I’m a slow reader. Always have been, always will be.

I’ve tried to get faster over the years by practicing and using “speed reading” apps, etc. But any improvements in reading speed have come with a cost of reduced understanding.

And as a result, I’ve always found learning via reading a bit of a slog.

That’s one of the drivers behind my listening to audio books.

When Ben and I started Glad, I knew I’d need to dive deep into climate related research papers, government reports, and scientific documentation to properly understand the climate science and policy landscape.

I was excited about the learning. But if I’m honest, I was dreading the reading.

Then along came NotebookLM - and it changed everything.

NotebookLM is Google’s AI-powered research assistant. You feed it documents, and it helps you make sense of them. Ask it questions, explore ideas, clarify meaning. All based on your own sources.

The game-changer for me was using it to turn dense, technical climate science and policy related content into conversational, easy-to-understand audio summaries.

Now, instead of wading through dozens of pages of policy or scientific writing, I can listen to an AI generated discussion of the subject. And because the content is grounded in the original documents, I can trust what I’m hearing.

This has helped me learn faster, go deeper, and stay more up-to-date than I ever could by just reading alone.

Initially Ben and I experimented with using NotebookLM to create our own personalised climate-science-focused-podcast. Creating episodes based on scientific reports and policy documents that we knew we needed to digest to inform our thinking at Glad.

Then we thought: if this helps us, maybe it could help others too?

So we’ve started sharing the podcast episodes publicly - under a new podcast called “Breaking Down Climate Pollution”.

Each episode takes a key climate related document or topic and creates a short, clear, and easy to listen to “discussion” between two (imagined) podcast hosts explaining the key concepts and their context.

If you’re interested in climate science and policy, but like me find the documents hard to read - or just don’t have the time! - this might be for you.

You can check it out on the Glad Blog at Introducing the Breaking Down Climate Pollution Podcast.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think. Does this kind of approach help you learn too? Are there documents you’d like us to break down?

Let me know at james@gladclimate.com