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A Podcast Listening Strategy for Learning

February 2, 2022 by Eva Keiffenheim


Three steps to make the most of your podcast time

Source: Canva

Podcasts are an excellent way to acquire new knowledge. Hosts boil hours of research down to digestible content.

Yet, while podcasts are growing into one of the largest knowledge libraries on our planet, many people are not as strategic about their listening practice.

Listening to podcasts doesn’t make you smarter per se — it’s what you pick and do with it that will make all the difference.

The following lines will give you three quick ways to make the most of any value-packed podcast you listen to.


1) Find high quality podcasts

The friction to publishing podcasts is lower than it is for publishing books. You don’t need a publisher. Anyone with a phone and internet connection can become a podcast host.

Hence the quality of podcasts varies, and most podcasts are not worth your time. But some are. Instead of choosing a podcast based on the thumbnail and title, make a short effort to find the best one for you.

You can check out charts in the category “education,” search by keyword and podcast (e.g., best podcasts for language learning), or look at a podcast curation site.

Here are three of my favorite value-packed podcasts for learning:

Huberman Lab
Dr. Andrew Huberman, a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Philosophize This!
Stephen West shares ideas that shaped our world. It’s for anyone interested in an educational podcast about philosophy where you don’t need to be a graduate-level philosopher to understand it.

NPR: It’s an independent, nonprofit media organization founded on a mission to create a more informed public. NPR has many great podcasts, but my favorites are Radio Ambulante (in Spanish) and TED Radio Hour.


2) Use apps that help you remember more

You won’t remember much from a podcast if you only listen to it. Your brain needs repetition and elaboration to make new knowledge stick.

Unlike books, you can’t highlight audio — or can you?

I listen to my podcasts while biking or walking. Hence, an extremely uncomfortable situation to open a notepad or Roam Research whenever I hear an interesting idea.

But two applications have transformed how I listen to podcasts: Snipd and Airr. Both are audio highlighting tools.

When you hear something you want to remember, you tap a button. In Snipd, this creates a snippet that includes a descriptive title with optimized start- and end-points to capture the context, a summary of your snip, and the full transcript.

Source: Snipd

Airr is very similar to Snipd. The app allows me to tap on my AirPod and pin a conversation so that I can reread it whenever I need it. I no longer need to scan back through an entire episode to find a snippet or thought I can’t quite remember.

I sync Airr with a service called Readwise, which extracts all my audio snippets to Roam and Obsidian.

Source: Airr on the App Store

I haven’t fully tried Snipd yet, but I like Airr (mainly because of the AirPod feature). However, an advantage of Snipd is that it works for Android as well as iOS. Snipd also offers you a direct integration to Obsidian, which makes the monthly Readwise subscription obsolete. You should be able to export markdown with Airr as well, but I haven’t managed to do this.


3) Become a teacher by learning in public

Have you ever read a book only to forget the quintessence three weeks later?

You don’t have a bad memory. Forgetting is natural and actually even essential for learning.

But to make information stick, you’ll want to interrupt this forgetting, ideally, through a meaningful learning practice.

All great books on learning that I have read agree on the effectiveness of teaching newly learned things to others.

In ‘How We Learn’, Benedict Carey writes,

“Many teachers have said that you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else.”

The attempt to communicate what you’ve learned to your family, friends or any online audience is a very effective learning technique. Carey again:

“These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying — the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 per cent more powerful than if you continue sitting on your butt, staring at that outline. Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, and what you’ve forgotten — and fast.”

Carey is not the only one who recommends teaching what you’ve learned to other people. In ‘A Mind for Numbers’, Dr. Barbara Oakley provides another powerful example:

“The legendary Charles Darwin would do much the same thing. When trying to explain a concept, he imagined someone had just walked into his study. He would put his pen down and try to explain the idea in the simplest terms. That helped him figure out how he would describe the concept in print. Along those lines, the website Reddit.com has a section called ‘Explain Like I’m 5’ where anyone can make a post asking for a simple explanation of a complex topic.”

You don’t have to be an expert on the topic you just listened to on the podcast. Having some knowledge gaps can even benefit your learning practice.

Oakley again:

“You may think you really have to understand something in order to explain it. But observe what happens when you are talking to other people about what you are studying. You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding. This is why teachers often say that the first time they ever really understood the material was when they had to teach it.”

So the next time you listen to an episode you want to remember, explain it to your flatmate in a blog post or a short video clip. You will be surprised by how much this practice improves your learning.


My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.

Filed Under: 🧠 Learning Hacks Tagged With: Ideas, inspiration, learning, podcast

The Two Traits That Made Joe Rogan a Million Dollar Podcaster

March 12, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim


No, it’s not consistency and patience.

Photo by Luis Miguel P. Bonilla from Pexels

Joe Rogan is to podcasting what Stephen King is to writing.

Their careers weren’t set from the start. They took random jobs to pay the bills. Both honed their crafts in early adulthood and pumped out content like crazy. To date, Joe published 1615 episodes, Stephen 62 novels.

Stephen is among the richest authors; Joe is the highest-paid podcaster.

In the past year, I published 149 articles and 61 podcast episodes. I’m still a bloody beginner. But I want to learn from the best.

I spent some hours analyzing Joe’s success and was surprised. Many online creators preach consistency is key. But Joe’s story adds deeper layers to the common advice.


From Kickboxer to Kickass Podcaster

Joe’s journey wasn’t clear from the start. In 1988 he set out to become a stand-up comedian and kickboxer. He said he tried to pay the bills by delivering newspapers, driving limousines, and construction work.

Between 1995 and 2006, he appeared on TV shows, continued with stand-up comedy, and became an interviewer and commentator for the UFC. In 2005, he hired two full-time employees to film him on tour.

In short: Joe had a ton of different jobs before starting his podcast.

The Joe Rogan Experience launched on December 24, 2009. If you look at one of his early videos, you see he even was a bloody beginner. You find snowflakes on-screen and identify the background as one of his house’s spare rooms.

In a podcast with Jon Stewart, he says about his early days: “The early episodes sucked. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t think anyone was listening. It was just for fun.”

And while his Comedy career and TV shows contributed to his conversational qualities, his career path hasn’t always been clear.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

— Steve Job

Joe’s dots connected in the future. These days his podcast gets 200 million downloads a month. If we look at the pricing for podcast advertising, he charges something between $22 and $50 CPM. Joe makes somewhere between $53-$120 million a year solely based on podcast advertising.

His real income is likely higher as he generates revenue from his 8 million subscribers YouTube Channel. Plus, Rogan signed a hundred million dollar deal with Spotify. Joe is indeed the highest-paid podcaster.


What Makes His Show Successful?

To be successful in anything, you need to be persistent. That’s the prerequisite. If he had stopped a few years in, he would have never gotten where he is right now.

But I’m pretty sure there are a few hundred other podcasters who started in 2009 and continued for five or even ten years without ever seeing the success Joe is seeing.

Two traits made his show so successful — courage and curiosity.

Courage

In his 1,600 episodes and counting, his guests range from comedians, over fighters, and thinkers including Elon Musk, Tim Ferriss, Sam Harris, and Rhonda Patrick.

If his guests have one thing in common, it’s that Rogan doesn’t pick them by fame but by sympathy. Every conversation feels like a small journey as he really tries to understand his guests.

Often dialogues drift into surprising directions. For example, the conversation with Metallica singer James Hetfield was less about heavy metal and more about bees and alcoholism.

But Rogan’s also not afraid to ask hard questions and discuss controversial topics. If somebody delivers sound arguments, he likely changes a stance on topics he was very certain about.

A person who lived like Joe Rogan for six weeks summarized the charm of his mission perfectly: “Hear several facets of a narrative, entertain disagreeing viewpoints, and decide positions from a place of the reason all without losing one’s cool or resorting to petty insults.”

Curiosity

To entertain disagreeing viewpoints is a rare gift of our time and super needed. Joe is genuinely interested in the position of someone who thinks differently, as in his interview with Ben Shapiro.

The unscripted, interested, sometimes, hour-long conversations make his guests open up. He creates an atmosphere where you can disagree without discomfort. He detaches arguments from a personal level. Even in disputes, he aims to find common ground.

In a time where the media often takes aside, these open-minded moments are gold. Politically Rogan is probably one of few public figures whose attitudes are difficult to assign.

As this article analyzes, Rogan advocates introducing the unconditional basic income as suggested by Yang, the legalization of cannabis, and marriage for same-sex couples. He identified himself as a supporter of left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders. On the other hand, he complains about high taxes and is hostile to transgender activists.

I disagree with Jordan Peterson on most of his positions, but in his reasoning for Rogan’s success, he couldn’t have been clearer:

“You’re very very curious but also very very tough. It’s interesting watching you because if you don’t understand something you will go after the person […] you’re really good at pursuing things you don’t understand instead of assuming that you know what you’re talking.”


Joe is by all means not perfect, and there are viewpoints I disagree with. But his courage and curiosity help him produce episodes millions of people want to hear.


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Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: Entrepreneurship, podcast

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