Hard Fork

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are two of the sharpest tech reporters working today, and Hard Fork is where they let their guard down a bit. The show comes out twice a week from The New York Times, and each episode runs about an hour. They break down the biggest stories in tech, but what makes it stick is how honest they are about what confuses them, too. Roose spent years covering Silicon Valley for the Times and literally wrote a book about AI anxiety. Newton ran Platformer, one of the most influential independent tech newsletters around, before joining the show full-time. The format is loose and conversational. They'll riff on something like an OpenAI boardroom meltdown for twenty minutes, then pivot to interviewing a robotics researcher or a government regulator. There's real reporting underneath the banter. They chase down sources, pull in internal documents, and actually push back on their guests. It's not a softball interview show. What keeps listeners coming back -- and the show has over 5,000 ratings on Apple Podcasts with a 4.3 average -- is the chemistry between the two hosts. They genuinely disagree sometimes, and they're not performing conflict for content. Roose tends to be more cautious and measured; Newton is quicker to call things out. That tension makes the analysis sharper than most roundtable tech shows. If you want to understand what's actually happening in AI, social media, and Big Tech without getting buried in jargon or hype, Hard Fork is one of the best options out there right now.