The Second Act: Megan Rapinoe Steps Behind the Microphone With a Podcast All Her Own
Megan Rapinoe has never been hard to hear. On the field, she was the pink-haired winger striking a victory pose in a packed World Cup stadium; off it, she was one of the most unmistakable voices in American sports, equally comfortable arguing for equal pay as bending a corner kick. But this August, the two-time World Cup champion is trying something that, for her, counts as novel: asking the questions instead of answering them. Her new interview podcast, “Why Are You Like This?”, arrives as one of the more intriguing media launches of the summer — and as the clearest sign yet of what Rapinoe’s second act is going to look like.
A Show of Her Own
The podcast, produced with Vox Media, premieres Thursday, August 6, according to Just Women’s Sports, with new hour-long interview episodes arriving weekly on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Variety first reported the launch, which quickly sent Rapinoe’s name up the trending charts this week.
The premise is right there in the title. Rather than a sports show with celebrity detours, “Why Are You Like This?” is built as a study of character — how people become who they are, what they carry from their origins, and what it costs to live a public life. The show’s ambitions reach deliberately beyond the touchline, into culture, politics, and the strange machinery of fame that Rapinoe knows from the inside.
“Since I was a kid I have always been curious about what makes people tick,” Rapinoe said in announcing the show, describing her fascination with “the zigging left when everyone is zagging right” — and the choices that follow.
From Duet to Solo
Podcasting is not new territory for Rapinoe. She previously co-hosted “A Touch More” with fellow sports icon Sue Bird, also under the Vox Media umbrella — a show that turned the pair’s living-room chemistry into one of the more beloved franchises in women’s sports media. The new venture, as Just Women’s Sports notes, is different in kind: something built entirely on her own name, her own curiosity, and her own interviewing instincts.
It also completes a transition that began the moment she hung up her boots in 2023. Rapinoe retired with a résumé few Americans in any sport can match: two World Cup titles, an Olympic gold medal, a Ballon d’Or, and a Golden Boot and Golden Ball from the 2019 tournament she all but personally narrated. Since then she has been steadily assembling a post-playing life — commentary, advocacy, brand-building — without settling on a single defining project. A weekly interview show with her name alone on the marquee is the closest she has come to answering the question every great athlete eventually faces: what do you do when the thing you were best at ends at 38?
That is a meaningful gamble. The interview-podcast field is crowded with retired athletes, comedians, and former talk-show hosts all chasing the same booking sheet. What Rapinoe brings is a rarer commodity: a genuine willingness to be disliked. Her career was defined as much by friction — kneeling during the anthem, feuding publicly with a sitting president, needling her sport’s establishment — as by trophies. An interviewer who has spent years absorbing criticism tends to ask questions politer hosts avoid.
The Retired-Athlete Media Boom
Rapinoe’s launch also lands in the middle of a gold rush. The past few years have seen retired athletes become some of the most bankable names in audio and video — a recognition by media companies that athletes arrive with built-in audiences, hard-won storytelling instincts, and decades of locker-room access that no journalist can replicate. Women’s sports figures, in particular, have converted surging league viewership into media ventures at a remarkable clip.
For Vox Media, keeping Rapinoe in the family was an obvious play. She is that unusual figure whose cultural footprint outgrew her sport: a World Cup hero to some, a lightning rod to others, and a recognizable name to millions who could not name a single NWSL club. Every episode of the new show effectively begins with an audience already leaning in — some out of admiration, some out of curiosity, and some, no doubt, waiting to be provoked.
What the Title Gives Away
There is a wink embedded in “Why Are You Like This?” — a question Rapinoe has been asked, in tones ranging from delight to fury, for the better part of two decades. Turning it outward is a neat inversion: the most scrutinized personality in American women’s soccer now doing the scrutinizing. No guest list has been announced yet, which has only fed speculation about who will sit across from her first.
Whether the show becomes appointment listening will depend on the answers she draws out. But the bet Vox Media is making is easy to understand. In an interview landscape full of hosts trying to seem interesting, Rapinoe genuinely is — and on August 6, Americans will find out whether the player who spent a career demanding the microphone knows what to do when she finally hands it to someone else.
