How Are Those Luxury Beliefs Working Out? Rob Henderson and the coinage that keeps on giving (FULL INTERVIEW)
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Release Date: 08/26/2025
Should We Bring Back Asylums? with Dr. Sally Satel
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Why is it so difficult to find meaningful help for the severely mentally ill, including those exhibiting patterns of violence? And why has this question become politicized? Policy expert and practicing psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel is not typically a fan of Donald Trump, but she agrees with the president’s recent executive order on mental health policy. That order called for “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment to restore public order.” This issue, she says, should not be about...
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The Making of A Gender Heretic, with Ben Appel
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week, Ben Appel joins me to talk about his new book, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, a memoir about leaving one kind of cult only to stumble into another. Raised in a rigid Christian community, Ben found refuge in the gay rights movement and, later, the Ivy League—until “allyship” started to look less like solidarity and more like a loyalty oath. We discuss • Why he chose the deliberately provocative title Cis, White, Gay — and what reactions revealed about current identity politics. • How queer “community” has become...
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How Do You Want Your Life To End? with Dr. Sunita Puri
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
My guest is Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative-care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. We talk about what it really means to care for patients when cure is no longer the goal, why our medical system resists honest conversations about death, and how clarity and compassion can coexist at the end of life. Topics we cover: • What palliative care really provides (beyond hospice) • Why “more treatment” ≠ “more life” • Prognosis, probabilities, and telling the truth kindly • How...
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Have Women Ruined The World? Helen Andrews on The Great Feminization
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Less than 24 hours after her Compact essay, “The Great Feminization,” set off a thousand group texts, writer Helen Andrews joined to talk about what she means by “feminization,” why the 2020 moral fervor looked the way it did, and how workplace culture shifts when women become the numerical majority. We also compare “agreeableness” with the kind of conflict that actually moves ideas forward (and where each belongs). In this episode we discuss: How Helen defines “the great feminization” and why she thinks it explains contemporary “wokeness” What...
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Does Your Personality Stink? There’s Hope!
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week I interview journalist and author Olga Khazan about her new book on personality change, Me, But Better. We talk about the Big Five traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and how they play out in ordinary life rather than in personality quizzes. Olga explains what research actually shows about how much you can change, how anxiety and depression tie into neuroticism, and why introversion can quietly turn into isolation. We also discuss everyone’s favorite personality expert, Carl Jung, the politics of “openness,”...
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The Los Angeles Wildfires In Fiction
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner returns to discuss his exceptionally timely new novel Amputation—a strange, exuberant, and ultra meta work set against a topic I’ve talked about a lot this year, the January LA wildfires. Bruce, an L.A. native and prominent literary figure in the city, explains how the book came together in less than two months, why he resists “political novels” even when writing inside a political moment, and how language (not legacy) keeps him making art. We also talk about real-life figures who appear as characters (Stephen Colbert, Mayor Karen Bass, Debra...
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How To Quit Drinking Without Quitting Drinking
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Katie Herzog, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast (BarPod), is best known as an anthropologist of, as she puts it, “internet bullshit.” But she’s swerved far out of her lane for her latest project. In her brand new book, Drink Your Way Sober, Katie combines personal history with deep reporting to chronicle a lifetime of drinking and explain how a little-known drug called naltrexone, combined with an approach called The Sinclair Method, finally allowed her to quit for good. They also get into why young people are drinking less, what the “California sober”...
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Street Protesters: Who Are They, Really? with Jeremy Lee Quinn
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Photojournalist Jeremy Lee Quinn has spent years documenting protests, rallies, and moments of public unrest that often look very different on the ground than they do on the evening news. In this conversation, he talks with Meghan about what really happens when a “mostly peaceful protest” turns chaotic, how viral clips can erase context, and why the incentives of freelance journalism can skew coverage. They also discuss what it takes to build trust with sources across ideological divides, the ethics of filming in volatile environments, and how ordinary viewers can tell when the narrative...
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Can Democrats Admit They Were Wrong On Gender? with Lisa Selin Davis
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
After years of institutional groupthink and policy whiplash, what have we actually learned—and what are we still not allowed to ask? Lisa Selin Davis returns to discuss the evidence (and non-evidence) around youth gender medicine, talk about the ongoing taboo and confusion around AGP (autogynephilia), and consider how to hold two truths at once: some people report thriving post-transition while others were clearly harmed. In this episode, we discuss / talk about: How “don’t question it” became a default and why that stalled real inquiry What the evidence actually says (and...
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Are Therapists Crazy? Andrew Hartz's quest for sanity in clinical psychology
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Dr. Andrew Hartz is a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, an organization dedicated to overcoming sociopolitical bias in the mental health field. He was last here in 2023 and returns now to talk about what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the mental-health landscape since then. We discuss the rise of “everyday dissociation,” how screens and Zoom relationships dull presence and feeling, and why talk therapy can miss the mark when the problem is disconnection from the body. Andrew also explains how anxiety became a form of social currency (from...
info_outlineThis week, I welcome back Rob Henderson, the social psychologist, author, and commentator who coined the concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer status on the upper class while inflicting real costs on lower-income communities. Rob was last here in early 2024 discussing his memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, which chronicles his journey through California’s foster system to the Air Force, and onward to Yale and Cambridge. In this conversation, we explore what he’s been thinking about since the book’s release—particularly the so-called “mating crisis,” why many young people delay or avoid partnerships and family, and what that means for the future. We also dissect the emergence of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral hopeful who, according to Rob (and I would concur), embodies luxury beliefs in action. Finally, Rob answers questions from Substack readers.
Rob will be a speaker at our Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas weekend, October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
GUEST BIO
Rob Henderson is the author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. He grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and in the rural town of Red Bluff, California. After enlisting in the U.S. Air Force at the age of seventeen, he subsequently attended Yale on the GI Bill and was then awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD in psychology in 2022. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and his Substack newsletter is sent each week to more than 70 thousand subscribers.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.