The Accidental Podcaster
I didn't listen to podcasts. Then I started one.
I was listening to Sara Gibbons from Nielsen Norman Group talk about AI interaction patterns on the way to my friend Megan's house. It was late 2023. Generative AI was everywhere and nowhere at the same time — everyone was talking about it, almost nobody knew what to do with it.
That night, Megan and I decided to start a meetup.
I want to be clear: I did not listen to podcasts. Occasionally, when Megan would tell me I absolutely had to hear a specific Hard Fork episode, I would. That was basically my relationship with the format. So the fact that I now co-host one is either a punchline or a lesson about not making predictions about yourself.
(Super)charged by AI started as a practical solution to a simple problem. Our AI Portland events were in person, in Portland, by design — we believed face-to-face connection was the point. But people kept asking if they could watch remotely. So Megan and I started recapping our events. Just the two of us, coffees in hand, usually the morning after, still processing what happened the night before.
Then we started inviting guests. People from Portland who were doing interesting things with AI. Then people outside Portland, because the conversations kept pointing beyond our city. Then we started just talking — about the state of AI, about what we were seeing, about Portland's tech community trying to find its footing in a fast-moving moment.
Two and a half years later, we've talked to a cancer patient who uses AI to manage his own health data and arrive at doctor's appointments more informed than ever. We've sat with friends using AI to process grief. We've had lunch with Senator Wyden and asked him about federal privacy regulation. We've watched 110 people stay an hour past the scheduled end time because nobody wanted the conversation to stop.
What I've learned from all of it is harder to summarize than I expected.
I thought the podcast would be about AI. It is, technically. But what it's really about is the uncomfortable middle — the place most people actually live, between the techno-optimists who think everything is going to be fine and the doomers who think it's already over. That middle is where the honest conversation happens. Where someone says, I tried to use this tool and it didn't work and I blamed myself, and someone else says, it's not you, it's actually just hard. Where a physician says she'd rather have a patient come in informed and a little wrong than completely passive. Where you can be excited and scared at the same time and have both feelings make sense.
Megan and I resist the extremes — not as a format choice, but because we genuinely find them both unconvincing. The hype removes your agency by telling you it'll all be fine. The doom removes your agency by telling you there's nothing to be done. The middle is the only place where you actually have to show up and think.
That's what the podcast is, I think. A record of two people who didn't set out to do this, trying to think in public, in a specific city, during a specific and genuinely strange moment in time.
I still don't really think of myself as a podcaster. But I was listening to one on the way to the night it all started, which feels like the universe making a point I wasn't paying attention to.
