Gwyneth Paltrow is detailing her approach to protecting bone density in her 50s.

“We're gonna talk to our doctor about potential estrogen supplementation,” she begins. “We're gonna do heavy weights. Lots of heavy weights. ... And we're gonna gag down protein 70 times a day.”

Moments later, Paltrow is laughing so hard about a Saturday Night Live sketch she saw that she overheats. Jokes follow about hot flashes — and then the topic ping-pongs again to something else.

It’s not the typical Q&A the actress and lifestyle expert has had on her Marty Supreme press tour — Seth Meyers asked her about her son’s reaction to the love scene she did with Timothée Chalamet — but she’s not on just any stop. Paltrow is recording Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, an episode that dropped Jan. 6.

Since debuting in March 2025 with Tina Fey as the first guest, Good Hang has quickly become one of the most successful celebrity podcasts in the medium, topping charts and earning a Golden Globe nomination for best podcast in December.

The Good Hang logline is that each week Poehler welcomes “celebrities and fun people” to “share stories about their careers, mutual friends, shared enthusiasms and … what's been making them laugh.” It promises not to be a podcast about “trying to make you better or giving advice,” because Poehler “just wants to have a good time.”

A good time is had: In Paltrow’s case, there was a Good Hang first — and possibly a Paltrow first — when the typically prim Goop founder did a spit take, spraying water from her mouth all over her designer skirt. She needed a tissue to wipe her face. While belly laughs are had in the episode, what stands out is how it’s a comedy podcast in which female midlife wellness topics — like menopause, hot flashes and bone density — pop up with normalcy and a gentle touch.

It’s so gentle that it’s rarely the takeaway from the conversation. Headlines stemming from Paltrow’s appearance are about the inefficiency of Marvel movie productions, getting fired from her first job and a reference to long-ago ex Ben Affleck. But a seed is planted. Poehler threads these topics into normal banter in a breezy way. They’re there, sandwiched between a question about what TV show Paltrow watches in bed and how she takes her coffee.

That understated approach is why Good Hang lands the way it does. In a media landscape that tends to either sidestep women’s aging or turn it into a product, Poehler doesn’t position menopause, midlife or wellness as topics to be solved or sold. They’re folded into conversations about work, routines and friendship and are less revelations than observations about life.

Listeners of all types come for Poehler, the laughs and the famous guests. They stay, often without realizing it, for candid talk about midlife — or life at two-thirds the way through, which is where Poehler says she technically is.

Poehler and actress Kristen Johnston noted that their boomer mothers never spoke the M-word aloud. Comedian Leanne Morgan, who hilariously called menopause “a booger” in conversation with Yahoo, said her 50s were lifting heavy weights, wearing a weighted vest to exercise and having to eat “too much protein.” Poehler and former first lady Michelle Obama have commiserated over frozen shoulder, which is linked to menopause, and Poehler shared her dermatologist’s advice for this stage of life while chatting with Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Wear a sun shirt.

Dr. Julia Adamian, an internist at NYU Langone Health, thinks normalizing conversations around menopause, osteoporosis and the like outside a medical setting is useful to all.

“There’s a stigma about menopause, so when people only talk about it in medical spaces with their doctors, it makes it feel like it's a concern, a disease or a condition that needs to be fixed or cured,” Adamian tells Yahoo. “It's not a disease. It’s a natural state of the human body at a certain stage. It’s an adjustment. … It’s about learning how to live with it,” or working with your doctor to treat any symptoms that are unbearable.

After all, “the reality is women spend 40% of their life in menopause,” Adamian says. “You can’t be sad or mad about it. It’s part of life. … So let's be aware and educate ourselves.”

Dr. Samantha M. Dunham, director of NYU Langone Health’s Center for Midlife Health and Menopause, tells Yahoo that she finds Poehler’s approach “refreshing.”

“[It’s] a welcome contrast to both mean-spirited jokes about menopause and a 'woe is me' approach to dealing with symptoms,” Dunham says. “She finds hilarity in how to deal with perimenopause and menopause day in and out. We laugh with her, and it feels like no one has to go it alone."

Not everything Poehler discusses regarding aging is specifically related to women. She asks nearly everyone about their sleep preferences, as healthy sleep habits are linked to longevity. Poehler goes to bed early — and likes the temperature of her bedroom in the cool 60s. She and comedian Jack Black bonded over their CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines, which treat sleep apnea. She joked with actress Kathryn Hahn about colonoscopy cleanses and gabbed with singer Hayley Williams about how cold plunges are good for inflammation.

Claire Sisco King, associate professor of communication studies and chair of the Cinema and Media Arts program at Vanderbilt University, believes Poehler’s podcast is effective because it mirrors the tone of everyday conversations between friends, bringing topics that have long been treated as hush-hush or shameful to the masses.

“Such conversations might typically be understood as private, but they are also part of a larger cultural movement to make such topics as reproductive health or mental health part of larger public discourse,” says King, a scholar of media and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on the study of gender. “The tendency to privatize such subjects was steeped in shame culture and bias against women, so Poehler’s efforts to bring these topics into public discourse resist such impulses and encourage women to be more open about their personal and embodied experiences.”

Poehler makes for a natural facilitator because the comedian infuses humor into every topic, serious or silly, which King notes helps “take the sting out of addressing difficult subjects."

What’s striking is how intentionally Poehler set out to avoid making Good Hang a podcast about self-improvement or instruction. From the start, she said she wasn’t interested in telling listeners how to be better.

“When we were thinking about this podcast, we thought: Guys get to just goof around and have fun and [it’s] straight comedy escapism,” she said while talking to Fey during the premiere episode. “Our stuff has to be … about menopause.”

What she’s crafted instead is a space where those conversations can exist without becoming the point. Aging isn’t the headline — it’s just part of the hang.