gilded age podcastverse lore: everyone has a podcast or multiple podcasts. too many to even imagine. arthur has a podcast, conkling and platt have a podcast, blaine has a podcast (which has to be called blainiac) which garfield eventually joins... grant has the biggest podcast, everyone else feels honored to come on his podcast, but blaine and garfield want to overtake him, causing drama. (hayes' podcast became temporarily more popular because he tried to make it appeal to everyone, but then everyone turned on him because it was boring and he didn't have good guests on) everyone is sponsored by some insane scams, the biggest one which will be buying/selling stocks in some highspeed rail company, and a crypto scam called gildedcoin or something. there's some deal that netflix/spotify/[world-specific streaming service] is going to be making with one podcast and there's huge drama over whose podcast will get picked up, blaine and garfield team up on a new one which gets super popular and it gets leaked that that's the one that's going to get the deal, so guiteau (who was an insane fan of arthur's podcast, and was so persistent and enthusiastic that he ended up becoming a co-host) poisons garfield's HelloFresh™️ (or some other method of harm involving whatever other generic product people do ad reads for). garfield ends up getting medical advice from Doctor Doctor Bliss, a biohacking guru who thinks he can cure garfield's ailment by injecting him with peptides and creatine and ketamine and putting him on a carnivore diet and so forth and so garfield dies. conkling gets cancelled for having repeatedly said on his podcast that garfield should die, so he takes his podcast off all platforms as protest expecting his fans to clamor for their return, but he has no fans and so he fades into obscurity. but this all does mean the podcast deal goes to the next most popular one, which is arthur's podcast now (even more popular now after the incident) so he does benefit. he streams himself reacting to guiteau's trial
julia sand is a listener who calls into arthur's podcast telling him how shitty it is and how bad all his friends are but encouraging him to be the funniest best podcast host the world has ever seen. at first he resents her calling in but over time they become friendly and eventually he has her on an episode