When Wokeness Stops Working: Brendan O’Neill’s VIBE SHIFT signals a new era
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Meghan's guest this week is British journalist and author Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer at Spiked and author of Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy. Brendan talks about what he sees as a growing “vibe shift” away from elite consensus and toward something like common sense—though not without its own distortions. He and Meghan discuss the UK’s role in pushing back on gender ideology (aka “TERF Island”), the uneasy state of free speech on both sides of the Atlantic, and why ordinary people seemed to tolerate cultural excesses until they suddenly...
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The Emaciated Elephant in the Room: Are GLP-1s causing us to lose our minds as well as weight?
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Hadley Freeman is a U.K.-based journalist, Sunday Times columnist, and the author of Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia. She joins the podcast this week to discuss what she calls the “thinness arms race” in the era of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. She and Meghan talk about why extreme thinness is once again being rewarded—if not demanded—of female celebrities, how the current aesthetic differs from 90s heroin chic, and why the language of body positivity is often used to shut down obvious observations. They also talk about the physical and psychological realities of...
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The Truth About Street Homelessness
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week’s guest is Estela Lopez, Executive Director of the LA Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, which encompasses Los Angeles’s Skid Row. With 25 years on the job and a lifetime in the neighborhood, Estela is one of the most clear-eyed, unsparing voices when it comes to what homelessness actually looks like at the ground level. In this conversation, she and Meghan talk about how a thriving industrial district became the nation’s most concentrated homeless encampment, why Estela sees this less as a homelessness crisis than a lawlessness crisis, and how the open-air...
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How To Develop A Curiosity Practice
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week, Meghan sits down for an efficient but information-packed conversation with mindset coach Amanda Gertz-Hurdy, author of The Curiosity Workbook. They discuss how Amanda pivoted from a corporate career to a more creative path before building a thriving practice in the mindfulness and curiosity space—and why she believes radical self-acceptance can only come when you’re ready to ask the radical questions. This episode is sponsored by Fecalicity. Visit to start your new gut health journey today. Guest bio: Amanda Gertz-Hurdy is a certified journaling...
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Lionel Shriver’s Most Problematic Novel Yet
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Bestselling novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to dicuss what might be her most controversial book yet. A Better Life takes on immigration through the story of a progressive Brooklyn woman who opens her home to a migrant. In this interview, she and Meghan discuss the book’s themes and central characters, including the deliciously complicated Nico, a basement-dwelling fan of manospheric podcasts, and the role of the family’s sprawling, Queen Anne-style house, which is almost a character in itself. They also talk about demography, population decline, and the...
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Better Living Through Dying, with Annabelle Gurwitch
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week Meghan is joined by actor, humorist, and six-time author Annabelle Gurwitch, who returns to the podcast to discuss her new memoir, The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker. Annabelle was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer during COVID, entirely out of the blue, after what she assumed was a meaningless cough. Five years later, she remains an outlier on a targeted therapy that has kept her stable. In this conversation, Annabelle talks about how she has resisted the sentimental clichés surrounding illness, why she rejects the idea that cancer is a...
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It’s the Drugs: Sam Quinones on Street Homelessness
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Meghan talks with investigative journalist and bestselling author Sam Quinones (Dreamland, The Least of Us) about the piece of the homelessness crisis we’re often encouraged to treat as secondary: synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, and its connection to the rapid rise of street psychosis and encampment life. Sam explains how today’s meth is fundamentally different from the “tweaker” era of the 1990s and early 2000s: cheaper, purer, more abundant, and more destabilizing. Known as P2P meth, this new form was perfectly suited to mass industrial production and reshaped...
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A Special Tranche In Hell, with Sarah Haider
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Time for another reunion! Sarah Haider, Meghan’s co-host on the late, great A Special Place In Hell, has a lot to say about the Epstein files, so she visited the podcast to unload. After opening the episode with an homage to the classic intro from our former podcast, the ladies talk about how everyone’s a pedophile now, why Ghislaine Maxwell was drawn to such bad boyfriends, and why Epstein’s favorite muffins (yes, literal muffins) were so delicious they inspired poetry. Because it’s Sarah, they also discuss the latest in Fertility Crisis Discourse, including new nostalgia about...
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When Podcasts Guests Attack!
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
A special solo episode! Now out from behind the paywall. As a recent bonus episode for subscribers, Meghan recorded some thoughts about a media dustup that was making her head explode. In the wake of the latest Epstein document dump, a smaller, unrelated story emerged a few weeks ago that carried some of the same themes. It involved New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s decision not to air an interview he recorded with journalist Seth Harp for his podcast Interesting Times. After Harp accused Douthat of spiking the episode out of cowardice, a chorus of online commenters demanded the tape...
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Is Sex With Another Human A Thing Of The Past? with Dr. Debra Soh
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Is it really true that no one—or at least no one under 30—is having sex anymore? In this episode, Meghan talks with neuroscientist, author, and former sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh about her new book Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy, a data-packed look at why millennials and Gen Z are having less sex than any cohort on record despite living in the most sexually permissive culture in history. From declining testosterone and endocrine disruptors to porn, dating apps, kink culture, sex dolls, and the rise of AI boyfriends and girlfriends (she tried a few), Debra...
info_outlineA special solo episode! Now out from behind the paywall.
As a recent bonus episode for subscribers, Meghan recorded some thoughts about a media dustup that was making her head explode. In the wake of the latest Epstein document dump, a smaller, unrelated story emerged a few weeks ago that carried some of the same themes. It involved New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s decision not to air an interview he recorded with journalist Seth Harp for his podcast Interesting Times.
After Harp accused Douthat of spiking the episode out of cowardice, a chorus of online commenters demanded the tape be released anyway—raw, unedited, or handed over to the guest—so “the people” could decide.
What interested Meghan wasn't who won a debate no one heard, but the apparently widespread belief that audiences are entitled to everything that gets recorded, regardless of editorial judgment. To her, this seems bonkers, but a surprising number of people seem not to realize that interviews get scrapped all the time. She's done it herself, and she explains some of the circumstances that led to it. This episode also contains a painful personal story about Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Get out your hankies.