Initial feedback on the (first?) Episode with Chana:
I liked the idea and know Chana has interesting things to say so decided to listen.
Was fun and kind of interesting but felt like I wasn’t sure what I was getting out of it.
I felt like wasn’t optimising for either ‘usefulness’ or ‘fun/relaxation’. E.g. I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything particularly surprising or useful by half way through the episode, and I felt like I was having less fun than I would by watching Netflix or chatting to my partner… So I stopped and went and did those things instead.
To be fair, this is a reason I don’t listen to podcasts all that much in general, but since this moved further away from obvious ‘usefulness’ than a usual 80k podcast, it made it seem less worthwhile.
Low confidence initial Impression though and I’ll probably listen to others!
Tentative recommendation: try to make the episodes more pointedly about useful, impact-relevant topics. You can preserve the chatty vibe and relatively low-effort prep but still cover important topics.
I just listened to most of the Dwarkesh episode and it seemed notably more useful to me! (And similarly fun/interesting?) I think just because of the topics you broached. E.g. Chana has useful takes on loads of impact-relevant topics but you were talking about quizzes and favourite beans. Whereas with Dwarkesh you were chatting about counterfactuals and lessons from history and career exploration and maximising impact through communications.
Initial feedback on the (first?) Episode with Chana: I liked the idea and know Chana has interesting things to say so decided to listen.
Was fun and kind of interesting but felt like I wasn’t sure what I was getting out of it.
I felt like wasn’t optimising for either ‘usefulness’ or ‘fun/relaxation’. E.g. I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything particularly surprising or useful by half way through the episode, and I felt like I was having less fun than I would by watching Netflix or chatting to my partner… So I stopped and went and did those things instead.
To be fair, this is a reason I don’t listen to podcasts all that much in general, but since this moved further away from obvious ‘usefulness’ than a usual 80k podcast, it made it seem less worthwhile.
Low confidence initial Impression though and I’ll probably listen to others!
Tentative recommendation: try to make the episodes more pointedly about useful, impact-relevant topics. You can preserve the chatty vibe and relatively low-effort prep but still cover important topics.
I just listened to most of the Dwarkesh episode and it seemed notably more useful to me! (And similarly fun/interesting?) I think just because of the topics you broached. E.g. Chana has useful takes on loads of impact-relevant topics but you were talking about quizzes and favourite beans. Whereas with Dwarkesh you were chatting about counterfactuals and lessons from history and career exploration and maximising impact through communications.