The Shift with Sam Baker

The Shift with Sam Baker

The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker. Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you...) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she's going - and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it... Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more. If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you'd like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/ For advertising enquiries, email sales@auddy.co

Episodes

Caryn Franklin on why fashion still fails older women - from the archives

September 22, 2025 • 56 mins
(This episode was first published in November 2022.) Today's guest is one of my personal heroes, Caryn Franklin. Caryn started her career in the 80s as a fashion editor before moving into TV where she presented, amongst other things, BBC’s The Clothes Show. Always outspoken, Caryn has spent four decades being a thorn in the fashion industry’s side. Championing diversity of all forms LONG before it became the cool thing to do.  Sh...
Mark as Played

Lisa Jewell on hitting a golden seam of success in her 50s - FROM THE ARCHIVES

September 15, 2025 • 61 mins
(This episode first aired in September 2022.) Today’s guest is one of Britain’s best loved novelists, Lisa Jewell. Her career started with a smash hit debut novel Ralph’s Party - which she started writing as a bet at the age of 27 while she was unemployed, and, according to her, “totally lacking in direction and ambition”. It was the book of the moment and for 14 novels it looked like her career - although ticking along nicely - w...
Mark as Played

Thomasina Miers on the midlife Mexican escape that rebuilt her

September 8, 2025 • 53 mins
Hello and welcome to the final episode of season 18. 18!!!! My guest today is the cook, Thomasina Miers. Despite being taught to cook as a child, Tommi didn’t really embrace her love of food until her late 20s when a trip to Mexico inspired a love of Mexican food that was to change her life. In 2005, she became the first person ever to win Masterchef and two years later she co-founded the successful Mexican restaurant chai...
Mark as Played

Laura Lippmann is having a second coming at 60

September 1, 2025 • 54 mins
A few weeks ago, I was pootling around on substack where The Shift newsletter lives - https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/ - and I noticed I had a DM from a new subscriber. It turned out to be from one of my favourite crime writers - the award winning Laura Lippmann, who some of you might know from the recent apple TV+ series of her novel, The Lady In The Lake. Laura had been brought to The Shift by a piece I wrote a year ...
Mark as Played

Charlotte Mendelson – middle-aged women are entitled to want more

August 25, 2025 • 61 mins
This season is dedicated to helping you pick your summer reads and my guest today is the novelist Charlotte Mendelson whose writing has been compared to “late Shakespeare meets Modern family!” So you know where to turn if you’re looking for a painfully funny, on the nose look at the dynamics of love and marriage. Charlotte worked as a publisher for twenty years before becoming an award winning novelist. She’s written seven bestsel...
Mark as Played

Betsy Lerner is on a mission to destigmatise mental health in her 60s

August 18, 2025 • 50 mins
My guest this week is the novelist Betsy Lerner.  Now Betsy is here to talk about her critically acclaimed debut novel, Shred Sisters, which takes us from the 1970s to the 90s and tells us the story of two troubled sisters, Amy and Ollie. No less a legend than Patti Smith described it as “moving like a souped up pick up truck” - and who am I to argue with Patti, it does! I loved it. Betsy only turned to fiction in her early s...
Mark as Played

Nicola Sturgeon on life after leadership

August 11, 2025 • 56 mins
This week I’m delighted to welcome back to The Shift one of my most listened-to guests, Nicola Sturgeon. When we last spoke, at the start of 2022, Nicola was First Minister of Scotland - the first woman to hold the role, the first woman in 600 years to be the keeper of the seal. And During her tenure, she was widely acknowledged to be one of the most impactful politicians of her generation. During our last conversation, she spo...
Mark as Played

Sarah Perry on "becoming a woman who didn't have children"

August 4, 2025 • 56 mins
My guest today is the award-winning novelist Sarah Perry. Sarah is the internationally bestselling author of four novels, but the one you will almost definitely heard of (and may well have watched) is The Essex Serpent. Published in 2016, it sold over half a million copies, and won both British Book of the Year and Waterstones book of the year before being made into an apple tv+ series starring Clare Danes and Tom Hiddleston (Sara...
Mark as Played

Glynnis MacNicol: everything you've been told about being a middle-aged woman is a lie

July 28, 2025 • 62 mins
What happens when the life you find yourself leading in midlife doesn’t tick all the supposed boxes? That’s the situation today’s guest found herself in. Glynnis MacNicol was 46 - a woman of a so-called certain age who found herself living life without a roadmap when, in august 2021, after almost 18 months spent alone in lockdown, she picked herself up and packed herself off to Paris for a month of living, loving and, well, pleasu...
Mark as Played

Steph McGovern on money, menopause & staying out of your lane

July 21, 2025 • 68 mins
Crime novels might not be the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the name Steph McGovern. Steph is an award-winning broadcaster who is currently co-host of The Rest Is Money podcast with Robert Peston. At the start of her career in journalism, Steph worked for BBC news behind the scenes (despite having been told that “people like you don’t work for the BBC”), before moving in front of the camera as the business reporter...
Mark as Played

Alison Bechdel on tarot, ageing & why men are scared of women who can do push-ups! - THE SHIFT REVISITED

July 14, 2025 • 40 mins
The last of our archive episodes this time around is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Spent, Alison's new graphic novel-come-memoir, reminded me of the conversation we had back in 2021. Here it is... ---- My guest this week is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Probably best known for the Bechdel test - a tongue in cheek method she came up with in the 80s for assessing gender bias in movies. She became a household name when Fun Home, h...
Mark as Played

Esther Freud on upending your life in your 50s - THE SHIFT REVISITED

July 7, 2025 • 42 mins
This week we're going way back in The Shift archives, to one of the earliest episodes I recorded with novelist Esther Freud. This summer Esther will be a guest of The Shift bookclub, to talk about her new novel, My Sister and Other Lovers - her long-awaited sort-of-sequel to her smash hit autofiction, Hideous Kinky, about her childhood with her sister Bella Freud (who was on The Shift podcast last autumn - listen here). Here's the ...
Mark as Played

Helen Garner on divorce, ageing and the erotic gaze - THE SHIFT REVISITED

June 30, 2025 • 49 mins
We're heading back to the archives for the next few weeks and first up here's one of my favourite episodes. With the desperately overdue publication of her brilliant diaries, How To End A Story, in the US and UK, the Australian novelist Helen Garner is finally, finally getting some of the credit she's due up here in the Northern hemisphere. Here's our chat... ---- My guest today is the writer Helen Garner. I’m pretty sure that ri...
Mark as Played

Molly Jong Fast: confessions of a bad daughter

June 23, 2025 • 47 mins
My guest today is the journalist Molly Jong Fast. The author of four books, Molly started writing about politics in 2016. She’s now a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a political analyst for MSNBC News and host of the Fast Politics Podcast. But she is also the daughter of the novelist Erica Jong, who in the 1970s wrote a novel that became synonymous with the sexual revolution. Fear of Flying, featuring Jong’s alter ego Isado...
Mark as Played

Jo Hamilton: The Post Office scandal stole 20 years of my life

June 16, 2025 • 55 mins
This is a really special episode and one I’m honoured to be trusted with. Because my guest today is Jo Hamilton, one of more than 700 British sub postmasters who was prosecuted between 2000 and 2014 by the Post Office. Falsely accused of stealing £36,000 Jo was ordered to put right a wrong she hadn’t committed, forced to remortgage her house and borrow from anyone she could in order to repay money that she had never taken. But it...
Mark as Played

Olia Hercules: my periods vanished when the war started

June 9, 2025 • 63 mins
My guest today is the Ukrainian chef, food writer and activist Olia Hercules. Olia was born in the South of Ukraine and has lived in the UK since her late teens. After working in journalism she decided to follow her heart, her stomach and arguably her heritage, and become a chef.  She trained at Leith’s School of Food and Wine, worked in kitchens, including as chef de partie for Yotam Ottolenghi and as a recipe developer.  But h...
Mark as Played

Melissa Febos on what she learnt from a year of celibacy

June 2, 2025 • 54 mins
My guest today is the author and essayist, Melissa Febos. Melissa has written four award winning books - Whip Smart, Abandon Me, Girlhood (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the states) and Body Work. She’s won too many prizes to mention here and her writing has appeared all over the place! In her mid thirties, after, let’s just say a pretty horrific two year relationship, Melissa decided to step away not just fr...
Mark as Played

Reeta Chakrabarti on growing older & bolder

May 26, 2025 • 54 mins
My guest this week is the journalist and broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti. After two decades producing and reporting for the BBC, Reeta became a news presenter at the age of 49. She was the main BBC presenter in Lviv in Western Ukraine and is now one of the chief presenters of BBC news at 6 and BBC news at 10. Brought up in Birmingham, as a teenager Reeta went to school in Calcutta before returning to the UK to go to university.  S...
Mark as Played

Jeanine Cummins on confidence, identity and surviving the American Dirt controversy

May 19, 2025 • 57 mins
My guest today is the bestselling novelist Jeanine Cummins. You might think you haven’t heard of her, but I’ll be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard of the book that catapulted her into the public eye, American Dirt. A story about a Mexican mother and son escaping to America after their entire family is massacred by a drug cartel, which Oprah said, “humanised the migration process in a way nothing else I’d ever felt or seen ha...
Mark as Played

Jennifer Weiner on Ozempic, ageing and growing some boundaries!

May 12, 2025 • 56 mins
My guest today is the bestselling American novelist Jennifer Weiner. I first encountered Jen When her debut novel, Good In Bed, was thrust into my hands by someone I worked with on Company magazine. It was the first time I’d ever read a mainstream novel whose lead character was a fat woman who didn’t need fixing. Good In Bed was a smash hit on both sides of the atlantic but for some reason it has taken until now to make its way to...
Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    On Purpose with Jay Shetty

    On Purpose with Jay Shetty

    I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!

    Stuff You Should Know

    Stuff You Should Know

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    Dateline NBC

    Dateline NBC

    Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

    The Bobby Bones Show

    The Bobby Bones Show

    Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.

    The Joe Rogan Experience

    The Joe Rogan Experience

    The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Advertise With Us
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

Explore

iHeart

Live Radio

Podcasts

Artist Radio

Exclusives

News

Features

Events

Contests

Photos

Information

About

Advertise

Blog

Brand Guidelines

Contest Guidelines

Subscription Offers

Jobs

Get the App

Automotive

Home

Mobile

Wearables

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.