I know a guy with eleven podcast episodes queued, forty-something newsletters sitting unread, and a browser with so many tabs open that his laptop fan runs like it’s training for something. He can talk for twenty minutes about geopolitics, macroeconomics, whatever the AI labs shipped that week. I have never once seen him change his mind mid-conversation.
That’s not really an insult. It’s an observation I keep having, across enough men, in enough contexts, that I’ve stopped assuming it’s a coincidence.
Ask him what he thought of something he listened to last week and he’ll give you a competent, confident summary — who said what, why the guest was wrong about one thing, what the smart take is. Ask him if it changed anything about how he sees the actual issue underneath, and the conversation gets shorter. Not because he’s being defensive. Because the question genuinely hasn’t occurred to him as something the podcast was supposed to do.
Consuming is not the same as updating
There’s a quiet assumption built into most information habits: that taking in more of it moves you closer to being right. More sources, more nuance, more perspectives you can cite at a dinner party. It feels like diligence.
But volume and direction are two different things. You can consume an enormous amount of information and end the week believing exactly what you believed at the start of it — sometimes more confidently, which is worse.
A Washington State University study on young adults found something specific enough that I can’t wave it away as vibes: men with a “news finds me” attitude — people who let information arrive through social feeds rather than seeking it out — were significantly more likely to believe misinformation about drug and alcohol safety. Women with the same passive habits didn’t show the same pattern. The researchers weren’t trying to make a point about men in general. They were trying to explain a gap in the data, and the gap happened to be gendered.
I don’t think this means men are less curious. If anything, the men I’m describing are almost aggressively curious, in the sense of wanting more input, more takes, more of the feed. What they’re not doing is treating any single piece of it as a claim that needs testing. It arrives, it gets filed under “things I know now,” and the queue moves on.
There’s a related finding in learning research that I think about a lot: passive exposure — rereading, relistening, letting information wash over you — reliably produces what’s sometimes called the illusion of competence. The material becomes familiar, familiarity gets mistaken for understanding, and the brain quietly stops doing the harder work of actually testing what it knows. Active engagement — being made to explain something, defend it, apply it somewhere it doesn’t want to go — is what actually recruits the parts of the brain associated with real comprehension. A podcast queue is, structurally, almost pure passive exposure. It was never going to update anyone by itself.
The smarter you are, the better you get at defending yourself
This is the part that should worry people more than it does: being informed doesn’t reliably protect you from this. In some cases it does the opposite.
Dan Kahan, at Yale, has spent years studying what he calls identity-protective cognition — the tendency to size up evidence not by whether it’s true, but by whether accepting it costs you standing with people whose approval you need. His most cited finding, from a 2012 study in Nature Climate Change, is the uncomfortable one: on politically charged science topics, higher science literacy and numeracy predicted more polarization, not less. The people best equipped to parse the data used that skill to defend what their group already believed, more effectively than less-informed people could.
Kahan’s point wasn’t that these people were bad at reasoning. It was that they were good at it, and reasoning is not the same tool as truth-seeking. You can be extremely competent at building a case for something and never once ask whether the something is correct.
I think this is what’s actually happening in the queue. All that consumption is training a skill — argument, recall, the ability to sound informed — without ever training the much less comfortable skill of noticing when you were wrong.
What the queue is actually for
I used to assume the unread newsletter pile was just a time-management failure. Now I think it’s doing something else: it’s a way of holding a relationship with being informed without the risk that comes from actually engaging with any one thing closely enough to be changed by it.
An unopened newsletter can’t contradict you. A queued podcast episode is pure potential — it’s the version of being well-read that exists before you’ve had to test any of it against your own opinions. There’s a kind of comfort in that, the same comfort as owning books you haven’t read yet: it lets you feel like the kind of person who engages with ideas, without the more exposed experience of actually letting an idea land somewhere it might do damage.
The tabs left open for weeks are, I’d guess, mostly never coming back. They’re not there to be read. They’re there to be a browser that looks like someone is in the middle of thinking hard about something.
There’s actually a word for the more sympathetic version of this, from Japanese: tsundoku, the pile of unread books someone keeps buying anyway. Some people who study reading habits argue the pile isn’t a failure at all — that an unread book is a small bet on the person you still intend to become, and that a stack of things you haven’t gotten to yet is closer to intellectual humility than to laziness. I don’t think that’s wrong, exactly. I just think it describes a different behavior than the one I’m talking about. Buying the book you might read is a bet on future curiosity. Queuing the fortieth newsletter you already know you won’t open is something closer to a costume.
None of this is really about men
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a tidy story about male intellectual vanity, and I don’t think that’s honest. The WSU researchers themselves flagged this as one study, one age group, one country, one behavior pattern — not a verdict on a gender. Plenty of men I know do the opposite: they read the thing, sit with the discomfort of it, and come back changed. Plenty of women perform the same unread-newsletter ritual I’m describing here.
What I keep noticing is less about who’s doing it and more about how easy it’s become to mistake the feeling of being informed for the much rarer experience of actually reconsidering something. The volume makes that mistake easier to make, not harder. When there’s always more in the queue, there’s always a reason to defer the harder question — did that last thing you read actually move you, or did it just confirm the version of you that opened the tab in the first place.
I don’t have a tidy fix for this, and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I’ve started asking myself, after finishing something I found interesting, a much smaller and more annoying question than “was that good.” Just: did I think anything different afterward, or did I just feel like I had.
Most days, honestly, the answer is that I felt like I had.
