This is a transcript from one of my interviews. Everything he said could be condensed down into two or three lines of writing — or 5 seconds of reading vs 60 seconds of audio.
Good writing is like dialogue, but has been filtered and compressed for you.
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Mark Twain
I think it’s virtually impossible to gain competency/mastery in a topic using podcasts, but they excel as a low investment discovery tool. Or less pretentiously, as a way to skim over many different topics — and dive into written content on what interests you.
Thinking About Something For a Really Long Time
I think books are a nice way to spend 6–10 hours of focused effort on a topic. The information is almost secondary.
I think if you spent 6–10 hours of focused effort Googling and reading articles on a topic, you could probably gain a similar understanding as reading a book.
But a book is a conveniently packaged version of that. Mostly, the knowledge gains (💪 📕 ) are coming from the focused effort and battling with the ideas presented, not particularly from the content itself.