I find the same is true when listening to lectures and non-trivial podcasts. I "can" listen to them at 2x speed (and many are proud of regularly doing it), but over time I found it's better to leave it at 1x, unless it's an 80+ year old person talking (sorry, Chomsky!). The point isn't to understand the words like some speech transcription algorithm, but to engage with them. "But FOMO! How will I catch up on all the JRE episodes then?!" Thing is, there are so many high quality podcasts out there that you cannot hope to digest them all deeply. Of course broad and deep are both needed. You need a view of "roughly what types of interesting things exist out there" in order to be able to dive into one, but endless "I'm interested in everything" is also untimately fruitless and let's you tread in place. Strangely enough once you do one thing deeply, it opens more avenues for understanding the other things.