The show opened with the loss of Stephen Colbert’s late-night platform and a larger discussion about free speech, authoritarianism, and why even someone as universally beloved—and frankly as mainstream white Catholic American as Colbert—is no longer safe from political retaliation. From there, things escalated quickly into the actual Fucked-up Friday stories.

Qasim brought data from a story he wrote called Who Is Igniting Antisemitism in America? It highlights a study by the Anti-Defamation League showing that out of more than 41,000 documented antisemitic hate incidents over two decades, only three were tied to leftists or Muslims — despite the nonstop narrative blaming campus protests and Muslim communities for rising antisemitism. The conversation expanded into white Christian nationalism, propaganda, Gaza, Islamophobia, synagogue and mosque violence, and the dangerous ways disinformation is making both Jewish and Muslim communities less safe.

Lawrence tackled Elon Musk suddenly championing Universal Basic Income while simultaneously helping build the AI systems most likely to eliminate millions of jobs in the first place. That spiraled into a conversation about tech billionaires, patriarchy, Andrew Yang being accidentally right too early, and why Jeff Bezos and Musk suddenly sound weirdly progressive now that the pitchforks are aimed in their direction.

And I brought the climate horror: a new study recommending that relocation from New Orleans begin immediately because the city may have already crossed a point of no return due to sea level rise. Which led us back again to parenting, children, collective trauma, and the fact that America keeps forcing entire generations to grow up inside overlapping crises while pretending none of them are connected.

Our audience voted, and while I captured a fair number of votes, today’s winner was clearly Qasim.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, with special thanks to our amazing mods, and .

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

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Dr. Connor — an OBGYN, engineer, founder, mother of three, and one of those people who makes you immediately wonder how she manages to fit more than 48 hours into a day — laid out the looming maternal healthcare crisis in terrifyingly concrete terms.

Thousands of OBGYNs are expected to leave the profession in the next few years. Rural hospitals are losing labor and delivery units. Emergency rooms are performing emergency C-sections without OB coverage.

Entire states are approaching catastrophic shortages of reproductive healthcare providers.

We knew it was bleak. I’m not sure I realized it was this bleak.

We also talked about Dr. Oz’s “under-babied” comments and why so many women reacted viscerally to them. Because the contradiction is impossible to ignore: politicians are simultaneously pressuring women to have more children while dismantling healthcare, Medicaid, childcare support, reproductive freedom, and the basic infrastructure required to safely raise families.

One of the most striking parts of the conversation was Dr. Connor’s framing that what we’re witnessing is not random policy chaos, but a coherent ideological project around power, dependency, race, gender, and control. She described modern attacks on reproductive rights as part of a larger “Manufactured Healthcare Crisis” to make women economically and physically dependent again — and called misogyny “impotence at scale,” which may be one of the sharpest phrases I’ve heard all year.

We also talked about feminism, motherhood, pumping breast milk between surgeries, raising daughters in a world increasingly hostile to female autonomy, and the emotional exhaustion of trying to protect young women while watching hard-won rights begin to erode in real time.

A furious, brilliant, deeply clarifying conversation.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and to and for moderating.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Subscribe now

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

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We opened with a long conversation about Substack’s recent live-streaming changes and why so many creators are alarmed by them. I talked pretty openly about what it felt like to lose the business and audience ecosystem I’d built on Medium after algorithm changes in early 2025 — and why my nervous system immediately recognized the same warning signs happening now on Substack. The larger conversation became less about one platform and more about the vulnerability of creators whose work, audiences, and livelihoods exist inside systems they ultimately don’t control.

Anne brought exactly the perspective I hoped she would: smart, grounded, legally precise, but also deeply human about all of it. She talked about how every internet platform ultimately treats creators as “the product,” why investor pressure changes company behavior, and why there may never be a perfect online home for independent media.

From there, the conversation spiraled into one of Anne’s signature legal deep dives around Trump, the IRS lawsuit dismissal, the so-called “anti-weaponization fund,” and what she believes are major procedural irregularities that could make the entire arrangement legally vulnerable. Watching Anne unpack complicated legal timelines in real time remains one of my favorite things on the internet.

We also covered YouTube censorship, stream keys, old-school internet culture, CompuServe nostalgia, platform polyamory, future blue-wave fantasies, Thomas Massie possibly becoming politically “liberated,” and whether AOC already sounds like a future president.

And naturally, somewhere in the middle of all that, Lawrence spontaneously invented a fake 1940s gay show tune called “If You Know Randall’s Handle.”

Tune into the final minutes of the show to hear it.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in and to for moderating solo today.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

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Tiffany talked about growing up deeply evangelical in Texas and the profound rupture that happened when so many Christians aligned themselves with Donald Trump. What stayed with me most was her description of leaving evangelicalism not as a political shift, but as an existential crisis. When your church is also your family, your friendships, your support system, your childcare, your social life, and your entire worldview, questioning it can mean losing almost everything at once.

We also spent a long time unpacking Dr. Oz’s horrifying phrase that America is “under-babied,” and why that rhetoric hit so many women viscerally. Tiffany connected it back to evangelical messaging around “be fruitful and multiply,” while we talked about the broader reality: women are being pressured to have more children while simultaneously losing healthcare, reproductive freedom, childcare support, financial stability, and basic bodily autonomy.

The conversation got especially emotional when we talked about queer and trans kids, including the recent murder of Juniper Blessing, a trans student at the University of Washington, and the growing fear many parents feel watching anti-trans rhetoric escalate nationally. One of the clearest threads running underneath the whole show was this: the people demanding more babies often seem deeply unwilling to protect the vulnerable children already here.

And somehow, despite the heaviness of all of that, the conversation still managed to include jokes about grapes, trad wives, abortion tourism in Montana, and Lawrence volunteering as tribute for The Handmaid’s Tale.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and for and for moderating.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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The Daily Whatever Show schedule this week

Mark your calendars, because we’ve got so many amazing guests coming to The Daily Whatever Show. 🗓️

• May 18: Not Straight Forward with

• May 19: Are we “under-babied?"?” with

• May 20: Dinner with Epstein with &

• May 21: Fine Feminist Hour with

• May 22: Fucked-up Friday with

Be sure to join us each weekday at 10am ET/7am PT for The Daily Whatever Show!

Subscribe now

ICYMI: Last week on The Daily Whatever Show

We had an incredible lineup of guests last week. Thanks to each and every one of you for the fantastic conversations— , , , , , and

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

&

We call it the “whatever” show for a reason.

Subscribe now

Anne joined us to talk about the increasingly wild Epstein revelations emerging from the work she’s doing alongside Zev Shalev, including a secret three-hour recording involving Epstein, Ehud Barak, and Larry Summers that appears to point toward far larger geopolitical and financial manipulation than most people understand. The conversation kept circling the same unsettling idea: Epstein may have been far less about sex crimes alone and far more about power, leverage, intelligence networks, and global economics.

Then Anne casually dropped the revelation that Epstein literally owned his own bank.

Not metaphorically. An actual bank. In the Virgin Islands. As one does.

Meanwhile, sent the show spiraling into existential dread discussing the AI-powered peptide research company he just built almost entirely using Claude. What started as “look what AI can do” quickly became “oh my God, what happens when 93 million white-collar workers become obsolete?” followed shortly thereafter by “also AI may accidentally wipe out civilization.” You can read his full essay here.

But hands-down won Fucked-up Friday for her story: “We Will Find You, and We Will Kill You,” a harrowing story by our dear friend detailing the latest Trump atrocity. He’s actively threatening to kill trans people and those who support a “radically pro-transgender” ideology. Add to this the same day murder of trans University of Washington student Juniper Blessing, and… well, we have no words, truly. Just horror.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and to and for moderating.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

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Carlyn and I started by talking about feminism in 2026 and immediately landed in a much bigger conversation about loneliness, disenfranchised young men, and the danger of leaving entire generations vulnerable to the manosphere pipeline. We talked about the “looksmaxxing” movement, young men literally micro-fracturing their jawbones for masculinity, and the terrifying rise of influencers like Clavicular, who now somehow have the attention of people at the highest levels of politics.

From there, we wandered into beauty culture, Instagram face, and the growing exhaustion of living inside algorithmic femininity. Carlyn made the fascinating point that culture may eventually swing back toward distinctive, imperfect, deeply human faces simply because sameness eventually becomes boring.

I think she’s right. I hope she is, at least.

We spent a long stretch talking about AI—not as a replacement for writers, but as a thinking companion, brainstorming tool, research assistant, and sometimes adversary. Carlyn compared AI to tarot cards: less a fortune teller than a reflective surface that helps reveal patterns and subconscious connections. It was one of the smartest conversations about creative AI use I’ve had publicly.

We also talked about something I’ve been thinking about constantly lately: whether the future belongs not to hyper-specialists, but to people with wide-ranging curiosity and interdisciplinary thinking. Carlyn argued that AI may actually reward Renaissance-style generalists — people who can connect ideas across history, psychology, politics, science, art, and culture in uniquely human ways. As a fellow Gen X multi-hyphenate, I found that oddly comforting.

And then we got into the darker stuff.

Trump’s cognitive decline. The congressional record now containing statements from 36 physicians raising alarms about his fitness. What authoritarian collapse actually looks like historically. The moral exhaustion of modern America. The difference between democracy dying dramatically versus slowly through paperwork and normalization.

But maybe the most unexpectedly moving part of the conversation was the quieter parenting thread running underneath all of it.

Both Carlyn and I are raising daughters who are about to leave home and enter a profoundly unstable world. And beneath all the talk about AI and fascism and beauty culture was a much more human question:

How do you raise kids to remain authentic in a world constantly trying to optimize, monetize, manipulate, and flatten them?

We had a deeply smart, weird, funny, unsettling conversation in the best possible way.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and to the wonderful and for moderating.

We love you, mean it!

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

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We talked about midlife reinvention, ageism in tech, menopause, independent publishing, nostalgia, burnout, creativity, sibling dynamics, music obsession, and the strange realization that many GenXers are simultaneously exhausted and creatively exploding at the exact same time.

Laura and Paul created Geezer as a giant analog print magazine for GenX (think part Interview, part McSweeney’s, part Mad Magazine) as a reaction against digital overload and the flattening way our generation keeps getting discussed online. The conversation kept circling back to the same core idea: many of us spent decades building careers that paid the bills while quietly putting our creative lives on hold. And now, somewhere in late midlife, a lot of people are trying to reclaim those parts of themselves before it’s too late.

We also got into the realities of aging in tech, the mythology around GenX nostalgia, why so many creatives still need “real jobs,” the economics of independent publishing, and whether any of us are emotionally prepared to become the people AARP thinks we are. Spoiler: absolutely not.

Also discussed: Nick Cave, The Smiths vs. The Cure, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, Red Hot Chili Peppers slander, pool-skating Dogtown legends, and the deeply GenX instinct to keep making art while quietly wondering how the hell to pay for it.

You can subscribe to Geezer magazine here, and don’t forget to use promo code FRIEND15 to get a 15% discount!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and thanks to for moderating.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Subscribe now

Amy joined us to talk about her memoir Widow in the City — a very GenX story about losing her husband, trying to survive early grief, and then throwing herself headfirst into dating, sex, fantasy, and self-discovery in midlife New York.

What stayed with us most was the way she talked about grief not as a clean, linear process, but as something strange and contradictory. Sometimes dissociative. Sometimes liberating. Sometimes deeply funny. Sometimes devastating.

We also got into dating app rhetoric, the Burned Haystack Dating Method, the politics of female sexuality, online community, GenX feminism, and the increasingly blurry line between intimacy and performance on the internet.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and to and for moderating with moxie.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Lawrence kicked things off by recommending a terrifying two-hour interview about the possibility that we’re already living through the opening stages of World War III, which naturally set the tone for the morning. Dana countered with an important question: do weeks have vibes? Because this one absolutely did. Weird vibes. Bad vibes. “Something feels off” vibes.

Then things took a hard pivot into Russian bot farms allegedly catfishing Lawrence with fake hot dudes and “dis-dick-formation,” which may be the most important linguistic contribution of our era. The chat eventually crowned “Dickception” the official winner of the morning’s accidental wordplay Olympics.

Our guests joined us to talk photography, Gen X culture, Star Trek, Star Wars, Substack side quests, and the increasingly chaotic experience of being multi-hyphenate creators online. We discussed everything from Barcelona to latchkey-kid nostalgia to radioactive monster cereal marshmallows that could probably still survive nuclear winter.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we also covered:

• DOGE allegedly using ChatGPT and DEI keywords to target grants connected to Black history, Holocaust survivors, Native American children, Asian American stories, and women’s projects.

• A Blackstone-owned data center quietly stealing 30 million gallons of water during a drought emergency while residents were told not to water their lawns.

• The terrifying new Claude AI model so good at discovering zero-day exploits that Anthropic reportedly refused to release it publicly because it could destabilize global banking systems.

• A group of doctors formally warning that Donald Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline severe enough that they felt ethically compelled to violate the Goldwater Rule and go public.

• The United States officially crossing the threshold where national debt now exceeds total economic output — historically one of the warning signs of imperial decline. Casual! Totally fine! Everything’s great!

And yet somehow, despite all of that, the show still ended up feeling less like despair and more like what this community often becomes at its best: smart people trying to stay awake to the world without losing their humanity, humor, curiosity, or each other in the process.

Oh, and the Fucked-up Friday competition? It was a total tie.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in—with extra THANKS to our amazing mods, and .

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

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We started with feminism: what it actually means, why the word has been so intentionally distorted, and why reclaiming it matters right now. Kait put it simply: feminism is the belief that women deserve equal rights. Full stop.

From there, we got into how she became one of the most compelling independent voices digging through the Epstein files on Substack.

And her origin story is pure internet-era investigative journalism.

A curiosity spiral that started with Donald Barr, Jeffrey Epstein, and a bizarre 1973 sci-fi novel somehow led her into uncovering deeper patterns involving billionaires, intelligence networks, Saudi money, survivor advocacy, and the broader systems protecting powerful people.

You can read more about it in her latest essay:

Downwind of Truth with Kait Justice

Is The Architecture Epstein Designed What Kushner Now Runs? THE RED STRING BOARD

What I have publishes, especially over the past 6 weeks or so, has been pretty dense with so many pieces to the…

Read more

23 days ago · 502 likes · 21 comments · Kait Justice

What struck me most wasn’t just the reporting—it was the way Kait talks about it. She’s not coming from legacy media. She comes from marketing, blogging, curiosity, and a relentless instinct for pattern recognition. And I think that’s part of why her work resonates with so many people right now.

We also talked about the strange and beautiful ecosystem developing on Substack itself: career journalists, accidental journalists, creative writers, researchers, and deeply curious people all building something in public together.

And underneath all of it was the same thread we come back to so often on TDWS: Who controls the narrative controls culture. And culture moves politics.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, with special thanks to our amazing moderators, and .

We love you, mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

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Tonight on we hosted GenX icon —of Sassy, Jane, xoJane, and now . The woman whose magazines told a generation of weirdos, queer kids, music nerds, and isolated red-state teenagers that they were not, in fact, alone. That Jane Pratt.

I shot my shot months ago—I sent her an invitation to the show, expecting the void—and to my astonishment, she wrote right back. We then proceeded to play email tag for months while I was just amazed I had Jane Pratt’s email address. But I persisted. Tonight we finally did it, and I’m still a little spun.

Getting to meet a hero is rare. Getting to thank a hero is rarer. Tonight we got both.

What unfolded over the next hour was part oral history, part reunion, part love letter to the weird girls, outsider kids, queer teens, music obsessives, and future writers who found themselves inside the pages of Sassy and Jane when almost nothing else reflected them back accurately.

Lawrence told a story about secretly reading Sassy as a closeted teenager because it was one of the first places he’d ever seen gay kids portrayed as just… normal people. Jane got emotional hearing what that meant to him. Honestly, a lot of us did.

Then the stories just kept coming.

talked about hiding copies of Sassy from her evangelical parents because the magazine became a lifeline while she was growing up depressed inside purity-culture America. talked about how an R.E.M. story in Sassy changed the trajectory of her life and ultimately helped spark Three Imaginary Girls (the indie-pop music website we launched in 2002). I talked about reading Jane in my twenties and realizing, for the first time, that weird women with voices and opinions could build culture instead of just consuming it.

And through all of it, Jane kept returning to the same core idea: she wanted people to feel less alone than she had at fifteen. That was the mission. Everything else came from there.

Then—because we all love some serious tea 🫖—Jane casually mentioned she dated Michael Stipe for many, many, many years. WHOA NOW WHAT??! The chat broke. We hosts visibly recalibrated entire Gen X childhoods in real time. Lawrence: y'all kept that secret? That's cool. (Yes she did. For years.)

It was funny, emotional, deeply GenX, and one of my favorite conversations we’ve had on .

Not because it was nostalgic.

But because it reminded us all that being seen at the right moment can change the course of a life. And changing the course of a generation of lives? Why, that can move the world.

We’re all living proof of it.

And while we have you here—go order a retro Sassy t-shirt! Proceeds go to Planned Parenthood, so you’re not just rocking your Sassy boobs. You’re helping to support a cause that’s more vital today than ever.

We adore you, .

You’re welcome on always and forever.

xoDana
xoLawrence

Thank you , , , , , , , and many others for tuning in. Special thanks to and for being such amazing moderators—especially when the chat pops off as hard as it did last night.

We love you all, mean it!

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We started with her essay “Maybe I Should Have Married Rich,” which is really about a tax bracket and emotional reality nobody talks about enough: not poor enough to qualify for help, not wealthy enough to stop constantly calculating. The kind of life where you can technically be “doing okay” while quietly wondering why every basic thing suddenly feels impossibly expensive.

And from there, the conversation just opened up.

We talked about being GenX parents raising kids in a world that feels dramatically less stable than the one we were promised. FAFSA rage. College tuition insanity. The hidden costs nobody prepares you for. The dawning realization that what once counted as a solid middle-class life now barely feels sustainable.

Betsy talked about literally moving to Minnesota so her son could qualify for in-state tuition at the University of Minnesota, and honestly? It made a lot of sense in this crazy timeline we’re all in.

We also got into the particular exhaustion of being a woman trying to navigate money, work, independence, and survival inside systems that seem designed to penalize you no matter what choice you make. One of the strongest parts of the conversation was Betsy unpacking the phrase “gold digger” and the impossible bind women are put in: told financial security matters, then mocked for pursuing it.

Somehow we also ended up talking about social media, progressive lenses, purging possessions, Stripe fees, Jeffrey Epstein, and a giant painting Betsy rescued from the side of the road featuring a shark with the word FUCK above it—which honestly became the accidental mascot for the entire discussion.

It was funny, sharp, deeply honest, and a deeply GenX-core conversation, the kind where everyone’s laughing a little while quietly admitting: this is harder than we thought it would be.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and to and for moderating.

Love you, mean it!

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And then we got into it.

I talked about where my head is right now—college decisions, writing very large checks, and the quiet reality of launching a kid into a world I don’t fully trust. That thread ran underneath more of the conversation than I expected.

Then Broom from joined us, and the show shifted.

We got into her backstory—growing up across multiple religious systems, teaching herself tarot, building a practice that blends tarot, Lenormand, astrology—and why she’s chosen anonymity after being very specifically targeted online.

From there, it opened up into something bigger: how people have always used divination to understand power and politics, and how she reads current events through that lens.

Her take on what’s coming wasn’t apocalyptic—it was evolutionary. Disruption, yes. Pressure, yes. But also a push toward something different, especially around energy, power, and how systems change when they’re pushed to the edge.

And then we got practical.

2026 elections: a high turnout, heavily watched, a shift in the House. Not a fantasy fix-everything moment—but movement.

It was one of those conversations that sits at the intersection of intuition and analysis, belief and reality—and somehow makes you think about all of it a little differently.

At the end, asked her to pull cards for our show. Child, dog, fish, stork, flowers: start something new with loyal, well-resourced friends, expect surprising climbs in audience. This all makes perfect sense to us. We'll report back…

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in and special thanks to and for moderating!

We love you, mean it!

Get more from The Daily Whatever Show in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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The Daily Whatever Show schedule this week

Mark your calendars, because we’ve got so many amazing guests coming to The Daily Whatever Show. 🗓️

• May 11: Not Straight Forward with

• May 12: “Widow in the City” book release with author

• May 13: with of

• May 14: Fine Feminist Hour with

• May 15: Fucked-up Friday with

Be sure to join us each weekday at 10am ET/7am PT for The Daily Whatever Show!

Subscribe now

ICYMI: Last week on The Daily Whatever Show

We had an incredible lineup of guests last week. Thanks to each and every one of you for the fantastic conversations— , , , , , , , , , and .

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

&

We spent a good chunk of the hour on Devil Wears Prada 2, Emily Blunt’s deeply disconnected advice to people in miserable jobs, Sex and the City, Bridgerton (Julie hates it), and somehow — seamlessly — medieval English literature, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, and Pete Hegseth. There is a through-line. Julie found it. We were delighted.

Then we got to the Fucked-up Friday stories.

Lawrence brought the Trump boys’ grift: Don and Eric have quietly stacked the boards of robotics and drone companies that are now receiving massive Pentagon contracts. Their family ventures have gained four billion dollars in value since the re-election. It is brazen and boring at the same time, which is exactly how they get away with it.

Julie came in with Melania. She has done the Slovenian deep dive—actual Slovenian press, a biography, receipts—and the picture it paints of who Melania was before she ever met Trump is nothing like what the New York Times and New Yorker sold America. Julie’s full piece drops Sunday. Watch for it.

I brought a story reported by at : the EPA is now recommending that states test drinking water for abortion medication and birth control pills, listing them as potential “contaminants.” The anti-abortion organization behind the campaign admitted on the record that environmental law is just the most effective weapon they currently have. It’s a clean water campaign. There’s abortion in your water. You’re welcome.

I won the vote. It wasn’t even close.

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Her debut memoir Girl Gone Wild is an unwitting feminist coming-of-age story, from small-town Minnesota to LA at 21, broke and newly arrived, taking a job selling merch on the “Girls Gone Wild” tour because the Craigslist post said “party and get paid to travel.” She figured it out pretty quickly. The most insidious part of the job, as the company told her in the interview: her actual role was to make the other women feel comfortable enough to be exploited. Just having a girl there.

From there we got into how shame shapes memory, writing your way out of what you’ve suppressed, and why the discomfort toward a topic is almost always a sign you should write about it. Courtney is a free speech maximalist — yes, even on Tate — and we got into that with the chat, who had opinions. The conversation on abortion was sharp: we lost the right partly because we softened the language, and Courtney doesn’t soften the language.

Courtney also interviewed me for her Private Parts Unknown last week, so we’re basically best friends now. Seriously, that talk was amazing and I can’t wait to hear the results. She said the show should be live in about two weeks, and you know I’ll be sure to share it.

Most def go buy Courtney’s book here: Girl Gone Wild

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