How I learn from podcasts

Following up from my last week's post about how I learn from books, here is my system to help me retain information I listen about in podcasts.

In the previous blog post I presented my system for learning from books. In this one, I’ll follow up by discussing how I learn from podcasts.

I have mixed feelings about podcasts. On one hand, they are a great way to multi-task by listening while doing chores, exercising or performing any other activity where my hands are busy and reading is not possible. On the other hand, I quickly lose focus, which means I have to keep rewinding to re-listen to what I missed. I also don’t remember much from podcasts - perhaps I’m more of a visual learner.

Casual vs systemic learning for podcasts

Sometimes I listen to podcasts without the intention to systematically learn from them - I listen more for enjoyment and to hear any interesting facts that may stick. I don’t have a process for this type of listening - I just casually listen.

Other times, I follow a systematic learning process, which I usually take when I listen to podcast series. For example, I am currently listening to The History in the Bible by Garry Stevens, which details all the history in the Bible, starting from the first book. Each episode is a continuation of the previous one, and in ~200 episodes, the podcast covers the entire topic. This is of course a huge time investment, but not in effort - more in duration. Because of this, I usually only do this with podcasts that are already finished or I’m very confident will finish - I’ve seen many podcasts that, albeit great, have been abandoned by their authors.

You might wonder why don’t I just read a book about the topic rather than investing so much time into a podcast. The answer is precisely what I mentioned at the beginning - podcasts allow me to learn while being occupied with something else. This also means I can simultaneously learn from two sources. For example, right now I’m reading about Ancient Egypt and listening about History in the Bible.

Step 1: listen

The first step is of course to give the podcast episode a listen. My aim is to actively listen to the entire episode and understand ~80% of the contents. By understand I don’t mean remember, just simply understanding while listening to the content. It is totally normal (and expected) that I will forget the information after listening.

During the listen, I frequently lose focus and need to rewind, often by a full minute. This too is normal and expected. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the double-listen method, where I simply listen to the episode twice, with the hope that I’ll be able to pick up the content that I didn’t hear in the first listen. This is conceptually similar to my double-read method in How I learn from books.

Step 2: transcribe and summarize

I usually dedicate specific time in my week where I process the episodes I’ve listened to. For each episode, I first download the mp3 sound file (usually available on the podcast’s official website) and transcribe it using this Python script (alternatively, if you’re less technical, there are online services for transcription, but as far as I’m aware, they are not free or very limited).

I then create a note for the episode (I use Notion, so each note/episode is a Notion page), attaching the transcript to it. Finally, I feed the transcript into ChatGPT (importantly, using the file upload feature rather than copy-pasting into the prompt, as that doesn’t work) and ask it to summarize it. I use a different prompt based on the podcast. Here is the Bible podcast prompt:

I’m learning about the history in the Bible, because I am curious about different cultures, stories in the bible and how they appear and relate to general history. I am listening to a podcast “The history in the bible”. I am attaching the transcript of the episode. Can you please summarise this text into something I’ll be able to read to refresh my memory as I work through this podcast. Keep the writing style in a narrative rather than bullet points. Include a quick reference at the start which can be made out of bullet points. Segment different topics into different chapters. Reply only with the summary. Write summary factually rather than by mentioning the podcast author’s name (ie. “Two translations of the bible will be used” rather than “Stevens [the podcast author] uses two translations of the Bible”). Also note that I never read the Bible and don’t know a lot about it (but I am reading it now), so include any explanations of events or people in the Bible that may sound like common knowledge that I might not know of.

I paste the end result into Notion, and read it through, attaching any pictures if needed. Here is an example of how it would look like: The stone age (this is from the History of Ancient Greece podcast by Ryan Stitt).

Why AI?

In How I learn from books, I mentioned that I like making initial notes by hand rather than using AI, using AI only to refine them. I listed two reasons: taking notes manually is fun, and AI summary doesn’t contain all the things I find important. So why don’t I follow the same guidance with podcasts?

The reason is quite simple - the topics I listen to, rather than read about, are topics I am interested in, but not at the same level as when reading. Therefore, I am fine with AI writing my notes. However, if I am very interested in the topic, I might as well follow the same approach as with book learning - write my own notes from the transcript, then use AI to refine them.

Step 3: periodic revision

Just like with books, during my weekly planning, I occasionally schedule one podcast for revision. This means I re-read through all notes, and potentially do more research to expand them.

This step is the key to long-term retaining and memorizing information, as well as linking information to other topics I learn.

Wrapping up

That’s it! This simple system has proven very effective at learning from podcasts, which have always been a bit elusive to me. I listen to the podcast to understand the material, then use the transcript and the power of AI to make notes which I periodically review.