The AI Podcast
Now on Apple and Spotify - for every Substack, there is a 5 minute podcast summary
So far, for every post, we have used AI to generate a short ~five-minute podcast.
We publish the podcast at about the same time a post goes live, but to avoid overloading your inboxes we don’t share it via email, and we haven’t yet drawn any attention to it.
We’ve recently managed to get both the Apple Podcast and Spotify feeds working, so you can now subscribe to them for easy listening on the daily commute, during exercise, while cooking, whenever you usually do your podcast listening.
What to expect
The podcasts are two-way dialogues generated by Google’s NotebookLM. They are never a substitute for the written post, but they can be quicker and easier to listen to for many people, and they very often provide a surprisingly excellent summary of the ideas.
Sometimes they turn around and offer genuine insights that we agree with, and go beyond what we wrote.
Often they can’t access the images or LaTeX, and so if you hear them trying to read mathematical expressions out loud, that probably won’t sound right.
Rarely, they make a flat out error, and say something we wouldn’t agree with. But from a few dozen posts to date I think that’s happened once.
Sharing with others
Because they’re so easy to listen to, and at 1.5x or 2x speed take even less time, they can be a good first step to share with friends and colleagues who aren’t following the Substack, but whom you’d like to know more about some of the ideas in here. If someone already has a podcast listening habit, then adding a few minutes to the queue is little hassle, whereas finding the time to sit and given full attention to reading even a short post is sometimes harder that it sounds.
What they add
We think they add something to the written experience, and so will continue to produce them. They are a quick summary of the content, a quick primer or reminder even if you still read the written post, and as noted above, occasionally the AI hosts come up with genuinely interesting ways of interpreting the ideas.
Sign up to the podcast feeds below to make them a part of your regular listening.