How long should a podcast be?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing how long a podcast should be. So starting with you Peter, I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, can you tell me how

Speaker B: 00:00:34

long a podcast should be? Well making reference to the only podcast I've ever been involved in which is this one, we sort of hit upon a length of about 15 to 20 minutes because we sort of felt that would be a sensible amount of time to cover an interesting thing and meander around it and cover it with a decent interesting amount of depth without being so long that we lose people and turn people off and I think we hit upon that from a sort of almost empirical empirical data-based approach where discussions and conversations we've had throughout our lives the best ones tend to you tend to have a beginning and you get some sort of resolution and they're probably not much more than half an hour otherwise you tend to get lost and try to cover too much so I think that's sort of how we approached it and how we hit upon sort of 20 minutes but it also might be influenced by conventions so radio programs, podcasts, TV programs are often half an hour in length and then if you discount any commercial breaks or the introduction and outro you tend to get about 25 minutes worth of air time so there might just be it might be convention driven as much as anything else okay well I'd be

Speaker A: 00:02:00

interested to know to hear about we've already talked about this but off air but any feedback that you've had from our audience but also I actually think the reasons why our podcast started out with being a target around 15 minutes they're now in the 20 minute area and the reason why is I can't remember who I know the from my side I said look I think for a new podcast it should be 15 minutes this is the advice I've had from someone because otherwise you're asking your audience to invest too much in you and you might lose them okay but actually I think the topics that we discuss are not necessarily suited to 15 minutes or 20 minutes I think the topics that we discuss are actually probably more suited to 45 minutes something like you know in that kind of area so Nick what what have people said to you about our podcast about yeah the the feedback the

Speaker C: 00:02:54

only feedback I've had about length has been that they should be long cast by the way is that they should be longer and no just podcasts and the but I think I think we you know here you come up against you know there's there's supply effects there's demand effects and you know there's questions about what you're trying to achieve but I think this comes down to this sort of general just to widen widen the question a bit is not so much how long is a podcast but how how big is an idea I mean how how much do you need how much time do you need to to talk about something and I think here you you see in almost every form of expression whether it's technical writing whether it's you know the structure of a film it is a scalability so that things will scale up or down so that if you look at a book it will be split into chapters and the chapters are split into paragraphs and the paragraphs are split into sentences and and with some differences but in general those things tend to have the same structure you know that there is a theme which in the case of a chapter will be a sort of bigger overarching theme and then within within each paragraph there'll be sort of a point and and it just feels right and I think with this podcast we could you know we could go into a lot more detail or we could cover things in about a minute you know in the same way they do in a news story on on the news we we you know we've chosen this as being about right it's in the goldilocks zone of being not too much detail gives us a chance to cover some bigger themes and a bit of detail but doesn't require I mean I think partly we probably haven't got time to do the research that would be necessary to to do a very long detailed podcast so there's you know there's it's it's a choice it's not it's not that there is it's the ideal length but it but it's it's the ideal length for what we're trying to achieve

Speaker A: 00:04:51

and we could make it longer we could make it shorter so in theory something you you got onto there as you say we're widening it really because what what we really want to ask you here is how big's an idea okay and you started saying that well actually when we look into whether it be books or tv programs whatever they things tend to follow a certain pattern but this shouldn't really be of a surprise to us it reminds me of this of the of a quote about uh god I think which is if you want to know the nature of uh if you want to know the mind of god look at the universe I think it's something like that if you want to know the mind of man um look at look at religion okay um which well it's the same thing there it's not surprising that all these outputs from human beings uh human beings like things in a certain way we tend to sort of organize things in a certain way react to things in a certain way so yeah but I suppose the question

Speaker C: 00:05:45

is what what is why why have we zeroed in on about this amount of time you know it sort of seems that you look at anything from the lessons you go to school to tv programs uh you know to this podcast they're about somewhere between sort of 10 minutes and an hour you know they're sort of in they're in that order of magnitude they're not one second long and they're never they're never sort of you know four days long it's so it's we're dealing with that sort of chunk which seems about right and the and and so the question is okay first of all there are obvious technological constraints so there's any so you know a book can only be a certain size before it falls apart under its own weight um you know volumes as you traditionally things like um a film was limited by the amount of physical amount of film you know you could kind of carry around the stick in a projector and um and uh the length of um records was determined by the physical size of a of a single you know these sorts of technological constraints but you know those technologies have been invented by us for a reason and it's that those though you know that is in some sense about right and so the question is is it that there are cognitive constraints are we is it actually that there is a certain amount we can kind of understand at once and if we try to go into more detail if you try and have more storylines uh you know if you try to make the story more complex or if you try to make the argument too complex it's just that we can't follow it okay so you've just asked a

Speaker A: 00:07:12

question you said the question is are there cognitive constraints um peter answer the question

Speaker B: 00:07:18

i don't know i i think there might well be but i think the the reason that that radio shows being half an hour books being of around 20 to 40 000 words um scientific articles being a few hundred words i think they are more driven by convention rather than any cognitive limiting factor i think they that that um people people want people who read we read novels regularly they want a novel to be of a similar size the people who manifest the print the publishers who print them on novels want to be of a sort of similar size because that's what they're used to that's what they're

Speaker C: 00:07:57

set up to produce um but hang on i mean are you saying that there might be cultures out there somewhere where their works of fiction are sort of four seconds long or or five weeks long i think they're right i mean i don't think they're all quite implausible there are forms of fiction that

Speaker B: 00:08:13

do have that they just happen to be less popular for one reason or another um but but but i think the the the the the the digital world um removes many of these artificial constraints so uh we can write blog posts now that could be any length um so we we're not constrained by that anymore so

Speaker A: 00:08:32

you think it's just convention i think it's mainly convention mainly convention convent yeah i think it's mainly convention but i disagree but i mean hold on i'll talk about why i disagree in a second but actually reminds me of i don't know if any of you either of you are kindle users um i'm not kindle user but i have read ebooks on an ipad and actually i remember reading a novel actually i think it was actually i think it was uh alex ferguson's uh autobiography and one of the things that frustrated me about it i found quite unnatural is i didn't know i wasn't really sure when it was going to finish um and i sort of did because you can look in the chapter you can see where you are and so you see okay there's 10 chapters but i what i found slightly uh disquieting is that i didn't have my little fold in the book and i well actually i didn't have the book itself that immediately told me how long that book is right um that's no that's not just you as well

Speaker C: 00:09:20

that's well been something that actually people have um who've studied kindle use have discovered that actually people have less what their recall for what they've read is is lower and partly that seems to be because and i know this is true for me if i'm asked to find something in a book i kind of know roughly where it was i know where it was and i remember that in physical terms whereabouts you can also remember which yeah sorry that's no that's but that that is a that's a robust finding this is something to do with the physicality um which which affects the way we actually

Speaker A: 00:09:51

receive the information but i mean so we went on a slightly sidetracked there so like i was taking issue what you said peter about you think it's mainly to do with convention i there's something about me i just think there's something innate that um you know if i let's say i want to let's say a short story for example now let me put it in a different way let's say i'm telling my children a story at night which i sometimes do and i i make up a story for them um i have an idea of in my head how long i think that should be which is about five maybe ten minutes and they probably have that idea now but you could say because of convention um but why would i want it to be five seconds why would i want it to be i don't i don't feel there's any conventions that

Speaker B: 00:10:35

constraining me there well well maybe maybe there are but you just don't spot them i think maybe if you had set out so all right all bedtime stories are going to be at least 20 minutes and you could make that work because you had time then then that would be the convention and you could fill that time you just have a more detailed story with with more adventures in it no because i wouldn't

Speaker A: 00:10:56

want a 20 minute story because i'm knackered the kids uh want to go to bed it's i think it fits

Speaker C: 00:11:01

nicely with human behavior yeah i think we i do i i'm with you fraser i don't i'm there's something beneath this it isn't i can't i can't see how it could be just convention i mean there are obvious cognitive limitations to what we can take in if you look at um if you look at the very sort of smallest unit i suppose of expression which of written expression which would be a sentence our our verbs go up to sort of di-transitive more or less so you can have a sentence like um theresa may made boris johnson the foreign secretary and uh verbs we don't have verbs that that are more complex there's no reason we shouldn't we could have verbs with you know 25 um subjects and objects and but we don't there is a sort of limit to how much we can hold in our short-term memory to receive a thought and um you know there's there really isn't there isn't any logical reason we can't uh take in bigger ones it's just it's just a you know a limitation with the the amount of the with our software the way that our kind of language software works um and it's actually there is sort of interest there is an interesting category of sentences called garden path sentences where our brains have to work you can feel them working because they don't the sentences sort of don't work uh in the way that they look like they're going to so one example is um the old man the boat and now yeah you hear that and you're thinking of an old man and then you realize what it means is the old man the boat so it's the the old people are the ones manning the boat um the the the man who whistles tunes pianos is another one uh and uh fat people eat accumulates weird sentence right and then you realize oh it's the fact that people eat accumulates you know on their bodies or whatever okay these you can so this is your cognitive software working to try and resolve what a sentence means which just pinpoints the fact that there are these limitations there are limitations to what we can take in you can you know very complex sentences would just be impossible for us to pass now scale that up into paragraphs scale it up into chapters you know there's only so much we can we can hold in our

Speaker A: 00:13:09

heads because my feeling is that to talk about this really in depth we need an evolutionary biologist here or something like that or an evolutionary psychologist if such a thing exists um that that's like i say that's that's how i see this um peter um i think well

Speaker B: 00:13:28

just picking up something that nick mentioned was the sentence being a sort of smallest atom of of of an idea or a concept so it's it's that that structure is used in um semantic computing to to record the meaning and the relationship between things in in in in in software uh and they so they're often referred to as triples uh and that's that can that is comprised of a subject a predicate and an object so the simplest possible sentence linking two concepts with something that tells you what that relationship is so an example would be a cat is a mammal where the mammal and the cat are two the object and subject and the the is a is the relationship that tells you that one is a is is a subset of the other um and that's that that is i think about the smallest you can possibly make a concept that that is the concept in itself that a cat is a mammal uh now you're referring to two other concepts which may need if you're if you're explaining to a complete naive uh audience what a cat is what a what a mammal is and what is a actually means but that sort of um that relies on a lot of on knowledge that isn't there in that concept so i think the the the smallest atom of an idea is is a really simple relationship like

Speaker C: 00:14:55

that i think the what a sentence does um which words by themselves don't do is it commits you to something so a sentence is a sort of commitment that something's the case um you know if i just say cat it doesn't you know it sort of refers to cats but it doesn't say anything about them um you know i in order to to fix some state of the world which i'm saying is the case uh a sentence is is you know is kind of saying well the cat is that cat is green or the cat is on the mat or whatever is is a commitment um so that is where you get okay the world is this way you know that's true in fiction as well as in factual statements um so that's that's why you know since and maybe sentences do behave differently uh obviously i think that that why we're talking about that as a sort of the smallest unit is they behave differently to you know when you're linking paragraphs together uh for example there's no such thing as an ungrammatical sequence of paragraphs um there there are sequences of paragraphs which perhaps are non-sequiturs but we wouldn't necessarily call them ungrammatical i mean i think this ties into

Speaker A: 00:15:59

discussions we've had about artificial intelligence and difficulties of replicating well no that it can only replicate human output it can't actually create something let's say or i know we've had even more involved discussions about whether it can create or not but it's this question of um you know uh neanderthals versus homo sapiens the one of the issues i think is uh language and one of the things that makes humans special is is is language and communication because it is it's actually you know so much more fundamental than than we realize and it's it's the result of such a complex um stuff going on underneath the hood kind of thing um what's my point my point is the um what what's my point nick well i'm i'm wondering you've just made

Speaker C: 00:16:49

me think about whether or not the constraint is language or whether the constraint is the concepts that we can hold that with our language reflects the the complexity of the concepts that we can have um or or whether in some way you know we we can have very complex concepts but they're they're hard to express in language i sort of feel i intuitively obviously not being a linguist that we can probably hold more complex concepts than we're able to express uh simply but um but no it's making me think about the um the sort of things like the three the three act structure in which recurs everywhere in fiction um you know and it occurs in all so it occurs over the course of um it's like something like this the star wars the original star wars trilogy the the three act structure can be seen at the level of the trilogy as being a story about luke skywalker um but at the level of any individual film it then becomes a separate story uh but it's still there the three act structure you know so the the yeah the first one um is uh you know is also a story about luke skywalker but it's him attempting to achieve something slightly different and um and then in a particular scene you would see that crop up and it even intriguingly it crops up in music as well that people actually like to have a three act structure in music where you introduce a theme you play with it you do you go somewhere different and then you come back at the end and and um i wonder if this is some sort of universal sense of you know what something ought to be like well

Speaker A: 00:18:19

that's the question whether it's an objective uh universal thing that's just part of the laws of the universe and it's it's it there's something naturally harmonic about it harmonious about it um or and or whether it's sort of human perceptions of that because there's actually you're probably familiar with um the rule of thirds okay in in in a visual form yeah are you you're familiar with this uh i probably when you explain what it is okay so the rule of thirds is that and it's something i use you know all the time in my work which for photography and film is that um you place your subject or it's something quite pleasing and natural if you place your subject on on a third so if you've got your oblong screen um and you divide that um uh you put two lines vertically two lines horizontally um and that divides it up into your six box in one two three four six boxes oh sorry nine boxes um and you can place your subject so if i was interviewing you and framing you i would place you over on the right or over on the left um and you can break these rules but it's again it's this third so something seems to be innate about it uh yeah i think and i wonder

Speaker C: 00:19:30

if um i mean we did we touched on that before i think when we were talking about seasons you know the the idea of the the right number of things to split something into um and in the case of i mean in the case of the um uh thing that things like the uh the three act structure i wouldn't be surprised now i've got no idea if this is true but i wouldn't be surprised that um if you look at people's neural activity while they're listening to someone tell them something i would guess that there's that a lack of resolution you know um a man walks into the bar uh you know the bar and says um you what would you like to drink uh then stopping there is probably probably generates a load of frustrated activity um in our brains frustrated is a good word because something i

Speaker A: 00:20:18

like that we get in films and in books is there's a climax okay there's a natural climax and i think that's that of course there is because it reflects the climax that we all hopefully have regularly in our own lives okay i think it's an it's a kind of natural orgasm okay which is that is that if the film let's say um let's say okay to use your star wars analogy the in the third in the return of the jedi is uh is luke goes and kills darth vader his father and then the film stops okay no you need that little bit afterwards you know you have that crescendo moment and then you need the little bit afterwards the sort of the kind of after you're saying you're saying every it's all about sex it's a kind of freudian i sort of am yeah because i just yeah and if you think how fundamental sex and reproduction is and um to continuing our genes and so on then yeah that's exactly what i'm saying i think best we can label this a hypothesis i don't we can say it's confirmed

Speaker C: 00:21:14

i but i i think i think there must there is some i i i don't know i would tend probably to look at something more like the um uh this being more of an economic thing about a competition for resources and uh that that actually um you know we have objectives all the time that we're attempting to achieve and you know we we sort of get our objectives we we find out how best to achieve them and then we achieve them you know that is uh something we all ought to be doing all the time okay and and and i kind of think that that is probably the origin of something like the three

Speaker A: 00:21:46

act structure okay so hopefully you're going to bring this we need to wrap up hopefully you're going to bring us right back around to where we need to be peter i think it's probably

Speaker B: 00:21:53

more innate ie a function of our brains and how they're made rather than naturally a thing to do with how the universe is set up because it's it's you can't you can't remove the human from this process of interpreting things so i think um that that's that's to answer the part of your question earlier i think that's okay it's really to do with our brains um but i think the the the desire for some closure and rounding things off yeah it might relate to the way that we learn things so we we want we we are scared frightened hungry creatures in in this big scary world and we we struggle all the time to try to make sense of the place and to develop um things that help that develop sort of heuristics for helping us predict what might happen next and so if you have if you have a situation where you're potentially for learning something so start the introduction to the story like man walks into a bar okay this is about a bar and a man i might learn something from this he asks the barman asks him what he wants to drink but then you will not give a resolution that sort of opportunity for learning is kind of snatched away from you and then then you have to either fill it in yourself from your knowledge um or um or seek other information so you kind of feel like you're losing out on something i mean i like that as an alternative

Speaker A: 00:23:18

explanation that is because we're learning creatures we want yeah and yeah i like that and we seek resolution and what i like even more is i persuaded you to my point of view which is all this stuff is innate rather than convention so thank you i think what i was saying is that

Speaker B: 00:23:32

a large part of the stuff that we read um is largely driven by convention no no no this is supply and demand is swayed by what we know no no no interestingly though well quick interesting but quick gone i just sort of if if you say if you draw an analogy between a wikipedia article and the concepts and they they have quite high editorial sort of rules and things so yeah um an article should pretty much explain everything you need about the concept there's a very interesting sort of there's a quite a tight distribution of the number of words and the uh the number of words of wikipedia articles is on average about 300 and that has not changed very much throughout the entire life of wikipedia whereas other things are important wikipedia have like the revisions per article and uh the number of overall articles so i mean maybe wikipedia is showing us in english uh that a concept should be around 300 words to adequately explain it for

Speaker A: 00:24:34

for a novice reader okay so we have answered the question in a in rather fittingly in in this sense of concluding something and rounding something out we have had our we've had our sort of moment of crescendo and climax and we've we've come to a conclusion which the answer is how big's an idea the answer is 300 words so thank you peter coghill um time for a cigarette time yeah and uh and on that note um i'm going to go off and look up what ditransitive means in a dictionary um and yeah we'll wrap up there uh thank you chaps you've been listening to the cognitive engineering podcast i'm fraser mcgrew um and with nick hare and peter coghill um i do

Speaker C: 00:25:15

interestingly i am going to look up what ditransitive means in a dictionary is it is itself using a ditransitive verb so you know i'm i'm ecstatic that you told me that thank you that's

Speaker A: 00:25:26

really yeah wonderful thank you for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast until next time goodbye