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Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I've tried, and listened to some interesting ones, but in the end I'd much rather consume the same content by rea

Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I've tried, and listened to some interesting ones, but in the end I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc. Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. There's a podcast related to a product I work with that I've tried a few times. The podcast is very well done, but each one is about an hour long. I'd much rather have it as a blog post where I can skim through to find the pieces that interest me. They've gotten a little better with their episode descriptions where they tell you what topics they are talking about and when they start, but it's only a minor improvement. Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever.

npollock 8y ago
> Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. Google is actively working with the podcast community and encouraging podcasters to structure their data to be accessible in search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/podcast https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/podcast
jldugger 8y ago
> The podcast is very well done, but each one is about an hour long. Many podcast apps have a pitch stable speedup function, that increases the playback speed. I'm currently at 2.1x, but I have a blind friend that listens to email via TTS at something like 4x. It's a skill that you can practice and ramp up over time. > I'd much rather have it as a blog post where I can skim through to find the pieces that interest me. Personally, podcasts are a supplement to my blog feeds, for the daily commute. There is no public transit to work that's feasible, and even if there was, I generally cannot read in car without getting motion sickness. So reading is pretty much off the table, and instead podcasts fill that slice of daily life. > Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. This is mostly true, although nothing prevents transcripts from being made readable.
alexpetralia 8y ago
The other thing is that we often engage with things for two goals: (1) information and (2) entertainment. Text excels at being extremely efficient for (1), but not as efficient for (2) - at least when compared to multimedia like photos, videos, audio, etc. Podcasts offer a good balance between (1) and (2), but they are not the high-octane fuel of information that pure text can offer.
astura 8y ago
Well, yeah, of course if you're just sitting in your living room you'd rather read than listen; however that's not really the use case of a Podcast. The value podcasts bring is you can consume them during times you can't read. During exercise, driving, walking to work, cleaning the house, cooking, and train/car rides (for people who get motion sick while reading in a moving vehicle). They turn tedious menial tasks into times when you're mildly entertained - that provides immense value. They can also be used for a slightly more interesting white noise.
- jeremy7600 8y ago
  If you can pay attention while doing those things. I am not the OP, but if it isn't music, listening to anything while doing those things is a non-starter for me, especially driving.
  - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
    I'm roughly the same way. When driving the choice is that I either miss something on the road or miss something on what I'm listening to. I usually take public transit to work, but the buses are too noisy for me to actually get anything out of a podcast. I could use noise canceling headphones, but I find those just make the bus sound weird instead of getting rid of the noise.
    - ferongr 8y ago
      Just get IEMs with properly fitting tips.
  - anyfoo 8y ago
    It's true that it does not work for any task that you need to pay attention to. Folding laundry, cooking a known meal, cleaning anything and driving the standard commute, however? No problem at all. Maybe I need to rewind 15 seconds a few times (which is purposefully made easy) if something unexpected happens in the menial task, but most of the time those menial tasks leave more than enough attention for a podcast.
  - 8y ago
Naga 8y ago
You're right, text is a much better medium. However, at least for me, I listen to podcasts at work mostly, or when I am doing something physical like dishes, where reading is impossible (or impractical).
bitlax 8y ago
You listen to podcasts like you listen to the radio: when you're driving, doing chores, working out, etc.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  I think this is part of my problem. Radio was never really a thing in my childhood, so it's not a big part of my adulthood either. Other than driving in the car, or as an alternative to the TV announcers when hockey was on, my family never had the radio on or music playing. I do listen to music on the bus, but podcasts are too much of a challenge since they're competing with all the other noise around me.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    I'm 33 and didn't grow up in a radio culture either. I first heard of podcasts around 2006 in college when Apple came out with a mic dongle for the iPod. Never bothered checking any out. It was only when I came across a lengthy interview with an athlete I like that I started listening. Podcasts can be good for that, since TV usually focuses on short segments to fit in all the commercials. For me, podcasts aren't like TV shows where I feel connected to the cast members. I'll listen only if the guest is interesting. In rare cases, I'll subscribe if the format is interesting, e.g. bad movies reviewed by comedic actors.
dominotw 8y ago
> I'd much rather consume the same content by reading I think most ppl listen to them when they can't read like driving, working out, on the train, falling asleep ect. Try casefile podcast if you are into truecrime. I've been travelling around the country and this podcast has kept me company well, although it did make me a little paranoid :D
motivated_gear 8y ago
I use them as white noise with the potential of an interesting tidbit here and there. I like having something playing in my headphones while working and podcasts have become something I turn to. Most of the time I'm focused on what's on my screen but every now and again an interesting story comes up that I stop to listen to. Also about your search engine comment, Google has basically crawled and tagged through all your images if you use google photos. They've added automated closed captioning to almost every single youtube video. I would not be shocked if they're in the process of transcribing and indexing every single podcast available on google podcasts. Once they do that, you could probably search for "orange chicken recipe" and it would skip to the 55:16 where they're talking about that very thing.
and0 8y ago
I seriously enjoy humor or political / debate podcasts, especially while commuting, but technical podcasts never stick. I find when getting into a new framework (something like Rails or React) then it's an interesting bit of "immersion learning" to throw on the latest episode of the big associated podcast. Maybe I pick up a bit of knowledge, but just hearing people speak naturally about the framework helps me build a fuzzy roadmap in my head of the big subjects to tackle.
- motivated_gear 8y ago
  Completely agree, most technical concepts require you to play with it. I've never heard of anyone learning spark from a podcast
- sotojuan 8y ago
  There's technical podcasts that are guides? When listening to something like The Changelog, it's just a conversation about a technology and its origins.
  - skinnyarms 8y ago
    Most tech podcasts tend to focus on interviews, but I tend to shy away from those. There are quite a few shows that are different though, either discussion or news based. Here are a couple of my favorites. * Coding Blocks * Complete Develop Podcast * Six Figure Developer * Weekly Dev Tips Full disclosure, host of CB here :)
- agbell 8y ago
  Immersion is a good term to use. I agree. You may not learn a lot of specific, but you may get the lay of the land in a low effort way.
deleted 8y ago
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EADGBE 8y ago
I would agree with you if I didn't have a significant commute every day. Many of my interests shouldn't be obsessed at over work (videos or a bunch of reading), but still require my attention. In the car alone on the way home or to work is perfect for that, because I've learned that the rest of my family REALLY REALLY could care less about Lawns Across America.
kbenson 8y ago
I think it depends on the type of podcast. I'm a huge fan of the storytelling style that was pioneered (AFAIK) at This American Life, continues at Planet Money, and is used in almost all the Gimlet Media posdcasts (given that one of the main Planet Money people started it). 99% invisible is also good at this, in a slightly different way. > Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. That depends on the Podcast. Planet Money, some (all?) Gimlet Media podcasts, and 99% Invisible have online articles/transcripts of their podcasts. I've found more than a few I wanted to reference here through searching for portions I remember.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  I agree that it depends on the type of podcast. Deep technical stuff, for me, is much better as text. But something like The Ongoing History of New Music[0] would be greatly degraded by switching to text. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ongoing_History_of_New_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ongoing_History_of_New_Mus...
bunderbunder 8y ago
Me, when I'm able to read a book, I certainly prefer to do that, too. But I can't really read a book while I'm driving, or walking to work, or cooking dinner, or cleaning the kitchen, or working out, or knitting, or soldering, or doing a jigsaw puzzle, or playing video games.
fashionrob 8y ago
also depends on your schedule. i dont listen to podcasts when I am in town. But when driving or flying somewhere, I always download a few.
otikik 8y ago
> I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc My counterargument to that is that in order to do any of those things you need to have your eyes engaged with the content. I can listen to podcasts (or audiobooks) while at the gym, cooking, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, or going to pick my kid from school. That means to me more than the advantages you mentioned. One additional advantage: getting to sleep. I don't enjoy sleeping. If i have a light source near me, be it a lamp or a screen, I don't feel sleepy at all. I can't fall asleep while watching a Netflix show that I like. I have done the experiment. I can feel sleepy while reading a book, but an engaging one and a night lamp will keep me awake: I read the first Harry Potter volume in a single sleep-less night. Listening to podcasts with the lights off and my eyes closed makes me drift to sleep much more easily.
- hanklazard 8y ago
  A slightly different take on your “eye engagement” point is that podcasts allow us to utilize time that would otherwise be spent listening to music, talking to others, thinking, or just zoning out. Combined with Apples air pods (a horribly great piece of technology), I find myself using lots of time for podcasts that I wouldn’t otherwise (like when I’m doing the dishes). I find all of this enjoyable overall but I do worry that the decreased time that I spend in thought or present with others could be a net negative in the end.
  - WhompingWindows 8y ago
    Try meditation, it's the best way I've found to be truly present in the current moment. Without focusing on any external stimuli or content, you're left with the sensations of being, as well as the thoughts/feelings of your mind. You then establish this "baseline" signal upon which all the other noise of modern life is added.
  - gibspaulding 8y ago
    I've wondered about this too. It's rare now, but sometimes I just want to drive to work in silence and it's always surprising to me how nice it can be. I'd be curious to see a study about the affects of time spent "zoned out". I wonder if it may turn out to be an important opportunity for our brains to subconsciously process things or work on ideas. I'd imagine our ancestors spent a significant portion of their lives in that state, whereas today we spend almost no time that way.
scriptkiddy 8y ago
For people with long commutes like myself (1 hour +), audio podcasts are a great way to pass the time in he car. Podcasts are a great way to keep your mind occupied when you're sitting in traffic or doing some other tedious and menial task. Sitting down and actively listening to a podcast while doing nothing else is not very appealing to most people.
BurningFrog 8y ago
Podcasts aren't for reading a prepared text. They're mostly for conversations.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  You do have to prep for those as well from experience on TWIWG (this week in wargaming) - you also have to prep for actual play ones look at the work that Mat Mercer puts in.
- roywiggins 8y ago
  Podcasts are very good for interviews and conversations, which of course can be cleaned up and transcribed but may suffer for it. There are also audio dramas, audiobooks, documentaries, and so on, that are all tightly scripted and can work very well. Some of them may work just as well as longform text and I guess that's what GP prefers. I enjoy audio documentaries a lot though.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- crusso 8y ago
  Listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on World War I, and it will change your mind on the need for a podcast to have a conversation. https://www.dancarlin.com/ https://www.dancarlin.com/
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    For me, the best series by far that Dan Carlin did was the one on Genghis Khan ("The Wrath of the Khans", I believe it's called). The WWI one was also quite engaging, though. Before hearing it, I really was not interested in WWI at all, but he managed to make it very interesting for me.
    - BurningFrog 8y ago
      The Tuchman book "The Guns of August" is an amazing book on the first month of WW1. https://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Outbreak/dp/0345476093 https://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Ou...
crispyambulance 8y ago
> Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I think your concerns are more about your dislike of podcasts as a medium. Not everyone listens to podcasts strictly to mainline information straight into their brain. There's something to be said for dialog and for the discovery and exploration of unexpected topics. Moreover, there's an aesthetic associated with the human voice and verbal communication that doesn't necessarily translate to text. Not everything has to have a fine-grained search index for a-la-carte consumption!
autokad 8y ago
I walk to/from work (about 40 minutes), so its nice to learn / stay up to date on things. I usually listen to data science related podcasts
EamonnMR 8y ago
I like Podcasts mostly because they're something to do with my head while my hands are occupied. I agree that for content that someone may actually care about, the format is a bit of a pain (though not as bad if, like Reply All (for example) you publish transcripts as well.
bfuller 8y ago
I like to read too, but its nice to have something to put on while you clean up around the house. >Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever. this is an issue, but I think it is solved by maintaining an active subreddit or discussion forum to discuss the episodes as they are released.
macspoofing 8y ago
Audio-only medium have benefits over text and video. For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie). >Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. You're making such a weird argument. Podcasts are not replacements for books. Books do things that podcasts can't. Podcasts do things that books can't. Don't want to listen to podcasts or music? Don't. Read your books and be happy. >Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. That's a problem for search engines to solve. In principle, search engines could auto-transcribe podcasts and index that. >If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever. Again, indexing is not something that the medium needs to solve. That's for others to figure out. Text is easy to index. Images are harder to index, audio is harder still, and video is probably the worst.
- jeremy7600 8y ago
  >For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie). As a personal anecdote, I DO need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way as text or video. Your example of vacuuming is a perfect example, while trying to pay attention to the carpet I'd stop paying attention to the podcast, and i'd have to rewind, which I find tedious.
onemoresoop 8y ago
I personally absorb some type of content, especially story types through my ears better than my eyes. This is perhaps because I enforce it through imagination. When I read, my imagination is still on but to a lesser degree. I also like the emotional impact a voice can make on my imagination.
wenbin 8y ago
Try searching podcasts by people or topics here https://www.listennotes.com https://www.listennotes.com
- paulgb 8y ago
  Thanks for creating listennotes! I've found it very useful when I want to find a bunch of interviews of the same person on different shows.
- goombastic 8y ago
  Hey, another fan of your site. Thanks for simplicity of your site!
nathias 8y ago
Can you read while driving a car or a bike?
heurist 8y ago
I prefer nonfiction audiobooks to podcasts. Good books have years of effort put into them to present a cohesive narrative with deep research and subtle detail. Podcasts feel rushed in comparison. I can also listen to classic books that will continue to be relevant for hundreds or thousands of years, where most podcasts will be stale in months or years.
peterwwillis 8y ago
I don't know about you, but I find it hard to read while cooking, jogging, eating, driving, folding laundry, doing the dishes, sweeping/mopping.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  Apart from driving, I don't even listen to music while doing any of those things. Even when driving, the radio is off most of the time. Having music or a radio always on is a concept I simply don't get.
donretag 8y ago
I am glad I am not the only one. Podcasts are simply not for me. I am FAR more efficient at reading content than listening to it. Not even close. And since I am a massive music fan, I rather listen to music than listen to talk. There is so much new music to explore, who has time for podcasts?
avinium 8y ago
I'm generally in the same boat as you (I even read my Kindle as I walk to work), with one exception - cleaning the house. My hands are occupied so I can't hold anything, and it's completely brainless work so I'm free to focus. I pop in a foreign language podcast and suddenly the time flies by.
skiw 8y ago
As many others have said, podcasts are definitely necessary over text when doing things you can't read during (driving, exercising, etc.) Additionally, I enjoy podcasts for the personalities. This varies with the podcast, as some podcasts consist of generally the same content as something like a blog post, with a generic narrator reading from a script. However, most popular podcasts are popular not just for the content, but the conversations between the personalities. e.g. I can read Bill Simmons' sports columns (which have their own merits) and get much of the same content, but I can't laugh along with him and one of his pals or a pro athlete tossing out an impromptu joke in one of his columns: only on his podcast.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  Indeed. 100% of the times I listen podcasts, it's when doing tasks that I can't read during. Podcasts has brought pleasures to doing daily chores, driving, going grocery shopping, walking the dog, and so on. Maybe too much so, I am finding that I maybe listen to too much podcast, to the point where I spend very little time in my own head, day dreaming and having my own thoughts. But that's an entirely separate issue.
matwood 8y ago
I partially agree with you. I don't like audio books, because I prefer the pace of thinking and reading a book. But, for conversational topics I love podcasts. Long form interviews (1-2-3 hours) that used to be impossible now can be done.
ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago
Yeah, I feel the same about podcasts and audiobooks. Would prefer to have it in a written medium.
flear 8y ago
For a text-based summary I really like: https://podcastnotes.org https://podcastnotes.org Especially the ones with Naval
samstave 8y ago
What wee need is a pod-cast-to-text-blog-bot A bot that will listen to the podcast, ML it and transcribe it into a blog post - when a term is stated verbally, it will look it up and turn it into a link. Over time we will teach the bot with verbal cues for what to lookup. Basically a virtual Jamie from Joe Rogan's podcast "Pull up" "Google" "where is" "someone said" "lets see" "did you see" "did you read" etc can be triggers for the bot to pull up that relative content and put into the transcript...

npollock 8y ago

> Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. Google is actively working with the podcast community and encouraging podcasters to structure their data to be accessible in search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/podcast https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/podcast

jldugger 8y ago

> The podcast is very well done, but each one is about an hour long. Many podcast apps have a pitch stable speedup function, that increases the playback speed. I'm currently at 2.1x, but I have a blind friend that listens to email via TTS at something like 4x. It's a skill that you can practice and ramp up over time. > I'd much rather have it as a blog post where I can skim through to find the pieces that interest me. Personally, podcasts are a supplement to my blog feeds, for the daily commute. There is no public transit to work that's feasible, and even if there was, I generally cannot read in car without getting motion sickness. So reading is pretty much off the table, and instead podcasts fill that slice of daily life. > Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. This is mostly true, although nothing prevents transcripts from being made readable.

alexpetralia 8y ago

The other thing is that we often engage with things for two goals: (1) information and (2) entertainment. Text excels at being extremely efficient for (1), but not as efficient for (2) - at least when compared to multimedia like photos, videos, audio, etc. Podcasts offer a good balance between (1) and (2), but they are not the high-octane fuel of information that pure text can offer.

astura 8y ago

Well, yeah, of course if you're just sitting in your living room you'd rather read than listen; however that's not really the use case of a Podcast. The value podcasts bring is you can consume them during times you can't read. During exercise, driving, walking to work, cleaning the house, cooking, and train/car rides (for people who get motion sick while reading in a moving vehicle). They turn tedious menial tasks into times when you're mildly entertained - that provides immense value. They can also be used for a slightly more interesting white noise.

jeremy7600 8y ago
If you can pay attention while doing those things. I am not the OP, but if it isn't music, listening to anything while doing those things is a non-starter for me, especially driving.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  I'm roughly the same way. When driving the choice is that I either miss something on the road or miss something on what I'm listening to. I usually take public transit to work, but the buses are too noisy for me to actually get anything out of a podcast. I could use noise canceling headphones, but I find those just make the bus sound weird instead of getting rid of the noise.
  - ferongr 8y ago
    Just get IEMs with properly fitting tips.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  It's true that it does not work for any task that you need to pay attention to. Folding laundry, cooking a known meal, cleaning anything and driving the standard commute, however? No problem at all. Maybe I need to rewind 15 seconds a few times (which is purposefully made easy) if something unexpected happens in the menial task, but most of the time those menial tasks leave more than enough attention for a podcast.
- 8y ago

Naga 8y ago

You're right, text is a much better medium. However, at least for me, I listen to podcasts at work mostly, or when I am doing something physical like dishes, where reading is impossible (or impractical).

bitlax 8y ago

You listen to podcasts like you listen to the radio: when you're driving, doing chores, working out, etc.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
I think this is part of my problem. Radio was never really a thing in my childhood, so it's not a big part of my adulthood either. Other than driving in the car, or as an alternative to the TV announcers when hockey was on, my family never had the radio on or music playing. I do listen to music on the bus, but podcasts are too much of a challenge since they're competing with all the other noise around me.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I'm 33 and didn't grow up in a radio culture either. I first heard of podcasts around 2006 in college when Apple came out with a mic dongle for the iPod. Never bothered checking any out. It was only when I came across a lengthy interview with an athlete I like that I started listening. Podcasts can be good for that, since TV usually focuses on short segments to fit in all the commercials. For me, podcasts aren't like TV shows where I feel connected to the cast members. I'll listen only if the guest is interesting. In rare cases, I'll subscribe if the format is interesting, e.g. bad movies reviewed by comedic actors.

dominotw 8y ago

> I'd much rather consume the same content by reading I think most ppl listen to them when they can't read like driving, working out, on the train, falling asleep ect. Try casefile podcast if you are into truecrime. I've been travelling around the country and this podcast has kept me company well, although it did make me a little paranoid :D

motivated_gear 8y ago

I use them as white noise with the potential of an interesting tidbit here and there. I like having something playing in my headphones while working and podcasts have become something I turn to. Most of the time I'm focused on what's on my screen but every now and again an interesting story comes up that I stop to listen to. Also about your search engine comment, Google has basically crawled and tagged through all your images if you use google photos. They've added automated closed captioning to almost every single youtube video. I would not be shocked if they're in the process of transcribing and indexing every single podcast available on google podcasts. Once they do that, you could probably search for "orange chicken recipe" and it would skip to the 55:16 where they're talking about that very thing.

and0 8y ago

I seriously enjoy humor or political / debate podcasts, especially while commuting, but technical podcasts never stick. I find when getting into a new framework (something like Rails or React) then it's an interesting bit of "immersion learning" to throw on the latest episode of the big associated podcast. Maybe I pick up a bit of knowledge, but just hearing people speak naturally about the framework helps me build a fuzzy roadmap in my head of the big subjects to tackle.

motivated_gear 8y ago
Completely agree, most technical concepts require you to play with it. I've never heard of anyone learning spark from a podcast
sotojuan 8y ago
There's technical podcasts that are guides? When listening to something like The Changelog, it's just a conversation about a technology and its origins.
- skinnyarms 8y ago
  Most tech podcasts tend to focus on interviews, but I tend to shy away from those. There are quite a few shows that are different though, either discussion or news based. Here are a couple of my favorites. * Coding Blocks * Complete Develop Podcast * Six Figure Developer * Weekly Dev Tips Full disclosure, host of CB here :)
agbell 8y ago
Immersion is a good term to use. I agree. You may not learn a lot of specific, but you may get the lay of the land in a low effort way.

deleted 8y ago

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EADGBE 8y ago

I would agree with you if I didn't have a significant commute every day. Many of my interests shouldn't be obsessed at over work (videos or a bunch of reading), but still require my attention. In the car alone on the way home or to work is perfect for that, because I've learned that the rest of my family REALLY REALLY could care less about Lawns Across America.

kbenson 8y ago

I think it depends on the type of podcast. I'm a huge fan of the storytelling style that was pioneered (AFAIK) at This American Life, continues at Planet Money, and is used in almost all the Gimlet Media posdcasts (given that one of the main Planet Money people started it). 99% invisible is also good at this, in a slightly different way. > Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. That depends on the Podcast. Planet Money, some (all?) Gimlet Media podcasts, and 99% Invisible have online articles/transcripts of their podcasts. I've found more than a few I wanted to reference here through searching for portions I remember.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
I agree that it depends on the type of podcast. Deep technical stuff, for me, is much better as text. But something like The Ongoing History of New Music[0] would be greatly degraded by switching to text. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ongoing_History_of_New_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ongoing_History_of_New_Mus...

bunderbunder 8y ago

Me, when I'm able to read a book, I certainly prefer to do that, too. But I can't really read a book while I'm driving, or walking to work, or cooking dinner, or cleaning the kitchen, or working out, or knitting, or soldering, or doing a jigsaw puzzle, or playing video games.

fashionrob 8y ago

also depends on your schedule. i dont listen to podcasts when I am in town. But when driving or flying somewhere, I always download a few.

otikik 8y ago

> I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc My counterargument to that is that in order to do any of those things you need to have your eyes engaged with the content. I can listen to podcasts (or audiobooks) while at the gym, cooking, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, or going to pick my kid from school. That means to me more than the advantages you mentioned. One additional advantage: getting to sleep. I don't enjoy sleeping. If i have a light source near me, be it a lamp or a screen, I don't feel sleepy at all. I can't fall asleep while watching a Netflix show that I like. I have done the experiment. I can feel sleepy while reading a book, but an engaging one and a night lamp will keep me awake: I read the first Harry Potter volume in a single sleep-less night. Listening to podcasts with the lights off and my eyes closed makes me drift to sleep much more easily.

hanklazard 8y ago
A slightly different take on your “eye engagement” point is that podcasts allow us to utilize time that would otherwise be spent listening to music, talking to others, thinking, or just zoning out. Combined with Apples air pods (a horribly great piece of technology), I find myself using lots of time for podcasts that I wouldn’t otherwise (like when I’m doing the dishes). I find all of this enjoyable overall but I do worry that the decreased time that I spend in thought or present with others could be a net negative in the end.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Try meditation, it's the best way I've found to be truly present in the current moment. Without focusing on any external stimuli or content, you're left with the sensations of being, as well as the thoughts/feelings of your mind. You then establish this "baseline" signal upon which all the other noise of modern life is added.
- gibspaulding 8y ago
  I've wondered about this too. It's rare now, but sometimes I just want to drive to work in silence and it's always surprising to me how nice it can be. I'd be curious to see a study about the affects of time spent "zoned out". I wonder if it may turn out to be an important opportunity for our brains to subconsciously process things or work on ideas. I'd imagine our ancestors spent a significant portion of their lives in that state, whereas today we spend almost no time that way.

scriptkiddy 8y ago

For people with long commutes like myself (1 hour +), audio podcasts are a great way to pass the time in he car. Podcasts are a great way to keep your mind occupied when you're sitting in traffic or doing some other tedious and menial task. Sitting down and actively listening to a podcast while doing nothing else is not very appealing to most people.

BurningFrog 8y ago

Podcasts aren't for reading a prepared text. They're mostly for conversations.

C1sc0cat 8y ago
You do have to prep for those as well from experience on TWIWG (this week in wargaming) - you also have to prep for actual play ones look at the work that Mat Mercer puts in.
roywiggins 8y ago
Podcasts are very good for interviews and conversations, which of course can be cleaned up and transcribed but may suffer for it. There are also audio dramas, audiobooks, documentaries, and so on, that are all tightly scripted and can work very well. Some of them may work just as well as longform text and I guess that's what GP prefers. I enjoy audio documentaries a lot though.
- deleted 8y ago
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crusso 8y ago
Listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on World War I, and it will change your mind on the need for a podcast to have a conversation. https://www.dancarlin.com/ https://www.dancarlin.com/
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  For me, the best series by far that Dan Carlin did was the one on Genghis Khan ("The Wrath of the Khans", I believe it's called). The WWI one was also quite engaging, though. Before hearing it, I really was not interested in WWI at all, but he managed to make it very interesting for me.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    The Tuchman book "The Guns of August" is an amazing book on the first month of WW1. https://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Outbreak/dp/0345476093 https://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Ou...

crispyambulance 8y ago

> Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I think your concerns are more about your dislike of podcasts as a medium. Not everyone listens to podcasts strictly to mainline information straight into their brain. There's something to be said for dialog and for the discovery and exploration of unexpected topics. Moreover, there's an aesthetic associated with the human voice and verbal communication that doesn't necessarily translate to text. Not everything has to have a fine-grained search index for a-la-carte consumption!

autokad 8y ago

I walk to/from work (about 40 minutes), so its nice to learn / stay up to date on things. I usually listen to data science related podcasts

EamonnMR 8y ago

I like Podcasts mostly because they're something to do with my head while my hands are occupied. I agree that for content that someone may actually care about, the format is a bit of a pain (though not as bad if, like Reply All (for example) you publish transcripts as well.

bfuller 8y ago

I like to read too, but its nice to have something to put on while you clean up around the house. >Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever. this is an issue, but I think it is solved by maintaining an active subreddit or discussion forum to discuss the episodes as they are released.

macspoofing 8y ago

Audio-only medium have benefits over text and video. For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie). >Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. You're making such a weird argument. Podcasts are not replacements for books. Books do things that podcasts can't. Podcasts do things that books can't. Don't want to listen to podcasts or music? Don't. Read your books and be happy. >Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. That's a problem for search engines to solve. In principle, search engines could auto-transcribe podcasts and index that. >If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever. Again, indexing is not something that the medium needs to solve. That's for others to figure out. Text is easy to index. Images are harder to index, audio is harder still, and video is probably the worst.

jeremy7600 8y ago
>For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie). As a personal anecdote, I DO need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way as text or video. Your example of vacuuming is a perfect example, while trying to pay attention to the carpet I'd stop paying attention to the podcast, and i'd have to rewind, which I find tedious.

onemoresoop 8y ago

I personally absorb some type of content, especially story types through my ears better than my eyes. This is perhaps because I enforce it through imagination. When I read, my imagination is still on but to a lesser degree. I also like the emotional impact a voice can make on my imagination.

wenbin 8y ago

Try searching podcasts by people or topics here https://www.listennotes.com https://www.listennotes.com

paulgb 8y ago
Thanks for creating listennotes! I've found it very useful when I want to find a bunch of interviews of the same person on different shows.
goombastic 8y ago
Hey, another fan of your site. Thanks for simplicity of your site!

nathias 8y ago

Can you read while driving a car or a bike?

heurist 8y ago

I prefer nonfiction audiobooks to podcasts. Good books have years of effort put into them to present a cohesive narrative with deep research and subtle detail. Podcasts feel rushed in comparison. I can also listen to classic books that will continue to be relevant for hundreds or thousands of years, where most podcasts will be stale in months or years.

peterwwillis 8y ago

I don't know about you, but I find it hard to read while cooking, jogging, eating, driving, folding laundry, doing the dishes, sweeping/mopping.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
Apart from driving, I don't even listen to music while doing any of those things. Even when driving, the radio is off most of the time. Having music or a radio always on is a concept I simply don't get.

donretag 8y ago

I am glad I am not the only one. Podcasts are simply not for me. I am FAR more efficient at reading content than listening to it. Not even close. And since I am a massive music fan, I rather listen to music than listen to talk. There is so much new music to explore, who has time for podcasts?

avinium 8y ago

I'm generally in the same boat as you (I even read my Kindle as I walk to work), with one exception - cleaning the house. My hands are occupied so I can't hold anything, and it's completely brainless work so I'm free to focus. I pop in a foreign language podcast and suddenly the time flies by.

skiw 8y ago

As many others have said, podcasts are definitely necessary over text when doing things you can't read during (driving, exercising, etc.) Additionally, I enjoy podcasts for the personalities. This varies with the podcast, as some podcasts consist of generally the same content as something like a blog post, with a generic narrator reading from a script. However, most popular podcasts are popular not just for the content, but the conversations between the personalities. e.g. I can read Bill Simmons' sports columns (which have their own merits) and get much of the same content, but I can't laugh along with him and one of his pals or a pro athlete tossing out an impromptu joke in one of his columns: only on his podcast.

ehsankia 8y ago
Indeed. 100% of the times I listen podcasts, it's when doing tasks that I can't read during. Podcasts has brought pleasures to doing daily chores, driving, going grocery shopping, walking the dog, and so on. Maybe too much so, I am finding that I maybe listen to too much podcast, to the point where I spend very little time in my own head, day dreaming and having my own thoughts. But that's an entirely separate issue.

matwood 8y ago

I partially agree with you. I don't like audio books, because I prefer the pace of thinking and reading a book. But, for conversational topics I love podcasts. Long form interviews (1-2-3 hours) that used to be impossible now can be done.

ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago

Yeah, I feel the same about podcasts and audiobooks. Would prefer to have it in a written medium.

flear 8y ago

For a text-based summary I really like: https://podcastnotes.org https://podcastnotes.org Especially the ones with Naval

samstave 8y ago

What wee need is a pod-cast-to-text-blog-bot A bot that will listen to the podcast, ML it and transcribe it into a blog post - when a term is stated verbally, it will look it up and turn it into a link. Over time we will teach the bot with verbal cues for what to lookup. Basically a virtual Jamie from Joe Rogan's podcast "Pull up" "Google" "where is" "someone said" "lets see" "did you see" "did you read" etc can be triggers for the bot to pull up that relative content and put into the transcript...