My Protest

We will be going LIVE with Substack today at 12pm!

We are taking this thing IRL, brothers. We are going global. We are both posted up in the global hegemon of financial capital this week, and so, at 12pm, I will be chaining myself to the Freedom Tower to demand the end of the 30-second promos for Amy Poehler’s new podcast, “Good Hang!”

Thanks to Substack for partnering with us here and providing the technology support for me to broadcast live from the World Trade Center at noon. I actually won’t be free, now that I think about it, so Ritam will do it for me.

He will, again, chain himself to one of the bike racks there to tell the world: “No more. No more of this. The promo is tonally incoherent and generally all over the place.”

The promo begins with clips of “advice” sent in from friends ranging from Dax Shepard to Rachel Dratch to Bill Simmons. I would love to know if Bill Simmons and Amy Poehler have ever hung out in any meaningful way.

Dax Shepard tells her to “just be yourself” and Bill clearly is in his Night Shirt. Then Rachel Dratch tries to do a weird bit:

She asks if Amy Poehler can combine “true crime and cooking” into a podcast. I don’t understand how this is funny, but I also cannot believe that if one of your best friends and former colleagues asked for a promotional clip for her new venture, this is what you would send in.

Then, things get even worse. And remember—Ritam will be going LIVE on Substack (thank you again!!!!) to protest whoever made this and wrote the script and produced it. I don’t know what Substack gets out of it, maybe some kind of shot across the bow in their creator-based media cold war. But for us? This means something. Me, specifically, but Ritam is going to take my place and do it because I’m not free.

After all these tonally mismatched clips, Amy Poehler says:

Wellllll, everyone’s got an opinion—and a podcast!

— Amy Poehler, 2025

So I don’t really know how this tracks. I don’t know what the point of these clips are, and the tone with which she says “and a podcast!” really throws me off. It’s like, why ask for the clips then? Why do it?

But remember—the cruelty is the point. You should be just as enraged as I am. And that’s why I am enlisting Ritam to chain himself to an immovable object in lower Manhattan (maybe the Wall Street bull?), where everyone’s bread is buttered, to protest this for me.

The cherry on top, of course, is Amy Poehler’s final line. The thing she wants us to leave with. The entire reason for the podcast existing, apparently, which doesn’t track at all with the preceding 25 seconds.

It’s rough out there. We’re just trying to lighten it up a little.

— Amy Poehler, a bit later in 2025

That’s awesome. I think, actually, that we must develop some kind of unifying logic in a promo script—but maybe that’s just me 😂😂😂😂😂😂

Again, thank you to Substack’s randa Shaiyan Khan Hamish McKenzie for supporting us in this endeavor! I know they want to take down the Swedish streaming giant and their monetary backing of celebrity vanity podcasts as much as we do!

Ritam’s Footnote

The superior nerd looks up from his Overcast app, gleefully smiling as he explains the importance of not tying podcasts to a large platform.