Before the hosts say a word, listeners are dropped into a dramatic trailer for Evil Dead: Burn — a new entry in the Evil Dead franchise hitting theaters July 10th — followed by a sponsor segment for Southern New Hampshire University. Henry reads the SNHU copy with characteristic deadpan, noting the school offers over 200 online degree programs, some of the lowest tuition rates in the US, and no set class meeting times. It's a routine cold open, but the true crime angle of the SNHU pitch — criminal justice and psychology as top programs — neatly foreshadows the episode to come.

The show's cold open is pure chaos: Henry and Eddie riff on foie gras production, the ethics of force-feeding geese, and the allegedly wasteful habit of orcas eating only the liver of great white sharks. Henry compares the practice to the TV show My 500-lb Life and wonders aloud whether a 600-pound human's liver could technically be turned into foie gras. Eddie counters that only the liver would be worth eating anyway. The conversation pivots to orcas being held to a different standard than indigenous peoples for wastefulness, then somehow arrives at Henry announcing a new society devoted to randomly killing whales and filming the results on an iPad. It's the perfect encapsulation of Side Stories' unhinged warmup energy.

Henry Zabrowski introduces himself and co-host Eddie Larson, noting that they experimented with switching sides of the desk for their other show Movie Stories (available on Patreon). The switching idea came from Henry watching a Tom Hanks interview about having a 'good side' and 'bad side' — and both hosts sheepishly admit they're currently facing the camera on their bad sides. Eddie mentions a missing tooth implant he needs to get. It's a brief, warm housekeeping moment before the episode's content begins.

Henry opens with what he frames as a hot financial tip: bet on Polymarket that Zendaya will leave Tom Holland within a year. His reasoning — delivered with full sincerity — is that Tom Holland, as a British man, will inevitably lose his looks in the specific way British men do, and once that happens, Zendaya will walk. He cites Jude Law's alleged multiple scalp reconstructions as supporting evidence. Eddie is skeptical, noting he fundamentally dislikes gambling given its role in ruining his family. The segment veers into Eddie searching Polymarket live and discovering you can bet on the 2028 presidential race and various celebrity divorces. From there, the conversation drifts to Eddie's purchase of a Ghana soccer jersey (featuring the name of recently deceased Ghanaian musician Ebo Taylor), a genuine debate about whether a white man can wear it, and Henry's extended reflection on his own past dashiki phase. The section closes with Eddie declaring allegiance to Ghana over England in the World Cup.

The mid-episode ad break features three sponsor reads, each elevated by Henry's characteristically chaotic delivery. The Rocket Money segment builds from the premise that money isn't real and organizing it is as absurd as organizing Care Bears. The Squarespace read becomes a meditation on using AI-powered web design to promote corrupting the youth of America. The BetterHelp spot is the most personal — Henry describes having to explain the devil imagery in his home to a skeptical handyman, eventually winning him over ('El Diablo es bueno'). All three are standard ad formats made memorable by the host's delivery.

Henry reveals he made Eddie watch the Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, and both are clearly gripped. The case involves Taylor Parker, then 27, who sustained a fake pregnancy for a full 10 months — aided by a purchased fake bump and a device simulating fetal kicking — before murdering her heavily pregnant best friend Reagan in Oklahoma and driving to Texas with the baby. Henry details the body cam footage widely circulated online: Parker, covered in blood, claiming to have given birth in her car. A doctor immediately knows something is wrong. The documentary traces how Parker watched C-section videos on YouTube before committing 94 cuts to extract the baby. Both Reagan and the baby died. Parker was convicted and became the 6th woman ever sentenced to death in Texas. Henry is particularly fascinated by the pathology of it — the gap between pathological lying and the choice to commit murder.

Henry steps back from the murder to trace its roots: Taylor Parker's lifelong pattern of fabrication. In high school, she would ask friends for nude photos 'from the chin down' to send to boys she liked, with no exit plan for when those boys eventually met her. Later, she began a chronic illness dive — first claiming fatigue and fainting, then announcing an MS diagnosis, then cancer. Henry frames pathological lying not as mere dishonesty but as a compulsion to reshape reality, citing other cases including an Australian woman who faked cancer and a woman who faked being a 9/11 widow to infiltrate a victims advocacy group. He argues the most dangerous phase isn't the lying itself but when a liar begins actively trying to make the lie real — which is exactly what Parker did, escalating from fake illness to fake pregnancy to murder. Eddie reflects that every social circle contains at least one pathological liar, and Henry adds that reformed pathological liars are equally fascinating.

After reinventing herself in a new town, Taylor Parker set her sights on Wade Griffin — a large, incurious hog-trapper she spotted at a rodeo in New Boston, Texas. She performed hyperauthenticity, pretending to love the country lifestyle to win him over. Within two months, she claimed to be inheriting $8 million and set about materializing it: buying him a $100,000 car on credit, buying his mother a car, and arranging a tour of a $4 million hog ranch in Oklahoma they were going to purchase for cash. The real estate agents, accustomed to agrarian millionaires who look nothing like their net worth, took her seriously. Henry relishes the names of her fictional support team: fake lawyer Bill Lawington, fake Shell Company representative named Shelly. When the house of cards began to collapse — repossessions, missed payments — she announced she was pregnant, knowing it would keep Wade from leaving. Henry and Eddie dissect Wade's willful blindness: he never attended a single appointment, his whole family told him she was lying, and he cut off every friend who raised doubts.

The climax of the Parker story: two weeks past her supposed due date, Taylor Parker drove to Reagan's home in Oklahoma, stabbed and mutilated her friend, performed the improvised C-section using 94 cuts, and drove back to Texas. She had already washed some of the blood off and changed, but arrived at the hospital still visibly bloodied, claiming to have given birth in her car. The doctor, checking her body, immediately knew no baby had been born there. The hosts note the surreal detail that she was wearing jeans — you don't put your jeans back on after giving birth on the roadside. Henry says the body cam footage, widely available online and featured in the documentary, looks like murder from the very first frame. Eddie arrives at a simple moral verdict: to get to murder, whatever your psychology, you're just evil. Henry is more conflicted, marveling at how many off-ramps Parker passed before arriving at the worst possible outcome.

Eddie adds a logistical note that had been overlooked: Parker deliberately crossed state lines, killing Reagan in Oklahoma before fleeing to Texas, which bought her a few hours of additional confusion as the two states' law enforcement connected the cases. Henry closes the Parker discussion with a characteristic flourish — suggesting that Wade Griffin, the man too checked out to notice his girlfriend was faking a pregnancy, could be repurposed to hog-tie Peter Thiel. The segment transitions into the Dialogue story with Eddie remarking that Peter Thiel has now surpassed Elon Musk as the person he hates most.

Eddie reads the Acorns ad, leaning into the financial anxiety angle by riffing on wanting to invest in cheeseburgers before landing on the app's $5 new-account bonus and 14-million-customer claim. Henry then reads for IXL, weaving in details about his dogs Wendy and Karmie struggling with biology and American history respectively. Both reads are delivered with the show's signature absurdist editorial voice, making functional ad copy feel like extensions of the episode's comedic texture.

Henry announces what he frames as the week's biggest story: a Wired magazine exposé revealing the existence of Peter Thiel's secret society, Dialogue, founded in 2006 and kept completely secret for nearly 20 years. The membership and website were unknown until hackers found a security loophole — made easier, Henry argues, because tech oligarchs are so convinced of their own genius that they don't imagine they can be attacked. The exposed attendee list is bipartisan to a startling degree: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, Ted Cruz, Cory Booker, Ezra Klein, Bryan Johnson ('the vampire man stealing blood from his son'), and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Henry's core argument: this isn't a left-right story, it's a wealth story — once your bank account hits a certain threshold, your brain changes and you start treating everyone else as expendable. The society also functions as an elite matchmaking service, and among its session topics are 'How to Start a Cult,' 'It's Fun to Be in Charge,' and 'Money Does Buy Happiness.' The Epstein connection emerges when Henry notes that a Dialogue email found in the Epstein archive says 'Peter Thiel loves your secret society idea,' and that Epstein was invited to attend gatherings.

Henry announces what he calls the 'big ups to robots' story: Ukraine's confirmed deployment of a fully autonomous combat drone that killed several Russian soldiers and destroyed a truck without any human pulling a trigger. The drone entered what the Ukrainians call 'Terminator mode' — everything in a designated area was eliminated. The only evidence of its success came from a second human-operated drone sent in afterward to survey the carnage. This launches Henry and Eddie into a sprawling debate about AI. Henry's thesis is blunt: 'AI' is a marketing buzzword applied to ordinary software — it doesn't think, it executes instructions. He compares an AI drone killing people to a waffle machine making waffles: if it does what it was built to do, it's just a machine with a fancy name. Eddie complicates the picture, noting that code is increasingly written by AI rather than humans and that programmers are being told not to write code themselves anymore. Henry argues this guarantees eventual collapse, since the systems are built on a shaky foundation of pattern-matching rather than genuine cognition. Both agree that AI is getting second chances for failures that would immediately get a human fired.

Henry pivots to a lighter story — lighter in subject matter if not in imagery. An Indian man has stood in the same place for 12 years as a devotional standing penance, a vow to Shiva. Henry's initial interest is almost entirely aesthetic: the man's feet have turned enormous, black, and necrotic — functionally dead weight attached to living legs. The hosts look at images together on camera, trading descriptions that become increasingly hyperbolic (Shaquille O'Neal feet, Ganesh legs). The philosophical conversation that follows is surprisingly substantive: Henry explains guru culture in India, where people rally around local spiritual leaders in a way that doesn't exist in the United States. Eddie is pragmatically dismissive — any religion that makes you do this can't be endorsed — while Henry is more curious, noting that extreme austerity practices are rare even within Hinduism. The segment ends with Eddie noting the man was using a leaning board with ropes to sleep, and therefore, technically, didn't complete the task.

The listener mail segment opens with a quick resolution: Eddie, who mentioned last week that he couldn't find his preferred Mitchum deodorant, has simply ordered a crate of it online. The next email reveals new information about a bungee jumping incident the hosts had touched on previously: video shows three operators physically lifting a woman above their heads and throwing her into a ravine without the cord attached, while people in the background shout that she's not connected. Henry watches footage on camera and is visibly disturbed — it looks less like an accident and more like a group of carnies javelined a person into the ground. The hosts agree: never trust bungee jump operators, they are carnies operating without a roof. The centerpiece of the segment is a letter from a listener who works for a local DA, describing 'Bob' — a chaotic, drug-addicted vigilante who posed as a young boy online to trap a community pedophile. Bob accidentally terrorized his target into voluntarily surrendering to police, not through tactical genius but because his repeated jail stints caused months of terrifying silence. The pedophile, convinced he was facing a cold mastermind, broke under the psychological pressure. Henry poses the broader question: if institutional justice is slow and vigilante violence is wrong, is weaponized psychological pressure a valid alternative?

The episode closes with a full slate of promotional content delivered with genuine enthusiasm. Henry plugs the Patreon (ad-free listening, Last Stream on the Left every Tuesday at 5PM PST) and Instagram/TikTok. Eddie delivers an extended endorsement of HGX2's second season on YouTube, calling it the favorite thing he's been involved in creating and singling out director Eric Lacombe. Both hosts promote the London show (sold out), and Eddie reads off an extensive list of solo tour dates across Bethlehem PA, Newark NJ, New York, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Plano TX, LA, and Chicago. The show closes with Henry's traditional 'Hail Satan' and Eddie's counter 'Hail Ghana,' ending on the running soccer jersey joke from the episode's opening.