A Special Place In Hell Reunion, with Sarah Haider
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Meghan Daum
4.8 • 784 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thanksgiving has come early! A year after bidding farewell to our much-loved/occasionally-despised podcast A Special Place In Hell, Sarah Haider joins me for a catch-up. A lot has happened in the last few weeks, not to mention the last year. We discuss the killing of Charlie Kirk, the wave of anti-Indian hate on X, the phenomenon of South Asian troll farming, the uses and abuses of AI, and, of course, the discourse around "the great feminization," which was the entire premise of A Special Place In Hell. (Did someone steal our idea?) We also discuss Sarah's new baby and whether her pregnancy was worse than my house burning down.
This version of our conversation is free to all. To hear a longer version, become a paying subscriber at Substack at https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/ or join The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Women will be in the workplace. |
| 0:01.3 | Women are in the workplace. |
| 0:02.1 | We have institutions where women in the workplace and we need to instigate perhaps different kinds of, you know, maybe there needs to be something more active that we can do to shift the psychology, the female psychology, not to dampen it, not to destroy it or force it to change necessarily, |
| 0:23.3 | but to harness it in a way that is still helpful to getting to that goal of excellence. |
| 0:28.1 | And is that possible at all? |
| 0:29.5 | And I wonder, like, how to make agreeableness work for you? |
| 0:35.9 | Work for you, right? |
| 0:36.6 | I mean, that's what all the good systems do that. They take |
| 0:40.9 | a harmful like aspect of human behavior, perhaps, you know, or harmful in a certain context, |
| 0:46.4 | and turn it into a helpful thing anyway. |
| 0:53.7 | Welcome to the unspeak easy podcast. I am your host, Megan Down, and this week I have something |
| 1:00.1 | really special for you, a reunion with my former Special Place in Hell podcast co-host, Sarah Hader. |
| 1:08.0 | A special place in hell, of course, was the podcast we started in 2022 and closed down just |
| 1:14.4 | about exactly a year ago. A lot has happened since then for both of us, and we decided to come |
| 1:20.6 | together just for you and talk about some of that, as well as our thoughts on recent news developments, including the death of Charlie Kirk, the rise of AI, and of course, the recent viral article by Helen Andrews about the great feminization. |
| 1:39.0 | We talked for so long that I am also releasing a longer uncut version of the conversation for paying |
| 1:46.5 | subscribers on both Substack and YouTube. In that version, we talk about Zoran Mandami, the latest |
| 1:54.6 | in pro-natalism news, and also how the creative writing community is keeping the social justice |
| 2:00.5 | flame burning. |
| 2:01.8 | If you want to hear that, become a member of the unspeak-easy channel on YouTube |
| 2:06.5 | or become a paying subscriber on Substack or both. |
| 2:10.1 | In the meantime, enjoy this long-overdue conversation with the one and only and sorely missed Sarah Hater. |
... |
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