The Flow Rig: How I Stopped Sitting at My Desk and Started Listening to Everything
10 Mins | 5.4 Million Words Without Looking at a Screen [Free Download👇🏽]
My hip flexors were finally releasing. Flat on my back on the living room floor, afternoon light warming the hardwood, legs up the wall, eyes closed. A three-hour Senate hearing on AI governance played through bone conduction headphones— the kind that sit on your cheekbones, not in your ears, so you hear the audio and the world at the same time. The committee chair was grilling a witness about compute thresholds. Outside, a dog was barking three houses down. I felt the argument start to tighten. There’s a texture to logic when you listen long enough, like hearing a chord that wants to resolve.
My friends think I do restorative yoga. I do. It’s just that mine involves a Senate hearing. The poses are the same. But the distinction between “doing yoga” and “lying on the floor in three different positions for ninety minutes” is a question I’ve never been the least bit interested in answering.
In a meeting last year a colleague asked me, flat out, “did you actually read that entire report last night?” I’d listened to it on a jog that morning. Two hundred pages at 1.5x on the asphalt, looping past neighborhood lawns.
People phrase it different ways. “Seriously, when do you sleep?” or “how are you reading all of this?” But the question underneath is always the same. The honest answer is that a number of years ago, my body forced a renegotiation. They say the most interesting adaptations come from constraints. And mine was physical. I work in leadership and strategic advisory. The kind that means staying up-to-date across policy, research, emerging technology, institutional dynamics, and the people trying to steer all of it. News articles, think tank reports, academic papers, grant applications, pitch decks, congressional hearings, research presentations, books, policy proposals, risk assessments, Substack posts, tweets, group chat messages. The list never ends. It’s just a pull-to-refresh infinite scroll.
For years I processed all of it at a desk. Eyes forward, neck craning, shoulders rounding, body slowly compressing into the shape of a person who spends twelve hours a day staring at rectangles. Until the pain wasn’t ignorable anymore. Hips. Back. Forward head posture wrecking my quality of life. Eye strain turning reading into endurance. And the volume wasn’t going down. It was going up.
So I started listening instead.
Over time I built what I’m just calling the Flow Rig for now, a set of tools on my computer, phone and tablet that moves most of my information intake from eyes to ears and most of my output from fingers to voice. Dictation instead of typing. Listening instead of reading. Walking and stretching instead of sitting.
On a given day: I dictate articles on walks. I listen to a dense research paper while stretching on the floor. I review grant proposals through headphones while watering and singing to plants. I’ll go on a long walk and toggle between a Buddhist lecture on impermanence and a long-form series on European antitrust enforcement, stopping to watch the local crows on the power lines swoop down between passing cars to scavenge the roadside— messing with rocks, inspecting trash, doing whatever it is crows do with their strange, purposeful attention.
Being in gentle motion, mind in focus. It’s not a productivity hack. I sincerely find the whole hustle culture energy intensely insufferable, the competitive so-called optimization of every waking second. This is closer to necessity. My body wouldn’t let me do it the old way, so I found a way where I could lay on the ground and close my eyes and focus entirely on sound.
And there’s something particular about the kind of content I consume most— policy language, procedural documents, evidence-based research— that makes this work. Dense factual prose doesn’t need as much emotional breathing room as a novel or a poem. There’s a formulaic dryness to the jargon of think tanks and executive briefs and academic journals that the ear can parse at pace. Direct arguments that land on evidence, intentionally stripped of feeling. Which means double speed can follow comprehension without losing the thread. Of course not everything is policy papers and research lectures, sometimes it’s just a conversation between two people who are smarter than me about something I’ll never need to know.
Eric Schmidt’s Superintelligence Strategy— his framework for Mutual Assured AI Malfunction and the weaponization of autonomous systems— played through my headphones while I stood in the toothbrush aisle at a Berkeley co-op, deciding between organic compostable BPA-free brushes and examining the recycled wood flossers. I listened to Gladstone AI’s State Department-commissioned report on extinction-level threats one afternoon while landscaping a friend’s garden, hands in the dirt, lifting heavy rocks into position to frame a walkway and flower bed. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness— his case for what the intelligence explosion looks like when it arrives— became a soundtrack that dappled a trail in Muir Woods, surrounded by old-growth redwoods that have been standing for a thousand years.
And then the Japanese Tea Gardens in San Francisco.
Moss that had been slowly claiming its stone for longer than anyone walking those paths would be alive. Water rippling across banks worn smooth over decades, already somewhere else by the time you noticed it. Branches shaped by patient hands that were no longer here to shape them. I was meandering alongside the water’s edge, as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s voice hummed— not through my ears but through my bones. That’s what bone conduction does. His words entered my skull and calmly explained why none of this might survive. The melodic chirping of birdsong streamed through my ears while the case for why superintelligence might end everything I’ve ever known, resonated through my skeleton, both songs vibrating together, present in the same body without the urge to pause.
There’s a quality the Japanese call mono no aware— not sadness, exactly, but the recognition that beauty is already leaving even as you stand in it. The moss knows. The water knows. The branches know. And someone trying to articulate why the whole thing might end far sooner than we expect— that voice is never an intruder in a place like this, never a trespasser in a sanctuary of such venerable beauty. In fact, that person might see the garden more clearly than anyone— or can at least name what others are so eager to look past.
The world doesn’t stop being beautiful because a book I listen to says it might end.
There’s a calm, imperturbable, even-keel register where catastrophic stakes and regional folk music are presented with the same timbre— like an NPR host reading the funding credits before a segment on the end of the world. You get used to it. Automated warfare alongside wildflower meadows. Mutual destruction as morning light glistens through glass hummingbird feeders. The only real difference between Bob Ross and Eliezer Yudkowski is the content.
And the listening itself changes over time. Not just what, but how.
When you train your ears long enough, perception itself shifts. Piano in the house before preschool. Sunday hymns, lessons by kindergarten, band every day through middle and high school, jamming from ten to ten all summer. University listening courses, choral harmony ear training, solfège and sight-reading, symphonic winds and jazz ensemble, full Afro-Cuban immersion, percussion, standup bass and tres in Cuba.
Years of professional gigs, live performance and festival touring, informally studying production and sound design, learning to hear not just music but the architecture inside it, the energy swelling around it. Jamming with old friends who just happen to be world-class conservatory-level fusion musicians. Decades of daily ear training, all told, and the training never stops.
What that does to a person: you learn to hold volumes— entire discographies, full orchestral scores— delicately, down to the pitch. The intimate knowledge of which notes scream and which barely whisper. Lyrics streaming across decades without fading. Entire repertoires catalogued in the fabric of your fingers as they age. Cartoon theme songs from childhood, remembered note for note, word for word, as if they never left. The music lives in your body along with everything else— first and second violin, violas, the brass section’s four-part harmony, woodwinds layering underneath, percussion anchoring the bottom.
You can sit inside a full ensemble and hear every line of counterpoint converging and diverging, and pinpoint a single ride cymbal hit at the back of the percussion section naming its character— dark, bright, shimmery, muted, dampened, washed out. You can tell when the drummer slightly shanks the shoulder in a sixteen note roll. And underneath everything, the sympathetic resonance of a snare drum vibrating in response to the French horn— that faint sizzle most people never consciously hear, the auditory equivalent of noticing a mosquito from across a large performance hall. It’s a kind of athletic listening where attention can move from the whole to the nearly invisible, simultaneously without losing either.
For me that capacity adapted to group dynamics and dense nonfiction. Language has a shape. Conversations build, turn, sometimes collapse. Over time, you start to hear the geometry of an idea unfold. Where the tension is, where the logic wants to resolve, where it breaks. The words fade, but the contour remains. The way a melody is remembered— not always note for note but as a shape, a direction, a place where it was heading before it caught you off guard.
And speed follows comprehension, not the other way around. When you’ve absorbed enough in a domain, new information clicks into existing structures instead of requiring assembly from scratch. The pace rises naturally. When the territory is familiar, you run. When it’s genuinely new— unfamiliar vocabulary, organizational structures you haven’t seen before— you slow down. Sometimes way down. Rewind. Listen to the same passage three times. Drift off mid-sentence and have to back up. Familiarity breeds quickness. New terrain requires patience. It’s not a linear process. But the floor keeps rising.
Some things I listen to at 1x deliberately. My own articles, especially, editing for pacing and felt sense, the way you’d check a song’s mix. You can’t speed up comedy. The timing is the joke. You can’t speed up music. The emotion lives in the duration.
This year’s listening stats across one app: 387 hours. 5.4 million words. 1,871 files and books. 64 hours saved. Even I didn’t expect the number to be that high.
This isn’t everything. Precision spreadsheet work still requires a desk. Audio and video editing requires eyes. When pixel-level control matters, I sit down like everyone else. And there are days when attention won’t cooperate— when information slides past and nothing sticks, when ten minutes of “listening” feels like it produces near-zero retention.
This isn’t for people who are comfortable at their desk. This is for people whose body is paying the price for their mind’s work, and who suspect there might be another way.
People have been asking me how this works for long enough that I finally documented the whole thing. Every tool, every setting, every configuration mistake I made along the way. The privacy traps, because when your entire information workflow runs through audio tools, you want to know exactly where your data goes. What your computer can already do for free and where it falls short. Which $29 upgrade made the biggest single difference. A scored decision matrix so you can pick the setup that matches your priorities, plus the one configuration mistake that will tank your privacy if you miss it.
For now, it’s called The Flow Rig— in honor of the “flow” that’s been missing from everyone’s “workflow.” And partly so I can stop explaining this one person at a time and just send a link.
The complete blueprint is free.
→ Get the Mac-only guide here
(I dictated the first draft of this a few days ago on a walk through my neighborhood.)
It’s quiet now. Floor again, happy baby pose, headphones on. A lecture on complexity theory is playing— something about emergence and self-organization in adaptive systems. Outside, the crows are back up, chatting on their phone lines. Late afternoon light is turning everything amber. The lecture is making a point about how order arises from noise, how pattern emerges from what looks like chaos.
Mmm… now that sounds about right.
Siri put a chef kiss in this comment no not like that Siri put a chef kiss emoji in this comment no wait stop typing Siri stop typing right now I give up Siri tell turquoise this is exquisite and prescient and right on
That was quite beautiful, uplifting and grounding, simultaneously. What a Friday treat, here in Britland.