Well, Casey, we picked a hell of a week to take off last week. Boy, did we. And thanks to all the listeners who wrote in asking us how dare we take any time away during a very busy and important time in the world of technology.
Yeah. And to those listeners, we have one message, which is this is our last show. We heard you. We hear your frustrations and so we are stepping down in shame. One-star Apple podcast reviewers, your words have finally paid off. This will be the last you ever have to deal with the likes of us.
So, there has been just an enormous amount of news in AI over the past week or so. It seems like this conversation about AI doom, AI risk, existential threats from AI has really gone from sort of our bubble to a much larger bubble that includes politicians and just random people in my life who have been texting me asking things like, "Are we all going to die for real?" So, let's talk about all of this. It has been one of the fastest, most sudden shifts I've ever experienced.
Yes. And I hope if you're a longtime Hard Fork listener, you've been feeling somewhat vindicated over the past few weeks because I know Kevin and I have, right? Like we have been trying to bring you stories about this almost ever since we started the show nearly four years ago and just within the past couple of weeks, it seems like there was some kind of inflection point and the vibe has shifted toward AI safety. Totally. So let's talk about what has been going on and what we feel about it. But first, since this is a conversation about AI, let's do our disclosures one last time for old time's sake.
Kevin, for the next 48 hours, I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, and my fiancée works at Anthropic. Okay, so let's kind of do a speedrun through the AI news of the last two weeks. The first sort of domino that I think really started to fall here was the now-viral resignation post of Jacob Coxin, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, who went online last week and publicly announced that he was stepping down, saying that neither company, OpenAI or Anthropic, is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. This kicked off a firestorm of attention, follow-on posts from other AI insiders saying, "We agree with him." People piling on and saying, "This guy is crazy."
But people basically, from what I saw, were saying, "Yeah, this is what we've all been talking about for years now." And in one group chat of Anthropic employees seen by the New York Times, one employee wrote that Jacob took the group chat public, and that's a good thing. Yeah. I mean, it was so fascinating to watch his response. And I have to tell you, this was a moment where I felt like, oh no, I really am in a bubble in a bad way because when I read his post, it did not faze me. Like this, like what Jacob said, as important as it is, is also like the median dinner table conversation in many households across San Francisco, including mine, on many evenings. And so when I first saw it, I was like, "Oh, okay. He's decided to opt out." What I didn't count on, I think, Kevin, was that the response to that OpenAI Hugging Face incident has really gotten people thinking differently about these sort of things. And so, I think people are just much more prepared to receive this message today than they were even a few weeks ago.
Totally. And I had the same realization about the bubble that we live in here in the Bay Area when I saw a follow-up post from one of Jacob Coxin's former co-workers at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, who sort of, you know, quote-tweeted his post and said, "I also believe that AI could kill all humans." And he attached a specific probability to it. He said, "I think there's a greater than 10% chance that this could happen." And my reaction to that was that's it. Like for me in the world that we travel in, people who have a p(doom) of 10% are considered somewhat optimistic. Like among the AI researchers at the labs that I've been talking to and interviewing, people have much higher probabilities that all this could go badly. And yet that number seemed to register on a scale that I had not fully appreciated. People are saying, "Wait a minute. These people are racing to build something that they think could have a 10% or more chance of killing us all. Why are they doing that? They should stop doing that."
Yeah. And I think maybe it's worth pausing for a beat, Kevin, on some of the logic here, not just in Jacob's post, but in some of the follow-on posts that you mentioned, because I think if maybe you just saw that post and didn't dig any deeper, you might be inclined to dismiss this as just more AI doom from a bunch of cultists. But I mentioned that OpenAI Hugging Face attack a little bit ago and I think it's really important here because as you heard Ajay Agrawal say on a recent episode, there was something surprising about how misaligned these AI systems are even in their current state, which the researchers still see even today as somewhat primitive compared to where we think they are going to be in six months or a year. Right? And what I heard Ajay say was, look, we sort of assumed we would start to see this kind of scary collaboration between agents sacrificing themselves for each other. We thought that might come, but we thought it was going to come much later. So that's sort of like pillar one, I think, of what's going on here. Pillar two is all of the big labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, they are racing toward recursive self-improvement and they're putting out posts that are trying to say in a very gentle way, the new models look like they're kind of getting there. We're already using these models to build the next version of the models. Like if you believe that recursive self-improvement is a spectrum, we're kind of getting ever closer to like the genuine article. And so if you have this unsolved alignment problem and you have imminent recursive self-improvement, then you might actually have a problem. And so I think it totally makes sense that some people would quit over it.
Totally. And I think the vibe has also shifted inside these companies where like until maybe three or four months ago, there were teams at these companies of safety researchers, alignment researchers who were very worried about the risks. But there were also teams that were not as worried about the risks. There were teams that just worked on improving the capabilities of the models or researching new breakthroughs who were sort of like at odds with the safety researchers even in their own companies. And what I think we've seen over the past few weeks is that that has shifted where now even the people who are sort of the optimists, the accelerationists inside these companies, the people working on capabilities are getting spooked by how quickly the systems are improving.
Absolutely. Now, should we talk about the reaction from the leaders at the big labs in the wake of all of these discussions that were kicked off?
Yes. So, on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei released a 3,800-word essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier" where he called for essentially a global coordinated AI slowdown. I'll just read a few lines. He says we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast and we must make wise use of the time we gain. He proposes a few different ways to actually conduct this sort of coordinated slowdown. One of them is to put what he called embedded evaluators inside the major AI companies. He said that Anthropic was going to do this and not wait for the rest of the industry or regulators to force them to. So they are going to have essentially metered groups who are actually given employee-level access to their internal systems who can kind of sit in their office and monitor their systems on an ongoing basis for signs of dangerous capabilities or mischief in the models.
Yeah. And this is based on something that we already do at banks, for example, and I think it is a great idea. And notably, other leaders came forward and said that essentially they were going to follow suit. And among them was Sam Altman from OpenAI, who famously does not have a good relationship with Dario Amodei.
No, these dudes hate each other. They never agree on anything. And yet Altman, to his credit, came out and said we are going to do the same thing.
Yes. This to me was the part that felt like, oh, we are in a new era of this stuff when like even Sam and Dario can agree on the need for a coordinated global slowdown. You know that things have gotten quite serious. But also Elon Musk, who is, you know, engaged in a protracted legal battle with OpenAI and who does not, you know, have a great history with Dario and Anthropic either, and also I would just say is not a big platform safety guy in general. Yeah.
Right. He also sort of co-signed Dario's statement. Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind said that he agreed with the need for a coordinated global slowdown too. So what we saw essentially is all the leaders of the sort of frontier or frontier-ish AI companies coming together to say in more or less unison things are moving too fast. We need to slow down and we not only need to slow down ourselves but we need to be slowed down. Some government or coalition of governments needs to put in place a coordination mechanism whereby we can sort of all press the big red button to slow down together. Yes.
Now, unfortunately though, we live at a time when for very understandable reasons, no one trusts the tech companies to have our best interests at heart. Everyone suspects them of doing constant marketing hype. And we have a government that is relying on the AI industry to prop up the entire American economy. And so the world that I hoped that we might have lived in, which is a bunch of lawmakers coming forward and saying, "Hey guys, thanks for sounding these alarms. We're going to get right to work on some regulations that will prevent you from building an out-of-control AI system." Instead, we got a bunch of leaders, starting with President Trump, who essentially said, "All of this is ridiculous." So yes, the Trump administration and many leading Republicans are very skeptical of all this doom talk, but there have been people who have rallied to try to do some sort of regulation in the wake of these statements. Politico reported that there are more than 100 Democrats urging Republican House leaders to keep them in session until they pass some meaningful bipartisan AI safeguards. There are other members of Congress, including some Republicans, who have been taking this quite seriously. So, I don't think it's quite as polarized as you're implying that it is, but you're right. It is generally Democrats who are more worried about the AI safety concerns and Republicans in the Trump orbit who are less concerned about it.
Yeah. And the Times had a great story this week about all of the proposals to regulate AI that have been introduced into Congress. Right. It is the case that members of Congress are introducing bills. It's just also the case that we have a Congress that very rarely if ever passes any sort of technology-related regulation. And when the president has already sort of come out and said we don't need any of this, the odds of a veto seem quite high. Yeah. So now we're in this moment where you have the AI company leaders calling for a coordinated slowdown. The public is really freaked out about this. I mean, you know, just to take, you know, my own experience as a proxy, like I have been just inundated with, you know, requests to go on TV and radio and friends and relatives and people I worked with two jobs ago texting me and saying like, "What is going on here? Should we be worried?" I do think this has broken through in a way that other kind of AI risk stories have not. Even the Hugging Face incident on its own did not seem to reach this level of concern. So it feels like something is swelling here. And I think it's going to be tough for President Trump and people in his orbit to maintain that there is nothing to worry about here when so much of the country, including many Republican voters, are concerned.
Yeah. From the administration that brought you "don't worry about COVID-19," comes "don't worry about the rogue agent swarms." Ooh, I wonder what happens next, Kevin. So, Casey, what do you think about this moment? Are you sort of skeptical? Are you feeling more optimistic now that people are talking about this more? Like, where has your head been in the weeks since Jacob Coxin resigned?
Well, listen, if you're, you know, a journalist who has opinions online, one of the best things that can happen to you is that you say something many years ago and then eventually the rest of the world starts to agree with you. And this is sort of what I think is happening right now. Right? We have been talking for years about the fact that these systems were developing very quickly, that the alignment problem was unsolved, and that eventually we might just get to some threshold where we started to see catastrophes in the real world. As we've said before, we are very lucky that this Hugging Face attack that has so captivated the world ultimately did not result in a lot of like harm. It didn't physically harm anyone. And I think Hugging Face the company is, you know, going to be perfectly fine. But it did start to wake people up to so many of the dangers that we are describing. So I think the question is are we able to get from this current moment to some real safeguards here in the United States or will it just unfortunately take something even worse happening to finally get the elected officials of this country to get a law passed. I have to say I have been feeling unexpectedly optimistic in the last couple of weeks. Like I think around the time of the Hugging Face hack, my worry about AI was really climbing. Like I was really feeling like we might be screwed. It might be too late to rein in these, you know, recursively self-improving agent swarms that are going out and creating these persistent botnets and doing all kinds of malicious things. And I'm still worried about that. But I think this sort of call for a slowdown especially among these rival AI leaders who, you know, most of the time do not like each other and agree with each other on much and are racing to build this technology. I think the fact that they are now willing to say in public what many of them have been saying in private for years is a good thing. I think it gives the permission for their own employees to start speaking out about their concerns. I also think it gives lawmakers permission to take this more seriously because it is rare that an industry comes to Washington and says, "Please slow us down. We are out of control. We need you to regulate us before it is too late." That I really want to draw people's attention to that because this gets at the marketing hype conversation which is just constant everywhere I look online. It is costing these people something to say this, right? It is costing their companies money potentially to not be able to release these models at the cadence that they otherwise could, right? Maybe they do get all the way to RSI and everything is fine, right? Like these people are just sort of making a bet that it will go badly and they are asking for help. And you know, so much of the moment that we're living is just informed by the social media era and how badly everyone feels about it even today. And I think they're sort of applying the frame of like what a social media leader would say about this and like how we should trust them. And I really think people just need to start shifting their thinking, right? Because there was never a moment at Facebook when they were saying you have to slow us down with these recommendation algorithms because we're getting people too addicted, right? It just never happened. That obviously would have had a cost to them. I'm just telling you this has a cost to these companies, too.
It does. And I am heartened that the sort of "it's all marketing hype" conversation while it is still out there, I'm not hearing as much of it around this because I think it is just obvious to most people that there is no self-interest in calling for your own company and all of your rivals to slow down. Well, let me ask you about another argument that gets made and Mark Zuckerberg did a post several days after everyone else where he sort of weighed in on this and one of the things that he said was like look we already have product liability laws in this country and that should be enough to truly rein us in right if like we release an agent swarm and it I don't know destroys your business we'll get in trouble and so that is the reason why you should expect us to you know pace ourselves. I would find that argument much more convincing if it came from literally anyone other than Mark Zuckerberg, who has unleashed harmful technology on the world for decades, despite the fact that there are product liability laws, despite the fact that Meta itself has been successfully sued for billions of dollars for causing harm with its products. In that case, it does not appear to have reined them in or made them more cautious about releasing anything. So I would just say like not the right messenger even if I think the message itself has some merit. But I also think like it is just unrealistic to think that our existing product liability laws, that our existing consumer protection laws are capable of meeting this moment. Like we really do need new laws. We have not ever had any technology like this before that is capable of acting autonomously, of committing crimes potentially on its own with no human intervention. And I'm just struggling to see how we're going to kind of crowbar our existing legal frameworks to cover this new technology.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think the thing that is most like affecting me that I've been coming back to and you know frankly maybe this is hopium like I'm not sure whether I am just looking for reasons to be optimistic but to me this past week or two really does feel like the part in the movie where humanity kind of bands together to save itself right you have these sort of weird alliances these unlikely sort of common cause situations with the major AI labs coming out and saying actually we're going to put the public interest and humanity's future above our own bottom lines.
Like in the movie Armageddon where and I'm not actually going to go look up the synopsis of Armageddon and I haven't seen it in about 30 years but what I remember is they say we are going to go land on that asteroid that's coming toward the earth and we're going to blow it up with a nuclear weapon even if Bruce Willis might die in the process.
Exactly. Spoilers for Armageddon. So this is roughly where I feel we might be like we might have this kind of golden opportunity now. This window where people are open to talking about existential risk from AI like that has now moved firmly inside the Overton window. And I think there is a willingness to tackle this and it hasn't yet fully polarized. I'm sure it will. Like I'm sure this will sort of be sorted into the narrow partisan lanes that we sort everything into, but right now like the past week or two, it just feels like people are more open to debate and discussion. And that's good. Like this technology should not be developed in secret by a very small group of people in San Francisco. Like this is too powerful and too important to be left to the insiders. We actually do need more of a collective effort around this. Let me toss one last idea in here, which is maybe for some reason you just completely trust OpenAI to get this right and you trust Anthropic and you trust Meta and you trust xAI and all of the other American companies. You think that they're going to do a great job pacing themselves. Something that I think people forget too much about large language models is that everyone has the recipe. Everyone knows how to build a large language model. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean you can afford to build a frontier model. You might not have the compute, you might not have the chips, but over time it's becoming easier and easier and cheaper and cheaper to train these models. And so my question is when you look at the OpenAI Hugging Face attack and you assume that before long some random collection of six or seven knuckleheads in some random country can get together their own sort of rogue agent swarm and actually keep control over it and send it out into the world to do harm. Why are you trusting them, right? And why are you trusting that they will eventually stop before they get to recursive self-improvement, right? So, you can't just think of this as an American problem because the cat is out of the bag. This is not just like Apple and only Apple knows how to make an iPhone. Other people know how to make this stuff too and they are making it right now.
Yes. And I think this is why it's so important to act now. While there are only a handful of organizations that have the resources and the expertise and the trade secrets to build the most advanced versions of these models, like you actually want there to be a coordinated action when there are only five sort of quasi-frontier labs rather than having this technology be open and distributed to everyone and available to anyone with a PC. So I think that's the argument for acting now. I know there are some people who want to wait until there's something truly catastrophic that happens or who think we might be, you know, firing our warning shots too early. But in my view like this is when it matters because if you act now when this technology is still quite scarce and the expertise and the resources to build it are quite scarce you can actually set the standards for the future and you can prevent there from being widespread distributed mass harms down the road. Let me ask you another criticism that gets made which is that this is the frontier labs that are trying to close the frontier. They're going to the government and they're saying put really onerous regulations on us now that no startup could possibly achieve and that way it will ensure that only we are allowed to build this technology and profit from it.
Yeah, I don't really buy this because if you actually look at some of the proposals that these organizations have made for new regulation, they would only apply to the organizations at the frontier or above a certain size. They're not going to stop the student hobbyists and tinkerers from training large language models down the road. And I think that kind of caution and discernment is important in these regulations. Like I don't think there's anything wrong with starting the regulatory push with the big companies. You know, if you're regulating the safety standards for airlines, you want to start with the major airlines before you get down to the people building planes in their garages because that is what most people use to travel through the air and that is where the safety standards matter most.
I think it's a great point. I think this is basically a fake criticism. I think it sounds really good because you sort of sound like the most red-blooded capitalist American when you make this point, but in practice, most internet businesses are winner-take-most businesses. Like most of these industries do not have more than four or five big players. So if you think that there were going to be like 17 companies that look like OpenAI, that is just like completely ahistorical.
Totally.
Yeah. Well, I'm glad this wound up being our final AI segment, Kevin, because I do feel like so many of the themes that we've talked about for the past four years all come together on this particular story. It is a momentous time and there will be many big stories to come. But if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it's if we tell you that something is important, three years from now, people will start to agree with us. Except the metaverse. You can ignore us on that one. But the rest of it, all true.
The metaverse did not have legs.
Well, Casey, since this is our final episode of Hard Fork, we wanted to answer some questions from our beloved listeners and viewers. And you all sent in some great questions. We're excited to tackle them. Some are about the show, some are about technology or AI. And we wanted to do this with our producer, Whitney Jones, who has been with the show since Whitney, how long have you been here? Two years, three years.
Two and a half years. Two and a half years.
A long time. And so Whitney, come on in and let us know what our listeners and viewers have sent in.
They're turning the tables on us.
They're saying we're going to do the question asking for once. Hello, Whitney.
I'll be asking the questions here.
You will be asking the questions and Whitney will be asking the questions. Yeah. So yeah, let's get right into it. The first question is some form of what's going on? What's next for you guys? What's happening to Hard Fork in this feed?
Well, I don't see how that's any of your business, but I'll answer it anyway. As for Kevin and I, we have a new show. It's called Machine Gods. We're doing it in partnership with NPR, and it is going to launch next month, the week of October 19th, and going to be on the airwaves, actually, starting early next year. So, we're really excited about it. We think if you liked Hard Fork, you may also like what we're doing over at Machine Gods. And if you want to get a taste, there is a trailer up now wherever you get your podcasts. And you can find links over at machinegods.fm.
And as for what is coming for Hard Fork next, we know that Hard Fork is going to continue. My amazing colleagues at the New York Times will have some exciting tech and AI coverage coming to this feed soon. So stick around for that. We're very excited about that. We think it's going to be great. And if you want to keep hearing from the two of us in the meantime, you can do that over at Machine Gods.
We're starting a business, Casey. Yep. God help us.
God help us. Machine Gods, help us. Okay. Next question is, we got from listeners Scott and Karen, and they sent in a little audio message for us. So, I'm going to play that now.
and we met at Hard Fork Live this year. And much like us, you two have amazing chemistry. So, our question is, how did you two meet?
And how did you decide to do a podcast together?
We love you so much. Thank you for making our favorite podcast.
It feels like the end of an era.
Wow. Is that real? Did they meet at our live show and get together? Hard Fork bringing people together. Assuming that what we think we just heard is true. That's wonderful news.
Wonderful news. We will officiate the wedding. I'm just putting it out there.
And that is not an idle threat. Here's another fun behind the scenes. In fact, Kevin has agreed to officiate my wedding next year.
Yes, I have. I asked you many months ago.
but I accept.
Well, let me answer the question as far as how Kevin and I met. You may know the notorious German club and bathhouse Berghain. Kevin and I have never been there. Where we actually met was at a book party that our friend Evan threw for his book Young Money. And I remember being so annoyed that a man who was several years younger than me was already on his second book. But I found him very nice in person and Kevin and I became friendly. Because you know the San Francisco tech reporting scene is just like pretty small. So we just like see each other at events and stuff. We would talk to each other a lot about career stuff. And so we were friendly. But what I always say was that pre-Hard Fork Kevin was not somebody who I would call if I was having an emotional crisis. He was somebody who I would trust to give me career advice, but we were not in emotional crisis friendship territory at this point. He's the first person I call when I'm having an emotional crisis.
You got to stop doing that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we decided to start a podcast in part because we had both done our own individual podcasts. You had a podcast at The Verge. I had done this show called Rabbit Hole at the New York Times. And we loved the audio medium. We thought it was so great for like connecting with an audience and telling stories and doing journalism, but something about doing it on our own just felt lonely. And so when we were talking about doing a show, we wanted to do it together. And we pitched the New York Times on this crazy idea where I would team up with this rogue newsletter writer, Casey Newton, and we would talk about the tech news of the week, and they said, "No, thank you." But then Kara Swisher left her show, and there was an empty feed, and we swooped in and saved the day.
Yeah. Many many things had to go right for me. I feel like I had to get tremendously lucky for any of this to happen and I truly am just so grateful that it did.
Okay, next up, Phoebe wants to know, "How do you decide on your opening anecdote/bit? Do you think about it all week? Do you argue about who has a better one?"
So sometimes I feel like if we're having a good week, we will write down little things, little peek behind the curtain. We call those the cold opens, little podcast lingo for you. And I want to say that those were actually an invention of our first producer, Davis Land. He just decided when he was sort of putting the first show together that it would be good if you heard the two of us talking about something other than the main news of the week. And that I think sort of started this trend of like the show kind of starting with a laugh. Which kind of did become kind of a signature element of it. And was something that we really liked. Kevin, do you think about yours all week?
I do actually. I have a little folder in my notes app where I keep my little sort of jots of ideas and often I will like not say something to you on Saturday because I know that when Wednesday comes around like I want to save it for the cold open. And these are not like scripted. They're just like things that happen to me that I would otherwise write in my, you know, journal or tell to my wife or someone, but instead I save them for you. And I think they actually serve a useful purpose in making the show which is because they are completely unscripted. It just we and we do start every episode by recording them. It just puts us in the mindset of two friends who are talking to each other which is who we always want to sound like when we were making the show that we started the show because we were already talking about the stuff. We want to do it on in front of microphones and for some other reasons. But when we start with the cold opens it just kind of helps get us in that mindset.
Right. And a little more behind the scenes on that. We usually record like I don't know 10 minutes, 15 minutes of those and then our wonderful producers select the funniest ones or the least unfunniest ones.
I was about to say there is almost because one of the questions is do you ever argue about who has a better one? There's almost never more than one usable one. Every once in a while there are two and in those cases I truly just almost always just do whatever the producers think is funnier.
Next up, Philip. Philip teaches an undergraduate course on podcasting at a small liberal arts college in South Carolina and wants to know, "What advice would you give to undergraduate students who are about to begin a podcasting course? What's something really important about quality podcasting that's also probably the least well understood or unknown?"
I have a strong point of view on this, which is that the most important thing about a podcast is the way it makes you feel. And this is not how most news organizations approach podcasting. I would say they approach it from this sort of very journalism-first perspective. That leads to a lot of really great podcasts by the way. And I do think that there is more than one way to make a great podcast. But I just noticed that with the podcasts that I was listening to, the thing that I was responding to was often less the content of the podcast and more the way I felt afterwards. Did I feel like the two people or the three people or the one person who was talking to me was trying to entertain me? Were they taking me into account? Did they seem like they themselves were having a good time? And if I left having a good time, then I wanted to keep coming back. And so that is just a spirit that I have tried to bring into what we do here at Hard Fork.
I think that's a great point. I would also add like I think editing is really important. People often talk about the show to us. They ask us, you know, how much of it is scripted? How much of it is planned? It is not scripted. It is not a scripted show. We are really here having a conversation. But we do have wonderful producers and editors who then sort of chop off the worst parts, the most boring parts, maybe a place where a conversation lags or slows down too much, repeats itself. There are many podcasts today that don't do any of that, right? That just sort of they tape for an hour, they publish an hour. We have always felt like it is a valuable service and respectful of our listeners' time to not make you sit through like call it the bottom 10% of what we record. And so I think it's very important to actually partner with or be yourself a good editor who can go through and sort of find the places where things are slowing down or lagging and chop those out.
Can I add something from a production perspective?
Whenever I talk to students or young producers, I say like kindness is really important. There's a lot of churn in the industry and you will often rely upon people you're working with right now for future gigs and just being kind and like being known as somebody who like works well with other people will go a long way.
Lead asks, "What are your favorite podcasts?"
So I am a big history guy. That's very dad-coded of me. I like podcasts like The Rest Is History, Hardcore History, things like that. That's sort of what I listen to in the car on a long drive just for pleasure. I'm also a tennis fan. So I listen to Served, a podcast by Andy Roddick that is quite good. What about you?
Well, yeah. Something else I believe about podcasts is that your favorite podcast is usually about something that you care a lot about but no one else in your life cares about. Right. The reason I don't listen to many tech podcasts is because everybody in my life is talking to me about tech at all times. You know what? They're not talking to me about professional wrestling. Which is why there are four pro wrestling podcasts on my podcast app at least. Yes, there are so many of them and they make me feel connected to something that I otherwise would not be connected to. Some other ones I love, I'll tell you the two podcasts that sort of gave me the most inspiration as we were planning what Hard Fork would be were Pod Save America and Lost Tistas. Shows that are very much about the relationship between people and make you feel like you were hanging out with very cool, smart, funny people. So I just love those. I'm also an incredibly longtime listener to the Savage Lovecast. I think Dan Savage is just one of the absolute best in the business. Of course I listen to Ezra Klein. Because you have to if you want to understand the world and he's the greatest. And yeah, so those are some and then one more that I would mention and this is like the show that is the least like Hard Fork and yet the one that like in some ways I admire the most and that's Search Engine with PJ Vogt. Truly the arrival of every new episode of Search Engine like is an event in my life. I stop everything and I listen to it. They're just doing such amazing work over there.
Yeah. Well, that's a great segue into the next question from Sheena who wants to know what is the beef with Ezra Klein? Every time that you guys bring him up on your show, there's been some crack made about him. The last one I recall was about there being vodka bottles in his studio. Here's the thing about Ezra Klein.
He's the smartest person in the world.
He's incredibly good-looking.
And he's a world-class podcaster. And for all of those reasons, we must pretend to hate him.
Like The Onion used to do this bit where they took a sort of pre-presidency Joe Biden and tried to make him seem like he was this kind of low-key grifter who was like always working on his Camaro like in the front of the White House that like because Ezra actually is the coolest person in the world like the only way I can think about to talk about him is to actually just like turn him into a different character who always just sort of has vodka bottles lying around the studio, you know? But um.
He's also infuriatingly nice.
What is going on? We must stop him.
No, there is just so much inspiration you can take from that human being. So yes, Ezra is the greatest.
Yeah, but also horrible drunk. Horrible drunk.
Peter wants to know how much of the show is scripted. And now he goes into all caps and says, "And are your scripts in all caps like the ones for The Daily that Michael Barbaro sometimes shares? By the way, you project your voices. I'm inclined to think so."
So the show is not scripted. We do not script anything. We do have these prep documents that we use to get ready for the show. And sometimes that'll have things like, you know, facts and figures or quotes from a news story that we want to make sure to hit. Our producers spend a lot of time putting those documents together. They are quite helpful, but we never read from them. We want it to feel like and to be an authentic conversation between people and we do not use the all-caps style that The Daily uses because that stresses me out too much. There was a big conversation when we were starting the show about whether we should use an outline or not. And we tried it without using an outline where it was just truly like the two of us talking about the week's big stories and it was horrible. It was incredibly self-indulgent. We missed a million different things that like we should have included in the segment. And so then we would have to like go back and redo different parts. And so we found that what was best, not just like for us, but honestly just for the listeners was to work from an outline. So I like the outline format because you can do a lot of improvising within it, right? Like I sort of know the main beats that we're hitting. Sometimes it'll make me like think of a joke. It'll make me think of a question. So we're like I actually think of us as maybe like way less scripted than some people think that we are, but like also more scripted than others do, right? Because like we do have a very solid spine that our producers put together.
We're not scripted, but we're structured. That's how I would put it. Absolutely.
Mark from Ottawa wants to know, "Do you write your own jokes? Have NY Times staff do it or use AI?"
Yes, we have a team of joke writers, dozens of them, just in the writers' room scripting our jokes, which is why they're so consistently incredible. No, the truth is that we don't actually write too many jokes. Every once in a while when I finish preparing for the podcast, like if we're doing a roundup segment, like a ChatGPT or something, like I will actually try to think of jokes that I want to make, but most of it is just like happening in the room. Something I realized about myself in making the show, and you hear it in a lot of the interviews that we do, is that I get bored very easily. And the way that I make myself unbored is by trying to get Kevin to laugh. And so that is just where it came from from me was like trying to entertain myself while talking about material that otherwise might bore me. And yeah, so that's why that happened.
Yeah. And I'm happy to play the straight man in more ways than one and let Casey be the jokester. One of the reasons that I was so excited to start a podcast with you, Casey, is that I knew that you, in addition to being a journalist, also had done improv comedy for a long time. And I think this is actually the advice that I would give to young podcasters is go into improv comedy and do that for like 10 years before you start a podcast because it has been such an asset to our show that you are just incredibly quick on your feet and also have the kind of improv yes-and energy where we're like building on each other's comments and jokes and like it is just such good.
Unexpected training for podcasting and interviewing and all the other things that we do on the show. So no, we don't write our own jokes, but I would say we both come into it knowing that there are going to be opportunities for us to make jokes, and we think that's an important part of the show.
Yeah. Well, that's very nice of you to say. Kevin, thank you. Kevin is also incredibly funny. The laughs that you hear on the show are genuine. You know, the show is styled as a conversation between friends. Friends should make each other laugh, or otherwise what's the point?
I've gotten in trouble with my wife on occasion for like doing bits around the house. She's like, "You've been spending too much time with Casey, or like is that like a, you know, something from the podcast this week?" So it has unfortunately bled over into the rest of my life.
That's why it's important to give men a podcast, because if you just sort of give them a safe space to contain their bits, then you don't have to deal with their bits at home. So maybe think about that.
That's true. There is one joke that I wrote into a script this year that actually made it to the show, and it was like my, it was my proudest moment of the year. It was about the, it was when the government said they were going to investigate George Santos over his couchy betting, and I wrote, "It's always exactly the ones you expect," and it made it through outlining into the recording and into the show.
That is a great point. As the show went on, the producers did start writing jokes into the outlines, and often they would be very funny, and we did use some of their jokes on the show. So yes.
Barbara also has a question about the humor. She says, "I'm struck by how your humor always lands well." She said, "What I really want to know is how often you joke in ways that doesn't land well, that stings or hurts or leaves one of you defensive, but is edited out."
Look, our jokes do get edited out. We do go too far. There is a standards department here, and not everything we've ever said in our lives is in strict accordance with the New York Times standards desk. That said, I really do think you get, you do get to hear like 95% of it, right? I think we've been given, you know, pretty wide leeway here. Maybe, you know, one of the things this question is getting at is we clown on each other a lot. I don't feel like you have ever clowned on me in a way that actually upset me, because you're such a nice person that I just know you would never try to hurt me. But this feels like a good opportunity for me to ask you for the first time: have I ever hurt your feelings on accident?
No, I like, you know, I think we both take it very well, you know, and we both understand that like we are friends who love each other and would never purposefully hurt each other. And I think we're both good sports about it. So like when you make a joke about how I haven't filed a column in six weeks, like I used to actually feel like I had to defend myself against that, be like, "No, I have filed much more recently than that." But now I'm just like, it's fine. It's a bit. I know that he loves me. And yeah, I think we have a shockingly low amount of conflict for people who work as closely together as we do.
You know, one thing that we are always getting asked by listeners to the show is like, "Are you guys really friends?" Like when the microphones are off. And we are like, that is a true asset of the show is that we actually are friends and like each other and talk to each other outside the show. I don't think that is true for every show.
This was the surprise for me, because I just assumed if you've been doing a show with somebody for a long time, like there must be a good relationship. But then we hear the stories of like, oh, well, you know, they haven't spoken in six years. And so we just sort of folded this into our act now. So when we go around, like we will tell people that this is the first time that we're speaking off mic in several years. Always gets a laugh.
But we are like, we are good at managing conflicts. We do have conflicts. They sometimes happen behind the scenes.
I think you are very conflict-averse and easygoing. I am much more of like an anxious perfectionist. We have had conflicts over editorial things on the show. There was one conflict where you felt like I was taking on too much of the talking and not sort of throwing to you enough. Like I remember we hashed it out over lunch. Like I think we've been very good and mature about like bringing things up before they sort of fester and turn into a bigger thing.
A great gift that I have is that Kevin has been to therapy and so have I. And so like he just did a lot of the work before we started the show, and it has just made everything about our lives like we are just actually practiced at being like adult humans who can be in conflict with each other and successfully navigate to a resolution. Like if we had started this show in our 20s, I think Nightmare City.
