I spend a large amount of time listening to podcasts. In the past, I suspected the amount of time was immense, but I never knew exactly what the number was. Now, thanks to the listening statistics in Pocket Casts I know exactly how much time I spend listening to podcasts.
I captured the image below on June 16, 2018, exactly 365 days after switching over to the Pocket Casts app:
Sixty seven days is 1,608 hours or 96,480 minutes. If I did absolutely nothing except listen to podcasts 24 hours a day beginning on January 1st, I would have to keep my headphones on until March 18th to equal the amount of listening I do over the course of a year.
However, 67 days is not a truly accurate representation of the amount of podcasts I have listened to because I do not listen to most podcasts at their regular speed. Given that my subscription count stands at 249 podcasts, it is not humanly possible to listen in realtime to all of the content they produce. Instead, I listen to most podcasts at two times their realtime speed. Additionally, I use Pocket Casts features such as silence trimming and intro skipping to further increase the amount of podcasts I can consume. This means that in reality, I actually listen to well over 120 days worth of podcasts every year.
The piece of this situation that strikes me as remarkable is not my total listening time or the amount of time I save by speeding up audio. Rather, what I find remarkable is that every single second of every podcast is 100% completely free. I did not need to spend even a single penny to obtain any of the programming I listened to. Try to do that with television, movies, or even books. In most mediums, it is not possible to consume content for free. Yet, with podcasts I can stay up-to-date with current events, explore various facets of the designed world, study important events in history, gain understandings of viewpoints which are not my own, follow local stories about the SF Bay Area, listen to music from bands across the musical spectrum, and a whole lot more without opening my wallet.