I’m someone that could never really get into talk shows, radio shows or podcasts because I tended to find the speakers too long winded, slow to get their points across and the formats generally encouraged the kind of runtime that discouraged me from giving it my full attention. I mean an hour to listen to something all the way through plus the ads? Pass.

Going back about a dozen years ago if I wanted to watch a video to get some kind of information out of it, I generally found a way to load it up into QuickTime Player and play it back at 2x or 3x.

Nowadays I listen to too many podcasts because two pieces of technology fixed that for me: truly wireless headphones, AirPods originally, Powerbeats Pro presently, and podcast players with variable audio acceleration, namely Overcast, but I think Castro can do it too, and I’m sure there’s equivalents out there in Android. Overcast has two major quality of life improvements that make talk shows not just tolerable, but if you like the speakers, enjoyable. It decreases the playback time by about 40% for me using a combination of a fixed speed adjustment and Smart Speed, and it evens out the voice volume of the speakers so if someone has a bad mic or speaks softly, I can hear what the hell they’re saying.

Without either of these, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate podcasts as a format at all. Even now I favor podcasts that still have shorter base runtimes, Overcast is going to decrease the length regardless, but I don’t want to listen to something for more than 35 minutes, if that.

There’s a lot of good interviews, talk shows, news podcasts and so on that I find superior than the crap I would find on the web, I can easily skip past ads, and I can relax be play a game while the podcast runs more or less in the background. There’s plenty I just wouldn’t hear about or learn about simply because it really isn’t on the web. It might be in a book somewhere, but hearing someone explain their position on this or that or another thing in their own voice in a conversational format is much more enjoyable to me than following their writing and piecing their positions together.

Now you might give this all a try and find you still don’t care for podcasts, or maybe you already did. That’s fine, also fine if you’re not interested at all. Just figured I would give my 2¢ as someone who previously thought along the same lines as you about audio/video mediums. Text has a myriad of advantage over audio and video, but I’m finding audio and video have some advantages as well over text. Having technology available to make it a fair bit less miserable and time consuming an experience was part of what helped me realize that.

you should try to listen to podcasts where you think the hosts are interesting. they’re useful for uncovering new threads of information of and modes of thought, which are more usually associated with what you gain from personal conversations. podcasts are probably never the supreme mode of conveying information, but they’re a cool window into peoples’ brains. they’re great for storytelling as well, and in quarantine, they’re acceptable substitutes for social engagement.

You made me realize that podcasts do take the place of Wikipedia for me, especially when I have a lot of busy work. For example, someone mentioned Jurgen Schmidhuber in an AI thread here the other day and I was able to find a bunch of podcasts interviewing him or mentioning him. I threw them in a playlist and got a lot of what I wanted, passively for the most part and while multitasking.

I can only multitask with audiobooks if the other task is fairly mindless.

I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes, for example. But coding takes too much cognitive load for me to multitask. I even find music distracting when trying to think deeply about a problem.

I used to have the same issue. Looking for interesting tidbits in a podcast was like finding a needle in an 1hr long rant haystack, and I personally like to have some snippet as a reference for later when I'm learning, but I found this app https://www.airr.io that lets me save and share snippets of podcasts. Pretty useful!

It took over a decade, but I finally realized that this is the original purpose of the dialectical journals I was required to write for my high-school English classes, before they were coopted as an assessment tool. As it’s a record of your own thinking about the various things you’ve read, it provides a way to figure out where ideas came from in a way that full-text search can’t handle.

These days, I use a traditional index card system combined with a spaced-repetition flashcard system. Each concept that I feel like collecting information about has a small stack of cards that starts with a 1- or 2-sentence definition, in case I’m using a term slightly differently from other people. Below that are cards that represent quotes, notes, summaries, and recommended reading on that topic.

The flash card deck is to make sure I know what things exist, and what words are used in the literature to refer to abstract things. If I need more detail than I can remember, those keywords will get me to a relevant wikipedia page, at least.

I've built a podcast app that lets you take notes at specific time stamps.

What I've personally found is it's way too cumbersome to pull the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, press the "Add Note" button (assuming the Now Playing screen is already showing, otherwise another click for that), type in your notes, and click save...and probably rewind 15 seconds because you lost track of the conversation.

But now that I write this out I realize a Siri shortcut could be apt here.

that seems like an A+ app idea. There’s lots of times I think of something I want to look up later and never remember to get around to it.

> I'll never understand the drive to bury so much good information inside video and audio.

Important aspect is that it faster to produce then writing.

> Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing.

Popular good podcasts are not like lectures. They tend to have less information per minute and light side chats where your brain rests. They can be consumed while cleaning, cooking or going somewhere and paying reasonable amount of attention to surrounding environment. You can not do it with lecture (I tried).

You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all, but at smaller pace then expected from lecture and it requires less attention.

Audio/video is also very inconvenient when you need to slow down your processing rate. You have to tweak playback controls for this, while dealing with pure text only requires a slight adjustment of your eyeball muscles. And similarly when you encounter parts that can be skipped forward easily: text just requires some more motion of your eyeballs, while recorded audio/video is a lot more awkward to deal with.

Nota bene: A great lecture is worth a lot. But a great text that delivers the same message is worth a lot more.

I understand where you're coming from. There are some very smart people who refuse to listen to podcasts, but instead read the transcripts because they find the signal:noise to be higher.

That being said, one factor you might be discounting is that producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read. There are a lot of people who are great conversationalists, but not great writers.

Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things. For super deep dives I certainly agree text is better.

> I feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.

I listen to a lot of podcasts about random topics while doing yardwork and (pre-pandemic) commuting. I find that I remember these podcasts rather clearly compared to reading articles, and I find that they "contextualize" well with my existing knowledge.

For instance, I recall a number of details from Dan Carlin's WWI podcast "Blueprint for Armageddon" because I was mulching the garden beds with 15yds of top dressing while listening to the series last year.

I don't know if the improved retention is due to the narrative/conversational style of podcasts, the "memory palace" effect of doing something mindless at the same time, or some other cognitive difference in spoken vs read information.

I listen to educational podcasts as I’m going to sleep at night and while I don’t retain everything, I do remember some of it and that’s time I’d otherwise have spent staring at the ceiling or whatever.

I’ve actually collected quite a large number of podcasts that hit my sweet spot of being just interesting enough to engage my attention but not interesting enough to keep me awake.

Podcasts are a nice thing to hear while doing other stuff. There are also fiction and true crime podcasts that use music, narration, and dramatization to great effect. They can use recordings of their subjects instead of quoting them. The rhetorical power of elocution is a pleasure in itself, and I like to feel that I am not so alone – especially now.

The flip side is to think about how much good information is already trapped in audio, but never transitioned to a better digestible format like podcasts. I’m thinking things like class lectures, quarterly results calls, company all-hands calls that often include an unnecessary video component.

Contextualizing information with a human speaker can make it much easier to understand for me. It's easier to narrow down the meaning behind spoken words when it is sourced from a real person.

There are too many occurrences of reading anonymous text that can interpreted multiple ways without enough context to make it clear what is meant. If you attached a speaker to the same context; with intonation, character and a reliable history of quirks it becomes trivial to see what they meant.

People tend to use simple language when talking to another human so you're not always chasing a rabbit hole of terms that can be summarized for the sake of time in a podcast.

You may enjoy https://podcastnotes.org which in a way is an attempt to solve this problem that you describe.

Disclosure: I work on PN on the tech side.

i forget who, but I remember reading someone who both writes and does podcasts saying that one of the nice things about audio is that you can't have your words screenshotted and mocked on social media.

which means you can express yourself less defensively and without having to worry about the worst possible interpretation of whatever you say.

The author uses podcasts as an audio Wikipedia, and the article explains what benefits they see and how their system works. I don't see how this trivializes anything, nor is there a need to detail the history of the systems.

One could argue that audio is superior for comedy, just to give an example.

Audio is superior for multitasking. It's hard to read while doing the dishes.