Hard Fork - Podcast Rankings and reviews

Kara could teach a MasterClass on interviewing, both in terms of the guests she manages to book as well as the breadth and depth of topics discussed. Her conversational style puts guests at ease right up to the well timed moment where she throws in the uncomfortable question. Love this show and look forward to each new episode!

Delivers consistently on a wide range of relevant topics, providing in-depth reporting that showcases exceptional journalist integrity. The hosts skillfully distinguish between opinion and fact, ensuring a reliable and trustworthy listening experience. I’m truly grateful for the thought-provoking insights into today’s technology landscape. This podcast does an outstanding job of keeping me up to date and engaged. Five stars and a heartfelt thank you for the invaluable contribution!

*this review was enhanced by ChatGPT-4 🤯

This is now my favorite podcast by far. They do an excellent job talking to the tech news of the week and I feel very well informed as a result. That said, it’s also the absolute funniest podcast as Kevin and Casey are just a perfect team. The Dec 8th show had me in stitches as I was driving. Highly, highly recommended and just very well done.

As someone who is not deeply interested in tech… I’ve found myself, for some reason, absolutely hooked on this podcast. Kevin & Casey have great chemistry and are so witty and informative that I find myself becoming interested in topics that I didn’t even know existed before I found this podcast. Their witty banter is genuinely entertaining- I often find myself giggling along with them. Truly a gem that you don’t have to be in the tech industry to enjoy.

I came to this because one of the hosts made the podcast Rabbit Hole which I found incredibly informative and critical on all the things deserving criticism in the tech industry. This podcast, however, is just a soulless regurgitation of everything tech companies say about themselves, with barely any critical analysis or understanding that a massive amount of the tech world is scams or scam adjacent. For these guys, if it has AI in it, or if it’s a self driving car, or if it’s a new social media network, they love it and have practically nothing to say beyond positives about it. Even apps like twitter or companies like meta, who have long standing track records of emphasizing conflict and conspiracy theories to make money, and in doing so have invited genocides like the one in Myanmar and revolts like Jan 6, are perfect in their eyes and they always focus on how they “bring people together”, just saying the blatantly untrue PR talk that these companies put out themselves. In the latest episode they interview anti automated vehicle activists and disagree with them on everything, saying that public transport doesn’t work and “it’s just easier to call an Uber then anything else”, ignoring the fact that most people can’t do that since they’re really expensive and the whole argument of the activists was that this focus on cars in general is damaging our communities. Thought it would be better, but I guess they’re just as bought into the inherent good of all of these massively toxic companies as the people running the companies are. So yeah, don’t listen. Unless you just want to hear some mediocre jokes, whitewashing of awful companies and bad products, and a whole lot of wealthy tech bro privilege.

I generally enjoyed this podcast at first but I became extremely frustrated with her penchant for being snarky and sometimes rude to guests, almost acting as if her presence is just as important as the guest she is interviewing. What finally pushed me to write this review was the episode with Patrick Soon-Shiong. He was in the middle of a sentence about his journey developing Abraxane and was interrupted by Kara needing to point out he met with trump (a fact that was irrelevant to the conversation at hand). It completely derailed the conversation and they never returned to the topic so he could complete his train of thought, which I really wanted to hear. I was far more interested in learning about him bringing a novel cancer treatment to market than I was about the fact he declined a job with the trump administration. It turned an interesting conversation with an interesting person about the scientific and regulatory path to bringing a novel therapy to market into a political one for no reason (at least no meaningful reason that I could ascertain). I will now go do more research on my own to hopefully figure out what he was going to say before he was interrupted. Please stop derailing conversations with your guests.