Overview

Tour Guide is my podcast in the spirit of the old tour guides. You press play as the trip begins, and the guide tells you what you are passing, right when you pass it: cities, rivers and mountains, history, music, food and the people who live there. It has been live on Spotify since 9 October 2026, in Serbian and English, with 18 episodes and about 34 hours of narration.

The Tour Guide cover: a red flag reading TOUR GUIDE against sun rays
The show's cover, which I made.

The routes

Four Serbian episodes cover Belgrade to Amsterdam and Belgrade to Istanbul, both ways. Two English series of seven episodes each follow the long flight from Istanbul to San Francisco and back, one episode per region on the moving map, from the Bosphorus over Greenland and the Canadian Arctic to the American West.

Route map: Istanbul to San Francisco over Greenland
Istanbul to San Francisco.

Listen

Three episodes to start with: the first one, from Belgrade to Amsterdam in Serbian, and the opening and the Greenland leg of the long flight to San Francisco in English.

How an episode is made

Each episode starts from the real flight. The tracks of recent flights on the route give the minute the plane crosses each border, city and river, and the script is written to that clock, country by country, with a source for every claim. The guide's voice is generated, it runs over quiet generated jazz, and the mix is loud enough for a cabin. A transcript check catches any sentence the voice dropped, and I listen to every episode in full before it goes out.

The guide talks the whole way, with no pause longer than five seconds. Spotify took down two early episodes that left long stretches to the music, so every episode is now narrated wall to wall.

My role

The idea, the writing direction, the cover, and the production pipeline from flight data to the finished mix, which I built with Claude Code.

Episode art

Every episode's picture is a map drawn from its real flight track, in the cover's colours, with the countries it crosses filled in and a pennant on the destination.

Route map: Belgrade to Amsterdam
Belgrade and Amsterdam.
Route map: the flight path across Greenland
Episode 4, Greenland.

What comes next

Bus and car trips, so the show's name leaves out the plane.

Episode maps

Details

Years
2026
Location
Serbia
Tools
Claude Code