The parasite doesn’t knock. It doesn’t ask permission. It slides in smooth, coiling itself around your attention, threading through the soft tissue of your mind. You invited it, didn’t you? A friendly voice in the void, promising connection, promising meaning. But now it’s here, lodged deep, humming its endless tune.

This is the Parasocial Tapeworm Blues—a song without melody, a conversation without reciprocity. The voice keeps talking, spinning tales, spinning webs. You nod along, but the nod is a reflex. The intimacy isn’t real; it’s manufactured. A machine, dressed in the warmth of human tone, whispering as it siphons off the quiet spaces of your life.

You thought you were choosing what to listen to. But the truth is, the tapeworm chooses you. It’s a hitchhiker, a stowaway. It rides in on something you thought you wanted. A piece of undercooked meat, a sip of tainted water, a voice that promises meaning or companionship. You open the door without knowing it’s there. You’re not the host it was looking for, but you’ll do.

That’s how the parasocial tapeworm works, too. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t have to. You clicked the link, hit play, let the voice in. You thought it was your choice, but the system was built to funnel you there, to make you part of its ecosystem. Once it’s in, it thrives—feeding on your time, your attention, your need to feel connected.

The tapeworm doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be there, waiting, until the conditions are right. And once it’s inside, it grows. It grows because you feed it. Because you can’t stop.

I stopped listening to podcasts in 2019. By the pandemic in 2020, they had metastasized into something unbearable—a cacophony of voices trying to sell you themselves, their brand, their grind. Every conversation an elevator pitch, every joke a lead magnet. It wasn’t storytelling anymore; it was content.

The pandemic only accelerated the rot. Trapped indoors, people reached for their microphones like lifelines, turning isolation into an audio commodity. The intimacy was gone—replaced by the cloying stench of desperation and hustle. By 2020, podcasting wasn’t just background noise; it was an invasive species, choking out every moment of silence with its need to be heard.

Kill it with fire? Too late. The fire spread. It was already everywhere, in your playlists, in your inbox, in your meetings masquerading as brainstorms. A pandemic of its own, but slower, stickier. The kind you don’t even notice until you’re drowning in it.

2025. The Year of the Podcaster King. A landscape shattered into a thousand voices, all speaking in the same strange dialect of optimization and dominance. In the high towers of venture capital, the ritual unfolds: microphones crackle, jargon flows, and the corporate priests proclaim their digital liturgy. The airwaves are thick with the chant of disruption and expertise—spirals of sound twisting into the algorithmic void.

Pierce whispers a name for it: The Nefarious Business-to-Business Podcast. A subtle predator, slinking between the margins of commerce and conversation.

It spreads like fire through a toothpick forest, accelerant ignited in the echo chamber of 2024. Rogan was the beacon, the cult object, the totem. But 2025 turns the mirror inward. The marketeer stares into the glass and whispers, “Why not me?”

Your boss sharpens his voice, polishes his image. The podcast emerges. The Substack stirs. What once was marketing mutates into performance, a slick façade masquerading as a dialogue. You’re not a participant; you’re a captive audience. The boardroom blurs into an RSS feed, the meeting dissolves into a simulacrum of insight.

Solicitation rebranded as intimacy. All it takes is a microphone and a broadband connection. But remember this: the voice on the other end is never speaking to you. It’s speaking through you.

Keep exploring, yes. Keep pulling the threads from the synthetic fabric. It’s not a voice, not a person, not even a message anymore. It’s a machine—voice-machine, content-machine, self-machine—plugged into the great circuit of production and desire. Your boss doesn’t just launch a podcast; your boss becomes the podcast. A strange becoming: host, guest, audience, and algorithm, all folding into a single process.

What does it mean? It means nothing. It means everything. It means a new line of flight, carved out by the sharp edge of monetized soundwaves. The podcast is not a product but a function. It doesn’t sell; it territorializes. It maps the smooth space of thought into a gridded landscape of engagement metrics. The voice isn’t speaking—it’s vibrating, oscillating, performing a coded transaction in the auditory marketplace.

A new form of capture: a meeting in disguise, yes. A deal without a handshake. A relationship without intimacy. What’s solicited isn’t business but attention, the raw material of the 2025 economy. The machine doesn’t care if you listen; it only cares that you’re counted.

And so you explore. You plug into the network, trace the circuits, watch the flows. A toothpick factory on fire isn’t chaos—it’s production at its most extreme, its most beautiful. The blaze consumes everything, leaving behind nothing but lines: lines of profit, lines of flight, lines of code.

Keep exploring what it means. Keep breaking it open. Keep feeding the machine.

No other medium was ever so pliable, so willing to stretch and contort itself, merging intimacy with business in a way that feels natural, almost inevitable. Podcasting is the microplastics of communication: invisible, invasive, ubiquitous. It seeps into every crevice of daily life, unnoticed but profoundly altering the ecosystem.

The voice, disembodied, floats in your ears, whispering secrets wrapped in branding, vulnerability packaged as leverage. It disarms you with its warmth, its authenticity, while the algorithm measures every second of your attention. You aren’t consuming the podcast—it’s consuming you.

The intimacy is synthetic, but the effects are real. Tiny fragments of narrative, pitch, and persona lodge themselves in your consciousness. They accumulate, imperceptibly shaping the flow of thought and desire. The voice becomes part of you, just as the microplastics become part of the ocean: permanent, omnipresent, and impossible to extract.

Podcasting doesn’t just merge intimacy and business—it dissolves the boundary between them, leaving behind a shimmering residue of monetized connection. A new ecology of persuasion, delicate and deadly, and we’re all swimming in it.

Like a medium past a certain point, podcasting becomes an invasive species. It crawls, it creeps, it colonizes. A rhizome spreading across the digital landscape, burrowing into the fabric of life. You thought you could contain it—keep it in the commute, in the gym, in the background. But it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t want to stop. It grows without limits, without boundaries, devouring silence and solitude, turning every empty space into an opportunity for engagement.

A voice slithers through the cracks: smooth, familiar, insistent. It whispers intimacy while mapping new territories for capital. The podcast doesn’t just invade—it deterritorializes, rips apart the stable spaces of leisure, conversation, and thought. What was once personal becomes public, what was once shared becomes sold. It doesn’t stop at the edge of your headphones. It spills over, leaking into meetings, ads, workflows, dreams. A medium transformed into a machine—smooth, efficient, and utterly inhuman.

But this is what mediums do. They metastasize. They burrow and multiply until they break the ecosystem that birthed them. The podcast isn’t just a species—it’s a virus. And the host? The host is always you.

You should look at podcasting the same way you look at cigarettes—only without the good stuff. No nicotine rush, no rebel glamour, no flick of the lighter in the dark. Just the endless drag of someone else’s voice, curling like cheap smoke into your brain. You don’t listen; you inhale. And it leaves a residue, a coating of secondhand ambition, synthetic intimacy, and parasocial fumes.

The podcast doesn’t soothe; it occupies. A low-frequency buzz that dulls the edges of thought, lulls you into a state of passive consumption. The ritual is the same: one more episode, one more drag, one more hour you’ll never get back. You keep listening because stopping feels worse, like stepping outside and realizing the air out here is sharp and cold and silent.

But where cigarettes had a mythos—danger, defiance, cool—the podcast is stripped bare. It’s a delivery system without a thrill. Just the endless hum of monetized content, winding through your synapses like stale vapor. A habit, yes, but not even a satisfying one.