Welcome to The New Abnormal, The Daily Beast’s podcast for a world gone off the rails.

The lives we lead today due to the coronavirus are like nothing any of us could have imagined a few months ago. America has changed, fast, and all the old predicates about our society, economy, culture, and politics have disappeared faster than stocks of N95 masks.

If you’re like us, every day this drags on seems longer than the day before, and one of the few comforts as we’re all trapped in our respective bunkers is contact and conversation with friends.

The New Abnormal is a podcast to expand those conversations, and to connect Americans with smart people who are both covering this pandemic and engaged in finding solutions to the dangers and challenges we face because of it. (Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.)

On The New Abnormal, we’ll be talking with reporters, scientists, elected officials, and people across the country trying to find their way in a time where uncertainty has replaced information, and where the truth gets too frequently run over by the politics involved.

We both love to connect, and talk. And talk. And talk. (Fine, we admit it.) We’re troublemakers who aren’t afraid to cross party and policy lines—just ask anyone in our respective political movements. Though we may come from very different worlds and very different perspectives, we’ve both come to believe that in the age of corona, the old partisan games don’t seem to mean as much.

We’ll be calling down some fire on the people who are making this situation worse, from that grifter in the White House to COVID truthers and deniers to scam artists and people exploiting this moment for political gain. (If you guessed that Rick named that segment of the show “Fuck That Guy,” you win a fabulous door prize!)

We believe that humor and fun is necessary to face the scary moments that American families confront every day, but we promise to take COVID very seriously. Ourselves? Not so much.

Molly will try to keep Rick from dropping too many F-bombs, and Rick will try to keep Molly’s woke teenage son from seizing the means of production. You may occasionally hear our various animals in the background; in the time of the quarantine, we’re in home “studios” but that’s part of the fun. Don’t lie; most of you aren’t even wearing pants as you read this.

We’re both committed to making The New Abnormal smart, insightful, and fun, and to giving folks who love The Daily Beast’s brand of fearless, iconoclastic writing, reporting, and commentary another way to get through these times.

We’re all locked in this quarantine together. The New Abnormal will help all of us make the most of it.

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.