Goodbye to Dieter Bohn, with special guest Walt Mossberg

This was a tough one. The Verge co-founder and Executive Editor Dieter Bohn is leaving us. Nilay Patel, Walt Mossberg and Dieter Bohn walk down memory lane and discuss their first meeting, founding The Verge, CES memories, and what Dieter is doing once he leaves. Behringer's iNuke Boom is the essence of Vegas And now, a brief definition of the web Dieter on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast flagship podcast, Vox Media. I'm saying it this time. I only say it on special occasions. We used to say it all the time because we were the only podcast. Now we have lots of others and I, you know, we gotta be friendly. But sometimes I say it. I'm saying it because it's a very special episode of the Vergecast. If you are here looking for news of the week, Apple event preview, all that stuff. We have another episode in the feed. We're doing it. You can go listen to it. This one is very special because our friend Dieter Bohn, co-host of the Vergecast, co-founder of the entire Verge, is leaving us. Hi, Dieter.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Hello. Yeah. What are we going to call this Vergecast? The Bittersweet Cast?

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  I keep saying bittersweet excitement, which I think sounds like a paint color.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  This garage is painted bittersweet excitement. We thought long and hard about what this episode of the show could be, who could be on it with us. There's only one person. Our friend Walt Mossberg is here. Hey Walt.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Hey guys.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, you once famously retired from The Verge. I feel like you're gonna have some good advice for Dieter. I feel like, you know, I just needed to be surrounded by friends and loved ones at this, at this time. We've got a lot to talk about. We're gonna talk about how we started The Verge. Dieter has been in media for 20 years, which is a lot to talk about. There's a line in a rundown that says Walt has other talking points he has prepared, which I have no idea what you have in store for us, Walt.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Hang on, hang on. Does this mean that, like, this is the greatest validation of my career ever. I have made Walt do writing in retirement.

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  True. Also, we have some clips from other people who've worked with Dieter. It's been a long career. Dieter, you've impacted a lot of people. People want to say goodbye. Actually, let's listen to a couple of those now.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Hey, Dieter. It's me, Joanna. Usually, you're the one asking me questions on The Vergecast, so I'm a bit at a loss of what to say here, but here goes. We haven't worked together on a daily basis since, well, I guess since Justin Bieber fell in love with me, but I'm pretty annoyed that you're leaving this job because you make me better. Yes, this is about me. There are really only a few people out there these days that really review and test things. And when I know we are both working on a review at the same time, I think, crap, what is Dieter gonna pick up on that I don't? So, yes, you will be missed deeply by me and those in the industry and those who are just trying to figure out

• 4:09Speaker 03

  what is a computer. But I couldn't be more excited for you and I am so proud of you in this next step, as I once boldly said, go [bleep] them all. Or did I say [bleep] them all? Anyway, do those things.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Hey Dieter, it's Phil. Wanted to say huge congrats on leaving us. I can't believe it, you traitor. We're gonna miss you a ton. We're gonna miss your videos. We're gonna miss reading your great articles and reports. It's been really awesome getting to work with you. And you've been a mentor to me and so many people on the team. And I know we're all just looking forward to seeing what you do next. We'll see you on Twitter.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, we have to address the burning question in the room.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  Leaving The Verge.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  I am leaving The Verge.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  Where are you going?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  You know, it's been 20 years in media and I want to go try doing something different. So I'm gonna go work for Google. I'm gonna work on the Platforms and Ecosystems team, which is the group that makes Android and Chrome and Chrome OS and Google Workspace and some of their messaging apps. And I'm gonna be working on long-term strategy. I'm gonna be working on like helping come up with clear narratives, clear stories, and working on the product. So for me, this change is about sort of less public speaking, less identifying myself with who I am publicly online, and more about helping to build products. I still care about the way that technology creates culture, the way that technology

• 5:43Speaker 02

  and culture interact with each other. I just think that I'm excited to try doing that from a product perspective instead of a reporting perspective.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  I think you're gonna, you're gonna help them. I think that 20 years in media is fully paid up dues as a media guy. The thought has crossed my mind over the years that it'd be fun to go somewhere and actually have an impact, direct impact on the products rather than an indirect impact. I think it's, I mean, it's obviously a loss to media, but I think Google is being very smart to bring you in inside the tent to help them. Because frankly, Dieter, they need help.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  They need help figuring out a narrative for everything they got going. Even if we leave out the 18 messaging apps, they need a little help. But I want to talk about something that only I can talk about, I think, which is, um, I had 40 years in media when I went to The Verge seven years ago. You always got to one-up me, don't you, Walt? I always do.

• 6:59Nilay Patel?

  This is why you brought Walt in at the end. You gotta bring that up here.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  And, um, I knew Neelai. I'd known him for, uh, you know, some years beforehand. I even tried to hire him once, but I didn't know you. And, uh, Neelai brought me and Lauren Good, who were part of the crew from Recode, which was going over to The Verge, to New York and sat us down in one of those crazy no-privacy offices right across from the two of you. So that was my first encounter with you, and I have to say, uh, Neelai was no surprise. It was no surprise that I liked him.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  It was no surprise that I, I already had figured out what it, what his downsides were as well as his upsides.

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  But you were a really pleasant surprise, I have to say.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Uh, you were, uh, kind of Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, and you did both tremendously well. Your journalism, your reporting, your videos, which actually got better and better over the years. The videos in particular were already great. I had read them, but I had not met you. But what I didn't understand was that you were also making the trains run on time inside there with, with Trello, and which I'd never heard of in my life. And, and I was. The editor or the co-editor of, uh, the co-executive editor, whatever it was called,

• 8:41Speaker 05

  at Recode and the co-CEO, but I, we didn't have, we didn't use Trello, we didn't use any of that stuff. You had all these tools and you were kind of herding cats inside while doing terrific journalism. And the other thing I have to say that both of you, I think, know I've always highly valued is speaking to the mainstream. I mean, you can nerd out with the best of them on anything and sometimes you do and that's fine, but you also, I think, have shown a terrific talent. Uh, if you're talking about whatever you're talking about, messaging, phones, whatever

• 9:20Speaker 05

  it is, you have terrific talent at talking to the mainstream, uh, consumer, which I think will, I, I, I'm betting, uh, will be something that you bring to the table at Google and help them because I would have no problem having a member in my family who knows nothing about tech, watch one of your videos to understand whether they should buy whatever it is you're talking about or, or why they should buy it or, or why there's really not much difference between these two competing things or whatever it is you're, you're talking about. So I, uh, am, am gonna miss those, to be really honest.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  And I also have to say that I consider you a friend.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Thank you. I consider you a friend too.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  And I'm very happy for you to go on to another chapter of your career, but I'm a little bit sad for you to leave media and that's just the truth.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  We spoke a little bit earlier and you, um, you pointed out that you got into tech media when you are, uh, were the, the same age that, that I am now and that, you know, if you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're younger than me. And the things Walt has told me about being willing to reinvent yourself and try new things, um, you know, really, really helpful and so thank you for that.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Well, you're welcome and everybody listening to this should reinvent themselves every once in a while. I am concerned about a couple of things.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  I think there's gonna be a crisis of puns on Twitter.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  Who is gonna fill your shoes at posting puns on Twitter?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  I think I can still tweet puns. I think I

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't I don't think there'll be a problem there. We'll see.

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  Does Google have like a social media policy?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  One assumes. I don't know. To be clear, like,

• 11:14Speaker 05

  No, they have 16 social media policies.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  And Samsung has its own that comes preloaded.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  Right, but but you're pretty sure you can keep up the puns because that would there's all kinds of of problems at Twitter, but the the sudden loss of puns would be just another one. So I'm a little worried about that.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Be catastrophic. I think I'll tweet puns. I'll also tweet angry angry videos about bike lanes. I'm anticipating that.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Bike lanes, yeah.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm kind of glad, Eli, that Control, Walt, Delete, the podcast you and I did for a couple of years together, is no longer active. Because, as you know, in every single episode, we had to say, Dieter Bohn.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  It came up a lot.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  You know, that would be a little weird now. This guy at Google we're talking about.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think we can still do it and we can still mention Dieter and blame him for everything.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  I fully expect to blame for everything.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  We would blame him.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yep. I do want to disclose really quick that as you're listening to this, I will I will not be dead. I will already be dead. I will already be kicked out of the Verge newsroom. So, you know, we, at the moment that I'm going to like formally accept this job at Google, I will have already been gone from the Verge newsroom.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the we'll just do the transparencies are brand, right? Dislosures are brand. So, Dieter, I can't have a Google employee in my newsroom. That's a very challenging problem.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  So we asked Dieter and he agreed to not actually accept this gig until we had made this show and he'd made his goodbye video on YouTube and wrote his last post. So we we have this very You know, in the end, it's very simple. He's going to leave The Verge, but it's orchestrated. We had to like stage manage this exit. So that's our disclosure. Again, I believe in transparency is like, it's probably too much. This is like Walt, the old Recode disclosures that we have modeled everything after for years.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  The famous line was, "It is probably more than you want to know." But here it is. And that's, that's how I feel about this.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Are you walking Dieter out of the building? Is security coming to do that?

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  If I had the opportunity to walk Dieter out of the building to make him put all his like old Nokia phones in a cardboard box, I would absolutely do it.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  That's the photo I want to see. That's the Instagram I want to see.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  If I could pull that off. But Dieter works at home now, so I'd be walking him out of his own garage.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  No, he has to come to the office so we can leave the office.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm in the San Francisco office.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  You have to hire two guys, big guys, in security uniforms to walk him out.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Look, it's not going to take two guys to intimidate me. I'm not that powerful. I'm actually in the San Francisco office now and I opened up a drawer and sitting right there was like a one plus one. And I was like, oh, man, I've been doing this a while. Remember the one plus one like that?

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  There was so much excitement about that phone anyway.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  Why don't we take a break here for some other people? Come back. Dieter, I'm dying to hear some of your kind of favorite moments from your run at The Verge. But let's hear from some folks.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  Hey, Dieter, it's me, Nad Garan. Remember the person you tried to hire by telling her you were better than her at Two Dots? And then you actually weren't? Anyway, The Verge wouldn't be what it is today if you hadn't been around to shape it. So I'm sure you already know that the tech journalism industry is going to miss you so very much. And personally, I want to thank you for always being a sounding board as a boss, a mentor, a collaborator, but most importantly, a friend. I'm looking forward to how you shape the next era of Android. And while you're there, remember, I'm one with the blob. The blob is me. Bring it back. Bye.

• 15:05Speaker 07

  Hey, Dieter, this is your San Francisco buddy, Viren. And also for the listeners who don't know me, I'm the senior video director here at The Verge and have been working with Dieter for quite a while. Five, six, probably six years. I just finished editing our last video, our last processor video. And it was a lot of fun until I got to the end, which was a little bit sad. But I don't want to talk about that right now. What I want to do right now is thank you. Thank you for hearing me out when I needed it. Thank you for listening to my directions on how to act in front of a camera, although sometimes you would ignore that advice. And that's okay. All is forgiven now.

• 15:48Speaker 07

  We made some great videos and we made a lot of them. Very proud of the work we did together. Lastly, I want to thank you for being a mentor. Thank you for all your words of wisdom. And most importantly, I want to thank you for carrying my gear whenever my back would hurt. Cause that shit is painful. Also, we made a fucking documentary. See you, buddy. Good luck.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter Bohn, you were the first person I reached out to when we were starting The Verge. The first non Engadget person. So I don't know if people know the story. Ancient history now. There was 12 of us. We worked at a site called Engadget. That site was owned by AOL, which Walt, I think you famously remember was not a great company. Products were falling apart. They're still around. I think they're, they got bought by Verizon, sold by whatever. We were all at AOL. We saw the writing on the wall. We wanted to leave. We're going to start The Verge. And we were thinking, who should we go out and get? And the only person on my list was Dieter Bohn. Dieter, do you remember that? That first conversation?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  We talked for a minute, for a while. The, what I remember is we first met and like hung out at a Microsoft conference in Las Vegas. I cannot remember what it was. A build?

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  It was a Windows Phone event, man.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  It was a Windows Phone event and everybody was running around. This was the same thing as the big Embarc WebOS event for the touchpad and the Veer and the pre-three.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I have a different, I have a different memory of that.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. But in both events, like. I was like killing myself, running around, trying to get the news, caring a lot. You were doing the same.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  You were a pre-Central and Windows Central.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  That was pre-Central. The Touchpad Day in particular was wild because our content management system crashed. And so we live blogged the entire day by me opening up AOL Instant Messenger and then sending updates to the owner, Marcus Adolphson, who then was just hand coding them into a blank HTML page and hitting refresh, hitting publish on it and telling people to hit refresh. We just straight up drudge reported it.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  But you're basically saying that this was the only successful thing to come out of Windows Phone. Is that correct?

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I remember this event. It was in Las Vegas. And you have to put yourself back in this mode. People believed that Microsoft was going to compete with the iPhone.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  You have to like put yourself in that space. It is very hard to put yourself in that space now. Remember, it was called Windows Phone 7 Series. It was a completely backwards name. No one could figure it out why they called it this. They announced three phones. Every time we would ask them a question, they would say, we'll tell you more. I don't remember what it was called. We'll tell you more at this event that's coming up.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  So all of the hype in the world is about this event. They're going to tell us about the apps, they're going to tell us about the price, and they're going to tell us about the partners. And so I gotta go. Here I am in Vegas. And it's like me and Dieter. And Dieter and I had had this interaction many, many times where it was like the two bloggers and then like the army of legacy media reporters.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  Sorry Walt. Although Walt was much more of a blogger by this time.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  I'm not sorry. It's all right.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  And so we're just like peppering them with questions. Just like arms raised, talking back, no decor. You know, everyone else is sort of like writing their thing to file for the print paper two months from now or whatever. And Dieter and I are like real time like blogging.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, oh, that guy, he's on my wavelength. And then we ended up at the bar and Dieter told me he'd broken up with his girlfriend.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And that was the whole situation.

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  And that's it. We were off to the races.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Disclosure, this was well before disclosure, my wife who works for Meta.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  By the way, that event, they released no information. They said nothing when this one failed.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, I think there was like one sliver of news and nobody else even recognized as news, but we did. And we're like, well, I guess this is the news and we're here in Las Vegas.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  The Palm event, that was different because we were still competitors.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. We were competitors at the Windows event, too, weren't we?

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think we were the, we were like kindred spirits because we were like, is there news? Are you, can you give us news? Is there? We were, we were like a little team. At the Palm event, it was like a keynote. Do you remember Jimmy Iovine was on stage?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  And he got totally knocked off his game by the president of Qualcomm, who was like, he was trying to sell beats to HP at that time.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  He just went on stage and rambled. It was like one of the best rambles of all time. But that event is the day I knew I was going to quit AOL.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Because they had, I will never forget this. They were running like those horrible belly fat ads on our pages.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember those, like early internet, like garbage remnant?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  One weird trick. And I sent this like furious email and I was like, I'm working my ass off at this event. And like some other person was like, those ads on your page suck. And it just like sent me in a spiral. So I sent this email, we gotta get these ads off. And I received an email back from, you know, one of the well-meaning dilettante AOL executives. He was like, well, we're a team here. And I literally said, no, I'm the team.

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  Like I'm, it's, it's me. I'm doing all the work. And that was the day I knew we were leaving and you were there. And I remember I was like, whatever we do next, Dieter's got to be on the, on the crew.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  It was great coming to start at The Verge. I don't know how public this story is, but when I interviewed at The Verge, I met Josh Topolsky at a bar at like almost one in the morning. It was like, like midnight and we talked until they, they shut us down and kicked us out. And we, we really had similar thoughts. The, a book by Jaron Lanier, You're Not a Gadget had just come out and I had like angry thoughts about this book. The next morning I went and I interviewed all day, starting at like 8:00 AM at HP to go work for WebOS.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Then I had to pick between these two jobs.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  This is really kind of in full circle.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I chose The Verge, which was at the time, a very, very risky bet. Because it was a brand new thing, no idea if it would succeed. It was, it is not the giant that it is today. It was like, you know, a new blog. Who knows what's going to happen with something like that? But I realized that I still cared and I, I continued to care today about helping people do a better job of understanding how technology affects their lives and making an impact on like their like ability to like think critically about technology. And I wanted to give that a shot at The Verge. And before that, I had run Smartphone Experts, which was later called Mobile Nation.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  So I founded Android Central and iMoore. And we had a Nokia Central site. Of course, we had the pre-Central site. I got my start blogging at Trio Central. My first post was about Trio Mail, the email app that the carriers refused to allow Palm to pre-install on their Trio phones because they had to have their carrier email apps instead. Anyway, yeah, it was, it was a wild time and like, you know, I show up and I'm like, oh, man, there's all these people from Endcages. This is going to be really intimidating. I like, you know, walk in the tiny room in a terrible New York office that was like tiny. And I think you got internet from like a satellite that only worked when it was like a perfectly clear sky or something.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  I know, it was a YMAX antenna on the roof. We, we couldn't, I mean, the themes here are, right? Dieter writes a post about email apps not being allowed by carriers. He shows up at our office. We can't get fiber internet, so I have to set up a YMAX antenna on the roof. You can see where a lot of the themes for the whole thing came from.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  YMAX internet did not work. By the way, um, the fiber company, they finally put fiber by that office. And they, to this day, still email me.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  Asking me if we want fiber internet or.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  You should say yes.

• 23:54David Pierce?

  Help somebody out.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, okay. Let's hear from some more people.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  Dieter is still the only person I know who can talk about theology, WebOS, the English language, RCS, iPhones, HDMI cables, and the history of the United States, all in a single sentence, and somehow it all makes sense. It's a real achievement, and I'm gonna miss him very much on The Vergecast and at The Verge. Dieter, I miss you. I'm very proud of you. Thank you for everything.

• 24:24Alex Cranz?

  Well, Dieter, this is a really cool situation you find yourself in. And, okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I had to do one last RCS reference for the road. I'm absolutely gutted by your departure, but I think you're gonna have a really fun time. I think Neil and I are gonna try to have a fun time. We are gonna be talking about Aaron Rodgers a lot more on the show. We're no longer gonna be talking about phones. It's gonna be all e-ink all the time. Please send me all your tips about how great e-ink is. And, Dieter, I'm gonna miss you, man.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  Dieter.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  You've done almost every job at The Verge. As Walt had pointed out, you once basically ran the entire newsroom. You have blogged your face off. My favorite role that you ever had was what we called reports editor.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Where we would have a daily meeting at the end of the day and talk about all the news, and then assign the next day's stories.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  And this would be at like 5:00 PM.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  So then, Dieter, in the window between 5:00 PM and everyone else leaving, would have to leave that meeting and then scramble around to every reporter to get the next day's assignments out.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  We should have had the meeting earlier in the day. It's like one of those things now with, you know, like, six years of hindsight, you're like, why did we do that to ourselves? We did it almost every day. Literally everything you can think of. But tell us some of your favorite moments.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Man, there are a bunch. It's also, it also is a blur. I'm gonna talk about CES for a minute.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  It hasn't been in person for a couple of years. It hasn't been relevant for much longer in terms of like, major products being announced there. And maybe, like, you count the number of like, actually genuinely impactful products that were directly announced at CES instead of an independent event. It's like, you know, less than half a dozen. But we always took it seriously, not because we thought that every single random gadget was important, but because it was an important way to sort of see what the industry was doing. So we didn't want to celebrate the industry. We wanted to like, see what they were doing and be there to report on it live. So, okay. One of my favorite things that happened there is there was this Bluetooth speaker. The size of a truck.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  It was the most stupid thing ever. It had like an iPhone dock on the top of it. So it was, it was a giant, like, literally a truck-sized speaker.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  It was so big.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  iPhone dock. And they're like, we're gonna sell this for real. This isn't just a little-

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  It was called the Inuke Boom.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  The Inuke Boom.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  And you bought it, Eli, right?

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  It's in the backyard right now.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  It was ridiculous.

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  But it had like a 30-pin connector, like, it was like old school.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is very old. So I go and I look at this thing, and I'm like, we should write about it here, but I didn't want to just point at it and laugh. I obviously didn't want to take it seriously as a product, because come on, you're not gonna sell a truck-sized Bluetooth speaker called the Inuke Boom. Nobody is going to buy this thing. This is obviously a gimmick to get attention. And then I realized, like, oh, wait, gimmicks to get attention is what's happened, is what happens here. I will write about what it's like to observe a gimmick to get attention. The Verge very kindly let me write this post that called back to a very famous essay about Las Vegas architecture and, like, architectural

• 27:33Speaker 02

  theory about painted sheds and ducks, which is very, very heady.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  Very deader.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  I called the thing a duck, which is, like, amazing if you are familiar with the Learning from Las Vegas essay. And The Verge just let me do it. I just, like, I wrote this thing, and I'm like, is this any good? And they're like, yep. I was like, okay. And it was, it was weird, and, like, I had permission to be weird. We published this thing, which, you know, was not exactly nice. And I think it was Behringer that made this thing, right?

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't even remember.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  I don't remember.

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  I have to find this post.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  They're like, oh, this is fun. And then they, like, they hauled their truck-sized Bluetooth speaker out to our trailer where we were blogging from. And, like, we had a little, like, nerd dance party outside our CES trailer.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  Actually, the most CES version of that story was, right, this is, like, an audio company, this is 2012, this is a very different time. And the guy was like, do you want me to bring the booth babes? And I had to be like, no. Yeah, absolutely not. It was a very CES moment for me. And it was like one of those moments where I was like, I'm in a position of authority and I'm making this call. And, like, it was, like, one of the first times, and it was about this speaker. Yeah, and it was just the I think about this story very fondly as being like it was an expression of our values. It was the verge, just like proudly being weird and literary

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  and heady about a gadget. And also, it's a truck sized Bluetooth speaker. And I was like, oh, we got like, this is where we are. Like, yeah, you've triangulated our identity as a publication inside of this experience. Well, you did a couple CESs with us, right?

• 29:14Speaker 05

  I did. And one of them was one of my fondest memories. And I did 25, I think, CESs and Comdex's over the years. But one of my favorite memories was we did a video of Dieter and I walking the floor. And we spent, I think, we spent more, most of our time, not the same, we went to Samsung, we went to see all the TVs and all that stuff. But my favorite thing is, we went to some little company, I can't remember the name.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  They were like out of Missouri or something.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, that every conceivable gadget you could think of, none of which Dieter and I had ever come across or written about, or whatever write about, did ever write about. But in the video, the whole, the video just shows us trying things like rocks that are Bluetooth speakers. And I mean, I'm not kidding, rocks. Yeah, I remember us saying to Tim Cook through the video, why don't you make one of these? And I don't know if Dieter remembers any of the other crazy stuff, but it was all that kind of stuff.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, emergency radios, and, you know, knockoff Bluetooth headphones, and like, flashlights that had like, extra random crap bolted on them, just cuz, right, just random stuff.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  And so I, you know, it's the kind of stuff that I imagine was sold in those ads you hated, Eli.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, did you guys lose any belly fat along the way?

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Maybe, you know, behind the front counter at CVS, you know?

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  That was their tech section. Because these guys seem to be doing quite well. They had a reasonable amount of floor space at CES. And so I mean,

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  This scramble at that company, when they finally realized that Walt Mossberg was at their booth was remarkable.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Well, that's no, they realized that you were at their booth.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  The other thing I want to say is, um, I was at the verge, maybe five days, four days before, um, I was in the backseat of a cab with Dieter. We were on our way to a restaurant for dinner with, with you, Neelai and others. And I got the lecture about the open web.

• 31:45Speaker 05

  I got the lecture about the open web.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Cause I was and still am essentially an apps guy. And I got the lecture about the open web and we argued about it, but I think actually on balance over the years, Dieter, I want to tell you, I think you were right.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. Wow.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let's unpack this. Dieter, your thesis about the open web versus apps has always been in the background of the verge.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  We've talked about it on maybe every verge cast, whether or not we even were explicitly talking about it. But it's basically that the open web is where the innovation comes from. It's the democratic thing and the sort of app ecosystem or the one true answer from Alexa, where you ask it a question and delivers it. That's all secret deals.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  And the consumer can see what is happening to them on the web. And that's better. How do you think that's gone?

• 32:39Speaker 02

  The, the cliche is always the web will always win. Um, I don't, I don't think that's necessarily true. And I definitely am not in the, in a position to say that like the web is better than apps for many, many applications. I've never thought that. Um, I think it's worse today for lots of things than it used to be. But I've always felt that it was important to defend and important to like encourage people to use it and to try to do cool stuff with it. Because it is still the platform that doesn't have a giant gatekeeper telling you what to do. And sometimes that's, you know, terrible because people do terrible things on the web. But it also is a chance for innovation without a massive resources or infrastructure.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but like the verge only exists because we could just make a website, you know? We didn't need to like, back in the day, remember with the iPad, there was like the, the whole idea of the iPad is they would cut deals and it was good to like a news consumption machine and like.

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp made an entire. iPad newspaper called

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Fifty million bucks. He spent fifty million bucks.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  And they hired some of the best people. When the Daily fell apart, we like went and hired some Daily people. Like, oh, this is, these people are great.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  But they were like, basically publishing a single PDF to an iPad a day.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, like, the, the fact that we didn't need to cut a deal to do something like that, that we could just, we start, the, the Verge started as a website called This Is My Next. It was a WordPress blog that y'all started and then I came on just because everyone wanted to make sure that they stayed sharp with writing, but also because we were all just, we couldn't stop ourselves from wanting to like, comment on tech and review tech and say things about the news events that were happening.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that moment is actually really instructive. So we all left Engadget, we're recruiting Dieter, Dieter comes on, he's our first hire. We started a website just to host what became The Vergecast. This was called This Is My Next Podcast because we didn't have a name. And we started the WordPress site just to put the podcast somewhere. Because back in those days, you just needed to do that. And then all of us, our plan was like, well, I'll just blog on our personal blogs. This is like ancient history that people thought this was a viable strategy. And then we're like, this is stupid. We should put it all in one place. And then our poor product team, which was desperately trying to build The Verge, started getting feature requests for the WordPress site we had started in the background. Because we couldn't stop ourselves from using it.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  I'd be like, we've got an Apple event, like, uh, the iPhone 4S was announced when we were still This Is My Next on our WordPress blog. And I was like, here's my feature list for how we're going to do an Apple event. And I very directly remember our product manager being like, do you want to delay The Verge by one month? Because if I go and do all this garbage you want on WordPress, I will not be building your actual website. And I was like, I'm gonna have to think about that.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  But all that's just web stuff. Like, we were able to just like build that stuff and invent it and go to the audience with it. But there's something to, and I recognize that building apps is not easier than ever, but there's something about the lack of gatekeepers. I think it's still very important.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Well, I think when I say Dieter was right, I don't mean that apps are terrible. And he didn't say that apps were terrible, but I think we need to have an open web. And if, and the pandemic has kind of proved it. I mean, you can do Zoom on your phone. Uh, you can do Zoom on your iPad, but most people have done Zoom on their laptop or, or uh, whatever. And that's just, it's just a, a link to another tab.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  That's the Zoom call. It's just like, just like this podcast we're doing right now is, is, I don't know. They, they have an app, I guess, but we're, I'm doing it on the Chrome browser.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Which is, by the way, Dieter, there's a little bit of gatekeeping on the web. Through Chrome, through Safari, through, uh, I don't, I have no idea about Edge. I have no idea.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  But Microsoft wants, Microsoft is desperately trying to gatekeep on Edge. Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there's a little gatekeeping there, but, but anyway, I just wanted to, uh, you know, when I was thinking about Dear Bone, I was thinking about that lecture in the cab, which took almost no time to develop.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's very accurate. Well, okay. So let's talk about gatekeeping on browsers like Chrome, for example, like when a company makes a website and it only works in Chrome, I refuse to say that it is a web app. That it instead is a Chrome app, or if it only works in Safari, well, that rarely happens. It's a Safari app. This is another one of my favorite things I've done at The Verge. I spent, God, Neel, when did I first pitch uh, the definition of the web to you? It took like two years.

• 37:46Nilay Patel?

  It did take so long.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  I just, I kept on writing it and erasing it and writing it and erasing it and like talking to people and talking to people on the web and whatever. This whole thing got started because John Gruber over at Daring Fireball had published a post wherein he argued that, it was about apps versus web, and he argued something to the effect of like, anything that uses HTTP is on the web and therefore apps are part of the web. And I was like, hang on. And so then I thought about it for like two years and I landed on this post that I'm very proud of, like a now a brief definition of the web, where I said that in order for something to be on the web, it has to be linkable. There needs to be a link, like you mentioned, the Zoom link wall. But then the second thing is it needs to be agnostic to the client. So there needs to not be a gatekeeper for it.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  It needs to be able to give me what it is it's trying to do using whatever computer or whatever browser app or whatever I choose to use with it. And unless the thing you're making, the app, the page or whatever, gives you that freedom, I don't think it should count as part of the open web.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  That was a great piece. I'm not sure I read it contemporaneously, but I read it. And the other thing you forgot to mention is, by being agnostic, there were no green videos and blue videos. It was, it was, no, no green bubbles, no blue bubbles. Just, we're all here, we could be using different brands of computers. I suspect we're not, but we could be. And it wouldn't matter. And we could be using different devices, you know?

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  I got that lecture and I, after all these years, I just wanted to say, I take your point. I take your point.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  That's a big victory.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  It's a giant win for me.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Thank you. I think it's a good, an excellent place to take another break here from some other folks. We'll be right back.

• 39:42Speaker 10

  Oh, hello, Dieter. This is Elvis from your Las Vegas wedding. I just want to wish you a successful next chapter in your life and always remember to rock on.

• 39:56Speaker 11

  Dieter, it's your bud Becca. Sorry if you can't hear me over the sound of the crashing waves. I'm currently celebrating on a beach because the competition on the channel just... Woo! Well, let's just say, "Thank God, you're finally leaving." No, I'm kidding. Dieter, you've been an incredible mentor for me. And it's definitely sad to see you get going. I feel like you were just getting really good at Premiere 2. But anyway, Android trumps iOS all day, every day. So just happy you're going to fight the good fight. I'll see you down the trail, bud.

• 40:34Speaker 12

  Hey, everyone. It's Lauren Good from Wired. And I had the absolute pleasure of working with Dieter for at least a few years at The Verge, which means that there are way too many stories that I can't possibly fit into this short little speech. But I think this sums Dieter up. The other day, when Dieter texted me and asked if we could talk, I ended up messaging him the next morning at about 6:30, so it was pretty early. And he replied, "Good morning, lol. Glad to see we are both still..." And then he put this in caps, "old people who are up too early." But I guess that story doesn't really encompass what a smart and kind and caring colleague and friend Dieter is.

• 41:19Speaker 12

  And this is something that I think Verge readers and Verge YouTube fans have really gotten a sense of over the years because who Dieter is really shows in his coverage. And I know he is going to be sorely missed, both at The Verge and in the world of journalism. But I also know he's going to do great and just be a great person, no matter where he is. So, good luck, Dieter. I would say I'll miss you, but hopefully I'll see you soon.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  Lastly, the three of us have worked together a lot. It would be remiss if we had this whole conversation. We shouldn't talk about the news because Dieter is not technically a Google executive. But we have covered an awful lot of Apple events together in our time. There's one next week. But, Dieter, I just want to talk about that. That... I'm just gonna take credit for it because it's the day you're leaving.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  I would say that we invented the sort of modern swarm and event approach. Live log, live posts, immediate hands-on videos. That was something that we were doing before The Verge at our various sites. The chaos of running around with. I used to take my first event videos on like a Canon Elf camera. It's like a real thing I used to do and we would just throw them up on whatever garbage player we could.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  I had some Sony camera that was like shaped like a pistol. You remember the Sony camera?

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, that thing was incredible.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  I used to have one of those Elgato Turbo 264 USB cards that would speed up.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:48Nilay Patel?

  Videos because computers are too slow.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  To speed up compression and encoding for you.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  That was all stuff we made up and now it's a system. But dude, I just want to talk about that moment like. I feel like I can say this to you like. We were nuts, right? Like that was not the right way to to burn our time or be stressed. But we did it. I'm just wondering, like, looking back on it. Like, what do we get right? What do you think we got wrong?

• 43:15Speaker 02

  I completely disagree.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  I don't think we were nuts at all. If you go to the site, you'll see my goodbye post. There's this long-running joke that I'm always the first person to show up at these live events. I'm like first in line. I should get there at like 6 a.m. Everyone teases me for it. And I happily take that teasing. Because when we do these live events and like in The Verge in general, people are like, how are you so good? And it's like, well, all our people care a lot. They all work very hard and we like, we are organized, like rigorously organized in our logistics and what the plan is going to be. And then we execute on that plan. It's very simple. But I always showed up to those events early and I always really killed myself to do the best job I could, be as fast as I could. And just like be like as on as I ever have been. Because it genuinely was a privilege to be there.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Most people can't go to these big tech events. And whether the products end up being impactful or minor, there's a very good chance that thousands, if not millions of people will be using the things that are announced that day. And so I always took it very seriously. Seriously to do my best to do the best work there. Because, one, there was a massive team back in the office, watching along with us, trying to get news posts up while I was live blogging or taking pictures of a phone in a giant crowd or whatever. And I wanted to make sure I didn't let them down. But importantly, I didn't want to let our audience down. Because one of the things about The Verge is, you know, we take this stuff really seriously.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  We take gadgets really seriously. We think that they are important objects because you use them thousands of times a day or sometimes. And so we know our audience does too. And so for me to be jaded about my 10th Apple keynote, to me, it strikes me as just fundamentally unfair. Because it genuinely was a privilege to be there. Not because, oh my God, I'm at the temple of Apple or the amazing Google I/O keynote. I'm lucky to be in the presence of this company. It was, I had the privilege of being the representative of our audience at that thing. So yeah, I'm going to show up a couple hours early to make sure that I don't screw it up.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  How do you think that's changed? I mean, that's kind of the heart of this question. And Walt, I would give that to you too, right? Like, when Walt and I were talking before we got on the air here, you mentioned that there was that early run of Apple where every keynote was like a Steve Jobs new product. Or at least the iPod was a different color, right? There was just like a fast and furious moment.

• 45:41Speaker 05

  Whatever it is, we had, you know, since I've retired a few years ago, I've been thinking about kind of the run of my career and products and all that. And in the early days, I'm not sure you guys were old enough to be writing then, but maybe you were, I don't know. In 1991, in the early days, everything was a new thing. And, you know, finding things to review or write about or comment about wasn't that hard. And then... You go through stages, then the computer becomes relatively common.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  They agree on certain, even though they don't, I assume, formally sign a, you know, a treaty, but, you know, you know what a touchpad looks like, or a trackpad, whatever word you want to use for it. And you know that the ones on the Macs are better than the ones on the PCs until the PCs catch up, a few of the PCs catch up. But you know what that is. And things like that. I mean, you know, that wasn't always clear. I think the most exciting part of that whole period, after everything got settled down, was about 10 years after Steve Jobs came back to Apple, and this is not a plug for

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Apple, but it's just what changed the world, what was fresh, what was exciting, what was different, and what was presented to you by one of the great salesmen ever. Those were those Apple events. I mean, you know, starting with the iMac in 98, going to the iPod, and the iPod Nano, and the iPod Mini, and all those things. That famous Saturday Night Live sketch where Fred Armisen, playing Steve Jobs, would introduce an iPod and then cancel it five minutes later, you know. And Tina Fey would go, wait a minute, that was only on the market for a minute, you know.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  He goes, too long.

• 47:51Speaker 05

  So those, and then, and then, of course, the iPhone, which is, you know, you could write a thesis on it. And then, the iPad. And, oh, and the MacBook Air in there. And that was an ama-, I, I'm not sure there's been a run of at least hardware products that could compare with that run over that period of time. And- The events themselves became, in a way, the place to be if you were a tech writer. Whether you cared about Apple or not, whether you thought the thing was dumb, or you thought it was, you know, the answer to everything, it didn't matter.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Those were the places to be, and those were the places all the journalists saw each other every time it came up. So it was quite an unusual thing, and I had been going to them, I don't think I missed more than one. I think I was snowed in for one or something. But I will say that the first one I went to with you guys, and watching the organization, a lot of which was Dieter, was quite astonishing to me. I mean, I helped a little with the live blogging. I sat there with an iPad mini and threw in lines into the live blog.

• 49:15Speaker 05

  But then, immediately after, we huddled outside on the sidewalk, we figured out, you know, where to go for the hands-on, who was, it was all figured out beforehand. But I mean, we reminded ourselves of that, we tried to decide if we should do a special podcast. I think we did do at least one of those, maybe more. Who was gonna write what? You know, what kind of, Neelai, I think you would always write something. I wrote a column typically the next day, out of sequence with my regular columns. So, you know, there was no stopping, and every kind of tool we had at our disposal to talk to our audience was used.

• 49:58Speaker 05

  So I was just blown away.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Dieter would often assign me the role of schmoozing, to just get me out of the way. He'd be like, "You go schmooze." Well, I got it.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I mean, it was also because I am incredibly bad at it. Like, I-

• 50:14Speaker 02

  I have I have learned to do a very good job to act like I am a social person and you know I'm comfortable in front of people. But the truth is, no, everybody is terrifying all of the time. And so I would, it was important that we try and get FaceTime with executives. It was important that we like talk to other people. And so I knew that I was bad at it and I knew that Eli is very good at it.

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  And I knew that the tool I had in my back pocket was that I could get them an introduction to Dieter Bohn. Which is very, once you find the leverage, you gotta use it, is my advice. Let's hear from a couple more people and then let's, let's wrap this thing up. But here's a, here's a couple more people saying about it here.

• 50:52Speaker 13

  Hi, it's Maria. One of my most important memories of Dieter is actually from a shoot for Handspring last year. We were on location and someone mistaked me for the production assistant and I was the senior producer for the project. Dieter quickly turns around and is like, "Hey, she's actually the one who's running this whole thing. This is as much her project as it is mine." In the last eight years working for Tech Blogs, I have never seen anyone in real time stand up for something like that. Usually people message me later being like, "Oh, hey, that sucks. Like, sorry that happened," even if they were there in person. I think for me, that story really encompasses the kind of collaborator and person Dieter

• 51:37Speaker 13

  is, really willing to champion others and in my experience, really stand up for the things that are right. So, we'll miss you a lot.

• 51:45Speaker 14

  Hey, Dieter, Tom here. I'm recording this on some type of Android messaging app, I'm not sure which one. So hopefully you actually get to hear it through the power of RCS. In all seriousness, though, it has been a pleasure working with you over the last 10 years. Your reviews, your YouTube videos and analysis has been non-stop 10 out of 10 and we're gonna miss you dearly. I'm now looking forward to watching you keep kicking ass, using really bad puns on Twitter and standing up for the open web.

• 52:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, dude, I, there's two things I want to talk about at the end here. One, we haven't really talked about your growth in video, right? You started The Verge, we all just sort of made videos, we had no ideas what we're doing. You obviously ran with it. I want to just hear about that a little bit.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  Because I think what you have built with your YouTube audience is incredible. And then, what are you doing at Google? But let's start with, let's start with this video thing. And so I think a lot of people look up to you, a lot of people want to be YouTubers. How did this start? How did it grow? What does that feel like?

• 52:46Speaker 02

  So we've always tried to do video at The Verge. And the video team has made some incredible ambitious stuff. But you know, you also got to do like hands-ons and reviews and whatnot. There was a very early hands-on with, uh, God, I think it might have been the Nexus 5. And it was in a weird space and there weren't a lot of journalists there. And I was nervous and I didn't want to like bother everybody else. So we did a really quick hands-on and I was like really quiet and I mumbled. And I was like, you know, because I didn't want to interrupt people in the room. And so the hands-on gets published and Reddit and a bunch of people just like excoriate me for this. Like I said, the camera's going to suck before I even tried it. How dare I? Turned out I was right.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  I, you know, like it was like an unenthusiastic, like, why are you so bored by this thing? You sound bored thing. And at first I was like, really like, come on, man. Like, you know, I, you, I don't actually like, this is unfair. I was, you don't know the situation, like blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I sort of just realized like, come on, that's not fair. Like, like they're right. I sounded unenthusiastic and the, the craft of making a good video, the craft of like communicating to an audience on YouTube or, you know, a different platform is a mix of like, understanding the conventions of that platform and like, you know, knowing where you can push on them, knowing where you should stick to them. And then actually caring about the craft of like,

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Being clear to camera and doing good work and you know, like the visuals, which I am terrible with the camera, but our, our video team has been amazing. And so a lot of the answer to like, how did I, you know, get good about, how did I get good on video was just really thinking about the audience, caring what I think people want, would want to see and what they need to know and taking the, the time that they are generously giving us to hit play on a video, even if you're playing it at 1.5, like you're giving me your time. I owe you caring about the thing I make for that time. And so it's not, it was like, maybe it's like a Malcolm Gladwell

• 54:58Speaker 02

  10,000 hours kind of thing or whatever, but mostly it was over and over again at The Verge, we, we really do want to make good things for our audience. And so like taking a step and not thinking about like just the product itself and what I want to say about it, but thinking about the craft that I want to say about it. And that craft is not there because I want to be a better writer, although of course it is. The craft is there because like I care that a person who buys a phone, like they buy the right phone and they, they understand how it works and they have a good experience. And so like, I need to tell them that. But at the same time, I care about them having a good experience with the products that we make. And so like, I just, it's

• 55:42Speaker 02

  a very long way of saying I just started trying harder. I mean, isn't that always the answer? But I tried harder in service of like, like for a specific reason that like I, I appreciate and feel privileged for the attention that people are willing to give us. And I feel like I need to give back the most that I can for that attention.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  You know, I said earlier that I admired you as a journalist, but that that only grew. And I think your videos were an enormous part of that. You, you didn't try to be flashy. You didn't try to be, you know, kind of fake funny. You just, you, you came across as a guy, and this was always my goal. I couldn't do it in video. I just stared at the webcam in a, in a. 1998 Mac, you know, that's what I did. Uh, and, and looked like a deer in the headlights. But what I mean is, you have to come across as somebody that they can trust, that knows more about it than they do,

• 56:42Speaker 05

  but that still never, ever forgets, people have to be comfortable with this. People have limited budgets. People have, uh, needs. I mean, the, the, the Samsung camera can have 150 features, but you know that most people are just gonna use the default. And you know that, and you said stuff like that in your videos. And, and you try, your, your tests took all of that into account. You might show the crazy features for a minute or two, but mostly you use the camera the way you thought your audience would use the camera.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  So I can't commend you enough for, uh, your video work.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Thanks. Actually, Neelai, can I ask you a question? Um, famously with our iPhone reviews, and, um, we really like dig in deep on like a particular camera feature. And often our reviews, both yours and mine, you know, there's like all the stuff, but then there's like one thing that we just like go very hard on. And I always liked that because it, um, you know, like the feature itself was interesting, but it was also like a demonstration of knowing that these new things that are like are getting put out by these companies, like, actually could have an effect on people's lives. And that the, the process of us showing how we examine and think about things

• 58:10Speaker 02

  was like a, I don't know, like a example for people who end up going buying them and not being journalists to think about those things. Like where we were demonstrating for our audience a way to think more critically about, you know, the latest random camera feature or whatever.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure what the question was. Now that you're a Google executive, I think you're filibustering on my podcast just like the rest of them. It's fine. It's good training. What I'll add to that is, we've done that a lot. I have all these ideas about The Verge's mission statement and the tagline. And what I've settled with lately is that we are a publication about how technology makes you feel, which I think is, you can get it and no one else is crazy enough to say that about a tech publication. But that's what we're about. How does this stuff make you feel? The other thing that I always think, and this is very much Neelai and Dieter being esoteric about things, is it's fun to be smart. Right? If you like come into this and you're curious, like we should reward your curiosity.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  And in a media environment where we don't have the production budget of Apple, and we certainly don't have their timelines, the amount of information that they can put out, or that Google can put out, or Samsung can put out about their phone, is infinite, and it's beautiful, and it lacks all credibility in my mind, because it's not real, right? They're trying to sell you something. We're trying to show you the experience of using it. And I think a huge part of the experience of using this stuff is understanding how it works, or at least knowing, and this is like very much what I've taken from Dieter over these many years, at least knowing that the people who made decisions about how it works are authors themselves.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  They are making choices to provide you with a tool or an instrument in the Dieter parlance, so that you yourself will then make culture. And particularly, I think this is true with phones and laptops, and why I spend so much time thinking about cameras. The way a smartphone camera works is the biggest unlock in human cultural production that has ever existed, like by far.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  We are like, the amount of video that we are, are just inundated with, that everyone can create, the fact that we're on a video call right now to make this podcast on, in three different cities in the country. And I will tell you, we use Riverside, which prioritizes audio. So you guys are a little blocky for me. It's podcast. That stuff is incredible. It is, happens because of cameras. And if you don't take the cameras seriously and the decisions that people made with cameras seriously, you might find yourself not really understanding the cultural object you look at. And that's why what's a computer or what is a photo in the context of computational photography, I think, have been, yep, that's

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  me and Dieter nerding out. Like, that's who we are. But I think the reason we've built an audience around those questions is once that light goes on in your brain, you understand that you're really, you're asking very deep questions about what it means to be like a participant in our society. And yeah, and then like, it's cool. So I can be like, the Face ID works by shooting lasers on your face. And like, that all comes together. But you got to start with that big idea. And then I think that if you're curious enough, you will find the things that are very cool.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  It's always there. It doesn't always necessarily come through. Sometimes we just got to tell you the battery life, man. Instead of like-

• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes you have one day embargo, and I'm like, it didn't light on fire-

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  -one time it did. Sorry. These phones explode is a real important thing to get through sometimes. All right, let's talk about Google. You're going to Google.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  I got a Google executive on the Vergecast. It's pretty cool.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Not yet. I don't start for a minute.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  All right. A pre, what are you doing? Are you like, going to be comms? Are you gonna like, send me emails on background that I have to tell you that I don't do that anymore?

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. I, I know our background policy, so I would never dare. No, I'm gonna be, uh, not very public for a while. I don't know how long, probably quite a while. I'm working inside the, again, the platform and ecosystems team. So I'll be working with the people who are making the actual products. And I'll be trying to help think, you know, more narratively and more deeply about what those products are, how they can fit together, and how they themselves could be better.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  Wait, I, I thought you were going there to fix their messaging app.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Both of us were like, he can do it. He can fix RCS.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Do you want me to talk about about RCS?

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  No, I mean, I just want you to fess up.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  Go out with a bang, man.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  You're going you're going over there to be the messaging guy.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I am not, please. So much more than that. I've said this publicly many times. I think that RCS is not the greatest messaging platform on earth. I think that it has many faults, but so does any messaging platform. But that it's sort of it's the direction that Google has chosen and they need to see it through. But more importantly, it's the direction that carriers have chosen and they need to see it through. So as much as I will say, you know, Apple should support RCS because fundamentally RCS can be an encrypted platform and there should be privacy between iPhone users and Android users, which I do believe.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  At a certain point, what we're talking about here are carrier services because that's what RCS fundamentally is if the carriers choose to support it. And so it's on them to be like, yeah, we're we're setting a sunset date on SMS. And that's like, that's what needs to happen.

• 1:04:00Speaker 05

  So you're going to be just spending all your days having meetings with T-Mobile?

• 1:04:06Nilay Patel?

  When Dieter first told me about this job, I was like, here are some here are some traps I foresee for you.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:15Nilay Patel?

  I think this job sounds really interesting. I do think that.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  The thing I'm looking forward to is like, yeah, I don't one day it'll be public again. And the first Dieter on Decoder episode is going to be hilarious.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be real good.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  I'm literally terrified because like, everybody just needs to know if this ever happens, not only will Neelai not play softball, it will be incumbent upon him and I would do the same thing in his position to play the hardest ball possible.

• 1:04:43Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  No answer on that one, no.

• 1:04:45Speaker 05

  And I'll be on his ass if he does it.

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  I know, Walt will produce that episode.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to wrap this up. We've gone over, actually, in classic Vergecast fashion. Walt, did you want to say one last thing to the earth?

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  I have. Enjoyed working with you. I've enjoyed being a consumer of your stuff. And I hope we still are friends. I'm pretty sure we will be. And I think you're gonna, I think Google is very lucky to get you. That's what I'll say.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  We are absolutely going to continue to be friends. Thank you.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  I will continue to be both of your rivals. I'd like everyone to realize I've now vanquished the both of you. This is really, that's what this episode's about. No, I will, Dieter, I will miss working with you tremendously. I don't know if people know this, we have very different kinds of public personas. Dieter is more ambitious than I am. He has higher standards than I do. He has consistently pushed me to be the best version of the editor in chief that I can be and to make The Verge great. And he has just absolutely esoteric intellectual ideas that he forces me to contend with, which is a useful exercise when you are in a creative partnership with someone. So I'm gonna miss working with you. I'm,

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  I still have your phone number. One of the hardest things about this episode is like, Dieter's not dying.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  So I don't want to like, we're even trying to calibrate the bittersweet excitement. That's what I started with. So I'm excited for you. I'm sad to be not working with you anymore, but I just really wanted to say, uh, thank you. And I think from our audience, I hope I'm channeling some of them. Uh, you know, the hours we have spent on this podcast together have gotten me through challenging times in our life. I think like the pandemic, part of getting through the endless slogs of pandemic was just complaining about how many days it had been since a website was announced with you. And like, all that stuff is really important. And I just wanted to say thank you for that. And also, really, can you, can you just do something about Chrome battery life? Because that would be great for all of us.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  I'll try. Well, I want to thank you for all of your guidance since we started working together and also your kindness. The thing about both of you, actually, that I think people don't realize is how supportive and kind you are to your fellow employees, to, you know, you're supportive publicly, but even even better privately when we talk. It has really meant a lot to me. And Neel, I'm not going to try and sum up 12 years of friendship and working together in 30 seconds because, good lord.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  But, you know, the number of times I've like submitted a draft to you and both been terrified and excited for you to just tell me that it was wrong or that I like missed it, I can't count because, you know, I've needed you to to check me. I've it's it's been incredibly, I don't know. It's deep in my humanity to have you force me to think more clearly about things and to be more courageous in saying things directly instead of couching it in a million, you know, little clauses and provisos and I don't know about this, not about that. And you would you've always pushed me just like, no, no, you know what the thing to say

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  is, you should just say it. And I think without you, I wouldn't have had that clarity. I'm still working on it today. And, yeah, man, I don't know. I'm gonna miss you. But I'm not dying, I'm still around, so please text me.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like hard to cob right at the end of this. Both of you are very dear to me. I'm gonna, Walt, I have missed you, although I do get the occasional text or call from Walt, it's like, make the thing better, which is helpful and I appreciate it. Dieter, I look forward to just complaining about Google to you in back channels. We're gonna have to disclose Dieter works at Google for like a few months to come.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Every time there's a stock photo of me that shows up on the site.

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  I didn't even think about that and we're gonna have to sort it out. But I think that'll all be fun. One thing I want to say to everybody, The Verge is not over. We're just saying goodbye to Dieter, who is our co-founder. We are putting on a show for it. If you have ever co-founded anything with anybody, it's a big deal. There's, there's a lot tied up. I've cried on Dieter's shoulder in a bar more times than I can count. Starting things is really hard. So yeah, we're making a big deal for Dieter going. The man deserves it, deserves every minute of it. The Verge, however, has a great team that is now closing in on 100 people. We have a wild new website design coming this year. We have a new video strategy. We have, all this stuff is happening.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  I host another podcast, which is excellent. Shameless plug at the end of the Dieter goodbye. So that's all still going. I just want to make sure, Dieter, you had this moment to say goodbye to this audience. Importantly, I wanted to hear people say how much we care about you and we're gonna miss you. That is our goodbye. We have a few more people who want to say goodbye to you. And then I think, Dieter, Dieter wants to talk to all of you directly. So that's what we're gonna do. But that's it. That's The Verge Cast.

• 1:10:13Speaker 15

  Hey, it's Casey Newton, contributing editor at The Verge and editor of Platformer. Dieter was my work husband for all seven and a half years that I worked at The Verge, except for his detour in New York. We sat next to each other and there is really no person in my professional life I have learned more from than Dieter. From my first day at The Verge, he taught me to try really, really hard, to be really ambitious and to always assume that you could accomplish huge things if you simply demanded it. I don't know that Dieter will ever get the credit he deserves for helping to build The Verge with his bare hands. He invented so many of our processes. He refined all those processes.

• 1:10:59Speaker 15

  He hired great people. He wrote great stuff. He made amazing videos. So Dieter is an all-time talent and we will miss him at The Verge. But I'm so, so grateful for the time that I got to spend learning by his side. Congratulations, Dieter.

• 1:11:14Speaker 16

  Hey Dieter, I'll never forget when it was just the two of us in that shitty San Francisco office with the barbecue place next door down the street. Those were the days, weren't they? West Coast news. Now you've come so damn far. It's been a pleasure to watch. Well, if you ever need someone to narrate an impactful video, you know who to call.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Well, that was great. I loved talking to Walt and Neelai. Obviously, one thing I just didn't get around to is thanking everybody at The Verge, both past and present. And I want to give like an Oscar-style speech where I just start saying names and telling you how amazing they are until the music plays and they kick me out. But I really shouldn't do that. And at some point, I'd forget a name and I'd feel terrible. But there are just, there's so many. I'm going to say a few. Helen Havelock, who we promoted to be our boss, is an incredible steward for The Verge. She is one of the things that makes it great. You might know Dan Seifert, he runs our reviews program. Casey Norrie runs

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  our video team. Maria has done incredible work. She helped me make the Springboard documentary, which I hope you go watch. It is a really important thing. Veron has been making videos with me forever. I knew this was going to happen. I'm going to want to keep saying names forever. And whoever I leave off is going to feel terrible about. But the thing I want to just emphasize here is The Verge is going to continue to be amazing because the people that work there are amazing. And they're making amazing stuff. And they care every bit as much as I always have, if not more. And they are even more talented than I am. So please keep heading over there. Please keep watching the videos. Listen to

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  the podcasts. I am so excited to see what they're going to be doing next. There's a bunch of stuff I know about that's coming that I think is going to be incredible. And there's even more stuff that I have no idea about. And I think I'm most excited about that stuff. So, Verge forever. Love all of you.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Hey. So, this is weird. I'm saying goodbye all by myself, talking in your ear, and you're out there, listening to me. It's called a parasocial relationship, by the way, if you haven't heard. You feel like I'm there with you, but I have no idea who you are. And that could be weird for a lot of creators. It is a little weird, but I've been incredibly lucky that I've never really felt that weird about it, because I always feel like when I'm talking to the folks on The Vergecast, that I'm also, like, talking to you, and that so many of you have, like, the same sort of innate curiosity, the same obsessions, the same desire

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  to just figure this stuff out and try and have a little fun while we do it. You know, the terms here that I've got, like, you're our listeners, or, you know, fans, or whatever, and that's all just too passive. You're not an audience. You're... This is in the post on the site. "I feel like you've been a kindred spirit." And so many of you have tweeted at me, and emailed me, and just sent me your thoughts in whatever way that you could. And it's always been wonderful. It's always wonderful when people stop by and say hi on the street, because then they get to see how awkward I truly am. So, thank you for listening. Thank

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  you for letting me be in your ear all of these years. And, you know, I'm not going away. Feel free to reach out to me anytime. I am and will remain @backlon on Twitter. But, thank you for listening. Thank you for all that you've given to me over the years. And be a kindred spirit. Don't be a stranger.

• 1:15:47Speaker 17

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• 1:16:17Speaker 18

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