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Ask HN: How do you retain what you learn from podcasts?

5 points by LifeOfKP ↗ HN
I listen to a lot of podcasts and realised I was retaining almost nothing. Finished episodes buzzing with ideas and forgot everything within 48 hours. Curious what others do. Do you take notes while listening? Re-listen to episodes? Use any tools? Or just accept the loss?

7 comments

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chistev
It's the same as reading books. You won't remember everything, but you'll definitely remember parts of it.

If you read more books on the same topic, you still won't remember everything from each individual book, but you'll remember parts of each.

Those bits add up quick, and you'll eventually find that you now know more than you knew before.

If you're in a conversation on something related to what you know you've read before, or you're writing about something related, but you vaguely remember the details you wish to speak about, you can revisit that book and skim it until you find what you were looking for. Now, that part you just found would stick with you for much longer.

All I wrote is about reading books, but it also applies to podcasts.

I too love listening to podcasts and reading books.

I've had threads asking people for their favorite podcasts -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43220656

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44308854

jajajajajaja
thats the thing. without active processing you will forget it. make notes actively and if you want to keep it long term create flash cards with anki. but podcast imo are more infotainment.
BlendedPanda
Aggregate knowledge is the key. It is the primary way i have learned topics for years. Depending on how good the podcast is at analogy and such, made nearly any topic ingestible. And it will sit in the back of my head until some factoid comes up weeks or months later that is relevant.

And when notebooklm came out with their pod cast feature I was in heaven.

trio8453
> Finished episodes buzzing with ideas and forgot everything within 48 hours.

Write them down?

For me, podcasts are for entertainment and exposure to ideas, not for learning that needs to retained. Otherwise it becomes yet another thing that you ruin the enjoyment of by trying to squeeze out the max value from it.

But if you are getting interesting ideas, writing them down to process later seems like a very obvious thing to do.

JohnFen
I don't. Listening to people talk is the worst way for me to learn anything (reading and doing are the best), and podcasts are entirely worthless to me on that count. So I stopped bothering with them.
brudgers
Finished episodes buzzing with ideas

Then those ideas are very low value.

Great ideas are the ones that make you stop listening/reading and compel action.

Doing is much much more valuable than knowing once there stops being a quiz next week.

Good luck.