> 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.

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.

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.

I spent years driving to remote sites in the desert for field work and have spent countless hours listening to audio books, podcasts and music. Often times on the return journey home I found myself thinking in silence or listening to my thoughts and the road in silence. Maybe it was sort of an active meditation but it seemed to happen naturally and felt great.

With all the screens around us, people or content, if you will, we often don't have long periods of time with the option to tune it all out. You allude to our ancestors and I think being still of mind is an important part of our being. Many people are anxious these days in that environment. My favorite part about doing extended river trips (1-3+ weeks) is tuning completely out for large stretches of time.

I’ve started to intentionally not listen to anything at times when I otherwise would

I have found that if I'm not careful, yeah, I'll fill in all my driving or chores or walking the dog time with podcasts. This absolutely destroys my creativity, because instead of thinking about e.g. short story ideas while walking the dog, I'm listening to old episodes of some podcast, letting my mind just sort of tick over with basic engagement.

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.

Are there any studies on how good retention is when consuming books as a background task while you're doing something else? Sample size = 1, but I briefly tried listening to audio books while driving, cooking, etc. but stopped when I realized I got all the way through a few books without even vaguely remembering what they were about.

Yeah IDK if I'm just way worse at focusing on spoken words while doing other things than most people or what, but I can't get into podcasts or audio books at all. If I do other things while listening I miss so much that I have no idea what's going on, and even the supposedly very good ones are so dull that if I'm going to spend focused time consuming them I'd rather read, or watch something, or listen closely to some good music, or almost anything else.

I guess maybe if I got back into running they'd be good for that. Can't think of when else I could possibly use them.

I've found it extremely dependent on fine differences in the primary thing I'm doing. e.g. I have no problem following if I'm going on an uneventful or familiar drive, but will automatically tune it out if I don't know where I'm going.

This is why I find more casual listening like a podcast good. Listening to a book you can really hamper understanding of the later parts of it with low retention of easier parts. A lot of podcasts don’t really require your full attention at all times to understand later parts.

i've been listening to audiobooks since 2013 and i remember 99% of everything i listened. YMMV, but at least for me, it was a thing i had to "learn" -- as in, listen and pay attention while doing a boring task.

The same thing happened to me. I recently acquired a pair of Bluetooth headphones, and even though it seems like a pair of wired earbuds or headphones would be about the same, it's not at all.

I listen to podcasts while doing all sorts of things now.

Listening to podcasts or audiobooks while I go to sleep is my biggest life hack. I've been doing it for about six years and now sleep in around 5-10 minutes, whereas it used to take up to an hour before that.

It does mean it takes me months to get through a longer book, but that's no big deal, and means I actually going to bed.

How do you keep track of what chapter/paragraph you fell asleep at when you wake up?

this is the biggest problem i have with audiobooks/podcasts. I've thought about the idea of hacking a fitbit or apple watch that can track sleep to automatically pause them but I fall asleep much faster and easier than my fiancee and she likes to leave things going to cover my snoring.

I use Listen audiobook player with a fifteen minute sleep timer. Before the sleep timer stops it playing it plays a series of soft beeps, if the phone detects any movement it will resume for another fifteen minutes.

Yes, there's still a little rewinding to do to work out where you left off but it only takes a few seconds.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.acmeandroi...

Two fit bits, with a recorded stop time for each of you (offset a little bit so that the part immediately before you went to sleep is repeated). When you wake up, the segment in between the two stop times has already been extracted and sent to whoever fell asleep first so that they can catch up before jointly continuing the podcast with their partner before bed.

I just sort of estimate which means in practice I sometimes listen to parts of it I wasn’t paying attention to over again. Most of the podcasts I listen to are like 20 minutes long and it takes me like 5 minutes to fall asleep.

I just set a sleep timer to 60 minutes and rewind the next day until I encounter a part of the book that I remember. Slightly annoying, but not a big deal at all.

Fully agree. Podcasts are a big part of my life, and apart from making my not short commute actually enjoyable, they often have the effect of making me do more housework, because I don’t mind doing dishes, laundry or cooking while listening to them at all. I cannot just “sit there” and listen to a podcast, so to continue doing so I will do whatever other menial task needs to be done. This is a win-win: stuff that needs to be done anyway gets done, while I am entertained.

Totally random aside, but one trick with falling asleep is that the body doesn't fall asleep when warm, but when it warms up. So get yourself nice and cold (open windows in winter, pump up ac, put a fan on, keep the blankets off, etc), like really uncomfortably cold, then cover up. Sleep is much easier to achieve :)

I ran into this same suggestion just a few months ago and after 30 years of shitty sleep finally learned how to relax and sleep.

Can confirm it definitely works - I'll intentionally get too cold, then pull up the blanket to warm up and fall asleep solid in moments.

To me podcasts and audiobooks are totally different animals. An audiobook about a subject will have many times the information density than a podcast about the same.

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.

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_Mus...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just get IEMs with properly fitting tips.

I have this problem too. The other nice thing about music for me is that it regularly inspires emotions in me that are useful for writing fiction.

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.

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.

> 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.

    > 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!

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.

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.

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.

Completely agree, most technical concepts require you to play with it. I've never heard of anyone learning spark from a podcast

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.

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 :)

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.

> 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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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

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.

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?

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.

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...

Podcasts aren't for reading a prepared text.

They're mostly for conversations.

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.

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/

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.

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-Ou...

I have listened, and you're right that they're amazing. Perhaps OP is right that they would be better printed, but I doubt it, Carlin does speak with a passion.

In my defense, i did use the weasel word "mostly" :)

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.

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.

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

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.

Hey, another fan of your site. Thanks for simplicity of your site!

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

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.

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.

Can you read while driving a car or a bike?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.