#328: Sorry – We Did It Again

There’s no shortage of podcasts waiting for you and when you’re ready to add that next great podcast to your listening queue, we’ve got your back. Here is a list of 134 podcasts we discovered and loved in 2023.

Look, we’ll get ahead of it.

We’re sorry.

We’re sorry to bring your attention back to the world’s biggest attention-seeker, but at this point, it’s nearly impossible to escape his reach.

At this rate, making a podcast about this guy could very well fast-track you to getting featured in this newsletter – see Podcast Delivery #263 and #296.

It’s not that we want to bring him up all the time, but the odds of him doing something news(letter)-worthy are pretty high – he owns a fledgling social network, a leading electric vehicle company, and is perfecting the art and science of sending reusable rockets into space.

On Musk focuses a critical lens on he-who-shall-not-be-named (before the fold, anyway) because we’re tired of talking about him. It actually delivers a sobering account of what it’s been like to shadow a driven, flippant, provocative, careless, egotistical, intelligent, entrepreneurial, and cultural force who has done a bang-up job demonstrating how comfortable he is endorsing some of the world’s most reprehensible people and his proclivity for being anti-Semitic.

Don’t worry, those ☝️ are just links to Wikipedia. Shoutout to the people out there maintaining the Wiki pages for the worst people on this planet.

The sober account isn’t without its biases or soft-balls but that’s to be expected. Biographer Walter Isaacson, who is the actual subject of On Musk, has a knack for weaving a thoroughly enjoyable narrative while still acknowledging his subjects’ more mercurial sides. But by all measures, Isaacson has more than earned his stripes, thanks to his rich biographies like those of Leonardo DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs.

You simply can’t deny how interesting the subjects of his biographies really are. But, Isaacson goes on to say in episode one, “Interesting is a word that has many nuances to it,” and we couldn’t agree more.

For two years, Isaacson followed Musk, typically in stints of 10 days or so, and was given an incredibly intimate view into one man’s life, but not without stating a few rules of the road first, the biggest of which being that Musk couldn’t control the outcome or contents of his biography.

You don’t have to read Isaacson’s biography or listen to this podcast to understand that the Musk of 2023 is not the same Musk from 2013. While On Musk does little to reconcile the wild and toxic cult of personality that surrounds this planet’s “most interesting” human, his detractors have one thing going for them – he still desperately wants to get off this planet and will eventually be “interesting” somewhere else.

Have a listen and share what you think.

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