The Unspeakable Podcast

Writer and podcaster Sarah Hepola returns to The Unspeakable to talk about love, sex, #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein’s overturned rape conviction, her new job at The Dallas Morning News, her book in progress, and why she thinks local reporting will lead the way out of the media abyss. GUEST BIO Sarah Hepola is a features staff writer at the Dallas Morning News, the cohost with Nancy Rommelmann of the Smoke ‘Em If You Got Em podcast and author of the 2015 best-selling memoir Blackout. She was also the host and creator of the Texas Monthly podcast "America's Girls," about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Read her work at the Dallas Morning News here. Listen to her podcast about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, “America’s Girls,” here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women: https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: http://aspecialplace.substack.com

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Andrew Boryga. The first portion of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Who says you can’t write a novel skewing social justice excesses? Andrew Boryga has done just that — to critical acclaim. His debut novel VICTIM tells the story of Javier Perez, an academically gifted kid from The Bronx who lands at an elite college and soon discovers the advantages of playing up his disadvantages. In this conversation, Andrew talks about the decade-long process of writing the book, his similarities to Javier, and how he feels about contemporary fiction and the literary world these days. He also discusses what it was like to shop the book to publishers and explores the question of whether a white author could get away with this kind of satire. GUEST BIO Andrew Boryga is a writer and editor who grew up in Bronx, NY and currently likes in Miami with his wife and two children. His debut novel VICTIM, was published in March by Doubleday. Buy VICTIM here. Follow his Substack here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

Is college pointless? Is an “elite education” more about networking than learning? Returning guest William Deresiewicz has been pondering these questions for more than a decade. They were the subject of his bestselling 2014 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. That book has just been reissued in a 10th anniversary edition and in this episode, William talks with Meghan about what’s changed (i.e. what’s gotten worse) and what, if anything, can be done to make things better. They also discuss whether we need affirmative action for men, whether it’s better to get a job waiting tables than go to college right after high school, and whether childless people have any standing to talk—or even care—about this stuff in the first place. GUEST BIO William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which will be published in a 10th-anniversary edition in May 2024. His latest book is The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society. Find his other conversations with Meghan here, here, and here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Nellie Bowles. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. You may know Nellie Bowles from TGIF, her popular news roundup in The Free Press. Before that, she reported on Silicon Valley for The New York Times. Now she’s out with her first book, Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side Of History. Filled with keenly observed details about the cultural and political battles of the last couple of years, it’s also an honest appraisal of her own political evolution. A self-described “lesbian from San Francisco lesbian who held all the values associated with that,” Nellie is now among those considered non-grata by progressives—her marriage to Bari Weiss would attest to that—and in this conversation, she talks about coming to terms with that as well as her reporting on everything from Antifa militants to the incel movement. She also talks about her own past life as a member of the progressive purity police. GUEST BIO Nellie Bowles is a writer living in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a correspondent at The New York Times where, as part of a team, she won the Gerald Loeb Award in Investigations and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. Now she is working with her wife to build The Free Press, a new media company. Get a copy of her book here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

This week’s guest is economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury. Glenn is almost certainly no stranger to Unspeakable listeners, many of whom know him from his long-running podcast The Glenn Show. In addition to opining there about political and social issues, Glenn is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005. He grew up on the south side of Chicago and eventually became the first black professor of economics at Harvard and a prominent conservative thinker and policy expert. The Glenn Show debuted in 2012, and Glenn’s conversations about race with linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter were foundational to the emergence of the independent media sphere sometimes called the “heterodoxy” (at least they were Meghan’s gateway drug). Glenn has published numerous books, but his latest, a memoir, is a major departure. Late Admissions: Confessions of A Black Conservative is not just an account of his professional trajectory but also an unflinching interrogation of his personal choices. This interview is stunningly candid and also utterly delightful. Meghan is grateful to Glenn for his honesty, deep insight, and great humor. GUEST BIO Glenn Loury is a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University. His new book Late Admissions: Confessions of A Black Conservative is out May 14. You can find him on Substack here. Pre-order or purchase Glenn’s book here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

This episode is with one of our guest speakers at The Unspeakeasy retreat in Chicago. If you’re interested in going, learn more here. This week Meghan welcomes returning guest Erec Smith. He is an academic whose area of scholarship is Rhetoric, but he also writes and speaks frequently about the state of race politics in America, particularly the perils (and uses) of DEI. In this conversation, they talk about the concept of prescriptive racism, which Erec wrote about in a recent Boston Globe column, and ask whether the emergence of the concept of microaggressions has resulted mainly in people steering clear of one another. They also discuss what’s happened on college campuses since Erec was on the podcast a year ago, including the ouster of college presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and U Penn’s Liz Magill over free speech policies. He also discusses what he was like as a college student carrying around a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and how he would have felt if he’d been told that he was living under the thumb of white supremacy. Erec will be a guest speaker at the first-ever Unspeakeasy coed retreat in Chicago on June 4-5. We’ll also be joined by recent Unspeakable guests Nadine Strossen and Lisa Selin Davis. To find out about that go to theunspeakeasy.com.) Make sure you listen all the way to the end, so you can hear an excerpt from Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist from the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q. (Probably not coming to a high school theater near you.) GUEST BIO Erec Smith is a professor of rhetoric at York College of PA, a research scholar at the Cato Insitute, and a co-founder and an editor at Free Black Thought. Read Erec’s recent Boston Globe column on prescriptive racism. Listen to the last time he was on the podcast. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

This interview with Benjamin Ryan is a BONUS episode for paying subscribers only. The first few minutes of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. On April 10th, a big story broke in the gender world: The long-awaited report commissioned by the UK's National Health Service, known as the Cass Review, was released. As soon as the report hit the news cycle, gender-critical activists celebrated it as the final nail in the coffin of harmful practices, while trans-rights activists accused it of faulty methodology. So who was right? This week, I spoke with Benjamin Ryan, a health and science reporter, to help unpack the Cass Review's data. Ben has spent years covering the intersection of health and public policy. He has a remarkably clear head and is a disciplined thinker about the youth gender medicine debate, so he is a great person to explain what is and is not in the Cass Review. GUEST BIO Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist who focuses on health care and science. He contributes to several major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and NBC News. He has a particular interest in public health, medicine, and psychology, and has spent years reporting on HIV. His work has received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, including the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award. Benjamin is a cancer survivor and enjoys reading, theatre, movies, biking, cooking, and photography in his spare time. Follow him on Twitter here. Follow his Substack here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

This week, Meghan talks with legal scholar, former law professor, and legendary free speech advocate Nadine Strossen. Nadine was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 and she’s the author of many books, including Defending Pornography, which has just been reissued nearly 30 years after its original publication. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nadine talks about pornography, campus speech codes, generational divides when it comes to ideas about words causing harm, and changes in institutions like the ACLU. This week, almost the entire conversation is available to everyone, but paying Substack subscribers get a fascinating and very funny tangent at the end about a subject (mostly) unrelated to free speech: the subject of choosing not to have children. Nadine always knew she never wanted kids and she talks candidly about what was behind that impulse and how she feels about it now that she’s in her 70s. GUEST BIO Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen also serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that promote free speech and academic freedom. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we'll be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week, author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis returns for her third visit to The Unspeakable. Lisa is best known to listeners for her thorough and rigorous reporting on the new gender movement and her probing insights into how ideas around gender nonconformity have shifted over time. But she has a new book out about something completely (or at least mostly) different: the concept of the housewife. In Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead, Lisa traces the social history of the housewife, examines the evolutionary and economic roots of housewifery, and wrestles with why the iconic 50s housewife has such a strong hold on the public consciousness despite not lasting all that long. In this conversation, she discusses what she learned in the course of her reporting, shares her own conflicting feelings about being a wife and mother, and talks about the rise of the “trad wife influencer.” Can Instagramming everything from your home birth to your home school be interpreted through a feminist lens? Lisa says yes! In the second part of the conversation, for paying subscribers, Lisa returns to form and talks about gender, which is the subject of her next book. GUEST BIO Lisa Selin Davis’s new book is Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead. She is also the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History & Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family. Follow her writing on her Substack, Broadview. You can pick up a copy of Housewife here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week, I’m talking with author Sloane Crosley. Best known for her humorous and existentially probing essays, Sloane’s latest book is a departure of sorts. Grief Is For People, a memoir, covers the year in her life following the death of Russell Perreault, a veteran of book publishing who’d been her boss before becoming her closest friend. A month before Russell’s death, Sloane’s apartment was burglarized by a jewel thief, turning her into an amateur detective as she attempted to retrieve family heirlooms while reckoning with loss across several dimensions. Sloane worked as a book publicist for many years before being an author herself, and in this conversation, she talks about how office culture has changed over the last decade, especially in the wake of #MeToo, and what it was like to work with famous authors like Joan Didion and Sandra Cisneros in the final glory days of publishing. Meghan and Sloane also explore the phenomenon of collective grief over animals that become symbols of something much larger: for instance, the response to the death a few months ago of Flaco, the Eurasian owl that got out of a zoo enclosure and flew around upper Manhattan for more than a year, captivating not just the New Yorkers who saw him in real life but people all over the world following his whereabouts on social media. GUEST BIO Sloane Crosley is the author of two novels and three essay collections, including the bestsellers I Was Told They’re Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number? Her new book is the memoir Grief Is For People. She lives in New York City. You can buy her new book here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week, Meghan welcomes Arielle Isaac Norman, an Austin-based comedian who has opened for Louie C.K., Bobcat Goldthwait, Tim Dillon, Joe DeRosa, Eddie Pepitone and Maria Bamford, among others. Arielle, who describes herself as a “politically non-binary lesbian,” has a new YouTube special, Ellen DeGenderless, in which she discusses gender identity, sexuality, pronouns, social issues, and pop culture. This conversation covers all of those topics and more — including Arielle’s friendship with Louis CK and her thoughts about his sexual behaviors and resulting cancelation. GUEST BIO Arielle Isaac Norman is an Austin-based comedian. Her new special, Ellen Degenderless, is now streaming on YouTube. Find her on Instagram at @ellendegenderless and on YouTube or Spotify at Politically Non-binary. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week’s guest is journalist Abigail Shrier. In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, she delves into why so many children, teens, and young adults have received mental health diagnoses over the last few decades. Is it because society is finally recognizing emotional suffering? Or is it because society has become irrationally fixated on the idea of suffering? Abigail says it’s the latter, and in this conversation, she talks about how mediocre clinicians, flawed research, overzealous prescribing of medications, and, above all, a cultural obsession with trauma and emotional injury are causing unnecessary misery. GUEST BIO Abigail Shrier’s new book is the best-selling Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She is also the author of the best-selling 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which was named a “Best Book” by the Economist and the Times of London and has been translated into ten languages. She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School. You can pick up a copy of Bad Therapy here. Read Abigail’s Substack here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

If you were in middle school or high school in the last couple of decades, there’s a good chance you were assigned Sherman’s classic young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an epistolary novel with cartoon illustrations about a native teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend a nearly all-white high school. The book is semi-autobiographical. Sherman grew up on that reservation in the 1970s and 80s and is a member of the Spokane Tribe. He is also arguably — or perhaps inarguably — the most significant native American writer of the last 30 years. Not only did The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian win the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other prizes, but his 2009 book War Dances won the 2010 Pen/Faulkner award for fiction, and his 1993 story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was adapted into the popular and highly acclaimed film Smoke Signals. Best of all (for me, anyway), Sherman is teaching a class for the brand-new Unspeakeasy School Of Thought. It’s in a brand new genre: Writing Your Cancelation Story. In this conversation, Sherman talks about his career, his 2018 “cancelation event” (or at least its aftermath) and offers his thoughts on the state of writing and publishing, not least of all the recent incident wherein editors at the journal Guernica retracted an essay when the Twitter mob and its own staffers deemed it harmful, even “genocidal.” GUEST BIO Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and filmmaker. He’s published two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was listed by the American Library Association as the Most Banned and Challenged Book from 2010 to 2019. He’s won the PEN-Faulkner and PEN-Malamud awards, and he wrote and co-produced the award-winning film Smoke Signals, which was based on his short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Visit Sherman’s Substack. Check out his upcoming course here. HOUSEKEEPING 📝 The Unspeakeasy now has writing classes! Learn more here. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

On podcasts devoted to free speech and so-called heterodox discourse, the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind is probably mentioned more frequently than any other. Written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar and Greg Lukianoff, who now heads the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it is effectively the bible of the Heterodox crowd. And now it’s a movie. My guests are husband and wife filmmaking team Ted Balaker, who directed the film, and Courtney Moorehead Balaker, who produced it. In this conversation, they discuss how they took a book about ideas and turned it into an engaging, poignant, and often very funny movie about mental health and how it intersects with higher education and campus life. They relay the stories of many of the young people featured in the movie and talk about the process of finding them. They also discuss how the movie ended up on Substack, where it’s making history as the first film to stream on that platform. You can watch the film here. GUEST BIO Ted Balaker is an award-winning filmmaker, former think tank scholar and network news producer.  He co-founded Korchula Productions, a film production company devoted to making important ideas entertaining, and Free Minds Film, which uses workshops and project-specific consultations to teach independent filmmakers how to reach large audiences. Ted produced the feature film Little Pink House and is the director of The Coddling of the American Mind, based on The New York Times bestselling book by Greg Lukionoff and Jonathan Haidt and the very first feature documentary presented by Substack. Courtney Moorehead Balaker is an award-winning filmmaker, adjunct professor of acting, and co-founder of Korchula Productions, a film production company devoted to making important ideas entertaining.  She also co-founded Free Minds Film, which uses workshops and project-specific consultations to teach independent filmmakers how to reach large audiences. Courtney wrote and directed Little Pink House, which stars Catherine Keener as Susette Kelo, the blue-collar woman whose fight against eminent domain abuse went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING 📝 The Unspeakeasy now has writing classes! Learn more here. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Alex Byrne. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Philosopher Alex Byrne spent most of his career innocently studying subjects like epistemology and metaphysics. But a few years ago, he became interested in — wait for it —  gender, and he became a “dissident” scholar just for exploring foundational questions. His book Trouble with Gender, covers a lot of ground. But above all, it wrestles with the linguistic confusion of gender. What does the word even mean? What did the philosopher Judith Butler (whose 1990 book Gender Trouble kicked off decades of debate and cognitive distortions) mean when she said sex was different from gender? What about social scientists like Anne Fausto-Sterling, who came up with the idea that there are five sexes? In this interview, Alex discusses all of that and more, including how the UK acquired the nickname "TERF Island,” whether “auto-androphilia” is a real thing, why autogynephilia isn’t technically a fetish, and why Oxford University Press changed its mind about publishing the book. (Their loss!) GUEST BIO Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at MIT and the author of Trouble With Gender which you can order here. Know someone who would love this podcast? Give a gift subscription. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Katherine Dee. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Katherine Dee is a writer, cultural commentator, and a phenomenally astute observer of online culture. If you want to understand the rise of the “tradcels,” the “girl boss” trope (and subsequent backlash), and how identity concepts like “otherkin” become connected to social justice politics, Katherine is the one to explain it. In this conversation, she talks with Meghan about how ideas on places like Tumblr found their way into our political discourse, academia, and even the retail space and they had a profound impact on young people’s psychological development, especially when it comes to dating and relationships. Katherine herself was so indoctrinated by online manosphere content and it’s the scarcity complex it engendered that she ended up marrying someone she met online after knowing him in person for three days. She also discusses why Taylor Swift is just the latest example of a powerful woman reframed as a sad cat lady, why the beauty standards of the 1990s were so destructive, and why New York City arts and media circles are incubators are terrible places to meet heterosexual men. (But very good places to be one.) GUEST BIO Katherine Dee is an internet culture blogger. Everything else is secondary. You can find her at default.blog. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING 📖 🌵Come see Meghan in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about her book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, her community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Rob Henderson. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. If you listen to this podcast and others like it, you may have heard of the concept of luxury beliefs. It was coined by this week’s guest Rob Henderson. Rob holds a PhD in psychology, has written for lots of media outlets, and writes a popular Sustack newsletter about social issues and how they relate to class dynamics, economic forces, and personal psychology. He also has a brand new book, Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class. Born to a drug addicted mother, Rob spent his early life in the foster care system in California, living in seven different homes before finding a permanent placement. However, his adoptive family was chaotic, and Rob navigated a labyrinth of dysfunction before joining the military and eventually finding his way to the Ivy League. It was there that he noticed that many of his classmates seemed to hold certain ideas about the world at large, often in the name of tolerance, even though they held themselves to a much higher standard. From that emerged the concept of luxury beliefs which he discusses in depth in his memoir. GUEST BIO Rob Henderson is a Yale and Cambridge University graduate who writes extensively on human nature, psychology, social class, TV shows, movies, political and social divisions, and more on Substack. The term "luxury beliefs" was coined by him, inspired by his experiences at Yale. His book, "Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class," will be published in February 2024 through Simon & Schuster. Follow him on Substack. Follow his Twitter/X. Get his book, “Troubled” here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING 📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters. ✏️ Apply for Meghan’s co-ed Personal Essay and Memoir class. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Lori Gottlieb. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Psychotherapist and writer Lori Gottlieb visited The Unspeakable in 2021 to talk about her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. She returns for a Valentine’s Day episode about finding love, staying in love, and what to make of all the social scientists constantly going on about how marriage and family are essential for mental, physical and even economic well-being. To that, Lori says, “well, obviously!” But she also asks “how are you supposed to find someone when our social systems are so dysfunctional?” Her own story involves becoming a mother on her own in her 30s (her son Zach is a budding Gen Z thought leader in his own right) and trying to balance her own dating life with childrearing and a busy career. In this conversation, she talks about how she tries to help clients who are struggling to find love, how honest talk about female fertility became taboo sometime in the 2000s, why dating apps are making things so much worse, and why age gaps in romantic relationships seem more prevalent than ever. She also explains why, for older daters, widowed people can make the best partners and, finally, why more singles should seriously consider hiring a matchmaker. GUEST BIO Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and the New York Times best-selling author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” and “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.” She is also a TED Speaker, the co-host of the popular "Dear Therapists" podcast, and the “Dear Therapist” columnist for The Atlantic. Listen to the last time she was on the podcast. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING 📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters. ✏️ Apply for Meghan’s co-ed Personal Essay and Memoir class. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with John Vervaeke and Shawn Coyne. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Meghan has been threatening to do an episode on artificial intelligence, and finally she makes good. This week, she welcomes two guests: the philosopher, neuroscientist, and popular YouTuber John Vervaeke and the editor and publishing entrepreneur Shawn Coyne. They have collaborated on Mentoring The Machines,  a series of short books–technically, it’s one book in four parts–about artificial intelligence. Their aim is to offer a clear understanding of the implications of AI and to invite readers to think about their own participation in its development and how their own choices can move that development in a positive or negative direction. In this conversation, they explain what drew them to this subject, how they came to work together, and how worried we should be about computers destroying civilization. GUEST BIOS John Vervaeke is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,” “After Socrates” and the host of “Voices with Vervaeke.” Sean Coyne is a writer, editor, and the founder of Story Grid. Learn about Mentoring The Machines. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING 📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters. ✏️ Apply for Meghan’s co-ed Personal Essay and Memoir class. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Kathrine Brodsky. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Cultural critic Katherine Brodsky is an example of what Meghan likes to call “Heterodoxy 2.0.” She’s committed to fighting censorship and groupthink but is also mindful of not becoming an ideologue herself. Born in the Soviet Union, she emigrated with her family to Israel and then Canada and is acutely sensitive to signs of creeping authoritarianism. She now lives in Vancouver and writes about a variety of topics, including the arts, technology, and the recently emerging debates about free speech and censorship. In her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage—Lessons for the Silenced Majority, Katherine recounts her own cancelation event but, more importantly, interviews a range of people—including Katie Herzog, Winston Marshall, Stephen Elliot, and Peter Boghossian, to name a few—who have fallen prey to the online mob. In this conversation, we talk about what can be learned from a cancelation, what has become of the “IDW,” and how to move free speech discourse in a more positive direction, less grievance-driven direction. ** GUEST BIO For over a decade, Katherine Brodsky has covered lifestyle and entertainment stories for works like Variety, WIRED, Newsweek, The Guardian, Esquire, The Independent, CNN Travel, Entertainment Weekly, Playboy Magazine, USA Today, Delta Sky, Mashable, and more. She has interviewed many personalities, including winners and nominees of the Academy Awards, Emmys, Grammys, Pulitzers, Tonys, and even the Nobel Prize. You can read her work at her Substack here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING 📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters. ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024! 🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women. 🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.