I Built a Career on Efficiency

My wife and I were driving—driving!—from Virginia to Cincinnati, OH to see a Reds game.

We're trying to see MLB games in as many ballparks as we can. I'm 57, and suddenly those "bucket list" things seem so much more in focus. You know the feeling. Time's a resource you can't get back, and I've never been good at wasting it.

Anyway, we're in like the middle of nowhere, south-eastern Ohio. It's green and rolling down from the old worn peaks of Appalachia, but man, it's quiet. We'd long since exhausted the podcast backlog and the conversation had settled into a comfortable silence.

The 57-Year-Old Epiphany

So, we're passing a lot of nothing, until I see this faded brown sign for "Snake Mounds." And something, somewhere in the back of my brain, was like, "Wait, I know what that is." Don't ask me how or where I heard it, but I knew that this was a super cool, 2,000-year-old historical site.

Suddenly, the car was electric. We were off on a Google rabbit hole chase with the phone, reading out loud about the Indigenous people who had lived there, how they must have lived, and saying, "Damn, we have to come back here." The 10-second drive past the sign had sparked 20 minutes of genuine, shared wonder.

Then it hit me. We got that moment of wonder despite the friction: not wrecking the car, pulling out the phone, unlocking the screen, fighting with the search terms, trying to keep one eye on the road.

What we wanted on this trip was a Companion of Curiosity. We didn't want a map or an assistant. We wanted a quiet, PhD-level narrator in the backseat who knew we were passing the oldest human-made earthwork in North America, and was simply waiting for the perfect moment to tell us that story.

The Problem of the Silent Road

For the last 30 years, I've built a career on finding waste in the system. And here I was, looking at the biggest, most neglected chunk of wasted time in the modern world: the 185 billion hours Americans spend in transit every single year.

That's 185 billion hours where people pass by the "Snake Mounds" of their own lives every single day (the streets where mastodon bones were found, the corners where forgotten legends played out, the bridges that hide real history) and they never know it.

The old solutions require you to look at a screen. That means sacrificing focus and creating friction. The modern commuter, the day-tripper, the road-tripper, they are ready for audio, but they are stuck with generic content that has nothing to do with the physical world passing by their window.

Taleway: The Companion of Curiosity

I'm 57. I'm not building a toy. I'm building a solution to the Snake Mounds Problem.

Taleway is the first app designed to turn that 185 billion hours of "dead time" into continuous, zero-friction discovery. It simply knows where you are and quietly tells you the most fascinating, hyper-local story that relates to your exact location, all without you lifting a finger or looking at a screen. It transforms routine into ritual.

It is the Today I Learned moment, delivered right on time.

The Call for Co-Conspirators

Taleway, which I call the Curiosity Engine, is now on TestFlight. It is an experiment to prove that people want to know what's around them while they drive, shop, walk, commute, or fall asleep. It's an early look, but it delivers those moments of wonder.

I'm looking for 100 people... commuters, curious travelers, treadmill zoom-callers, long-haul kid taxis, and fellow professionals... who are tired of staring AT THE SCREEN and scrolling their lives away, or gardening podcasts, or listening to a Tribe Called Quest for the 8 millionth time. Want a direct line to help shape this thing? If you ever feel a sudden, sharp desire for discovery, then this is for you.