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

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.