“One courthouse, told week by week,” Sarah Koenig, journalist and narrator for the number one  charting iTunes podcast “Serial,” leaves the listener with in the trailer for their third-running season, continuing, “You’ll see what we saw—from the inside.” 

A homage to the true-crime documentary genre, the podcast is credited as one of several players that launched the medium into one of growing profitability in the entertainment industry. The audience podcasts attract has nearly doubled since 2014, boasting over 68 million listeners monthly and 220 million dollars in revenue in 2017. 

While “Serial” has skyrocketed with over five million downloads recorded since its debut, there are thousands that saturate the market. Some, such as “This American Life” and “Radiolab,” similarly tackle the “based-on-a-true-story” genre where listeners follow an investigative journalist. Others, the likes of which include “Stuff You Should Know” and “Pod Save America,” seek to provide an educational experience that is intellectually compelling. 

In a countless number of cases, though, many are attempting to deconstruct and evolve the celebrity interview format. “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard” is acclaimed as a podcast “that celebrates the messiness of being human,” and “Death, Sex and Money” defines itself as purposely discussing “the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.” 

Despite its recent boom in popularity within the last decade, though, there are few answers to a question rooted in both our behavior as consumers and as storytellers: Why? 

“There are three reasons people listen to a podcast,” Sidney Pierucci posed in Medium’s “The Rise of Podcast and Why ‘YOU’ Should Start One.” “An unusual sense of intimacy, the ability to productively multitask while driving or working out and great stories–the power of narrative.” 

In research conducted by the National Training Laboratory, it was found that the retention rate of auditory learning is twice that of reading and four times that of attending a lecture; even the most tedious of podcasts are produced to be easily consumable for the average listener. In podcasts driven by story, there are seldom long and winded tangents and monologues that require intense focus. Listeners can tune in and tune out at their leisure and still feel engaged with the material as the narration switches quickly from person to person. 

Their stories are driven by character, and there is an poignant immediacy in being able to ground those characters back to tangible voices. We can hear ourselves in their stories and perspectives, in the implied tones of how they tell them, and there is a rich, holistic quality to podcasts that other forms of storytelling cannot offer because they demand active and critical  consumption in order to connect. 

“Podcasts embody what is arguably the essential promise of the Internet: a means for surprising, revealing and above all ennobling encounters with people, things and ideas we didn’t know before,” Jonah Weiner, writer for Slate, argues in “What Makes Podcasts So Addictive and Pleasure.” He continues, “In an antidotal and almost paradoxical way, podcasts  are the Internet freed from pixels.” 

In a culture where the media is constantly reinforcing that only “workaholics” are the vision of success, podcasts provide the working person with opportunities to connect with others in a compactable and bite-size form that still allows them to continue the grind. 

Podcasts accord with our priorities and values as a society, and as a testament to this, our obsession with them is predicted to only continue to grow. 

When looking and assessing at how they have exploded recently, though, we’re also looking at a quiet undercurrent that defines us as people. In them, there is proof of our love for learning and stimulation, our craving to understand one another and our growing need for the world and the stories we tell of it to be packaged into convenient                                                                  and accessible materials. 

Jad Abumrad, host of “Radiolab,” described the essence of the form as this: “In a sense, I’m painting something, but I’m not holding the paintbrush. You are. It’s this deep act of co-authorship, and in that is some potential for empathy.”