Meghan, Kim, and now Gwyneth has two

Celebrity culture always used to be largely about glamour. Tabloid culture was dominated by posed paparazzi pics and stories of “party girls”. However, the past decade has seen a shift towards the wholesome. Now, celebrities aim to present themselves as culturally engaged figures whose coolness is rooted in intelligence, not glitz. On one level this might just be about sharing the books they are reading – but for some it is moving to a whole new level: starting a podcast.

Podcasts were once an outlet mainly for nerds and news outlets, now they have become the personal project of many millennial female celebrities. In October, Kim Kardashian entered the true crime podcast arena with The System: The Case of Kevin Keith, an eight-part series on a 1994 triple homicide ruling. Gwyneth Paltrow announced in mid-November that she will launch The Goop Pursuit with Audible in January, a “collection” of podcast episodes dedicated to “pleasure, healing, beauty, and change” (this is alongside her ongoing series, The Goop Podcast).

Meghan Markle’s interview series, Archetypes – part of her and Prince Harry’s reported $25m (£21m) Spotify deal – began at the end of August. And on 1 November, supermodel Emily Ratajkowski began a thrice-weekly series, High Low with EmRata, interviewing celebrities and discussing “marrying everything high and low brow”, with the third episode each week available to paying subscribers only.

Undated handout image issued by Archewell Audio/Spotify of the Podcast cover for Archetypes. The Duchess of Sussex has shared the trauma of how son Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom on the Sussexes??? royal tour to South Africa. Issue date: Tuesday August 23, 2022. PA Photo. Meghan recounted the experience on her long-awaited Archetypes podcast, released on Spotify on Tuesday, in a conversation with her close friend, tennis great Serena Williams. See PA story ROYAL Sussex . Photo credit should read: Archewell Audio/Spotify/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.
The second edition of Meghan Markle’s Archetypes podcast (Photo: Archewell Audio/Spotify)

On the surface, this trend signals a moment in which celebrities are taking themselves – and modern life – more seriously. However, despite their worthy subject matter, ranging from sex to politics to race, more often than not, these podcasts do little beyond serving as a brand exercise for the sole benefit of their hosts. Rather than creating something intellectually stimulating – or even stimulating by any measure – what we are left with is a series of self-involved ruminations, with value that’s difficult to locate. It’s podcasting for podcasting’s sake.

The podcasts are of varying quality, but the thread that runs throughout is, at best, a clear aim to enhance the brand of their host and, at worst, a complete tone deafness in their topics.

As an example of the former, Kardashian’s podcast clearly helps bolster her rebrand from reality TV star to aspiring lawyer and criminal law activist. While Ratajkowski’s comes one year after the release of her essay collection, My Body, which aimed to present her as a political writer. It was a bestseller in the US but it was panned by critics (myself included) as “repetitive and myopic”.

Celebrity brand exercises are, of course, nothing new. Many may lead to something engaging or at least entertaining, but these podcasts are excruciatingly dull and fundamentally founded upon clichés.

Emily Ratajkowski’s podcast aims to marry everything high and low brow (Photo: Gotham/GC Images)

Ratajkowski’s in particular heavily relies on discussions of feminism and politics that have been part of the mainstream for the better part of a decade (such as sex positivity and anti-capitalism), while she and her guests often use the refrain that what they’re talking about is “so important”. She also presents her podcast’s theme as unique and taboo-shattering, despite a British podcast with this exact premise and a nearly identical name (The High Low) having covered these subjects for nearly four years, regularly topping the UK podcasting charts and only finishing in 2020.

Beyond its shallowness, though, the podcast crassly aims to situate Ratajkowski – a celebrity with a net worth of $8m (£6.6m) – as something of a “common man”: last week she did an episode on inflation and the pinch many may be feeling about rising costs around Thanksgiving.

What ultimately comes to light is the belief that the creation of a podcast is in itself enough to transcend quality or popularity – that by simply making a podcast, you must be a high thinker and/or a woman of substance. As the writer Rachel Connolly recently noted, “[there is] this tendency in the present moment for people (especially highly visible people) to advertise themselves as unfrivolous, as well as culturally and politically discerning… Sometime in the recent past, sitting apart from vapidness and performing the role of ‘someone who gets it’ became important.”

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This is also happening beyond celebrities, for example in the publishing industry. Podcasts are often launched alongside new nonfiction releases that touch on subjects usually described as “zeitgeisty” or “trendy”. Some popular examples include business influencer Grace Beverley’s Working Hard, Hardly Working podcast, interviewing entrepreneurs about productivity, and Pandora Sykes’s Doing It Right, an interview series on the “myths, anxieties and trends of modern life” (both are named after their similarly-titled books that were published in 2021 and 2020 respectively).

Though these podcasts may have more merit than the celebrity versions – and are explicitly a marketing exercise – it does point to a widespread perception of what podcasting signals: that hosting a podcast is a guaranteed way to improve a reputation or a product, and the prestige (and sales) gained in doing so will outweigh the production and promotional costs.

While most of these celebrity podcasts are clearly of little intellectual value, there could be the argument that they are at least providing some form of entertainment. However, most are exceptionally boring, even when discussing inherently juicy topics, such as sex, or shame. They artfully straddle a dead point between complexity and intrigue, somehow missing the mark on both substance and fun.

Who, then, do these podcasts serve? Listener numbers are hard to come by, but rarely do they crack into the top 100 in the charts (even many of those fronted by A-list celebrities). It doesn’t seem to be wildly changing anyone’s view of these women, nor gaining them huge new audiences. Few answers, then, beyond serving the egos of their hosts.

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While this trend is largely rooted in the wealthy, white female demographic, it is worth noting many male podcasters have been doing their own versions for years – with far greater objective success. Podcasts like Diary of a CEO, hosted by entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den investor, Steven Bartlett, and On Purpose, hosted by wellness influencer Jay Shetty, consistently top national charts and draw in cult-like followings, gaining millions of listeners per episode and playing a major role in turning their hosts into household names. These podcasts are equally vapid, non-substantive, and self-involved – if not more so – but the aim of boosting their host’s profile has evidently been achieved.

This could be part of the explanation for the glut of female podcasting – their experience of misogyny and sexism is likely to have blunted their success. It’s understandable that they might attempt something with greater depth and substance than their male counterparts, and are frustrated when they achieve less success.

But this is a trap, obscuring quite how low the bar has become. No matter how high the production value, how worthy the subject matter, or famous the celebrity, we shouldn’t forget that these podcasts are pure vanity: a signal to the world about how the host should be perceived, while revealing their lack of substance in the process.


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