The kind of consuming he's talking about here, the continuous soaking up of information, news, current events, on subjects that interest you, is something I'm pretty familiar with personally, and I can tell you that it can be a cognitive drain that actually reduces your desire to produce. And news is addictive; it's easier than producing something new, and, at least to me, seems to hit the reward receptors in the brain pretty hard.

This is one of the reasons I try to route all the streams of news I keep up with through a single RSS reader; this helps enforce limits on how often I can go back for another hit.