I recently read the essay “Phantom Fluency” by Terry Godier about learning from podcasts and retaining ideas discussed there.
This was interesting for me for multiple reasons. For one thing, I’m not sure if I ever expect to learn something in particular from listening to a podcast. Even the ones that are about specific topics or professional fields. So I’m not disappointed that I don’t get super knowledgeable by listening to podcasts, but I wonder if you treat podcasts differently?
For another thing, I actually feel a bit bad producing a podcast
When I started my current podcasting project (tabletop RPG reviews and discussions), I wondered if I should rather start a website and write reviews and analyses by myself, or get someone else to produce a podcast with. I went for the latter.
I think this has a lot of upsides:
people can listen to it on their commute or when doing household chores and such
it’s more motivating to research and record it together
the connection to the listener seems more social and interested
I get a lot of views for a specific episode because it’s apparently very nice to fall asleep to
But I also feel like it’s a bit more shallow this way. Like I could do better, convey more than just “game funny”. Maybe it’s something about the medium that will still evolve, or maybe I’m completely overthinking this
I’ve found myself often watching video essays in a topic I care about, having ideas while I watch, but if I don’t capture them immediately then it becomes really hard to recall those thoughts later. I don’t listen to podcasts but I imagine it’s the same idea.
But I agree that not all podcasts are supposed to be informational per se, and not all listeners are aiming to retain knowledge or thoughts had during the experience. That’s fine.
I will say, when reading your reasons for doing a podcast the first thing that came to my mind is that it’s a lot nicer of a transition to listen to a article read aloud than to read the transcription of a conversational podcast. If the goal is conveying information then I think the article makes more sense, and lets readers consume it however they’re most comfortable doing so. But for entertainment or building a brand, I imagine hearing the voice can add a lot over reading text.
I think it definitely varies a lot by person. My spouse listens to podcasts all the time, and they’re always telling me about things that they learned from podcasts, so clearly they’re absorbing a lot of information from them. Me, I remember pretty much nothing from audio or video unless I’m actively taking notes while I listen, and it took me years to figure even that much out. I’m a big fan of transcripts being made available for podcasts or especially for video training materials.
The discussion is actually relevant to my interests because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I learn best, actually, so thank you for sharing it!
While I mostly listen to podcasts for fun, occasionally I do listen to and watch things that are about my interests. I find that I’m able to retain the general gist of the info pretty well, but the details are often lost. Because of that, if I feel I’ll want to reference them later, I’ve taken to making little notes on them in my phone. Sometimes I have more to say depending–I’ve actually got several essays worth of stuff about different podcasts that I’ve never put up on my blog because it’s just too niche, or I feel like no one would care.
But it is great to go back and read through them later! Plus, it makes talking about them with people easier.
I never really considered taking notes when listening to a podcast! I actually listen to them very rarely, because I have trouble following them when I’m tried (which is pretty much all the time, thanks disability~).
Podcasts have always struck me as a pretty inaccessible medium. I’m glad whenever they do transcripts (although they can be seriously lacking if they’re unedited LLM output). But I think there’s something to this idea of the current implementation holding them back. If we can have lyrics synced to music in certain apps, this can’t be that hard with podcasts. I think transcripts would need to be a bit better than they are now, though, such as using headings and formatting to help with navigation.
