“Enough with improving ourselves! And listening to stuff about how we’re supposed to get better, and better, and better,” Amy Poehler joked on an early episode of her podcast, Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Over the 70-plus episodes the show has released since launching in early 2025, it’s become clear that Good Hang isn’t a place for typical podcast chat about optimization and self-improvement—but it is the spot for celebrity interviews with a ton of heart, lots of laughs, and the odd crying jag, too.
But making things look easy takes a lot of work. As executive producer Jenna Weiss-Berman explains, it helps to have a beloved-by-everyone host like Amy leading the charge. But the show has earned its success—it’s consistently at the top of Spotify’s podcast charts, and took home the first-ever Golden Globe award for Best Podcast—thanks to hard work and deep research, too.
After a live recording of the podcast in New York earlier this month, Jenna sat down with For the Record to talk about bringing Good Hang to life.
How did you guys talk about the show before it launched?
Amy and I talked about it for almost two years before it launched. She made three limited audio series where she played characters, and she is a true, massive podcast head, you know. She listens to everything. She was talking about how she wanted to build out more podcasts in her producing life, and I was basically, like, “I think you should host one as yourself.” She’s a private person, so it’s a little scary to think about hosting a podcast. We started kind of sending ideas back and forth, and thinking about what the show could be.
What are some more granular editorial or or production choices that gave the show its footing early on? How do you set the very specific tone?
It’s a very specific tone, and it’s a very Amy tone. You meet Amy, and you’re like, “You would be the best in the world at this thing.” There is simply no one better. And we were thinking a lot about the times that we’re in—there are a lot of podcasts that are really heavy, about the news, and also a lot of self-betterment podcasts. And we knew—she says this in the first episode, or the trailer, “We’re not going to tell you how to be better.” We always just wanted to set a tone where it was like, This is a happy place.
You get to come here and you don’t have to be anyone other than who you are, and you don’t have to strive to be better. We’re just here to make you laugh. We ask every guest what’s making them laugh—that’s a big part of it, too. And that was also in the early planning: how can we not just make this a fun, happy, safe place, but also bring the guests into helping our audience figure out what’s going to make them laugh?
Did the show title come first or last?
We were shopping it around as Whatever Works. I actually think it was Bill Simmons who was, like, “So it sounds like what you’re talking about is a good hang. Maybe that’s your title.” And we were, like, “Okay, that’s the title.” It wasn’t a thing that we workshopped or brought in an outside marketing group. It was literally Bill Simmons sitting in a meeting telling us that it sounded like a good hang.
You hit on what I suspect is the number-one thing that makes Amy a good host, which is that she’s just Amy Poehler. But besides that, what makes her so good at this?
She’s super curious about people. She just genuinely wants to know and understand people. She’s never judgmental, she’s very loving, and she just knows how to make everyone feel so comfortable. Every guest who comes in, afterwards, they’re all, like, “That was so great.”
There’s more crying than maybe you would expect on a fun celebrity chat podcast.
Maybe it sounds corny, but I think people feel comfortable to cry because they know that Amy sees them. And a lot of the crying on the show comes when Amy is shining people and telling them how amazing they are. And I think that they’re genuinely moved by feeling that she really sees and gets them. Seth Meyers was our first cryer, and it was really because he was talking about the early days of feeling like she was so supportive of him at SNL, and was really looking out for him.
Darcy Carden and Amy Poehler, live onstage in New York. (Photo: Jess Williams)
How do you guys book the show? There’s a preponderance of people who seemingly know Amy or are friends with her, but I’m curious how you think about the mix.
At first, it was a lot of us going to her friends and being, like, “Please, please help us.” [Laughs] The early episodes, it was a lot of her friends—Tina Fey and Martin Short, Seth Meyers, Rachel Dratch. A lot of her buddies. And that’ll always be a part of the show. She also knows a lot of people from, say, hosting the Golden Globes. People feel very comfortable with her even if they’ve only met her a couple times. So sometimes people think that it’s a lot of her friends on the show, but a lot of people are just friendly with Amy because she’s so nice. But now a ton of it is inbound—we’re getting at least like 10 to 15 pitches a day from the biggest stars in the world.
What qualities make for an ideal guest?
Honestly, the thing we think about a lot is, are they going to be a good hang? That’s really the bar for us.
The show has been way up on the charts, you guys won a Golden Globe—what does your success tell you about what people are looking for in a podcast?
I think people want joy, they want an escape, they want loving connection. And like that’s what the show is. I listen to news podcasts all day. Those are extremely important. Everyone should be listening to those. We should never check out of the world. But sometimes we just need like an hour to kind of just have a sweet, warm bath or whatever.
When you’re recording, how do you know you’re getting a moment that’s going to resonate?
Sometimes I see Amy laughing so hard that she puts her face down on the table, and I know that we have a good moment. Amy is also, at her core, one of the greatest comedians in the world, so she gets like excited at doing bits with people, and sometimes this like back-and-forth starts that gets crazier and crazier and elevates itself. And then we also have really deep moments where people feel really comfortable and safe to share heavy stuff. So the show is a lot of things.
Looking for your next good hang? Find the latest episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler on Spotify now.
Top photo courtesy of Good Hang with Amy Poehler.
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