A few weeks ago there was a video that kept popping up on my social media feeds. Two guys sat on New York public transit, talking into little mics attached to their Metro cards. You’ve seen this series, I’m sure. It’s called SubwayTakes, and each episode starts with the host, Kareem Rahma, in a crumpled earth tone suit asking the guest, generally a celebrity or comedian, the same question, “So, what’s your take?” Those takes range from funny (see “ban leaf blowers”) to serious thoughts, like, “fundamentally everyone is a good person.” Rahma agrees or disagrees (we do too), they discuss and debate for a couple minutes, and then we laugh, like and share online.

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The subway take I saw being reposted over and over was virally reshared in my online social circle because it touched on the space where me and a lot of the people I mutually follow work—narrative podcasts. The take here was that “every podcast is better at 2.0 speed.” If you aren’t familiar, that’s double the playback of real time, condensing, say, an hour-long conversation into a quick 30 minutes.

I know part of the premise of SubwayTakes is to give a slightly absurd perspective to either get giggles or have the audience thinking about bigger social issues. But, at a moment when big narrative audio studios are shuttering, loads of people are being laid off and fewer documentary series are being made, this sentence really struck a nerve in the industry of folks who produce, write, edit and sound design longform narrative audio. These are people giving sometimes years of their lives to tell stories about the world and themselves in hopes that it has some impact on whoever hears it.

Having spent more than a dozen years working on these types of audio projects, I know they are crafted in a way that’s as much about the experience of listening as it is about telling a story. For these creators—myself included—the idea of rushing through an episode of the work they create is no different than listening to your favorite song or watching your favorite film on fast forward just to ingest it quicker. The wave of reposts and shares from this group was not a vote of support for 2x speed, but a collective cringe.

Podcasts have always come in a multitude of styles—there’s the stuff that takes a long time to make like documentary series and multi-part audiofiction, there’s the interview shows, comedy and celebrity chatcasts, and now even AI personalities hosting niche slop.

Now, industry eyerolling at the thought of listening faster has existed since the majority of audio storytelling moved from terrestrial radio—where there’s no skipping, scrubbing forward or backward, and certainly no way to speed things up—to podcasting. Here app makers gave listeners the option to alter how they experience time. The debate about what is the appropriate listening speed has raged since, and even the most popular newsletter covering podcasts fires a shot, with a name that perpetually infuriates some makers—1.5x Speed.

Of course, in the end, and though it might feel insulting, once you click publish, it’s the listeners decision.

Yet what felt truly horrifying to everyone I saw sharing this SubwayTake video was the guest giving said take: Ira Glass, creator and host of This American Life, arguably the most popular storytelling podcast of its kind, and the show that inspired so many of the now stunned to build their careers around telling stories in sound.

I responded to a lot of the reposts with green-faced and vomit emojis to show my solidarity of disgust, but a theme emerged in the replies to those sour visages, a question that summed up what was causing many of us to recoil at this video: “Would Ira listen to his own podcast at 2x speed?”

Doing my due diligence as a journalist, I emailed Glass hoping he’d answer that question, but I have not yet heard back from him.

I have to say that part of me agrees with Glass, there are some interview podcasts that are purely informational for me, and I will chug those down a little faster. I do that with some nonfiction audiobooks too. I’m not there for joy, I’ve come to absorb information. Underneath the question of whether or not he’d listen to his own show at double speed is a much bigger question that is bothering me.

Whether or not he would choose to play something like his own show at double speed is an interesting question though, and one that stems from the fact that podcasts, like any other media, have always come in a multitude of styles—there’s the stuff that takes a long time to make like documentary series and multi-part audiofiction, there’s the interview shows, comedy and celebrity chatcasts, and now even AI personalities hosting niche slop about everything from lawncare to menopause to snakes.

Podcast is a word with an ever evolving definition. If E.T. were staring through the slats of Elliot’s closet door in 2025, he’d probably see a kid passively watching and laughing along to a YouTube video where a few people sat with big microphones in front of their faces chat for a few hours. Then E.T. would phone home and tell everyone on his planet that this video is called a podcast!

If a video of a conversation on YouTube is a podcast, then why isn’t an indie documentary on the same site called that too? What exactly is a podcast? And, in this moment where the popular definition feels more and more like it means chatcasts and YouTube—shows where you are probably not missing anything by listening on 2x, or even 3x speed—do we need a new language for the stories that we listen to?

In the case of narrative audio, I would say yes.

For the better part of the last year or so, I’ve been working on an audio magazine where I publish nonfiction audio stories entirely outside the podcast space—I embed them on Substack and as an album on Bandcamp, the indie music site. There’s even some cassette tapes. Part of the reason for doing this is a rebellion against the word podcast and the discomfort I feel about uploading the highly crafted work that people are making for this magazine into apps that are dominated by shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert and The Charlie Kirk Show. Even calling it a magazine is a conscious way of trying to distinguish the work producers are putting months and months of effort into recording and writing from what podcasting has become.

Reading through this you’ll notice that I use loads of different ways of talking about the work that I do and there are even more—narrative audio, audio storytelling, nonfiction audio, audio documentary, radio. They are all either clunky or boring or vague. Rather than trying to come up with something new, I suggest going in reverse and calling this type of crafted work “literary audio.” It’s a big enough umbrella to include nonfiction and fiction, and aligns with how a lot of people making and engaging with the work feel about it. This terminology also invites a new level of criticism to the medium that you’d find for novels, memoirs and cinema.

In 2017, Ira Glass’s own shows (This American Life and Serial) came together to release a third podcast—S-Town. It was downloaded by millions and reviewed widely as the first nonfiction novel of podcasting. S-Town was deeply researched, reported over years, and written into chapters laced together in a way that felt intentional. This was audio’s own In Cold Blood. Artful audio existed before then, but reviews comparing a podcast to a novel is something many makers had felt they were doing all along. Plenty of literary audio has been made in the more than eight years since S-Town, but the writer language used to talk about podcasting ceases to exist outside the editing room.

Part of the reason why there are so few of these conversations about podcasting is a general lack of criticism for narrative audio. Even the writers most dedicated to covering podcasts in mainstream media seem confined to a paragraph or two in a round up of what’s new or an end of year “best of” list. Unlike book releases from noted writers, rarely is a podcast reviewed or profiled on its own. The other side of this has been the money in the industry’s pivot first to cheaper talk shows, which don’t innovate enough to merit much critique, and now to a second pivot to turn those interview shows into video series, which makes podcasts more friendly on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. Now longer conversations can be sliced up, pulled from context and served into the viral morsels like what you might see on SubwayTakes.

Narrative audio needs new language and expanded criticism, or else Ira’s take will come true, because the only stuff left to listen to will be the bloated interview shows that are better at 2x speed.