Let me start with the unpopular opinion that kicked this off: I really don't like podcasts. They're too informal for me. Too much rambling, too colloquial, too many minutes between the parts I actually wanted. What I do love is dense, well-spoken material — a good audiobook, a sharp TED talk, the kind of thing that respects my time and tells me something. I also love curated content, things picked specifically for me.
So I had a want and a constraint sitting right next to each other. I want to use my commute to learn about things I'm genuinely curious about. I don't want to wade through casual audio to get there. How do I turn that into a workflow?
I started brainstorming it with Claude. I didn't reach for Claude Code on this one — I kept it as a Claude Skill that taps into a few integrations I already have set up. What began as a loose idea turned into a workflow I now use all the time.
Here's how it works. I keep a sheet in Google Drive with 30-plus pre-approved topics — ideas, angles, and little abstracts for the kind of briefing I'd actually want to hear, all tuned to what I'm into. When I want a new one, the skill first makes sure it understands what I'm really asking for, checks my Google Sheet to see what's been made before to avoid repeats, then outlines a loose flow. If approved, it drafts a full write-up that's written specifically for text-to-speech, not for the page.
Two things I baked in that I care a lot about. First, a set of rules to keep the AI speech mannerisms out — the tics and filler cadence that drive me up the wall when something's obviously machine-written. Second, multiple hallucination checks, so the odds of getting confidently fed something false are as low as I can reasonably make them. When I'm learning on the drive, I need to be able to trust what I'm hearing.
It's already taken me through some great rabbit holes:
- The Maya: Rise, Peak, and the Collapse Debate
- Cenotes: The Geology, Biology, and Sacred Portals of the Yucatan
- Trout, and what they actually know about the world
- The Physiology of Scuba Diving and Snorkeling
- Rainwater Collection Systems: what they are, how they work, is it worth it?
When the briefing's done, the skill drops the doc into a folder wired up to Speechify, and Speechify reads it to me in a celebrity narrator's voice that makes the whole thing a pleasure rather than a chore. By the time I'm parking, I've learned something real.
If I'm honest, v1 is manual on purpose — I pick the topic each time. The version in my head pulls the day's topic automatically from whatever's on my calendar, so I show up to a meeting already smarter about whatever it's about. But that's the next pass. Ship first, automate second.