Q: “Do you prefer listening to a podcast that is edited? Or nah?”

My Answer: For the most part, I prefer podcasts that are edited for umms and aahs and pauses.

Now, there are shows which the conversations are just absolutely incredible (Bill Simmons, Tim Ferriss, Marketing Over Coffee), and it would actually do it injustice to edit the natural flow – so such shows are the exception. But those are far and few in-between.

Most regular “interview” shows can use all the editing they can, not just to improve the length of the show, but for improving the audio quality (sound leveling, cross-talk, etc), and to improve the show quality just by cutting out the completely unnecessary stuff – like “Can you hear me now?” pre-interview banter, “Hold on, my door bell just rang”, “Sorry, my child is calling me, let me quickly check what it is”, “Mind if I grab a quick drink of water?”, type stuff which is not important to the show or to the listeners.

Some other points: I listen at 1.8x speed, I skip the intros and outros for all shows, fast-forward thru the ads, skip the last 1-2 minutes as soon as I realize the show is ending and outro is coming up, etc. Only 24 hours in a day. Even a few minutes saved as long as I’m still getting what I need, is big for me.

My main interest is in education and information in my niche. So, while I’m not specifically looking for podcasts primarily to be entertained (like comedy, for eg.), I absolutely WANT to be entertained while I’m getting what I need. I need to have fun listening to the show.

So if a show has the greatest information and education, but is boring as hell, or the show’s host has no personality, or the guests or questioning are/is annoying, or it takes too much time to get to what I care about, then I won’t subscribe to such shows.

So everything has to be entertaining, at a minimum, or it becomes C-SPAN to me

P.S: That’s me in the picture listening to a podcast while getting my teeth worked on.