Nobody accused Dave Portnoy of doing things small. The Cancel Me If You Can book tour has been running like a full media operation — live events, podcast appearances, social clips — and this week it hit a different gear. The Boston stop packed a multi-level venue wall to wall, and Portnoy couldn't help himself when he posted the crowd footage.
Dave posted the Boston crowd footage and made the Eras Tour comparison himself.
That's a real crowd. Purple and red stage lighting, people filling multiple levels, the kind of turnout that earns you the right to make a Taylor Swift joke. Amazon had already declared the book the "smash hit of the summer," and Portnoy gleefully amplified a review using a word — hagiography — he admitted he didn't know, noting whoever wrote it seemed to love the book. The machine was humming.
Meanwhile, Feitelberg took the promotional brief further than anyone asked. While most people would post a tweet or cut a studio clip, Feits strapped on a backpack and went hiking to film content for the new How'd We Get Here episode tied to the book release. That's commitment. The outdoor footage of him addressing the camera against blue sky while sweating through a trail actually works — it's the kind of stunt that gets clipped and passed around precisely because nobody expected it.
Feitelberg documented the hike he actually went on to film book promos.
The How'd We Get Here episode pulled in more than the mountain promo. It also surfaced Feits responding on camera to an email from Dave — filmed outdoors, clearly not in a studio, the frustration coming through in real time. And separately, the old Amsterdam strip club story with Bert Kreischer resurfaced as a throwback clip circulating alongside the episode drop. The book tour has become its own content ecosystem, pulling in old stories, internal drama, and yes, mountain hikes.
The single best clip driving the book this week came out of the ForePlayPod. Trent sat down and retold the story of his infamous Google Maps arrest — the one that apparently made it into the book itself. In the clip, three subtitle fragments flash across the screen in sequence: "KEVIN" — "GOOGLE MAPS" — "MY LIFE IS OVER." That's the whole emotional arc of the story in 6 words, and it landed. The clip spread fast because it doesn't need context to be funny; it works cold.
A book about Barstool controversies was always going to generate its own content loop — the stories in the book become clips, the clips drive people to buy the book, the tour events become clips, repeat. That flywheel is fully spinning now. Barnes & Noble reportedly ran low on stock. Mitchell's Book Corner on Nantucket stocked it. BFW turned finding a copy into a 2-part series. Even Clem got the last one at his local Barnes & Noble and compared it to championship merch. Whatever you think of the Portnoy media universe, the book launch is running exactly the way it was supposed to.