Every podcast is different, with various levels of quality. Every podcast has different equipment within their means, they are sometimes recorded in person, or remote, and all of these various levels so of production quality mean that some podcasts sound quiet, while others do not.
I have a server where all my podcasts are downloaded and served to me, so I figure there must be a way to normalize all the incoming podcasts to make them a similar volume before I even listen to them. I'm just not sure how I would do that, precisely. I know it can be done, but if someone has solved this before, or knows of a solution they've tried and liked, I'm curious to hear about it.
given your use case the ffmpeg incantation wins out but just for posterity I should add that if you are producing a podcast or other audio medium you can do this in Audacity as well pretty simply