Walt Mossberg & MKBHD Break Down The Art of the Tech Review
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Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We've got a special episode today, a conversation with Walt Mossberg and Marques Brownlee.

Walt is my mentor, former business partner, and dear friend. Before he retired in 2017, Walt was the finest tech reviewer on the planet. In fact, it felt like he was the only tech reviewer on the planet. And just to give you an idea of how influential he was, a few weeks ago, we had Senator Maria Cantwell on this show. She's a former tech executive, and before she answered the first question, the senator wanted to talk about Walt because, as she put it, all our product reviews lived or died by Walt Mossberg.

Marques, who's also known as MKBHD, is an independent content creator who specializes mainly in tech reviews. He's the host of the Waveform podcast on the Vox Media Podcast Network, and his YouTube channel has over 18 million subscribers. He's undoubtedly the most influential tech reviewer today, just as Walt was during his era, but these two have never met before.

Today, I'm happy to say I'm writing that wrong with the first ever Walt Mossberg-Marques Brownlee conversation. Our expert question comes from Joanna Stern. She's a senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal where she, you guessed it, reviews tech and was another Mossberg mentoree like me.

It is on. So I'm excited to do a joint interview with you two. This isn't quite Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but you two are the juggernauts of tech reviewing. So this is going to be excellent. Welcome. Thank you for coming. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Cool. So this is a lead to a Wired Magazine profile of Walt in 2004. Walt Mossberg is walking through the convention hall at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him. This man was Hugh Panero, the CEO of XM Satellite Radio, which is now Sirius XM. And he blamed you, Walt, for their falling stock price and a sudden plunge in consumer interest.

Well, you yelled back, I don't give a fuck about your stock price, which is the platonic ideal of a tech reviewer. Talk about what challenges you faced when you tried to live up to that ideal, besides being yelled at by tech CEOs at CES. Well, you know, I started my column in 1991, which was not the birth of the mass market personal computer, but it was the

It was roughly the moment when it began to spread in a big way to consumers. And my column was different than all the other columns that were out there at the time because I spoke in plain English or refused to use jargon. To this day, I don't think I ever – I mean, I wrote thousands of columns. I don't think I ever used the word milliamp. And the second way was –

I just focused clearly on

quality, ease of use, utility for the consumer. And I didn't care. I didn't, I never, I don't think in any of those columns, the word stock appears, the word market cap appears, the word earnings appear. None of those words appear. It's all product and it's all consumer and it's all about that. And so when I started, the challenges were, first of all, there were internal challenges and

Believe it or not, there was a significant amount of opinion among some of the editors that technology wasn't important enough to devote a column to. I'd been there 20 years covering Washington policy and all that, so they knew who I was, but they didn't think technology mattered. So that was the first thing that the top editor at the time is the one who pushed it through. And

and it became very popular very quickly, but the editors didn't see it. And then the companies went crazy. One of the earliest columns I wrote, and you know all about this, Cara, was I said, "AOL was the online service of the future. It was the one you should all join. Don't bother with Prodigy. Don't bother with CompuServe," which were the leaders at the time. And the head of Prodigy,

apparently appeared at the journal offices like a week later and demanded I be fired. Wow. So you had pushback from companies. Oh, there was a lot of pushback, which I had no, I didn't pay any attention to it. Marquez, 10 years after that profile, Wired Magazine called you a YouTube sensation and suggested you might become a media mogul.

And now you kind of are one, as Mr. Beast has said, quote, you're a video producer that decides what everyone in America buys. What challenges do you run into as the premier reviewer of tech these days? There's tons of reviewers. A lot of people have opinions. The power of reviewers has declined significantly, not just in tech, but movies and everywhere else. Yeah, I guess probably the most interesting part, since it is YouTube that we're talking about, is there are a

a ton of voices now. Like, anyone can review anything they have. But I think the challenge is when a phone comes out, for example,

I mean, there could be 50, 100 videos that day all about that device reviewing it. And so you kind of have to give people a good reason to watch yours instead of just reviewing it like anyone else. You kind of need this additional extra, you know, whether it's production value or entertainment value or something to give people a reason to look at your thing. So that feels like a little extra challenge on top of like just the regular review part of trying to be honest about a product.

And you also operate under different financial incentives. Walt and I eventually started our own thing. And even then, text is different than video, as you talked about. Talk about how creating content on YouTube affects the way you review products, because you do it a very similar way to Walt did, which is reporting, is what I would call it. It's hard.

Would you approach the job differently if you're writing tech reviews independently, say, on Substack, for example, which doesn't – I don't think there's a big tech reviewer on Subtac that I can think of off the top of my head. But how is that different? Because at the heart, you have to be accurate and do actual reporting rather than do an ad for people or –

or whatever, 'cause that's what a lot of tech reviews have degenerated into, ads essentially. - Yeah, I think what you'll notice a lot of people point out is on YouTube specifically, you're incentivized to package your video in a way that is very clickable because you want it to translate. You want the impressions to turn into views. You want people to click on your thing. So I talked about this in a recent video, but basically there is the part where you're reviewing a product and trying to be fair and honest and informative for the person watching.

But then the other half for people making videos online is how do you package it? And I think if I was writing for Substack or writing for a newspaper or a blog, you can package it in all these different ways. And I think people maybe either ignore or aren't as familiar with YouTube packaging in a way that sort of clearly translates to clicks while still being honest.

So yeah, those are, as you point out, two different challenges that come with the same job, but we try to blend them together as best we can.

So when you put those sensational titles, and I think you've been criticized for that, is that a problem? Because the reviews are very different, but do you have to do that and make it seem like, look over here, you know, that kind of thing? Does it change the nature of reviewing? No, I think we spend a lot of time debating. I have a small team, and we talk about titles all the time and try to figure out what is the best title ever.

that kind of has a bunch of different jobs. It needs to summarize the video or the sentiment of the video, but not give away too much. But it also needs to create intrigue so that you actually do want to watch the video. But it also needs to be somewhat unique in a way that because I could just call like, let's say a new phone comes out, for example, I could just call it Galaxy S24 review. And that's it. No effort headline works for the video.

But there could be some common thread that I've strung through the entire video that is the theme or the motif of the video. That could be an appendage to that title that kind of helps you, you know, stay paying attention for the whole video. So there's all kinds of methods that we have for coming up with titles like that.

Yeah, so it's kind of more of a science than anything. But you don't find it sensational is what I'm saying. No, and that's one of the things we try not to do is like if you over promise and under deliver, if you're sensational or something like that, people will watch the video and find it not to represent what you're actually saying and they'll leave. And YouTube analytics will reflect that and then you're punished for that. Yeah.

That doesn't work. - Walt, you talked about the evolution of the tech review. What's gone through your head as you watched power and consumer tech reviews shift from reporters working at legacy media outlets like you did, and to writers at blogs and digital media companies, to eventually content creators at YouTube? And so many of them, and so many of them. And I know when you started, there were a lot of tech fanboys that were writing reviews, as I recall, and you were not one of those. - Right. I mean, I was accused of it, but I was not.

Most general purpose publications, magazines, newspapers, eventually early crude websites had reviewers, but they were – I would break them down into two camps –

One was fanboys. So if you were an Apple fanboy, everything Apple did was perfect. If you were a – there were Blackberry fanboys in those days. There were Word Perfect fanboys. Right.

Marquez, word perfect. Yeah. We didn't hang with them. There were Lotus. There were Microsoft. This is hard to believe, but there were Microsoft fanboys. Not that many, but there were some. And so that was one camp. The other camp was just people not necessarily trying to be a fanboy, but...

But people who were geeks, geeks writing for geeks and completely ignoring mainstream people. Those were the two big camps. And then there was me and maybe one or two others who tried to write for the general public. And I was lucky because –

I could stick to my guns on anything. And, you know, you know this, Cara, but, you know, in those days, I don't know about today, but in those days, the journal would stand by you. And nobody, and I mean nobody, not even when Murdoch bought our company, nobody screwed around with

conclusions or anything. There was some... I had veto power over the headlines, and in a small way, they were a little bit like what Marquez was describing with his titles of his reviews, because...

You know, even in the old, really old days, a headline was meant kind of a little bit like clickbait. It was meant to get you to read the thing. But the Wall Street Journal headlines, most of them were boring. And most of the ones on my columns were boring. They hired a cartoonist when I started.

who was with me for a few years, who wrote little funny cartoon figures with the columns as another way of drawing people in. Marquez, it seems like a 10% teapot from the outside, but in a nutshell, you published a review of the Humane Pin, which I'm going to ask about later for both of you, that was titled The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed...for Now. Some people objected. One viral post said your YouTube title was, quote, distasteful, almost unethical, and that, quote, potentially killing someone else's nascent project reeks of carelessness.

I know what Walt's going to say, but you responded with a video titled, Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies? So anyone who wants to hear you go deep can watch that video. My question is, why do people who have no skin in the game get so upset by your reviews? Humane's head of new media said your review was honest and solid. Meanwhile, the people who wrote the viral review criticizing you doesn't work for Humane. And they were like, you shouldn't hurt companies that are trying things. I think that's ridiculous, but talk to me about that.

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I do feel like a lot of the times you see a response like that, you click on their bio and you're like, oh, you're invested in the company. Oh, you work for the company or something like that.

And I guess the only other version of that I've seen is when someone has a persona or a theme that they have to stick to where they're like, I am the optimist about tech and tech can only be good. And so if anything says tech is bad, I have to defend it. And that's kind of...

the other, you know, bubble that I guess some people... Yes, I know them well. Yeah, the lens that people look at everything from. So, you know, I try to take constructive criticism, obviously, with anything that we make. But obviously, we considered, you know, the title and all the things that went into the Humane Pin review very thoroughly. It's a new form factor. It's a very interesting product to us. So the review, a lot of work went into it. But yeah, I feel like for the most part, people agreed with the way we...

framed it, the way we analyzed the product, the conclusions that we came to, which, by the way, it is still the worst product I've ever reviewed, but that's still a for now thing because of the state of these products. They're supposed to get so much better, so we'll keep an eye on it. But it's typical. You're talking about the people that you think they're anti-tech. Tech reporter Abe Brown explained the anger directed your way and the information. Those humane defenders probably belong to the same crowd who think tech journalists are

are inherently anti-tech or anti-founder and then seem to think Brownlee, a digital creator, belonged in their tribe within tech, not the journalist world. How dare he criticize another tribe member's efforts? Walt, what's your take on tribe? I get that a lot, as you know. I hate Elon Musk, which I do not hate him. He said that to me. My heart was seething with hate toward him.

which is untrue. Well, you know how he feels about me. Yes, that's true. I do, absolutely. And he likes you less than me. So what's your take on tribalism within tech and sort of that anti-journalist ethos that goes along with it? Well, I have to say I think the anti-journalist ethos that you guys were just describing is

You know, the idea that these gentle snowflakes of a startup have to be protected or treated differently, even though they're trying to charge whatever that humane pin was, 600 bucks or something to the general public for the product.

I think that has gotten worse, but it wasn't entirely absent in the 90s when I was starting or in the 2000s when you and I were jointly doing things. And, you know, yeah.

This was the basis, by the way, of the prodigy guy and other people trying to get me fired was this guy is out wrecking our company. Look at our stock. Look at, you know, whatever the proxy was for wrecking our company. And I was expected to be pro-tech. I mean, Bill Gates personally and sometimes Steve Jobs, they –

bitched about my columns, both of them quite frequently, even when they were relatively positive. Like if there was a small, they had different ways of doing it. I mean, Gates got the Wall Street Journal, you know, dropped on his doorstep at,

I don't know, 7 or 8 a.m., 6 a.m. in Seattle, and I would get a call or an email from him shortly thereafter bitching about something in the column, even if it was – and I didn't write that many positive columns about Microsoft. No, you didn't. But even if it was a positive column – and I can think of several –

There was something about it he didn't like. I once declared him to be the most important business figure since World War II, and it was basically in an obit of Apple, which I wrote at the request of the editor of the journal because we thought they were going out of business. They didn't. And Gates was complaining. He says, I'm really tired of these pieces like yours, which say that –

I'm the business guy, and Steve Jobs is the tech genius. And I'm tired of that. And I said, wait, just wait a minute. In the Wall Street frigging journal, I just declared you to be the most important business figure since World War II, and you're complaining? Yeah, that sounds like it. And Jobs would call, even if I said, buy this iMac. It's the best desktop computer you can buy.

I had, and just like Marquez does now, nothing is perfect. So all these things are gray areas. So I had downsides that you should know about. Here are all the good things, but there are some still things missing or flawed in this. And Jobs would call and say, Walt, I'm not calling to complain about your column. And that meant I'm calling to complain about your column. And what was he complaining about?

Those five downside things at the kind of end of the column. Couldn't take it. Couldn't take it. You're unfair to us on this one. You're unfair to us on that one. But small companies, you know, they were terrified sometimes to call. I would have to call

the PR people, the good PR people, and say to them, when I wrote a negative review, and I wrote reviews that said, I've never seen a worse product. I didn't exactly use Marquez's words, but I did that. There was one called the QCAT where I wrote that. And I would on my own call the good PR people who represented some of these companies and say, I know this is not your fault.

If the CEO who doesn't understand journalism and doesn't understand reviews is

is try to blame you for it, I want you to tell them to call me because it's nothing to do with you. It's me. I'll argue with them. Right, right. But that still didn't save a lot of jobs, I'm guessing. So Marques, do you get calls from CEOs? Do they call and complain if you don't like something? And then some of these companies have enormous businesses worth billions and billions of dollars. Talk about dealing with that power. Do you get called, Marques? And do you think about the power you might have over...

I was going to say no, not really. And I'm curious, Walt, because just when I hear, you know, oh, this downside was unfair or, you know, these cons about the product were unfair. I wonder what your reaction to that is, because I've always thought like, OK, I'm trying to be as honest as possible here. So I get the product.

I test it. If things are really good about it and my experience is great, I'm writing that down. If things are bad about it or it's buggy or it has this issue or it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, I write that down. At the end of my review period, I get to whatever and I'm like, "All right, I feel like I know everything I need to know. Time to put together the piece," and I put it out.

If they think that something is unfair, it seems like they're suggesting that I missed something or I'm incorrect in some way. Maybe I've gotten a CEO or two call me, a lot of marketing people, PR people call. But at the end of the day, if what I'm saying is true about the product, then I don't really feel any obligation to change it or defend it. Here's my experience. This is how it went. I'm testing the thing you're shipping.

So yeah, never any crazy calls, but I mean... So Steve Jobs doesn't call you. No, I'm kidding. No, no, no. He's not living. I've never gotten any angry, like, I don't like your video calls, but I have definitely gotten emails asking for clarification on things or some examples, or I said some camera is bad, so they're like, can you send us some of those sample images? We want to look back at some of that stuff.

So that's happened. Right. Walt used to get that. Oh, it's the one, the review device that he got. There were a couple of those. Yeah, they would say all kinds of things. I honestly can't remember ever changing anything. My conclusion was my conclusion. Yeah. So you both live very far from Silicon Valley. Walt, you're in Maryland, always have been in the D.C. suburbs. And Marques, you're in New Jersey. Walt, explain why you lived where you were, besides the fact that you have a delightful home. I do have a delightful home, but...

The journal wanted – once they greenlit the column, they wanted to move me to Palo Alto or Menlo Park or somewhere, which are perfectly delightful places I always enjoyed being in. And they – in those days, they had plenty of money. They would have paid for the move. And I said no. And here's why. I did not want –

If I was going to judge these people's work, I did not want to see them in the Safeway. I did not want to be in the PTA meeting with them. I didn't want to be their social friends. And it wasn't that I didn't like them. There are lots of people in tech I really liked. And we had a good chemistry and all that.

But I wanted distance. So I want to talk about that just very briefly to explain the process of reviewing how you guys are different in a lot of ways and how much time you spend reporting, you know, researching and testing a product, how much time you spend crafting the review. Marques, in your case, that's writing, filming, editing, and for Walt, writing and editing.

Marques, what's the average video review take from start to finish? And Wal, how long did it take you to write a column? Marques, why don't you start? Yeah, I feel like the go-to is like a smartphone review. So we've done a ton of those. So smartphone comes out, we get it in our hands. I would say I've reviewed so many hundreds of smartphones at this point that I can use a phone for five days and know everything that I think I'm going to need to know about this phone.

You know, five days is, you know, some weekdays, some weekend, some long days, some short days, some travel, some photos. Like I can do everything, like all my testing in like five days. Once I finished my testing, it's typically one day of writing and pre-production, one day of production. So my writing is like, all right, I take all my notes and I go through and I turn this into somewhat of a bullet point list slash video script.

And then production is literally like shooting a video, editing the video, getting the tests on camera, putting it all together. So roughly two days of like making the thing that you eventually see. So a week, a week or more. But some of them take longer, right? Presumably. What's the longest? I mean, there are, well, there are things that take like... Yeah. Well, it's funny. A car is kind of the same. Like you can drive it for a week and know it very well. But some of the bigger productions, they, the productions themselves take longer. There'll be a couple of days of shooting. Okay.

And what product would that be? I mean, our Cybertruck review took like a month. Walt, what about you? Obviously, things were different, but it changed. I did this for 27 years, and it changed over the course of 27 years. But for the first 15 years or so, I...

Had minimum two weeks and often as much as a month to because they would give me the products way in advance of shipping. And I would say, hey, I would talk to them and say, hey, what is this? This seems like a bug. And they would fix it.

And my deal was, as long as they didn't ship the bug to consumers, I wouldn't get into it in the column. If they wound up shipping it with the bug anyway, I would talk about it. So I had time. Most famously, I guess, the first iPhone, I had two weeks. There were four journalists who got it. I was one of them. I had two weeks. I tested it.

in every scenario you can think of, in cars and stadiums and all kinds of things. This is 2007, right? 2000. Yeah, 2007, right. I assume most people who consume your reviews aren't actually researching a product, they're considering buying. They just want to be entertained and informed and know things.

As someone commented in one of your videos, Marques, I would buy this if I wasn't broke. To be honest, for me, this channel is just 99% window shopping. Love you, Marques. That sums it up. The audience trusts you, enjoys your work, and wants to go on an aspirational ride with you, even if they're never going to buy the thing you're reviewing. Well, I think the same with you. People really trusted you. If you said to buy it, they trusted you to buy it.

I'd like each of you to talk about that. Innumerable people are like, Walt didn't like it. I'm not going to do it. It's sort of like a restaurant reviewer or something like that. But they had an implicit trust in you. Marques, first you talk about trust and then Walt, because I think, Walt, probably you were the most trusted person.

reporter at the Wall Street Journal in a strange way, if you think about it. Go ahead, Marques. - Yeah, I think, okay, so what you were just talking about with people who watch the videos but don't buy it, I very distinctly think of my audience as two different buckets of people, one of them being people who are just watching videos for entertainment and to learn about something, whatever, they're not gonna buy something, but then the other is people who are actively searching to go decide what they're going to buy.

So similar to the journal, like not everyone who reads it is actually thinking about going to buy a new phone, but those who are, are also going to go look for opinions on the new phone. So I'm trying to talk to both of those groups of people in every review that I do.

As far as trust, I think that just comes with telling a truth for a long time consistently. I don't think there's much more to that. I think people see that if you're truthful about things that are good and things that are bad and sort of are able to back it up and do that for a long period of time, then that can only generate trust.

And I think some people lose their trust with their audience when they sort of bend to that a little bit. If they sugarcoat something because they don't want to be too mean or they're friends with a company so they don't want to say too many hurtful things, then you start to not tell the truth as much and lose that trust. So the trust just comes from being consistently honest. What about you, Walt?

Yeah, I would say that that's the same. I mean, there were people who read my column, particularly in the days when it was in The Wall Street Journal, which is a very particular kind of publication. There were people who read it because they wanted to know what stocks to buy, even though I never, ever, ever gave investment advice or they just wanted to keep up with tech.

And so then I had these new products. And so they want to know what was the new product. But then, like Marquez says, there were lots of people who made buy, no buy decisions based on reviews and particularly my reviews. I mean, this is one reason that I was influential. We'll be back in a minute. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify.

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For each episode, we ask an expert to send a question. And for this one, we got Joanna Stern, the senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Here's her question for both of you. Hi, guys. You both have been an inspiration to me. Walt, a decade ago, I took over your personal tech column at The Wall Street Journal. And every week since, I've tried to uphold what you've built.

Marques, you motivated me to make sure video was key to it all. But something big has changed over the last decade. Mainstream media outlets went balls to the wall with affiliate links and Wirecutter-like sites. Then creator reviews—yes, I'm doing air quotes—flood social media and YouTube with every major product launch.

Problem is, neither creators nor platforms are great at flagging paid content. And with AI, it only looks to get worse. So the question, going forward, how are people going to know who to trust for tech buying decisions? And what's the business model to make sure the trust remains?

Marques, why don't you start with that? Because, you know, this is absolutely true. The paid content is getting more and more confusing, right? Yeah. And they probably assume you did. I know once in a while everyone's like, oh, Walt's paid for that. I'm like, what are you talking about? Oh, they used to say that, yeah. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Thanks, Joanna. Yeah.

I think that is for sure something to consider. I think, honestly, as far as knowing who to trust, that's still going to come from this very human thing of what is your track record of being trustworthy? Just a basic, how long have you been doing this the way I expect someone I trust to be doing this? When you see, and the other half of this, and I wish I could do some sort of

journalistic sort of sidebar where you can just see all my ethics next to every video, but I don't necessarily have that ability. But I've done a video like, Can You Trust Marques Brownlee? Where I talked about exactly here is what I disclose. Here's what I have to disclose legally. Here is how I handle ads. Here is like everything laid out in front of you. So yeah, you know that from the get go.

So when you watch videos and people don't disclose and you notice that, or when people have a bunch of affiliate links and have said, "You really should buy this one and it looks kind of weird," that stuff erodes trust.

Even if it's just a person talking to a person, that erodes trust. So, yeah, I kind of feel like you just treat it like a person to a person. I was just talking in a GroupMe, a bunch of messages, GroupMe, terrible app, but Frisbee Team I play for uses it to talk to each other. And they were all talking about this certain product, whether they should buy it or not. And

I'm just chiming in as someone who just happens to have the product and use it, and that's just how it sort of feels on the internet. Like, oh, I have one. Actually, it's pretty good. Here's what I liked about it. And that's the sort of thing people – that's what trust looks like. Yeah. What about you, Walt, from Joanna? Yeah.

Well, thank you, Joanna. Same thing. Look, there are reviews and there are descriptions. And when Apple or any company brings out something new, Google brings out something new, I know that Marquez and Joanna and other honest reviewers will say, this is a first look. This is not a review. I will have my review shortly.

So this is not a review, but on first impressions, whatever. The OLED screen looks good or the OLED screen, don't buy this version of the OLED screen, whatever. But there are 10,000 people on YouTube for whom there's no difference between the review and the first look. They spend an hour or less with something and they publish what they call, they use the word, review.

So when I see that, I don't try immediately don't trust it. Secondly, affiliate links are I understand it's very tough to make money, but I think an affiliate link is an ethical problem. And I'm sure there are ways to build walls, but it just looks like an ethical problem to me and you and I, Cara.

We wrote ethics statements. Yeah. We designed our Recode website to have, and our All Things D website, to have ethics statements right next to the byline of every reporter. Right. Which was unusual at the time. Which was highly unusual, and to my knowledge, nobody's copied it. But...

If you wanted to know the financial, you know, first of all, you weren't allowed to hold any stock in any of these companies whose products you reviewed. I don't believe that to be true of all these creators who are reviewers. I'm sure it's true of you. I have no doubt, Marques, but I don't think it's true of a lot of people trying to compete with you. So I agree.

I look at a lot of these people and I have various clues that tell me this is not legit. I don't know if the average person has those clues. Yeah. And so that's tough. Let's talk about that. Marques, we're going to leave aside that your professional Frisbee team uses GroupMe. I'm disappointed, but we can point you to better things.

But you sell merch, including things like T-shirts. We're about to open one for the Pivot. We're having a Pivot store. You sell a leather strap for Apple Watch. You have a mug. You have affiliate links to products on Amazon, like the Google Nest, branded collection of wallets and key organizers made by Ridge.

shoe collaboration. You've done content, uh, sponsored content. So have I, by the way, let me just say for different things, I'm about to sleep in a hotel room with a bed, uh, that they want me to talk about once I go sleep on it. Um, obviously you've built a coveted, uh,

and highly lucrative personal brand. How do you decide to partner with a brand or do an ad, sell something, and how does it relate to the work you do as a publisher? I can see how picking the wrong partnership or putting your name on the wrong product can dent your credibility as a reviewer. Talk a little bit about this because you have a lot of different things for revenue streams.

Yeah, I guess kind of my only rule, or I have basically two rules for companies that I will actually work with on a not editorial basis. One is that they don't do anything in the area of things that I actually review.

And you're right, I also don't own stocks in any of the companies that I review. I don't own any stocks. But the other rule is that I actually have to believe in the thing. I actually have to like it or use it or believe in it in some way. And so as long as those two things are true, then it is a candidate for maybe being endorsed or a partner or collab or something like that.

So you gave some examples. I think a really good one is dbrand. They make skins for phones. They don't make phones, so I review a phone. They're a perfect integration because they make an accessory for that phone. And I don't like to use cases, so they're kind of like the perfect accessory that I would use for it. So it's like that's right in the Goldilocks zone of they don't make what I review, but I do like and believe in their thing, and it's close enough that it's a great plug.

That's a perfect use case for that. Right, right. All right. So, Walt, what about you? We started Recode together, partnered with CNBC, did the Code Conference. We got money from our sponsors. We did not pay any of our speakers, but they came and, you know, coming made money for us. So that to me was like having an interview, same thing that you would have in a newspaper. I started a podcast called Recode Decode where I did host red ads online.

which is something I do to this day. Obviously, we aren't against entrepreneurism. As I said, I didn't read any ad. We never did a sneaker collaboration, although I might today. Nobody asked, I think. I think Qatar wanted to be a sponsor. We turned them down, if you recall. Remember when Qatar wanted to buy us? I do, yeah. What's the line for you, and how has it changed today, if you imagine yourself in that?

Well, I will just say that no sneaker company or skins company or anybody like that ever even asked me to do it. It wasn't because they thought I was so holy. It just wasn't being done. And it wasn't primarily video in those days. I think that we treated it as a case-by-case basis. I mean, like she says, the government of Qatar, I think it's pronounced Qatar, Qatar,

wanted to pay for every cent of us coming there and doing a conference. And we just said no. A lot of money. We wouldn't have done it with the U.S. government. We just wouldn't have done it with any government. And so, you know, I think you...

What you want to preserve is your independence and your honesty. There already are people who distrust journalists instinctively, who thought I was being bought. There were loads of people who thought I was being bought. And so that's a problem to begin with. You don't want to feed that in any way. And so we would take it case by case. We'll be back in a minute.

So let's go through actual products. We're going to finish up very quickly through a bunch of them. Marques, you've said this Tesla Cybertruck might be iconic. That's certainly one word for it. You seem genuinely enthusiastic about it. You got early access to the Cybertruck, but that didn't stop you from pointing out its flaws, including the door gap that got worse over time, and now the accelerator. Tell us why you thought iconic. I have not tried it, so I...

but it looks not iconic. It could not be a word I would use. Heinous, it might be. Okay, I look forward to changing your mind. Okay, so- No, you're not going to. The Cybertruck is really interesting. So Tesla, first of all, is famously very weird about PR. Sometimes they have a PR department, sometimes they don't. But in the past, I have purchased vehicles from Tesla, and they will find my order and go, oh, that's Marquez's, we'll move it

earlier in the queue so that I get it earlier. And I'll get a call from someone who's like, hey, we moved it earlier in the queue just so, you know, if you want to make a video, you can be in the first wave. They've since started doing PR stuff again and stopped, whatever. They're very weird about that. But with the Cybertruck, I bought a Cybertruck and then I got my Cybertruck to review. So I reviewed the vehicle I bought. Iconic, again, is one of those titles that we spent a lot of time thinking about and a lot of time coming up with.

And I talked about how it took us a month to put together these thoughts because I was living with the vehicle for, you know, five, six, seven weeks. Yeah. Condolences. But go ahead.

Yeah. And, you know, going to ShopRite or going to the recycling center or whatever and stopping to talk to people about it. And every single person had the same like top line set of questions. Like they would eventually get to what's the range? Oh, this thing is electric. Like, what are the features like? How long does it take to charge? But at the very top was always just like, what is this thing? What this I've never seen anything that looks like this.

And the reactions that you get on the street and the people who are driving next to you on the highway who take their phone out while they're driving, like I said in the beginning of the video, the most dangerous thing about the truck is the way it makes other people on the road behave around you. Mm-hmm.

I have driven probably close to 100 cars now in my testing of vehicles. None of them get any sort of attention like that. And I think that is why it's iconic, is because there are Lamborghinis that are on kids' walls. There are Bugatti Veyrons that are on kids' walls. And if you see one of those on the street, that's the reaction that people are giving this truck. Right.

So, yeah, then, you know, the rest of the features came after that. It's obviously got its flaws. It's got its recalls. I made a short about that, too. But it is quite an icon on the street, at least for now. And you like it? You still like it? Well, that's a whole separate argument. Do you like that kind of attention? Not really. Do you like the car? If I like a car, everyone makes fun of my Chevy Bolt, Marques, and I don't give a fuck because I love my Chevy Bolt. Sure.

I think the Cybertruck, so it's very comfortable. It's smooth. It's actually like fundamentally, it's a really solid vehicle. It's the exact same range as my Rivian. It's more spacious. It has a bigger bed. It has the same power features. It's the quickest truck ever made. Like it's got a lot going for it. But there's the other thing about like Walt and I reviewing products.

Other people have had issues with their trucks that I haven't had with mine. So I can see how people really don't like the Cybertruck if they might have one of those issues. If you're paying that much for it, it's $80,000 to $100,000. It should work perfectly. And the pedals should work. That's my feeling. But the Rivian's beautiful. There's a beauty element. The second Rivian is gorgeous, I think. That's just my opinion. Walt, you're no longer moving to that on Twitter X because you got tired of Elon's antics.

Explain the decision. And secondly, would your distaste really prevent you from buying a Tesla or any other product made by an Elon-related company? You also didn't like the product anymore, correct? You mean Twitter? Twitter, yeah. Yeah. Well, I had not as many followers as you, but I had, I don't know, 850,000 followers. I don't know how many of them were bots. No way to tell. But...

I could not take, I would not frequent a bar that was basically a Nazi bar. And that's what Twitter had become, has become. I understand that there are journalists like you, Cara, who have to be there in order to properly cover what's going on there. And that was my beat, a big part of my beat. I would probably still be there, but I didn't have to be there.

and uh you know i know elon i know you know i uh i know elon but for some reason um he's become you know an anti-semite or at least an adjacent anti-semite however you want to put it i think he's a bigot

I think there's a whole, I think he's a conspiracy theorist. I know he's a conspiracy theorist. He once told you and I on stage that he believed we were all just simulations in a video game being played by an alien. And that's a relatively harmless conspiracy theory, but he's

more recently endorsed bigger ones. So, yeah. And then the product, I think, has suffered from some of the same things. I mean, you know, there is no content moderation. And when there is no content moderation, you find that when you post something, your comments are not just – it's healthy to have people disagree with you. That's fine in a civil way, even if they're all fired up. I mean, they could do an eight

tweet thread disagreeing with you. And as long as it's civil, it's fine with me. But now the whole thing is following Elon's ethos of attacking you personally, of, you know, getting into bigotry and lies and conspiracy theories and all that. So the product is much, much less

Would you not buy a Tesla? Would I not buy a Tesla? I would not buy a Tesla from an anti-Semite. No. Okay. Well, there it is. Let's move on to the Apple Vision Pro, not anti-Semitic as far as I can tell. Marques, you've called it both absolutely incredible and possibly dystopian. I think those are probably two exact things.

Explain what you meant and paint a picture of this possibly dystopian techno-enabled future. I like them, too. I like this product, too. Talk just very briefly about this product, why you did, because people are wondering whether it can become a business. Well, yeah, the tech is incredible. But also, have you seen people, what they look like walking around with them on? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that part, not so great. I'm not sure people will be walking around with them, so I think that's a stunt more than anything. That's a great point. So I kind of talked about this where Vision Pro is on one side of a spectrum where on the other side you have smart glasses.

where smart glasses are, they look very normal and you could see people walking around with them today and not even notice, but they're trying to pack as much tech. - The Facebook ones are very popular. - Exactly. And they have cameras in them and computers and an LLM and they try to pack as much tech in there as possible and some batteries, but they look like normal glasses.

And those are trying to accelerate to do more and more and more. Where on the other end of that spectrum is Vision Pro, which is all of the things, but it doesn't look like anything you'd wear today. And so they're trying to shrink it over and over again, shrink it down, shrink it down until it looks like a regular pair of glasses. And so they're kind of

meeting somewhere in the middle and I don't know, it just feels kind of dystopian to imagine like everyone's going to have something on their face at some point in the future. I don't know if that's the wearable computer revolution we all want.

But yeah, I mean, I got to admit the tech is incredible if you just don't look at me while I'm wearing it. Scott has said it makes people unfuckable and therefore we won't have a human race. Um, but that's just his review. Um, well, you haven't tried the vision pro yet. Why not? I have not. Uh, well, because I'm not, I mean, look, if I called Apple, even as a retired guy and said, I'd like to try the vision pro, they would find a way to make it work, but I don't need to bother them to do that because I'm not going to review it. Um,

On the wearable thing, I think Marquez's description is spot on. I think you and I both know, Cara, that Tim Cook really wanted to do glasses. That was his goal.

I don't know how far they ever got with it, but that was really what he wanted to do. One time in one of our interviews with him, he took his glasses off and pointed at them. You know, they never like to talk about future products, so that was what he did was gesture. Another time he touched his wrist before the watch came out.

Speaking of the watch, I'm wearing an Apple Watch. I've had one since they came out. That is a piece of wearable tech. It has a lot of power. It does a lot of things. Marques has one on, too. I have one right here. I look at it a million times a day. I check the weather. I check my...

messages to see if something's important. If it's a video, I might have to go to my phone to watch the video. But the point is, I use it a ton. It's an extremely useful piece of wearable technology. Does it sit on your face? No. But in a way, it's sitting in a place where people expect to see some kind of device and have for 200 years. So there is wearable technology. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if that is by far

By far the most economically successful and successful in terms of units piece of wearable technology ever built right to this day. Right. It certainly is. That's absolutely what it is. And it's amazing to me that in these articles about wearable technology, it rarely is even mentioned.

And yet it's a product people are, while we're doing this podcast, people are in Apple stores and Best Buys buying them. And they're not necessarily buying, I mean, they're certainly not buying Vision Pros very much. So I think wearable technology is a thing. I think the Ray-Ban glasses are very, very interesting. But I think...

they are going to run into a problem of trying to scale it up. I don't know which is easier, trying to scale up Ray-Ban glasses

So they don't look like Vision Pros eventually, or try to scale down the Vision Pro. One last thing about Apple, and then I have just one question about AI. But Apple recently put out an ad for the new iPad. It's very thin. That's reminiscent of their iconic 1984 ad, but not in a good way. They crush a lot of objects, art and music objects. And

And one of the reactions from Brian Merchant was, what an incredible self-owned by Apple at a time when artists, musicians, and creatives are more worried than ever about tech companies trying to crush them into dust for profit. Along comes Apple and makes an ad whose whole message is, yes, that is exactly what we're doing. Very briefly, Marques, thoughts on that ad?

Man, I saw it and I remember watching it during the keynote and I thought it was, oh, that's clever. They're like crunching down all of this creative juice into one product. And then I saw the reactions, yeah, to the iPad. Now I see all the reactions online and I totally understand how Apple never saw the other side of it, which is, wait a second, we're crushing every artistic and beautiful thing you've ever known into a small black box? Ah, pfft.

I don't know. It just didn't hit the same way the second or third time, yeah, watching it. So I don't know. We haven't seen a reaction from Apple. It kind of feels like they never tend to respond to these types of things, but we'll see. Walt, any thoughts? Yeah, I agree with Marques, and I would even be stronger. I only watched the ad once, twice, once during the keynote, once on a standalone basis. I know there's a lot of criticism. I think the ad has one purpose. I think the ad is...

their thousandth effort at explaining that you can do a ton of things on the iPad and people who think you can only do one thing on it or two things on it are wrong. And so, you know, music, video, writing, all the things they crushed into it, iPads are good at. I'm a fan of the iPad. I use it a lot.

And that's the way I took it. I did not take it as we're going to take all the market money away from the people that create these things. Yeah. Yeah. Did you see how someone someone fixed it? Yeah, they went backwards. They put it backwards. They played it back. And then the share song that's with it goes backwards. That's what's creative to me. I liked it. I'm like, have a sense of humor, people. They're not trying to kill you. And that's the last company will try to kill you. There's others that will kill you much quicker. They actually have a whole history.

History of pain creators. Yeah, but they're also in a fight with a lot of—the Justice Department is suing them or will be suing them. In any case, let's end up talking about gender of AI very quickly. Marques, you've made videos about Dolly fake porn.

deep fake audio, AI-generated video in that order. When you published the DALI video about two years ago, the product clearly blew your mind. Now it seems like child's play compared to Sora. OpenAI's generative video product gotten better and better. You said Sora is both impressive and frightening. I'm sensing a theme there. And you recently reviewed two AI on a box products, the Humane AI pin that we talked about, which you already mentioned, and the Rabbit RI, which you said was barely reviewable. It looked like it.

just very briefly, your thoughts on AI products. Okay. Yeah. I actually love the idea of

of being able to purchase a digital assistant that can do a whole bunch of things for me, just like a human assistant would. Imagine this little assistant, this little digital thing that knows everything about me. And I just say, hey, buy me a plane ticket. And it knows I like the window seat. And it knows I like to fly out of Newark from United. And it just knows everything about me and can help me. I love that idea.

However, all of the tech and the products coming out are not there yet, to put it nicely. So we end up getting a whole bunch of like, "Well, what if it could do this?" products. Or, "What if it was just the one track? It's just a chat bot. What if it's just this?" And some of these are kind of interesting. Sora isn't publicly available yet, but it's maybe the closest one I've seen to being unbelievable at something.

But it's still, I'm still waiting for it to get generally intelligent enough to be that helpful assistant. And so far you've trashed all of them, essentially. And Sora, how many people are really going to use it, right? Maybe Hollywood will eventually, but it's very expensive.

None of these are businesses, really, and single-use products in history have not tended to win out, as Walt knows. But, Walt, I'm going to ask you a question, and I have one final question for both of you. In the early days of Silicon Valley, there was a lot of optimism, as you and I know. I talked about it a lot in my book, but a lot of it is curdled. AI is the ultimate tech paradox. All of the techno-optimists' wildest dreams and techno-pessimists' most dystopian fears seem closer than ever because of AI. Walt, as you look back on your career covering tech,

Where does AI fit into the evolution of it? And it doesn't make you optimistic or pessimistic today. I think both in a way. I'll just be very quick about this. My last column was called The Disappearing Computer, and it talked about ambient computing. And my point was, you know, the ceilings, the floors, everything.

the furniture, everything is going to have some sensors and some processing power, and you're not going to need a specific thing like a tablet or a computer or even a watch necessarily to tell you what temperature. You can just say, you'll be able to do what they did in Star Trek and just say, you know, where's Marquez, what's the temperature, whatever.

Pessimistic is, you know, I'm on the board of the News Literacy Project, which teaches kids in school how to tell fact from fiction online. And we have ways of doing that. And there are ways of doing that, that we teach these kids. Well, AI is going to make that infinitely worse. So what I want and what I think OpenAI has started to work on in a small way is I want an AI tool that can detect information.

AI content.

My understanding is that's a very difficult problem, and they don't have that big an economic incentive to do it, but that's what I want to see. And then we can have all the AI we want, and somebody who wants to not be tricked will have a tool to help with that. So, actually, two last questions. Very quickly, one, two words. What's your favorite product right now, Marques? My favorite product in the world right now? Yeah. Wow.

Jeez. That is... All right, I'll start. Still my iPhone. Yeah, you might. Go ahead. Your iPhone, really? Okay. Still. What...

That's such a hard question. What'd you buy? I feel like it's my car. Your car. I bought a car. I bought a Porsche 911, and it's about as good of a product as I've ever experienced in my life. Okay. So maybe it's that. I think it might be that. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. The car is the original mobile device. Walt, what about you? It's a tie for me between maple walnut ice cream and my iPhone. Okay.

Those are the two greatest products. I'm glad you went there because I was going to go like, sorbet is pretty good to me. Speaking of a product that both of you loved, very briefly, Marques, you've tweeted about her. Walt, literally everybody thinks it's your next job is the Taylor Swift reporter for all of social media. You have one minute. Talk about her as a product. Marques first, and then we'll finish up with Walt.

Taylor Swift is a lot of people's favorite products, man. She's entertaining. She's everywhere. She almost defies language. She can go to any country and people want to see her perform. So I feel like she is a lot of people's favorite product. And what would be your headline for that on your YouTube video? If I reviewed Taylor Swift? Uh...

Man, I would probably have to, I think I would go to a concert as a product. Like that would be the product I reviewed. And it would probably have something to do with like whether or not it was worth the hype because the hype is at an all-time high. It is, let me tell you. And you would come out with many bracelets as Walt Mossberg does. Walt, you get the last word on Taylor Swift. I got all my bracelets from Cara, I should point out. You did, yeah. Yeah.

I just very quickly, I would say she is the best singer songwriter since the 1960s and 70s, when we had people like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Paul McCartney and that kind of thing. She's the best singer songwriter, but she has something those people didn't have. She's a much better business person, and she's actually a much better onstage performer than any of those people. The world was different. They didn't have the kinds of

concerts in those days that they do now. And so she has those two additional things. And she's a great product. She's great talent. She's a great product. All right. The seal of approval from the two best reviewers. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much. I'm so glad you got to meet. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. Great. Thank you.

Today's show is produced by Christian Castro Rossell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Kate Furby. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a free cup of your favorite sorbet.

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