There is also another benefit to books, on average they are much better than a random 3 hour podcast. If you care about what you read, you'd be getting something that the author has spend a lot of time, skill and energy to write, the editor would have spend a lot of time and skill to improve with the author.

I have a measure for all content I consume, quality/hr of reading/listening. If it's just a long video that has 2-3 questions that has caught my attention I'd be listening only those. If it's a long text that I might find something interesting I'll ask the LLM to summarize the main ideas as a filter before I decide to dive in.

Books, and their audiobooks version have on average much more bang per hour than random podcasts, because they're structured, authors had spend more time on them and you can cherry pick from a structure.

I also have caught myself using sloppy content as excuse not working on planned tasks with excuses like "this might be useful", or watching "productivity porn" videos. I think LLMs are good as a pre-filter for that.

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WalterBright an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I gave up on podcasts because of the excessive insertion of commercials, and the execrable user interface of the iphone podcast app.

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elAhmo an hour ago | parent [-]

There are other apps too, such as Overcast, and ads on podcasts are really easy to skip.

	▲	WalterBright an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I can skip forward 30 sec, then back up, blech. It's just not worth it when you constantly have to interact with the podcast app. Scott Adams' podcasts were different. He inserted very few commericials, and they were short enough there was no reason to skip forward. I tried many other podcasts after he passed away, and they all were largely long, boring commercials. Yuck. I now listen to Pandora or Soma FM instead.

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heyheyhey an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Comparing a podcast to a book is like comparing a 30-minute TV episode to a 3 hour Scorsese movie. Similar mediums with completely different goals.