Why would you assume someone is trying to learn guitar or programming solely from podcasts?
And yes, I have some idea about how much I retained from podcasts I listened to. Seriously, remembering facts is also form of knowing, it beats up not remembering facts. It is not "just", many times it is the thing to go after when learning.
Re:Podcasts are my new Wikipedia
by banmeagaindan2 on Saturday May 16, 2020 @12:55PM
(#23205089)
I agree with you - I think most of us are disdainful of watching television for long periods of time but there is value in getting the cultural context by audio. A lot of reading is not high quality - the interview Russ Roberts has with Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning discusses the topic.
I don't think that's obvious at all. Learning is an active process. People listening to podcasts while doing work aren't going to actually develop some skill, they're just passively listening to some facts being thrown at them, much of it they probably won't even retain, let alone productively integrate.
You can listen to thousands of hours of guitar playing podcasts, it won't really help you play the guitar. Or you could listen to programming podcasts, but without ever writing a line of code you'd not be a any good as a programmer.