I feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.
Important aspect is that it faster to produce then writing.
> Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing.
Popular good podcasts are not like lectures. They tend to have less information per minute and light side chats where your brain rests. They can be consumed while cleaning, cooking or going somewhere and paying reasonable amount of attention to surrounding environment. You can not do it with lecture (I tried).
You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all, but at smaller pace then expected from lecture and it requires less attention.
I don't think that's obvious at all. Learning is an active process. People listening to podcasts while doing work aren't going to actually develop some skill, they're just passively listening to some facts being thrown at them, much of it they probably won't even retain, let alone productively integrate.
You can listen to thousands of hours of guitar playing podcasts, it won't really help you play the guitar. Or you could listen to programming podcasts, but without ever writing a line of code you'd not be a any good as a programmer.
And yes, I have some idea about how much I retained from podcasts I listened to. Seriously, remembering facts is also form of knowing, it beats up not remembering facts. It is not "just", many times it is the thing to go after when learning.
Unless it's trivia and current knowledge type stuff.
[1] Never mind that in order to produce quality audio, you need to have written... Your script. Which is a lot harder than writing something readable.
Another podcast I've learned a lot from is the Ottoman History Podcast (not to be confused with The History of the Ottoman Empire podcast). It often has episodes where academic historians are interviewing other academic historians about their areas of research. So you'll have a whole episode where a historian talks about their research into mining communities in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance.
For something a bit lighter, the Tides of History podcast is worth a listen. It's an academic historian who takes a look at various historical events.
Nota bene: A great lecture is worth a lot. But a great text that delivers the same message is worth a lot more.
That being said, one factor you might be discounting is that producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read. There are a lot of people who are great conversationalists, but not great writers.
I'm not sure I agree. For example, I find myself fast-forwarding Coursera videos because the teachers just don't understand where it makes sense to slow the pace or where to pick it up. I find myself skipping huge parts of YouTube videos (my interest is hobby stuff) because the author just doesn't understand I already understood the idea, the take is getting boring (or just not showing the interesting stuff), and they should just cut ahead.
I find producing mediocre audio/video is easy. But quality audio/video is as hard as quality text, if not harder.
I’m not making any statement on the average quality of audiovisual content, just the barrier to entry for the production of that content.
FWIW I do a lot of skipping and fast replaying too. My podcasts are usually around 2.5x. Most people perform-talk way too slow. If I weren’t able to listen that quickly while doing dishes or similar, I’d normally prefer to read.
I used to listen to a number of podcasts regularly, but I would repeatedly notice that I barely remembered what the key points were. In the end, I cut down my consumption more and more, and only listen to episodes that I specifically find interesting, and only when I have the time and mental resources to really listen to them.
Regarding walking your dog: that's true. Walking around is a good way to retain information. That's explained on Moonwalking With Einstein
It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.)
For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue.
Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.
As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.
> Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things
which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.
I listen to a lot of podcasts about random topics while doing yardwork and (pre-pandemic) commuting. I find that I remember these podcasts rather clearly compared to reading articles, and I find that they "contextualize" well with my existing knowledge.
For instance, I recall a number of details from Dan Carlin's WWI podcast "Blueprint for Armageddon" because I was mulching the garden beds with 15yds of top dressing while listening to the series last year.
I don't know if the improved retention is due to the narrative/conversational style of podcasts, the "memory palace" effect of doing something mindless at the same time, or some other cognitive difference in spoken vs read information.
I’ve actually collected quite a large number of podcasts that hit my sweet spot of being just interesting enough to engage my attention but not interesting enough to keep me awake.
There are too many occurrences of reading anonymous text that can interpreted multiple ways without enough context to make it clear what is meant. If you attached a speaker to the same context; with intonation, character and a reliable history of quirks it becomes trivial to see what they meant.
People tend to use simple language when talking to another human so you're not always chasing a rabbit hole of terms that can be summarized for the sake of time in a podcast.
Disclosure: I work on PN on the tech side.
which means you can express yourself less defensively and without having to worry about the worst possible interpretation of whatever you say.