How I Turned My Commute Into a Conversation

For years, that hour belonged to podcasts. Marketing School with Neil Patel and Eric Siu was — and still is — a regular. A handful of others in the rotation, depending on the week.

But for the last few months, I’ve been doing something different.

When there’s something specific I want to learn about, I open Grok and start a conversation.

From Listening to Talking

The shift sounds small. It isn’t.

Podcasts are great. They expose you to ideas you didn’t know you needed. They surface unexpected connections. They give you the experience of being in someone else’s brain for an hour. I’m not giving them up.

But podcasts are one-way. You listen at the pace they choose, on the topic they choose, for the duration they choose. If a host glosses over the one thing you actually wanted to understand, too bad. If you have a follow-up question, it lives in your head.

A conversation with Grok is the opposite. I get exactly the information I need, in the order I need it. I can jump between topics. I can ask to go deeper on something. I can stop the conversation whenever I want and pick it back up later. There’s no audience.

No host. No agenda but mine.

That asymmetry compounds over a 2-hour week.

Why Talking Through It Sticks

I’ve noticed something specific: I retain information dramatically better when I talk through it than when I read it or listen to an audio overview.

Twice a week, I spend an hour in the car driving to the office.

Part of that is engagement. When you’re in conversation, you’re not a passive recipient — you’re a participant. You ask questions, you push back, you summarize what you think you just heard. The act of formulating the next question forces you to actually process the previous answer.

Part of it is friction. A research report can sit in a tab for weeks, mostly unread. An audio overview washes over you while your mind drifts. A conversation requires presence, because the next thing you say has to be coherent.

I’ve used the commute to talk through finances and taxes, technology I’m trying to understand, random topics I want to chase down on a given day. None of it would have stuck the same way if I’d read it on a screen.

The Enablement Layer Hiding in Plain Sight

Most of the AI enablement conversation is about big things. Agents. Workflows. Platform rebuilds. The stuff that fits on a strategy slide.

This is the smaller version. It’s not a workflow I designed. It’s not a system I built. It’s a 2-hour-a-week change in what I do with time I already had.

That’s the part most people miss. AI enablement isn’t only the agents you deploy or the platforms you rebuild around. It’s also the small substitutions that compound — what you read, how you learn, what you do with the white space of your week.

The biggest unlock isn’t always the most sophisticated one. Sometimes it’s just a different conversation in a car you were already driving.

Where to Start

If you want to try your own version, the bar is low.

Pick one recurring block of time you’ve already given up on doing anything productive with — a commute, a walk, a workout where podcasts don’t quite hold your attention. Pick one thing you’ve been meaning to learn but never got around to. Then start a conversation with whatever voice AI you prefer (I use Grok; Gemini and Claude both have solid voice modes).

The goal isn’t to optimize the hour. The goal is to find out what your brain actually does when you replace one-way input with two-way conversation. For me, the answer was: it learns more, and it remembers more.

You don’t need a system. You just need to start the conversation.

But of course, all of that only happens after I’ve called my parents.

Those are the important conversations.