A Co-Hosted Podcast Has Come Back With a New Co-Host, Six Weeks After the Hosts Disagreed

Sophie Cunningham is podcasting again. The Indiana Fever guard announced the return on Thursday, September 10, and the announcement contained a name that was not the one listeners were expecting.

"Sophie Cunningham is BACK with world renowned basketball trainer Drew Hanlen," the show's account posted. "New episodes dropping every Thursday, with Episode 1 dropping later today. This is No Hesitation."

Cunningham, 30, marked it on Instagram with a short line: the podcast is back.

What changed

Two things did, and one of them is cosmetic.

The show was previously called Show Me Something. It is now No Hesitation. It is Cunningham's first podcast in more than two months.

The other change is the chair beside her. West Wilson, 31, known from Summer House, had been her co-host. Drew Hanlen, 36, a basketball trainer, is in the seat now.

Neither Cunningham nor Wilson has said why. Wilson has not commented on reports that he was dropped.

By continuing to platform this, you're only isolating transgender people even more

The disagreement that preceded it

What is on the record is that six weeks before the relaunch, Wilson publicly took a position at odds with his co-host's on transgender athletes in sport.

He set it out in a video posted to TikTok in July.

"Transgender athletes in American sports is such a borderline non-existent issue," he said.

He went further on how the subject is covered. "Right-wingers have convinced a massive portion of people in our country that these people are, like, a threat to sports in America, when mathematically it's not the case at all," he said. "And by continuing to platform this, politicians, athletes, journalists, news outlets, you're only isolating transgender people even more by making them seem like this giant group of people is a threat to society, a threat to sports, when that's just not proportionately the truth in any capacity."

It is not known whether that video is connected to the change of co-host, and nobody involved has drawn the link.

The structural problem with a two-hander

Whatever happened here, the situation illustrates something about the format that its popularity has obscured.

A co-hosted podcast is a business partnership presented as a friendship. It works because two people will talk in front of a microphone the way they talk in private, and the audience is buying access to that relationship rather than to either individual.

Which makes a genuine public disagreement a different kind of event than it would be for colleagues in almost any other workplace. There is no version of the show in which the two of them simply avoid the topic, because the format's entire proposition is that they do not avoid topics.

An athlete whose co-host has publicly characterised a position close to hers as a manufactured panic has a show with a fault line running through it. So does a co-host whose partner disagrees.

What happens next

The replacement suggests a direction rather than just a substitution.

Hanlen is a basketball trainer, which moves the show towards Cunningham's professional territory and away from the cross-genre pairing of an athlete and a reality television personality. That is a narrower proposition and a considerably more durable one, since two people from the same industry have a subject to fall back on.

The rebrand from Show Me Something to No Hesitation reads the same way. The first is an invitation. The second is a statement about how she intends to proceed.

The one thing nobody involved has done is explain any of it, and that silence is likely to hold. There is no upside for either of them in narrating a split, and a weekly show returning with a new name and a new voice tends to answer the question by simply continuing.