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 f

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.