My Fave New Podcasts of 2023
As someone who does a lot of my learning via podcasts, I’ve been putting up picks lists for 4 years straight (see main 2019 list, then my 2020 and 2021 and 2022 diffs), so it’s time to do year 5(!)
My hard AI Pivot
In 2023 I finally became a semi-successful podcast host, after attempts 1, 2, 3. I got confidence that I was not too old to pivot and pivoted into AI. We cracked the US top 10 charts and established what is being considered one of the ”gold standard” AI pods.
Someday I’ll have to write a separate blog about setting up the pod and what worked/didnt work. That doesn’t belong here. What does belong here though, is the extensive amount of industry research I do that no longer shows up in my mixtape notes, because of the volume and the increased workload that I had in 2023. But you can see alot of old and new podcasts here, mostly personally vetted and actively recommended by me, in this list on my AI notes repo:
this ended up being the best list — Andrew Chen
There are too many to list individually here, so consider this a transcluded list on to this year’s selections. I will also actively update (and delete) entries thru the year so if you are reading this after 2024 you will have to go back in the git history to see what the list was at end 2023/early 2024. Everything with a ⭐ is something I strongly recommend you listen to.
In general though, I will say that the AI podcasts tend to lag far behind YouTube and Twitter and Discord in terms of keeping up to date. I do what I can with Latent Space, but I’m also painfully aware of my gaps in coverage and understanding. Just be aware that podcasts are feel far behind in terms of the technical depth vs the recency tradeoff:
(there is a 3rd dimension here which indicates accessibility, which of course varies inversely with the 45 degree diagonal line on this chart)
Other non-AI pods
I just have 3 to recommend this year, but each are very high quality, I-listen-to-almost-all-episodes-including-the-backlog type recommendations. Ironically 2 are VC podcasts, and the last is a VC-backed startup pod.
- Kleiner Perkins’ Grit podcast with Joubin. Super high audio quality (I am jealous + need to learn how to make something like this) + Joubin’s rapport with his high level/profile guests (usually large SaaS co CEOs) is extremely unique/hard to get. I was turned on to it by their Brex pod, and have gone thru much of the backlog.
- Update: their editor is Eric Johnson: “The naturally deep voice & a good mic both help, but I also make a cocktail of amplitude, EQ, and compression settings for all my clients’ voices. I also prefer to edit the show with those filters already toggled on in the DAW so that I can fine-tune it as I work.”
- Gamecraft podcast from Benchmark capital. Limited run, but very well curated and storytold about the business history of computer gaming. Could basically be an audiobook, but its told by Mitch who lived through many of the things he is talking about.
- HN Recap pod by Wondercraft AI. This is a fully automated, AI generated pod - part of the AI Content Flippening - I ended up interviewing Youssef in London this year aout it, which you can hear here.
That is about it for this year - my interests narrowed alot (I no longer liten to most of the data engineering podcasts from last year except for maybe the Analytics Eng podcast. David Senra’s Founders and TechCrunch’s Found podcast and Digital Writing pod is still great, so I guess the Test of Time award goes to them.