Also speaking slower gives the listener time to think about what you say.

You can also add a second or two of pause between sentences to the same effect.

and people can watch you at 1.5x or 2x anyway

I think people don't like the sound of my voice ha, will experiment with shorts

And with YouTube, anyone that wants to hear it faster can just speed up the video anyway.

This is really mostly possible with well enunciated speech, which is only really possible if you slow down a reasonable bit.

I disagree. I think it has more to do with ear training and being familiar with the topics at hand. I listen to most spoken videos on 1.5x by default and can easily go to 2x for channels with hosts that speak slower. This is most noticeable for podcast-esque content that is more free-flowing and unscripted. In those scenarios, I might start out at 2x but slow it down if the podcast hosts/guests get into a passionate argument about a topic and start speaking faster and faster.

Importantly, for topics that I don't understand (learning a new language - Dutch), I often don't speed up those videos because my brain is working a helluva lot harder to keep up. This changed last week however, when I was watching some very basic A1 content and found myself wanting to speed it up just a little bit. Did it help that the presenter was speaking slow and enunciating? Yes, but it's nowhere near the most important deciding factor (imo).

To be fair, a lot of content on a podcast-like format is like 5 minutes of ideas stretched out to 115 minutes because that's what podcasts typically boil down to. Doesn't matter if you miss out on some detail because there's just not much subtlety to anything shaped up like a podcast. You can walk away from it for 5 minutes and come back and often you'll not feel like you've lost any information.

You'd probably miss out on quite a lot more if you played a Platonic dialogue back at 2x speed.

God no, I'm tired of having to set videos to 1.5x

its no consolation but get the Video Speed Controller extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Or drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar.

  javascript: (() => { document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = prompt("Set video speed multiplier:", "3"); })();

I disagree. The creator should slow down when writing, but they should not waste the viewer's time when speaking. I don't want to hear someone's ramblings unless they're really someone special.

Rambling and speaking slowly are very different things.

Yes exactly! Speaking slowly without a reason to do so is very painful for the listener. If what they have written is worth slowing down for, I'm all ears.