Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy

Nancy Rommelmann returns to Walk-Ins Welcome fresh from reporting on ICE raids for Reason Magazine. She and Bridget discuss LA's unprecedented triple crisis—immigration crackdowns, devastating wildfires, and Hollywood's exodus—and what might be next for the city, which leads to the larger question of whether America itself is resetting. They cover why Gen Z might be our saving grace, the...

Meghan Daum sits down with Bridget to discuss her latest book, The Catastrophe Hour, and the conversation covers everything from aging on camera, to modern existential dread, to the death of quality journalism (RIP, actual editors), the rise of "femcel cope", and pro-natalist propaganda. They discuss Meghan’s decision not to have kids, the grim reality that AI is coming for everyone&apos...

Paul Shirley, former NBA basketball player turned productivity guru, returns to the podcast for a conversation with Bridget that takes us from his Kansas farm origins (where apparently growing your own food creates a family of giants) to battling what he calls the "Distraction Industrial Complex." Paul breaks down why we're all suffering from "informational diabetes" in an...

Walk-Ins Welcome 345  Comedian Eleanor Kerrigan joins Bridget for a hilarious conversation covering how her dreams of being an actor led to an unexpected wrestling stint, a West Wing mixup, and the one woman show that led her to realize her true calling is comedy. She dishes on behind-the-scenes stories from over a decade running the iconic Comedy Store, being a caretaker for legendary owner Mitzi...

Amanda Knox returns for a fascinating conversation with Bridget about her wild ride from wrongful conviction to reclaiming her life, as detailed in her new book, Free. She candidly examines how she survived prison and what life looked like on the other side, wrestling with trust (and distrust), her relationship with the media, and the realization that when you pray to God for strength He doesn’t g...

Journalist and podcaster, Eli Lake, sits down with Bridget for a wide ranging conversation that wanders from tracing the evolution of comedy, from Lenny Bruce’s groundbreaking defiance to Shane Gillis’s resilience against cancel culture, to making compelling parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and contemporary political challenges - including Pakistan’s deep state and its global impli...

Alana Newhouse, the mastermind behind Tablet Magazine, sits down with Bridget for a fascinating dissection of modern media, identity politics, and the resurgence of print in a digital age. They dive into the internet’s shift from a punk-rock playground to a tribal shouting match, discuss the flatness of corporate media, and analyze the quirky rebellion of magazines like Tablet and County Highway....

Aaron Stupple, author of The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents, joins Bridget for a discussion of a parenting philosophy that tosses out the rulebook and embraces kids as creative, knowledge-hungry mini-humans. From turning teeth brushing into a sugar-bug-smashing game to letting kids opt out of arbitrary rules, Aaron argues for problem-solving over co...

Comedian Tre Stewart and Bridget Phetasy dive into a whirlwind of topics, from being mislabeled an anti-trans activist to navigating the chaotic shift from Bernie Bro to MAGA-curious, they unpack the absurdity of political tribalism, the hypocrisy of yacht-owning climate crusaders like Leonardo DiCaprio, and Hunter Biden’s suspiciously lucrative art. They cover the gritty realities of the comedy w...

If you’ve ever wondered where Critical Race Theory came from, or why the Progressive Left seems to have collectively lost its mind all at once, buckle up for a comprehensive breakdown and analysis of the history of postmodernism. Michael Young sits down with Bridget for a fascinating conversation tracking the roots of the postmodern movement and how it’s come to dominate the landscape of today’s c...

Carol Roth returns for a breakdown of Trump’s tariffs and a nuanced examination of America’s economic challenges. She and Bridget discuss the tariffs’ disproportionate impact on the 35 million small businesses in the US, the alarming debt-to-GDP ratio that has reached unsustainable levels, the truth about American companies with overseas supply chains, the prevailing misconceptions about tariffs,...

Riot season has returned with Antifa activists throwing poo at an event in Portland and pro-Palestinian activists causing damage at the University of Washington.  0:00 - Patriarchy So Crafty  6:13 - The Perfect Jean  8:00 - Weather  8:24 - Parade of Morons  13:13 - Sheath  14:17 - Parade of Morons Continued  16:21 - Phetasy News  17:17 - The Internet Is Glorious End Music  - Sweetfire performed by...

Kate Compton Barr, a North Carolina state senate candidate, deliberately ran a campaign she knew wouldn't win to highlight gerrymandering issues. She and Bridget discuss how politicians strategically redraw voting districts to maintain power, techniques like "packing" and "cracking," and why it’s one of the most extreme problems facing our country right now. They cover her...

Accidental urban warfare expert, John Spencer, joins Bridget for a discussion about navigating the concrete jungle of modern combat. He shares his evolution from a 25-year active duty service member, to analyzing hypothetical US military operations in mega-cities, teaching strategy and tactics at West Point, to finally setting up a research center called the Modern War Institute, and becoming an u...

Brooke Urick, author of Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge: Sexual Exploits and Secrets from Inside a Sugar Daddy Website , joins Bridget to discuss the seductive lies of sugar daddy websites, the murky world of "soft prostitution," and how these platforms prey on young women. They cover the long term repercussions of being on OnlyFans, what porn and online gambling are doing to young men, pushing...

Sarah Rose Siskind returns to Walk-Ins Welcome for a fascinating chat about AI, exploring its strengths, quirks, and why it sparks insecurity in so many. She and Bridget unpack humanity’s love-hate dance with robots, wrestling with the paradox at its core: Will robots become too human? Why aren’t they human enough? They dive into AI’s struggle to nail comedy (despite being a comedian’s secret weap...

Coleman Hughes returns to the podcast for a wide ranging conversation with Bridget about his new teaching position at University of Austin, their mission to rescue free speech from the clutches of woke academia, what a healthy version of DEI might look like, and the course he's teaching about the legacy of slavery and what aspects of American society today are part of the long-term consequenc...

Editor at Large of Reason magazine, Nick Gillespie returns to the podcast discuss the current state of libertarianism, why he feels it’s moving into a revival, Trump’s tariff tantrums, what’s wrong with the deportations, the problem with Europe, pondering how California lost Hollywood and Silicon Valley and what it will take to recover, and whether or not bitcoin can fix money. He and Bridget cove...

Bridget sits down with Meghan McCain to discuss her new show Meghan McCain’s Happy Hour with 2Way, which provides live feedback from the audience and keeps her in touch with what the normies are actually worrying about. They address concerns that popular independent podcasters have been co-opted by the right wing, mirroring the way left wing media has historically been influenced. They also cover...

Bridget sits down with Lisa Selin Davis, author of Tomboy, who confesses to soft-pedaling some truths about the trans movement and activism in that book. Now, she’s working on a new project, unraveling the threads she was nudged to ignore and diving headfirst into the hot-button issues she was once told to dodge. They discuss the youth gender culture war, the absurdity of automatically labeling a...

Bridget sits down with Conn Carroll, author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy , for a discussion about the history and purpose of marriage, why it's a fundamental part of what makes us human, monogamy vs. polygamy, how dating apps turn certain men into digital sultans, and how the decline of "I do" threatens everything from fertility rates t...

Fellow brunch hater, Mary Katherine Ham, returns to discuss Trump’s win on the heels of debating whether or not she and Bridget would vote for him in the lead up to the election, and their respective “Awww, f*ck it” last minute decisions. They cover the true nature of RFK Jr.’s influence in swinging votes for Trump, why COVID lockdowns and policies were the last straw for many people, red-pilled y...

James Lindsay returns to the podcast for a fascinating conversation about the “woke right” which is essentially a resurrected version of the alt-right with a hipster twist. He and Bridget discuss the consequences of academia’s grievance culture spilling into society and the resulting self-censorship, how people felt freed by Trump’s election in realizing they weren’t alone, what to do when the mob...

Buckle up for a wild ride through the digital apocalypse with Katherine Dee, where influencers are dying, AI’s churning out slop, and Substack’s the artisanal Etsy of writing in a world drowning in fluff. From the collapse of legacy media to TikTok as "digital fentanyl," she’s got the scoop on how we’re all losing our humanity to screens—yet craving real connection so bad we’re anthropom...

Professional poker player, physicist, and general badass, Liv Boeree, sits down with Bridget for a fascinating conversation about the mind games of poker, where intuition meets math, how game theory shapes everything from philanthropy to AI ethics, and the paradoxes of AI consciousness. They discuss being pathologically competitive, beating the boys at their own games, how everyone’s an egalitaria...