It was the X post that lit up a thousand tech journalists’ phones. On Thursday, The New York Times’ local chatbot seducer (opens in new tab) Kevin Roose announced (opens in new tab) on X that he and Platformer founder Casey Newton are stepping down as hosts of the popular weekly Times podcast “Hard Fork” after their final shows in August. Roose will be leaving the paper entirely, and he and Newton plan to launch their own media company, with a new podcast with a new name focused on, you guessed it, AI. 

The news left some in the small San Francisco bureau of the Times stunned, since the company has spent months and, according to one source, more than half a million dollars, converting a large conference room into a new video studio for “Hard Fork.” The video studio is still not finished. But some Timesians in the San Francisco bureau were not surprised. 

According to multiple sources, word had been going around that deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick had asked Newton and Roose to ramp up to two shows a week, but hadn’t met their salary requests to make it worthwhile.

But reached for comment on vacation, Newton said that wasn’t really it. “The main thing was just that Kevin and I wanted to start a company together. Platformer has been really fun and we think this will be too.” Roose declined The Waggle’s request for comments on the move. 

Dolnick and Tech Editor Pui-Wing Tam reportedly (opens in new tab) told staff that the company will “immediately”  look for new hosts for the show. It will be impossible to recreate the exact friendship vibes that Newton and Roose strike, but The Waggle’s preferred pairing would be X power user and punk music fan Mike Isaac and the delightful investigative reporter Sheera Frankel, but of course we are not in charge. Insiders suspect there will be internal auditions. Everyone The Waggle spoke to assumed the name of the podcast will change.

The announcement comes only a week after “Hard Fork’s” sold-out live show at the Yerba Buena Center, which got decidedly mixed reviews from audience members who spoke to The Waggle. Running at nearly 3½ hours, the show induced many attendees to depart halfway through, after being bored by rushed segments, including one with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Attendees were particularly irked to be “held hostage” through a long, IBM-sponsored segment after shelling out $150 to the Times for the tickets. “How much money does the Times really need?” asked one. 

Well, it has to pay off that new video studio, folks.

In perhaps the most San Francisco screening of all time, a few dozen select guests gathered at the Alamo Drafthouse in the Mission on Wednesday for a private showing of “Whispers,” one of the first-ever AI-generated, interactive TV shows. An audience of a few dozen — including two early OpenAI employees, a cofounder of Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and multiple Emmy voters — settled into cushy seats and pulled up their phones to engage in a live chat that shaped the progression of the animated murder mystery in real time. (Thanks to repeated prodding by the audience, the main character ultimately extracted a confession from the murderer by launching into NBA player Allen Iverson’s (opens in new tab) “practice” speech (opens in new tab).) 

In attendance were producers Stephen Piron and Cole Clifford, founders of the AI media company Pickford (opens in new tab) (and creators of one of the world’s first viral deepfakes (opens in new tab)), as well as creator Bernie Su. The trio have been on a screening tour that included Sundance, Cannes, and the famous Sony Pictures Studios lot in Los Angeles. Piron said the San Francisco audience was fun, but not nearly as “unhinged” as the one at the L.A. screening or as raucous as the London one. “The London audience, they’re pretty drunk,” he said. “They get raunchy.”

Olympic gold medalist and Sea Cliff resident Eileen Gu graduated from Stanford this past weekend, as did “PST” podcast guest and author Theo Baker, who took down the university president as a freshman and then wrote a bestselling burn-book about it. 

Celeste Amadon (opens in new tab), co-founder of dating app Known, did not graduate from Stanford this weekend, but she did walk at Stanford’s graduation — cap, gown, and all. Amadon dropped out a year ago to build Known, which uses voice-based chat in place of swiping, but returned to campus this week to sneak into the celebration. “The people were always the point,” she wrote on X. The Waggle salutes her commitment to having it both ways — the startup street cred of dropping out and the graduation pictures.