You know that friend who does voices really well, so you’re always having them record your outgoing voicemail messages and needling them to perform at parties? Yeah, we want narrator Robert Petkoff to be that friend.

He has lent his voice to nearly 150 audiobooks in Audible’s catalog, winning awards and fans with his eminently capable performances. Among his most beloved works, though, are the Star Trek: Legacies audiobooks — and for good reason. Listen to him effortlessly glide between Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty as he reads from  and  in the below clip. He somehow manages to evoke each character as we remember them in the original series but without hamming it up to the detriment of the narrative.

(Transcript has been edited and will not reflect audio exactly.)

Robert Petkoff: Hi, this is Robert Petkoff, narrator of the Star Trek: Legacies audiobooks.

First of all, I was thrilled when I got the call [to narrate] because I’m a huge Star Trek fan. I’m a total geek when it comes to Star Trek … I’m so familiar with the original series; it’s my favorite of [all] the series. It’s been really exciting to do, to prepare, to be able to say “captain’s log,” to be able to do the voices of Kirk and Spock and Scotty and Chekov and McCoy … it’s fabulous.

I was reading the book and preparing it — I already know the characters, I know what they sound like to me, in my head — and I went even as far as, when highlighting the characters, I would highlight their ship’s-uniform colors. So Kirk got the yellow; Spock gets blue; McCoy got a different version of blue; Chekov and Sulu get different varying versions of yellow; Uhura, Scotty both get red. That was just my way of recognizing who I was talking about.

I’m a giant Captain Kirk fan; I think that’s my favorite character in the series and so it’s been a lot of fun to try to do William Shatner’s Kirk without obviously imitating him but to give a sort of a feel of that guy. Spock’s a lot of fun, and of course with McCoy you get that Southern sort of “blasted-Spock” thing going on, which is always great. And, naturally, everyone loves imitating Scotty because doing the Scottish accent is just really fun.

So what’s the recording process like? Well, I’m here in the studio and we just start reading the book out loud. I have an engineer and a producer out there, and she stops me a lot to tell me how I’m saying the Klingon words wrong, and corrects me on how to do that, which is (laughs) very important because I want to get them right. And it’s just a fantastic time; we have a really fun time doing this. We’ll end some scenes and just laugh because it’s so fun to see these people or to be voicing these people again and having them brought to a new audience.