Personally, I think the audio essay is a better form of communication compared to a podcast. Upon reflecting on the composition of these pieces, I realized that you can convey the same amount of information in an audio essay as a podcast, without all of the added time. This comes from the necessity for a podcast to seem somewhat casual and personal, but if someone is looking for strictly facts and information through audio, the audio essay is definitely the best way to consume it. Because of this, I would love to see audio essays become more popular. Also, many of the learnings I garnered from creating the audio essay were easily transferable to the construction of my podcast. The struggles and consequent understandings of formatting, cutting audio, and creating interesting content in my audio essay made my live recording of the podcast much more successful because I knew how to weave information together in an interesting way and had already become adept at using Audacity.