As the sibling says: I can skim over the boring, boilerplate stuff ("thanks for having me") much faster in a transcript.

Since I can see the whole thing, it's much easier to skip down to the more interesting stuff, or realize that there isn't any.

A typical podcast is 150 to 200 words per minute, while many on hacker news read at north of 600 words per minute.

I'm not the original poster, but I have bad hearing and exclusively read transcripts over listening to podcasts - can't tell you how many times I've been grateful when podcasters provide even a partial list of transcripts for episodes. Speed-reading is also a lot faster overall versus simple listening.

You would be surprised, but reading a transcript is much faster than listening, even on speedup (1.25x, 1.5x, )

You can also quickly scan ahead, or reread a sentence. Navigating audio is harder.