THE AUXORO STORY

Sometime in the spring of 2017, my senior year of college, I was marinating on a musty, beer-stained couch in the Richmond baseball house, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with the rest of my life.

After two elbow surgeries and a lackluster season on the mound, my dream of pitching professionally was circling the drain. But at least I had an accounting degree from a respected business school to fall back on. A lifetime of fluorescent lighting, spreadsheets, and pretending to care about accounts receivable, the slow descent into client-meeting purgatory and illicit lunch-hour parking-lot cigarettes. Incredible.

In a moment of self-pity, I cracked my fourth beer and sank deeper into that couch, an archaeological dig site of Keystone, Adderall dust, a little semen, and whatever other substances college house parties leaves behind.

Fuck this.

I grabbed my phone and texted the baseball group chat:

“Guys, I’m starting a website. I’m gonna interview music artists I’m curious about. Vote on these names.”

I don’t remember most of the list. All I remember is the one name I was secretly praying would win: Auxoro.

It sounded cool. Chic. Less like a blog and more like a fashion house.

“Did you see that new collab? Auxoro x Saint Laurent? Sick.”

I was delusional, but spiritually aligned.

When I sat on that couch thinking about the only thing I liked as much as baseball, “music” floated up. And in 2017, if you wanted to play music at a party, you needed one sacred object: an aux cord. I tossed “aux” into a word-mashing generator, and it spat out a thousand Frankenwords.

But one hit me right in the chest.

AUXORO.

So I sent it to my teammates along with the other names… knowing in my bones Auxoro would win.

It got absolutely obliterated.

Two votes, one of them mine.

The winning name had something like ten, and I can’t even remember what it was. All I knew was: screw my teammates, I’m choosing Auxoro anyway.

Right there on that beautiful, disgusting couch, I opened my laptop and bought the domain Auxoro.com on Squarespace.

And just like that, Auxoro was born.

I started posting print interviews with local Richmond musicians, filming band practices in rented storage units, mini documentaries fueled by ambition and too many scoops of C4.

Then, school ended. I moved back home to New York for work, but I kept the auxoro interview train chugging.

Eventually, I landed an interview with Mod Sun. I told my older brother, Matt.

“Are you recording it? Like a podcast?” he asked.

“What? Like Joe Rogan? No. I’m gonna ask him questions and take notes. Like always.”

“You should record it,” Matt said. “If you’re gonna write an article, you might as well put out the conversation as a podcast too.”

And I did.

I recorded my first-ever podcast conversation in the summer of 2018, in the basement of the Brooklyn Bazaar with Mod Sun. The greenroom was filthy, covered in graffiti, smelled not far off from a college baseball couch, and it was the most magical experience of my life.

Eventually, I ditched the print interviews entirely and went all-in on podcasting. I named the show The Auxoro Podcast, which, in hindsight, is an absolutely awful name.

“How do you spell that? A-W-K-S…?”

Exactly what you want to hear as a host when you tell someone about your show.

But hey, terrible name or not, the podcast was born.

My older brother Matt helped me record and edit the early episodes. Wyclef Jean. Jess Glynne. Finneas. People I never imagined I’d meet, let alone sit across from for hours.

I was hopeless. Hopeless at audio gear. Hopeless at editing. Hopeless at everything except enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Matt was actually doing real audio and video work like editing for Martha Stewart’s now-defunct TV channel, working on movies like The Fighter, and he still took hours out of his day to help his fumbling little brother chase a shaky dream.

Thank you, Matt. This platform would have never gotten off the ground without you.

Over time, the show grew. I stopped talking to musicians exclusively and started talking to anyone I was genuinely curious about, athletes, comedians, scientists, artists, doctors, whoever I found fascinating.

This is a terrible move for gaining traction in the algorithm, which incentivizes creators to constantly double down on the same slop that garners the most clicks.

“What's that, Zach? Your video with the lead singer got 20,000 views? Surely you'll feed me, lord algorithm, with another podcast in the same vein. FEED ME MORE OF THE SAME! Who's next? What?? A scientist trying to save the world?? Gross. 33 views.” 

Look, I never said I was a businessman. I just barely survived business school.

But here I am now. Five years in, and the podcast is still growing. I’ve talked to hundreds of smart, kind, hilarious humans like Mark Normand, Chloé Valdary, Andy Weir, and so many others.

I also renamed the podcast to The Zach Show.

Turns out, my name is easier to spell than a random non-word fabricated out of thin air by a word masher.

But I still love Auxoro. It’s still the name of the studio. And every show I make, The Zach Show, Sip & Sin, Zach Reacts, lives under the Auxoro Studios umbrella.

So that’s my extremely long-winded way of saying: a little bit about me and how I got here.

I don’t know how you ended up on this platform, but I’m really glad you did.

Thanks for checking it out, and I hope you hang around for a bit.

The Zach Show

Sip & Sin

Zach Reacts

Instagram

Substack