New York Times’ Hard Fork goes live again in San Francisco

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are turning their New York Times tech podcast into a stage act that treats transparency as part of the product. Hard Fork Live first drew a crowd at SFJAZZ in San Francisco’s fine arts district, then returned to the Blue Shield of California Theater with a bigger guest list, a louder pitch and the promise of just enough disorder to keep the room guessing.

The appeal of the live show is not simply that fans can watch the hosts work. The Times framed the 2025 debut as a live recording for the Hard Fork feed, built around big ideas, tough questions, fun games, fascinating guests and audience participation. That structure mattered because Roose and Newton were not hiding the mechanics of the show. They were putting them on display, letting a crowd see the banter, the pivots and the improvisation that can be edited out of a studio episode.

The format returned on June 10, 2026, in what the Times billed as a second-ever live recording and a “supersized” evening of live interviews, music, mayhem and surprises. The announcement teased that last year “got weird,” with the kind of self-aware promotion that now travels well in creator-driven media, where audiences often want both analysis and a performance of how that analysis gets made. It also promised disclosures about A.I. lawsuits and Casey’s boyfriend, now fiancé, folding personal and legal stakes into the same public conversation.

By May 22, the guest list had filled out with a cross-section of the AI and tech world: Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn, AI Futures Project executive director Daniel Kokotajlo, Princeton researcher and AI author Sayash Kapoor, Figma chief executive Dylan Field, Dwarkesh Podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, Toborlife AI engineering director George Ekas and NODE executive director Phil Mohun. IBM backed the event as premier sponsor, with Everpure, Pure Leaf, the University of Notre Dame and Atlassian also attached as sponsors and partners.

The live shows point to a broader shift in tech journalism. Roose, a New York Times tech columnist and host of Rabbit Hole, and Newton, the founder and editor of Platformer, have embraced a format that makes reporting feel less sealed off and more accountable in real time. Nearly 700 people filled a sold-out San Francisco event the first time around, where a marching band, costume changes and a captive audience turned a podcast taping into something closer to civic theater than a standard broadcast.