We opened today’s The Daily Whatever Show with some pre-Thanksgiving banter (and Dana DuBois channeling her recurring “old smoker barfly” voice), plus a quick chat about Dana’s new essay When Thanksgiving Isn’t Safe for Your Trans or Nonbinary Child, delving into issues around family, pronouns, and why 2025 feels very different from pre-Trump-2.0 days.

After that, we pulled in our guest Dash from The Halfway Cafe, who arrived fresh off hitting #2 on Substack’s Rising list, which gave us the perfect excuse to deep-dive the weird, chaotic sorcery of Substack algorithms.

Dash broke down how he uses Notes (spoiler: obsessively), why he doomscrolls hourly for joke ideas, and how even two or three paid subscribers can rocket you up the leaderboard. Lawrence explained what we’ve learned about restacking — namely, that it’s the secret fertilizer for growth if you hit it in the first 48 hours. Dash vowed to start treating restacks like cardio.

From there, the conversation spiraled beautifully into politics, and what the Dems keep getting wrong—and how MAGA keeps trapping the left into bad messaging.

Dash argued that Democrats lose when they obsess over micro-niche culture-war issues and forget mass appeal. Dana and Lawrence countered that the problem isn’t raising tough issues — it’s letting the right weaponize them first and define the narrative. Cue a spirited argument about the “big tent,” the filibuster, the Overton window, and whether Democrats should stop poll-testing themselves into oatmeal.

Some standout moments:

* Dana: “Democrats need a Maslow’s hierarchy of communications. Start with groceries.”

* Lawrence: “Start at 1000, not 25.”

* Dash: “Democrats bring pillows to a gunfight.”

* Everyone agreeing we live in the worst goddamn timeline.

We wrapped without solving American democracy (again), but with a whole lot of clarity about what works, what doesn’t, and why Dash might be the hardest-working humorist in the Substack trenches.

Huge thanks to Dash — we always love chatting with you, and need to do that again, soon!

Thank you Jason Odell, Neurodivergent Hodgepodge, Caro Henry, Polly Walker Blakemore, You Ready Grandma, and many others for tuning in.

We love you all, mean it!

This show was pure electricity — the kind where the guest arrives mid-chaos, mid-tech-glitch, mid-greenroom confusion, and still manages to set the universe on fire within three minutes of speaking. That is, in short, Mona Das.

Lawrence Winnerman and I opened by letting everyone witness the sausage-making: Mona briefly appeared on screen by accident, declared “I need to switch to my iPad,” and vanished again like a glamorous political sorceress. Five minutes later, she made her official grand entrance — earbuds fighting for their lives, energy turned to max, already dropping life-changing advice.

And from the moment she said, “I only do three things — and I’m better at those three things than anyone I know,” the show ignited.

Mona walked us through her philosophy:Do only what you’re exceptional at. Hire literally everyone else to do the rest.

Cooking? Nope. Cleaning? Absolutely not. Driving? Only if forced. Managing? She hired her own boss. It wasn’t flexing — it was clarity. And it instantly reframed the way I think about time, energy, and bandwidth.

Then we jumped into her superpowers exercise: write down your three gifts, ask social media what they think your three gifts are, and make a word cloud you can slap onto your bathroom mirror for the days when your inner “negative bitch roommate” won’t shut up. It was peak Mona: funny, pragmatic, spiritually grounded, and just a tiny bit chaotic.

But the episode took its deepest turn when she opened up about the five months she went silent — the fear that took her off social media, the moment her own father (married to an immigration attorney!) warned her not to leave the country, the realization that even as a naturalized citizen and former Senator, she did not feel safe. Her storytelling was raw, blistering, and painfully honest — about ICE raids, about white women’s voting patterns, about how communities of color never got to “go back to sleep” after Biden won.

And then, because she is Mona Das, she pivoted into her next giant leap:

She is raising a billion dollars — with a B — to give 101 women one million and one dollars each, plus full trauma, health, financial, and leadership coaching.

A billion dollars.101 women.

She said it with the confidence of someone announcing weekend plans, and somehow we all believed her — because that’s the power of a true futurist (her favorite title).

We closed with our origin story — meeting Mona at a “Cue the Blue” fundraiser, then hosting a fundraiser for her at my house, the drawing my kid made of her on my front door — and her uncanny ability to remember everything and everyone. Even my kids’ names and pronouns. Even what my living room looked like.

That day, it looked a bit like this…

This episode wasn’t just inspiring. It was a master class in reinvention, courage, boundary-setting, political clarity, and choosing to live big.

Mona doesn’t just talk about possibility.She behaves like possibility is already happening.

And after this show?It kind of feels like it is.

Thank you Nick Paro, The Bathrobe Guy (Robes) 👘, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Yanni Hamburger, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning in.

We love you, mean it!

Today’s Fucked-Up Friday episode delivered exactly the blend of outrage, catharsis, and chaotic laughter the title promises — thanks in huge part to our guest, writer and community-builder Walter Rhein, who jumped in last-minute and absolutely owned the show from the opening seconds.

We kicked things off with Walter’s daughter’s adorable caricatures of us — including Lawrence’s now-iconic “eye smile,” which Walter insists cannot be faked. Then we slid straight into Substack shop talk: authenticity, accessibility, creators supporting creators, and why the mainstream media ecosystem is allergic to lifting up new voices. Walter, ever the connector, named half the people he thinks we should bring on next — and he’s not wrong.

From there we swerved into the week’s political hellscape. Trump calling for the killing of members of Congress. Senators begging the military not to obey unlawful orders. The absolute collapse of civics education. Conservative political violence. Death threats against Jasmine Crockett — all of it. And Walter, with his trademark clarity, said the thing that dropped the air out of the room:

“They’re wasting time so evil people can rape kids.”You could feel the collective gasp in the chat.

Then came the hard pivot that defines Fucked-Up Friday: the Epstein lemon-penis story. Yes, the New York Post’s report that Jeffrey Epstein had a “tiny, extremely deformed penis shaped like a lemon” became a full ten-minute detour into anatomy, patriarchy, sexual insecurity, carrots, mushrooms, Peyronie’s-disease commercials, and why men need therapy with their own genitals.

But woven through the chaos was something else: community. People in the chat sharing their outrage, their humor, their exhaustion, their joy. Melissa heading to D.C. to report back. @Lefty declaring Thanksgiving a safe space for loudly yelling “vagina” and “penis” on principle. The Dropkick Murphys apparently playing at the rally. Kira the dog barking in solidarity.

And the overarching theme kept circling back:

We are building something the establishment won’t. We talk to each other. We lift each other. We don’t gatekeep.

As Walter put it: “Had Substack not existed, I don’t know where I’d be. Probably in a padded cell.”

Thank you Melissa Corrigan, she/her, The Bathrobe Guy (Robes) 👘, Caro Henry, Polly Walker Blakemore, Char Sundust, and many others for tuning in. We love you all, mean it!

Today Lawrence Winnerman and I got to welcome someone who has been a pillar of our little Whatever community from the very beginning: Polly Walker Blakemore.

We started in the usual chaos — still riding the high of going quad-platform (Substack! YouTube! Facebook! Instagram… kind of!) — and me recovering from hosting a full-scale teenage soup party in my tiny house. Then Polly joined us and opened up about her mental health challenges, and her rewarding life of volunteerism.

Polly’s the kind of person who brings a grounded, lived sincerity that you can feel even through a laptop. She’s a writer, a former lawyer, a mom, a survivor, and a person who has rebuilt her life not through grand reinventions, but through quiet acts of connection: volunteering, storytelling, and showing up for people most of society looks past.

She told us about her work at St. John’s Center for Homeless Men, where she spends her days checking mail, handing out toiletries, helping men get IDs and essential documents, and — maybe most importantly — remembering their names. “The best thing I get to say is: I know who you are,” she told us. That hit me. The dignity of being seen.

Her volunteering history spans hospice homes, kitchens feeding the food insecure, senior centers, and more — but the thread running through all of it is her belief in agency. Even choosing between red, blue, or green aftershave becomes a tiny moment of control for someone who has none. In her words: “They don’t get many choices. So when they do, it matters.”

Polly also opened up — bravely and generously — about surviving a medically induced suicidal episode, and how volunteering became part of stitching herself back together. Her stories were raw and unvarnished, but threaded with humor (only Polly could make a post-psych-ward Dairy Queen ritual sound like a holy pilgrimage).

We talked about SNAP cuts, the cruelty built into social services, the absurdity of dropping unhoused men in wheelchairs on shelter steps, and the heroes in the trenches trying to help. But Polly kept bringing us back to the same truth: you can always offer something — your time, your presence, your humanity.

At a moment in the world that feels bleak and cynical, Polly reminded us that compassion is not a feeling. It’s a practice. And showing up — imperfectly, tired, with whatever we’ve got — is what keeps the moral arc bending, however slowly.

Thank you Walter Rhein, Nick Paro, Caro Henry, John Pearce😀🦋🌈 🦅🌻, Yanni Hamburger, and many others for tuning int. We love you, mean it!

Join us each weekday morning at 10am ET/7am PT and Saturdays at noon ET/9an OT for The Daily Whatever Show!

Today’s episode hit me harder than most. I came in tired — the kind of tired that comes from juggling late-stage capitalism, Substack life, and a multi-hyphenate existence where the eggs are cracked but the omelet is nowhere in sight. And then there was that New York Times article. The one asking — with a straight face — whether women are “ruining the workplace.”

It gutted Dana DuBois. And honestly, it punched me in the stomach too. We both felt that familiar mix of exhaustion, disbelief, and “is this really where the Overton window is now?” If you’ve ever worked in the real world — especially as a woman — you know the workplace hasn’t been ruined by women; it’s been held together by them.

And that was the perfect moment for Carlyn Beccia to enter.

Carlyn — author, illustrator, historian, science communicator, and one of the fiercest minds writing today — came in like a lightning bolt. What Dana and I love about Carlyn is her ability to take cultural chaos, run it through a scientific lens, and come back with razor-sharp clarity. The minute she joined, the whole emotional temperature of the show shifted.

Carlyn walked us through the dangerous worldview behind the Times piece: evolutionary determinism masquerading as scholarship, “conservative feminism” (which she correctly pointed out is as real as dry water), and the broader authoritarian project to push women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and anyone outside the white male norm back into the margins. She called it what it is: eugenics-adjacent thinking wrapped in polite media packaging.

Dana — with her trademark empathy, intelligence, and lived experience — brought the human side of all this. She spoke so beautifully about what it means to come of age as a Gen X woman, to fight your way forward in the workplace for decades, only to watch the country flirt with rolling back your hard-won rights. She kept grounding us in the emotional stakes of the moment — something only she can do with that mix of vulnerability and fire.

Meanwhile, Carlyn kept cutting through the noise: pointing out that “wokeness” literally means staying awake to injustice; that gossip networks were survival tools long before HR existed; that historians, scientists, and workers of all genders benefit when workplaces evolve; and that the real threat to work isn’t women — it’s assholes and billionaires.

By the end of the conversation, the knot in my stomach was gone. Replaced with clarity. With anger that felt productive. And with gratitude — for Dana, for Carlyn, and for all of you who show up with us every morning.

Stay woke. Stay loud. And women — please keep “ruining” the workplace. It’s saving the rest of us.

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Thank you Cat, Harry Hogg, cynmac, Beth Cruz, Jessica Bee 🍁, and many others for tuning into my live video with Carlyn Beccia and Lawrence Winnerman! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Today’s Fucked Up Friday on The Daily Whatever Show brought the chaos, the catharsis, and a whole lot of righteous fury — with Dana DuBois hosting, and Melissa Corrigan, she/her and Nick Paro stepping in for me while I was off on a “secret stealth spy mission.” Both of them showed up fully loaded and absolutely delivered.

The episode started with a whirlwind recap of the week’s political sewage: the Republican scramble over the Epstein files, Mike Johnson’s panic-fueled strategy pivots, the GOP’s ongoing protection of predators, and a broader discussion about how fascism, misogyny, and state violence are colliding in real time. But as always, the ritual of Fucked Up Friday is the main event — each panelist presents their pick for Most Fucked Up Story of the Week, and the audience votes.

Melissa’s Pick: Wisconsin’s Miscarriage “Catch Kits”

Melissa switched her story at the last second after discovering a new headline so dystopian it shook the panel: Wisconsin Republicans have introduced a bill requiring pregnant people to keep “catch kits” on hand so they can collect fetal remains if they miscarry — and bring the tissue to a hospital to avoid criminal charges.Melissa walked through the emotional and physical horror of expecting someone who is miscarrying — often unexpectedly, in a bathroom, in pain and panic — to dig through a toilet bowl and “retrieve evidence” of their innocence. It is dehumanizing, medically deranged, and morally obscene. The chat reacted viscerally — and so did the panel.

Dana’s Pick: Megyn Kelly Moving the Overton Window on Abuse

Dana chose Megyn Kelly’s grotesque attempt to sanitize and normalize sexual exploitation. In her interview, Kelly suggested Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t a pedophile but simply liked the “barely legal type” — meaning 15-year-old girls. Dana tore apart the rhetorical laundering happening here: a woman with a massive platform softening the cultural understanding of abuse, reframing coercion as preference, and opening the door to predators to claim legitimacy. The panel connected this to the broader Christo-fascist effort to blur consent and push child marriage.

Nick’s Pick: Recriminalizing Hemp

Nick delivered the dark-horse entry: buried in the shutdown deal was a provision recriminalizing hemp with trace THC in 23 states. That means farmers thrown back into criminal jeopardy, entire state industries destroyed, and a massive new opening for carceral expansion. Nick tied it to the far-right agenda to rebuild drug criminalization and keep poor people, especially rural farmers, vulnerable to prosecution.

The Vote

When the audience weighed in, it wasn’t even close. Melissa’s “catch kit” miscarriage bill swept the vote — the runaway winner for the most fucked up story of the week.

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Thank you Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Caro Henry, Cat, Cheech Previti, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Melissa Corrigan, she/her and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Today’s episode of The Daily Whatever Show hit differently. Maybe because Dana DuBois and I both grew up in the era when your hometown newspaper was as essential as your morning cereal. Maybe because our guest, the extraordinary Untrickled by Michelle Teheux , brought the kind of clarity, integrity, and lived expertise that makes you realize how much we’ve lost—and how much it matters.

Michelle spent more than three decades in local journalism, rising to become editor of her small-town daily paper. She didn’t describe the job as a career; she described it as a calling. A form of civic service. Democracy work. The kind of work done by people who earned little, slept less, and cared deeply.

And as she walked us through what small newspapers once provided—accurate reporting, community cohesion, a neutral shared set of facts—it became painfully clear: those papers weren’t just covering the town. They were holding it together.

Michelle talked about a truth we no longer confront often enough: local news was where we once agreed on the same reality.

Birth announcements, zoning debates, who won the basketball game, which roads were closing, who got arrested, who got honored, who needed help. You didn’t have a liberal version or a conservative version—you had the news. One shared civic bloodstream.

Now? She sees people signing petitions they don’t understand, voting on issues they’ve never actually had explained, and living inside algorithmic bubbles where half the town doesn’t know what the other half thinks, sees, or fears. And the result isn’t just confusion. It’s vulnerability. To propaganda. To manipulation. To Trumpism. To extremism. To “news deserts” where bad actors thrive because no one’s checking the receipts.

Michelle explained that covering local government isn’t something tech can automate. It takes human beings—reading the council packet, going to the meetings, asking the uncomfortable questions, writing the stories, contextualizing what matters. Local reporting is labor. Care. Time. Attention. Humanity.

And no digital platform has stepped in to replace the watchdog role small papers once filled. Not Facebook. Not Nextdoor. Not hyperlocal apps. Nothing.

By the end of the hour, the chat was on fire and our hearts were heavy—but also full of admiration. Michelle reminded us that journalism, when done right, is an act of devotion to community. A democratic backbone. And losing it isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice we’ve allowed to happen.

We’ll absolutely be bringing Michelle back. And maybe next time, we’ll spend less time mourning what we lost—and more time imagining how to rebuild it.

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This morning’s The Daily Whatever Show was equal parts hilarious, heartfelt, and righteously pissed off — which is to say, a typical Wednesday.

Lawrence Winnerman joined me live from Seattle (yes, he’s here this week!!), and we kicked things off catching up on jet lag, sleep deprivation, and my ongoing campaign to make lentil curry a political act. Then we dove straight into the good stuff: our guest, Nick Paro — writer, veteran, and co-founder of Banner and Backbone, a civic advocacy platform that’s actually walking its talk.

Nick’s the kind of guy who looks like he should be wearing an American flag tie on Fox News — and yet, he’s out here reclaiming patriotism for the sane. He talked about building a “manosphere that doesn’t suck” — one where men are allowed to have feelings, hold each other accountable, and still tell their friends they love them without qualifying it with “no homo.”

From there, we got into the politics of exhaustion: the Democratic Senate folding (again), the cult of centrism, and why “take the win” isn’t a strategy when the so-called win still hurts people. Nick’s take was blunt and unfiltered — he’s not interested in performative moderation. As he put it, “We’re not here for fascism slowly instead of fascism fast.”

But the highlight of the show came when we turned to our Feeding America fundraiser. Nick, along with Melissa Corrigan, she/her, Banner & Backbone, and our whole Substack Scribes crew, has been raising funds to combat food insecurity, and the results are jaw-dropping. Between donations from listeners (and one friendly rivalry between us on-air), Substack Scribes have already raised $9,280, $3,200 of which has come from The Daily Whatever Show! And let’s face it—most of that has come from the incredibly generous Eric Lullove. Together, we’ve funded tens of thousands of meals, and we couldn’t be happier about that.

Nick said something that stuck with me: “It’s okay to feel good when you do good.” That, I think, was the thread tying it all together — from the fight for truth online to the quiet act of feeding families.

Thank you Char Sundust, Samantha Paige (she/they), Soso's World, Beth Cruz, Yolanda D., and many others for tuning in. We love you, mean it!

Join us tomorrow when we welcome Untrickled by Michelle Teheux to the show to talk about the loss of local newspapers and how we’re all worse off for it.

Today’s show was a full ninety minutes, an emotional marathon that swung from personal transformation to political courage, from quitting cigarettes to fighting hunger.

We started with frustration. Another morning, another Democratic cave-in to Trump’s hostage politics. Lawrence Winnerman and I vented (loudly) about the collapse of strategy into surrender — how our party keeps defending procedure while the other side burns down the process. “This isn’t chess,” I said. “It’s a hostage negotiation.”

Enter Murphy , writer of The Exile Files and absurdist friend of TDWS, who joined us to talk about the anatomy of habit — specifically, how he’s trying to quit smoking after decades of using it to manage emotion, boredom, and fear. It wasn’t about nicotine, he said. It was about awareness. “I thought I was quitting cigarettes,” Murphy told us. “Turns out I was quitting autopilot.”

His honesty cracked something open. We talked about how attention itself has become an addiction — the way doomscrolling, caffeine, and constant distraction have replaced cigarettes as our numbing agent of choice. It was funny, a little sad, and unexpectedly hopeful.

But the real shift came in hour two, when Connecticut State Senator Saud Anwar joined us. He’s a Pulmonologist, a Democrat, and walking embodiment of compassion in action. Saud and his wife have been living on a food budget $6.20 a day, the equivalent of the SNAP food allowance, documenting each meal on social media to show what life really looks like under America’s safety net, which is how he crossed my path. I was thrilled when I reached out and he agreed to come on our show. And he exceeded our expectations with his wise, compassionate views on leadership.

He didn’t talk about policy as a talking point — he talked about people. About the families he’s met as a physician, the hunger he’s witnessed, and the quiet shame that too often keeps suffering invisible. “You can’t understand policy,” he said, “if you don’t understand hunger.”

In a week when Washington felt morally bankrupt, Saud reminded us what leadership should sound like: steady, kind, and relentlessly human. Listening to him was like being reintroduced to empathy, the kind that nourishes rather than performs.

We ended lighter, but not easy — and maybe that’s the point. Awareness, whether it’s about a craving or a country, is where all healing begins.

Thank you Murphy, Melissa Corrigan, she/her, John Pearce😀🦋🌈 🦅🌻, Noble Blend, Jason Odell, Eric Lullove and many others for tuning in! We love you all, mean it!

Join us tomorrow when Lawrence and I are gonna nerd out about the story I just published and talk about Big Dick Energy vs Between Date Behavior—and why BDB is the better indicator of a good partner.

Today’s show was supposed to feature Tara Dublin, and we were SO excited to meet her and learn more about both her activism work in Portland and her creative writing work as a novelist. But in classic “I’m fine, everything’s fine” fashion, I gave her the wrong time zone when I sent the start time. So we’re gonna reschedule Tara’s appearance—hopefully for very soon!

Instead, today was just me and Lawrence Winnerman — two slightly disgruntled best friends winging it through a Saturday morning that was heavier than usual

Lawrence opened the show with hard news: his mom’s recent cancer diagnosis. He spoke about moving to Fort Wayne years ago, following a gut feeling that he needed to be there. It was heartbreaking and grounding — a reminder that even in chaos, intuition matters. When he joked he was “not fully gruntled,” we both fell apart laughing and immediately looked up the word. Turns out “gruntled” is real, and it means content. Leave it to us to turn grief into a vocabulary lesson.

From there, we swung into politics (because of course we did): the Seattle mayoral race still too close to call, the Trump administration’s SNAP benefits stunt, and rumors of an airport crisis that could turn Thanksgiving into a general strike. Lawrence, ever the explainer, broke down Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s late-night ruling, assuring us that yes, it’s awful now — but she’s playing chess while everyone else is playing tiddlywinks.

We also shared an update on Feeding America, the national fundraiser that Substack’s Creator Coalition (led by the indefatigable Melissa Corrigan, she/her ) is promoting. Every dollar donated provides 13 pounds of food. We’ll be adding donation links to our newsletters this week, but please don’t wait — people are hungry now.

Somewhere between politics and philosophy, we veered into personal stuff: pillars wobbling, burnout, and the art of staying creative when the world’s on fire. We wrapped with absurdity (as one does), joking about “Ballard chicken snatching” as a new Depression-era survival skill.

It wasn’t the show we planned — it was raw, weird, and real. And maybe that’s exactly what The Daily Whatever is supposed to be.

Thank you Ellie Leonard, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Jason Odell, The One Minute Daily Boost, Brandon Ellrich, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dana DuBois! Join me for my next live video in the app.