> You'll find thousands of shows with perfect audio quality and professional-grade cover art that contain absolutely zero intellectual nutritional value

This is why I switched to audio books. Many podcasts with real guests contained too much salad and not enough meat (e.g. a machine learning podcast but they talked about going to conferences).

Contrary to what many think, I believe AI generated content can increase the nutritional value. I've done experiments with turning technical PDFs into podcasts, e.g. summarizing machine learning papers (similar to NotebookLM).

Totally agree. The best thing about AI for me so far has been the audio models that can turn an ebook into an audio book.

I have not only switched from podcasts to audio books but now I am on to all the books I have wanted to listen to but are too obscure to ever hire a voice actor for.

This week I have been listening to a PhD thesis in the car that is on an obscure subject of interest to me. In contrast, even what I use to think of as good in terms of podcasts seem more like junk food now.

I searched for good programming or more broad IT-related podcasts but unfortunately haven't found ones that aren't either straight up ad or thinly veiled ad. I understand that invited guests or podcast producers want to have compensation but end result is of putting and not attractive to me. I'll place software engineering radio as an example - I listened to some episodes but it gave me impression of slop even before word slop was established. On the other hand I know excellent quality podcasts founded by voluntary Patreon members so I hope issue is I simply haven't found IT ones from that spectrum yet.