about that type of content. I'll be thinking about that obviously.

One of the other things I'm really interested in is this idea, and again, it's too soon to tell what the impact of misogyny is in terms of what's happened in the last couple of months. And I think that there will be the tendency in some ways to overplay it. I'm not saying that it's not real, but as time goes on, I am less interested in blaming external factors or assuming that it's so simple that it's like, oh, it must be misogyny, it must be racism, it must be homophobia. And I'm not saying that those elements aren't real and that they aren't part of this, but I think it's far more nuanced than that.

And I think when we try and play whack-a-mole or we accuse certain swaths of the population of being homophobic or racist or misogynistic outright, we just lose people because I think people can immediately think of a million instances in which they are not those things. And I think it's because the way that we talk about them suggests that they're wholesale personality traits when what we're really talking about is conditioned behavior. And I'm not condoning it, but I think that the minute that you make someone bad, they're gone. It is a losing strategy. And someone on Instagram very nicely in response to my substack after the election when I wrote about how my hope for all of us is that we can resist the un impulse to place blame and shame and that we don't immediately rush to it was white women, it was Latino men, it was black men, it was all men, whatever it may be, because that is a losing strategy.

That is strategy of alienation. And when you find yourself in one of those groups, the immediate impulse is to go to where you're wanted and where you feel safe and where you're outside of shame. And I can say as a white woman who is Jewish, my immediate response to that, which is why I know it's so full of energy, is I'm not bad. I am a Jewish woman. I vote pretty much like a black woman, so don't make me part of this calculus. I immediately get incredibly defensive and rigid and angry. And I think that we've been trying this, the problem is white women strategy for eight years and friends, it does not work. It is not helpful. But all to say that I really hope we can stop talking about each other as these giant swaths or monoliths because we are not. And I don't think a lot of people voted based on who they hate.

And they might have false beliefs, a lot of aggrieved and entitled white men, for example, clearly blame immigrants or women from taking away job opportunities for them when really they need to blame Jeff Bezos and corporate titans who have destroyed mom and pop businesses and outsourced jobs and all of that. They're blaming the wrong people. It's called horizontal hostility. It's our instinct to blame sideways. That's the only place where we feel powerful. We feel powerful only against the people who have less power. So I think some people vote with some of that in mind, but I don't think that people are voting just because they don't like women. I think that that's not a misunderstanding. I recognize that these energies are present, but I don't think that that's the story. And I hope that we don't stick with it. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to write on our best behavior in part was because I was trying to blame men for Hillary or for women not having as many seats of power or being as consequential in media or in any other space.

And I couldn't make my case because I looked around and I saw a lot of men who had been really lovely to me and incredibly supportive, and I knew a lot of women who hadn't been. And so it just wasn't so cut and dry. And then I recognized, oh my God, part of this is me. It's my own internalized patriarchy. That's what my book is about. It's about taking responsibility for our own programming in the way that we're showing up in the world because that's really all that we can control for one. But two, these systems are baked into us and that's what we're enacting in the world. And so it's just, man, if it were so easy to just blame other people and then get rid of them, sure, but we know how we can look at history and see what that looks like and how that's worked out.

And I don't think any of us want to participate in that. So to me, it's not nearly as simple as just misogyny. And one of the questions that I got for this episode was from someone who said it and very wasn't in a confrontational way at all, but she was like, I don't understand. So you're saying that you aren't going to morally exclude racists, misogynists homophobes. Is that really how you feel? And my response was, no, I'm not going to morally exclude racists and homophobes and misogynists because then where do we end up? And if people like me, people who have a lot of privilege in this culture aren't willing to engage with people who are maybe behaving ways that are hateful or minimizing of other people, then we're really screwed. And if Loretta Ross, Loretta Ross was one of the very first podcast guests that I had on pulling the thread and she talks about calling in rather than calling out.

And she's a professor at Smith. She's amazing. Please listen to the episode. And she's a survivor of rape and obviously a tremendous amount of racism and her work, she would go and work with rapists and planners past and present in prison. She had to work with them and talk to them. And if Loretta Ross can find common ground with men like that, and she did, she writes or talks about how there are a certain percentage of the population that are unreachable, but it's a pretty small percentage. And mostly there's a huge Venn diagram of overlapping values and beliefs. There's a lot of space, there's a lot of ground not in between us, but that we're all standing on. And if she can do that work, then I certainly can. And I think anyone with any privilege needs to do that work. It's my job. I mean, put me in with a conservative white man any day I will go to town.

That's my job. That's my job. So yeah, I think when we write each other off as gone, you need to look in the mirror. There's a great book called Doppelganger. I'm sure many of you guys have read it by Naomi Klein, but that's about this phenomenon. What happens when we reject morally exclude and shame people and they go to the, she calls it the mirror world, they go to the other side. And in this moment of extreme polarity, we can't afford it. We cannot afford it. We have to figure out how to quote, can Wilbur transcendent include this extreme polarization and this highly binary space that we find ourselves in? And to that note, I know I've done a fair number of spiral dynamics episodes. I wrote a newsletter detailing the whole system that you can find on my substack, and then I had Nicole Churchill on to describe the spiral and then also Ken Wilbur.

And some people struggle with Ken Wilbur, I know. But if you want a short primer on this moment politically read post-truth world, it's very short. Most of his books are very long, but it's a really good primer on exactly what's happening politically right now in terms of spiral dynamics, which is a psychological system that looks at, it's a personal that dovetails with cultural development and it's fascinating. And so what we have right now is red, which is Trump. And so much of what's happening in the Middle East, we have orange, which is the part of the spiral that's about technology and freedom, and that has really become the provenance of the oligarchs. That's the technocrat, that's this shift within the Republican party from all of these seemingly sort of liberal men who have moved, right? My friend Carissa calls them the cyborgs, but there are a lot of orange people in the world.

That's Wall Street again, all link a more comprehensive primer. And then you have green, which is very beautiful, which is the politics and the values of Democrats mostly with some orange in there as well. And green is eco-centric and every story counts and it's very loving. It hates hierarchy, which gets it into trouble. In this moment of time, we have what's called regressive green, where green starts behaving like red. We have gotten a big lesson in the last year. It's sort of our culture gone mad, which I think is a big part of this election too, is a big clap back at that where instead of living up to our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we are intolerant of anyone who doesn't agree with us or doesn't see the world in the same way we are exclusionary, we can be mean and hateful and shaming.

So that's spiral dynamics. And I think we're in the middle of a shock point that's trying to push as many of us as possible to the next stage of the spiral, which is integral, which is a stage that's a new tier. And within integral, you can allow, see and accept all parts of the spiral and recognize that all parts of the spiral are also present in you at different points of time. And there comes a point where the center of gravity of a culture starts to shift. And right now the culture we're in sort of a turf war, but I think we're going to pop to integral. I really feel like that's the growing pain that we're in right now is how do we transcend and include what's present and get to a different vantage point where we are not making each other bad and wrong and that we recognize we are all in this together and you are not going anywhere and I am not going anywhere even if we are different on different sides of the political aisle. So I might be taking you all on pulling the thread back into spiral dynamics because I think it's so helpful and calming.

I got a lot of questions about what larger spiritual movement this moment is part of, and I think it's that. I think it's a rise in consciousness. I think it is breaking our brains to the point of recognizing we are soaking in the polarity. I think in part to say, okay, I'm done with this. This is not helpful, this is not fun, this is not interesting, this is not peace promoting, this is not loving and I need to change the channel. So I think that part of it is this as a big awakening big, and this'll probably be too woo woo for some of you, but we are in this fascinating astrological moment where we are at the end of the old era where Pluto has been in Capricorn for a really long time and Pluto goes to Aquarius imminently. It might already have moved by the time this episode comes out.

And I am not an astrologer, nor am I a student of astrology, but from what I understand is that old aerodynamics no longer work in the new era. It's going to have a totally different energetic feel that I think will be palpable to those of us who are sensitive to energy and not everyone is or should be because it's a lot to be sensitive to energy. And I think that things are going to start to change. One of the hallmarks of this new era and what we've been going through for a while is this era of transparency. And as we know, nothing really stays hidden for long anymore. And I think that we're going to continue to have these revelations about what's really happening and going. And I don't say that to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I'm really not. I recognize that there's darkness present and I think people are doing shitty things.

I'm not saying that they're not, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think there's plots to undermine our health and so on and so forth. I do think companies and countries have ulterior motives and I think that people are good at having a long view and executing a strategy like Project 2025. And may it not come true, I really hope we're not going to see a Project 2025 world, but I mostly believe that people are good even if they are full of shadow simultaneously. And I think that at this moment in time with transparency, it's like the blinds are coming up in a way. We're all going to see all the things that people don't really necessarily want us to see. And that said, it's going to be on us to exercise our discretion in terms of not getting too twisted or caught up or played by these larger forces.

By that I mean just players and influencers and people on this larger stage. Again, I always go to what is this person's motivation? What are they getting out of this? How are they transacting on me? What are they after? What do they get if they win? It's really important because it's so easy to become corrupted. It's so easy to become enslaved to money or to followers or to attention. It just is watched it. It happens all the time. I watched it happen all the time, and it's something I of course watch in myself, but I recognize that it's why I have an aversion to marketing tactics and link baiting and going for things that are salacious and catchy just for this hope or sake of capturing eyeballs. It's a dangerous slippery game. And maybe I'll leave you there. That's my favorite Carissa quote: Your vibration must be higher than what you create otherwise you cannot manage it.

And I cannot repeat this enough. And I think it is true for all of us, regardless of whether we think we're creating something or not. Your vibration must be higher than what you create otherwise you cannot manage it. And I think it's incumbent on all of us to take responsibility for our own energy, for what we're projecting out into the world, what we're taking out on the world, what we're projecting onto other people. It's really incumbent on all of us to take particularly as things get wilder, as we find ourselves caught in what feels a bit like a clown car, that we really get clean with ourselves and on top of our own energetic hygiene. Take time to ground. Take time to take care of yourself, to breathe. Turn off social media, unhook from 24 hour news. Figure out who you can trust and who is worth listening to and who isn't going to inflame your nervous system.

I wrote a newsletter this week about how I feel like anxiety has become synonymous with as a virtue signal in our culture where if you're not expressing enough anxiety about what might happen, then somehow you are a bad person or you're not really seeing what other people are going through, et cetera. And so one of the things that I wrote about was staying with facts and not with what if stories, but also that I'm over that story, that I need to be running my nervous system at a really high level in order to prove that I'm paying attention and that to be resourced and to resource myself, take care of myself, breathe, move through my own anxiety by myself, send it into the ground rather than shedding it all over you is a service. And it also means that I am more capable of responding to the moment I can care more because I'm not exhausted and I'm not frazzled and I am standing on my own two feet.

So let's all do that as much as possible. Let's not exercise ourselves into a total tizzy so that we can stay present with what is and respond as needed to reality. This is a tall order, but I think we can do it. And I think that that allows us to take the temperature down a little bit, at least in our own lives, but we regulate off of each other. And you know this, when you're around someone who's really highly anxious and is really cranked up, it can be very hard to stay in your body. And when you're around someone who is incredibly calm, that task becomes much easier. So may we regulate off of each other and stay grounded, if not for yourself, do it for yourself, but do it for your family and do it for people who just can't and are not capable and maybe are feeling exceptionally threatened. So the more of us who can stay grounded and present the better.

NEWSLETTERS MENTIONED:

PART 1: Ending the “Manel”—Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves

PART 2: The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity

PART 3: Who Gets to Be an Expert?

PART 4: The Achilles Heel of Women

Follow-on: “One Thing We Need to Learn”

PODCAST EPISODES MENTIONED:

Loretta Ross Episode: “Calling in the Call-Out Culture”

Ken Wilber Episode: “To Transcend and Include”

Nicole Churchill Episode: “The Basics of Spiral Dynamics”

Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger