grisaitis

even better, podcasters probably easier to fetch the data as well

when you say fine-tuning skills or talent are scarce, do you have specific skills in mind? perhaps engineering for training models (eg making model parallelism work)? or the more ML type skills of designing experiments, choosing which methods to use, figuring out datasets for training, hyperparam tuning/evaluation, etc?

I'd recommend Elements of / An Introduction to Statistical Learning. Both books are written well and by experts in the field, and cover relevant topics like linear and non-linear methods of today and yesteryear.