The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
When it's real, and when it's not. (Part Two from last week.)
I decided to do a short series—four newsletters—because of the response to last week’s newsletter, “Ending the Manel.” If you missed it, read that one quickly first for context.
A friend of mine is contemplating starting her own business—or specifically taking herself out of an institution which sells her services and working for herself instead. She has many advanced, highly specific therapeutic degrees and will have no problem filling her slate with clients, and groups, and content-based support work, but she has a lot of understandable anxiety about the leap. She’s been asking around for advice and the resounding feedback is that she must peddle scarcity: Limited-time opportunity! This will sell out fast! And so on. When she told me this, my heart sank, not because it doesn’t work (obviously, it does), but because I’m so tired of manufactured scarcity—women already encounter enough of it in our thinking and in our daily lives.
“I think there’s real scarcity in your practice, which is one thing,” I offered. “Your time is limited by the hours in the day, and you likely won’t be able to take on everyone who comes. And yes, some programs have a start date and people need to sign up before then. It’s okay to say all of that. But hitting peoples’ fear and panic buttons by creating scarcity where it might not exist is not a vibrational match for your highly, highly sensitive system. You will count yourself a fraud if you feel like you manipulated people into signing up.” Obviously, she knew all of this and just wanted reassurance that she wasn’t an idiot for not adopting standard marketing practices. And this is where I waver: Because a refusal to play the game means you likely won’t win it. I know what I think is more valuable (integrity), but that’s a privileged stance—because scarcity for women is real. And it also can’t be overstated that playing the game doesn’t necessarily work either: It’s hard to win when you not only hate the rules, but the game is rigged.
We all know the pay gap—85 cents to the dollar, women to men. (That said, we definitely don’t spend enough time on its nuances, namely that single white women typically earn as much as their male peers. It’s mothers and women of color—and the Venn diagram of those two groups in particular—who really take the hit.) The pay gap isn’t the worst offender when it comes to women and money, though: I write in On Our Best Behavior in the Greed chapter (which is all about scarcity and feelings of not-enoughness) about the wealth gap, which is 32 cents to the dollar, women to men. Yep, you read that right. It’s a staggering gap to bridge.
For women, scarcity is often very real, and not just when it comes to cash: Access to higher salaries yes, but also to resources, time, visibility, opportunity, funding, mentorship, to a seat on the executive team or in a board room where tokenism, or “twokenism” often reigns. And this is where real scarcity and the perception of scarcity get wobbly. Because instead of solely railing against systemic inequities, we are conditioned to train our sights on the woman in the seat, armed with the belief that in order to make room for ourselves, she must be dethroned. That if she has the thing, we can’t possibly have it too. (Back to the Envy chapter in On Our Best Behavior.) When we engage in this type of behavior, we inhibit our ability to expand by keeping what’s possible constrained to what’s in our sights, what we already know to be possible. This is subtle and it’s also deeply rooted. It’s difficult enough to identify when this socialized behavior has us by the throat—it’s much harder to change it, particularly when it’s largely invisible and functions as a norm. (I’m coming back to this in a minute.)
The other idea we’re fed is that we should try to join the boy’s club, and adopt the dominant strategies of the culture, specifically the strategies that have been employed by men since the birth of patriarchy. But again, many of us hate this game, particularly in our broken world, which is on the precipice of environmental catastrophe and already raging with multiple, heartless wars. We can’t sustain growth for growth’s sake in this unremitting quest for more and more and more—and by that logic, never enough. It’s time to care for what we’ve already created, to nurture what and who is already here.
To that end, I have a strong aversion to any programming that suggests women should just behave more like men. In fact, I think men need to behave more like women, and let their Divine Feminine come up, that nurturing, caring, creative energy that is every human’s birthright, regardless of gender. (The Sadness chapter of On Our Best Behavior is about what happens to men in our culture, specifically when we sever them from their feelings as boys and “turn them into” men.) I don’t see our culture re-balancing until men let this happen en masse, and support each other in the process. (I think there will be great relief for them when they do—and certainly relief for women.)
So what do we do about scarcity—both real and perceived—in the interim? I believe the latter drives the former, and that’s where we must start—with that instinct inside each of us that insists there’s not enough for everyone, that flares in the moments when our own safety and security is threatened. (I.e., for many of us, it flares all the time.)
In On Our Best Behavior, I wrote about Lynne Twist and her book The Soul of Money, where she describes how men and women think about money. Men describe money as a flowing river—infinite, unceasing, moving, whereas women are more likely to describe it as a pond: boundaried, small, and with no source of input. It’s a stunningly different vision. And so while I don’t want women to feel like they should behave like men, I think we can look to them for inspiration here, to what it would feel like to assume that there’s always more where that came from. After all, money is energy.
I promised this was a Part Two to last week, and it is, so let’s turn back to the world of podcasting, which has arguably become one of the most culture-defining, dominant forms of media in the past decade. Presidents and wannabe-presidents make the rounds: RFK Jr. owes his polling numbers to podcasters like Joe Rogan and others of his ilk, POTUS has sat with the Smartless guys and Jay Shetty, Obama has visited Marc Maron for an episode, as well as Armchair Expert’s attic.
When I started co-hosting a big podcast six years ago as part of my previous job, it was still a pretty niche industry, and dominated by men and male listeners (in 2013, women accounted for 39% of the audience). These days, women are 48% of the listeners, but there are very few big female podcasters outside the True Crime space. It was looking better for a minute: Brené Brown’s wide-ranging show “Unlocking Us,” had a huge debut in 2020 (it’s currently on hiatus, though it looks like it’s coming back), Meghan Markle’s “Archetypes” beat Joe Rogan on Spotify for a minute (it’s currently off the air, though a return seems planned), leaving Glennon Doyle’s “We Can Do Hard Things,” Mel Robbins’ eponymous show, and Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” as three of the only female hosted interview shows that can regularly crack into the top 50. For the most part, this is a sport dominated by the voices of men—and, as we learned last week, these men primarily only talk to other men.
The podcast world is a horseshoe. On one side, you have a graveyard of shows that haven’t published an episode in years. The middle is a sea of tiny shows, and then on the other end, you have giant shows: In fact, the top 1% of shows account for 99% of all listens. Yep, isn’t that wild? As it were, it looks a lot like the wealth spread in America. Buzzsprout—a turnkey hosting solution for amateur podcasters—suggests that 5,000 listeners per episode puts a show in the top 1%, meanwhile, Peter Attia self-reported last summer that his show is at 70 million listens, which averaged to 260,000 an episode. It’s likely grown since, as his book has been sitting on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year—how do you think that happened? (If you don’t, I’m going to tell you below!) ;)
This is rarified air, and absent a news media organization at your back or celebrity status, it’s nearly impossible to reach those peaks, because here’s another thing about the podcast space: It is not like other content zones that are bolstered by search and discovery based algorithms that tend to spread the wealth around a little bit. You cannot stoke virality, you will not be “discovered,” and it’s hard to drive people to open their podcast app through social or newsletter promotion. Pretty much the only way to grow a podcast is by appearing on other podcasts. And this is where these men can teach us a lot about scarcity.
Rather than seeing each other as competition, these dudes really know how to scratch each other’s backs. They host each other all the time, engaging in endless favor-swapping: For example, Peter Attia appeared on Sam Harris, Dax Shepherd, and Jay Shetty’s shows in August/September alone, and had guested on Tim Ferriss’s show five times the last time I looked; Tim Ferriss has done Huberman Labs and was Peter Attia’s first guest; Sam Harris has been on Attia’s show, Armchair Expert, and Huberman Labs; and around and around we go. (The network is much wider than this, but I can’t spend any more energy documenting it. Katie Gatti Tassin calls this the “thinkboi network,” which makes me laugh.) While you’d think that these men might lose their own audience by backing each other in this way, they don’t: They keep growing and growing and becoming ever more dominant in the space, drowning out other voices and platforming only men. It’s a big lesson in the perception of scarcity and how it is not real.
Meanwhile, there is no similar corollary among female podcasters: To my knowledge, we’re not on WhatsApp chains trading intel, ad rates, and running each other through our shows. In many ways, this makes me very proud: I pinch my nose at the above, and don’t think it’s of great service to the listener. That said, to be perfectly honest, I know that as women, we’re not entirely motivated by valor or our own integrity. We’re also motivated by scarcity and competition—by fear that a listener might abandon us for someone she likes better. (I know this, because when I think about all the women in my network who have supported me and my work (so, so many!), and all the women who haven’t, I’m struck by the fact that the women who have yet to support my book or my work are the ones whose own work is most closely aligned to mine. It pains me to say this, and yes it sounds embittered, but…it’s true. And honestly, it surprised me. But I recognize it’s part of a larger trend, a trend that I understand well: It feels like there’s not enough to go around, that we’re inherently in competition for what’s left, that how can we possibly be expected to help another women when nobody is helping us. This is how we stay stuck in cycles, cycles of perceived scarcity—and also how we fail to build choral movements, siloing ourselves as lone voices, lone Cassandras.) It’s hard to write about this: It feels self-interested and entitled and humiliating—who am I to expect their support?—but sometimes these things need to be said otherwise we can’t see it.
It’s hard to push against the status quo, and I understand why people with bigger platforms and more to lose don’t do it: I don’t want to call out women I love and respect, and these men wield a lot of power in the culture. To say something risks alienating oneself from opportunity. Putting these men on the mat is not in my personal best interest. (I can see my book’s PR team holding their heads as they read this!) After all, there’s a slim chance that I could be part of that 11-13% of women who are invited on their shows. Or 34% if we’re talking about Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert, which already has a leg-up on the competition because he shares hosting duties with Monica Padman, a 36-year-old woman of Indian descent. Or Jay Shetty: While half of Shetty’s episodes are solos, as of last August he had hosted 108 women, as compared to 138 men, which is far more inclusive than his contemporaries (44%).* That said: I’m not holding my breath. After all, I have yet to be interviewed about my book in America by a single man.** (I’ve been on 55 shows helmed by women.) A friend who is a publicist suggested that I ask either therapist Terry Real or physician Gabor Maté to co-pitch shows with me (they both blurbed my book) with the promise of making me more palatable to male hosts. In a sense, they could both shield and sponsor me with their masculinity. It was a wise, though sad, suggestion. But men can’t rescue us here: Instead of waiting for these guys to hold the doors wider, we have to solve this for ourselves.
(*Yes, I’ve audited other shows and am struggling—outside of Dan Harris and 10% Happier, and Jay Shetty, and I believe Ezra Klein—to find any male host who is doing this well. It is disheartening. If any of you want to keep auditing, I’d happily pass the torch!)
(**One lovely man interviewed me for a radio program in Australia…let me state for the record that it was one of my favorite interviews for the book because he loved On Our Best Behavior, had read it incredibly closely, and felt it was required reading for every man, as it explained to him the psychology of so many women he loved, as well as his disconnection from his own feminine.)
Before I go, there is some good news. There are networks like Dear Media and Lemonada that are actively working to try to change this landscape by producing shows that are exclusively, or predominantly, hosted by women. Dear Media has my good friend Aliza Pressman, PhD’s show “Raising Good Humans”—as a note, I just looked and Aliza hasn’t been interviewed by any men about her New York Times bestselling parenting book, The Five Principles of Parenting, either. (I guess this underlines that the welfare of children is still perceived as women’s work.) Lemonada has my ride-or-die’s Jessica St. Clair and June Diane Raphael’s show “The Deep Dive”; Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’s “Wiser Than Me,” Sarah Silverman’s eponymous podcast; Samantha Bee’s “Choice Words”; the relaunch of Meghan Markle’s Archetypes, and so many more.) Like the male podcasters above, they actively network each other and advertise each other’s shows. Many female hosted shows platform more women than men—some exclusively interview women. Most include a balance. I tend to host slightly more women than men, simply because women have fewer opportunities to be heard. But I would love to create total parity, and listen to parity everywhere.
That is the big hope, of course—not for stark binary divides on these shows were men only hear from men and women only hear from women, but actual parity. In this alternate reality, there would plenty of opportunity and audience for everyone—listeners would get to follow along with their favorite hosts, and hear from experts and thought leaders who reflect our full demographic reality. They would get to hear that men are interested in the lives and realities and health of women. And the reverse: Though, in my experience, women are definitely interested in understanding men. How amazing would it be to achieve this without needing to goose algorithms via marketing hacks? Dare to dream.
Meanwhile, a challenge to all women: When you feel scarcity flare—“there’s not enough,” “why her and not me?”—question it. Challenge it. Push past your discomfort to evaluate whether the scarcity is real. We cannot change representation statistics, pay gaps, wealth gaps, until we show up for, and champion each other in the same way that men show up for and champion other men. Let these male podcasters prove to all of us that the pie only gets bigger: None of them are suffering for helping each other grow.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
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2/1: On the essential nature of relational conflict with John & Julie Gottman, PhDs
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1/25: On our fat-phobic culture with Kate Manne
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1/18: On growing ourselves up with Aliza Pressman, PhD
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1/11: On being with each other’s pain with Rabbi Sharon Brous
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1/4: Embracing the Shadow with Connie Zweig, PhD
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12/26: What motivates change with Carrie Wilkens, PhD
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THE LATEST POSTS:
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If You Build It, They Will Come: Maybe?
Entering the Wilderness: Embracing All that’s Not Human
Accepting Responsibility: Growing Up is Hard
What Motivates Change? Hint: Not Harshness, and Likely Not Fear
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Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
This was really really good Elise, especially as a podcast host myself. I remember when you shared on my Insatiable podcast that no men had interviewed you my jaw dropped! Your book is such a rich cultural text for all!
And I love how you're bringing up "What is our part as women?". It's a lot of shadowy bits that are in our individual shadow that have come from the collective. Both need tending and I appreciate you pulling them out of the shadows.
The shadow is so uncomfortable! Being candid, I've been talking about this compete/scarcity strategy within my own Truce with Food work for about 10 years. And when I initially read the title of your piece, I was like, "Elise has a bigger platform than me. Now its (scarcity) already been said." And then I had the self-awareness to recognize that as my own protective reaction to fearing my work will remain less visible. And realize that you covering this topic also means more people want to discuss it and work through it!
It's amazing how this scarcity perception is like a house of mirrors, even thinking because a topic is covered once, that's enough!
It's interesting too that you ask, "Who am I to expect their support?". I think there's an underlying assumption that women have to "earn" support whereas men just expect it in these examples you've highlighted. This has been my experience in building relationships with other women to develop support and collaborations with my podcast and work. Some are all about it and others are playing the game that I think we all want to change.
Of course there's nuances about relationships and reciprocity but I think there's so many layers to this scarcity.
In my work, I also discuss the layer colonization and capitalism play into hustle culture which leads to burn out and not taking care of our bodies, all from real and manufactured scarcity. It's like "rush in there, conquer, hoard all the resources" and then they become scarce. That rushing and need to hoard or keep things close to us IMO is a legacy of these systems we need to unlearn for our own health but also the health of the planet.
It's hard to trust there's enough inside late-stage capitalism but as I tell my clients, everyone says well, humans are like crabs in barrel, pulling each other down. And I remind them crabs natural habitat is the beach, where they aren't fighting for the few (scarce) chances to get outside the barrel and live. Humans have made it this long more because of cooperation, not competition.
It's so sad and enraging how women are pitted against each other by society which is why women have to make the pie bigger and believe, contrary to what we are taught, that THERE IS ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE. If we don't support each other, who will?
ALSO THIS IS INFURIATING: "After all, I have yet to be interviewed about my book in America by a single man.** (I’ve been on 55 shows helmed by women.)"