Kevin Roose is AGI-pilled. Why aren’t you?
The Verge Nilay Patel
Kevin Roose left the New York Times to launch Machine Gods, a video-first AI podcast with Casey Newton. He’s betting AI coverage needs a new format, not just more hot takes.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Nilay Patel — read the original for the full story.
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Kevin Roose has a new job title now: cofounder, co-host, and, thanks to a coin flip, CEO. He and Casey Newton have left The New York Times behind to launch Machine Gods, a podcast they want to make video-first and distribute widely, including on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Roose says the move is part creative experiment, part business bet, and part response to how AI coverage itself is changing around them.
The video part is not an afterthought. Roose says the show is built for YouTube, a platform he calls the most important media platform in the world right now and one that journalism has barely cracked. He argues that a podcast today can’t really ignore video, so Machine Gods will focus on how it looks as much as how it sounds. The goal is simple enough: make something people want to watch, not just hear, and figure out whether two middle-aged journalists can pull that off without embarrassing themselves.
He’s also unusually upbeat about the business side of all this. That’s not the cliché answer from a career journalist, and he knows it. But after years in a newsroom, Roose says he likes learning the founder stuff, even if he doesn’t enjoy every part of it, like negotiating insurance quotes for defamation coverage. He sees more media power shifting toward people who control both their audience and their business, and he’s clearly eager to be one of them.
That mindset spills into how he thinks about AI coverage too. Roose says the audience has split into camps: people who love the technology, people who hate it, and a growing middle that just wants to understand what’s happening. Machine Gods, he says, is aimed at that middle. Not the AI-utopia crowd, and not the “this is fake and will go away” crowd either. More like the people who are curious, a little uneasy, and tired of pretending this isn’t happening.
That same instinct is what pushed him to write The AGI Chronicles. Roose says he wanted to preserve a moment that could otherwise vanish, because the people building this stuff are inside private companies, their chats auto-delete, and they’re too busy chasing the thing to keep neat records. The book, then, is not just a report on AI’s recent boom. It’s a race against disappearing evidence.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Roose is right about the weird middle here: most people don’t want AI worship or AI panic, they want a usable map. That’s bad news for the loudest people in the room, which is probably why they’re so loud. The real story isn’t the hype cycle; it’s that the record is being written by people who keep deleting the evidence.
Read more about this at: The Verge
