Are Podcasts The Same As Books? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right.

00:00:01.000 | Let's see here.

00:00:02.000 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:00:03.000 | All right.

00:00:04.000 | Next question we got from Mika, and he asked, "Does listening to a podcast count as reading?"

00:00:12.000 | No, I don't count it the same.

00:00:16.000 | I think these are two different classes of intellectual substance that you're ingesting.

00:00:22.000 | Here's the quick way I discern between the two.

00:00:24.000 | So when you're reading a book, you're ingesting a fully formed, carefully thought through

00:00:32.000 | thought structure.

00:00:34.000 | And we're talking nonfiction here.

00:00:35.000 | But you have a writer who has really thought something through.

00:00:38.000 | It might be their lifelong expertise or something they researched deeply.

00:00:41.000 | They spent a long time trying to organize these thoughts into a structure that is internally

00:00:45.000 | coherent and makes sense and has been validated.

00:00:47.000 | So when you're reading a good nonfiction book, you can basically take this well-crafted

00:00:51.000 | thought structure and just graft it onto your cognitive framework.

00:00:54.000 | Oh, now I understand, you know, the influence of cryptocurrency on whatever.

00:01:01.000 | Yeah, currency markets.

00:01:03.000 | Plug that in.

00:01:04.000 | Podcast, it's more conversational.

00:01:06.000 | I think of podcast as a source of the type of material with which you could build one

00:01:12.000 | of these structured thoughts, right?

00:01:15.000 | Or I might learn a bunch of interesting stuff from a podcast, but there's still a lot of

00:01:18.000 | work to be done probably to take the various things I heard in this interview or got out

00:01:22.000 | of this conversation and mix it with things I've learned elsewhere and build it together

00:01:25.000 | into a coherent thought.

00:01:27.000 | To build it together into something I could write 10,000 words on or write a book about.

00:01:31.000 | So you're getting raw thought stuff on podcast than in books.

00:01:35.000 | That's why I think about it differently.

00:01:37.000 | It's also why it's less cognitively demanding to listen to a podcast.

00:01:40.000 | You can zone in and out, be in conversational mode.

00:01:44.000 | And when you hear something interesting, then pay attention and sort of collect that

00:01:47.000 | for use later.

00:01:48.000 | So I see it as being different things.

00:01:50.000 | The exception, of course, is this podcast.

00:01:53.000 | Nothing about this is raw.

00:01:55.000 | This is all finely honed intellectual material.

00:01:58.000 | My proposal, and I think this is reasonable, is that listening to this podcast should legally

00:02:04.000 | be equivalent to being awarded a doctorate from an accredited university.

00:02:10.000 | And that's just one man's opinion.

00:02:13.000 | What's your view on podcasts versus music?

00:02:17.000 | Different things.

00:02:18.000 | Music's an aesthetic experience.

00:02:21.000 | Especially if you have music appreciation, either it's an appreciation experience,

00:02:26.000 | like I just really enjoy this musician, or it's kind of like a neurotropic experience.

00:02:31.000 | I'm working out and I want to whatever, just get fired up.

00:02:34.000 | Or it's just want to get lost or listen to something funny, like mood alteration.

00:02:38.000 | So it's like an aesthetic experience, mood alteration.

00:02:41.000 | I think it's different than information ingestion.

00:02:44.000 | So I count them differently.

00:02:46.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

Are Podcasts The Same As Books? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

Chapters