> I'll never understand the drive to bury so much good information inside video and audio.

Important aspect is that it faster to produce then writing.

> Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing.

Popular good podcasts are not like lectures. They tend to have less information per minute and light side chats where your brain rests. They can be consumed while cleaning, cooking or going somewhere and paying reasonable amount of attention to surrounding environment. You can not do it with lecture (I tried).

You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all, but at smaller pace then expected from lecture and it requires less attention.

>You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all

I don't think that's obvious at all. Learning is an active process. People listening to podcasts while doing work aren't going to actually develop some skill, they're just passively listening to some facts being thrown at them, much of it they probably won't even retain, let alone productively integrate.

You can listen to thousands of hours of guitar playing podcasts, it won't really help you play the guitar. Or you could listen to programming podcasts, but without ever writing a line of code you'd not be a any good as a programmer.

Why would you assume someone is trying to learn guitar or programming solely from podcasts?

And yes, I have some idea about how much I retained from podcasts I listened to. Seriously, remembering facts is also form of knowing, it beats up not remembering facts. It is not "just", many times it is the thing to go after when learning.

I agree with you - I think most of us are disdainful of watching television for long periods of time but there is value in getting the cultural context by audio. A lot of reading is not high quality - the interview Russ Roberts has with Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning discusses the topic.

In summary, podcasts make people feel like they've learned something but they haven't really?

Unless it's trivia and current knowledge type stuff.

Quality video, or audio[1] is not faster to produce than writing. Recording, editing, encoding, uploading are all very slow, time-consuming processes, per minute of content produced.

[1] Never mind that in order to produce quality audio, you need to have written... Your script. Which is a lot harder than writing something readable.

It depends on the format. For a produced show with narration and excerpted segments of interviews, I agree with you. However, there are many good podcasts that are basically a conversation/interview and, while there's some degree of prepping and editing required, you can largely wing these with the right guests. This format is quite a bit easier than writing an equivalent length document from scratch.

It depends. A lot of podcasts are just conversations with “script” being a set of interesting topics.

So get two people to text-chat over WhatsApp on a subject for an hour, and clean it up after the fact. It's still easier to produce than a conversation podcast.

A text chat would be full of misunderstandings and needless clarifications that wouldn't have to be there if spoken with inflections hinting at how something was to be taken, or facial cues for in-person interviews.

It depends on the podcast. I tend to listen to podcasts over lectures because the podcasts are often more information rich and deeper than the lectures I've found on the same subject. Some podcasts even seem to include edited university lectures where extraneous parts were removed.

Sounds interesting, do you have any suggestions?

I noticed episodes that seems to be edited lectures in both Mark Goodacre's NT Pod and Philip Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Both are academic studies of the Christian New Testament (though the later also spends a lot of time on the surrounding society), and I enjoyed both a lot (though they can be a bit information dense at times). If you give the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast a listen I'd recommend considering starting at series 2 and coming back to series 1 later, as starting with a deep dive into Paul's letters and their historical context can be a difficult place to start for some people.

Another podcast I've learned a lot from is the Ottoman History Podcast (not to be confused with The History of the Ottoman Empire podcast). It often has episodes where academic historians are interviewing other academic historians about their areas of research. So you'll have a whole episode where a historian talks about their research into mining communities in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance.

For something a bit lighter, the Tides of History podcast is worth a listen. It's an academic historian who takes a look at various historical events.

Audio/video is also very inconvenient when you need to slow down your processing rate. You have to tweak playback controls for this, while dealing with pure text only requires a slight adjustment of your eyeball muscles. And similarly when you encounter parts that can be skipped forward easily: text just requires some more motion of your eyeballs, while recorded audio/video is a lot more awkward to deal with.

Nota bene: A great lecture is worth a lot. But a great text that delivers the same message is worth a lot more.

I understand where you're coming from. There are some very smart people who refuse to listen to podcasts, but instead read the transcripts because they find the signal:noise to be higher.

That being said, one factor you might be discounting is that producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read. There are a lot of people who are great conversationalists, but not great writers.

> producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read

I'm not sure I agree. For example, I find myself fast-forwarding Coursera videos because the teachers just don't understand where it makes sense to slow the pace or where to pick it up. I find myself skipping huge parts of YouTube videos (my interest is hobby stuff) because the author just doesn't understand I already understood the idea, the take is getting boring (or just not showing the interesting stuff), and they should just cut ahead.

I find producing mediocre audio/video is easy. But quality audio/video is as hard as quality text, if not harder.

I actually agree with everything you’re saying. My kind of meta point was that those content producers might have never made anything accessible to you, if they didn’t have access to audio or video publishing platforms.

I’m not making any statement on the average quality of audiovisual content, just the barrier to entry for the production of that content.

FWIW I do a lot of skipping and fast replaying too. My podcasts are usually around 2.5x. Most people perform-talk way too slow. If I weren’t able to listen that quickly while doing dishes or similar, I’d normally prefer to read.

Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things. For super deep dives I certainly agree text is better.

Consume yes, but how much of that do you actually retain when you are doing anything that requires real attention? This seems like one of those things that give you the feeling of getting informed, but in reality you are mostly just wasting your time.

I used to listen to a number of podcasts regularly, but I would repeatedly notice that I barely remembered what the key points were. In the end, I cut down my consumption more and more, and only listen to episodes that I specifically find interesting, and only when I have the time and mental resources to really listen to them.

Depends what you do at the same time. If you walk your dog or play a video game, you probably retain as much as reading. I mean it's not like people don't skip parts or start thinking about something else when they read.

I really doubt you'll retain as much as dedicated reading if you are listening to a podcast and playing a game. Unless it's a game where you don't need to think/read at all.

Regarding walking your dog: that's true. Walking around is a good way to retain information. That's explained on Moonwalking With Einstein

Why on earth would I listen to a podcast while playing a game? Though TBH I mostly don't much care for background audio when doing other things that involve any real thinking. Podcasts are mostly for driving, cleaning, etc.

I don't do much thinking when playing a FPS game

I suppose it depends on the individual. I personally haven't found podcasts to be worse than written sources when it comes to retention.

I listen to podcasts just more of an entertainment and to be vaguely informed and not on topics that I want to deep dive and study.

Completely agree. Back in the before-before time when I would go to an office, the walk in to work was always a great chance to consume some interesting content.

I'm pretty much unable to do this. I think I focus too intently on what I'm consuming. Doing almost anything else lessens my focus on the podcast, and makes me mess up whatever else I'm trying to do. So I basically just sit there and stare into space while listening to one. Because of this I don't tend to consume them very often.

So what about having a text-to-speech program read a book? Doesn't that satisfy both?

I'm probably in the 99th percentile of listening to articles via text to speech but the book experience (especially fiction) is not nearly as good in this form. One difficulty is you're at the mercy of the text quality--visual artifacts and things like that which are easily ignored in visual form become a lot more annoying when listening to them. If you have a clean source, great, but most books you'd want to read aren't in this format.

> Doesn't [text-to-speech] satisfy both?

It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.)

For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue.

Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.

Do you prefer someone read you a book or reading it yourself?

As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.

Well, normally I read them myself, but I was replying to:

> Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things

which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.

I enjoy both but have probably 5x the time for listening compared to reading.

> I feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.

I listen to a lot of podcasts about random topics while doing yardwork and (pre-pandemic) commuting. I find that I remember these podcasts rather clearly compared to reading articles, and I find that they "contextualize" well with my existing knowledge.

For instance, I recall a number of details from Dan Carlin's WWI podcast "Blueprint for Armageddon" because I was mulching the garden beds with 15yds of top dressing while listening to the series last year.

I don't know if the improved retention is due to the narrative/conversational style of podcasts, the "memory palace" effect of doing something mindless at the same time, or some other cognitive difference in spoken vs read information.

I listen to educational podcasts as I’m going to sleep at night and while I don’t retain everything, I do remember some of it and that’s time I’d otherwise have spent staring at the ceiling or whatever.

I’ve actually collected quite a large number of podcasts that hit my sweet spot of being just interesting enough to engage my attention but not interesting enough to keep me awake.

Podcasts are a nice thing to hear while doing other stuff. There are also fiction and true crime podcasts that use music, narration, and dramatization to great effect. They can use recordings of their subjects instead of quoting them. The rhetorical power of elocution is a pleasure in itself, and I like to feel that I am not so alone – especially now.

The flip side is to think about how much good information is already trapped in audio, but never transitioned to a better digestible format like podcasts. I’m thinking things like class lectures, quarterly results calls, company all-hands calls that often include an unnecessary video component.

Contextualizing information with a human speaker can make it much easier to understand for me. It's easier to narrow down the meaning behind spoken words when it is sourced from a real person.

There are too many occurrences of reading anonymous text that can interpreted multiple ways without enough context to make it clear what is meant. If you attached a speaker to the same context; with intonation, character and a reliable history of quirks it becomes trivial to see what they meant.

People tend to use simple language when talking to another human so you're not always chasing a rabbit hole of terms that can be summarized for the sake of time in a podcast.

You may enjoy https://podcastnotes.org which in a way is an attempt to solve this problem that you describe.

Disclosure: I work on PN on the tech side.

i forget who, but I remember reading someone who both writes and does podcasts saying that one of the nice things about audio is that you can't have your words screenshotted and mocked on social media.

which means you can express yourself less defensively and without having to worry about the worst possible interpretation of whatever you say.