There’s perhaps no modern movement more synonymous with storytelling than The Moth. Beginning in 1997, the organization evolved from a living-room slam hosted by novelist George Dawes into a tale-spinning juggernaut, hosting hundreds of live events and workshops across the world every year. But there’s another version of The Moth that exists only virtually, and that has attracted an audience almost entirely distinct from those at its live events: The Moth Podcast, which turns 10 years old this spring, was perhaps the very first podcast to capitalize on the medium’s unique capacity to conjure intimacy.

From the earliest, pre-podcast days of The Moth, the nonprofit dutifully collected audio recordings from live events, at one point releasing a CD with a selection of stories—but it was nearly 11 years before anyone thought to do anything more ambitious with the massive archive of audio. In the mid-aughts, however, podcasting began picking up steam, and Dan Kennedy, a longtime Moth host and performer, immediately saw its potential. “We need to get into this space in a big way," he recalls telling the staff. "Storytelling is just so prime for it.”

And so, in the spring of 2008, The Moth put forth its first humble podcast dispatch. Podcasting was still a nascent medium; no one really knew what to expect, or had any real sense of how the format could be leveraged. “It’s hard to overstate how low-tech the whole thing was,” says Catherine Burns, artistic director at The Moth: Some of the archived recordings sounded like they’d been taped underwater, and the nonprofit didn’t have its own studio for recording hosts’ introductions. Rather, they borrowed studio space from Paul Ruest, The Moth’s audio engineer, and in the early days, a Moth staffer with some basic audio skills edited together each podcast on her laptop.

But low-tech didn’t mean limitation; when The Moth Podcast debuted, it accumulated some 2,000 subscribers within a couple of weeks. The show’s producers were blown away. “A big show for us was 300, maybe 400 people,’” recalls Kennedy. Today, a Moth Mainstage event can seat as many as 3,000 people, but at the time, the fact that the podcast was reaching so many more people than had ever attended a single live event seemed like a tremendous win.

The show enjoyed steady growth for several years, bolstered by occasional features on This American Life, which could bring in 50,000 new subscribers from just a single, brief feature. Then, in 2014, Serial hit—and with its success came a rush of new podcast enthusiasts hungry for more content. “In the public radio and podcasting world, there’s definitely this attitude that all boats rise together,” says Burns. “When Serial blew everything up, we all found bigger audiences.” In the post-Serial era, The Moth Podcast’s subscriber count doubled, and today, the show boasts 46 million downloads a year—hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode, with some, like its special episode featuring global stories from women and girls, receiving over a million.

Though The Moth Podcast has come a long way from those early days, the show’s sound design remains relatively sparse, especially in comparison to the Radiolab-inspired genre of high-production podcasts. It eschews ASMR-esque sound effects and chill-inducing needle drops, leaving the focus on humans speaking into microphones.

Don’t let that simplicity fool you; packaging a single episode of The Moth Podcast is no easy feat. The Moth puts on nearly 600 live shows each year, producing thousands of hours’ worth of audio. And then there are those 11 years’ worth of archived audio that predate the podcast. Deciding what makes it into listeners earbuds is a multi-tiered process that requires dozens of people to listen to hours of audio per week, nominating their favorite stories.