PODCAST · technology
The Courier
by Jonah Bliss
Jonah and Greg give you the low down on all the week's latest urbanism, delivery, mobility and tech policy developments. www.thecurbivore.com
Episodes
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How Do Machines Map the World? A Conversation With Geospatial Legend Brian McClendon
An autonomous vehicle can have the greatest lidar and cameras in the world, but how does it “understand” what it’s looking at? Robotaxis and delivery bots alike need a source of ground truth that lets them comprehend the state of the world. Properly equipped, an AV can ideally enter a new space…
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From RV Rentals to Fleet Management to AV Insurance
Building the world’s biggest RV rental platform would be ambitious enough. But what if you also launched a suite of fleet-management tools, and then an entirely new division insuring autonomous vehicles, with rates that automatically drop whenever self-driving is engaged? That’s the story of The...
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Today's Profitable Mobility Startups Have The "Luxury of Optionality" Says Stifel's Florent Roulet
It’s been a rocky road for new mobility startups these past few years. Late 2020 until early 2022 saw rock bottom interest rates fuel massive funding for all sorts of new companies: many raised far more cash than their fundamentals ever justified. When rates shot up, many companies languished on...
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How to Amortize an Ebike, With Wombi CEO Dan Carr
Far too many bike shops treat two-wheelers like they’re high-end sporting equipment: sleek and expensive pieces of hardware that are meant to be stored in the closet when not out bounding trails. As electric bicycling takes off, brands are finding they need new pathways to get consumers to treat...
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The McKinsey Center for Future Mobility’s Bold Claims About the Coming AV Revolution
As the world transitions to autonomous mobility, consumer uptake rests on four core pillars: affordability, accessibility, safety and sustainability. In a bold new report, Ani Kelkar and Darius Scurtu, from our partners at the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, argue that AVs will perform so...
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Could a New Mayor Transform LA’s Streets, Housing and City Services? Councilmember Nithya Raman Wants a City That Works
Los Angeles has always been the city of the future, offering the world a vision of what’s to come, for both better and worse. Lately, while the region has still delivered on some audacious goals — building dozens of new transit stations, transitioning the nation’s largest municipally owned…
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Reverse Logistics: So Hot Right Now! Uber's Head of Grocery & Retail Partnerships Talks Returns Launch & 10 Years of Growth
Third party delivery has gone on a wild ride over the last decade, going from an urban niche to a worldwide must-have. Along the way, the array of items that consumers can get at the push of a button has grown from restaurant meals, to grocery items, to just about any SKU you can dream of:...
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AVs' Impact on Cities, Mobility & Delivery
As AVs start to impact everything from traditional ridesharing, to mobility more broadly, to even delivery and city-scale systems, it's time to think about how public and private players can best prepare for this new autonomous future. In today's podcast episode, Jonah Bliss and Harry Campbell...
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This Fighter Pilot Knows Why Autonomous Machines Shouldn't Settle for Anything Less Than Perfection
There’s nothing worse than an almost perfect machine. If a machine misbehaves consistently, users will know not to trust it. But if it works right 99.9% of the time, by the time it fails, most humans will have given up on closely monitoring it. Professor Missy Cummings knows exactly how high…
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How to Build a Winning Coalition for Complete Streets
Los Angeles is many things, but it’s definitely a town where diffuse power structures make it difficult to build political movements. That’s doubly true when you’re asking both local citizens and elected officials to buck the status quo, and reconsider how they get around the city. That’s why...
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Can NYC Build a Sustainable Mobility Startup Ecosystem? LACI BATWorks' Alex Mitchell Is Leading the Charge
When it comes to sustainable mobility startups, New York City finds itself in a peculiar position. Blessed with a legacy of strong public transit infrastructure, local politicos have crafted an ecosystem that encourages all sorts of clean transport and logistics innovation: bikesharing and cargo...
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Are Rising Insurance Premiums Eating the Mobility Industry Alive?
Some days it feels like insurance is devouring the entire mobility economy, with rising premiums taking down transportation options new and old alike. Auto insurance premiums have jumped a whopping 64% in the past five years, driven partially by a labor shortage but even more by the fact that…
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A Fast Casual Restaurateur's "Love-Hate Relationship" with Delivery
Your favorite podcast — Zag Talk — is back for an all new season. Today we kick things off by chatting with Seth Cohen, Co-Founder of Sweetfin, a 15-unit fast casual restaurant chain focused on poké, raw fish and bowls. Oftentimes on the podcast we talk about delivery innovations — new robotics,...
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Can Sustainable Delivery Be a Sustainable Business? Delivery Mates' Kevin Savage Makes the Case
Over the past few months we’ve had the distinct pleasure of digging deep in the world of sustainable delivery: we’ve kicked the tires on the new Honda Fastport, snuck in to Amazon’s NYC equad operations and studied how cities and third party delivery networks are working together to get couriers...
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Lyft’s Not Content With Second Place in the Robotaxi Race
As robotaxis race towards becoming a regular part of our mobility landscape, it at first looked like Lyft had no interest in joining the competition, instead letting deep pocked competitors like Waymo and Uber push ahead (while wisely avoiding the costly mistakes that took down others like Cruise...
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Can Corporations Nudge Workers Towards Greener Commuting Options?
A city can spend all the money in the world on making its streets multi-modal, on transit investments and the like, but if all the jobs are still located out in the burbs, commuters will likely opt to stick with their cars. That’s why corporate mobility is so important — the interplay between...
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Senator Scott Wiener Discusses YIMBY's Big Win: SB79
Dense housing and public transit: two great tastes that taste better together. You’d think this classic combo would be a no-brainer, as building mid-rise housing helps with affordability and locating it near rail stations lets folks cut down on commuting costs, while putting more commuters near...
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Can Portable Benefits Improve Gig Work? With DoorDash's Max Rettig
Managing policy for DoorDash is no mean feat; the globe-spanning 3PD often finds itself interfacing with cities across all sorts of issues: traffic / road safety, merchant relationships, courier behavior and more (and as the company continues to push into new territory — like drones or its…
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Getting Ebikes Into the Hands of Hard-Working Couriers
Delivery is tough work, especially in dense, urban environments. Couriers and policymakers often find themselves pulled between competing priorities: cash-strapped workers often don’t have the resources to invest in a good e-bike, driving them to cheaper alternatives that aren’t reliable enough…
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Is Hydrogen Finally the Fuel of the Future? MH2Fund Is Betting on It
Hydrogen is having its moment—not because of hype, but because the economics and demand finally line up. Heavy industry, shipping, and aviation are desperate for clean fuels, governments are throwing serious subsidies behind hydrogen production, and technologies that once seemed speculative are…
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You Want People That Found Something Secret - Steve Greenfield, Automotive Ventures
On this week’s episode of Zag Talk, I’m joined by Steve Greenfield, General Partner at Automotive Ventures. Steve knows the mobility industry inside and out, having jumped from Manheim, Autotrader and TrueCar to investing in promising startups like Axion Ray, JOCO, Recurrent and SparkCharge.…
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Risky Opportunities: Why Insurance Is the Most Important Component of Any Mobility Startup
This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Gita Gupta, VP, Director of Emerging Technology and Digital Economies, Global Technology Risk Practice at Lockton, and we go deep on all things risk, insurance, and fraud: three words that might make founders’ eyes glaze over… right up until they’re…
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From the "Arson Box" to Revocable Consent Permits & Equity Capital
If you step out onto a street corner in NYC these days, you’ll instantly notice the city is buzzing with delivery workers: couriers zip across streets and sidewalks — not always quite following traffic laws — to deliver food, packages, documents and more. It can be a tough job with low pay…
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Seed Strapping The Urban Infrastructure Powering Ecommerce, Delivery & LEVs
From delivery bots, to cargo bikes, scooters and LEVs… our streets have become a hodgepodge of busy little machines, transporting goods and people to their last mile destinations. But keeping those devices charged, and those packages sorted is no easy feat, especially in cities where real estate…
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You Can't 'Move Fast & Break Things' in Mobility
Startup founders often believe so deeply in the mission of their business that they struggle to see how the world could exist any other way. They adopt a mindset akin to “once my product breaks through, all the naysayers will understand they were wrong to doubt its importance.” Or to borrow a...
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Introducing Zag Talk - Coco's Zach Rash Shares Path to Global Expansion
Your favorite mobility and delivery podcast is back, but with a whole new twist! Jonah Bliss and Greg Lindsay have teamed up with Zag Daily to bring you Zag Talk, bringing you fresh news, in-depth interviews and witty analysis every two weeks. To kick things off, we’re chatting with Zach Rash…
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Zag Daily's Ben Hubbard Knows How to Pitch the Future of Mobility
Few publications have their fingers on the pulse of new mobility quite like Zag Daily. In just the past month, the UK-based publisher has tracked the rise of the robotaxi market, covered the launch of inventive new micromobility options like the Otherlab solar-powered Lightfoot, and has closely...
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How Joe Cohen Raised $9M for His Infinite Machine
At this point it’s not exactly news that it’s a tough fundraising environment out there for new mobility startups, especially ones with a hardware focus. That’s what makes it all the more impressive that Joseph Cohen was able to raise $9 million for Infinite Machine, with the round led by a16z....
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Tatiana Peralta Quirós on the Journey from ITDP to MobilityVC
Tatiana Peralta Quirós has had quite the impressive career: educated at both MIT and Harvard, thoughtful research works with the likes of Gensler and the World Bank, before going on to advise the President of Costa Rica on urban mobility and technology, modernizing LatAm’s automotive giant’s…
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Connexion CEO Aaryn Nania's New Partnership with Uber
If you think about the transportation world as “new mobility” and “old mobility,” it often seems that despite all the innovation of the past few years, it often happens in its own silo, leaving the classic world of American transportation — car dealers — unaffected. So that’s why this…
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What Can't The Camera Catch? | Chatting With Umojo's Rick Neubauer
In this week’s edition of The Courier, Jonah chats with Rick Neubauer, Founder and CEO of Umojo. Rick’s mobility journey is an interesting one, with Umojo getting its start in the glamorous world of parking management. But as the action shifted to the curb, Rick sensed an opportunity, and now...
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AVs & Narrative Command, Investing in the Future of Mobility With Alex Roy
Alex Roy knows two things — how the mobility world works, and how to tell a damn good story. On the first front, he established himself on the legendary Cannonball Run race, held the record for fastest lap around Manhattan and served as Director of Special Operations for Argo AI. On the latter…
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Has Kyte Crashed to Earth? Talking Winners & Losers with Placer.ai's RJ Hottovy
With respect to the dozens of other companies that go by Kyte or Kite, the car rental via delivery startup Kyte looks like it may have hit a very bumpy road. Last week, Los Angeles-area customers received word the company was pulling out of the market — the nation’s largest for car usage — after...
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Could DoorDash Do DSPs? Building A Delivery Biz with First's Andrew Nakkache
Making delivery work is darn difficult: even when everything’s going well with the customers and the kitchens, you still have to manage hundreds of thousands of very loosely managed workers. With unaligned incentives, why should a courier make sure an order is right, or wait around for a customer...
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ChargerHelp! CEO Worries About EVSE Reliability So You Don’t Have To
When’s the last time you pulled up to a gas station and the pump didn’t work? While that’s a very rare occasion indeed, it’s sadly all too frequent an occurrence in the world of electric vehicle charging. And if people aren’t confident they can power up their cars, they’re not going to want to...
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NYC Mobility Leader Dawn Miller on How Startups Can Sell to Government
Anyone that’s been following the news knows it’s been an interesting time in New York City governance, to say the least. At the state level, Governor Hochul killed congestion pricing at the last second, and now a federal indictment of Mayor Adams has made things even more complicated. Despite…
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Paris, Marseille and... Hoboken? Talking Cool Curbs With Jordan Justus
After a brief summer break, The Courier is back in action. Jonah Bliss and Greg Lindsay explore what makes the urbanism of France — both old and new — work so well. But, might there be somewhere exotic in America that offers a taste of that progress? Then, Jordan Justus, CEO and Co-Founder of...
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Introducing The Courier Podcast
Want all your hottest urbanism, delivery, mobility and tech policy news in audio form?! Well you’re in luck, because Greg Lindsay and I are back with a new podcast — The Courier — now live. Listen in with the player above. In episode one we dive in to some spicy topics: can the Olympics be car...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Jonah and Greg give you the low down on all the week's latest urbanism, delivery, mobility and tech policy developments.
www.thecurbivore.com
HOSTED BY
Jonah Bliss
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Courier have?
The Courier currently has 38 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Courier about?
Jonah and Greg give you the low down on all the week's latest urbanism, delivery, mobility and tech policy developments. www.thecurbivore.com
How often does The Courier release new episodes?
The Courier has 38 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Courier?
You can listen to The Courier on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Courier?
The Courier is created and hosted by Jonah Bliss.
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