I Tried Listening to Podcasts at 3x and Broke My Brain - by Steve Rousseau (medium)
At 2x, the experience of listening to audio began to change: Though I could understand the words, they seemed to have less emotional resonance. At these high speeds, my brain seemed to shift away from assessing people's feelings towards baseline comprehension. At the end of each sentence, I'd feel a little twinge of joy, not because of anything happening in the podcast, but just because I had understood the words.