The Daily Show’s Jason Jones had a segment on the show last night that highlighted so-called “discrimination” against Google Glass wearers. And I was the butt of a lot of its jokes. The show invited me on after I was assaulted while wearing Google Glass in the Mission District of San Francisco.
I won’t spoil the segment, so be sure to watch it before scrolling further:
Rather than respond to the show’s criticisms of Glass (because, let’s face it, they have a point), I thought it would be fun to shed light on what it’s actually like to film a segment on The Daily Show.
First off, we all knew exactly what we were getting into. I was contacted by a producer of the show who identified himself as such. There were no attempts made to trick any of us with claims that they were a news team from out of town.
We were all told that the show was considering doing a segment on Google Glass and that they wanted to feature people who had incidents wearing the gadget out in public. He asked me about my experience with Glass in general, the mugging, and how I feel about it now.
About a week later, the show confirmed that it would film the segment and gave us a date and time to meet at a hotel in San Francisco for the shoot. When we arrived, they took us to a small conference room where cameras were set up and staff was ready to do makeup:
Google Glass user Nick Starr getting his makeup done for The Daily Show.
While Glass was the only piece of wearable tech that I owned, my fellow Glassholes were all equipped with at least one more piece of smart tech somewhere on their bodies:
You wouldn’t know it from the segment, but our group interview took the better part of four hours. We each took turns answering several pages of questions that the show’s producers had prepared ahead of time, with Jason Jones occasionally asking whether we should film a response again or telling one of us to stop laughing.
At the end of it, the producers gave Jones a series of fun comebacks to some of the nerdier things we said during the interviews — so yes, we knew about the out-of-context jokes before the segment aired.