I think for me, personally, my total is honestly probably in the thirties. Which is a lot!

Were you surprised by how quickly “Binge Mode: Harry Potter” found a dedicated audience, even separately from “Game of Thrones”?

RUBIN Well, people have done stuff on Harry Potter for a very long time. My freshman year of college, I was just walking around listening to The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet podcasts, all the time. Some of my first exposure to podcasting, was listening to those podcasts. So people have been doing this for a while.

We knew the appetite for coverage and thoughtful discussion about these stories was insatiable. People love them. The thing that means the most to us, and that we hoped would matter the most to other people, is finding somebody you can talk to about a story who really feels the same way about it that you do.

Did we know it would be like this? No. Of course not. But we knew there was the potential for an audience.

What kind of Harry Potter readers are listening to the show? Are they die-hards, casual fans, people coming to the books for the first time? What has been your experience engaging with the fandoms?

RUBIN I think all of the above. One of the coolest and most fulfilling things for us has been hearing from people who say, “I never read Harry Potter, and I’m doing it for the first time so that I can listen to ‘Binge Mode.’” And then those people come back and say, “Boy, Harry Potter is really great.”

Certainly most of the people listening to it have read the books, but even within that there’s huge variance. There are people who are obsessives and read the books every year, every few months. It’s everything in between, this whole swath of different experiences.