How the hosts of “Hard Fork” bring their tech podcast to a live audience

“Hard Fork Live” was already running about 20 minutes behind schedule — security screenings for the 700-strong audience were slower than expected — when Casey Newton got some bad news about their star guest from fellow host Kevin Roos.

If they don’t start soon, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will have to go. “That gave me a nice jolt of existential dread that followed me for the next three hours,” Newton said.

After recording their New York Times tech podcast live in San Francisco a year ago, the hosts knew that unexpected twists and turns would be part of the deal.

In the end, the interview with Nadella went as planned, as did interviews with other tech leaders last week. A robot named Toby took a spill in the evening’s only minor disaster.

Roose and Newton join me for a conversation about what it’s like to host a live press event at a transformative moment in the tech industry. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Kevin and Casey, what can “Hard Fork Live” do that your regular podcast can’t?

KEVIN ROOSE: We’re both theater kids at heart, so it’s always fun to bring a bit of showbiz to the podcast. We tried to have as many robots as possible on stage this year. I also think there’s something usefully messy about live journalism – it’s all out there on stage, warts and all, in a way that’s a bit more fun.

CASEY NEWTON: We want to create the kind of big moment that makes you feel good about buying a ticket. So to the robot that did the big dance this year and then fell dramatically like it had been shot – thank you.

What’s the hardest thing to transition from a podcast to live journalism?

Casey: It’s just a different kind of pressure. On a normal shoot, we have about three hours of downtime to find the best hour-long discussion we can have. When it’s live, you only get one shot.

KEVIN: It’s hard to convey how small and cramped our normal 100 square foot studio is to an audience in a fancy theater.

How do you decide what to wear during an event?

KEVIN: We try to have an eclectic mix on stage and find people we really enjoy talking to. This year we had the CEO of tech giant Satya Nadella from Microsoft; privacy and First Amendment activist and former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn; and two essayists, Daniel Kokotajlo and Sayash Kapoor, who disagree about the likelihood of near-term artificial intelligence “explosion of intelligence.” All of these people are interested in AI, but think about the benefits and risks extremely differently.

Casey: I want to talk about things that the audience is already talking about. That’s the fun part of the weekly show – you get to be in the mix.

Tech companies and the news media can sometimes have an adversarial relationship. How do you navigate this to get the most out of your conversations and take people off their standard topics?

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast that makes sense of the rapidly changing world of technology. Subscribe and listen.

KEVIN: I think most tech executives appreciate that our job as reporters is to ask tough questions, and we generally don’t mind as long as the questions are fair and informed.

We try to ask people questions they haven’t answered a thousand times before. I’d also like to introduce a bit of chaos at the beginning of the interview as a way to start on a less predictable path – this year I gave Satya Nadel a sweatshirt commemorating the release of Sam Altman in 2023 and showed Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, a Facebook message he wrote to me as a teenager in 2009 after reading my book.

Casey: Most managers we talk to have years of media training and it can be hard to break through that shell. So I usually head into our conversations and try to understand how he thinks. They won’t actually tell you what’s next on their product roadmap or if they’re going to settle that lawsuit. But they tend to be more open about describing their decision-making process or predictions about how AI will change the workforce. I try to direct them to questions along these lines.

Speaking of lawsuits: The Times sued OpenAI, Microsoft and Confusionand accused them of copyright infringement. Does this affect your approach to covering AI, especially when interviewing the CEO of Microsoft?

KEVIN: Frankly, it doesn’t really inform the news, except when the CEOs of AI companies bring it up as a cudgel against us — which OpenAI’s Sam Altman did at last year’s “Hard Fork Live,” even though he doesn’t know that neither Casey nor I have anything to do with The Times’ legal team. We post every episode, including the lawsuits, as usual, but they don’t count otherwise. We asked Satya the same questions we would have asked him in a world without litigation.

Casey: I was hoping to get Satya to settle the lawsuit live on stage. Unfortunately we only had 30 minutes.

You mentioned Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap from OpenAI surprised you on stage last year and ask questions about the lawsuit. How do you prepare for unexpected moments?

KEVIN: We work with the amazing events team at The Times who are great at planning unexpected moments. They tell us things like, “Here’s what to do when someone’s rushing the stage,” and we mostly ignore them because you can’t do a good live show if you’re constantly imagining worst-case scenarios.

Casey: I sincerely pray for unexpected moments. When Sam and Brad stormed the stage last year, I knew we had a show.

What is your duty to fact-check guests or push them back in real time?

KEVIN: Our audience is smart and sophisticated, and we’d rather ask our guests the questions we really care about, including lots of dismissive and tough questions, than put on some journalistic kabuki act to prove we’re tough enough.

Casey: We’ve found that if you ask people enough questions, that’s often enough to get you new messages. We will utter obvious nonsense. But if they dodge or pretend, our audience is almost always smart enough to see through it.

What was the most memorable interview for you this year?

KEVIN: Satya Nadella is very smooth and polished, as you’d expect from the CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company, but he’s also cool and has a nice mischievous streak that I think came out during the interview.

Casey: The show was fairly heavy on techno-optimism, and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought a dash of skepticism to the whole affair. There were at least four rounds of applause for her during the relatively short 20-minute interview.

What do you learn about your audience from these events?

KEVIN: They are so cool and smart and perfect. It became a bit of a joke in the photo line after the show how much more impressive all of our listeners are than we are. Everyone who introduced themselves said, “I’m a biotech executive” or “I founded a tech literacy nonprofit” or “I’m developing new cancer drugs.” And we’re like, “Oh great, we’re doing a podcast, nice to meet you.”

Casey: I loved hearing the lengths people went to get tickets. When they went to the sale, they went off the road; buying them for their parents’ birthdays; finaging a few after they were sold out. Seeing people go through all that just to hear Kevin Roos speak… personally I would never do that.

You can listen to parts 1 and 2 of the “Hard Fork” live performance below. The next episode will be posted on Friday.