For those of you who are searching for a new role. It is definitely a new world, and from what I gather, it is even more true for those of you who are earlier in your careers.

I’m looking for my next role myself, and exploring some different and varied industries along with it. Some I’m very familiar with, like security, networking, CPG (consumer packaged goods), and consumer electronics. With those I’m looking for details and differentiation about the company. But for some other industries that I’m less familiar with, I need to bootstrap my base level understanding, and I’m usually trying to do so quickly to be able to get into deeper than surface level conversations about the opportunities. All the usual things like reading through 10-K’s if they’re publicly traded, seeing what their execs have posted on LinkedIn or spoken about in interviews. But almost every organization invests heavily in putting out a wealth of text about what they do, who they are, and what they want to be next.

I found myself looking for a way to take in some of that information a little bit more passively, and being able to do that while I was a little more active.

If I’m doing something in my garage gym (its too small to fit anything larger than a miata so it’s mostly holiday decoration storage and a squat rack), 80% of the time I’ve got a podcast on the speaker. A few shows from The Economist, Bloomberg, BBC, and recent favorite Platypus Economics by Justin Wolfers top my listening list. I don’t pretend to think it’s as “good” as deeply focused reading, but I get a lot of value through ambient learning, even if I’m doing my best to lift heavy circles during it.

So I thought I might combine my need to bootstrap knowledge about various organizations and industries with my enjoyment of semi-dense background audio.

If you haven’t experimented with text to speech recently, it has gotten quite good. We’re a long way from the old “say” command. I don’t know if its the best, but using the open-weight Kokoro and the very nice front-end to it, FastKoko I’m able to get very good quality voice out of the pre-trained voice models like af_heart on a few year old macbook.

From there, it’s just a matter of getting the text you’re interested in, like say the last 12 months of blog posts from a company, summarized by your LLM of choice and added to your podcast player app. My setup uses Apple Podcasts, Tailscale serve, and little script that updates when I put a new MP3 file in the directory.

Is some nuance and some of the corporate voice lost in the summarization? Absolutely. But it’d be lost in a “real” podcast as well and this approach lets me get fairly targeted information in a nice audio format easily. If you’re a big podcast listener or audiobook enjoyer, I’d recommend giving it a try if there are some things you want to internalize, but don’t necessarily need precise details.