How To Stay Sane While Staying Informed: Tara Henley on audience capture, J.D. Vance, fertility, loneliness and the price of “progress.”
The Unspeakable Podcast
Meghan Daum
4.8 • 784 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2024
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Unspeakable is moving to video! Here’s the scoop, in case you missed it.
The Unspeakable’s debut video guest is one of Meghan’s favorite people to talk with about our confounding political times: journalist and podcaster Tara Henley. Since visiting the pod back in early 2023, Tara’s podcast and Substack newsletter Lean Out has become a major force in the heterodox space. She is one of the finest interviewers and sharpest thinkers working today.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Meghan and Tara talk about how to avoid the phenomenon of audience capture, how to think about J.D. Vance, how to find the joy (or at least the fun memes) in Kamala Harris, and what’s behind the mating crisis, the masculinity crisis, the economic crisis, and any number of other crises (not necessarily in that order).
This conversation was recorded on August 15, 2024. The video will appear on The Unspeakable’s YouTube channel soon.
Tara will be a guest speaker at the October 21-24 Unspeakeasy retreat in Woodstock, NY. There still may be spots left. Find out more here.
Follow Tara on Substack.
GUEST BIO
Tara Henley is a Canadian journalist and the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life. Her 22-year career spans TV, radio, online media, magazines, and newspapers. She has worked as a producer on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight and on current affairs morning and afternoon shows at CBC Radio, in both Vancouver and Toronto. Henley's CBC radio documentary "39" was a finalist at the New York Festivals International Radio Program Awards. A former books columnist for The Toronto Star, and for Metro Morning, Toronto's top morning radio show, Henley is a contributor to the books section of The Globe and Mail. Her writing has appeared in outlets across Canada and around the world, and she now publishes a popular current affairs Substack newsletter, Lean Out. Her weekly interview podcast of the same name has listeners in more than 150 countries and 5,000 cities worldwide.
HOUSEKEEPING
📺 Watch episodes on my YouTube Channel here.
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: New ones will be announced soon. See where we'll be!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Do you have the aspiration of being fair and balanced and objective and, you know, doing work |
| 0:10.3 | that is replicable by other journalists that is relying on publicly available data that |
| 0:15.4 | cites its sources, that doesn't use unnamed sources, that doesn't come out and editorialize in the process of reporting a story. |
| 0:23.4 | Is that an aspiration and a goal? |
| 0:25.6 | We will always fail it because we all do have our own political agenda, of course. |
| 0:29.4 | We'll fail that. |
| 0:30.5 | But at least with the aspiration in place, it's a guiding principle in the media that pushes us in the right direction. |
| 0:37.3 | What we've seen in the last |
| 0:39.1 | couple of years, particularly in 2020, was a totally new thing, which is to say we reject that as a |
| 0:45.3 | guiding principle. We think objectivity is fundamentally flawed. We don't want to practice it. |
| 0:51.4 | We don't think it's useful. We think it's kind of racist. That is a new |
| 0:56.0 | moment. And that is not a moment I think that the general public can really relate to. |
| 1:03.6 | Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dow. My guest is the inimitable Tara Henley. She is a Toronto-based journalist with an incredibly |
| 1:16.3 | impressive background. She was a producer at the CBC for a long time. And then she broke out and |
| 1:22.9 | went out on her own a couple of years ago. She has an incredibly successful podcast called Lean Out, |
| 1:29.1 | which I've been privileged to be a guest on a couple of times. She also has an excellent substack |
| 1:35.2 | by the same name. Tara was here, I think a few years ago now to talk about what it was like |
| 1:42.4 | to leave the CBC and when she started to become frustrated with the |
| 1:46.3 | media landscape, all the kinds of things we talk about a lot around here. I wanted to have her back |
| 1:51.7 | to see how she was feeling about things these days, what she was thinking about. And this is a great |
| 1:57.1 | conversation, not only about the news business, about the journalism business, |
| 2:01.3 | but about sort of the business of life, how to stay sane, not obsess about politics all the |
... |
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