I’m someone that could never really get into talk shows, radio shows or podcasts because I tended to find the speakers too long winded, slow to get their points across and the formats generally encouraged the kind of runtime that discouraged me from giving it my full attention. I mean an hour to listen to something all the way through plus the ads? Pass.

Going back about a dozen years ago if I wanted to watch a video to get some kind of information out of it, I generally found a way to load it up into QuickTime Player and play it back at 2x or 3x.

Nowadays I listen to too many podcasts because two pieces of technology fixed that for me: truly wireless headphones, AirPods originally, Powerbeats Pro presently, and podcast players with variable audio acceleration, namely Overcast, but I think Castro can do it too, and I’m sure there’s equivalents out there in Android. Overcast has two major quality of life improvements that make talk shows not just tolerable, but if you like the speakers, enjoyable. It decreases the playback time by about 40% for me using a combination of a fixed speed adjustment and Smart Speed, and it evens out the voice volume of the speakers so if someone has a bad mic or speaks softly, I can hear what the hell they’re saying.

Without either of these, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate podcasts as a format at all. Even now I favor podcasts that still have shorter base runtimes, Overcast is going to decrease the length regardless, but I don’t want to listen to something for more than 35 minutes, if that.

There’s a lot of good interviews, talk shows, news podcasts and so on that I find superior than the crap I would find on the web, I can easily skip past ads, and I can relax be play a game while the podcast runs more or less in the background. There’s plenty I just wouldn’t hear about or learn about simply because it really isn’t on the web. It might be in a book somewhere, but hearing someone explain their position on this or that or another thing in their own voice in a conversational format is much more enjoyable to me than following their writing and piecing their positions together.

Now you might give this all a try and find you still don’t care for podcasts, or maybe you already did. That’s fine, also fine if you’re not interested at all. Just figured I would give my 2¢ as someone who previously thought along the same lines as you about audio/video mediums. Text has a myriad of advantage over audio and video, but I’m finding audio and video have some advantages as well over text. Having technology available to make it a fair bit less miserable and time consuming an experience was part of what helped me realize that.

you should try to listen to podcasts where you think the hosts are interesting. they’re useful for uncovering new threads of information of and modes of thought, which are more usually associated with what you gain from personal conversations. podcasts are probably never the supreme mode of conveying information, but they’re a cool window into peoples’ brains. they’re great for storytelling as well, and in quarantine, they’re acceptable substitutes for social engagement.

I've tried podcasts and the format is just not for me. I do enjoy YouTube channels on particular topics (history, warfare, hobby stuff).

My point is that this isn't at all a replacement for Wikipedia. Even the time investment is wildly different between the two.

Yup. The title sounds like "The train is my new bicycle".

I mean, both get you places and have wheels.

You made me realize that podcasts do take the place of Wikipedia for me, especially when I have a lot of busy work. For example, someone mentioned Jurgen Schmidhuber in an AI thread here the other day and I was able to find a bunch of podcasts interviewing him or mentioning him. I threw them in a playlist and got a lot of what I wanted, passively for the most part and while multitasking.

But the time investment alone makes this not a Wikipedia replacement...

Listening to Samuel Pepys doesn't give me a deep dive into history but it goes go wide in a way reading the Wiki entry for the great fire of london does not. That information is compressed does not mean it is more useful. Suppose there is a second great fire or flooding - I believe locating friends with secure lodgings to store consumer goods would come immediately to mind after listening to Pepys but this would not occur by just having read the wiki.

Note I did not argue more compressed info (or Wikipedia) is "more useful". I argued it's a different use case, quicker and more to the point.

Of course, I don't like podcasts so that alone makes Wikipedia better for me, but this is not what I was arguing.

I was arguing podcasts can never be a replacement for Wikipedia.