Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy

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...

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, ho...

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...

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...

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 ho...

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 fa...

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 s...

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 &mda...

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 di...

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...