Hot Take Swan Song
March 23, 2023 4:12 PM   Subscribe

In 2022, the podcast Hot Take—a "holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it"— was acquired by Crooked Media, the network founded by the men behind Pod Save America. A year later, the hosts of Hot Take have written separate takes about why the podcast is ending, highlighting mismanagement and malfeasance from the company that acquired them.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted (18 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Crooked Media

Eponysterical
posted by glaucon at 4:47 PM on March 23, 2023 [6 favorites]


There's so much value in getting more than one telling of a story, because when I read Mary saying this:
They held the feed hostage unless we signed a termination agreement with a very detailed non-disparagement agreement (is that even legal anymore? Who knows!). When we refused to do that, instead of returning the feed to us, they took it down from Apple. That means all of our subscribers, ratings, and reviews disappeared, and we can never get them back, even though most of them pre-dated our move to Crooked and no one has ever disputed that we own the show.
(which, right there, makes me SO ANGRY - I hate lost data, and I really really hate Crooked trashing data that Mary and Amy built and should have gotten back) - when I read that, I did not get this, from Amy's post:
As a media criticism newsletter and podcast focused on climate, we didn’t feel like we could see what we saw and not talk about it all, so we turned down a payout in favor of telling it like it is.
They turned down money so they could talk honestly about what happened?!

Good for them for telling their story, really really good for us to get to know their story, but wow, if a non-disparagement clause that that ISN'T illegal, it really should be. All of society is damaged when we don't get to know how companies treated those who went before us.


This reminds me a bit of what Wil Wheaton went through with O'Reilly, with the added bonus of this being really important work about climate change that should be enthusiastically promoted to the public, not skewed and spun and eventually unceremoniously dumped.

This makes me really mad, and very sad for Amy and Mary (even though I completely understand their being ready to move on to other projects - even so, there's no excuse for treating them this way, and for just generally smothering the podcast like that).

Even so, I'm glad to know about the whole thing ... just like with the climate horrors that Amy and Mary have been reporting on, it may be infuriating and depressing to know what's been going on, but there's also a satisfying and hopeful spark in knowing more.

Thank you for posting this, Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted. I'm glad I got to read their stories, and I'm glad to know about them - I was not familiar with Hot Take, and I'm looking forward to seeing what both of them do next.
posted by kristi at 5:04 PM on March 23, 2023 [8 favorites]


Let me tell you I guessed the gender and race of all involved toot sweet. It's really fucking disappointing. It's disappointing I never heard of this podcast before (which is RTMI) and now I can't even go find their back catalog?
posted by muddgirl at 5:10 PM on March 23, 2023 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I somehow picked up that racism was involved before it was explicitly mentioned. Funny how that works, right?

Their back catalogue does still appear to be available from a number of sources—Here it is on iHeart.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:46 PM on March 23, 2023 [4 favorites]


Ah, it's in my podcast app too. 😍 Finding anyone talking openly and honestly about climate change (as a systemic issue) fulfills a deep thirst.
posted by muddgirl at 6:02 PM on March 23, 2023


I always confuse Crooked Media with Crooked Timber (the blog). They're not related, and I'm relieved to find out/be reminded that Crooked Timber, which I enjoy reading, is not the entity that screwed over these podcasters.

Similarly I always confuse Jon Favreau the filmmaker with the Jon Favreau at Crooked Media. I'm relieved to find out the filmmaker is not the one who was involved in screwing over these podcasters.

Makes me wonder how many podcasters they screwed over who took the money.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 6:18 PM on March 23, 2023 [6 favorites]


The racism and sexism is disheartening but not terribly surprising. That said, I can also say that non-disparagement clauses still appear in contracts and can occasionally be a tool for the powerless to protect themselves from the powerful. For instance if, completely hypothetically, one lived in a state with a fascist governor and wished to contribute to efforts to expand the reach of a tool with progressive political aims, one might face such a contract before being allowed to join such efforts. And one might even decide that it is worth signing such a contract in light of what's at stake.

(And yes, they're separate questions whether non-disparagement clauses are legal and whether contract law would win out over "ew, people who don't live or look like I do" in a reactionary state with a fascist governor who has appointed many judges, but that's a question for a later time--or, preferably, never.)
posted by johnofjack at 6:35 PM on March 23, 2023


Heggler and Westervelt are worth following. Westervelts other serieses on the oil industry are must listen. Damages, Drilled, Rigged, etc (they are separate shows but thematically linked.

Hegler is a writer, and so appears in diverse outlets.

I guess they brought to much realism to the evaluation of Biden-Manchin climate policies.

Pod Save America and Pod Save the World et all are basically the sorken west-wing methadone for people who still want to believe the system is ok, institutions will save us and we can vote our way out of our problems.

I guess it depends on how much time you have to listen and where else you get your infotainment. Pod Save et al get good guests for interviews.

Crooked Timber, i haven read them since the Volohk conspiracy days, Jon Favreau of Marvel, Is he a milkshake duck yet? Love the movies.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 7:14 PM on March 23, 2023 [7 favorites]


Yeah, the IRA would clearly split any climate reporter from the Democratic line. Liberals really want it to be a climate bill, while ignoring the oil and gas bonanza.

There are 48 new petrochemical plants being built in Louisiana alone....half of which are on the expanded 45Q tax credit who knew, that a bill to prop up coal prices would be bad for the climate?
posted by eustatic at 7:21 PM on March 23, 2023 [5 favorites]


Pod Save America and Pod Save the World et all are basically the sorken west-wing methadone for people who still want to believe the system is ok, institutions will save us and we can vote our way out of our problems.

Yeah I first started listening to the PodJons after 2016 in an effort to try and understand a bit more about what was happening in the US. But I aged out of it pretty quickly - hyperventilating over Trumps' crimes and urging people to vote, but always somehow never holding Dems accountable for bad policy. It became obvious they are just part of the machine.
posted by awfurby at 8:13 PM on March 23, 2023


“ This reminds me a bit of what Wil Wheaton went through with O'Reilly”

Which would be…?
posted by jzb at 12:27 AM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


We need reporters like Hot Take so badly.

Only climate reporters would be able to communicate the fact that the struggle for St James Parish is a struggle for the climate

These ladies are fighting 20? 30MT CO2e per year, by my estimation. That is several states' worth of car emissions.

Shell is planning a massive new Ammonia plant in their backyard--which contains two or three already, and in the next Parish west contains the largest Ammonia plant in the hemisphere already.

Saint James residents file lawsuit against parish over petrochemical plants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_op4VA_FX8
posted by eustatic at 7:32 AM on March 24, 2023


re: Wil Wheaton
I am still hurt, and angry, and disappointed with the way O'Reilly completely fucked up Just A Geek. More than that, I'm hurt, and angry, and disappointed at the way I was treated, as a person and as an author.

From his Typepad Blog.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:13 AM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


I went into this story with an open mind, but stuff like this irritates me:
Suffice it to say that Amy and I were far, far to the left of just about every show I’ve heard in the Crooked Universe. You kinda have to be if you take climate change—and especially climate justice—seriously. You can’t just take the talking points from Uncle Joe as gospel cause it ain’t. If neoliberalism was going to save us, it would have done it already.
In any event, it sounds like all sorts of things went wrong, but it's important to remember that one side of the story is still only one side of the story.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:49 AM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


They held the feed hostage unless we signed a termination agreement with a very detailed non-disparagement agreement (is that even legal anymore? Who knows!).

Non-disparagement agreements have just been retroactively voided by the National Labor Relations Board. Everybody start dishing!
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:43 PM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


This is really too bad, but I think it's a bit of a tempest in a teapot. I listen to a lot of the Crooked Media podcasts and they are uniformly great and well-produced, and have included more diverse voices over time. Maybe it just wasn't the right fit? Crooked is a bunch of left-leaning/left folks, but there are a couple things that are clear:

1) They are running a business. They employ people full-time and want to grow, which is a whole different ballgame than having a life and doing a podcast on the side. To make a 20th century music analogy, when the indie band signs to a major label, they *know* the label is going to want to hear a hit and that they are giving up some autonomy.

2) The flagship shows (PSA, PStW) are hosted by ex-Obama staffers and are focused on the current world situation and pragmatic solutions. Given that we live in a capitalist country with 3 branches of government, what can we do? Given that it's Biden or Trump, what's relatively better? That's incredibly helpful to me and a lot of others day-to-day. I would suspect, though, that some of them have idealist positions that aren't front and center on the show. I also know from listening that they are not at all suggesting people shouldn't organize outside the system or push things left.

The thing about not interviewing the EPA administrator seemed weird to me. Why not? Seems a bit entitled to turn that down, frankly. "Hey, we'd like to get you to interview this hugely influential and well-known person who has actual power on climatte." "No thanks, we'd seem uncool if we talk to THE MAN." Whatevs.

They definitely didn't get promoted a ton though - I've organically found like 8 different CM pods through cross-advertising and I don't remember Hot Take. In fact I listen to The Climate Pod (not CM) because I went looking for better climate discussion.

I think they're better off independent. They can be an outside voice and keep things 100% as they want. That's what I did (turned down the major label), and I stayed broke another 5 years, but I got to call the shots.*

* I quit music forever and got a soulless desk job.
posted by caviar2d2 at 1:04 PM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]


I'm entirely NOT victim blaming with this comment. I listen to several CM podcasts (Strict Scrutiny, their SCOTUS analysis, is SO good), and am shocked and left feeling a bit angry about these circumstances. These people deserved better.

But I guess it's a lesson about personal archives of anything you create, and not relying on another party and their servers to continually have your material existing on them. Some echoes in this slice of this story in the HBO animation deletion from a short while ago.

Creators shouldn't lose their work. Even if they don't own it, it is part of their C.V. and they should never be denied having access to it. And I guess there are questions of ownership in this, just as in many other similar bought-out pre-existing properties.

I do wish we'd either sort this shit out in a good way, or just ditch capitalism in favor of an economy that allows creatives to flourish without being dependent on the marketplace.
posted by hippybear at 4:42 PM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


I adore Crooked, so this is very disappointing.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 11:17 PM on March 26, 2023 [1 favorite]


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