Empathy Machines identifies This American Life as a cultural institution in the evolution of empathy as a “liberal feeling” central to podcast storytelling and the neoliberal era in which it developed.

This American Life revitalized the public radio traditions of investigative journalism and sonically inventive audio production. An early adopter of podcasting as a time-shifted delivery mechanism for its broadcast content, the program also ushered in appointment listening, a key innovation and disruption in the emerging chaotic attention economy of the 21st century. Empathy Machines centers This American Life as a model for prioritizing empathy as an affective and ideological strategy for feeling liberal as liberal democracy's precarious balance of opposites began to fracture into hypercapitalism, atavistic ethnonationalism, and new identity politics.

The book explores sound studies, and podcasting more specifically, through the lens of “empathy” and a kind of affective feeling that can be seen in the history of radio, and focusing specifically on the centrality of This American Life (TAL) as a focal point. It presents important contributions, perhaps the most central of which is the first book on TAL and its importance in the history of both radio and podcasting. It contextualizes TAL within the history of radio, looking back to radio's golden era and the para-social connections that it encouraged as well as the formation of NPR in the 1960's and the “Great Society Liberalism” that guided its programming and approach to the audience.