SoulCycle Confessions

Tales of Taboo

Ali Weiss

Society & Culture

4.8 • 725 Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2021

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thanks to the help of @deuxmoi and all of my amazing contributors, I’ve collected a ton of scalding hot, third degree burn-worthy tea on SoulCycle.

I start by reading email letters from two ‘famous’ former instructors. One details tons of employee drug usage (including during class!), instructor and client deaths, emotional abuse, fat-shaming, hyper-sexualization and homophobia during training, and the secret methodology taught in order to manipulate riders into coming back for more. The other instructor talks about bullying from clients, pay inequality between men & women, and how disgustingly SoulCycle treated her when she was publicly cheated on by her boyfriend - another famous instructor - and thrown into an intense media scandal. A former member of the corporate team also spills the beans on the way company PR is handled internally.

(41:42) Voice notes from front desk peeps tell stories of hellish celebrity clients, the Stephen Ross scandal, size discrimination, SoulCycle forbidding their employees to eat fast food, and what “wafflestomping” is. There are voice notes from clients whose eating disorders were made worse by Soul, too. And lastly, we hear from women bravely accusing Connor Kelly and Mike Press of psychological and sexual abuse.

~ Tales of Taboo is produced and narrated by Ali Weiss. Follow Ali on Instagram & TikTok @aliweissworld. Audio production by Zoe Kuhlkin. Theme song by Chris Stathopolous. Cover photo by Erika Flynn. Cover art by Kristen Montenegro. GOT A SECRET TO GET OFF YOUR CHEST? Share your own confession - or thoughts and feedback - at [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, hello, hello.
0:19.5	Ciao. Ola, bonjourge. Your... Hello, hello, hello, hello, chow.
0:21.7	Ola, bonjour, you're my degenerate angels.
0:26.4	I'm trying to think if I missed anything.
0:28.2	Yeah, I actually missed a lot, but that's all I know.
0:30.7	And so that's all you're going to get today.
0:33.3	Hi, welcome back to another episode of Health is Hell.
0:39.6	I have a feeling this week. We have a lot of people who are new because of the subject matter. So I'd like to take a quick minute and say,
0:45.0	sup. My name is Ali Weiss. I am a Z-List actor, comedian, host, writer, living in downtown New York
0:52.3	City. And I created this show Health is Hell as a way of
0:55.5	breaking down taboos. Diving deep into all of the people, places, things, ideas, concepts that
1:02.1	society tells us are socially unacceptable, forbidden, rude, crude, that are, you know, it's going to land
1:08.8	us in hot water if we decide to uh dip our toes into it
1:12.9	it's going to burn those toes right off anything that makes a karen clutch her pearls is something
1:18.3	that gets me moist that makes me excited that gets me out of bed in the morning and this this soul
1:26.6	cycle drama this expose that I am dropping today is no
1:31.6	exception. So I don't want to waste too much time having me blabber on about my own bullshit when
1:38.7	this is a very long episode today, chalk full of so much information. But I did want to give a little
1:44.0	bit of background as to why
1:45.8	I am particularly interested in this topic. So like many of you, I found out about the
1:52.5	Soul Cycle Drama through the media. I heard the various stories, including the studio manager
1:58.8	in Palo Alto, who said that Connor Kelly called her Aunt
	...

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