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I wish I could get them. I can’t pay attention to them well enough to follow along if I’m doing anything else at all—so I may as well engage with audio-visual c

I wish I could get them. I can’t pay attention to them well enough to follow along if I’m doing anything else at all—so I may as well engage with audio-visual content instead. This entire huge medium is basically not usefully accessible to me. For whatever reason, I don’t have this problem with news or talk radio in the car. Podcasts? I can’t follow the topic well enough, even if I’m just driving on a mostly-empty highway. Dunno why. [edit] same with audio books, actually. I can’t follow along unless I’m doing nothing else.

HPsquared 3y ago
Maybe just need to find one that interests you. A lot of them are quite poor quality.
- vundercind 3y ago
  I’ve tried some that are supposed to be very good. Still can’t follow along unless I’m doing nothing but listening. In a handful of cases I’ve listened to and enjoyed specific episodes of one podcast or another for some topic I wanted to hear enough that I was willing to just sit and listen and watch the progress bar and not do anything else, but the value that others find in podcasts seems to be that they can listen to them in time that’d otherwise be lost to mundane activities—I can’t do that, I’ll constant be moving the podcast back a few minutes because I realize I’ve not processed a word they’ve said for quite a while, pretty soon I’ve doubled the time taken to do whatever else I’m doing and have taken 90 minutes to get 20 minutes into a half-hour podcast. [edit] probably-relatedly, I also can’t take notes and also follow what someone’s saying. If I take notes I’ll end up having written a bunch of stuff that I then have to read to figure out what was said. If someone asks me a question in the middle of note-taking I’ll typically have no clue what the context is.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
News and talk radio is a lot better about packaging topics in short coherent stories. Podcasts have different incentives. They could tell you the whole story in a tidy 5 minutes, but by rambling with another voice for 15 or so you now have three times as much time to potentially monetize with your own product placement pieces in the segment.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  Sometimes, but good podcasts are usually structured around some discussion or interview, which is hard to compress. Additionally the somewhat stretched nature is good if you don't have 100% of your attention on it.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  Kind of an odd take. News and talk radio is incentivized to give you the smallest amount of news possible so they can get back to the advertisers. Podcasts can actually go deep on a story over an extended period of time and number of episodes.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  That depends completely on the podcast, it's weird to impugn an entire category of media because you've picked bad podcasts. Podcasts like The Economist, Slow News Cast, Sensemaker and The Inquiry have basically no wasted time whatsoever. They are punchy as any radio story, which is why I prefer this category of podcast. I for one can't stand to listen to long rambling repetitive conversations from guys like Huberman or Rogan, which is why I don't listen to them.
pksebben 3y ago
I have a raft of podcasts that are specifically for those times when I want to be able to lose the thread; - Hey Riddle Riddle: Morning talk-radio vibes, but goofier. - The Past Times: Comedians reading old newspapers to each other. Subset of The Dollop but with much shorter-form stories. - Houston we have a Podcast: Interviews and exposition from NASA staff about everything space and space engineering. I find you can miss chunks of this one and still keep up, sometimes. For me, whether I can keep up sort of depends on the context. Longer-form stuff (including audiobooks) I can do when driving or deep-cleaning the house, these ones are for going through the morning routine and other times when my attention is going to be kinda scattered. edit: formatting
j45 3y ago
There are some podcasts that will fit each listening style more than others based on their speaking style.
coldpie 3y ago
I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I treat them as kind of drift-in, drift-out background noise. When I'm washing dishes or something I'll listen to every word. But some tasks, like some parts of playing a video game or sorting out the mail or whatever, requires more attention so I'll stop listening for a bit and then drift back in when the task is done. For that reason, I don't listen to "high attention" podcasts, like stories or highly educational shows and audiobooks. Instead I listen to weekly update kind of things (weekly video game podcasts, science news podcasts, guitar Q&A show, etc) where if I zone out for a few minutes, I don't really care because they'll move on to some other topic shortly and I can tune back in.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  I suspect my ADHD makes it hard to do this.
graeme 3y ago
I wouldn’t worry you’re missing much. The whole reason podcasts are popular is that many people can listen to them and do something else. If you can’t it means your brain is doing something else. For me a podcast completely arrests my thought processes in a way that radio chatter or music doesn’t. I listen to a very, very small number of podcasts either that I find valuable enough to listen to despite the trade off. I’ll especially save them for cooking or another task which already half occupies my brain. I take in information dramatically faster by reading. Podcasting is a perfectly viable way to get information or be entertain, but so are books and movies and shows or just looking at things and thinking.
vikingerik 3y ago
I had this same problem too, and then I isolated it. It's the number of people speaking. I can't follow a podcast with two or more speakers. One speaker is fine. Radio news and talk radio is most often one person so it behaves that way. It's a really different dynamic with one person compared to two or more. One person will speak continuously and stay on topic. Multiple people will stumble over each other or have delays between them, or waste time laughing or congratulating each other ("wow that's a great story" etc). It's surprising how much non-content noise there is between two people once you notice it. There's also technical concerns: inevitably one person has a better and louder microphone and the other has scratchy lousy remote voice quality, and it's extremely jarring to bounce back and forth between those. I can only listen to podcasts where it's only one person speaking.
willio58 3y ago
A lot of my Podcasts that I listen to _are_ basically news or talk-radio style shows. Just with the added benefit that I can listen on demand, pause, skip past ads, etc.
anjel 3y ago
For less than obvious reasons, I can't follow audio books if they are fiction, but non fiction audio isn't a probLem. Meanwhile, I read plenty of fiction.

HPsquared 3y ago

Maybe just need to find one that interests you. A lot of them are quite poor quality.

vundercind 3y ago
I’ve tried some that are supposed to be very good. Still can’t follow along unless I’m doing nothing but listening. In a handful of cases I’ve listened to and enjoyed specific episodes of one podcast or another for some topic I wanted to hear enough that I was willing to just sit and listen and watch the progress bar and not do anything else, but the value that others find in podcasts seems to be that they can listen to them in time that’d otherwise be lost to mundane activities—I can’t do that, I’ll constant be moving the podcast back a few minutes because I realize I’ve not processed a word they’ve said for quite a while, pretty soon I’ve doubled the time taken to do whatever else I’m doing and have taken 90 minutes to get 20 minutes into a half-hour podcast. [edit] probably-relatedly, I also can’t take notes and also follow what someone’s saying. If I take notes I’ll end up having written a bunch of stuff that I then have to read to figure out what was said. If someone asks me a question in the middle of note-taking I’ll typically have no clue what the context is.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

News and talk radio is a lot better about packaging topics in short coherent stories. Podcasts have different incentives. They could tell you the whole story in a tidy 5 minutes, but by rambling with another voice for 15 or so you now have three times as much time to potentially monetize with your own product placement pieces in the segment.

constantcrying 3y ago
Sometimes, but good podcasts are usually structured around some discussion or interview, which is hard to compress. Additionally the somewhat stretched nature is good if you don't have 100% of your attention on it.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
Kind of an odd take. News and talk radio is incentivized to give you the smallest amount of news possible so they can get back to the advertisers. Podcasts can actually go deep on a story over an extended period of time and number of episodes.
mvdtnz 3y ago
That depends completely on the podcast, it's weird to impugn an entire category of media because you've picked bad podcasts. Podcasts like The Economist, Slow News Cast, Sensemaker and The Inquiry have basically no wasted time whatsoever. They are punchy as any radio story, which is why I prefer this category of podcast. I for one can't stand to listen to long rambling repetitive conversations from guys like Huberman or Rogan, which is why I don't listen to them.

pksebben 3y ago

I have a raft of podcasts that are specifically for those times when I want to be able to lose the thread; - Hey Riddle Riddle: Morning talk-radio vibes, but goofier. - The Past Times: Comedians reading old newspapers to each other. Subset of The Dollop but with much shorter-form stories. - Houston we have a Podcast: Interviews and exposition from NASA staff about everything space and space engineering. I find you can miss chunks of this one and still keep up, sometimes. For me, whether I can keep up sort of depends on the context. Longer-form stuff (including audiobooks) I can do when driving or deep-cleaning the house, these ones are for going through the morning routine and other times when my attention is going to be kinda scattered. edit: formatting

j45 3y ago

There are some podcasts that will fit each listening style more than others based on their speaking style.

coldpie 3y ago

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I treat them as kind of drift-in, drift-out background noise. When I'm washing dishes or something I'll listen to every word. But some tasks, like some parts of playing a video game or sorting out the mail or whatever, requires more attention so I'll stop listening for a bit and then drift back in when the task is done. For that reason, I don't listen to "high attention" podcasts, like stories or highly educational shows and audiobooks. Instead I listen to weekly update kind of things (weekly video game podcasts, science news podcasts, guitar Q&A show, etc) where if I zone out for a few minutes, I don't really care because they'll move on to some other topic shortly and I can tune back in.

aaomidi 3y ago
I suspect my ADHD makes it hard to do this.

graeme 3y ago

I wouldn’t worry you’re missing much. The whole reason podcasts are popular is that many people can listen to them and do something else. If you can’t it means your brain is doing something else. For me a podcast completely arrests my thought processes in a way that radio chatter or music doesn’t. I listen to a very, very small number of podcasts either that I find valuable enough to listen to despite the trade off. I’ll especially save them for cooking or another task which already half occupies my brain. I take in information dramatically faster by reading. Podcasting is a perfectly viable way to get information or be entertain, but so are books and movies and shows or just looking at things and thinking.

vikingerik 3y ago

I had this same problem too, and then I isolated it. It's the number of people speaking. I can't follow a podcast with two or more speakers. One speaker is fine. Radio news and talk radio is most often one person so it behaves that way. It's a really different dynamic with one person compared to two or more. One person will speak continuously and stay on topic. Multiple people will stumble over each other or have delays between them, or waste time laughing or congratulating each other ("wow that's a great story" etc). It's surprising how much non-content noise there is between two people once you notice it. There's also technical concerns: inevitably one person has a better and louder microphone and the other has scratchy lousy remote voice quality, and it's extremely jarring to bounce back and forth between those. I can only listen to podcasts where it's only one person speaking.

willio58 3y ago

A lot of my Podcasts that I listen to _are_ basically news or talk-radio style shows. Just with the added benefit that I can listen on demand, pause, skip past ads, etc.

anjel 3y ago

For less than obvious reasons, I can't follow audio books if they are fiction, but non fiction audio isn't a probLem. Meanwhile, I read plenty of fiction.