In 2023, we had a new record of 4 million combined podcast downloads and YouTube views. That’s up from 3.3 million a year earlier; thank you for your support listening, rating, sharing, liking, commenting on episodes and so on!
Speaking of 2023, the time has come for our annual “best-of” episode, where I provide you with a data-backed set of outstanding episodes from the prior year that you might want to go back and check out if you’re hankering for more content. This episode also ensures that you didn’t miss any of the most popular episodes from last year that sound interesting to you.
One thing you might be wondering is why I’m airing a best-of-2023 episode in March instead of in, say, January. Well, there are two factors. First, internally at the SuperDataScience Podcast we use the 30-day mark after an episode’s release as our KPI of how an episode’s been received by you, our audience. For our purposes today, using the 30-day snapshot also ensures that episodes released at the beginning of last year don’t have an unfair advantage over episodes released at the end of the year, which haven’t had as much time live to garner listens. So if it’s just a 30-day data lag, why wasn’t this episode out in February? Well, I typically record episodes several weeks ahead of their release date to give our production team plenty of time to clean them up real nice for you and to leave a few episodes in the pipeline in case I get sick or something. Explanations out of the way, let’s dig into — quantitatively-speaking — the ten top-performing episodes of 2023.
The tenth-most popular episode was a “Machine Learning 101” episode led by, not one, but two guests: Kirill Eremenko (the founder and one-time host of this very podcast) and Hadelin de Ponteves (the super-popular data science instructor).
The ninth-most popular episode starred the renowned data engineering instructor Andreas Kretz detailing (of course!) how best to learn the data engineering skill set.
In eighth place comes the Hugging Face ML engineer Dr. Lewis Tunstall with an introduction to NLP with Transformers, based on his eponymous, bestselling O’Reilly book.
In seventh place is an episode featuring Prof. Tom Davenport, who's the author of more than 20 bestselling books in the data space and who coined the concept of data science being the sexiest job of the 21st century. In his episode, he detailed how A.I. will augment rather than replace human workers and he filled us in on whether he thinks data science is still sexy.
In sixth is another professor and many-time bestselling author; this time, it’s Allen Downey. My conversation with Prof. Downey is one of my favorites of all-time; it’s a mind-blowing one featuring topics from his latest book, Probably Overthinking It, in which he expounds upon many startling statistical paradoxes that have profound implications for how we view the world. I highly recommend checking that episode out.
Moving on, in fifth place is Dr. Ben Goertzel, one of the world’s best-known futurists. His episode is another mind-bending one, in which he provides his roadmap for making AGI a reality within a mere seven years.
In fourth is the extremely popular Chip Huyen, on designing ML systems — the topic of the Stanford course she developed and her subsequent bestselling O’Reilly book.
Our bronze medallist is the angel investor and data science consultant Josh Wills on how to blend social impact with financial success in your data science career.
Our silver medallist is Vincent Warmerdam on open-source tools for NLP.
And… drum roll please! Our gold medalist, with over 19,000 listens within 30 days of publication — a record not only for 2023, but an all-time record for our show — is the very first episode of 2023, which featured Sadie St. Lawrence’s predictions of 2023’s data science trends, all of which ended up being spot on, by the way.
All right, so there you go. Ten incredible episodes to consider checking out from last year if you’re hankering for some more episodes to dig into.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.