The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Katie Herzog is a co-host, with Jesse Singal, of the new and wildly successful podcast, Blocked and Reported, which analyzes internet dramas and attempts to bring missing facts to supposedly foregone conclusions. A lifelong liberal who, a few years ago, found herself questioning certain assumptions of both the political left and the queer community to which she'd always belonged, Katie has become...

Journalist Lenore Skenazy was dubbed "America's Worst Mom" in 2008 for a column about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone. The controversy led her to speak out about finding safe ways to allow kids to be more independent and she founded the Free Range Kids movement. In 2018 she co-founded Let Grow, a nonprofit that offers resource materials, school curricula and even does policy work w...

When Sandra Tsing Loh was beginning her career in the 1980s, she modeled herself after avant garde performance artists like Laurie Anderson. She even put the "Tsing" in her name because she thought it sounded "Yoko Ono-ish." But after becoming an established figure in the Los Angeles arts scene and a prolific writer for alternative publications, Sandra's life began to change and so did the notion...

"We make long term decisions based on short term feelings." - Evan Marc Katz  Evan Marc Katz is a dating coach who specializes in high achieving women seeking male partners. But instead of telling his clients to settle for nothing less than their financial, educational, and professional equals, he encourages them to get real about the dating economy and accept some hard truths about human mating p...

British academic Helen Pluckrose is the co-author, with James Lindsay, of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity-And Why This Harms Everybody. She was also part of an infamous academic hoax wherein "grievance studies" papers about subjects such as fat bodybuilding and dog park rape culture were accepted for publication in established journals. I...

We forget that beyond thoughts and ideas and language there is a three-dimensional reality that gives us valuable experiences and can teach us a lot about how to be in the world.  - Sasha Ayad In this edition of the podcast, Meghan speaks with Sasha Ayad, a Licensed Professional Counselor who treats adolescents and young adults dealing with issues related to gender identity. Over the last few year...

"You're far less likely to be shot as a black man in New York City than as a white man in Tulsa." - Peter Moskos In this episode, Meghan talks with Peter Moskos, a professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who also happens to be a former Baltimore City police officer. They discuss the media's role in public perceptions of policing, the various definitions of "defu...

"No one escapes. Everyone ends up in the guillotine eventually."  In this episode of the podcast, Meghan speaks with celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky, whose career in both medicine and media dates back to the 1980s, when he began co-hosting the nationally syndicated call-in radio program Loveline. Recorded in May on the heels of a controversy over some of Drew's initial comments about the coron...

"It feels so good to feel like you're on the right side of history." In this episode of the podcast, Meghan talks with novelist Leigh Stein, whose wickedly satirical new novel Self Care sends up internet influencers and Goop-flavored millennial startup culture while also slyly poking fun at the commodification of social justice activism. Leigh discusses the feminism, capitalism, and "performative...

**Recorded July 15th**  "I do think on average men are more likely to be more disruptive than necessary and women are more likely to be less disruptive than necessary" - Dr. Heather Heying Evolutionary biologist Dr. Heather Heying has emerged over the last few years as a free speech advocate, largely because of her connection to a now-infamous set of protests at Evergreen State College, where she...