TWO PODCAST STORIES by STEVE GERGLEY
May 6 2025
1. Podcast Appearance
After I won eighty-seven million dollars in the New York State Lottery, my wife and I abandoned our repugnant house in the suburbs and rented an expensive apartment in Brooklyn. Now that we had money, people suddenly cared what we had to say. Soon the co-host of a popular but controversial podcast sent us an email and asked us to appear on her show. During the recording, my wife and I ate pears and oranges with our fingers and made sticky mouth noises into our microphones. We dropped our voices three semitones and indulged in large amounts of vocal fry. We said that apples are deadly poison and that the sun is made of blue paste. In response to our deranged antics, the hosts cackled and smoked and nodded their heads in glee. They got drunk on red wine and rambled about religion and astrology and anonymous commenters on the internet. The recording lasted forever. It was a horrible and terrifying experience.
2. A Podcast of Our Own
In the weeks following our appearance on the podcast, my wife and I transformed into minor celebrities on the internet, so we started a podcast of our own and continued our deviant behavior. There we quoted unattributed lines of dialogue from William Gaddis's J R for the entirety of a two-hour episode. We hosted an adult film actress and asked her to describe her daily bowel movements in excruciating, polysyllabic detail. We interviewed a man with an adult baby fetish and questioned him about his favorite brand of diapers.
To our surprise, these episodes were a great success. Tens of thousands of listeners downloaded every new episode, and in less than a year, more than seven thousand people subscribed to our Patreon for extra episodes and exclusive content. But we soon discovered that our business model was unsustainable. Our downloads were plateauing. Our pool of bizarre guests was quickly drying up. And our Patreon was shedding subscribers at a rapid and alarming rate. So at the beginning of the next election cycle, we pivoted to serious journalism and scheduled a live show at an NYU lecture hall with a popular dark horse candidate beloved by the vast majority of our listeners. But three minutes and forty-nine seconds into our show, the candidate suffered a fatal heart attack and died on the stage beside us.
Moments after the horrible thump of the candidate’s body echoed through the silent lecture hall, the audience began screaming venomous insults at my wife and I, as if we had murdered the candidate with our own trembling fingers. From here my wife checked on the candidate and began dialing 911 on her phone. While she did this, I tried to bring the room to order and to apologize to the audience. This was a grave error. Without a moment of hesitation they began to chant horrific slurs and throw sharp pieces of refuse at our faces. Hurrying to the other side of the stage, I helped my wife to her feet; together we scrambled through the back door of the lecture hall.
Following this incident, we reverted our podcast to the strange and grotesque subject matter of its original incarnation. For our first new episode after the debate disaster, we read the ingredients of every box in our dry goods cabinet while roaring black metal blared from a crackling tape deck in the corner of the room. The episode was a grand success. The candidate's death at our live show was quickly forgotten. The incumbent president won the election in a landslide. Our Patreon surpassed ten-thousand subscribers. We now earn more than $57,000 a month.
Steve Gergley is a writer from New York who writes weird things that can be read in various places. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of scaffold literary magazine.
Also by Steve:THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE SEEN