How to really know another person

IMO podcasts without transcriptions shouldn't be allowed on HN. The vast majority of readers aren't going to invest an hour listening to the whole thing, so any discussion is just going to be about the title.

Since when is "information density" the goal of that format? Imagine trying to complain that the "information density" of The Tonight Show Starring Jim Fallon--or hell: The Howard Stern Show ;P--was "really low". The reason people listen to a bunch of people chatting is because they actively enjoy the personalities and the banter, wanting to get a feel for the people involved, not because they are looking for the fastest way to get to the point.

If you are remotely interested in philosophy, Philosophize This! is a great podcast. I listen to it when walking the dog and sometimes I have to rewind a minute or two when I get distracted by something enough to miss a few sentences. It's quite dense but really informative and entertaining. https://www.philosophizethis.org/

Highly depends on the podcast for me. I don't generally listen to the conversational ones, and usually I listen to podcasts while doing something else like cleaning or working on my house.

Arms Control Wonk, In Defense of Plants, The Long Now, and The History of English are some of my more favorite information dense podcasts.

Depends on the podcast but Hidden Brain has always been more on the easy listening/infotainment side of things, rather than something more serious.

You might like The Economist, which has the entire publication professionally read each week, and you can listen at 2x speed, just like a podcast.

Yup. Same thing with articles. It's all lazy production.

This is why people like HN.. You just read the headlines, and see if someone posts a tldr so you don't have to waste your time reading or listening to an hour of unstructured data

I agree most of them (90+ percent?) are milking one small thing for ad money.

The exception to the rule: Huberman Labs. He has 2.5 hour pods that are so dense I have to consume them over days.

I have this problem with radiolab. A lot of people really love it, but it's so repetitive, filled with pointless filler sounds/music, and takes so long to get to the point that even when I'm very interested in the topic I often rage quit. At least a little banter/joking is new information even when it isn't on topic.

Exactly. It's so much more prevalent when reading the transcript - you can see how many words are wasted and how much longer it takes to convey something in that form as opposed to an article, however it has the advantage of not engaging your visual system so ultimately allows you to parallelize.

There are podcasts and podcasts. Some are information dense, some are chatty. Different purposes for different moods, styles and people. When it comes to technical stuff yes, the transcript makes for an easy visual scan over whether it is even worth listening.

Nope. I find good podcasts to be at the right level. Hidden brain for the most part hits that. To me, information density isn't as important as to how it is communicated. I actually like some interviewer interviewee panels because they draw out connections that you may not get in an information dense dump. Some of these podcasts episodes (like this one) though are interviews about the book the interviewee wrote, so the density you are looking for is likely in the book.

If you like information dense podcasts you'd like Huberman's podcast as he just lays everything out there.

Depends on the podcast. Well-produced ones are tightly edited, and the moderator keeps the conversation tight. That takes some work (and budget) to do. I find I mainly listen to big-budget podcasts, not on purpose, but because I won’t put up with low information density and all that is left after that are podcasts with the budget and production values to keep it tight.

It is low. I prefer the video essay style although many of those are also full of fluff, but many aren't. If I watch podcast material, its almost always clips cut out and posted by someone with more time and patience than myself - thank you unknown hero who cuts out the good stuff.

David Perell’s North Star Podcast is almost nonstop info. He asks great questions, sort of rapid-fire, while still keeping a pleasant and engaging flow. Try his Tyler Cowen interview if you haven’t listened yet.

No new episodes this year so I’m not sure if he plans to continue but the few I’ve heard have been great. Hoping the rest of the archive is similar.

Well said, most podcasts I listen to these days I skip about five to seven minutes in to dispense with the chat and get to meat of the issue.

If podcasts were information-dense, they'd be useless (for me) because it would be way to easy to miss important points.

most podcasts select for those that can fill the air

so succinctness is not selected for

note that many of the mid tier youtubers are so verbose that even 2x isn’t good enough

There's already clues there as to what sort of angle this might be approached from. The speakers book "Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them, by Tessa West, 2022." as well as their work and other cited research is listed on the page.

I just started listening, there were segments with the first being 15m. I would say that they're a collection of anecdata stories on the subject. I napped for a segment in the middle, dreaming about visiting a treehouse office, and was awake again for the end. I didn't find any big answers but also don't mind having passed the time.

Transcribed using 'base' model:

https://pastebin.com/M5276AFE

You can search here:

https://www.happyscribe.com/public

Didn't find Hidden Brain through a quick search, maybe it's there and I didn't have enough patience.

I'd love to know if there are other services similar to happyscribe.com .. anyone know any?

It adds so much value to a podcast to be able to search for words/text and read instead of just listening.

Also, if you want to add your own thoughts to something that was said, with a transcription you can simply make a PDF and attach an annotation or highlight sentences.

If like me, you like to listen to podcasts and take notes and add your own thoughts, and if you have found some handy tools for that or come up with your custom convenient workflows, I'd really like to know.

the answer is "You ask them". Saved you one hour.

Better yet.. podcast -> Whisper -> text summarization model... sounds like it'd be fun to hack together

I made a similar thing for the Lex Friedman podcast. It transcribes the audio and runs it through a summarization model. You can then search the entire corpus to find relevant snippets from episodes:

http://lexicon.lol

what's a Whisper transcript? (looking, enticed)

Yes, absolutely. I am in constant contact with people that are two ends of the spectrum. They either align malicious intent to every one else's actions or they are blissfully unaware of malicious intent at all. These are both examples of people thinking they know what someone else is thinking.

Some of them do. And if it turns out that you were actually not thinking what they thought you were thinking -- it's your fault!

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you aren't married.

Yes, it seems that we learn to do that really early [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention#Knowledge_of_the_int...

Oh yes. When I was a kid, my dad did this to me constantly.

I’m neurodivergent and he was completely wrong most of the time. I did not have an ideal childhood.

People think things that range from typical to highly atypical. The more typical your thought patterns, the higher the probability that others can infer your thinking. This leads to more successful social interactions because people will infer your thinking incorrectly less often.

This is one significant reason why the neurodivergent (e.g., autism spectrum) often have social interaction issues. Highly intelligent people also have out of the box thinking that is hard to predict, but they often have increased capacity to infer the thinking of others and adjust accordingly (if they want).

THANK YOU