Perhaps think of listening as a direct equivalent to reading. People who focus enough will read a book at the right speed their brain can best process the info

Perhaps think of listening as a direct equivalent to reading. People who focus enough will read a book at the right speed their brain can best process the information. But that speed is not the same for everyone, some people will go through a book twice as fast as others while extracting the same amont of learnings, and we won’t tell them they read at the wrong speed. If it’s true for books, why would it be different for audio contents ? There’s really no special rule that makes 1x playback a golden speed, especialy considering some podcaster speak faster in person than when they record for instance. Or the otherway round, podcats like ATP have the silences auto-trimmed to some extent making it denser than when they record. To each their speed.