Nowadays, you can spend all your waking hours consuming valuable information. Pretty remarkable, when you come to think of it. Hint: AirPods Pro.

Whenever you’re doing something not demanding your full attention, you can always turn on a podcast. You can listen to podcasts when commuting, working out or cooking¹.

Technically, you could have done something similar 50 years ago using a walkman. But it have been very high-effort. Today, we have dedicated podcast apps and noise-cancelling, wireless earplugs. As a result, the podcast industry is rapidly growing in size. If you sample 100 young adults from the street in an urban area, a substantial number of them might be listening to podcasts.

I. #

In school, they teach you analytic reading. But they don’t teach you analytic podcast-listening. By this, I mean podcast-listening to learn about new ideas. Deliberate listening, as opposed to just hearing.

Analytic podcast-listening is very different from analytic reading. While I find it harder following the structure of an argument in podcast form, the podcast medium has other benefits:

• Podcasts are low-effort way of discovering new ideas. Because there are so many podcast hours in the day, you can afford to explore more novel content. I’m pickier when selecting books to read, since it’s a bigger investment.
• Podcasts can have a very high idea density. Because most podcasts are at most one hour, podcast guests are forced to focus on their key insights.
• Podcasts are great for stress testing ideas. Someone might make a convincing argument in a blog post but fail to defend their views in a podcast. Similarly, you might come away from a podcast feeling like a podcast guest is completely unreasonable. Suspicious!

So, it seems worth practising analytic podcast-listening. If you listen to podcasts 2h daily, this might make a huge difference.

II. #

Before we get into strategies for analytic podcast-listening, I’d like to stress the need to prioritise. If you feed a neural network bad data, you won’t get good results – no matter how efficient the training process. My podcast taste, in a nutshell:

• I mostly listen to podcasts with transcripts, so I can easily refer back to interesting parts of the conversation. For my favourite episodes, I’ll chuck the transcript into a large language model and have it summarise the key points. Ideally, the show notes also contain time stamps and further references. In this respect, Hear This Idea and the 80,000 hours podcast do an excellent job.
• I find it quite valuable listening to podcasts with authors of books or articles I’ve read. These podcast episodes serve as good refreshers. This point also relates to the above point about stress testing ideas.
• I also like listening to blog posts in podcast form. While I don’t retain as much information as after reading the post, I usually get the gist. Above all, listening to blog posts helps me decide which posts to read later.

III. #

Here are some strategies for analytic podcast-listening²:

• Have some system for saving podcasts that resonated with you. Re-listen to your favourite episodes, much as you’d reread your favourite books. Here’s my podcast shelf.
• Similarly, keep an anti-library for podcasts. I have a list of podcasts recommended by others.
• Create voice memos to capture your thoughts. If I’m on the go, I might dictate thoughts and have an LLM convert my yapping into bullet points later.
• There are dedicated podcast apps which allow you to capture segments of podcasts. I’ve played around with some of these, and I’m quite impressed by how well they work.
• Work with playback speed. Here it’s useful to think in terms of exploration and exploitation. If it’s a high-quality episode, I’ll usually listen at a 0.8x speed. While listening to podcasts, I’m usually multitasking, so I need additional processing time. If I’m listening to a new show, I’ll turn up the speed to 2x.
• If you have a smartwatch, put it to good use! The most valuable feature of my Apple Watch has been the ability to rewind podcast episodes by 15s.

IV. #

Podcasts play a big role in my process for updating beliefs. Podcasts, along with conversations with others, are my main methods for “gaining surface area”.

I only began thinking in terms of analytic podcast-listening quite recently. Ultimately, I’m realising that it’s “just” a matter of being more intentional about the content you consume. But it probably helps having a funky name for it.