Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy

Bridget checks in with Maggie right after finishing the first draft of her book, The Left Can’t Meme: How Comedy Wins Culture Wars. She walks through the brutal, years-long process of selling and writing it — the endless proposal feedback loops, the mental block of trying to write about the culture while the culture is still unfolding, and surrendering to the lack of control you have about what’s going on in the w...

Original Air Date - October 10, 2024
Author Brendan O’Neill joins Bridget to talk about his book, After The Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and The Crisis of Civilization. They discuss the aftermath of Hamas's attack on October 7th, 2023, what it told us about the West, the lure of barbarism, the rise of antisemitism, why we shouldn’t be allowed to forget what happened on October 7th, and why his book should make you angry...

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Peachy Keenan — author of Domestic Extremist and her new book Supervillains: Architects of America's Decline — for a wide-ranging conversation about who's actually driving the country's decline and why the people trying to stay normal are the real heroes. Peachy makes the case that the most damaging villains aren't the famous ones but the "female liberation theologists" peddling what she c...

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 ...

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...

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, oxidiz...

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 re...

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 lea...

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. T...

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 work...

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 ...

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...

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 declin...

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, w...

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 ac...

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 fo...

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&r...

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 &mdas...

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 t...