Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy

Dave Landau returns to the podcast to talk about his new comedy special, breaking down the nuts and bolts of what actually goes into making a stand-up special, how he assembles a set from road-tested bits, how many shows you actually tape, the art of crowd work - engaging with the audience but not losing control of the room - and why some venues now expect it when they used to frown on it. He and Bridget discuss why comedy is more popular now than ever, how podcasting changed the comedy world, and why the best material comes from...

Bridget sits down with Mike Solana — founder of Pirate Wires — who returns to the podcast to talk about why it's nearly impossible to figure out what's actually real anymore. They get into how everyone's algorithm has quietly split us into separate internets, where one person's feed is wall-to-wall Imam videos and another has never seen a single one, the art of hosting a podcast, and why comedians are just weather vanes for the mood of the masses. They also cover the rising glee around political violence on both sides, the collapse of a shared American identity into thousands of micr...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Max Marion - founder of one of the highest-potency Omega-3 companies in the world, AquaOmega — for a deep dive into why Omega-3s might be the single most important supplement almost nobody is taking correctly. Max explains why less than 2% of North Americans get enough Omega-3s, how our seed-oil-soaked diets flooded us with inflammation, and why most fish oil on the shelf is cheaply made, oxidized, and processed with industrial solvents — including a live Styrofoam cup test that shows exactly what those solvents do. They get into the difference between EPA and DHA, why...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with comedian Lou Perez, author of That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: On the Death And Rebirth of Comedy, to talk about what the internet actually did to comedy. They get into why short-form content rewired the whole art form, how crowd work turned audiences into performers who think heckling is helping, and why the average anonymous shitposter is now funnier than a lot of professionals. They also cover the relationship between satire and shame, why satire loses its teeth in a culture with no shame left, the difference between American comedians congratulating themselves for being...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Katharine Birbalsingh — the founder of Michaela Community School and the woman known as Britain's strictest headmistress — to talk about how an entire generation grew up without values, and whose fault that actually is. Katharine makes the case that kids never abandoned their values; they were simply never taught them, because Gen X and Boomers took those values for granted and stopped leading. They get into why consistency in praise and punishment is everything, why you should praise the work and not the child, the case for choosing religion over woke when picking a school, and...

Bridget sits down with Jennifer Sey, founder of XX-XY Athletics — to talk about why the fight to keep men out of women's sports is gaining ground. They get into Sophie Cunningham becoming the active pro athlete willing to say girls deserve their own spaces, why the WNBA, the media, and corporate America are still acting like it's 2020, and why Caitlin Clark shouldn't be a target for saying she just wants to play basketball. They cover the Fauci Diaries and the rage of being proven right when COVID cost Jennifer friendships, family, and the life she loved in San Francisco — and...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with fitness coach Stasia Patwell, to talk about fitness, recovery and how COVID accidentally launched her career. They get into why accountability is the only thing that actually works, how AA and weight training are basically the same program, why most trainers who tell you they love working out might be lying to you, and why Stasia’s approach of embracing the fact that you will never like the workouts might be the thing you need to hear that motivates you. They cover the Ozempic lunch problem, stage fright, why normies need a program as mu...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Evan Barker, former Democratic operative and author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, to talk about what it looks like when a political party decides it doesn't need normal people anymore. Evan spent years as a fundraising specialist for progressive Democrats and watching the party be slowly hijacked by social justice activists, special interests, and the DSA until she reached a breaking point and ultimately ended up voting for Trump in 2024. She and Bridget discuss the DSA's strategy for the 2026 midterms, why the progressive wing thinks they lost because they weren't radical...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with culture critic and journalist Art Tavana — a former Playboy colleague — to talk about why the Right's meltdown over Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is the most Liberal thing they've ever done. They dig into how both sides have been completely consumed by the same culture war brain rot, why nobody can actually win this fight, how postmodernism has infected everyone including its own critics, and what it means that we've lost the ability to sit down and finish a movie. Plus: The literacy crisis nobody's talking about, Gen Z's dead-eyed immunity to outrage, how Playboy blew...

Bridget checks in from Los Angeles — where she's spending five weeks with family — and the city is not what she remembered. Empty storefronts on 3rd Street, deodorant locked behind glass at Walgreens, stores you have to get buzzed into, and a Hollywood Bowl 4th of July that felt more like a eulogy than a celebration. She and Maggie get into what it actually feels like to come back to a place you loved and see the decline in real time, why Texas feels so different, what a dead Vegas says about the country, and why the right needs to calm...

Bridget sits down again with novelist and Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield to talk about the rise of death doulas, the death of YA fiction, and how the internet is quietly erasing itself. Kat digs into how YA fiction collapsed into "romantasy" and smut, the dead internet theory and vanishing digital archives - including Bridget's own lost Playboy articles and Kat's MTV News work. They also cover the Kennedy Center controversy, why Gen Z treats Trump as their political "factory settings," why woke isn't dead, it's hibernating, and how people are substituting politics for personality now. Kat's new thriller...

Original Air Date - December 4, 2025
Drinkin’ Bros podcast host Dan Hollaway joins Bridget for an uncensored conversation about all the third rail topics you could ever ask for, from why we should probably just invade Mexico, to how 20 million illegals and BlackRock turned 29-year-old home-buyers into 40-year-old renters, the reality behind the horseshoe theory that brings together “Queers for Palestine” and actual Islamists, and Zohran Mamdani’s "brown guilt." They explore how pure libertarianism was tried and failed during the founding of the United States, the truth about Trump’s plan to bring manufacturing back to the US, why the Co...

The Democratic Socialists of America just swept the New York City primaries, and one winning candidate has said 9/11 was America's fault because of "capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia." Bridget breaks down the new anti-American wing of the Democratic Party, why "democratic socialism" is just socialism wearing a wig, why these aren't just progressive Democrats — they're revolutionaries who openly want to tear down America, and why gentle parenting might be to blame for all of it. 

Study up on the DSA Insanity here: 
https://platform.dsausa.org/program/ 
https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/ 

#DSA...

Bridget sits down with conservative commentator and political pundit Kira Davis to talk about why she thinks it's time to bring back shame, decorum, and "Karens." They discuss the Major League Baseball Pride Month controversy, why California's election system is built to erode trust in democracy, why influencers don’t actually affect elections, the Gavin Newsom scandal Kira believes is about to blow up, and her predictions for the GOP and Democrat 2028 fields. They cover dealing with TDS from family members, inspiring people to love America again, and why we should be renormalizing normal — saying grace in public, flying flag...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Luke Burgis to discuss his new book, The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. They explore one of the most uncomfortable ideas in modern thought: that we don't actually know what we want — we copy the desires of others. They discuss why tribalism is surging even as loneliness is rising, the longterm effects of turning everything - even religion - into “content”. They share a variety of stories from attending seminary to winding up at an ashram cult, analyze the Gen Z stare, and talk about what it means to be...

Bridget sits down with Xi Van Fleet, author of Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat. Xi is a survivor of China's Cultural Revolution and traces the eerie parallels between Mao's revolution and today's woke ideology. She draws on her own experience — growing up under the CCP, enduring re-education in the countryside, and eventually escaping to America — to argue that cultural Marxism is not a foreign threat but a homegrown one, and that American elites have been enabling the CCP's rise since the 1920s. They dig into the...

Bridget sits down with Batya Ungar-Sargon — journalist, author, and deputy opinion editor at Newsweek — for a wide-ranging conversation about her new book, The Jews and The Left, about American Jewish history and the political realignment happening in real time. They dig into how Jews became so deeply identified with the Democratic Party, why October 7th forced a reckoning for secular Jews who had barely thought about their identity in decades, and what it means that the loudest antisemitism right now is coming from the Left rather than the Right. They cover losing media opportunities for refusing to go along with...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Courtney O’Dell, food blogger and creator behind Sweet C’s Designs, to dig into the viral DoorDash discourse that exploded online and ask the obvious question: how did we end up with a generation that genuinely doesn’t know how to feed itself? They get into why convenience culture has replaced basic life skills with helplessness, what food blogging actually looks like as a career, how AI is changing the industry, and why the simple act of cooking dinner might be one of the most underrated forms of self-sufficiency left. They also cover favori...

Bridget sits down with Jonathan Alpert, therapist and author of Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided, to dig into something most mental health professionals won’t say out loud - that the therapy industry may be making people worse, not better. They cover how therapists are trained to validate rather than challenge, why the explosion of diagnoses tracks more with social media trends than actual illness, and how therapy culture has quietly become one of the most divisive forces in American life. They also discuss political bias in t...

Bridget sits down with Noah Rothman, senior editor at National Review and author of Blood And Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, to trace the long, suppressed history of radical left-wing political violence in the United States — from the anarchist bombings of the 1920s to the Weather Underground to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Noah argues that this history isn't obscure, it's deliberately buried, and that the same patterns driving today's wave of violence have shown up in 50-year cycles throughout American history. They also get into why 9/11 inadvertently put the brakes on a bombing campaign that mi...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Adam Louis-Klein, anthropologist and founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ), to examine why the word "antisemitism" has stopped working — and what language we actually need to name and confront the Israel hatred spreading across campuses, media, and institutions. Klein traces antizionism from its roots in Nazi and Soviet propaganda through its capture of Western academia, explains how it functions as a libel machine resistant to any counterevidence, and lays out why defeating it — not just defending Israel — is the only path to peace. Bridget brings her own experience of being labeled a Zionist, the co...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Freya India, British writer and author of Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, to dig into why Gen Z women are struggling in ways previous generations didn't. They discuss why it's not simply a case of kids being soft, and how the mental health crisis among young women isn't just about bad parenting or weak foundations, but predatory industries stepping into the vacuum left by family breakdown, community loss, and the decline of religion — and selling girls a simulation of everything they lost. They cover the over-medicalization of normal teenage behavior, the sa...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Scott Lincicome, Vice President of General Economics and Trade at the Cato Institute, to unpack what Trump's tariffs have actually done to the American economy. They dig into why the apocalyptic predictions didn't pan out, who's really paying the price, and how small businesses got blindsided by customs bills they never saw coming. They discuss the history of US protectionism, the difference between stated and revealed preferences, the truth about "buying American," what modern conservatism actually looks like today, and why Americans actually love globalization even though they might not realize it. 

#T...

Bridget sits down with Andrew Gold, host of the Heretics podcast and author of The Psychology of Secrets, for a conversation about cult dynamics, Islamism in Europe, purity spirals, and what happens when your online tribe starts demanding you sell your soul to keep them. Andrew breaks down how YouTube channels, political movements, and entire cultures operate on the same psychological mechanics as Scientology and Heaven's Gate — just at different points on the spectrum. They get into why the UK can't talk about its rapidly changing demographics, how comedians and podcasters navigate audience capture without losing their integrity, Nick Fu...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Elnathan John, Nigerian satirist and author of Becoming Nigerian, for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens when an entire culture loses the ability to feel shame.

Elnathan argues that the effectiveness of satire is directly proportional to a society's capacity for shame—and right now, that capacity is bottoming out everywhere from Lagos to Washington.
In this episode, they discuss:
 • The comedian's complex relationship to power
 • Why declaring your vote can trap you ideologically
 • The collapse of liberalism across the West
 • Nigeria's overlapping crises of terrorism and corruption

Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits down with Bridget for an in-depth conversation about if and how the West can save itself. They discuss why the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact and shouldn’t be weaponized against us by those who seek our destruction,  how our core values of tolerance and freedom are being exploited by adversaries who don’t share those values, the post-9/11 failure of Western elites to understand Islamic ideology and jihadist motivation, and the binary choice America faces with Iran’s regime — destroy them or they destroy us. They also cover why Europe may be past the point o...

Jacob Siegel returns to talk about his new book The Information State: Politics and the Age of Total Control, which explains why the war on disinformation is a continuation of the War on Terror using repurposed counterinsurgency tools, and the replacement of bottom-up civic institutions with top-down algorithmic control. They cover how Obama's administration built the censorship infrastructure that defined the Trump era, the role of the CIA in fabricating Russiagate through the Intelligence Community Assessment, how COVID censorship was far more radicalizing than Russiagate because it touched people's everyday lives, how tech platforms concentrate power by eliminating private...

Behnam Ben Taleblu joins Bridget to offer his expertise on Iran. They discuss who’s actually in charge in Iran right now, what Americans need to understand about the Islamic Republic’s ideology, why the plight of Iranian women gets ignored by Western feminists, and why this conflict is fundamentally different from Iraq 2003. They cover how the regime destroyed Iran’s environment to fund the Revolutionary Guard, how they worked with Mexican drug cartels and Canadian biker gangs to target dissidents on US soil, how AI-generated propaganda muddies the water in favor of the regime, why Hollywood actors completely miss w...

Spencer Klavan joins Bridget for a fascinating conversation about why Plato's 2,000-year-old warning about the invention of writing perfectly explains our AI panic, what it's like to invent an entire language for Daily Wire's Pendragon Cycle (and how it made him finally understand Tolkien), and why AI can only reproduce the "outer word" while humans alone possess the "inner word." They discuss how Instagram reels have replaced sitcoms as the shared cultural touchstone for exhausted parents, why students can't finish movies anymore and what that means for the future, the death of observational comedy after Hannah Gadsby turned standup...

Michael Young returns to the podcast for another epic conversation with Bridget to pull back the curtain on Beautiful Trouble—the activist handbook that’s basically Rules for Radicals on steroids. If you’ve ever wondered why protests seem to turn on and off like a faucet, why certain tactics feel weirdly coordinated, or how Minnesota went from zero to chaos overnight, this conversation breaks down the entire playbook. Michael walks us through the actual training manuals activists use: how to put targets in decision dilemmas, why “the real action is your target’s reaction,” deploying sympathetic characters like the Wall of...

Journalist Michael Tracey joins Bridget to dissect the Epstein moral panic currently swallowing the internet whole—and he's got the receipts on why most of it is "conspiracy-brain melted slop." As one of the only journalists pushing back on the dominant narrative, Tracey breaks down what we actually know versus what people want to believe: the FBI's fraudulent "1000 victims" number, why the Alex Acosta "sweetheart deal" wasn't actually a sweetheart deal, how Whitney Webb's "research" is a joke, and why the evidence doesn't support the blackmail ring everyone's convinced exists. They cover audience capture turning podcasters into Pizzagate truthers, th...

Independent journalist Benjamin Ryan was the only reporter who sat through all three weeks of the first-ever gender surgery malpractice trial. He and Bridget discuss the chilling testimony of a mother who was browbeaten until she consented to her daughter’s mastectomy, a 15-year-old’s 11-month sprint from questioning her gender to surgery, and why the psychologist was an “enabler” instead of a measured professional. They cover the judge who tried to scare Ryan off reporting, why detransitioners get ghosted by the same medical system that celebrated them when they were trans, the suicide prevention data that doesn’t actually s...

Author Kylie Ora Lobell joins Bridget for a thoughtful conversation about her book, Choosing to Be Chosen, which tells the story of her conversion from atheist to Orthodox Jew. Kylie’s shift from atheism was sparked by a melting warmth she recognized as God at a Shabbat dinner, and it led her on a five-year journey of embracing kosher laws, rituals, the challenges of conversion, and a profound trust in God amid life’s darkest questions (like child suffering and October 7th). They discuss why taking care of yourself is a Godly instinct, how most Americans in general are not...

Media maven Darvio Morrow shares his story—from launching a record label at 16 and sleeping on studio floors to keep his dream alive, to growing up amid Cleveland’s economic decline, gunshots next door, and a family legacy tied to a great-grandfather raised by a former slave. He and Bridget discuss his nuanced take on reparations, why today’s media ecosystem is trash, white paternalism as a cousin to white supremacy, and our desensitization to global atrocities like the ongoing crisis in Iran. They cover why it’s difficult to find straight news that keeps you informed these days, how huma...

Michael Shermer returns for a fascinating conversation about the crisis of truth in our polarized, AI-driven world. He and Bridget discuss the fate of print magazines, shrinking attention spans, the challenges of discerning reality amid deepfakes, misinformation, and Shermer’s new book Truth: What It Is, How To Find It, and Why It Still Matters. They cover political violence, ICE controversies, the power of belief to shape actions (and self-fulfilling prophecies), human gullibility, the replication crisis in science, evolving views on religion and morality, divorce, guns, the relationship between truth and trust, and what happens to truth when trust in...

Mike Solana joins Bridget for a fascinating conversation about America's shifting political fault lines, why critiquing tech is critiquing power, and the coming Luddite backlash. They discuss Mamdani's Marxist housing advisor calling for the seizure of private homes (especially from the white middle class), and then crying about it when confronted with questions, the social justice ideas that escaped academia, why Solana thinks that "real leftism" is coming, and why social media is probably net negative. They cover his journey from 23-year-old anarchist to Peter Thiel protégé, to Chief Marketing Officer of Founder’s Fund, to founder of Pira...

Triggernometry co-host and comedian, Francis Foster, returns to the podcast to unpack Nicolás Maduro’s dramatic downfall. Foster’s familiarity with the country stems from his Venezuelan mother, and he references on-the-ground stories from friends and family in the wake of Maduro’s arrest. He and Bridget discuss chilling stories of a friend robbed at gunpoint by police officers, teen protesters gunned down, and a regime so corrupt it turned the world’s richest oil nation into a country so economically crippled it barely ranks higher than Gaza. They cover the truth about Maduro’s wife, why no one knows w...

Andrew Yang returns to the podcast for a conversation about the chaos of modern life, his no-phone parties aimed at reviving real human hookups in a world that’s stopped partying, and his new phone service that literally pays you to doomscroll less. They discuss future of the Forward Party, how getting a few seats in Congress could change everything, how the terrifying speed of AI quietly erasing jobs will inevitably lead to some sort of universal basic income, why an extreme winner-take-all economy will only make things more dystopian, how he tries to stay positive in the face of...

Original Air Date - November 16, 2024 

The Dark Queen, Adrienne Iapalucci joins Bridget for a hilarious conversation about having a love-hate relationship with comedy, constantly contemplating quitting, being fearless when tackling controversial topics, the inability to be a conventional employee, and why Adrienne loves pissing people off. They cover drug escapades, allowing politics to divide families, being “white lady nuts,” career aspirations, and how her new comedy special The Dark Queen, directed by Louis CK and produced by Ari Shaffir, came together. 

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Original Air Date - 8/22/24 

Comedian and host of Normal World, Dave Landau, sits down with Bridget for a fun conversation about how they should start their own morning show, Dave’s childhood in Detroit, their respective struggles with addiction, Agent Orange, AIDS, parents with mental illness, dealing with Satanists in rehab, their experiences in mental hospitals, how Dave’s teacher suggested he get into stand up, the ups and downs of his career, and stumbling into the culture wars. They cover texting each other when Trump was shot, living in a country where the middle class has been...