So is it not possible then? With all due respect, you're making assumptions about my show that aren't really applicable. I'm not making a newspaper. I'm essentially trying to make a documentary. One sustainable, enjoyable and professional enough to warrant repeat listens (as many of our listeners have told me) and be a significant document that will stick around for a long time.
I wasn't looking for advice on how polished or unpolished to make my show, as I already have strong, fairly settled opinions on this subject. "Not many will hear it" is never a good reason not to try your best. Otherwise I would have quit making music 20 years ago. And a good amount of people do listen to my podcast, so I want it to sound great. If someone asked me for advice about audio, I wouldn't really go in the direction of "who cares, nobody's listening." That's not how you learn and improve. I'm aiming for it to be as good as it can be.
Also, I use strip silence anyway, because the show is intensely edited. It's not loose or unstructured. So that helps create region chunks to easily discard. Long pauses. Countless "ums." Gross lip noises. Motorcycles driving by. Ramblings that go nowhere and will save us a good minute if cut out. So "don't strip silence" is not an option here. Otherwise every cut, hundreds of them, would be manual.
I just want to know if there's a technical way to be more accurate with stripping silence, as it greatly improves the audio quality of my presentation. Thank you