Paula Poundstone and Adam Thelber host a variety show tackling QAnon and rocket science, but the episode's core focuses on the speaker's hospital experience at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. Witnessing nurse addiction and vaccine misinformation, they connect these realities to "The Pitts," where Dr. Samira Mohan's panic attack mirrors the speaker's own generalized anxiety disorder. Discussing physiological hijacking and emergency room chaos, the segment concludes by urging listeners to support Conspirituality on Patreon for ad-free access to four years of bonus content. [Automatically generated summary]
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your cue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late-night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a roller coaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon.
And we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Get out, McWay.
Emergency Rooms Meet the Moment00:05:02
Get in.
I'm okay. I'm okay.
Get in the fucking chair.
I don't know how they do it.
Every Thursday night, I'm sitting on the couch with my wife watching the pit, and I'm hit with this visceral feeling, this flood of memories.
I worked in an emergency room for two years in college at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.
I was employed as a patient monitor, meaning that people would come into the emergency room having tried to have killed themselves.
And my job was to make sure they didn't leave and try to run away, which happened on occasion, or they didn't try to hurt themselves.
Fortunately, I was never in the room with someone who tried to do that, but I did see people try to leave and had to call security.
Being in that environment for that amount of time, the pit just gets so much right.
And I see some talk online about people like, oh, it's July 4th or they get these little things wrong.
I don't care.
I think it's a public service what they're doing.
And just a few of the things that they absolutely nail how emergency rooms can go from calm to chaos.
I mean, the pit has it at chaos because it is a television show.
So it always has to be up at this certain level.
But I used to work the overnight shift sometimes from 11 to 7.
And at 2 in the morning, it could be completely quiet and black in the emergency room.
And six people get wheeled in, and then all of a sudden everything explodes.
That is real.
The realities of addiction that they show on the show.
I remember nurses who were working 36-hour shifts and they would slip into the pharmacy closet and take a little something and then come back out because how the fuck else are you going to work a 36-hour shift without some sort of assistance?
Which unfortunately spills over into forms of dependence that I saw up close.
They get the vaccines and the supplement overdoses right.
Kid who was brought in with measles because he wasn't vaccinated.
They portray the sort of grief that doctors and nurses and all the professionals get with all the misinformation and the doctor Googles out there.
They get the woman dying of cancer or being assisted to die of cancer.
That one probably hit me the hardest because my niece is in that situation with two children and it's not looking great right now.
So there are moments I'm sitting there and tears are just coming to my eyes.
And I really care about a show that gets that much right and takes that much care to get that much right for a number of reasons.
So when I'm watching Samira Mohan, Dr. Mohan have a panic attack even before they said what it was, I knew what it was because I've had hundreds of panic attacks in my life.
I no longer suffer from them, but they were such a prevalent part of my life.
And two of them landed me in the emergency room, one when I was 16 and one in my mid-20s for different reasons, but all to do with generalized anxiety disorder.
I want to get into that a little bit today and about how well they represented that moment.
Let's hear Supriya Ganesh talk about it this morning.
I'm recording this on Friday.
So she was on a talk show talking about how she prepared.
I mean, there was so much sweat, which is, it was a real thing that happens.
And so, yeah, it was definitely a challenge.
It made sense in a way, even though I wasn't aware when I got the episode that I was going to have that happen.
And it kind of felt like to me, I, it was a little scary for it to like come up so suddenly.
But then, like, you don't plan for a panic attack.
You know, I mean, it just happens.
And like, with everything going on in Samira's life that we've discussed, it kind of makes sense that she's feeling a little thrown by everything.
I mean, yeah, they do just happen sometimes, seemingly from out of nowhere when your physiology hijacks your nervous system and takes over.
And the sweat, that was one of the first indicators.
Your body just breaks out and then all of the other signs start cascading and rolling in from there.
Let's talk about it a little bit more.
Let's talk about anxiety and how this show really meets the moment.
I'm Derek Barris and you are listening to a conspiratuality bonus episode.
Anxiety is the pits.
Now let's get into it.
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Conspiratuality Bonus Episode00:00:09
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