Let AI Do the Talking

The weirdest — and most useful — thing I've started doing on my morning walks.

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It started simple.

I'd pick a topic, feed it to an AI, and hit play on my walk.

Tell me about the history of Cuba. Teach me about cooking with spices and peppers.

Twenty minutes of walking, twenty minutes of learning. It was good. But it was basically a smarter Wikipedia — just information flowing at me while I moved.

Then I got more intentional about it. And that's when things got interesting.

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From topics to problems.

Instead of feeding the AI a subject, I started feeding it a situation.

As a startup entrepreneur in Wesley Chapel, Florida — someone who builds software and might want to sell merchandise — what do I actually need to know about sales tax?

Same walk. Completely different experience. Instead of a lecture, I was getting a briefing. Targeted, specific, relevant to my actual life.

Here's the workflow I landed on. It's a few steps, but worth it:

1. Take your question to Perplexity (think Google, but it shows its sources)
2. Copy the links from the sources it references
3. Drop those links into NotebookLM — a free Google tool that does one thing exceptionally well: turns documents into a podcast

NotebookLM will generate a two-host audio conversation covering the material. It sounds real. It's surprisingly good. One caveat: some links won't load if the pages are paywalled or JavaScript-heavy — if that happens, try pasting the article text directly instead.

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Then I fed it myself.

This is the part that genuinely surprised me.

I took my Operating System and my Personal Compass — if you haven't read that piece, the short version is: your OS defines who you are and how you operate, your Personal Compass defines where you've been, where you are, and where you want to go — and I loaded both into NotebookLM.

Then I prompted it about my future goals.

What came back was a two-person audio conversation enthusiastically discussing my life. My background. My trajectory. Where I was headed and why it made sense. It was part business briefing, part pep talk, part mirror.

I'm not going to pretend it was some profound AI awakening. But I will tell you it was one of the more motivating 20-minute walks I've had in a while.

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Why this works.

Most people use AI to answer questions. This is using AI to process your life — running your actual context through a system smart enough to find the patterns and hand them back to you in a format you'll actually absorb.

You're not Googling anymore. You're consulting. There's a difference. (If you want the longer version of that idea, start here.)

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Here's the thing I keep coming back to: the AI didn't know me — I told it who I was. And it reflected it back more clearly than I expected. Which makes me wonder — how much of "knowing yourself" is just having the right conversation with the right listener?

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Tags: AI-productivity · NotebookLM · AI-for-entrepreneurs · small-business-AI