Interviews

Well, this isn’t your average interview.

“Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone” is a comedy podcast series spun off by the US National Public Radio game show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  A while back they called out of the blue.  Apparently they had done an interview with a parking garage designer, and a listener replied by asking them why they don’t interview the Human Transit guy, for balance I guess.  I had all the leeriness of comedy that you might expect, but it came off better than I expected, and it was fun.

The podcast is here.  After half an hour of comic banter between the hosts, the segment starts at 31:53 to 1:02:00.

“Getting excited about technology is often a way of distracting ourselves from the actual problems before us.”

I’m not known for the glorifying mass disruption, but I guess I’m a disruptor now.  Matt Ward’s podcast The Disruptors interviewed me this fall.  We talked about driverless cars, flying cars, Uber, scooters, “super mini micro smartcar pods,” and whether the whole interview was a Turing test.  Matt asked me especially tough questions about what might be possible in the future.

Something about Matt’s style got me talking a little fast, but it was fun.  It starts at 5:15 with John F. Kennedy pretending to be me, and then I get going at 5:30.  There’s one irritating ad early on, and then it’s uninterrupted.

It’s here.