Podcasts are awesome, but if you just listen to them and you don't do anything else, you're probably not learning as much as you could from them. In this video, I show you a simple technique to learn a lot more from the podcasts that you love. I think podcasts are a little bit more difficult to learn from than a book. One reason is that you can control the pace at which you read. Good readers do this naturally as they are reading so when things get easier to understand they'll probably speed up a little bit and when things get a little harder they'll slow down. But with a podcast you are less in control of the speed at which information is coming at you. Now, I guess you could set the podcast speed to go a little faster or a little slower, but that doesn't occur naturally as you are listening to the podcast. But another important drawback to using podcasts and audiobooks to help learn something is how we listen to them. Often people listen to podcasts when they're doing something else, right? They're driving. They're doing the dishes. They're folding laundry. They're at the gym. Because we are doing two things at once, it's easy for our mind to wander and to zone in and out of awareness of what the podcaster is saying. Sometimes, you might not even be aware that you missed 20 seconds or 30 seconds somewhere. So what's my approach to learning from them? Well, I want to show you with an example of me learning from a popular history podcast that you may have heard of. And if you've seen my video on how to learn from YouTube videos, some of this is going to sound kind of familiar. Right now, I'm going to listen to the episode Twilight of the Aesir by Dan Carlin on his Hardcore History Podcast. It's a four-hour episode on the Vikings and presumably the disappearance of the Vikings. And so I already know what the topic is about. Since I already know what the broad topic is before I listen to it at all, I take a few minutes to just write down what I know about the topic on a piece of paper. And you can use a blank text file or really any kind of medium you want to use where you just take a few minutes to write down - like what do I know about Vikings? Anything? The purpose of this is to activate my prior knowledge about the Viking era, so even if I don't know that much about it - which I don't - I'm at least putting myself in the right frame of mind to understand the new material and when I go to listen, I either just listen and don't do anything else at all, or I will try to do the least demanding task possible because I want to reduce those fade-in/fade-out moments as much as possible. I'm going to listen to it in roughly one hour chunks. So I'll listen to the first hour now and then I'll do a free recall exercise after that first hour. Okay, so now I'm back. I just listened to the first hour earlier today and now I'm gonna do a free recall exercise kind of like what we did in the beginning. So I'm just going to get out a blank sheet of paper I'm going to try to remember everything that I can. One of the advantages of doing free recall exercises like this happens before you even sit down to listen to the podcast. If you know you are going to be tested on something - which is what these pre-recall exercises are by the way, they are self tests - you listen differently. You pay more attention and you process the material more deeply. This is one of several kinds of testing effects because knowing there is a test in the future creates a learning benefit right now. When I'm doing this, I'm letting my mind wander a bit. It's perfectly okay to bring in other topics and to go on tangents and these things. If you can relate what you're learning about Vikings to other things, that's really great. Perhaps this goes without saying but I'm going to say it anyhow: as we are doing this - as we are doing these free recall exercises - we are trying to make sense of the material. It's not just a word vomiting session. It is a sense-making exercise. For instance, Dan Carlin, in the podcast, talks about various reasons that Viking attacks increased in the late 700s and early 800s but this happens over the course of, I don't know, maybe 45 minutes of discussion. What I've done here is to distill those reasons and organize them in a way that makes sense to me. After I do a free recall session I will have some things that maybe I am not that clear on or some words or names that I don't quite remember what they were. For instance, Dan Carlin references Jutland many times in the podcast and I just didn't know: is that all of Denmark is that a little tiny piece of it? I don't know let's look it up I didn't exactly know where the Saxons were living at this time or really where they originally came from. I didn't know that, so I looked it up. Once I'm satisfied that I have a pretty good understanding of what has gone on so far, then I can keep listening to the next hour or so and usually when I am engaged in this sense-making process I end up with questions - open questions that the podcast hasn't answered yet. Maybe the podcast is never going to answer. But a lot of times these are questions that make me want to learn more. Ao doing this free-recall exercise is about organizing and understanding what I heard, but it's also about binding what I heard - that one hour that I heard before - to what I am about to hear - the next hour or the next hours that I'm going to listen to. As you might guess we are going to do the same kind of thing after every hour and we're going to see how my understanding progresses. So now I'm done with the podcast I'm going to show you the results of my free recall exercise that I did at the end of each hour of listening. [Music] Doing what I just described alone can be quite helpful but if you really want to go the extra mile, you can bring all of this material into a cohesive picture or pictures that reflect your understanding. If you do this, start off by just relying on your own memory first before you go back and you use your free recall materials or other references to fill in the gaps. You can also schedule a free recall session a couple of months from now and that will be another way of testing and reinforcing what you've learned. And, if you want to get really crazy you could download another podcast talking about the same era but from a different perspective. So if you had another podcast talking about England or France during this time period, and so you had a perspective of the French during this time period, a perspective of the Vikings from this time period, a perspective of the English from this time period... Then you would really start to see some of the connections that maybe you wouldn't see just from listening to one perspective. So that's it for me, but I want to hear from you what are other ideas that you have for learning from podcasts? Write them down in the comments and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.