In 2018, podcasts are more ubiquitous than ever. But does the industry reflect the diversity of its listeners? Even though podcast listening among America women jumped 14% from 2017 to 2018, podcast hosting still feels male-dominated. And the numbers don’t lie: 66 percent of American podcasts had a white male host in 2016.

It is from this landscape that Hysteria emerges as the new podcast from Crooked Media, developed, produced, edited, and hosted entirely by women. (Crooked’s been publicly skewered for its lack of female hosts on its other shows, but more on that later.) One of these women is Erin Ryan, a senior editor at The Daily Beast, writer for It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, host of Hysteria, brain behind many good tweets, and (allegedly) a person with the same number of hours in a day as everyone else.

TuneIn caught up with Ryan to discuss how Hysteria came to be, who we should be following on Twitter, and which member of the Trump administration is the Dennis Reynolds of the White House.

TuneIn: Congratulations on the launch of the podcast! To jump right in, can you tell me the origin story of Hysteria?

Erin Ryan: Last summer, I met with the Pod Save America guys about doing a podcast. I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be about at first. Then one day, I was reading something about how in co-education, girls do better in single sex education and boys do worse in single sex education, and in co-education girls’ performance suffers. I was thinking about how when women are in a space by themselves, they speak to each other differently than they do when there are men around. It would be cool if I could help facilitate that space and make it a podcast. So, that was the germination of the idea.

We wanted it to be a women-only space. In talking about the project with the people at Crooked who developed it with me, Mukta Mohan and Corrine Gilliard, we realized that it was really important to have as many different women’s voices in as possible and to try to have it be a space where any woman could listen and feel like there was something of her being represented.

So, we looked for a group of women who came from different backgrounds, had different perspectives, were different ages. We tried out people out in LA and we tried people out in New York. Some of them were people who I’d known. Some of them were people that other people at Crooked Media knew, and some of them were people that were suggested to us. We tried a million different combinations of just incredible women. There were so many great ones.

We settled on three people in L.A. and three people in New York. But the name itself changed. Originally it had a different name, but I joked around with Girls Just Wanna Have Pod.

T: I remember you said that at a live show I was at.

E: Yeah, I also made a joke about Broad Save America, which was never going to be the name. We wanted something that was a little bit more along the lines of what the show was shaping into. It uses news as a jumping-off point into topics that women care about that extend beyond the headlines. Also, all the women that we ended up bringing in are really funny, and I was thinking something along the lines of “hysterical.” And we were kind of circling that word, and hysteria was the one that just felt the best. And now that’s the name. Pretty succinct.

T: You had previously hosted Girl Friday, which I think was part of the CAFE Network — why did you wanna work with Crooked specifically? I had talked to Ira when Keep It first launched, and I know that one thing he had mentioned was that Crooked has more resources to dedicate to audio and has been really appealing to audiences. So, in addition to why you wanted to work with Crooked, why do you feel like Crooked is resonating with such a large audience in this day and age?

E: Sure. For the CAFE thing, I didn’t leave CAFE to go to Crooked. One of the co-hosts couldn’t do it anymore, and rather than find a new co-host on my own, I figured that I would take the time to develop it with Crooked since, like Ira said, they have a lot of resources and they know how to do this.

I also wanted to go with Crooked though because the audience is built in. They’re very positive. They’re very engaged. They’re like a dream audience. They’re just lovely, and I guess I’ve never experienced that in any place that I’ve written or done anything in the media.

The audience tends to engage in a way that’s like critical and then in some ways combative [at other places]. I was at Jezebel for a long time, and the audience and the staff had a sort of love-hate relationship with each other and sometimes it wore a little bit, I think, on the people who are on staff. People were constantly mad at us. But Crooked’s audience is amazing. They have lots of resources and they know how to use it.

Another reason I wanted to work with them is just because I really like them. I liked every single person at that company, top to bottom. I like the hosts of Pod Save America. I like the women who run the company behind the scenes, who are incredible forces of nature. I like their sensibility, and it worked with my sensibility without totally 100% overlapping. They’ve also given me a lot of freedom — they’re just great. I can’t say enough nice things about the people at Crooked. There was a couple other big platforms that reached out tentatively, and there was never any question in my mind that I was going to do a Crooked podcast.

T: To your point about Jezebel, I grew up reading Jezebel when you were there, and I definitely understand that feeling of kind of combativeness between the audience and the writers. It’s interesting, and I think you’re right about Crooked’s relationship with their audience being a little different.

E: Right, right. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from the first episode of Hysteria and a couple listeners had a few issues that they wanted to bring up, but it seemed like it came from a place of wanting the show to be better or to be good, instead of coming from a place that’s just wanting us to feel bad, which really floored me.

T: You said earlier that you wanted Hysteria to kind of be a women-only podcast in terms of its production and have as many women’s voices involved as possible. In a different interview, you had said that having men, even well-meaning men, in a conversation changes the tenor of the conversation, which was a line that I loved. What do you think that male members of the audience can learn from your podcast and from a space where they aren’t there?

E: I think it’s actually a cool opportunity for men who care about women to listen to how women talk to each other when men aren’t around. It’s a unique, special sort of thing. I’m not suggesting that Hysteria is the only place that does that, there are other women-only podcasts too, but, we would love for men to listen. Somebody said, “Yeah, I listened to it even though I’m a straight white dude.” It’s like no, no. I want you to listen to it.

I want women to listen to it and feel like they’re hanging out with people who make them laugh, or at least make them feel comfortable and heard and supported. I want men to listen and say, oh, this is what women say when they’re supporting and conversing with and respecting each other. Hopefully, at its best, that’s what [Hysteria] could be for both men and women. Lofty goals! But so far I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to do.

T: I’m sure that you saw the Clickhole article making fun of the Pod Save America hosts (namely, that a fervently progressive podcast is hosted by a cast of only white men) a few months ago that the Crooked guys were sharing on social. How do you feel about that criticism? How do you think Crooked is working to make its content more diverse and what do you think other media companies can learn from this move?

E: Behind the scenes, Crooked, I believe, is not only majority women, it’s majority women of color. That’s an interesting stat that a lot of people who criticize Pod Save America don’t quite realize. I’m also not a full time employee of Crooked. I host the podcast and when I’m in Los Angeles, I go by the office and they go hey, it’s Erin. I don’t sit in meetings. I don’t help them decide to make hiring decisions. So, I probably wouldn’t be the best person to answer that question, but I do think that in just developing my podcast with the staff of Crooked, giving it time to find its best possible mix of people was really key.

One of the people that we ended up choosing for co-host doesn’t have a comedy background at all. I wanted everybody to have some kind of comedy background. I wanted everybody to be able to make jokes about things that are difficult to make jokes about, but the audience might want to laugh about. One of them doesn’t have a comedy background at all, and she just came in and was so funny. I never would have found her if I would have just been looking in comedy spaces. So, I think broadening the places that people look, giving people chances that maybe didn’t necessarily have chances before, led to us being able to find this really cool group of diverse and unique women.

T: As the podcast space has become really saturated, especially in the news and politics realm, what do you think makes a podcast special, and what do you feel Hysteria brings to the table that’s different from what you get from other podcasts?

E: I don’t really listen to a lot of news and politics podcasts. I listen to straight news, like Up First from NPR, and I listen to Pod Save America and the Crooked family of podcasts.

What I’m hoping that Hysteria does is get closer to that sweet spot of people who know what they’re talking about and are actually funny. Now, not everybody is going to be funny all the time, but at any given time, I would like there to be somebody who can jump in with a quick one-liner. I think in the first episode, Ziwe Fumudoh, who’s one of the co-hosts here in New York, was talking about something very serious about the oppression of people of color, and she started a sentence, “And as the first black woman at my Equinox.”

It was so fucking funny, and that’s the sort of thing that I don’t really find in podcasts in the female-driven podcast space. Not that they’re totally absent, I just have not personally found them. Also, [the co-hosts, Crooked, and I] all agree that it’s important for us to take seriously how motivated and action-oriented our listeners are. So, just like how in Pod Save America, they tell people, “this is an organization that’s helping, this is the person that you can call,” we’re hoping to keep that in this podcast so that people feel like after they’re done listening, maybe they laughed, maybe they got angry, but at the end they feel like there’s something else that they can do besides just continue to be angry.

T: Who’s a guest that you would love to have on the pod?

E: Chrissy Teigen, for sure. I would love to have her sit in and be a extra co-host. I also love Ayanna Pressley, who is a city council woman and congressional candidate in Boston. I saw her speak two years ago, and I was so impressed by her. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be amazing. I also think it would be fun to have Laverne Cox. Beth Ditto, who I really love, would be a lot of fun.

T: Okay, you are also very active on social media, particularly Twitter. In the spirit of Hysteria, who are five women that we should be following on Twitter, and why should we be following them?

E: I would just say follow all my Hysteria co-hosts, but that’s six of them. I guess in addition to that, I follow a lot of female reporters. I really like Laura Bassett. She is low-key very funny, and her work is really important. I also really enjoy her as a human being, she’s great. Olivia Nuzzi is also a good follow. I think Joanna Rothkopf, who is now just leaving Jezebel, is one of the funniest women that I know.

Megan Amram, obviously. I think Jen Statsky, who is, full disclosure, married to a guy that works at Crooked Media, is hilarious and amazing. There’s a lot of them. Michelle Wolf, obviously. I think her new show The Break is just sublime. Yeah, I think just follow all my co-hosts. Follow Ziwe, Alyssa, Blair, Megan, Kiran, and Grace.

T: On Keep It, Kara has mentioned multiple times that she never wants to have to think about Omarosa or Kanye West again. In the spirit of that, what is something that we’re talking about currently that you hope you never have to address again?

E: Ivanka Trump. I hope that she’s forever shunned from all social events and she should be. She should be shunned.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I’m tired of thinking about her. Sarah Palin also drives me nuts, but seems like she’s kind of going away on her own.

There are things that I would like to not have to think about again. There are conversations that we have over and over, especially as women, that I’m tired of having. I’m tired of the virgin-whore dichotomy. It’s been thousands of years, and it hasn’t gone away, so I think we’re probably always gonna have it. I’m tired of the abortion debate. It should be settled that a woman should control what happens inside of her own skin, but we’re never gonna stop talking about that.

I’m sort of tired of men thinking that the worst thing they can say to a woman is, “I don’t want to have sex with you,” because it is not. There are so many men who I don’t give a fuck if they want to have sex with me or not. I really want men to stop thinking that’s an insult. Oh, you don’t want to? Oh, that’s too bad. I don’t really care. There’s a lot of things I’m kind of tired of thinking about and that I’m sick of. I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall sometimes.

T: Since you’re a writer for It’s Always Sunny, which is the best show on television, we were hoping that you could compare characters from It’s Always Sunny to members of the White House, since they’re both a castle of interesting characters.

E: The Huckabee family are definitely the McPoyles. All the Huckabees are one McPoyle or another McPoyle. I think that Dee is probably the Ivanka. Not just because she’s blonde and a woman, but because she’s got like a vain, wannabe actress thing about her, and Ivanka very clearly wants to be like a brown shirt Martha Stewart, although I can’t really see that brand really taking off as much as she wants.

The waitress is definitely Dina Powell. She doesn’t really want to be involved but she is. But it’s like, I think you actually kind of want to be involved. Frank Reynolds might be Steve Bannon.

I would say Charlie is probably the Jared. He [Charlie] is brilliant in life, but he is dumb on the show, so he’s probably the Jared. I think Mac may be the Rudy Giuliani, because he says the weirdest things, and he doesn’t seem to know how they come across when Mac says that. So, probably Rudy Giuliani. Let me think, what’s another Sunny character you’d like me to analyze?

T: Dennis.

E: Let’s see, maybe Dennis is the Donald. Cause he’s the creepiest one.

— Meghan Crowther

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.