Tiaodao FM (跳岛, “island hopping”) was a Chinese literary podcast from 2020 to 2024, with more than three hundred episodes. I’d listened to over sixty hours of it; when reading Annie Ernaux, I went back to the episode about her. In July 2026, at my first BuilderUp event at Xinrui Lab, I happened to meet Cai Xin, the curator of Tiaodao FM — a lucky coincidence. She had been looking for someone to build a Tiaodao app, so we started it together. In August, at her invitation, I actually built it for “AI Reading Cube” at the Shanghai Book Fair: started on August 10, had a phone app running with Codex on the 13th, moved it to the web on the 14th, and demoed it on stage on the 15th.
What it’s for
Online, Tiaodao was just a feed of episodes. I wanted a different way in: start from a question in life that matters to me, like “work feeds me, but will it also eat my life?”, see what the hosts and guests said about it across different episodes, and follow the books and writers they mention.
How it was built
- Bring back the raw material: Codex downloaded the show notes scattered across the web, episode by episode, and paired them with transcripts: 256 show notes and 244 timestamped transcripts. Then we checked the speakers and cleaned up the names of authors and works.
- Let AI listen: from hundreds of hours of conversation, pull out “the moments where life suddenly shows through”. Each one is tagged with its episode and minute, and you can tap to hear the original audio.
- Build a knowledge graph from a single sentence: one sentence connects to its speaker, its episode, and the works and authors it mentions.
- Curate themes: I picked a few themes I care about: work wearing people out, being too tired to read after work, AI and reading, and falling in love. Each theme reads like a magazine issue, with an opening line, a few chapters, two voice clips per chapter, and further reading.
AI drew the illustrations and searched for author photos and book covers, which were then checked; my job was to say what felt off and make the calls.
On the day
During the demo, Yu Shi found their own page in the app: “Oh no, I have my own page too.” As people were leaving, someone also brought up a line from host He Runzhe on the show: “Falling in love is more interesting. Work isn’t interesting.” That line opens the “work” theme. In the following days the app got a lot of love. The full story of the day is in the talk at the book fair.
Looking back
When it was done, my feeling was that it was just okay. My design sense still needs work; it should be more playful and more interesting.
I’m also thinking about how to rebuild it. Lately I’ve realised it might not be only for people:
- For people: readers come in through a question in life or a writer, and wander through three hundred episodes;
- For agents: organise the episodes, topics, people and books in a form AI can read. Then if someone asks an AI “I want to understand Virginia Woolf, which episodes of Tiaodao FM should I listen to?”, it can answer, and the show can be found in search too.
How to organise those two on the page, I’m still working out. I’d like to make it a “Tiaodao Universe”, as someone suggested on the day.