Three years ago, Daniel Waite Penny, who lives in Provincetown, started a podcast called Non-Toxic: a play on the term “toxic masculinity” and the state of the environment. The podcast “is a way of thinking out loud,” he says. But he’s not thinking alone. Instead, the episodes feature conversations with experts, artists, activists, academics, journalists, and “regular people.” They talk health, harm, money, and mortality as they explore the relationship between the climate and masculinity.
“I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything. It’s motivated by curiosity and a desire to have these conversations,” Penny says. “It’s not Joe Rogan.” That is to say, Penny is no “podcast bro” — a term for a certain kind of mouthy man that isn’t in the dictionary yet but has appeared in headlines in the New York Times. Penny talks, but he also listens.
Penny grew up in Brooklyn before the word “hypebeast” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, back when, he says, “anything that could be perceived as feminine was not OK.”
Penny says he was a “New York brat — you grow up fast in the city.” To counteract that, he went to Grinnell College in the rural flatlands of Iowa, where he majored in English. After graduating in 2013, he moved back to New York to live with his girlfriend, now wife, Molly, who was a graduate student at the Parsons School of Design.
After getting an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Columbia, Penny taught at Parsons and worked at the New Yorker as an editorial staff member — “the lowest possible person,” he says — in the fiction department: “I mostly reviewed the slush pile.” At the same time, he wrote cultural and arts criticism, often about fashion and gender, as a freelancer for the Paris Review, the Boston Review, and GQ.
He wanted to do “sustainability coverage.” GQ, the self-defined men’s magazine, was attempting to tap into conversations about gender and race, says Penny. “But they weren’t touching sustainability. I just couldn’t get my stories through.” Editors told him they were “too green.”
That didn’t change his mind. “Men do care about sustainability,” he figured. “Maybe they just need to be reached in a different way than the way the media target women.”
After three seasons of hosting his podcast solo, Penny is now collaborating with the investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, host of Drilled, what she calls a “true crime podcast about climate change,” those crimes being the ways we delay action. They’ll focus on the “climate gender gap,” he says, addressing what he sees as staggering differences between how men and women view the crisis.
The Joe Rogan Experience was the most listened-to show on Spotify in 2024 for the fourth year in a row, according to a December 2024 article in Variety. Rogan’s YouTube channel, where he posts episodes of his podcast, has more than 19 million subscribers. Edison Research reported in October 2024 that his audience is 80 percent male, with 51 percent between ages 18 and 34.
According to AP VoteCast, more than half of male voters under 30 voted for Trump in 2024. Trump minimized the threat of climate change on the Oct. 25 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, calling those concerned about sea-level rise “poor fools.”
In an episode of Non-Toxic on Nov. 14, 2024 titled “How Trump Won the Bro Vote,” Penny interviewed Shauna Daly, co-founder and executive director of the Young Men Research Project. They spoke about the “right-wing media ecosystem” that has enthralled many young men through YouTube channels, internet subgroups, and, yes, podcasts.
“Men are much less likely than women to believe that climate change is real,” says Penny. In the ’80s and ’90s, he says, fossil fuel companies decided to direct climate denial propaganda to men. “They believed they were the most susceptible,” says Penny. “They were right.”
Men whirling around the manosphere aren’t necessarily trapped forever. “But you can’t scold men into changing their behavior or adopting a different view,” says Penny. The average man today — putting aside those billionaires who have risen to the very top — feels “a loss of status,” says Penny.
For many, an old vision of masculinity — “You’re a man, you go to the factory, you come home with your paycheck, you have a housewife, two kids, and two cars” — has vanished. “It’s not coming back,” says Penny, “despite the promises Trump is making.”
And the link to climate: “That life is predicated on fossil fuels,” says Penny. “That’s a future we can’t return to, and it would be a terrible idea to try.”
In November, Penny interviewed psychologist Roberto Olivardia on Non-Toxic about muscle dysmorphia — a term that Olivardia coined. “As opportunities for fulfilling the traditional role of masculinity have receded,” says Penny, “a lot of men overcompensate by getting really buff — even if their livelihoods don’t depend on physical strength.” Penny describes it as an “arms race” — “millions of American men are on steroids now.”
Artificially inflated, lost, feeling excluded by slogans like “The future is female” and attacked by phrases like “toxic masculinity,” men need a new ideal. And Penny wants to persuade men that there is a future for them worth fighting for.
The hitch is, men don’t like to be told what to do, he says. “One of the core values of hegemonic masculinity is this idea that you’re a sovereign individual, and you answer to no one.” Any attempt to adjust your perspective to include others is seen as a weakness, he says, not a virtue. “Obviously, humans have evolved to be interdependent,” Penny adds. “That’s what society is.”
Not many of Penny’s interviews on Non-Toxic have left him feeling hopeful. But many of his guests “are surprisingly plucky in the face of enormous odds.” Take Bob Hendrikx, a Dutch designer, engineer, and inventor of a coffin made of mycelium — a fungi’s root system, basically. “It digests your body,” Penny says.
Fear of death, Penny says, is fundamental to masculinity’s present perversion. “It’s the inability to deal with the idea that we’re weak and powerless in the face of this big force that’s bearing down on us.” You may know the conundrum: “On one hand, wanting to speed headlong off a cliff in your cybertruck and, on the other hand, being a scared little boy who is afraid of the dark.”
The way Penny sees it, Hendrikx’s invention is an alternative to fear. To submit your body to a mycelium coffin is a way of being honest: “Like, yeah, I’m gonna die.” Rather than radical independence, it’s radical dependence. He can imagine a man whose last act would leave the Earth a better place.
