It’s 10 a.m. and way too early for a hand-job story. But Erin Ryan, the host of the popular political podcast Hysteria, is telling one anyway.

Looking across a table littered with printed news articles and crumbs from a pound cake she’d baked, Ryan is animatedly telling her cohosts, Ziwe Fumudoh and Alyssa Mastromonaco, about a time she was at a party and saw a woman giving a guy a hand job on the crowded dance floor.

Hysteria launched in June and hit number one on iTunes. .

“Everybody was just sort of quietly dancing away, instead of being like, ‘Stop giving a hand job on the dance floor,’” Ryan says, coming to the point she’s trying to make with this story: “Donald Trump is the dance-floor hand job of the American presidency—nobody is saying anything, because everybody is hoping that somebody else says something first.”

This—comparing our current political miasma to a sex act—is what makes Ryan and Hysteria so damn compelling. She and her six cohosts are able to discuss the often bleak things happening in the country in a way that makes you feel energized rather than resigned to living out your life in Gilead.



Hysteria is a recent addition to the Crooked Media network, founded by former Obama White House staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, and it’s their first and only podcast featuring just women. The show launched at the top of iTunes charts in June, but really, it’s part of an ongoing effort by the network to do something that feels revolutionary but shouldn’t. Or, to borrow a word Fumudoh coined in a conversation about Sandra Oh finally getting an Emmy nod for Lead Actress in a Drama, it’s “sadgressive”—progressive but sad that it’s considered progress in 2018.

It’s a stupidly simple premise, especially now, as the country is in the midst of a long-needed push to diversify its leaders: Hire women, hire people of color, let them be their full selves, and trust them to do great work. Crooked now has 14 female on-air contributors—the type of roster that listeners had been demanding since the company launched in January 2017. The (vocal) Crooked fan base has praised the non–“white dude” voices added to the network over the past year, and since its premiere, Hysteria has been downloaded nearly a million times, charming hand-job anecdotes and all.

Julissa Arce “Crooked Conversations” host, author, activist



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How, exactly, do you attract so many knowledgeable, quick-witted, and otherwise very busy women to a podcast network? Let women drive the hiring.

“Most of our team is women, and out of the women who work here, a lot of us, maybe half of us, are women of color,” says Mukta Mohan, a producer who’s been with Crooked since August 2017.

Mohan, who books the guests for Lovett’s weekly live show, Lovett or Leave It, noticed a pattern: The shows were better when they were diverse. “For us, it’s like, ‘Who is the best person to speak about these topics, and how can we have a truly representative set of voices?’” she says. “We’re not booking people because they’re first generation or because they’re women or because they’re trans. We can have diverse panels where we talk about the news without tokenizing people.”

As a first-generation American, Mohan says she grew up never seeing people who looked like her on TV, so now that she’s working in media, it’s her personal goal to make sure Crooked’s audience hears from voices that are more reflective of the country as a whole.

That matters not just because featuring more perspectives makes for a less boring show but also because, as Crooked contributor and former Bernie Sanders press secretary Symone Sanders (no relation) says, podcasts are to the left what talk radio is to the right. Which is to say: an intimate influence on people’s political points of view. Throughout 2017, episodes of Crooked’s flagship show, Pod Save America, regularly hit 1.5 million listeners—more than some cable news shows—and the early download numbers of Hysteria suggest the show is filling a serious gap.

“The guys will acknowledge this criticism,” Sanders says of the fact that before hiring a bunch of women, “they were three young white boys talking about politics—on the Democratic side of the aisle—at a time when black women and people of color are not just important but also vital to the conversation and integral to what is happening on the left.”

Not only were they all white dudes, but, as former White House staffers, they also brought similar outlooks to the table. The female contributors represent a much wider range of backgrounds. On Hysteria, for instance, only Mastromonaco (who also worked in the Obama White House) has government experience. The rest of the hosts are writers, activists, filmmakers, and comedians, which is how a politics show is able to turn you into that person laughing out loud in public to what’s going on in your earbuds. It’s also how Hysteria avoids the usual podcast pitfall of dissolving into a political dick-measuring contest of who knows the most.

“It’s not about impressing the people you’re having a conversation with if you’re doing a podcast—it’s about giving information or joy or laughter to the people you’re speaking to,” Ryan explains. “I really wanted Hysteria to be a show that made our listeners think that talking about politics was something they can and should be doing, even if they’re not professional political-opinion-havers.”



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That includes people like “moms and girls in college and business ladies on the road,” Mastromonaco says, who want to “get a laugh” and “forget about how fucked up the world is for a minute—even though sometimes we talk about how fucked up the world is.”

Because as it turns out, humor and understanding the dire state of abortion access aren’t mutually exclusive. Fumudoh says making jokes out of the really awful stuff is the only way she can cope with the trauma. “I think when men approach tragedy with humor, it’s viewed as high art,” Ryan says. “And when women do it, sometimes it’s viewed as less than high art.”

It also helps that Crooked is doing the rare, radical (sadgressive) thing of hiring women and then leaving them alone. That freedom allows room for refreshing additions to a media landscape so overcrowded with politi-bros that there’s a viral tweet mocking “podcast” as an alternate term for a group of white men. And it means hosts like activist Brittany Packnett can be honest about the topics they’re learning about right alongside you. After her recent discovery of how proposed straw bans affect people with disabilities, she decided to devote an episode of Pod Save the People to the issue.

“With TV, you can build fans, but with podcast and radio and more intimate settings, you can build community, and that’s what we try to do,” she says. “You literally feel like you’re talking with and learning with friends you’ve never met.”

The network could still be more representative. “Black women consistently bring it during Crooked Media podcasts,” one listener wrote on Facebook. “Are there plans for a black woman Crooked contributor to have her own podcast?” Or as Sanders suggests, they could add a podcast hosted by a group of Latinx young people. But with the addition just this month of 17-year-old Winter BreeAnne as a contributor focused on making content appealing to Gen Z listeners, it seems Crooked knows there are still far too many people left out of the conversation.

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Crooked Conversations No-bullshit interviews about the stories you aren't seeing in headlines. Hysteria A political podcast that examines the issues that matter most to women. Keep It A show about the intersection of pop culture and politics. Pod Save the People Conversations that help turn energy into activism. With Friends Like These Interviews that explore the difference and similarities across party lines.



What you probably won’t see the network do much of is give a platform to conservatives. Hosts on Crooked podcasts talk pretty much exclusively—and unapologetically—to progressives. (Ana Marie Cox’s show With Friends Like These is the exception, as she tries to do the thing so many people were scratching their heads about after the election: understand the similarities and differences across the political spectrum.) But this focus on one side of the aisle isn’t without value—Sanders, one of a rotating cast of cohosts on Crooked Conversations, calls it “self-care for the bubble.”

For those on the left, the two years since the election have been filled with a specific type of angst that comes from wanting to do something but not always knowing what. It’s a restlessness that drives some people to run for office, others to organize, and others still to turn to a podcast for inspiration and information about ways to mobilize.

Credit: Amy Lombard

“I can ignore things and pretend that everything is gonna be fine, which is the asshole way to approach things,” Ryan tells me from a couch in the studio space where Hysteria records. “I can listen to what’s going on, be like, ‘Everything’s bad, everything sucks, I give up, fuck it,’ which is an understandable way to deal with things but not be helpful. Or I can listen to what’s going on and, as much as my energy allows, respond to it in a way that is proactive and tenacious and refuses to give up. I think the third way is the only way to survive.”

Lead Photo Credit: Amy Lombard