Stop living life on someone else's settings.
We follow so many rules we never agreed to. Work 40 hours a week. Buy a house. Save for retirement the "right" way. But who decided these were the only options?
Disrupting Default is the podcast that challenges the assumptions everyone takes for granted. In quick 15-20 minute conversations, we pick apart one societal norm and explore what happens when you choose a different path entirely.
Why do we structure education the way we do? What if the traditional career ladder is actually a trap? How did we decide that being busy equals being important? Each episode unpacks the hidden logic behind our collective choices and reveals the alternatives hiding in plain sight.
This isn't about being contrarian for the sake of it. It's about recognizing that most of our "defaults" aren't natural laws – they're just habits we can change.
Think of it as a software update for your brain. We'll help you identify which defaults are worth keeping and which ones are ready for an upgrade.
Join us for honest conversations that might just change how you see everything. Because the most radical thing you can do is think for yourself.
Short episodes, big questions, real alternatives.
In Episode 3 of Season 2, Hema and Mike extend the gender conditioning thread into the physical: the way we’ve all been taught to exist in our bodies differently based on our gender.
Women are taught to shrink - sit with legs crossed, smile constantly, avoid postures that might read as aggressive. Men are taught to expand - spread out, take up room, hold eye contact. Nobody said any of this explicitly. It was absorbed through watching, through being corrected, through learning what version of yourself made others most comfortable. And most of us have never questioned it.
This episode unpacks the real consequences: how posture affects not just how others perceive you but how you perceive yourself, the gendered patterns in meeting rooms and workplace dynamics, and the specific double bind facing executive women - told to be more assertive, penalized when they are.
Learn practical, honest guidance for women reclaiming physical space, for executive women navigating impossible double standards, and for men recognizing when physical space becomes an unconscious dominance cue.
Perfect for anyone who has ever made themselves smaller to make others comfortable - and anyone ready to stop.
27 May 2026
S2 E2: Men Don’t Talk About It
Following the alpha male myth dismantled in Episode 1, Episode 2 of Disrupting Default Season 2 explores the human cost of actually living by that script. The alpha archetype doesn’t just shape behavior - it shapes what men are allowed to feel, say, and ask for. And the numbers tell the story: men die by suicide at nearly 4x the rate of women, are significantly less likely to seek mental health support, and report fewer close friendships than women, with the gap growing.
Hema and Mike trace the conditioning from childhood - the “don’t cry,” “man up,” “don’t be sensitive” messages that become so automatic they’re invisible - through adult male friendships built on activity rather than conversation.
The disruption section is practical and nuanced: what actually helps men access emotional honesty, what the people around men can do differently, and what this conversation is not about. Not forced vulnerability, not pathologizing stoicism. Just making sure men actually have a choice.
Perfect for men who’ve been told to handle it alone, partners and friends who want to show up differently, and anyone who has watched someone they care about carry something they didn’t have to carry alone.
13 May 2026
S2 E1: The Alpha Male Myth
In the Season 2 premiere of Disrupting Default, Hema and Mike take on one of modern culture’s most persistent archetypes: the alpha male. Dominant, aggressive, never asking for help, volume as authority - it’s a blueprint millions have been handed as the definition of strength. The problem? It was built on a scientific mistake the original researcher spent decades trying to correct.
This episode traces the alpha myth from its origins - a 1970s study of wolves in captivity that fundamentally misread how wolf packs actually work - to the billion-dollar self-help industry that monetized the error before anyone could walk it back. We unpack what the alpha archetype is actually describing, who profits from keeping it alive, and what real leadership looks like in wolf packs and in boardrooms.
We also go where this conversation rarely goes: the impact on women. Executive women are routinely told to adopt alpha characteristics to be taken seriously - and then penalized for the exact same behaviors that are rewarded in men. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a double bind built on a myth that was wrong from the start.
Perfect for anyone who’s been told to “be more alpha,” anyone navigating leadership in a culture that rewards dominance, and anyone ready to stop measuring themselves against a fiction.
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