Jess Rothschild
speaker
92 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Jess Rothschild’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is The Cult of Body and Soul, episode three, noon on Monday. In this episode, we're taking a peek behind the curtain of instructor auditions and the elusive training program. Plus, the cult of personality the brand thrives on and the chaos it can breed.
Chris's performing career had ended, and he was now running a dance company. This was his first class.
Dancers tend to be perfectionists, so he could not handle being bad at this one thing.
Unlike Chris, Halle Becker was already a sought-after personality, having taught yoga in Manhattan, at festivals, and retreats around the world. I go, what do they want me to do?
While Hallie was fast tracked, Chris had to will himself into performing the art of SoulCycle. He, of course, was eventually asked if he would like to audition. And so the auditions begin.
This is Stevie Santangelo. She was a master instructor at SoulCycle for eight years from 2012 to 2020. Stevie was my gateway to a lot of SoulCycle lore. It was through Stevie that I first learned the name Janet Fitzgerald. See, Stevie worked for Janet at Body and Soul back in LA. I introduced myself after a few weeks and she asked me to dinner after class, just the two of us.
I quickly got her backstory that she had moved to New York for SoulCycle after 20 years in Los Angeles. She actually wasn't a fitness instructor at all, but a professional chef with a passion for spin. For her 40th birthday, they offered her a job at Body and Soul, which would alter the trajectory of her entire career.
Stevie witnessed how SoulCycle West Hollywood put all of the boutique spin studios out of business. So it wasn't a surprise that Janet was in L.A. with Julie Rice scouting for talent.
Because auditions can happen over several weeks, people had to wait to find out if they were accepted into the training program.
The training program was now somewhat codified. It took place between 8 and 12 weeks, three days a week. It was a mix of lectures, drills, and you were expected to ride frequently.
Unlike fellow studios like Barry's Boot Camp or boxing gyms, SoulCycle does not require their instructors to be certified in personal training or group fitness. So you could have an entire career at SoulCycle and still not be qualified to take on personal training clients or teach at a competing studio.
So the degree to which your Soul Instructor knows about human anatomy, physiology, and exercise science is pretty unclear.
Drew was with the company for eight years, starting at the front desk and later an instructor.
They finally attempted to document the training program because they were hiring a lot of new instructors.
Once you complete the training program and perform several community rides, you are officially placed on the schedule. Getting people to place a $35 bet on an unknown entity is an impossible proposition, so the company would get creative by having them substitute extremely popular instructors' classes with the hope that people wouldn't cancel. They usually would.
Chris was offered to debut his class on one of the most popular days of the year.
Noon on Monday is an expression that yields both panic and delight by folks. It's the time when classes for the week open for bookings. Servers would crash, the site would freeze, people would freak out because the website could not handle the volume of traffic.
When you walk through the doors of SoulCycle, you are immediately greeted by the front desk staff. Funny.
Front desk staff and studio managers interviewed for this project have chosen to remain anonymous. We were obsessed.
In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast. Over the course of 48 hours, wind, rain and water left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers without power and limited access to food, drinking water and health care.
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