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Comment by mbrd | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Dan's ability to "move the topic along" should be underestimated. It's a real skill to be able to give a discussion somewhat on topic and on time and he is excellent at it.

I can't imagine trying to get even 20 minutes of useful content from Merlin Mann but Dan does it every week on Back to Work!

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Actually, I tried a couple of the "talk show" podcasts and found them incredibly boring. Somehow instead of there being any density of insight or intelligence it was just a couple of people talking about random crap.

I've listened to other podcasts, e.g. with Merlin or Marco or "the other John", and those were much better, but it didn't feel to me like Gruber and Benjamin added up to something worth listening to.

But almost all the 5by5 major shows are horribly overtime.

Hypercritical, Back to Work, Build and Analyse, the once Talk Show, every host other than Dan is rambling, on and on and on and on for hours. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it, 5by5 podcasts are background noises when I walking around the city, doing chores etc. But information densities are really low (Back to Work is an exception but per Merlin's style it's so all over the places, after a while you just give up caring.)

I've never gotten any of these complaints about shows running "overtime". Personally, the longer the better IMHO. They're podcasts. I listen as much as I can, and then pause them to pick them up later. Short ones are just over quicker and then I have to wait until the next one until there's more to listen to.

PS: (edit) unless its music, I almost always listen to the spoken word at 1.5x or 2x speed.

My main complaint is that no one is saying "let's get back on topic" because the topic is whatever the host wants. So you get a 10 minute digression on random crap. That is the "overtime" part. I wouldn't mind 90 minutes of on-topic chat.

I guess what I was trying to saw was not that Dan can/cannot control the amount of time his co-hosts spend orating, but that he gets them to come out of their shell and say what they truly think on topics. I think it's fair to say that the majority of people on the 5by5 network are not the stereotypical, media-friendly, smooth-talking celebs that we might be used to on traditional radio, but they are very knowledgeable about their topics and speak with conviction - something which is very important. Through various means, including playing dumb at times and asking 'obvious' questions, Dan does an excellent job in getting these 'geeks' to open up and talk at length about things that they are passionate about. I don't see what he does as a being passive and not contributing - I think he is very consciously getting the most out of his co-hosts.

This is a big problem with podcasting in general these days. If you want to listen to even 3 shows per week you could be looking at 4.5 to 5 hours worth of material. I would love to see 5by5 maybe splice up these shows into chapters or otherwise offer some time index that allows me to skip to the parts I'm actually interested in. I would have no problem with a pre/post-roll ad for each segment. There are a number of 5by5 shows I'd like to listen to but I just don't have 10-15 hours per week for it.

Along those lines, I listened to The Talk Show a few times, and it often sounded to me like Dan really had to work to pull material out of Gruber. I would've expected Gruber to just stop podcasting before taking the show elsewhere.

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