Marques Brownlee and Walt Mossberg on Trustworthy Tech Reviews
Despite being two of the most influential tech reviewers ever, Walt Mossberg and Marques Brownlee (a.k.a. MKBHD) had somehow never met — at least before appearing on the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher. In the resulting group chat, Kara gets them to compare and contrast their experiences, a generation apart, and weigh in on everything from AI gadgets to the Cybertruck. In the two segments excerpted below, the trio dives into how to handle pushback, the problems with paid content, and what matters most when it comes to earning and keeping people’s trust.
Kara Swisher: So this is a lede 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 SiriusXM, and he blamed you, Walt, for their falling stock price and a sudden plunge in consumer interest. Walt, 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.
Walt Mossberg: Well, I started my column in 1991, which was not the birth of the mass-market personal computer, but 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, 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.
