Like most Americans, I commute to work by driving a car. In fact, on average, Americans spend almost 30 minutes each way getting to their place of work, mostly using cars, but sometimes propelled through their cities and towns by buses, Metro trains, ebikes, scooters and everything else in between. Regardless of the method, the amount of time that we spend getting to work has fluctuated significantly across the past few years because of COVID. From 2019 to 2021, the American Community Survey showed average commutes dropping in duration by almost two minutes per trip, due in large part to clearer roads from a growing work-from-home workforce. But by 2022, average commute times had already started to creep back up by about 48 seconds per trip year over year, reflecting the longer term trend of longer and longer commutes for American workers. And given this trend, I ask you what better thing to do with all this extra commute time than to listen to a podcast. You know, Americans whose time is often occupied by commuting, household chores, and low-intensity tasks at work are increasingly living in a world stimulated by audio. According to the Pew Research Center, while terrestrial radio has seen marginal declines in listenership over the past decade, now almost 1/3 of all Americans report listening to podcasts at least weekly. We consume a ton of audio-only information about everything from true crime to politics to celebrities, even to the social sciences. But what if our ears deceive us?