“Hard Fork Live” was already running about 20 minutes behind schedule — security screening for the audience of 700 was going slower than expected — when Casey Newton got some bad news from his fellow host, Kevin Roose, about their star guest.
If they didn’t start soon, Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, was going to have to leave. “That gave me a nice jolt of existential terror that carried me through the next three hours,” Newton said.
Having taped their New York Times tech podcast live in San Francisco once before, a year ago, the hosts knew that unexpected twists and turns would be part of the bargain.
In the end, the Nadella interview went off as planned, as did conversations with other leaders from the tech world last week. A robot named Toby took a spill in the evening’s only minor disaster.
Roose and Newton joined me for a conversation about what it’s like to stage a live journalism event at a transformational moment in the technology 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: Both of us are theater kids at heart, so it’s always fun to bring a little show business to the podcast. We tried to have as many robots onstage this year as possible. I also think there’s something usefully messy about live journalism — it’s all out there on the stage, warts and all, in a way that makes it a little more fun.
CASEY NEWTON: We want to create the sort of big moment that makes you feel good about buying a ticket. So, to the robot that did a big dance this year and then dramatically fell over as if it had been shot — thank you.
What is the hardest thing to translate from the podcast to live journalism?
CASEY: It’s just a different kind of pressure. In a regular taping, we have a relaxed three hours or so to find the best hourlong discussion we can have. When it’s live, you only get one shot.
KEVIN: It’s difficult to convey just how small and cramped our normal, 100-square-foot studio is to an audience in a luxurious theater.
How do you decide what to cover during the event?
KEVIN: We try to have an eclectic mix onstage, and find people we genuinely enjoy talking to. This year, we had the chief executive of a tech giant, Satya Nadella of Microsoft; a 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 a near-term A.I. “intelligence explosion.” All of these people are interested in A.I., but they think about the benefits and risks extremely differently.
CASEY: I want to talk about the things the audience is already talking about. That’s the fun part of a 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 interviews, and get people off their standard talking points?
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 it’s our job as reporters to ask tough questions, and generally don’t mind as long as the questions are fair-minded and informed.
We try to ask people questions they haven’t answered a thousand times before. I also like to introduce a little chaos early in the interview as a way to start off on a less predictable path — this year I gave Satya Nadella a sweatshirt commemorating the 2023 firing of Sam Altman, and showed Dylan Field, the chief executive officer of Figma, a Facebook message he wrote me as a teenager in 2009 after reading my book.
CASEY: Most executives we speak to have years of media training, and it can be hard to pierce that shell. So I generally head into our interviews trying to get a sense of how they think. They won’t really tell you what’s next on their product road map, or if they’re going to settle that lawsuit. But they tend to be more open when it comes to describing their decision-making process, or making predictions about how A.I. will change the work force. I try to steer them to questions in that vein.
Speaking of lawsuits: The Times has sued OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, accusing them of copyright infringement. Does that inform your approach to covering A.I., especially when interviewing Microsoft’s chief executive?
KEVIN: Honestly, it doesn’t really inform the coverage, except when the C.E.O.s of the A.I. companies bring it up as a cudgel against us — which Sam Altman of OpenAI did at last year’s “Hard Fork Live,” even though he knows neither Casey nor I have anything to do with The Times’s legal team. We do our usual disclosures every episode, which includes the lawsuits, but they don’t factor in otherwise. We asked Satya the same questions we would have asked him in a world with no lawsuits.
CASEY: I was hoping that I could get Satya to settle the lawsuit live onstage. Unfortunately we only had 30 minutes.
You mentioned Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap of OpenAI surprising you onstage last year and asking questions about the lawsuit. How do you prepare for unexpected moments?
KEVIN: We work with a wonderful events team at The Times who are great at planning for unexpected moments. They tell us things like, “Here’s what to do if someone rushes the stage,” and we mostly ignore them because you can’t throw a good live show if you’re constantly imagining worst-case scenarios.
CASEY: Honestly, I’m praying for unexpected moments. When Sam and Brad burst onto the stage last year, I knew we had a show.
What is your obligation to fact-check guests or push back in real time?
KEVIN: Our audience is smart and sophisticated, and would rather we ask our guests questions that we’re genuinely curious about, including plenty of pushback and hard questions, than perform some sort of journalistic Kabuki act to prove we’re sufficiently tough.
CASEY: We’ve found that if you ask people enough questions, it’s often enough to break news. We’ll call out the obvious nonsense. But if they’re dodging or dissembling, our audience is almost always smart enough to see right through it.
What was this year’s most memorable interview for you?
KEVIN: Satya Nadella is very smooth and polished, as you’d expect from the chief executive of a multitrillion-dollar company, but he’s also a great hang and has a nice mischievous streak that I think came out during the interview.
CASEY: The show was relatively heavy on techno-optimism, and Cindy Cohn, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, brought a bracing jolt of skepticism to the whole affair. There were at least four applause breaks for her during a relatively brief 20-minute interview.
What do you learn about your audience from these events?
KEVIN: They are so cool and smart and accomplished. In the photo line after the show, it became sort of a joke how much more impressive all of our listeners are than us. Every person who introduced themselves was like, “I’m a biotech C.E.O.” or “I started a tech literacy nonprofit” or “I develop new cancer drugs.” And we’re like, “Oh, cool, we host a podcast, nice to meet you.”
CASEY: I loved hearing about the lengths that people went to in order to get tickets. Swerving off the road the second they went on sale; buying them for a parent’s birthday; finagling a few after they were sold out. Seeing people go through all of that just to hear Kevin Roose speak … personally, I would never.
You can listen to parts 1 and 2 of the live “Hard Fork” event below. An additional episode will be published on Friday.
