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 dating to testing accommodations), the overuse of diagnostic labels online, and why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a saner path than endless self-rumination. Guest Bio: Andrew Hartz is the Founder, President, and Executive Director of the Open Therapy Institute. He's also a practicing clinical psychologist and was formerly a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University, where he also completed his Ph.D. He's been featured in the New York Times, on The Dr. Drew Podcast, on Dr. Phil Primetime, and in The Free Press and has written about political issues and mental health for outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Discourse, Heterodox Academy, the New York Post, and Quillette.

This 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.

This is the full version of the Aug 4 episode, now available to all subscribers. 

This week I’m joined by Alana Newhouse, journalist, cultural critic, and founder/editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine. Since launching Tablet in 2009, Alana has carved out a space for nuanced and surprising reporting on Jewish identity and the larger cultural questions shaping those issues, as well as the broader issues of our time.

We discuss her 2021 essay, Everything Is Broken, in which she diagnoses systemic failures in medicine, media, education, and culture. Alana traces these breakdowns to a pervasive cultural force she calls flatness — the drive toward frictionless interaction, simplified narratives, and ideological conformity.

Drawing from her own story of navigating a medical crisis with her own child, Alana exposes how even privileged, insured families can be failed by institutions. She also offers a blueprint for repair: embracing complexity, friction, unpredictability, and deep creative engagement.

Alana will be a guest speaker at our Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas weekend, October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.

Are you a fan of what Alana has done at Tablet? Show your love (and get a big discount) by using promo code ALANA1800 at checkout.

GUEST BIO

Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

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. More info here.

🗽 Live event in NYC on Sept 3! Come see me discuss The Catastrophe Hour with bestselling novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver (catch my recent interview with Lionel here). The Village Underground, 6 pm. Tickets and info [here](http://paid%20subscribers%20get%20access%20to%20my%20entire%20interview%20with%20rachel%20mason.%20to%20hear%20the%20entire%20conversation,%20become%20a%20paying%20subscriber%20here./).

This 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.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

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.

This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In that book, How To Disappear Completely, Kelsey wrote not just about anorexia itself but the culture surrounding it, notably the “peak sad girl” era of the late 1990s through early 2000s. The therapeutic approach that accompanied it, she argues, took universal human questions that have been asked for millennia and repackaged them as personal neuroses to be indulged and then solved — or, more often, deemed unsolvable. Her conversion to Judaism and participation in an Orthodox community helped reframe her entire way of thinking and changed her life for the better.

GUEST BIO

Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program, and Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, which came out in April from Viking. Her work has appeared online or in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's, and the New Yorker, among other outlets.

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.

📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.

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 just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.

Paid subscribers get early access to my interview with John McWhorter, who will be at the coed New York City Retreat. If you’re interested in meeting him in person (among others), you can get $700 off with the code NYC1800.

Author, New York Times columnist, and superstar linguist John McWhorter returns to the pod to catch us up on what’s been on his mind now that the Woke Emergency is over . . . or is it over? We talk about how figures like Robin D’Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi have receded from the spotlight and then move on to more pressing questions topics, such as whether New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s “I vs me” confusion is disqualifying (I say yes), whether a smart person would say “stupider” or “more stupid,” when it became acceptable to say “anyways,” and why kids today have substituted “based off” for “based on.”

We also discuss John’s long-running conversations with economist Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show and how their divergent views on the Trump phenomenon have changed (and also not changed) the dynamics of their discussions. John reflects on Glenn’s 2024 memoir and explains why he would be reluctant to expand the personal writing in his columns into an entire book. (Listen to my interview with Glenn here.)

Finally, we talk about the definition of a public intellectual and why so many people with microphones count themselves as such. Would a legendary public intellectual like Susan Sontag have adapted to the YouTube era? What John has to say might surprise you.

GUEST BIO

John McWhorter writes a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and the author or more than 20 books, most recently Pronoun Trouble, Nine Nasty Words, and Woke Racism.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

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.

September 3 in NYC at 6 pm, I’ll be in conversation with Lionel live at The Village Underground. Tix available here. Use promo code CATASTROPHE18 at checkout for a discount.

Bestselling novelist and beloved (and occasionally be-hated) columnist Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to talk about several topics, including her most recent novel, Mania. In that novel, she imagines a society under the grip of “mental parity,” a concept arguing that all individuals possess equal intelligence and no one should be given greater credence or responsibility because of the perception that they are smarter. We also discuss our own intelligence (are we really all that smart?) and wonder what makes us so resistant to groupthink in politics and daily life, especially around movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and gender ideology.

In search of a lighter topic, we finally move on to . . . immigration. (Oops.) As a Los Angeles resident, I’ve been alarmed by the ICE raids in my community, and I’m quite upset about the Trump administration’s policies. As a longtime expatriate in the U.K. and as the author of a forthcoming novel about immigration (A Better Life, coming in February 2026), Lionel sees things a little differently.

GUEST BIO

A prolific journalist with a fortnightly column in Britain’s The Spectator, Lionel Shriver has written widely for the New York Times, the London Times, the Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications. Her first nonfiction book, ABOMINATIONS: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-destruction, was published in 2022. It joins a story collection and fifteen novels, including Mania, Should We Stay or Should We Go, The Mandibles, and We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton). Her work has been translated into 35 languages. Her latest novel A Better Life, focused on immigration, will be out in early 2026.

UPCOMING EVENT:

Once again, if you enjoyed this interview, join me in NYC on September 3 at The Village Underground for a conversation with Lionel about The Catastrophe Hour as well as her work. Topics will include (but are not limited to) death, sex, real estate, dogs, beauty, grief, aging, cancelation, incels, femcels, self-destruction, natural disasters, pronatalism, anti-natalism, human intelligence, and cultural stupidity.

Doors open at 5:15, show starts at 6pm. Tix available here. Use promo code CATASTROPHE18 at checkout for a discount.

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.

This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In that book, How To Disappear Completely, Kelsey wrote not just about anorexia itself but the culture surrounding it, notably the “peak sad girl” era of the late 1990s through early 2000s. The therapeutic approach that accompanied it, she argues, took universal human questions that have been asked for millennia and repackaged them as personal neuroses to be indulged and then solved — or, more often, deemed unsolvable. Her conversion to Judaism and participation in an Orthodox community helped reframe her entire way of thinking and changed her life for the better.

GUEST BIO

Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program, and Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, which came out in April from Viking. Her work has appeared online or in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's, and the New Yorker, among other outlets.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

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.

📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.

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 just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.