In this episode, we are delighted to have Megan Daum, a prolific author, journalist, and podcast host. The discussion dives into Megan's extensive work, including her podcasts 'The Unspeakable' and 'A Special Place in Hell,' as well as her new series of retreats called 'The Unspeakeasy.' These retreats, mostly for women, offer a unique space to discuss topics like gender issues, COVID-19 policies, and the impact of feminism across generations. We explore the motivations behind these retreats and the valuable conversations they foster. Additionally, Megan talks about her thoughts on anti-natalism and her book 'Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed,' which presents various perspectives on the decision not to have children.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00 ] Hello everyone. I am so excited today because we're joined by Megan Dom, someone who I admire on so many different fronts. She is a prolific author. She's written six books or written or edited six books. She is been also prolific journalist, very respected by many of our friends.

She now is on Substack. Plus she hosts a special place in hell with Sarah Hader, also a friend of the podcast. And before that she had the Unspeakeasy podcast, which I listened to with really great interviews with heterodox. She's kind of like the Alex Kishida of like a different sort of segment of the internet.

And more recently Megan has launched a series of retreats, which I kind of wanted to dig into now. They're it's called the unspeak easy, kind of inspired by one of her books, which is titled unspeakable. And it is a place they're mostly, sometimes they're mixed gender, but they're mostly. Female only retreats pretty small, like very, like, sort of, you, you can have a real conversation with everyone who goes, maybe 16 people or fewer negative, maybe sometimes 20, right?

Yeah. And behind closed doors, these, [00:01:00 ] you know, mostly all women finally get to sort of discuss what they. Want whatever that's what we want to get to is what do professional educated, you know, probably more affluent women in the United States think and say and worry about and discuss behind closed doors because I think there's this, this perception that the educated women of America are largely this progressive monolith.

They all kind of think the same thing. Like they're not very interesting. You know, then you have some like far right, you know, crazy women and like, you know, whatever, like cam girls and cat girls or whatever. Like, but then there's like just this. There's nothing, a big question mark. So we, we wanted to, you know, we might, we might get into a little bit of a, an anti natalist discussion at the end of this, but we wanted to get into what's going on behind closed doors with all these women.

Meghan Daum: Well, if I, I couldn't tell you, right. If it was really behind closed doors, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I love talking about all these. All these topics. And I will just say I, [00:02:00 ] I've got my hand in so many things that it gets confusing what I'm doing. So I still host the unspeakable podcast.

So I actually have two podcasts. I do a special place in hell with Sarah Hader. And I know you've, you've been on our podcast and she's been here. I, I do the unspeakable podcast, which is Sort of my flagship podcast. And that's an interview, it's a weekly interview show started it four years ago, summer of 2020 when all, when every podcast started and so, right.

So I've been doing that and yeah, so the speakeasy is it's an enterprise that has sort of, you know, arisen out of a lot of my work including. the podcast, my books, my teaching as well. I've been a teacher of writing for a really long time. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess the easiest way to kind of launch into what the unspeak easy is about is to tell you the origins of it.

And you know, that is, I've been, I've been journalists for a long time. I was Los Angeles times columnist for 12 years on the opinion page, written a bunch of books, written for every magazine, was like, you know, an [00:03:00 ] acceptable, celebrated arguably celebrated member of the literary community.

Simone Collins: I looked at the number of reviews your books have gotten.

Yeah. Yeah. And they used to be really

Meghan Daum: positive. Yeah.

And you know, I've always been allergic to b******t. Like that's my thing. I've never been really particularly political. I mean, obviously as a journalist, you have to write about what's going on in the news and the culture, but I just never liked virtue signaling.

Even before there was a term for that, I just got it everywhere and I was very sensitive to it and I was very. interested in why it was happening. So that's always been a theme of my work. And I've always tried to sort of look at the places, you know, in the culture and politics where like what people saying, what people were saying about the world or themselves was not matching up with.

What was actually true about the world and themselves. So, so people, you know, knew that about my work and I started doing the podcast and I would have people like [00:04:00 ] Sam Harris and, you know, all the sort of the heterodox, you know, I've had hundreds and hundreds of guests by now, but people sort of trying to pick apart these issues, nuanced discussions, right?

So nuanced AF is is what the merch says, right? Here's the Yes, nuanced AF. Okay, so So people would listen to the podcast. I was talking about things like gender, you know, pretty early on Sasha Iod, who's, you know, wonderful is now the co host of gender wider lens was like my fifth guest. And you know, I had Peter Moskos on really early talking about policing.

I had now John McWhorter, all, you know, all, all these sorts of people. And also a lot of literary people. Cause that that's my world. And, But I also teach writing. So I just teach, you know, personal essay, memoir, opinion, writing, that kind of thing. And I've always, I've taught at Columbia and elsewhere, but I teach private workshops.

So, you know, around, you know, 2021 or so, I [00:05:00 ] started noticing that the people who were coming into my workshops, many of them, women, not, not all by any means, but a lot of the women in particular We're like, not necessarily wanting to write, like they didn't necessarily want their stuff workshopped. They just wanted a place to talk about things.

And they knew that I talked about this stuff on my podcast and I wrote about it. And I had a certain approach that wasn't like, particularly partisan and that appealed to them. And they, they just wanted a place to talk about this and they would come in and say, I can't talk about this with my friends.

I've gotten kicked out of my book club. I can't talk about this with. With my, you know, I have lost relationships, families are being torn apart over politics and over, you know, wokeness, Trumpism, whatever it is. And I feel like I'm losing my mind and I feel so lonely and they were silencing themselves in a way that was.

A little bit different from the way men were silencing themselves. I mean, obviously they were having a lot of the same problems at work. [00:06:00 ] Like everybody wants to protect their, you know, their paycheck and their situation at work. But women were really talking about relationships a lot more and talking about how they had a lot to say and they weren't speaking up because they didn't want to get excommunicated by the group and they didn't want to hurt people's feelings.

I, so I was seeing this on like this micro level. Like people were talking about how this played out in their personal lives, normal people out in the world. And these were all kinds of women. These were women with big careers. These were stay at home moms. These were women in their twenties into their sixties, seventies, eighties.

It was like so many all over the country, all over the world. Yeah. These were not like necessarily girl bosses. These were all kinds of women. And. I was seeing this and then I was also noticing that like in our sort of podcasting content creator space, a lot of the people who are speaking up about culture war issues are men, not all by any means, but it's a very male dominated [00:07:00 ] space.

And I started to think, well, why is that? And the listener communities were like all men, like, you know, I went to a persuasion hangout for instance. And there was one other woman there and we were like, Whoa, what is going on? And so I said, you know, I really, need to start a heterodox women's community.

Like somebody needs to do that. And it's hilarious because I'm the last person who ever would start a woman's anything. I hate it. But I thought, you know, something is really wrong here because women are, are, are left out of the conversation in the public arena and in their private lives. And they're, they're leaving themselves out.

And I want to try to fix that and so

Malcolm Collins: I want to dive into you said the women have these conversations that they are afraid to have in public or they've gotten in trouble. What are these conversations? Like, what are the topics that you see come up again and again in this environment?

Meghan Daum: Yeah. So, gender is a big one.

School lockdown, COVID policies is another big one. It's no accident that this started to [00:08:00 ] emerge around COVID. You had a lot of people who were nice, normal liberals and remain so, still identify as liberals. And they were suddenly like dealing With school closures that didn't make any sense in many cases.

And then the kids were at home and then they could hear what the kids were learning on the zoom school. Like all of a sudden they k