transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:06] Hello, and welcome to Hysteria. I'm Erin Ryan.

Speaker 2:
[00:09] And I'm Alyssa Mastromonaco.

Speaker 1:
[00:11] Alyssa, this week, our friend Tucker Carlson, I guess we're on the same side of this war some things with him, some things, disliking Lindsey Graham being against this war. Tucker Carlson seemed kind of contrite when he talked about his former support for Donald Trump. He is so incensed by the state of America in the world, and the fact that we're at war, and the Strait of Hormuz is still not open, and we're no closer, but it's not, but it is. He's sorry though. He sounded like he was authentically contrite.

Speaker 2:
[00:45] He is, I think he's authentic. He's been broken, his heart is broken.

Speaker 1:
[00:49] His heart is broken, but he's being honest about his role in bringing us to this point. A, Alyssa, I have two questions. A, do you think he reads my sub stack?

Speaker 2:
[00:57] It's entirely possible.

Speaker 1:
[00:57] Because I did read, I did write about him like, okay dude, you gotta take some ownership over this thing that you're mad about. B, what penance do you think people who are now realizing that they got us into this mess, but are sorry, what penance do they need to do before they can make money off of being sorry?

Speaker 2:
[01:14] Well Erin, it's like, they've been making money, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1:
[01:19] Right, do you think they should just donate stuff to like anti-war candidates?

Speaker 2:
[01:23] I would like to see them donate, I don't know, maybe, you know, they've been pretty bad to women. Like, he's still only mad because of the war, you know what I mean? He's not mad because of immigration. I mean, he was a little mad, he thought things went too far. But he's really just mad because Trump broke his heart about bombs. Not how he was even treating people in this country. So like, do we even care that he's sorry about this one thing?

Speaker 1:
[01:48] I think that you don't get to be a thought leader after exhibiting extremely poor judgment multiple times. So I think maybe lead with curiosity would just be my, love that, my tip. Lead with curiosity, not know-it-allism, because clearly you don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2:
[02:06] Right.

Speaker 1:
[02:07] The proof is in the pudding.

Speaker 2:
[02:07] Maybe he needs to go on a listening tour.

Speaker 1:
[02:09] Maybe he goes, yeah, he just shows up and just wearing tape over his mouth, and he's just like, come here and talk at me, guys. I want to hear it.

Speaker 2:
[02:18] Tell me what I've been missing.

Speaker 1:
[02:20] Today, we check in on the latest Bravo level drama from Trump's liquor cabinet, Planned Parenthood's foray into cosmetic offerings and Reese Witherspoon's suspicious call for women to use more AI. We also get into two recent chilling tragedies out of Virginia and Louisiana and analyze a new interview with Amanda Ungaro, where she alludes to even more shady business and abuse from Trump's inner circle. Maybe that's why Melania was so worried the other week. Then, a cosmic mind-bending chat with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Of course, we wrap up with Sandy Petty. You're listening to Hysteria, the podcast for people who think that if the Trump administration can just unilaterally change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, that I think the people should be allowed to change the name of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Federal Bureau of Ennebriation.

Speaker 2:
[03:26] I agree with that. I also think that they should start calling it the Liquor Cabinet, since Trump's cabinet likes to imbibe.

Speaker 1:
[03:35] It's a Liquor Cabinet, although one of the bottles is missing now after this week, apparently. We'll get into that in a second. But first I want to talk about the Department of War had some like- Busy, busy, doing dumb shit that doesn't matter. Not like we're at war, but Tuesday-

Speaker 2:
[03:52] Let's take a time out to make a video, though.

Speaker 1:
[03:54] Yes, a very suspiciously smooth looking video. I got into a debate about this yesterday at work with one of my coworkers. He was like, this looks like it was like AI enhanced.

Speaker 2:
[04:06] It 100% does. The background, it looks like he's not actually in the background. Like the background's not real.

Speaker 1:
[04:12] Yeah, like the lighting is weird. His coloring is enhanced. It looks like AI. But one of my coworkers is actually like a photographer, is like, no, no, no, you can make a picture look like this. I don't know, though. Maybe it- Regardless, it was a weird video. It was a weird video.

Speaker 2:
[04:27] It was very strange.

Speaker 1:
[04:28] The content of the video was weird too, because in it, Pete Hegseth is like, soldiers don't need flu vaccines anymore.

Speaker 2:
[04:34] It's like, okay.

Speaker 1:
[04:35] So, this is great news for the influenza virus, who in a tearful press conference yesterday, announced that they were so grateful to the secretary for acknowledging their heritage as a germ that was able to thrive and kill 50 million people in 1918 to 1920, thanks to crowded conditions in army facilities. So it's really getting the influenza virus back to its roots, right on the cusp of World War III. We're paying homage to World War I. Influenza getting another shot at American soldiers, right now, this moment in history feels like, it feels like Celine Dion doing her comeback shows in Paris. It's like a homecoming in a way, like I know she's French Canadian, but it just like, she sings in French, she's a French speaker, it just feels like welcome home, you know?

Speaker 2:
[05:28] It does feel like welcome home.

Speaker 1:
[05:29] Yeah, this is, this is Pete Hegseth welcoming Influenza. Welcome home to the American soldiers.

Speaker 2:
[05:35] There's room for you.

Speaker 1:
[05:36] This is where it started and this is how it's going. So I want to just remind everybody that soldiers are getting public health and hygiene advice from Pete Hegseth, who is the person responsible for this great bit of hygiene and public health advice. Let's listen to this clip.

Speaker 3:
[05:55] As I told you, my 2019 resolution is to say things on air that I say off air, I don't think I've washed my hands for 10 years. Really, I don't really wash my hands ever.

Speaker 4:
[06:06] Someone help me.

Speaker 3:
[06:07] No, I inoculate myself. It's just not germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they're not real. So you're becoming immune?

Speaker 1:
[06:15] Okay. He can't see them.

Speaker 2:
[06:16] It's like morals. I can't see them, so they're not real.

Speaker 1:
[06:19] It is very ironic that a guy that's always harping on God is like, things that I cannot see are not real. Like germs have been observed under microscopes, dude. God has not. But whatever, Pete, he's not really a bastion of moral consistency.

Speaker 2:
[06:37] Again, you'd never know there was war based on how the secretary of war is behaving.

Speaker 1:
[06:44] Yeah. Well, that's a clip from 2019.

Speaker 2:
[06:48] No, but I mean the original video about the flu vaccine.

Speaker 1:
[06:51] It's like, did you bank this one? I wonder, when did he have time to set this up? Are they just giving him little side quests so that he doesn't interfere in the war?

Speaker 2:
[07:03] Also, can I just say something? If you look at the picture of him in the video from when he's at Fox and Friends Weekend and then now, objectively a bit of a glow up. I don't understand it because when we worked in the government, we worked so hard, we looked broken. There's not one person. You should look at pictures of when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and literally grew her hair out so she could put it back in a scrunchie because it was just easier. It's a true story. Watching these people, everyone, if you look at pictures of the Obama administration, people, Biden administration, people look fucking tired. These people look oddly refreshed every day that they're making their social media videos.

Speaker 1:
[07:42] I mean, you know my theory that Pete Hegseth did not actually quit drinking. He promised he would quit drinking, but I don't think he actually did. Maybe this is a counter-argument, because he does look better than he did in 2019. Not better like, I want to sit on his face because gross.

Speaker 2:
[08:00] No, that's disgusting.

Speaker 1:
[08:01] Better like, so early in the morning for me to say that. Better like he looks less concerningly ill.

Speaker 2:
[08:10] Yes, his inflammation seemed to have gone down. He got a new fresher haircut and his suits, because of the I think bloat and inflammation, his suits are fitting better.

Speaker 1:
[08:22] Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I mean, let's talk about someone who, according to reporting that has been contested, what is not drinking any less. Alyssa?

Speaker 2:
[08:34] Well, Erin, let's start with something delicious, only a little hint of existential terror. FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Monday that he was suing The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick over her blockbuster piece from last week detailing an alleged, alleged pattern of heavy drinking and all its attendant professional drawbacks. This was incredible. I do not know how he is still the FBI Director. The article titled, The FBI Director is MIA, Fitzpatrick spoke to dozens of current and former FBI, intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as hospitality workers, members of Congress, lobbyists, former advisors. In other words, this was sourced as fuck.

Speaker 1:
[09:18] Can we talk about sourcing for a second?

Speaker 2:
[09:21] Please.

Speaker 1:
[09:21] Do we think Bondi was a source?

Speaker 2:
[09:23] A hundred percent.

Speaker 1:
[09:25] She did not like him. They were the Amy and Pete of the Trump administration.

Speaker 2:
[09:30] Absolutely. On the debate stage, like if I'm going down, you're fucking coming down with me.

Speaker 1:
[09:36] I feel like Bondi is, I don't want to hand anything to her because she's just like an empty, morally empty vessel. But she's more intelligent than Kash Patel and was more qualified to be AG because she was an actual lawyer and not just like a podcaster who liked to wear like butch insignia to try to pretend they were tough.

Speaker 2:
[09:54] And be roided out.

Speaker 1:
[09:56] And be roided out. Yeah. Anyway, so Patel, when we did our This Fucking Guy video on him, my read was that he just desperately wants to be this bro, this big, muscly, frat guy Chad, like Giga Chad bro.

Speaker 2:
[10:13] But he's like my height.

Speaker 1:
[10:13] But he's just this little, this mousy little guy.

Speaker 2:
[10:19] Come on guys, let me in.

Speaker 1:
[10:20] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:20] Oh, oh.

Speaker 1:
[10:21] He's just like this kind of little dude who wants to be something that he's not, like a kitten looking in the mirror and being like, I want to be a lion. It's like, you're never going to be a lion, dude.

Speaker 2:
[10:30] You're a kitten.

Speaker 1:
[10:31] It's fine. Just be a kitten, you know? There can be something charming about being, just being a kitten.

Speaker 2:
[10:37] You could. No, he reminds me of like the kid on the softball team was like, come on coach, put me in, put me in.

Speaker 1:
[10:41] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have to say also the reporter, Sarah Fitzpatrick has a good reputation of being thorough and she's working for the Atlantic, which does not have a, like it's not, the Atlantic isn't a rag, you know? I think it's arguably the best magazine in the game right now.

Speaker 2:
[10:58] Oh, I agree.

Speaker 1:
[10:59] I would put it up against the New Yorker in terms of the quality of writers and reporters that are working there. I think it's, it's right up there. So I didn't approach this article like I would approach like a daily mail article.

Speaker 2:
[11:11] No, you know, I mean, this is real. This is like, wasn't the Atlantic, the Atlantic was who was in the small group Yemen chat, right?

Speaker 1:
[11:19] Yes. Yes. That was, that was Huthi, Huthi's small group chat too or something like that. Yeah, that was, god, another, another reason that Hegseth should be gone. Like, but anyway, where that's neither here nor there. The article claimed that Patel was drinking, quote, to the point of obvious intoxication in many cases at the private club Neds in Washington, DC. This is like the third time this week that Neds has come up in just like in my life.

Speaker 2:
[11:47] It's like, it's a membership club.

Speaker 1:
[11:49] It sounds terrible.

Speaker 2:
[11:50] Is it cool? No.

Speaker 1:
[11:51] Okay. Well, they're at a private club called Neds in Washington, DC while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. This is unsurprising behavior from the guy pathetically and openly trying to bro out with the US men's hockey team. It's not like he's just this little like church boy. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2:
[12:08] No, he's been trying to make Fetch happen for years.

Speaker 1:
[12:11] Yeah, there's footage of him slamming beers in the locker room like he's a little St. Jude's hospital kid who just got his wish granted before he goes into treatment. The Atlantic also alleged that he is known to drink to access at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas.

Speaker 2:
[12:26] FBI directors at the Poodle Room, Erin.

Speaker 1:
[12:29] Where he frequently spends parts of his weekends with his...

Speaker 2:
[12:33] Girlfriend.

Speaker 1:
[12:34] Well, but he also is roommates with this really rich guy, and it's very odd.

Speaker 2:
[12:38] Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right.

Speaker 1:
[12:41] He lives with a guy in Las Vegas who is like this rich developer guy. It's just like, okay, everyone's just accepted that. Earlier in his tenure, meetings and briefings would have to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights.

Speaker 2:
[12:57] Outrageous.

Speaker 1:
[12:58] Outrageous. Alyssa, have you ever called into work because of alcohol? I have in my 20s, and I remember I did it the day after work happy hour. It was like Merrill Lynch, so whatever. That's different. It was, yeah, but I did it the next day because I was just hung over and was like, I don't want to walk to the blue line. What is this? I'm too pretty for this. Then the day that I came back after that, my boss was like, Erin, sometimes you got to play her. If we know that you're out the night before, if your co-workers know you're out, you have to play her the next day.

Speaker 2:
[13:34] When I was in high school and I did call it out sick once to Kilmer's IGA because we'd had a party the night before, and my boss said, if you're going to hoot with the owls, you got to scream with the eagles. I always think of that, and when we were in the White House, one of our friends, I never went out. For six years, I didn't go out. Someone turned 40 and they had their birthday at a Speakeasy, which Erin and I was like, what's a Speakeasy? What does that even mean? I had no idea. I was drinking blindingly strong alcohol. I was so drunk that I had to call a friend to come pick me up because I had no idea how to get home. I picked up an entire pizza on the way home, ate it on the bathroom floor because I was convinced I was going to barf, ultimately did, and still went to work the next day.

Speaker 1:
[14:24] And you were even the director of the FBI.

Speaker 2:
[14:27] And it was a Saturday I went to work.

Speaker 1:
[14:31] It was okay. So Kash is really mad about this article that makes him sound like exactly like the person that we think he is. So he's suing The Atlantic for defamation and seeking $250 million in damages. His lawsuit is claiming that The Atlantic wrote the piece with actual malice, which is the legal standard for you to get sued if you're a member of the media. So you basically, it's a defamation thing. Basically, in order to meet the definition of defamation for legal purposes, if you are a journalist in America, you need to prove that statements made were false and were acted under reckless disregard. So you have to know they were false and you have to have intention when you publish the false things. The Atlantic called the lawsuit meritless and a lot of people have pointed out that this means that Kash Patel is going to have to go through Discovery and the Atlantic is about to get access to a bunch of FBI related shit.

Speaker 2:
[15:32] Incredible. Incredible. You know this lawsuit is going to go away. I mean, this is just like classic Trump playbook that's like, we're just going to say we're going to sue. Everyone will think that there's maybe something up with the story and then we'll just move on because he's not going to, I mean, it would be incredible.

Speaker 1:
[15:48] You're going to go through with this, Kash? Like this is, I don't know. I mean, we've already seen some of his emails and some of the things.

Speaker 2:
[15:55] They're not good.

Speaker 1:
[15:56] Him like, posing with cigars, like they just got engaged on a romantic trip to Cuba or whatever. Like, he's so, such a dork. Does he really want everyone to see the full rainbow of dorkiness? Like one of the stories in the article that really, really was funny to me was, Kash tried to log in to his work computer at the end of the day and he couldn't log in. And so we started being like, that's it, I'm fired. I'm fired. I'm fired. Calling people up, freaking out.

Speaker 2:
[16:25] Like, and it was nothing.

Speaker 1:
[16:27] It was nothing.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] Do you know who he is?

Speaker 1:
[16:29] Who?

Speaker 2:
[16:29] Because we have both been watching this. It is like in the podcast, Love Trapped. It's like Laura Owens is the FBI director.

Speaker 1:
[16:37] I mean, a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[16:39] The text messages, I'm just saying.

Speaker 1:
[16:41] A little bit. I mean, it's really crazy. I mean, also that thing, something not going right. There's a technical issue immediately thinking the worst thing has happened and freaking out.

Speaker 2:
[16:53] Totally.

Speaker 1:
[16:53] Something that a drunk person would do. That is 100% a way that a drunk person would react to a problem, would react to something not working. One time I came home, this was also in Chicago. I was young, whatever. And I used the wrong set of keys. I had a pair of my boyfriend at the time's keys and I was trying to use them to open my door and they won't work and I was like, they changed my locks, the shit for like full five minutes and I was like, oh wait, I was using the wrong keys. But anyway, it turns out Patel wasn't fired, he should have been fired. And he's not the only one in the liquor cabinet day drinking. A lot of people day drinking in this administration. The third cabinet member and the third woman in the Trump administration has resigned in a mess of a scandal.

Speaker 2:
[17:42] This is messy.

Speaker 1:
[17:42] I swear to God.

Speaker 2:
[17:44] Like what?

Speaker 1:
[17:46] All of the Trump cabinet officials remind me of like, they're their own little Lisa Vanderpump. They're all starting a summer. Instead of trying to run their respective departments, they are launching their own summer houses. Or they're doing a Vanderpump villa, the fuck cabin or whatever. Like they're just, they're not concerned with doing the business of the American people. It seems like they're just trying to create little dens of drama.

Speaker 2:
[18:16] Well, because none of them have ever run anything before. So now they have a big office building and staff and money. And they're cosplaying what they've literally seen on The Real Housewives and other some such shows and acting it out as the first time they've had power. Now, bear in mind, power. They're not exercising responsibility over anything. But they've got the means and they're just going with it.

Speaker 1:
[18:43] Well, according to a Vox write up of this latest...

Speaker 2:
[18:49] Mess.

Speaker 1:
[18:50] Mess. Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez de Rehmer resigned Monday amid an internal investigation into her conduct. So here are some things that the former Labor Secretary was doing. She was instructing staff to buy her bottles of Sauvignon Blanc on work trips, which I get the inclination to ask them for that.

Speaker 2:
[19:10] During the day.

Speaker 1:
[19:11] During the day though. Sauv Blanc on a work trip during the day. That better be alongside a big restaurant size Caesar salad. It better be... It's got to be a...

Speaker 2:
[19:25] A social glass doing diplomacy.

Speaker 1:
[19:27] Yes, yes. But Sauv Blanc in the office on work trips. She also allegedly stashed liquor in her office, which, okay, I've worked in the media for 15 years. I don't care about that. That's...

Speaker 2:
[19:38] Whatever.

Speaker 1:
[19:38] At the Daily Beast, everybody had a like emergency bottle of booze in their file cabinet.

Speaker 2:
[19:43] Even in the White House, I had a bottle of something in my bottom drawer. It's like, he just had it, you know? He wasn't nipping at it during lunch.

Speaker 1:
[19:50] Right, so this is like low on the tot... Asking to buy bottles of Sauv Blanc, don't do that. Stashing liquor in the office, where else you supposed to stash it? I don't know. Right, but... But then it gets really bad. She also encouraged young female staffers to pay attention to her father and her husband's flirtatious overtures. Some of these texts were really bad.

Speaker 2:
[20:12] Disgusting.

Speaker 1:
[20:12] The texts were like, when are you in... Like her dad being like, are you in town? Like texting...

Speaker 2:
[20:18] Let me know.

Speaker 1:
[20:18] Let me know where you are. Where are you staying? Like all of this... She also allegedly had an affair with a member of her security detail.

Speaker 2:
[20:26] I mean...

Speaker 1:
[20:27] Don't do it.

Speaker 2:
[20:29] No.

Speaker 1:
[20:29] That's a real former Senator Kirsten Sinema move. She also arranged work travel to visit family and friends, which I think is par for the course for this administration. They're all doing work travel for their family and friends.

Speaker 2:
[20:41] I do. It wasn't the case for other administrations, but for this, it seems like the lowest hanging of their offenses.

Speaker 1:
[20:48] My favorite story of the former Labor Secretary was that she had a birthday party for herself in the office. Do you remember this story?

Speaker 2:
[20:56] No.

Speaker 1:
[20:56] Oh my gosh. She had a birthday party for herself in the office that involved people coming together and singing happy birthday to her, which is like not... You're not supposed to do that in the government. That's not something that she was supposed to do. She also served liquor there or something. And when she was asked about it, she was like, that wasn't a birthday party, but they sang happy birthday.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] It wasn't a birthday party, but they sang happy birthday.

Speaker 1:
[21:23] Yeah. Santa came. I sat on his lap. I asked him for things. He gave me some presents. It was December 25th, but it wasn't Christmas. Come on. According to the New York Times, the texts about bringing Chavez de Reimer wine were sometimes sent in the middle of the day.

Speaker 2:
[21:38] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[21:38] One of the creepiest parts of the story though was how her husband was creeping around the grounds. I don't know. I'm picturing him like-

Speaker 2:
[21:46] I don't understand this at all.

Speaker 1:
[21:47] I'm picturing him like cartoon sneaking.

Speaker 2:
[21:50] Yeah, like lurking.

Speaker 1:
[21:51] Like lurking. So he's lurking around the grounds of the Department of Labor, and he is harassing and pestering female staffers.

Speaker 2:
[22:01] Staff, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[22:03] It's so strange. I was looking into her background because I was like, who is this lady?

Speaker 2:
[22:07] Yeah. Tell me what you found because I was looking her up too.

Speaker 1:
[22:11] She started her career. She was like a receptionist at a Planned Parenthood early in her career, which is interesting. She's done a bunch of odd jobs. She was a mayor of a small town in Oregon, and she has run for office a bunch of times. She's lost as many offices as she's won. She'd only served for I think one or two terms as a member of Congress from Oregon, and then was given this appointment because the head of the Teamsters told Donald Trump to appoint her. So she was like in terms of the secretaries in the Trump administration, like not bad on paper.

Speaker 2:
[22:48] Like okay.

Speaker 1:
[22:49] Yeah. Right. But like as a boss and a coworker, colleague, leader, kind of a nightmare.

Speaker 2:
[22:59] Yeah. Not rising to the occasion.

Speaker 1:
[23:00] Not rise. I mean, but again, I would challenge anybody to put up the allegations against Chavez, DeRamer. I would encourage anybody to put those allegations up against what has been alleged about other members of the Trump administration. Like Kash Patel.

Speaker 2:
[23:15] Like Kash Patel.

Speaker 1:
[23:17] Like Pete Hegsath, even if, let's just say he really did quit drinking. Fine. There are still InfoSec concerns. His treatment of the-

Speaker 2:
[23:29] InfoSec, the way he's spending money on- Remember this reports about the lobster and all the incredible, just gross waste of taxpayer dollars. If IGs still existed in this government, everyone would be under investigation.

Speaker 1:
[23:49] Yeah. They all should be under an investigation. And honestly, here's something I haven't really seen from Democrats when we're talking about what happens on the other side of this, if we have a country on the other side of this. I really think that Democrats in 2026 and 2028, especially 2028, should run on clawing some of this shit back. They should have a bill called the Clawback Bill, which is where any ill-gotten gains that were gotten during the Trump administration will be clawed back by the government, will be clawed back and redistributed to taxpayers, will be redistributed as scientific grants, will be redistributed in ways that actually benefit the American people instead of just enhance and enrich the lives of these tacky-ass motherfuckers.

Speaker 2:
[24:34] Totally tacky.

Speaker 1:
[24:35] Like, Kash Patel should have to work for the rest of his life to pay back what he has siphoned from the taxpayers.

Speaker 2:
[24:44] The plane that he uses for, as if he is, this is the thing. They all think that because they have become cabinet secretaries or administrators, that everything is just, like, par for the course. It's like, oh no, I now have car service to go wherever I go. No, it's for official duties. Like, oh, I have a plane. I want to use a plane. Remember, Christy Noem, before she got ousted, was outfitting a new plane for DHS. Which, like, guess what? When I was there, the DHS secretary used the plane to go to disasters, not on, like, you know, personal, I'm gonna go on a personal vacation. I'll make a stop that's official on the way, but then the plane's gonna take the rest of the way. It is so fucking broken and gross.

Speaker 1:
[25:29] It is tacky. It's Beverly Hillbillies level shit.

Speaker 2:
[25:32] It is Hillbilly shit.

Speaker 1:
[25:33] And I think that, we've discussed this before, but I think that that is why TMZ's presence in DC is essential right now. These people are acting like fucking out-of-control celebrity, Brat Pack Childs. I don't know if the Brat Pack were wild at clubs, but they're out of control.

Speaker 2:
[25:54] Brat Pack were wild at clubs.

Speaker 1:
[25:55] Yeah, they're out-of-control celebrities puking all over the bathrooms of the Viper Room. In Hollywood, I feel like, and as culture becomes more fractured, as our celebrities become just very, very specific to different groups, they're not really very many big stars anymore.

Speaker 2:
[26:13] Yeah, true.

Speaker 1:
[26:13] The only people that every American is compelled to know about are people that are elected officials because whether or not we like them, they impact our lives. Whether or not we really are excited about that, whether or not we're fans of their work, they are fucking our lives up and they're running around like they're stars. They all want to be stars.

Speaker 2:
[26:36] They all want to be famous.

Speaker 1:
[26:37] But this is what it is to be famous, guys. We got PAPS chasing after you. And I feel like they're also kind of stoking it in the opposite direction as well. Like they like it. I think that they might not like it once they are getting photographed doing things they don't want to be photographed doing by TMZ. But I think two of the people that are really into like being a celebrity VIP, Nancy Mace, our girl Nancy Mace, and Corey Mills, both Republicans. They are in a fight to the death, theoretically or metaphorically. Corey Mills is currently being investigated for allegations of sexual and financial misconduct.

Speaker 2:
[27:23] Like multiple.

Speaker 1:
[27:24] Like multiple.

Speaker 2:
[27:26] I'm glad that Nancy actually raised this because I was not aware of what an absolute just swamp creature that Corey Mills was.

Speaker 1:
[27:34] You know what? Roger Sullenberger has done really good reporting on him. There's a super long piece about Corey Mills on his sub stack. Just free promo for that. It's really good. If you want to know who Corey Mills is, like you should probably read the sub stack. Also, Roger Stone was tweeting about Corey Mills a couple days ago. It was like there's some big things coming out about Corey Mills on Monday. Now, we didn't really get the big things, but he said that it would make Eric Swalwell look like nothing basically. But we also know Roger Stone is a rat fucker, so he might just be putting something out there to hype a story, to make it seem bigger than it actually is. So when the actual story breaks or to make it seem like there's something out there that isn't. So take that with a grain of salt. But here's Nancy Mace's fighting words. So good. Quote, the swamp has protected Corey Mills for far too long and we are done letting it slide. We tried to censure him and strip him from his committee assignments. Both parties blocked it, but we are not backing down. The evidence against Mills is overwhelming, beating women and telling them to lie about it. This is something that actually is alleged to have happened. There is body cam footage of Corey Mills instructing a woman that he allegedly beat to tell the cops that she's okay. So just as an aside. The evidence against Mills is overwhelming, beating women and telling them to lie about it, cyber-stalking women, lying about his military service and profiting off his seat. Any member who votes to keep him here is voting to protect a woman beater and a fraud. He needs to be expelled immediately. I did not come to Congress to watch powerful people abuse women and cover it up. Cori, your days are numbered. Start packing. Okay. I think a lot of Republicans actually did come to Congress to watch people abuse women and cover it up. I think that's actually one of the planks in the Republican Party platform at this point.

Speaker 2:
[29:24] I mean, it all started with grabbing by the pussy.

Speaker 1:
[29:27] Grabbing by the pussy. And how many people has Trump appointed or stood by that have allegations of violence or really gross disrespect toward women, just misconduct aimed at women? It seems like it's a feature, not a bug at this point. And so I don't know how, I don't know if Nancy Mace is stupid or being willfully disingenuous here, because we're also in the age of Epstein. What do you mean you didn't come to Congress to watch powerful people abuse women in Congress? She's been on the right side of most Epstein things, but she also isn't speaking out against Trump?

Speaker 2:
[30:10] Ever?

Speaker 1:
[30:11] No. I mean, we'll talk more about this later in the show, but Amanda Ungaro, who apparently has some dirt on Trump and Melania, or is trying to make it seem as though she has dirt on Trump and Melania, alleges that Trump was a lot more involved in the Epstein thing than people know about. But Nancy, go off, go off, sis. I can appreciate when a chaos muppet, chaos is in a way that helps me, ideologically speaking. It's fine.

Speaker 2:
[30:42] Corey Mills should be gone.

Speaker 1:
[30:44] Corey Mills should be gone.

Speaker 2:
[30:46] The enemy of my enemy.

Speaker 1:
[30:48] Surely, there are people who can better represent Corey Mills' Florida district than Corey Mills. Surely, there is somebody who hasn't been a domestic violence incident or who hasn't been like-

Speaker 2:
[31:01] Cyber-stocked.

Speaker 1:
[31:02] Oh, yeah. He's cyber-stocked and threatened to release nude photos of the girlfriend or the fiance he was cheating with when he was accused of domestic violence. So he was accused of domestic violence by a woman that was the other woman to his main woman who he also threatened with revenge porn.

Speaker 2:
[31:21] It's crazy.

Speaker 1:
[31:22] And she's like a former Miss Florida. It is so, again, again, everyone is their own little Lisa Vanderpump here. I'm tired of these Vanderpump rules. Let's go back to the Constitution. In true petty fashion, it's been reported that Corey Mills is now deciding whether or not to fight back and introduce a resolution to expel Mace, who is also currently under investigation over claims of inappropriate reimbursement practices. And she's running for governor in South Carolina. And she's being sued for some things that she said on the floor of the US. House.

Speaker 2:
[31:54] Remember that? She just went ham on the floor.

Speaker 1:
[31:56] She went completely ham. She was like, speech and debate clause means I get to get out a slander-free card. I can say whatever.

Speaker 2:
[32:03] And she slandered.

Speaker 1:
[32:04] She really did some slandering.

Speaker 2:
[32:06] She did some slandering.

Speaker 1:
[32:07] She did some real slandering. And I'm not sure how that's all going to play out. But for now, she's still out there swinging. She's not putting her head down.

Speaker 2:
[32:17] She literally is like somebody who goes home, plugs herself back in, gets recharged, comes out swinging, doesn't know what is going to motivate her the next day, but something will. Something eventually will motivate her to be chaotic.

Speaker 1:
[32:31] We'll talk about a liquor cabinet. Some people say that that also contributes to Nancy Mace's, let's say, unevenness. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we've got more news. Hysteria is brought to you by OneSkin. You've probably heard us talk about OneSkin before for their best-selling skincare, but now they're bringing that same longevity science to address hair loss with their scalp serum, OS1 Hair.

Speaker 2:
[33:11] If you're noticing more hair shedding lately or feeling like your hair is looking a little thinner than usual, you might not be imagining it. Trust me, I see it too. Erin, my hair is actually looking the way it does today because this that you see here is the hair that is growing in and what is at the bottom is the remnants of what has fallen out, but I'm still too chicken to cut it all off to the same length. Spring can bring an increase in seasonal hair shedding and changes in routine can trigger stress-related hair loss at any time of the year. But OneSkin's OS1 Hair Serum is designed to help. It's a scalp serum powered by their patented OS1 peptide and it works by targeting the cells in your hair follicles that contribute to shedding, thinning and slower growth. This means OS1 hair can actually reactivate the hair growth cycle and promote thicker, fuller, denser hair. Even better, OS1 hair is drug-free, delivering effective results without any harsh side effects. They've done clinical studies on this serum to validate the science and the numbers are pretty incredible. Six months in, people saw a 43 percent increase in hair thickness and a 40 percent increase in their hair density. In addition to seeing an overall reduction in hair shedding and increased hair volume and fullness, people are seeing a real difference with this hair serum.

Speaker 1:
[34:26] RIP to the hair spiders that are stuck to the side of your shower.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[36:03] Really? What do they say?

Speaker 1:
[36:05] Well, the little one was like, Mommy, no, no hair because my hair was half dry and it was like I hadn't.

Speaker 2:
[36:12] It's not her your normal look, she wasn't feeling it.

Speaker 1:
[36:14] No, my worth as a mother depends on me taking care of my hair. That's why I need Nutri-ful. Let your hair become one less thing, taking up space in your head and see thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding in just three to six months with Nutri-ful. For a limited time, Nutri-ful is offering our listeners $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping. When you visit nutriful.com and enter promo code Hysteria10. That's nutriful.com spelled nutrafol.com, promo code Hysteria10. And welcome back, you're listening to Hysteria, the show that is tired of reading the same story over and over and over again. We're just as tired of talking about it as you guys are of hearing about it, but it keeps happening, so we have to talk about it. We can't just pretend it's not a big deal. I'm talking, of course, about violence by men toward women. So I wanna talk about two stories that unfolded just days apart. They're horrible, so please listen to this part of the show with care. In both cases, they involve men who were reportedly consumed with dark thoughts and fear of their marriages falling apart, who took extreme measures to end their torment. Now I just have to say, so much coverage of family annihilators, men who kill members of their own family, they seek to find, like, sympathy for the men.

Speaker 2:
[37:46] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:47] Kate Mann, the philosopher and writer, calls it, empathy, which is like an attempt to rationalize, oh, like, oh, he was in so much pain, he was feeling so dark, rather than being like some women and children died. Like, do you know?

Speaker 2:
[38:03] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:03] These people talked about having mental health issues. First in Virginia, the former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, his accused of killing his wife and what law enforcement confirmed was a murder-suicide. Their two kids were home when he did it.

Speaker 2:
[38:17] So fucked.

Speaker 1:
[38:18] Multiple outlets, including the Washington Post, reported that Fairfax's life had quickly unraveled after his political career was derailed by accusations of sexual misconduct. Since then, according to court documents, he'd been obsessed with clearing his name and began showing patterns of erratic and emotionally withdrawn behavior. He and his wife were separated at the time, but still living under the same house. Just horrible. It's just such a tragedy. Those children don't have a mother.

Speaker 2:
[38:45] Parent.

Speaker 1:
[38:45] They don't have parents anymore.

Speaker 2:
[38:47] Right. They will never be the same. No. It will never be okay after being in the house.

Speaker 1:
[38:53] I don't care, honestly, what a person is going through, an act that selfish betrays a soul rot that is irredeemable. I don't care what he was going through. Honestly, I don't care. Second, over the weekend, our country experienced the deadliest mass shooting since 2024, when a man in Shreveport, Louisiana allegedly killed eight children, seven of which were his kids, and shot two women. One of them was his wife in a shooting spree that spanned three locations. Reports say the gunman, Shamar Elkins, had been struggling with his mental health and expressed his distress to family members and his wife. His wife was trying to leave him, and that's why he did that. So we talked a little bit about about empathy. There was a really good piece written on The Cut by Brittany Cooper. And Brittany Cooper's piece is a must read, I think, for any— for this time that this happened, for the next time that this happens, because it's not ever going to be the last time that it happens. I'm going to just read a quote from that piece. Quote, Patriarchy offers a better explanation for this violence. Patriarchy teaches men that women and children belong to them, that they are property that men get to have as a male rite of passage. Men are taught in what Bell Hooks famously called a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, to measure their worth and value by the size of their bank account, the size of their genitals and the size of their families. These are forms of toxic self-value predicated as they are on women and children having no agency or dreams of their own. What do you make of that Alyssa?

Speaker 2:
[40:28] It's absolutely true. I mean, it's like, look, especially in these two cases, these were two men who thought they were going to lose their families. And this is how they decided to not lose their family by killing them. I saw a study recently that 30% of Gen Z men believe women should just do what their husbands tell them. So you could, in a word, like, it's like you just, it's like the white Christian nationalism, the like women should be subservient to men. This is, it's like taking hold. I mean, it's always sort of been percolating, but it's really like, you can see it. These men are like, no, just because, you know, in the case of Justin Fairfax, who had been accused of sexual misconduct, I mean, clearly like outside of his marriage, and then it's like, his wife wants to leave him, and he's like, well, fuck that, you don't leave me. You know, we'll leave this earth together. And that's, it's really, you know, I hadn't, until I read Brittany Cooper's piece, I hadn't thought about it in this way, but it's so fucking true.

Speaker 1:
[41:36] Yeah. I mean, the idea of ownership being something, an entitlement, is something that you see in all of these like family annihilator situations. Of course, there are some people that are honestly having like a psychotic break with reality. And that happens with mass shooters, mass murderers. You know, that's not an uncommon thing. But setting that aside, when violence is aimed at a family, it tends to be an extension of like an entitlement to those people. And I read something really interesting about the profile of family annihilators. Now both of the men that we're talking about this episode are black men. But the vast majority of family annihilators in the US are white men. And that is, I think, Cooper, you know, would point out that this is an extension of what L. Hooks said, which is that a society arranged around the entitlement of a group of people to whole other groups of people is eventually going to lead to a dehumanization of the people that they feel entitled to and a sense of ownership. I feel like there's a lot of that just in kind of baked into American society. The concept of taking your husband's name when you get married, and the concept of giving your children your husband's name is like, it's a sign that they are his, his, I mean, and it's not nearly as insidious as violence that's inflicted on people because of a sense of entitlement. I'm just pointing out that there is just this baked in sense that a woman and children belong to a man when they are in a family unit with that man. And it's just really horrifying. Alyssa, can you guess who represents the Shreveport district in Congress?

Speaker 2:
[43:21] Is it Mike Johnson?

Speaker 1:
[43:22] It's Mike Johnson. Oh, I have not seen anything as a press time. Anything that I haven't seen that he said anything. No, I have too. He might still say something. Do you think Mike Johnson really gives a damn about the impact of this sort of toxic cultural messaging and how it might contribute to violence against women and children?

Speaker 2:
[43:45] I'm going to go with no.

Speaker 1:
[43:47] Do you think he's going to say anything? Like what should he say?

Speaker 2:
[43:51] He'll say that mental health is a terrible plague.

Speaker 1:
[43:56] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[43:57] Because that's what they always do now.

Speaker 1:
[43:59] That's all it is.

Speaker 2:
[44:01] There's no critical thinking about why some of this stuff wants to happen. They're like, mental health sounds like a good, sounds like an acceptable thing for them to say. And so now they're just like, we're just going to stand behind mental health. It's terrible. There's a crisis. Something should be done.

Speaker 1:
[44:18] They'll throw it in like, do you ever, sometimes when I'm cleaning, I have like a box that I take with me where I just am like, everything where I don't know where it goes, I throw it in the box just to like get it out of the room.

Speaker 2:
[44:27] Oh, that's smart.

Speaker 1:
[44:28] Yeah. I feel like mental health is that for conservatives, but they never want to put it away. They're never going to put the stuff in the, they're just like, okay, mental health. And then they don't do anything about mental health.

Speaker 2:
[44:38] Well, cause it's mental health, not guns, right? Like that was the original, they're like, well, it can't be the guns. So it has to be that the people who have the guns have had a mental break. And not that it was something predictable that we still could have helped or seen or, you know, or that maybe-

Speaker 1:
[44:53] Well, and it's, they're never going to be, and Mike Johnson is not going to come out and be like, it's patriarchy, guys. It's male entitlement to women and children. And that needs to change because otherwise men are still going to feel entitled to kill women and children when they fear that they might no longer be their possession. Like they just, you know, he's never going to say that, but I think it's really important for us to think about these things when we have to think about them as an extension of a system that dehumanizes a large part of the population. And it's just, it's such a huge tragedy. I want to, we're going to pivot a little bit, talk about some changes that are happening in the way that Planned Parenthood is doing business. You know, yeah, Planned Parenthood has been stripped of federal funding. I think a lot of people lose track of that because there's so much other stuff going on, and it has been, you know, forced to figure out creative ways to make up some of that funding. Last year, they had to close 50 of their 600 clinics. That's dangerous because in a lot of places, it's the primary point of care for women. Yeah. I mean, honestly, though, like OBGYN care, my OBGYN knows way more about me than my, I don't think I even have a regular doctor.

Speaker 2:
[46:07] No, I always for years, my, for a very long time, my OBGYN was, my was essentially my primary care physician. Like he knew everything about me.

Speaker 1:
[46:18] Right. And so the source of like OBGYN care for women, like Planned Parenthood, it takes away their access to medical care. So it's very dangerous when these places are closing. I have to respect the hustle here. The Marmante affiliate of Planned Parenthood includes 30 clinics in the Nevada and California area. And they are going to start to offer Botox and cosmetic procedures for patients to pay out of pocket. So you can get Botox or an IV drip or something. You know, the LA Nightmare things that when you first come out here, you're like, oh, that's crazy. But then after three years, you're lining up to get them.

Speaker 2:
[46:54] You're like, that worked.

Speaker 1:
[46:56] The services were first introduced to a Sacramento location and were immediately popular, both with clients and providers, eager to be trained in administering them. The Botox is $9 a unit, which is...

Speaker 2:
[47:07] Apparently a good deal.

Speaker 1:
[47:08] It's a good deal. It's cheaper than the normal range, which is like from $10 to $30. I get Botox. I have for like a long time. I love it. It works. Get mad at me.

Speaker 2:
[47:17] Enjoy yourself.

Speaker 1:
[47:17] I don't care.

Speaker 2:
[47:18] Enjoy yourself.

Speaker 1:
[47:18] I get about 40 units when I get it. I get it every four months and I get 40 units. And it's like crow's feet, forehead. So it's not like a ton of units, but that's just so people know like how much Botox costs. Not cheap. $9 a unit's pretty good. That's competitive. That's competitive. They're also offering laughing gas for pain management during IUD insertions. I'm going to say I don't do well with any form of pain management. So I'm going to raw dog my next IUD insertion, I think, after I had like...

Speaker 2:
[47:52] Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
[47:53] Yeah. Remember I like got really sick in my doc... I had to be taken out in a wheelchair. But anything that helps with the pain, if you're not going to raw dog it, laughing gas sounds like a good option. They are also introducing a telehealth perimenopausal care program.

Speaker 2:
[48:09] 10 out of 10.

Speaker 1:
[48:10] And possibly offering GLP-1 medication for weight loss.

Speaker 2:
[48:14] Enjoy.

Speaker 1:
[48:14] Yeah. Do it.

Speaker 2:
[48:15] Honestly, so smart. Like when I first saw this article, I was like, wait, what? Planned Parenthood and Botox? But you know what else is kind of nice about it? Is that a lot of times when you go to the doctor, you have like a negative... If you're usually going... Most people when they go to the doctor, they're going for something bad. Something has happened and it prompts them to make a doctor's appointment. I feel like I like this because like normalizes going there and that like you don't always have to have a problem. And it's like more of a positive, like when I finally found a dentist that didn't terrify the shit out of me, I didn't mind going to the dentist anymore. You know what I mean? And so I feel like this is... It's like, oh, you know, you go for your Botox, you go talk for GLP-1. You're like, I'm having like my perimenopause symptoms and I'm going to have a telomid, and then I'm going to go get my pap. It's like, I don't know, I just feel like it's nice to have more options.

Speaker 1:
[49:07] It's like a mini-mall of lady services.

Speaker 2:
[49:10] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[49:10] You know? Yeah, I have to say, I don't know if I... I love Planned Parenthood. I support them. I don't know, I'm very devoted to my Botox lady. Like, I've been seeing her for six years.

Speaker 2:
[49:24] But that's fine.

Speaker 1:
[49:25] I'm not going to mix it up, but I would say if you're like a Botox virgin, or you want to like, give it a try, why not?

Speaker 2:
[49:32] Give it a whirl.

Speaker 1:
[49:33] Give it a whirl. All right. We talked a little bit about Amanda Ungaro earlier.

Speaker 2:
[49:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[49:39] Yeah. Amanda Ungaro, just for people who don't know, she is a former model who was linked to a man named Paolo Zampoli for years and has a child with him. She also was close with Melania and Donald Trump, because they ran in similar circles in New York City. So earlier this year, Ungaro was held in ICE custody for three months and ultimately deported to Brazil. New York Times reporting revealed that her ex, Paolo Zampoli, who is Trump's former business partner and special envoy for global partnerships, is the one who egged ICE on to get her out of the country. They've been in a custody battle for their kid together for a long time, and Zampoli reportedly, yeah, he made the call and was like, I want to get her out of here. It's such a gross story. She was a teenager when she was first brought to the US. She was 15. She was 15. She was flown here from Paris. She was a 15-year-old model from the middle of Brazil, flown here from Paris, literally on the Lolita Express, Jeffrey Epstein's plane, with Jean-Luc Brunel. I sound crazy. I sound like Candice with the Egyptian planes, but this is documented. She flew with Jean-Luc Brunel. Jean-Luc Brunel was the co-owner of Jeffrey Epstein's modeling agency, and at the time, he was Ungaro's modeling agent. Jean-Luc Brunel, in 2022, was arrested for crimes related to this Epstein stuff, and was found dead in his cell, apparently by his own hand, but who knows? But yeah, he was also Epsteined. Brunel, Epstein, Zampoli, they were kind of all in similar circles. There's been some reporting that Zampoli and Epstein tried to work together to purchase elite model management. At one point, it didn't succeed. Zampoli denies having a business relationship with Epstein, but it's kind of like, come on, dude.

Speaker 2:
[51:35] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[51:36] Come on. So the Courier published an interview with Ungaro over the weekend, where she contradicted elements of the Melania Donald story. The Melania Donald story is that Paola Zampoli introduced the two of them. Ungaro has implied heavily that it was Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 2:
[51:52] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[51:52] And has suggested that Zampoli was involved in recruiting girls for Epstein, which he denies. And she also alleged in the interview that he was abusive to her ever since she was a teenager because Zampoli and Amanda met when she was 17. They got together when she was 17. Apparently, he'd been courting her for years. He was like in his late 30s. It's gross.

Speaker 2:
[52:10] Yeah. Yeah. Since she was like 15.

Speaker 1:
[52:12] Yeah. It's gross.

Speaker 2:
[52:12] It's when they met.

Speaker 1:
[52:13] Yes. And then they got together when she was 17, which is yuck. Yuck. She also said Zampulli was not the one who introduced Trump and Melania, and that everybody knows who it really was. I think Amanda Ungaro kind of coming out and dangling some juicy knowledge is what might have been behind that weird Melania press conference the other week.

Speaker 2:
[52:35] Out of nowhere.

Speaker 1:
[52:36] When Melania came out and was like, I would not friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 2:
[52:40] Ever.

Speaker 1:
[52:41] Yeah. So this interview was with our girl, Nina Berle, who we love. She's a great writer. Every time I come across a story of hers, I'm like, it's Nina again.

Speaker 2:
[52:52] Another one.

Speaker 1:
[52:53] There she is. But anyway, Nina landed this. It was a great interview, a great get. At the end of the interview, Ungaro said that she would absolutely testify in front of the House Oversight Committee. Why isn't this story getting more attention, Alyssa?

Speaker 2:
[53:06] Well, Erin, because no one cares.

Speaker 1:
[53:09] I mean, I care. I don't. No, we care.

Speaker 2:
[53:12] No, we care. But this is, look, she has said, she has said, I will testify before the House Oversight Committee. Where are they? Where are they? I mean, I hope Harvey Levin and TMZ get in on this because maybe, maybe it will get more traction. But her interview was pretty fucking deprecating. It was both depressing. It was also inflammatory. Like she's saying that Melania and Donald Trump know so much more than they're letting on about a case that everyone's been fixated over for how many years now. So it's like, why is she not set to testify next week? It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1:
[53:52] I think that it's pretty clear and she's kind of like, wink, wink, wink, like if Democrats take over Congress and start an early next year, she's kind of like, your move, guys. It's not going to happen with a Republican majority. I think we can all admit that. But it might with a Democratic majority. I think it would be pretty interesting and messy. Because Melania's press conference was so weird.

Speaker 2:
[54:23] She was clearly spooked by something.

Speaker 1:
[54:25] You wouldn't come out and be like, I'm not a pedophile.

Speaker 2:
[54:29] Especially, it was like the whole war in Iran had wiped the Epstein story off the news entirely. And she was like, let me re-up this one for good measure.

Speaker 1:
[54:40] I feel like right now it's a perpetual motion machine, though. It's like, Epstein, war.

Speaker 2:
[54:45] Right.

Speaker 1:
[54:45] Epstein, war. I guess we could throw in Greenland and have a three ball juggle.

Speaker 2:
[54:50] Greenland's like, leave us alone. He's forgotten about us for now.

Speaker 1:
[54:53] They're like, keep our name out of your mouth. All right. One more quick hit before we take a break and get to our interview. I guess women, girls, are we bossing hard enough with AI?

Speaker 2:
[55:05] I don't know. I don't know. But Reese Witherspoon had thoughts. Reese made a formal announcement on her Instagram that she's ready to embrace AI.

Speaker 1:
[55:17] Wait, I had a hard time hearing it. She made a video announcement, right?

Speaker 2:
[55:21] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[55:21] I kept hearing the sound in the background, like a beeping of a dump truck full of money from an AI company backing up to her house. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[55:28] Yes. It's very funny. I mean, look, Reese, I don't know what she thought. I mean, look, I get. So she's like, women should embrace AI, that she was at a book club, and that not hardly any of the women understood AI or had ever used it, and that women need to embrace it. And that we especially need to understand AI, because it's going to take all of our jobs.

Speaker 1:
[55:53] She cited this really strange statistic. She said, FYI, the jobs women hold are three times more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25 percent lower than men on average.

Speaker 2:
[56:06] Okay, so I mean, that came from somewhere.

Speaker 1:
[56:08] Citation needed, but also like, in a lot of the discussions on AI, I think that there's something really huge missing, which is that care work cannot be automated.

Speaker 2:
[56:17] That's exactly what I was going to say.

Speaker 1:
[56:18] Care work cannot be automated. What the fuck are you talking about? Are we going to use AI to replace nurses?

Speaker 2:
[56:25] Right.

Speaker 1:
[56:25] No. Teachers?

Speaker 2:
[56:27] Teachers.

Speaker 1:
[56:28] They're trying, but we saw what happened when we tried to replace teachers, just human teachers, when we tried to put them on screens for kids for less than a year.

Speaker 2:
[56:37] Right, that went great.

Speaker 1:
[56:38] Now all the kids are super dumb. We can't teach kids with, we cannot replace teachers with videos of teachers, with streams of teachers. Kids need to be in a classroom with a human teacher who 80% of the time is going to be a woman. 75% or 80% of the time is going to be a human woman. Like CNAs, home care workers. Like what are you talking about, Reese?

Speaker 2:
[57:04] Here's the thing. On the one hand, yes, AI is a huge issue. Women should know how to use it, should understand it, so they can be competitive also, so they can be weaponized.

Speaker 1:
[57:15] I totally disagree, Alyssa. I don't think you should have to learn it at all. I've tried to use it and it is a drain. It is a drain on my psyche and a drain on my time.

Speaker 2:
[57:25] My point is if that was, if she was just making that point, okay, fine, but it just felt sponsored.

Speaker 1:
[57:32] It did feel like SponCon. I am very anti-AI, it's just like shitty Google, and if I want to go have something told to me that is incorrect with a lot of confidence, I will go to a golf course and talk to the first old white man I see and ask him a question about history. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2:
[57:52] No, and don't get me wrong, I don't think I've ever used AI.

Speaker 1:
[57:56] I used to try to use it for, sometimes I've talked about this before, but I'll have a very specific question, and because Google is asked now and DuckDuckGo, which I normally use, sometimes has, it doesn't give me the results that I want and I know exactly what I'm looking for, so I'll ask AI. AI does a super annoying thing where I'm like, I'll say something like, here's an example, what did Lindsey Graham say about Iran's nuclear capabilities in 1999? I'm looking for a very specific thing. Right. It'll come up with an article that references another, it'll be like, this is what he said, and it'll link to an article that isn't the original reporting and it's so dumb. It is so dumb, Alyssa.

Speaker 2:
[58:38] No, I agree.

Speaker 1:
[58:39] We need to learn why AI is stupid, so that we are not afraid of it. We need to learn the limits of it. I think if search engines are bad and this is the new search engine, then I can see it being justifiable to learn how to navigate how shitty it is. But you have to use AI. What are you talking about, Reese? I'm sorry. I like your work, but what are you talking about?

Speaker 2:
[59:04] Well, Sandra Bullock got on the bandwagon too.

Speaker 1:
[59:06] Wow, what a coincidence. Somebody is writing some checks, I think. Yeah, curiously, she shared a cautiously pro-AI attitude after fans were creating AI-generated scenes and trailers for the new Practical Magic sequel. She said, we have to lean into it. We have to use it in a really constructive and creative way, make it our friend.

Speaker 2:
[59:33] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[59:33] Why are we using the word lean in? Given what we, why are we using that phrase, given what we know about what?

Speaker 2:
[59:39] But here's the thing. Look, I love Sandra Bullock. It's so strange because I haven't seen her make a statement on anything in like a hundred years. So that's like the other reason, like she tends to be someone who's really not on social media, who's very private. So like when she did it too, I was like, what, what is happening?

Speaker 1:
[59:57] What is happening? I don't know. Maybe AI companies are overvalued as these like multi-bagillionaire things. And every single day we are being bombarded with all of this messaging that like AI is the future. You got to learn AI, blah, blah, blah, blah. And honestly, it feels like I'm being proselytized to by religious zealots because I can't see it. Like I can't see the future. This is all based on belief. This is all based on like a need for everyone else to believe in it in order for it to work. It's fucking Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, the audience has to clap and clap and clap and then the flashlight moves out of the little thing and she's alive. Like I don't believe that what AI is promising us will ever, ever come to fruition, the good or the bad. I think that there's going to be like bad effects, but it's just gonna be like mildly shitty. Like, or a letdown, you know?

Speaker 2:
[60:54] No, I get it.

Speaker 1:
[60:54] It's like going to Knott's Berry Farm after you've gone to Disneyland. You're like, what is this?

Speaker 2:
[61:00] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[61:01] Okay. I guess I get it. Do you think women need to learn AI? Like, for what purpose?

Speaker 2:
[61:08] No, I mean, I think that like, I think it's worthwhile just knowing what it is. Like, you know, so that you don't get tricked by it. Do you know what I mean? That's kind of, you know, so that you know it exists, you know what AI is capable of, so you can be aware of it in your own life. Not that you necessarily have to use it, but I think like knowing what it is capable of, how to not be tricked by it, how to not fall for scams that may be AI-related. I think all of that is like worthwhile, but I don't need an influencer to tell me after, you know, just they've maybe gotten some money for it.

Speaker 1:
[61:43] I mean, it just feels so like Girlboss 2.0, but this time shittier. Like, what are you talking about? You know, you have to, AI creates a different kind of work.

Speaker 2:
[61:54] Well, it was like, remember back in the day, this was maybe a year or so ago, I think at this point, when Natasha Lyon came out and said that her production company was going to like embrace AI and it's like, but, okay. So you're just, if that's what you're saying, then like you're putting people out of work.

Speaker 1:
[62:10] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[62:11] Why is that good?

Speaker 1:
[62:12] Yeah, I don't know. People would rather pay tons of money for robot software than use that money to pay human beings.

Speaker 2:
[62:19] Right.

Speaker 1:
[62:20] And it's gross. I hate it. It's anti-human. It's anti-human. Okay. Before we take a break, I wanted to let you all know that there's a new episode of Pod Save America, Only Friends. I love that name. With me, Erin Ryan, and what a day's Jane Costin out now. Only Friends is the Friends of the Pod subscription exclusive show where Crooked hosts unpack the stories that didn't make it to the main pods. Subscribers also get bonus content like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, where he breaks down the latest polling and what it means as the midterms approach. Terminally online, where Crooked hosts and staff reveal the unhinged rabbit holes their algorithms dragged them into this week and more. Subscribing to Friends of the Pod supports everything we do at Crooked and helps power independent progressive media. Hit pause and subscribe now at crooked.com/friends. Now a quick break and we'll be right back with a special interview.

Speaker 2:
[63:21] Hysteria is brought to you by Aura Frames. With an Aura Frame, you can capture and relive mom's magic every day. Erin, do you have a picture of your mom that always makes you smile?

Speaker 1:
[63:32] Yeah, but the ones that make me smile are the ones where she's like mad.

Speaker 2:
[63:36] Me too.

Speaker 1:
[63:39] My favorite mad picture of her is like, we're on vacation. I think we're at the Gettysburg site. All three of us are standing there. My brother's probably acting wild. My sister's probably whining, and I'm just being a jerk because I was like a teenager. And my mom is just, it looks like the life force has been drained out of her.

Speaker 2:
[63:58] My picture that I thought of the minute I read this was the four of us. I think Lauren, my sister, was like four or five, and I was eight or nine, and we went to Disney World. My sister and I are very sadly and hotly eating a Dole fruit and juice bar because it was the 80s and we were not allowed to have ice cream, obviously. Lauren's got her figment hat on, and my mom has just given up. She's just laying on this white bench, both arms out. She's like, I'm getting a tan on my face, and she was so annoyed by us.

Speaker 1:
[64:27] With Aura Frames, you can integrate reminders of your favorite memories into your day-to-day.

Speaker 2:
[64:31] That's amazing.

Speaker 1:
[64:32] Every frame comes with unlimited storage and simple controls so you can upload as many photos as you want and mom can pick the perfect one. She probably won't pick the same ones that we would pick.

Speaker 2:
[64:41] Probably not.

Speaker 1:
[64:41] It's a perfect gift. You can preload photos before it ships. You can add a personalized message and every frame comes packaged in a premium gift box with no price tag. Make Mother's Day special with Aura Frames. Name number one by wire cutter. You can save on the gifts moms love by visiting auraframes.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $25 off their best selling Carver Mat Frame with code HYSTERIA. That's AURAFRAMESCOM promo code HYSTERIA. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions apply. Hysteria is brought to you by Babbel. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of learning a new language, you're not alone. Studies show that 70% to 90% of people trying to learn a new language give up. Fortunately, Babbel is built so that it's really easy to get started. They understand that people learn differently, so you can dive into a podcast when you don't quite feel like a quick lesson. You can speak out loud to get that practice in. You can explore courses based on specific topics and even create your own customized review lists all within the app.

Speaker 2:
[65:36] Learning a language with Babbel is all about small steps, big wins, and progress you can actually track and feel. Their bite-sized lessons fit easily into your daily routine and are also easy to remember. Just 10 minutes a day is enough to start seeing real results. Babbel recognizes that real-world connections are at the heart of language learning. Their courses are designed by over 200 language experts, real human beings, to teach you relevant words and phrases you'll actually use, so you can start speaking with confidence in as little as three weeks. Babbel lets you practice real-life conversations step-by-step without the stress. You'll build the confidence to speak up when it matters, from ordering a coffee to chatting with a new friend abroad.

Speaker 1:
[66:14] And Babbel is more than just lessons that even offer a large collection of podcasts where Babbel experts reveal language secrets and offer an inside look at local cultures. Alyssa, the plan is we're going to send my older kid to a dual-language kindergarten. That is like an option in LA and it's really amazing, so we're going to take advantage of it. She's entering TK next year, but when she goes to kindergarten, we're going to get her into a dual-language program. So the clock is ticking for me to brush up on Spanish. Little kids are like sponges with that stuff. However you learn best by listening, speaking, reading, or writing, Babbel adapts to your style and keeps you motivated with personalized learning plans, real-time feedback, and progress tracking. Make fast, lasting progress with Babbel, the science-backed language learning app that actually works. Babbel has over 25 million subscriptions sold worldwide and with 14 languages to choose from, every course comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. Here's a special limited-time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com/hysteria. Get up to 60% off at babbel.com/hysteria, spelled babbel.com/hysteria. Rules and restrictions may apply. And welcome back, you're listening to Hysteria, the podcast for people that never realize that slowing down and really thinking about particles is actually kind of a good stress reliever. Today, joining me in the studio, we have Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor of physics and astronomy. She works on a wide breadth of research from theoretical physics to black feminist science. I'm in the middle of reading her new book, The Edge of Space-Time, and it's blowing my mind, just like your first book did. It's wonderful, it's mind-bending. We're so glad you're here. Welcome.

Speaker 4:
[68:01] Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:
[68:03] So congrats on the book. I've seen some rumors on social media that it's doing pretty well. How's it going?

Speaker 4:
[68:09] Yeah, so so far it's made two bestseller lists.

Speaker 1:
[68:11] Really?

Speaker 4:
[68:12] It's made the USA Today bestselling books list, and it's also made the indie bookstore bestselling list, which is very exciting. I'm so pleased that people are supporting indie bookstores.

Speaker 1:
[68:21] That's amazing. And it's a book, it's a science book. It's a book about science.

Speaker 4:
[68:26] It's very exciting for people to be supporting a science book so well that it could actually appear in the top 150. So it was 62 for USA Today, it was number nine for the indie bookstores. And that means people are going into indie bookstores and being like, yeah, I will totally pick up a book that talks about quantum field theory in it. Awesome.

Speaker 1:
[68:44] That's great. Well, so in the book, you claim that your party trick is coming up with limericks on the fly. Oh no.

Speaker 2:
[68:50] Oh no. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[68:51] Can you, I know I'm really putting you on the spot, but you're like the smartest person I know. Can you describe your book for our audience in limerick form?

Speaker 4:
[69:01] No fucking way.

Speaker 2:
[69:02] I don't think I can do that.

Speaker 1:
[69:05] I guess it's hard to like-

Speaker 4:
[69:06] There once was a physicist from East LA who said, I'm going to teach quantum field theory today. That delightful black queer physicist from East LA. That's like an Edward Lear style limerick.

Speaker 1:
[69:24] I love that. Oh my gosh. I knew I was going to put you on the spot, but you came through, Chanda. As a primer, and I know it's a big question, what is particle physics? How would you explain it to somebody who sees words like particle physics and cosmology and their eyes start to glaze over because they think it's beyond what they can grasp?

Speaker 4:
[69:45] I think the traditional way to answer this question is to say that particles are subatomic phenomenon. All atoms are made out of particles. So an electron, which you've probably heard of as a particle, protons and neutrons that are also in atoms are particles. Protons and neutrons are actually made of something called quarks. So those are the smallest particles inside of them. So I could give you a kind of this like taxonomy answer, but I don't think that really gives you a feel for it. So what I wanted to do in the edge of space-time was give people a sense of what does it mean when I tell you something is made out of quarks? Like what's a quark? What's its relevance? And what's the mathematical structure that this is made from? So the mathematical formalism that we use to describe particle physics is something called quantum field theory. And this is the idea that there is basically something that's pervading throughout all of space-time that is causing particles to manifest in different locations. So basically you take empty space and empty space has energy in it that can manifest into particles. That's a much cooler way of talking about particle physics, right? So I have a chapter in the book called Burn Abstract Contraption Made of Nothing. And that's basically the idea is that we're all made of these particles that come from what seems like nothing. And it's a cool mind-bending thing to think about that I think can be really freeing for your mind.

Speaker 1:
[71:06] Yeah, you're right with a lot of clarity. I'm not a science person. I majored in English. But you're really good at distilling complicated concepts for people who might be shy. And you tie in like pop culture references and history references. How has your experience teaching college students informed the way that you write about these complicated subjects?

Speaker 4:
[71:26] So I will say that when I started working on this book, I had just finished teaching a graduate course on quantum physics. And in the process of preparing that course, I started thinking a lot about one particular quantum physics experiment called the Stern-Gerlach experiment and got really obsessed with it. The fun thing about this experiment is that when you fully explain it to people, it's something that actually doesn't make sense. And that's actually kind of the point. It's the thing that pushes you out of your Newtonian, classical everyday sensibility into the weird world of quantum physics. And so actually at the core of this book, I really wanted to write about that particular experiment. And I was at a workshop with a bunch of theoretical physicists in Santa Barbara last year. And was like, yeah, I'm writing this section about the Stern-Gerlach experiment for the book. And literally everybody at the table stopped and looked at me like I had broken something. They were like, you don't talk to people about the Stern-Gerlach experiment. But my attitude about it was like, this was fun to teach my students because I taught it to them three times throughout the course. And then the third time I had someone raise their hand and say, that doesn't make any sense. And I was like, yes, now you get it. And I think that's the experience I want people to have is realizing that the universe is fucking weird. And that's actually a good thing. And it's a reminder that whatever we're being told is normal or there's some boundary that we can't go past, whether that's like a physical boundary in terms of like being able to leave East LA and go pursue my dreams of doing physics or whether that's like a political boundary of it's not possible to build a society where bodily autonomy is simply respected, that we can imagine past that because the universe is weird, so why not?

Speaker 1:
[73:13] Mm-hmm, right. There's nothing natural about the way that things are right now. And the way that things are is they don't, it doesn't follow the rules anyway. You're a big advocate for more diversity in science. Not a good time for that. How has the second Trump administration impacted that goal for you?

Speaker 4:
[73:30] You know, my first book was called The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey into Dark Matter Space-Time and Dreams Deferred. And that Dreams Deferred piece was like a really important part for me because a lot of the book was about what's wrong with physics and specifically in terms of inclusion and how people are treated in the field. At the time that I wrote the book, I had a lot of criticisms, but I also felt like we were starting to put things in place to protect people and things were definitely better than they were when I was a graduate student. And over the last year, it's really been watching like dreams deferred come to life, come roaring back as we watch all of the protections we put in place get taken away. And it can be hard for the general public to appreciate the long-term impact of that. If, you know, for example, black women graduate students are pushed to the margins, or black women don't get admitted to graduate programs now, in 20 years, that means no black women faculty. So we don't necessarily feel it immediately, but the long-term consequences are enormous, and it kind of sends us back to square one, which is what they want. This is like what Caritha Mitchell calls know your place aggression. They're basically telling us to go back to where we belong, and we don't belong in physics departments, in their view.

Speaker 1:
[74:45] Well, one thing I appreciate about your work is you challenge the narrative that all important scientific discoveries originated from European men. And you wrote a lot about that in your first book. But you also, you touch on a couple of those, challenging that narrative in this book as well. Can you go over an example or two in your latest book that spotlights the way that people outside of Europe were kind of ahead of the curve when it came to scientific breakthroughs?

Speaker 4:
[75:13] Yeah. So I definitely made a lot of my friends nuts for a good like two or three weeks while I was working on The Edge of Space-Time, because I was trying to figure out how I was going to talk about Newtonian physics and when a lot of, there are a lot of books out there that go over like Isaac Newton and his contributions to what was called at the time natural philosophy. I was like, okay, I don't want to just do what everybody else did and also I actually found that class kind of boring in college. So I was trying to figure out how do I make it interesting to me because if it's not interesting to me, why should my audience care? In the process, I saw a tidbit somewhere that basically a millennium before Newton was alive, that some Jow Kingdom philosophers had already started to think through some ideas that are very similar to one of Newton's laws.

Speaker 1:
[75:55] Oh, interesting.

Speaker 4:
[75:56] So I chased down the only three English language translations of this text, the Mo Qing, and realized that there were all of these incredible examples that were written in what we would call ancient Chinese, but this is before Imperial China forms. They were doing all of these amazing things trying to figure out how do I explain the difference between extent in space and duration in time, and saying things like, an ox is not a horse. So I ended up using that as an example in the book. I have this delightful drawing of an ox and a horse, so that you can be reminded.

Speaker 1:
[76:33] There's pictures in the book.

Speaker 4:
[76:34] There's pictures. Sharif Azanib Williams did an amazing job with the figures in the book. But that's an example of realizing that these things that get framed as being from a very particular intellectual moment in European history, were actually a long part of conversation in different parts of the world. There are other examples. I talk about Taki Eldin, who was an astronomer in the Middle East, who was Muslim and was thinking about a mechanistic universe and the idea of mechanism well before that becomes popular in European discourses. For me, that was challenging to reframe my understanding of what is the lineage of these ideas and whose story is physics actually.

Speaker 1:
[77:20] Well, here at Hysteria, we have a series called This Fucking Guy, where we spotlight-

Speaker 4:
[77:23] I love that series.

Speaker 1:
[77:24] Thank you. We pick one person we think is making America worse, and we talk about why they suck. We've done tech bros. As you know, we've done Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, we've done Jeff Bezos. If there was a science, This Fucking Guy, who would you choose?

Speaker 4:
[77:38] Oh man, actually, I would go with Isaac Newton.

Speaker 1:
[77:40] You would go with Isaac Newton?

Speaker 4:
[77:41] That dude was a total fucker.

Speaker 1:
[77:45] What did he do?

Speaker 4:
[77:45] I mean, so he was like a cop. He was in charge, at one point, he was basically the cop for the Mint, and he was like into, I think people lost fingers. What? He was also invested in the enslavement trade.

Speaker 1:
[77:59] Oh no.

Speaker 4:
[78:00] He was invested in colonialism. He was, I don't think he was a nice man. He was like kind of an asshole. Oh my God. I mean, I also would say, if the film Oppenheimer hadn't come out, he would be my second choice, because for a long time, people didn't know about the poison apple thing, where he tried to poison his teacher at Cambridge.

Speaker 1:
[78:22] Yes.

Speaker 4:
[78:22] And the part that's not in the film is that his parents sailed to England to basically clean up that mess. Like the only reason Oppenheimer got out of that is because he was a rich kid.

Speaker 1:
[78:33] Oh my gosh.

Speaker 4:
[78:34] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[78:34] Also that movie wasn't that good. Can I just say it? It wasn't that good.

Speaker 4:
[78:37] I didn't like it. I didn't like it either. The film crews were so mad at me about it. And I actually, I write about Nolan's work in the book, because there are things that I think Nolan does really, really well.

Speaker 1:
[78:47] This is no shade on him as a filmmaker. I personally just didn't think the film was well done. And it's nice to know that it's not about a good dude anyway.

Speaker 4:
[78:55] And I find Oppenheimer as a Jewish person and as a Jewish physicist to be very fascinating, particularly because he came from a German Jewish family. And that particular community in New York actually opposed the immigration of Eastern European Jewish families like mine. And he was also a student of the Ethical Culture School. And so some of that doesn't really make its way into the movie. But I found David Krumholtz's performance in that film is like the best thing about that film. That's a positive thing I can say about the movie, as is Isidore Robbie. Because Robbie had this theory that Oppenheimer not dealing with his Jewishness was his problem. So I think that that would be a really interesting thing to talk about.

Speaker 1:
[79:37] For sure. Space has been in the news quite a bit these last couple of weeks. Given how awful the news is on Earth, I totally get why people would be like, I really want to embrace this story. It's never the astronauts and the Nutella and the space hugs and the beautiful flowing sentences about the beauty of the Earth or whatever. But I understand you've got some notes for the way that the media has been covering the Artemis mission and is the public getting the whole story. What should people know?

Speaker 4:
[80:06] The Nutella moment is actually a really interesting one because I've been thinking a lot about that Brad Pitt film Ad Astra where on the moon there's like a freaking Applebee's and you're like what the fuck did you guys do to the moon? And the Nutella moment was like this incredible advertising. Like I don't think they could have dreamed up better advertising for like Nutella is so good that the astronauts took it on a giant around the moon, right? And at the same time the Artemis mission, the media hasn't really talked about the fact that it's a commercialization and militarization mission. So this is a mission, it's not about going out and being curious and seeking out new life and new civilizations as we Trekkies might say. It is absolutely about going and launching capitalism into space and it's a decision that's being made by a very small number of people on behalf of the entire planet. So just coming back to the Nutella Applebee's thing, we actually have to worry about what will happen a few generations from now. Will the next generation or two generations from now be able to look at the moon and see the same thing that we see? I don't think that that's a small thing. Our species has only ever seen the moon in one way basically, and we might be making the decision that for the rest of all time, our species will have a very different experience. That's a big spiritual decision in addition to a big scientific decision. The other thing is that the reason that we were able to see that nutella in such high resolution is because of a technology that was developed primarily by the Department of Defense and NASA in collaboration at the Department of Defense's Lincoln Labs. Just sometimes in the press called MIT's Lincoln Labs, but MIT is just paid by the Department of Defense to manage it for them. These are like the little things that get left out. So basically in watching that nutella, not ad, I was about to say nutella ad, the nutella video, we're watching an experiment and participating in a military technology experiment. We need to be honest and I think that the science media has done a really bad job. I think the policy media also increasingly people who cover policy are going to need to be well-versed in science policy because that's clearly a very important thing right now.

Speaker 1:
[82:23] You mentioned being a Trekkie. I have weirdly, I keep running into Trekkies. One of my best friends here is a Trekkie.

Speaker 4:
[82:31] Because we're awesome.

Speaker 1:
[82:33] We have a Trekkie, Kendra here is a Trekkie, Kendra James who works here is a Trekkie. How has being a Trekkie influenced the way that you see science and poetry and culture? How has that influenced the way you see those things intersect?

Speaker 4:
[82:51] I think one of the things that's important about Star Trek is that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, was obviously a huge literature and Shakespeare nerd, and believed in the power of classical literary storytelling. So a lot of that is in the original series. You also see this in The Next Generation. You literally cast Patrick Stewart as his captain on The Next Generation. So, deeply classical. He believed in the power of drama and storytelling to tell critical stories about society and civilization. He understood Star Trek not just as a projection of what our future could be if we learn to take care of each other and make sure everybody's basic needs are met, because he basically crafts a socialist utopia in Star Trek, but it's also a warning sign, because first in the Star Trek universe before they get to that socialist utopia, there is a third world war, there's a eugenicist war, and the 2020s in Star Trek are actually quite bad.

Speaker 1:
[83:54] Oh no. Are they lining up with the real 2020s?

Speaker 4:
[83:58] It's an interesting question because one of the famous incidents that's portrayed in Star Trek Deep Space Nine is something called the Bell Riots that supposedly happened in 2024 in San Francisco. In that version of San Francisco, the rates of homelessness are very high. There is a big distance between these high-tech authoritarian bros who have everything in San Francisco and then these homeless people that they're trying to keep distance from. And it's much more extreme than the San Francisco of 2024, but there's clearly a lot of overlap between them. And there's also been a lot of unrest because people are not happy with their social conditions. I think the decision that a lot of voters made in response to that in 2024 it was obviously like atrociously wrong. But there is a reason that populism speaks to people. And I do think that that story about the Bell Riots taps into that.

Speaker 1:
[84:54] Yeah, you talk a little bit about Afrofuturism in the book. I mean, this is an Afrofuturist adjacent book for sure. And a lot of times people bring up Octavia Butler in the Parable of the Sower as another forward thinking work of literature. So it's like just a comment. It's just interesting to read you talk about her in the book as well.

Speaker 4:
[85:12] Yeah, I mean, she's hard to read right now, right? Because like the Parable series opens and there are these fires and it's 2024 and then 2025, right? And it's set in Los Angeles. And it's literally like, I wrote about our time. And I think that there is a real lesson there. Octavia Butler is sometimes talked about as being kind of like a seer or a visionary. And really, what she was doing is she looked at Ronald Reagan's campaign, where their slogan was, Let's Make America Great Again, and just projected what happens if that slogan takes hold and keeps coming back. And so she was a really astute student of history. And I think that when we read Butler, that's part of what we should be paying attention to. And in The Edge of Space-Time, the argument that I'm making is that we should go back and know our history, including our cosmic history. And so I think that that's the connection, is that she was also saying, if you know your history, then you can start to think about what the future might be. But she also says in her non-fiction writing to not count out the surprises. So she's not saying we're doomed, we're destined for this crap. She's also saying that we have to be ready for things to go differently than we expected because maybe we make a different choice.

Speaker 1:
[86:32] All right. You're one of the smartest people I know. I have a dumb question. What's the dumbest thing you're into right now?

Speaker 4:
[86:39] Wait, I have to think about this for a second.

Speaker 1:
[86:40] I mean, you used to be into reality TV.

Speaker 4:
[86:42] I used to be into reality TV. Okay. I have it.

Speaker 1:
[86:45] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[86:46] I have been watching The Vampire Diaries.

Speaker 1:
[86:49] Okay. Is it currently making new episodes?

Speaker 4:
[86:51] No.

Speaker 1:
[86:52] So you're watching an old vampire show.

Speaker 4:
[86:54] I'm marathoning The Vampire Diaries, which is basically like a soap opera with vampires, and I got into it because I finally saw the Twilight movies for the first time a few months ago, and became completely obsessed. I am super into Twilight now.

Speaker 1:
[87:12] Wait, ironically, or you're just like, this is good and I like it?

Speaker 4:
[87:17] Both. So I definitely think that you will, for anyone who hasn't watched Twilight, you should, and the reason that you should watch the first movie at least, is if you watch it as if it's camp, it is like perfect campy film making. Like I just like, they're so good.

Speaker 1:
[87:33] Yeah. I mean, and you're a baseball fan, so I'm immediately thinking of how you're receiving the like scene where they're playing, they have to play baseball in the thunderstorm because they're so good at playing baseball.

Speaker 4:
[87:43] It's so funny. That said, and there are so many things, I've read the first book, I haven't gotten through the second one. I will say, I don't think Stephanie Meyer is the most amazing writer of all time. But she is a great world builder, or what I would say, a great universe builder. She just decided, I am making vampires totally unlike vampires have ever existed before. Like they glisten like diamonds, and they are hard like rocks. And so when they have sex, they make clanging noises, I guess. I've heard there's a lot of discussion on Reddit about the clanging sex with the vampires. And I am just so impressed by how intensely driven she was to just create the saying, where she was like, I obviously really want to have this deep, sensual, clanging diamond sex thing with blood and biting. And there is a little bit of a feminist element to it, even though it's sort of weird about pre-marital sex. It is a representation of teenage girls being horny and that being totally normal. And I love that for teenage girls.

Speaker 1:
[88:58] You know what, I did not expect that answer to this question but I will take it.

Speaker 4:
[89:02] In my next book, I will.

Speaker 1:
[89:04] You know, I had to read all three of them for an assignment at Jezebel, like whatever, 15 years ago now. And just beware, because after I read all three of them in a short period of time, I felt like...

Speaker 4:
[89:15] No, there are four.

Speaker 1:
[89:16] Well, I read all of them in a short period of time. Right, see, I felt myself get dumber. With the end of it. Like I felt myself, like my writing was like bad. Like there's some writers I can read and I'll be so inspired, you're one of them. I'll be so inspired by how good the writing is that it like makes me better. It gives me a little boost for a little while, but this is like opposite. So don't read it right before you have to write something. Because it won't be as easy as writing normally is. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, thank you so much for joining us and you can get her book at your local independent bookstore.

Speaker 4:
[89:53] Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:
[89:54] Thanks for coming.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
[91:05] Oh, they have? How do they look?

Speaker 2:
[91:06] They're alive and they're about to go into the ground because it was very cold here, so we had to keep them in the garage for a little while.

Speaker 1:
[91:13] I just got my garden in the ground and I've been perusing, but I'm just going to sit with it for a little bit because-

Speaker 2:
[91:20] Sometimes you just have to see what comes to you.

Speaker 1:
[91:21] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[91:41] I've thought about a lemon tree for inside the house. I have one that could get pretty big because we have high ceilings.

Speaker 1:
[91:45] Yeah. You should. Why not?

Speaker 2:
[91:47] I know. All right. Next up. Maybe I'll use our discount.

Speaker 1:
[91:51] You can also grow a wide variety of house plants all grown with care and hand selected to thrive in your home. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% off their first purchase when using code hysteria at checkout. That's an additional 20% off better plants and better growing at fastgrowingtrees.com using code hysteria at checkout. fastgrowingtrees.com code hysteria. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use hysteria to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. And welcome back, you're listening to Hysteria, the podcast for people tempted to blow all their cash on the Diane Keaton Auction.

Speaker 2:
[92:36] I'm excited about the auction.

Speaker 1:
[92:38] Do you have your eyes on anything? I haven't even looked at it yet.

Speaker 2:
[92:41] Not yet, no, I'm gonna look. It was gonna be my sit down and have a glass of wine before dinner and browse the auction.

Speaker 1:
[92:49] I love that. I love that for you.

Speaker 2:
[92:51] I love her. You did good, kid.

Speaker 1:
[92:54] RIP. It was the 10-year anniversary of Prince dying on Tuesday.

Speaker 2:
[92:58] I know I saw that.

Speaker 1:
[92:59] I walked into the Keep It studio where Lewis was preparing to record Keep It and announced it to the studio. He was like, okay, maybe we shouldn't have you on the show every week. Just coming in and announcing really sad facts that I talked about how much Prince loved the WNBA because he was really into tall, strong women. How he had the Minnesota links over to his house after they won the WNBA championship. He did a private concert for them that lasted all night long and he's amazing.

Speaker 4:
[93:28] He was amazing.

Speaker 1:
[93:29] He was the celebrity that when he died, I was like, he was my Diane Keaton.

Speaker 2:
[93:32] I get it.

Speaker 1:
[93:33] I get it.

Speaker 2:
[93:34] He's a good man and he loved Minnesota and he loved his town. He just, he was a good person.

Speaker 1:
[93:40] I feel like if Prince had been alive when ICE was raiding the town, he would have sent purple drones in to take out his own private, he would have become like a paramilitary ruler of the independent state of Minneapolis, St. Paul. I think he would have marched with armies. That's just a little imagination flight of fancy I've been doing today. Before we get to Sandy Petty, some announcements for the class. If the latest ICE raids, police crackdowns, and law and order talking points feel like they're everywhere and somehow never explained, Empire City is where it starts to make sense. Host Tanjere Kumanika breaks down how these systems were built, who they were built for, and why they keep showing up in every headline. Now he's taking Empire City off the feed and onto your screen for a live conversation with journalist Matt Katz and Yale professor Elizabeth Hinton, two people who've spent years reporting on and studying policing from completely different angles.

Speaker 2:
[94:36] They'll dig into how we got here and what comes next. Join them live Tuesday, April 28th at 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Sign up at crookedideas.org/empirecity.

Speaker 1:
[94:48] Spring is all about fresh starts, new t-shirts and terrifying new reasons to call your reps. The Crooked Store's Call Congress line has been a best seller since it launched years ago, and now it's available in new spring colors like butter yellow and chocolate brown. Alyssa, you know who came up with the Call Congress shirt?

Speaker 2:
[95:03] Me. You did?

Speaker 1:
[95:04] Yeah, that was me. That was an Erin Ryan original back in the fucking day. That was me. My baby will outlive me. Plus, all the pieces got a quality upgrade so your favorites can stay in rotation for even longer. Calling your reps has never been more important, so why not make spreading the word as easy as throwing on a comfy t-shirt, crew neck or hat? Head to crooked.com/store to shop. Now let's get to Sandy Petty. Alyssa, what are you feeling this week? Sanity?

Speaker 2:
[95:31] Sandy. Okay. Erin, I know I shared it with you, but I really was just tickled, warmed, loved an article about the cookie house at Carleton College in Minnesota.

Speaker 1:
[95:46] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[95:47] This, to me, was so lovely. So going back decades, there has been a house at Carleton College that is always stocked so that people can show up and make chocolate chip cookies. Now, you can bring your own ingredients. You can make whatever you'd like, bake whatever you'd like. They have space for people to study and have quiet time. But at the end of the day, when you have baked something, you may eat what you eat, but you have to leave the rest for people who then come to the house. And Erin, in this brain broken world that we live in, reading about a place where you could just go and bake a cookie or whatever you want, and the stories that they had about kids who would go there after being in the library, and they would try their grandparents' recipes, and would teach each other how to make biscuits, and how to make different doughs, and they were really into it. I was like, if every town had a house where you could go make cookies and just take what you want, leave the rest, I don't know, I just thought it was lovely, and community, and how the people had taken care of the house for all of these years, the students in the university, from the woman whose idea it was originally. It was just fucking lovely, I loved it.

Speaker 1:
[97:04] I love that. Also, just shout out to Carleton College. It's a great school. It's in Northfield, Minnesota. If you ever want to have a really good time on Zillow, Northfield is so cute. It is a cute town.

Speaker 2:
[97:15] It looks so cute.

Speaker 1:
[97:16] St. Olaf is also in Northfield. So it's like a little college town.

Speaker 2:
[97:21] Famously, where Rose Nyland from The Golden Girls was from.

Speaker 1:
[97:24] Yes. Famously, where my sister-in-law graduated from also. Okay. My brother went there for a year before he transferred. But St. Olaf, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, just like amazing.

Speaker 2:
[97:37] 10 out of 10.

Speaker 1:
[97:38] I love it. 10 out of 10.

Speaker 2:
[97:39] It seemed charming. I loved the story. I shared it with a million people because I'm like, you should read this today. This is great.

Speaker 1:
[97:45] It is great. Northfield itself is like a Hallmark movie set looking. Like it's so cute. I don't want to like, it felt that way. I don't want to blow up its spot, but it's so cute. I haven't been to Northfield in a while, but it is like so cute. It's as cute as Stillwater in my opinion. Stillwater, Minnesota is also one of the cutest places I think I've ever been. It's so cute.

Speaker 2:
[98:04] Minnesota.

Speaker 1:
[98:04] Minnesota's got some cute ass towns guys.

Speaker 2:
[98:07] And it's got Prince. I mean, main Prince in Peace.

Speaker 1:
[98:09] Well, the ghost of Prince.

Speaker 2:
[98:10] The ghost of Prince, but they had Prince for a long time.

Speaker 1:
[98:12] They've had Prince for a long time. Okay, here's a thing I'm feeling petty about. This is also like Midwestern based. I recently, I've been trying to like kind of, when I have the bandwidth, I try to fill in the blind spots in my pop culture history.

Speaker 2:
[98:28] Okay, fair.

Speaker 1:
[98:29] And the other night, I had the energy to stay awake for long enough to watch a movie. And I wanted to put on A Simple Plan, which is a movie from like-

Speaker 2:
[98:38] Oh, I've watched that.

Speaker 1:
[98:39] Yeah, the late 90s. It's like Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton. And it's a movie about these guys in rural Minnesota, who come across a plane that's crashed in the woods, and the plane is full of cash. And they take the cash, and then everything kind of like goes sideways from there, because they're- anyway. So here's my petty, and I've harped on this before, but I really need to keep harping on it. Two things. I had to just piece out of the movie.

Speaker 2:
[99:08] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[99:08] And the reason that I had to piece- it's like well-written, it's well-paced, it's well-shot. Some of the scenes were shot like very close to where I grew up. So I was like, oh yeah, it's Ashland. It's outside of Ashland. So anyway, it's, you know, and the winter scenes are beautiful. It just feels like there's not a lot of movies that feel or look like that anymore. Well acted. It was well acted except for one thing. Just because a movie takes place in a rural area does not mean that Billy Bob Thornton's accent is appropriate. A local person in Minnesota would never have a drawl. We just because there are tractors in town that you sometimes have to share the road with doesn't mean people have a fucking southern accent. It drives me absolutely bananas.

Speaker 2:
[99:57] That's funny.

Speaker 1:
[99:58] There are plenty of transplants in Los Angeles in the film industry that came from the Midwest. I know that you know better. I know that you know and you should have known better in the late 90s too. The Coen brothers were a thing. The Coen brothers don't get it wrong because the Coen brothers are actually from Minneapolis, St. Paul. And so when they make movies that are set in the Midwest, people speak appropriately. They're not drawing. If someone were drawing in my hometown, it would be like, what is this person doing? Everyone else talks like the mom from Bobby's World. Like there is not a world where people, just because it's a small town, doesn't mean there's a Southern accent. And this is why I hated the movie Three Billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri. I hate that movie with a fucking passion. And I will like yell at anyone who likes it. Nobody in this small town in Missouri has the same accent. What? What? You all are in this same insular little area, and you talk to each other all day. That's why people like, that's how accents form. People don't just like come in. Some of them are like, oh, y'all, I got to get this cash out of this airplane here in Minnesota. Like, that's not how, it drives me nuts. I had to peace out. And then I tried to go back to it, and I was like, OK, can I set this aside? And just whatever. Bill Paxton is at the height of his powers, and I love Billy Bob Thornton.

Speaker 2:
[101:16] That's, wait, but you know what's funny? So when you set a simple plan, and I was like, oh yeah, I've seen that movie. No. I saw a simple favor with Blake Lively and the Kendrick.

Speaker 1:
[101:25] Oh, OK, yeah, yeah. No, that's a totally different, the totally different thing.

Speaker 2:
[101:28] I was like, oh yeah, I saw this. I was like, it was shockingly good. And then I was like, wait a minute, hard left.

Speaker 1:
[101:33] Yeah, I mean, but here's the thing. Here's the thing. I tried to go back to it, and I was like, oh, you know what? Actually, I just, I don't want to watch a movie where only men talk to each other. I just can't. It fails the best test so hard that I was just like, I don't actually care. And then the other night, I tried to put on Tropic Thunder to like relax, cause it's so silly. And I was like, I don't need to hear all these men talking to each other. I just, I don't care for this. I don't care for this at all. I don't think I can do it anymore. I don't think I can watch movies where it's just men talking to each other. That's fair. I just don't, it doesn't mean that all movies where men talk to each other are bad. It just means I had a set amount of patience for that type of media and it's gone. I've used it all. I've spent it. I don't have anymore. Maybe it'll replenish. Maybe it'll respawn, but I can't do it anymore. Yeah, I guess it's like a two-pronged petty. I can't do, you got to get the accents right.

Speaker 2:
[102:27] You can't do bad accents, but also movies with only men talking.

Speaker 1:
[102:30] Well, in Anatomy of a Fall, which was a European film, it takes place in a border region and they're so, like, exactly on what everybody's accent and linguistics should be, that, like, people are speaking different versions of French and, like, switching into English and French and German. Right. And it's like, in America, we can't even get, like, regional accents right. And that's half of the fun of doing movies set in other places, is, like, giving actors a chance to, like, work with linguistics coach and get it right, and, like, that's fun. Anyway, so, yeah, I can't do the bad accents movies anymore. I can't do movies where it's only men talking to each other or only boys talking to each other, because they just don't care what they're talking about. I'm done. Done caring.

Speaker 2:
[103:13] You know what? I recommend just a nice little palette cleanser of steel magnolias.

Speaker 1:
[103:19] Ooh, that's a good idea.

Speaker 2:
[103:20] Only women talking to each other except for, what's his name, the husband whose hat I have. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I was like, wow, I have a fishing hat from the 1980s. But that, it's like you listen to Shirley MacLaine, and Olympia Dukakis, and Sally Field, who was way younger than I am when that movie was filmed and Julia Roberts. It is Daryl Hannah way before Ryan Murphy did the hatchet job he did to her in his latest show. But it's really enjoyable. I watched it last week and I was like, this is a perfect movie.

Speaker 1:
[103:56] All right. Well, I will try to find a palette cleanser. I mean, luckily now there are more options of entertainment where it's just women talking to each other than I think ever before. So that's a good thing for me. All right. That's all the time we have for this week's episode of Hysteria. We want to thank Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for stopping by. Smartest person we know. She's literally a theoretical astrophysicist. Amazing. Buy her book. It's available in your local independent bookstore. If you want to get in touch, hysteria at crooked.com is our email address. I want to thank everybody who got in touch about the book Sophie's Squash. When I said that my little one was carrying a potato around, a lot of people got in touch, a lot of librarians and people in the know were like, check out this book. It's about a little girl that has a friend that's a squash and the squash dies. I'm like, okay, cool.

Speaker 2:
[104:44] It's like the Velveteen Rabbit, but with a squash.

Speaker 1:
[104:47] It is. But I'm definitely going to try and check it out from the Los Angeles library and read it to my little one, see if it resonates. I found it in her purse the other day. She has a purse.

Speaker 4:
[105:01] That's so cute though.

Speaker 1:
[105:02] Yeah. So I'll let everybody know how that all goes. Yeah. Anyway, that's the show. We'll be back with more Hysteria next week. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Subscribe to Hysteria on YouTube for access to video versions of your favorite segments and other exclusive content. And if you are as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a nice review. Hysteria is a Crooked Media production. Caroline Reston is our Senior Producer, our Executive Producer is me, Erin Ryan, and Alyssa Mastromonaco is our Co-Producer. Claire Fogarty is our Associate Producer. The show is engineered and edited by Jordan Cantor. We get audio support from Charlotte Landis. Our video producers are Rachel Gajewski and Claudia Sheng. Matt DeGroote is our Head of Production. Adrian Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Kendra James is our Executive Producer of Culture and Entertainment. And thank you to Daisy Cruz and David Tolles for production and marketing support every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.