Written by Catie Keck
Following a move to New York, Made It Out host Mal Glowenke is building a new chapter for herself and for her rapidly expanding media company.
Tucking into an exchange with Mal Glowenke feels a lot like sipping a perfectly brewed mug of lavender chamomile tea: familiar, comforting, and effortlessly warm. It’s a useful quality for a people person. It’s invaluable for a podcast host.
On Made It Out, her queer culture and storytelling podcast and a GLAAD Media Awards Outstanding Podcast nominee last year, Mal tackles personal, delicate, and sometimes hot-button topics. Being a gifted conversationalist isn’t just a perk; it’s a necessity of the job. An activist, cultural commentator, and public speaker, she’s built a platform around thoughtful interviews with guests ranging from creatives and influencers to comedians and athletes.
In the years since launching Made It Out, that approach has helped her cultivate a loyal and growing audience. But lately she’s found herself entering a new chapter of her own life, one that’s beginning to reshape the platform she’s built. After packing up her life in Los Angeles and relocating to New York, she’s begun thinking bigger about what Made It Out can become: not just as a podcast, but as a media ecosystem for telling queer stories across new formats and platforms.
New City, New Chapter
Mal’s departure from her longtime Los Angeles base following a breakup last year saw her box up her life, pack up her bags, and make a cross-continental pilgrimage to the Big Apple. During the trip, she recorded her “30 Days of Breaking Up” series, a hard-reset guide for the brokenhearted.
Originally, she’d planned to be in the city temporarily for business. Plans to stay weren’t prebaked into her itinerary; the timeline only had her there for a week or two while she took meetings and recorded content. But by some great cosmic fortune, a childhood friend happened to have a vacant apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone.
“The more I started talking to people and telling them, like, ‘Oh, yeah, my childhood friend has an apartment…’ They were like, ‘You have to fucking move here. That doesn’t happen. It’s a sign,” she says. “So I was kind of like okay, maybe the universe wants me here.”
New York opened new opportunities for Mal’s work, sure. But it also widened her world in other meaningful ways.
“It was time for a change — work wise, life wise, friend wise. Just kind of everything,” she says. Soon after, she called her movers and arranged to have her things shipped to Brooklyn. If anyone could romanticize a post-breakup recalibration, it might look something like this. Mal began making decisions purely from her gut, a process that’s been so fortuitous she now describes the outcome as “divine.”
Breaking Up Better
For the “30 Days of Breaking Up” series, a new format she plans to expand on, Mal drew from her own experiences, but not in the way audiences might expect. Rather than focusing on the breakup itself, she turned the conversation toward healing, introspection, and the strange possibility that a moment of upheaval might also feel good — or even, and get this, fun.
“I just felt a gap in the conversation,” she says. Discussions about queer breakups, particularly between public-facing figures, can be tricky (or even toxic, depending on the parasocial dynamics of each partner’s following). Mal wanted to try something different, and it paid off. Not only did the series feel candid and reflective, but the themes resonated beyond romantic relationships, speaking just as easily to personal pivots away from things, places, or people no longer serving you.
The format was newer for Made It Out, but it’s only the beginning. For Mal, it’s part of a larger vision she’s been building for a while.
Vulnerability in Public
One of the things that makes Mal such a compelling personality is her effervescence. She brings a raw honesty to her audience that feels personal rather than performative. That level of openness, though, inevitably comes with a certain vulnerability. When I ask how she decides what to share publicly, and how that transparency impacts her personally, she says the process has become less about perfection and more about experimentation. Because Mal doesn’t consider herself an influencer in the traditional sense, she also doesn’t follow the same algorithmic playbook.
“The biggest thing I’ve become okay with is embarrassment and learning in public,” Mal says. “I’ve kind of stripped the ego away. I tell my manager, ‘Please, all the feedback. I want it. Let’s go.’ I just have such tunnel vision that I’m going to throw everything at the wall. Let’s strategize, let’s look at numbers, let’s see what works.”
Sometimes that means taking risks that don’t always land the way she hoped. And when you’re building a platform online, those missteps rarely happen quietly. But Mal says she’s made changes that give her more support behind the scenes. She now has an infrastructure in place that allows her to build more freely. And in an industry where ego can quietly derail progress, she believes the real key is to let go of the fear of being wrong and give yourself permission to fail.
“I think the most important piece, something I don’t think I would have had in my younger years, is this long-term vision,” Mal says. “Being okay with the internet, being misunderstood, and saying that’s okay.”
She says that by staying focused, she trusts that over time people will see her heart and the larger mission behind the work she’s building.
Made It Out’s Second Act
Believe it or not, Made It Out wasn’t Mal’s first foray into the wild west of podcasting. She’d tried a pair of other similarly formatted podcasts before, though neither had all the pieces needed to fit the way that works so well for Made It Out today. Made It Out expanded into a fully fledged media company in 2025, launching its short-form original series Out for a Drive hosted by comedian Rachel Samples. Even at that time, Mal had said that expanding beyond podcasting had always been her intention.
But with “30 Days of Breaking Up,” we’re watching that vision take shape in new and experimental ways. Mal says we can expect a whole lot more as she crystallizes Made It Out Media as an umbrella brand that encompasses new mediums and formats. Alongside her changes to location and other parts of her personal and professional life, she’s also assembled a whole new management team.
“With the change came an opportunity to be like, ‘Let’s get some fresh eyes, some fresh perspective, kind of shake things up a little,’” she says, “That’s been really good. I think there’s more strategy now and I’m going to have more bandwidth [to do more creative work].”
Ask Mal what her dream project is, and you’ll catch a knowing smile that suggests big things are in the works for the company. It’s probably safe to expect more short-form series, for one. But Mal adds there are people, causes, and experiences she’d like to branch out with as well. Amid all the change, though, Mal says she feels incredibly grounded, and she’s squarely and confidently focused on executing the vision she sees in her strategist mind’s eye.
“Where you would think I’ve been in total chaos, it’s actually been a place of stillness and peace,” she says. “I can breathe and I can look around and I can make the moves that really make sense for me and for where I personally want to take the brand.”
The Next Wave of Queer Storytelling
That vision extends beyond the show itself. Made It Out is at something of an inflection point, Mal says, which gives her platform an opportunity to expand the narrative work that’s already made the podcast so successful. (As of this writing, Made It Out has 75,000 subscribers on YouTube and 170,000 followers on Instagram. It’s hosted guests including comedian Tig Notaro, soccer star Ali Krieger, and comedian Robby Hoffman.) There’s inarguably an appetite for more queer storytelling, and Made It Out Media is well positioned to expand its universe for a growing audience hungry for it.
Mal sees a tremendous opportunity to tell these stories through emerging media formats as a workaround for legacy industries still largely gatekept by men, particularly where funding is concerned. Platforms like YouTube increasingly resemble television networks, while video podcasts have emerged as the next evolution of the talk show format: conversational, accessible, and far less polished than the Hollywood machinery that used to define daytime television. Alongside that shift, vertical shorts and serialized content are gaining traction as new ways to tell stories as well.
“I think that creators are going to have more power, and there’s going to be more interest in that market, and hopefully that will open up more opportunity,” Mal says. “But again, it is this interesting thing of funding. How do you get those things made? That’s where my mind is right now: How can I use my network and leverage it to make these shows and hopefully change the conversation?”
Mal has a clear vision for where she’d like that expansion to lead. She also believes there’s space right now for a kind of cultural bridge: someone who can connect queer audiences with a much broader mainstream viewership.
“I think there’s a really big place for a queer woman to come in and fill that space,” she says.
For Mal, the goal isn’t to dilute the queer perspective that defines Made It Out, but to widen the circle around it. Series like “30 Days of Breaking Up” offered a glimpse of that potential by drawing in viewers outside the show’s core audience who saw pieces of their own lives reflected in the conversations. In the long run, she hopes Made It Out Media can continue opening those cultural doors, introducing new voices and stories to audiences who might not otherwise encounter them. The expansion feels a bit like opening a brand-new box of technicolor crayons: suddenly, the possibilities for creating feel much bigger.
“I just really want to tell stories,” she says. “I want to listen to the right voices and put the right voices out there.”
Follow Mal on instagram @malglowenke and @madeitout
Watch the Made It Out Podcast on YouTube or listen on Spotify
