What’s a Hard Fork?

Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore stories from the wild frontier of tech. What’s real? What’s hype? “Hard Fork” is here to help you make sense of it. Tune in every Friday.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your agents can talk to each other. They still can't think together. That's the gap Outshift by Cisco is closing. Outshift is Cisco's incubation engine, building the internet of cognition, shared intent, shared memory, and guardrails that allow agents to work together from anywhere. Open source protocols and code, a system for intelligence that scales. Read the paper and experience the demo at outshift.com. That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T.com. Casey, how would you describe our podcast Hard Fork to someone who's never heard of it before?

• 0:35Casey Newton?

  I'd say the premise of our show is, what if an esteemed technology columnist for the New York Times was constantly interrupted by his gay friend? And then we just kind of did that for an hour. No, it's a lot more than that. It's a show where we talk about the news.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  So Sam Bankman-Fried is having one of the worst weeks because this week he went to jail.

• 0:56Casey Newton?

  We'll go to a robot lab. Hello, Kevin and Casey. Ride around in self-driving cars.

• 1:01Kevin Roose?

  We're getting picked up in a car called Banana Slug.

• 1:03Casey Newton?

  And get creative with AI.

• 1:05Kevin Roose?

  Here's the prompt we gave ChatGPT. Give me a recipe for a cocktail that features all three of the following ingredients: kiwi hot sauce, lavender, and lime.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Oh my god, cheers.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  Woo!

• 1:15Speaker 03

  I've had worse cocktails. I'll be honest.

• 1:18Casey Newton?

  We talk to the biggest players in tech, like the CEO of Google.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  I do think it's a bit ironic that Microsoft can call someone as an 800-pound gorilla, given the scale and size of their company.

• 1:29Casey Newton?

  We're talking to schoolteachers, college professors, and listeners with real tech problems in their lives that need to be solved. Kate, should this person create a synthetic version of their beloved's voice and have it tell them that they love them? No, they should not.

• 1:43Kevin Roose?

  It's a conversation about tech and the future.

• 1:45Casey Newton?

  We're two friends, both reporters. We get together once a week to talk about the biggest stories in tech.

• 1:50Kevin Roose?

  And gossip a little, let's be real.

• 1:51Casey Newton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53Kevin Roose?

  You can find Hard Fork wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:56Speaker 03

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