The episode kicks off with a sponsor segment for Visible, Amy Poehler's endorsement of the wireless carrier that rides on Verizon's 5G network. She frames it around summer travel and staying connected without overpaying, noting plans start at $25/month with no contract. Listeners who use promo code HANG can save $10 on the premium Visible+ Pro plan. It's a breezy, concise read before Amy previews the episode — teasing conversations about waitressing, drowning on camera, Russian Doll memories, and Greta Lee's new villain role in Toy Story 5.

Amy offers a quick rundown of Greta Lee's career highlights — Past Lives, The Morning Show, Girls, Broad City, Russian Doll — and flags the conversation topics to come: waitressing, drowning, and Greta's iPad villain in Toy Story 5. The segment is brief, functioning as a tent-pole before the pre-interview chat with Alison Roman.

Amy reads for Ulta Beauty on Uber Eats, emphasizing summer glow essentials — SPF, cleansers — delivered in 25 minutes at in-store prices. The big sell is the summer sale running through July 11th with up to 40% off and new deals weekly. Concise and on-brand for a beauty-adjacent audience.

Amy opens video with Alison Roman — and Leonard, her enormous cat — in Alison's kitchen. They discuss First Bloom, Alison's independent Catskills grocery store she opened in 2023 without a full plan, and her upcoming Brooklyn expansion. The conversation takes a delightful detour through co-op culture (both agree they'd never participate), and Alison describes her habit of offering unsolicited butcher-shop cooking advice to strangers — only to be dismissed 80% of the time as 'just a lady.' Amy likens it to being a doctor on a plane nobody asked for. Alison speaks warmly about Greta, describing her as one of the hardest-working, kindest, funniest people she knows, with a natural hospitality energy. She then offers her question for Greta: how has working in restaurants shaped her as an actor? Amy reveals she too was a restaurant person — a waiter for years in New York — before the pair wrap with artichoke preparation advice and a fond goodbye to Leonard.

Amy delivers a second read for Visible, this time targeting the podcast audience directly — 'how many of you are listening on your phone right now?' — and emphasizing the big-wireless perks at half the cost. The pitch is identical: unlimited 5G, no contract, plans from $25/month, save $10 on Visible+ Pro with the promo code. Clean and brief.

Greta sweeps in arms-full: a professionally paper-wrapped bouquet of white sage, pine, lemon verbena and natives; curly and dinosaur kale; avocados so large they need a year to ripen; a yellow Mexican lime; and eggplants — which Amy dispatches immediately with 'get them out of here.' Greta explains the Oro Blanco, a pomelo-white grapefruit cross, and Amy jokes that having a productive garden and bringing the fruit to people is her definition of success. The exchange is pure warmth and establishes Greta's deeply LA-domestic phase.

Amy opens the main interview by running through their collaborative history: Broad City, the un-aired pilot Old Soul, the film Sisters, and Russian Doll. She can't quite remember when they first crossed paths, and neither can Greta, who suspects it may have been a Broad City audition. Greta reflects on how that period in New York gets blurry — how the same career stories get repeated until you're no longer sure they're true. Amy frames Greta's defining quality as someone who takes the work seriously but never themselves, and Greta simply agrees before asking Amy to move on.

Amy presses Greta on her family background: her mother, a classically trained pianist, and her father, a physical therapist whose skills Amy immediately covets for her frozen shoulder. Greta explains she's first-generation American — her parents immigrated from Korea and she grew up speaking Korean in Canarsie, Brooklyn, developing a Korean-Brooklyn hybrid accent that required ESL and speech therapy. From there she channeled her drive into classical singing, winning the Bach Festival in middle school and conducting a children's choir without being invited to do so. She then discusses the specific electricity of that late-2000s New York moment — the rise of Broad City, the SNL women, Lena Dunham — which she watched somewhat from the outside, coming from a theater background but feeling its energy.

Greta's first professional credit turned out to be a Law & Order: SVU incest episode — something she didn't disclose to her immigrant parents who excitedly tuned in. She's philosophical about it now: it did well in reruns, great residuals. She then winds through Northwestern University, which she praises for both its theater program and its Big Ten social life ('I learned how to do a keg stand and made friends from Sheboygan'). She describes moving to New York at 21 with a Sex and the City fantasy and landing immediately in the grueling eight-shows-a-week reality of Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway. Amy asks about the West End production of La Bête with Mark Rylance — a play in iambic pentameter set in 16th-century France where Greta's character could only speak words rhyming with 'blue.' Both marvel at how much of Greta's pre-fame life most people have no idea about.

The conversation turns to physical acting demands when Greta mentions she recently shot a drowning scene. She delivers the episode's most memorable insight: performing a drowning scene and actually drowning are functionally identical, involving real water ingestion and real choking. The darkly funny wrinkle is the stunt safety protocol — you're supposed to give a hand signal if you need help — but if you're doing the drowning well, you literally cannot signal without breaking the performance. Amy crystallizes the paradox with her go-to philosophy: don't be good at things you don't want to do, because if the scene is great, you'll be cast as drowning victim again and again.

After a brief ad break, Amy steers into motherhood. Greta has two sons — Apollo, 9, and Raph, just turned 7 — and describes the particular physical demand of being a boy mom: you don't just supervise, you participate. She's running, playing soccer, biking, outdoors constantly, which she credits for her perennial tan. Amy offers perspective from the other side, with boys at 15 and 17 who are now driving and almost voting. Both women laugh about the 'worn down' quality of boy moms and the necessity of running kids 'like dogs' to tire them out every day.

The conversation pivots from athletic parenting to athletic acting when Greta mentions she had to run in Tron. Not a light jog — her character sprints for her life across what Greta estimates was 13 miles of pier footage in a single night shoot, take after take. The next morning she couldn't take a single step and production halted. Amy relates with her own story from Blades of Glory: an Olympic-level ice dance coach she strategically neutralized by buying her coffee and asking personal questions to eat up their limited practice time. Both agree: running is bad for you, scuba is worse, avoid physical demands you're not genuinely trained for.

Amy brings up the Old Soul pilot — a project with Natasha Lyonne and a stacked cast including Fred Willard, Rita Moreno, Alan Arkin, Marla Gibbs, and Richard Benjamin — that never got picked up. Greta's clearest memory: Rita Moreno pulling her aside to say she was on her phone too much. She still thinks about it, even though she considers herself far from addicted. From there, Amy and Greta excavate the Sisters shoot: a sinkhole set that was built indoors with real plants that began to decompose and smell, and tiny plywood 'doghouse' boxes where supporting players like Kate McKinnon, Bobby Moynihan, John Glaser, and Greta would sit and wait for weeks. Amy jokes that she spent her time angling to get her character written out of the sinkhole entirely.

Delivering Alison Roman's question about what restaurant life left behind, Greta takes Amy to Momofuku circa 2007-2012, when David Chang's restaurants were the hottest tables in New York. Greta was the hostess — and the power was real. Telling a guest they'd wait four hours wasn't a time estimate, it was a coded dismissal. She describes the culture where cash bribes and name-dropping didn't work (it was actively discouraged), and where the atmosphere was electric because chefs had become cultural rock stars. She and David Chang are now close friends with kids the same age and living near each other in LA. The discussion circles back to Alison's observation: the restaurant work ethic is permanent. Greta connects 'being in the weeds' with the crushing multitasking demands of a long film shoot.

Amy steers toward Russian Doll, the Netflix hit she produced alongside Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland, and specifically Greta's iconic role as the birthday party hostess. What listeners don't know: Greta said no at first. She couldn't conceive of repeating the same line authentically across dozens of takes in multiple seasons. She actually asked if they could just record it once and loop it — they said no. She said yes anyway, nailed the delivery on her first attempt, and then was locked into reproducing that exact reading every single time, whether or not she felt she'd perfected it. The genuine friendship and instant chemistry with Natasha Lyonne, she says, was the real engine of what made those scenes work — not technique, not backstory, just connection.

Amy declares Past Lives her favorite film of the last decade and pushes Greta to describe what making it actually felt like. Greta reveals the most specific challenge: she had spent her career improvising, filling gaps, generating comedy. Céline Song's meditative realism required the opposite. There's a self-aware, funny moment where Greta imagines what Past Lives would look like if she'd kept her impulses: 'Huh, Michael, where'd you get that? Russ and Daughters?' Céline would've shut it down immediately. Greta also notes that Past Lives was the first time she was number one on a call sheet, the first time she acted entirely in Korean on film, and the first time she allowed the camera to hold on her face, doing nothing, for what she measured as a couple of minutes — a challenge that required genuine courage to sit with. She adds that she was not nominated for an Oscar despite the widespread acclaim, and observes that almost no one knows this.

Amy brings up Toy Story 5 and Greta confirms the basics: she plays the main new villain, an iPad named Lily Pad. She cried six times at a screening due to Joan Cusack's performance, and she makes what might be the episode's boldest claim — that the film is genuinely emotionally comparable to Past Lives. Amy then shifts to Greta's fashion identity, calling her a fashion icon and marveling at the Calvin Klein campaign. Greta deflects with a theory: posing is just character acting. She's always wanted to be a male character actor — a De Niro type — and the confidence on the carpet comes from that internal framing, not vanity. Amy agrees the posture is remarkably De Niro-esque: a solid, baller self-possession under constant scrutiny.

Amy asks Greta what she's watching for fun, and Greta's answer is completely unexpected: stain removal videos on YouTube. Specifically, ink stain tutorials from a channel called Gentleman's Gazette, featuring a presenter named Preston who opens with a time-stamped 'if this is a stain emergency, skip to this point.' Amy and Greta actually pull it up and watch together, reacting with genuine delight. Amy complains she keeps getting her own commercials in YouTube pre-rolls. The segment is a loose, fun winding-down of the conversation before a brief gardening exchange.

The conversation closes with a gardening exchange: Greta warns Amy that the lettuces she's growing on the East Coast will bolt in summer heat, turn bitter, and are harder than they look — advice delivered with cheerful authority. Amy wraps with genuine warmth, thanking Greta for the garden gifts and the conversation. For the Polar Plunge — her recurring 'go watch this' segment — Amy recommends Joan Cusack's filmography, specifically Broadcast News, in tribute to the conversation about Toy Story 5 and Cusack's extraordinary career. The episode closes with credits and a brief Walmart back-to-school and Tremfya pharmaceutical ad read.