A personal note from Ken: 

Occasionally a listener will ask if we could enable variable playback speed on our audio players. Curiously enough, no one has ever asked for the option to slow down, only to speed up. This seems analogous to the bad reading habits that Nicholas Carr discussed in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. People have become accustomed to skimming texts, and they want — need? — to be able to do the same with things they listen to.

My decision to omit variable playback speed reflects my stubborn insistence that one of the ailments of modernity is the desire to increase the speed of everything. The contemplative has surrendered to the efficient. For a long time, I’ve written, spoken, and done interviews about the destructive consequences of the common desire to speed things up, so it’s hard for me to consider accommodating this desire.

Given the conceptual density of many of my conversations, people often say that they had to listen two or three times to understand what’s being discussed. That’s all the more reason not to speed up the speech.

When I speak and when we edit my interviews, I’m very conscious (as are musicians) of the importance of tempo. When editing, we often trim pauses in the conversation, but never to the point of eliminating them. Someone once said to me that thoughtful pauses — sometimes accompanied by the rustling of pages — is the sound of civilization taking shape.

I wouldn’t dream of asking a friend (or one of my guests) to speak faster during a conversation. So when people ask for the technical capacity to speed up the conversations I’m part of, it seems to be a way of forgetting that the speakers are persons, not just deliverers of “content.”

Thanks for listening thoughtfully! After all, leisure is the basis of culture.