Which makes it such a shame that people throw them around like they are an authoritative source of anything. It’s literally just some guy who read a book and has a microphone. It’s as good as whatever book they read.

Podcasts, in general, are not made to cater to bonafide genius intellectuals.

Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere, but to expect an entire series of episodes to average out to anything close to that is too high of an expectation.

That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.

> Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere

Much like comments written on the internet.

> That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.

See above.

Podcasts, like live news, radio talk shows, and other scheduled throughput based media, have to fill time with content. If there's nothing intelligent to say, they say stuff anyways.

Nah. Podcasts are one of the few mediums that don’t have set lengths. The one here goes to 6 parts because of the volume of material. And often I’ve heard podcasts do multiple episodes in one. There’s no time they’re trying to achieve as there’s no standard.

That's mostly true, except for the big ones that have signed deals, but even then a lot of filler sentences, filler talk, etc., happens regularly in the podcast episodes I've heard.

The huge advantage of podcasts over most other forms of media is that they don't have to cut things down into tiny bite sized pieces. Many podcasts will get down into the nitty gritty details of things that the news never will. I think it's much closer to long form journalism than television news. Although, obviously, podcasts can take any form and some are geared toward that latter rather than former. But the ones I am most drawn to are those where actual experts pour over the data in great detail.

This Week in Virology was my go to during the pandemic, hosted by a virologist, and immunologist, and an infectious disease doctor.

You'll notice that many if not most of the loudest "expert" voices during the pandemic were speaking outside their area of expertise. With the exception of Fauci, of course.

It’s an easy and entertaining consumption method and the sources are linked right there…

Or books, in this case. Multiple primary sources.

Try Age of Napoleon.

Mentioned the reasons in my last post.