I've only listened to the intro so far, but I thought I'd respond to the question in the intro.
My first Escape Artists story was Pseudopod #153: The Hay Devils, by Colin P. Davies, read by Jaron Cohen.
I had just signed the contract for my very first fiction sale ever, to Pseudopod, and that one couldn't have come at a better time--The seemingly infinite stack of rejection slips was really starting to wear on me, and that email from Ben Phillips saying that he liked the story, making one small and reasonable editorial suggestion, was nothing short of amazing.
So then, since I'd never heard an episode before, I figured "Hm, I should probably find out what kind of things Pseudopod produces and what authors they've published, so I download the whole story archive and put it on my iPod. I started with that one because it was the most recent at the time.
Now, audio fiction was very new to me. I actually had only the vaguest idea what "podcast" meant (I still think it's a bad name, but that's a rant for another day). But I had listened to my dad reminisce many a time about the old radio drama serials that he used to listen to. I'd always thought they sounded pretty awesome, and thought it was a damned shame that they had died out. So I was very excited to learn that they haven't died out, they've just evolved into new distribution formats! Alasdair's smooth tones and interesting discussions multiplied the coolness by a factor of 10.
And thus my mad run of threadomancy began!