Counterargument: most of the things you can consume at 3x speed are not worth remembering long term. For example, every day the APM: Marketplace podcast recites

Counterargument: most of the things you can consume at 3x speed are not worth remembering long term. For example, every day the APM: Marketplace podcast recites the returns on specific induces for the day. It can help put context to stories in other segments, but I have no need to retain it for more than an hour, if ever. And in general, the relevance of news rapidly decays; I forget where I read it (the irony!) but if you imagine a newspaper that only published once a month, it would have different headlines than one that published daily, and different again from one that published annually. In that context, speeding up news podcasts makes a bit of sense. You don't need to remember it long term, just long enough for this week's watercooler conversations to jog your memory until it disappears completely. In contrast, books I read by myself, at a relatively slow pace. I focus on timeless books, that teach knowledge or skill that I can apply on the job. The pace will vary depending on the type of book; the last university textbook I studied took me about 10 pages a hour (including all the problems). For a pop sci book, I can do about a chapter an hour. I try not to spend more than an hour block on this, for the spaced repetition effects mentioned. Moreover, I typically try to get at least one Anki card per chapter (textbooks usually a dozen per chapter). I can't imagine trying to retain anything at 3x speed, especially the mathematical tomes I focus on. But I'm pretty sure most people can up their podcasts to 1.2x without even noticing. Most content is recorded at a leisurely pace, both because it's easier to pronounce clearly, and to accommodate non-native speakers. But it's not always about efficiency. For comedy podcasts, I set the rate to 1x, because the point is to enjoy it and as they say, timing is the essence of comedy.