I don't like podcasters because they usually muddle through stuff and approach things in a kind of non-productive superficial way that drives easy engagement rather than hard work results.

That said if it's a topic that I'm really really ignorant about, a little podcast/YouTube can be helpful. For example Yannick kilchers YouTube videos, especially how he annotates and breaks down the math equations, can be very useful if the paper's domain is new to me.

I think about it as pre-reading the paper.

A more focused first and second reading mode, may I propose, would add even more value. In these modes, the paper would be read more faithfully.

A problem that text to speech has when you feed it a regular PDF is that it will choke on titles, headings, footers, inline citations, page numbers, acronyms, abbreviations, numerical tables, charts, and diagrams.

So I would like to build or see something that conversationally reads the PDF as if it were a peer reading to me, unpacking abbreviations, mentioning titles and authors and years of citations (when I want that), describing charts, and perhaps even letting me interrupt to discuss specific misunderstandings I'm having.

There's obviously a challenge that reading a paper is an active engagement depending on your own knowledge state. We might gloss over formulas, footnotes, and citations on a first read, for example.

Still, a low hanging fruit would be a converter mode that accurately strips out page numbers and headers. There is little in this world more aggravating than listening to a 30 page paper, and having to hear that paper title and authors repeated an additional 15 times because it's reading the header.