Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, A Parody | Daniel Lyons | Talks at Google

And I think that guy Lutz from GM was blogging. So some CEOs were blogging. The big question was, should your CEO blog? And I thought it was a crazy idea that CEOs. No way. They should never blog. But I thought, what if a CEO did? But he went totally off the rails, and he totally did say what he really thought and was just a complete jerk. And when the Wall Street Journal wrote something bad about him, he'd write something back saying, what idiots they are. I thought that would be really hilarious and depending on the CEO. And I was a big Apple fan. And, you know, Jobs is very reclusive. He doesn't ever say much. And when he does say stuff, he's very controlled and very, you know, very tight, and he'll repeat the same sentence over and over. So I thought he'd be perfect, you know, because, you know, he knows everything about the industry. You know, Schmidt's on the. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, like, okay, so he's got Google connections, so you can do Google Dish because he's got a connection there. You can do Sundish because of the connection there. You can do Hollywood Dish because he's involved with Disney and Pixar, the music industry because of itunes and even politics. So it was like this lens that you could suddenly riff on all sorts of stuff, but through the point of view of someone who's much more interesting than I am. Right? So which was. That was the key to it. And I did it for, like, six weeks. And I said, okay, that was fun. I sent links to a couple friends of mine. I didn't tell them that I was writing, and I just said, oh, I found this blog. And they passed it on, and it started growing. And after six weeks, they said, oh, that was fun. I shut it down. All these people wrote in saying what happened. And I didn't have site meter. I was so clueless about the Internet. I didn't know that you could, like, meter your blog and anything, right? So somebody told me, like, put it back up and put a site meter on it. Then you can see what's. Oh, really? So I did that, and I was like, you know, I told my wife there were like a thousand people this week, you know, like, from all over. Like, you know, people in Russia, you know, whatever, all over the world, in England and all over the state. So I started doing it more seriously then. And then it started evolving as, like, first it was just jokes, then I started adding in. Like, I could actually cover the news. Through this filter. It was like the Daily show or Colbert. You could actually. You could riff on the news, but you could still actually do real, kind of real coverage, you know? And then I also started doing this fictional stuff where I would have scenes or recurring storylines like a comic strip would have, where something happens on Tuesday and then you build on it on Friday. And before I came to Forbes, I was writing fiction. I did an MFA at University of Michigan and published a couple books. And I was still trying to write books, even when I was at Forbes, but I wrote two and just kept them in drawers. They were serious and artsy and they didn't really work. But if you get an MFA, you probably don't have a lot of MFAs here. But literature is like, oh, do you? I don't know. No. Oh, see, there's one. But at Michigan, anyway, it's very serious, and people would agonize over literature and blah, blah, blah. So it never occurred to me, like, fake Steve could be like a book or literature, because it seemed like a joke. But it was starting to become kind of like that. There was this world of Larry Ellison's a character, and Bono's a character, and Schmidt's a character, and Schwartz. So all these people, and they're exaggerated cartoon versions of the real people. I think I've never met the real people, but it was this weird little world. And then I realized, oh, you could actually make a novel out of this. It was sort of. The raw material was there and the voice was there. And then the option stuff happened. This SEC thing happened. And I thought, like, that's going to be really big. I think I was wrong, because now it's gone away. But I still think there may be something going on there. But at the time I thought, oh, so you have a protagonist with a voice. You have a world that they inhabit, and it's Silicon Valley, which is fun and kind of cool. And now you have the impetus for a storyline. So the storyline of the book is that it opens with Steve being told the SEC is after you, the US Attorney's after you. And he's very dismissive and doesn't want to believe it. But gradually they circle in and circle in, and it becomes really real to him. Like, you're really, really in trouble. And then the question of the story is, well, how do you get the protagonist out of trouble? How does he get himself out of danger? Which is a pretty straightforward plot of any kind of book, right? Character in trouble, in danger, has to get out. Or, you know. So that was the genesis of the book and the blog now has continued. I was anonymous for a long time, as you probably know, but I was really bad at being anonymous. And I told almost everybody I knew and I told Forbes back in March. So, like, a lot of people knew. I knew, like, this is going to blow up eventually. This is going to come out. I've known that for a long time. But I wanted to be anonymous because it was more fun, I think, for people to read it thinking you don't know who it is. And it's just kind of like you forget about that. There's a guy I think it's worse to know, like, oh, it's secret diary brought to you by this idiot from Boston. It's just not as fun, right? It's just that now that you know who it is, I think people are still reading it. So maybe not. But at one point in January, it started to get like 90, got to like 90,000 readers a month. And I thought, this is really, you know, big. But I wasn't making any money. I was just doing it. But I could see it was getting bigger and bigger. And someone told me I should shut it down. A lawyer said, you know, you can't, you should, you should stop doing this, you're going to get fired. And, you know, it's really bad. So I posted something saying, well, I think I'm going to have to shut this down. And my lawyers have told me this and you know, blah, blah, blah. So I got all this email from like, Wired and Fast Company, Time. No, no, Fortune, Small Business. And a bunch of magazines wrote to me saying, oh, we'd like to sponsor it or do something. Would you like to do something? But in all this mail, I got one from the publisher of Forbes, who's a friend of mine, saying, I'm Rich Karlgard, I'm the publisher of Forbes. And you know, we'd really, we think you're great and we don't know who you are and we'd love you to come write a column for us, you know. And meanwhile, I had been in Forbes in New York that week, you know, begging for a raise. And you know, and they were like, ah, there you jackass, you know, no, but so meanwhile, the publisher's writing to me, you know, offering, you know, throwing, you know, baskets of money. So I thought, what do I do? You know, I. Because I know him. I know him really well. So I wrote back and said, well, how much would that pay? What would the money be? And he wrote back saying, well, let's Talk about it, blah, blah, blah. So we started going back and forth, and then the guys who Forbes has a stake. A Silicon Valley company has a stake in Forbes. Bono happens to be one of the partners, which also freaked me out. When they bought the stake, I was like, oh, my God, I've been writing all this stuff about Bono and now he's my boss, right? Anyway, they wrote to me saying, we love your blog and we think it's great and we want to invest in it, too. Who are you? And I was like. So I finally told them. I was like, well, it's me. And then they were kind of like, oh, yeah, not so fun anymore. You know what I mean? Then I could see the wheel spinning, like, oh, well, maybe we can get it for free. Like, aha. I was on this panel the other day, and somebody asked a guy, a blogger guy from the Washington Post, what's the first thing you would tell someone, one of your writers who wanted to do a blog? And the answer was, we're not paying you. That's kind of like the whole ethos of the Internet. Well, you guys know that better than anyone, right? You're the ones who are making the money. But adsense. Don't mean to say anything, but I don't even want to go on about AdSense. But where does all that money go? I don't know. I had AdSense one day. I had 500,000 hits in a day. And I looked at my AdSense account. I was like, you've made $9.72. I was like, what the. But sorry, I know you guys are all. And it's not class rivalry or jealousy as it is. So where was I? I was talking about, oh, so the Forbes guy. So I came out, I came out, told them, and they said, let's try to put it on Forbes.com and over many, many months, they finally decided, OK, we'll do this. Which I think is amazing. So now they're sponsoring my blog and they're actually paying me to write this blog. And the only thing they told me is like, we're not going to have anything to do with it, and we don't want you to tone it down or change it or whatever, so do whatever you want. And. And I kind of told them, like, man, some of the top guys stare at it. I said, do you actually read it? And he's like, no, but we heard it's good. I said, well, let me tell you a couple things that have been on there recently. And they were like, oh, you know, but they were cool about it. And finally in August, the New York Times figured out who I was and sent me an email saying, this guy Brad Stone sent me an email saying, I'm pretty sure it's you. And I thought if I, you know, I didn't want to lie, but I could kind of say, well, you know, no comment. But then, you know, it's just going to be death by a thousand cuts. So I thought, well, I'll jump on the grenade and, you know, I'll finally. Plus, this is the New York Times, right? If you're going to have to be outed by somebody, it's better than Valleywag, right? So. And Valleywag kept taking shots and they kept getting it wrong. I was like laughing my ass off because they would do these big things, but they would announce tomorrow, we've got him, fake Steve, we've got him. And the first time I did it, I thought, oh, my God, they really do it. I wrote them an email begging them not to out me. Please don't do this. You'll ruin it. What's the point of this? And you should buy it instead and pay me. No. And then they were so sick, they were so evil that they actually ran that pleading email from fake Steve saying, listen to this desperate loser begging us not to do it. And they go, too bad, pal. And they go after the jump, the name. So I'm reading, I was shaking. I was shaking. I read and I jumped. And it was like this guy@wired.com who I knew I was emailing with him all the time because they were sponsoring the blog at the time. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so great. So then it invented this whole thread of Nick Denton of Gawker being the world's greatest investigative journalist. And we invented a verb called to denton, which means to screw up in a big royal way publicly. And I think somebody actually put it into the urban dictionary. Like, to Denton as a verb is now to screw up really badly. And I started writing all these things about Valleywag. Valleywag's about to announce tomorrow they found Princess Diana. She's living in Dubai. And then I'd run a follow up saying, oh, they pulled the veil back and it's just a woman who looks like Princess Diana on the web. I found a picture on Google Image searches, which, by the way, thank you for that. That's really great. I found like a Princess Diana impersonator who looks a lot like Princess Di. So I had this, you know, Valleyweg now has to Retract the story. It wasn't really Princess Diana. And so I was having a lot of fun winding them up and calling them names. And they were emailing me the whole time saying, you know, we're gonna get you. And they tried two more times and they even worse guesses. So it was all kind of fun. Like, that cat and mouse part of it was okay, but actually, when I finally did get busted, I was sort of glad because it was tiring to have to, you know, have. These people were, like, sending me emails with links that were really just a link to try to catch my IP address. And they'd say, oh, it's in Boston. You know, it was like, crazy. It was stupid. And so I was kind of glad anyway. That was. I just don't know if it's going to be. If it'll still be fun. People still seem to be reading it, although the total numbers are down a little bit since. Well, like, June, July and August were big because of the iPhone, and then July for the iPhone, and then August because I got outed. So September was back down to normal. But it's still, you know, still. God, it's a pretty big audience for one person. And it's been kind of fun for me to do that as a. You know, the difference is, like, if I write an article for Forbes Print, I write a column. Now I write this tech column. You know, I might get a letter, two letters, people say, hey, that was nice. What's the address of that? Like, you know, or if it's about Linux, they get right in and they hate me, right? And, you know, they threaten to kill me and, you know, find my cat and boil it and say, you know, this is terrible, but basically, there's no real feedback. It's a real disconnect for a print journalist. And then on the blog, as you know, it's like, really immediate, and you get feedback right away. Like, this one sucks, you know, not your best effort, you know, or this one was good. And, you know, I'm always amazed. Like, people are so critical. Like, I have two little kids, we have twins at 2 years old, and I blog, like, in the morning when we get up and the kids are climbing on me and my wife's trying to run out the door, and I'm trying to, like. Like check the mail and, you know, do the comments and bank something out quickly. And then, you know, in the middle of that chaos, I get one out. And someone like, this could have been so much better, dude. Like, I was like, duh, you know it's free, you know, you didn't pay for it, but. Or people. I'm now getting. Ever since the times thing happened, there's people who I don't think were reading early on who only heard about it recently and they got upset because I used a couple swears, blasphemy and headlines like one being God damn it. I got to think, you know, your blog is wonderful and really intelligent, but I don't think you need to lower yourself to that coarse line. I was like, God damn it, it's not that bad. And people get really outraged, like, I'm taking you out of my reader. That's it. You're out of my RSS reader because you blasphemed. I'm like, okay, I guess you haven't been along. You haven't been around. I did one about Britney Spears, you know, recently she was photographed again, you know, without underwear. And I had a link to that. I didn't run that photo, but I ran a thing saying we're not going to let her be an iPhone spokesperson anymore. And I needed some lame connection reason to put it on my blog. Right? So. And that was like the best I could think of anyway, all these people saying, this blog has been wonderful, but I'm leaving now. If this is the kind of humor that you're going to have here, I don't want to be here anymore. I was like, well, probably better off, you know. But anyway, that's generally the gist of the thing. If you want questions and answers, might be more fun than me just I ramble. But do you have questions or anybody you want to. Anything specific you want to ask about? And oh, by the way, I know I did something about Google like yesterday or the day before and honestly I didn't do that because I was coming. Quite the opposite. I forgot that I was coming here and just now when I got to the lobby I was like, oh crap, I wrote that thing about Google's in trouble. Believe me, Google in trouble is like the kind of trouble most companies would love to have. Sun would love to have the Google in trouble trouble. Anyway, but anyway, I'm sorry to take questions and so I'm just going to ask if you could repeat the question because. Oh, right, right. Ok, sure. Ok. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. If you can comment on your experience with the fake Steve Ballmer. Sorry, my interaction with the fake Steve Palmer. I don't know who that is. Right. I have a theory. I think it's Dvorak. I think he got outed recently, or they claimed it was Dvorak. And it seems to me like Dvorak. I don't think it's very funny, right? And when it came out, he started bombarding my posts with comments and everyone with a link to his blog, trying to draft on my blog to drop people over to his. Which is fine for a while, but after a while it was annoying because he just kept writing these insane, stupid comments and they weren't funny. So I started moderating him out. But I have a theory on why it's not funny. And it's that I think in terms of parody, in terms of doing this kind of thing, Jobs is a perfect, a very good target for this in the sense that he has one face to the world of this is sin, he's under control, blah, blah, blah. But you kind of know from anybody who ever worked at Apple or the books about him that behind the scenes, he's a completely different guy and really difficult and a monster and a diva and all that kind of thing. Whereas Steve Ballmer, to me, doesn't lend himself to parody. I was at Microsoft yesterday. I told him this. Ballmer kind of just has one face for the world. He's monkey boy and he's up. Like I basically said, if you're on stage with sweat pouring down your arms and you're running around and dancing, going like this, you can't parody that guy because he's already parodied himself, right? He is a parody. I mean, he's just out there and he doesn't care. The thing about Jobs that makes it funny is that Jobs is trying to pretend to be Namaste and all that stuff. So I had some. He emailed whoever it is that's doing that does email me once in a while or taunts me. And I think I don't read his blog very much anymore. I think occasionally there are things on his blog where he'll say stuff about my blog. Is that right? You don't know either, right? I don't know. Yeah. See, who keeps track of this stuff? But there are also, someone told me today there are fake, fake Steve blogs where there's another fake Steve who's doing like a parallel universe version of my fake Steve, right? And then there's this guy in Canada. I'm not going to say his name on camera, but you know who you are? Psycho. And he. He hates me, right? He hates me as Dan Lyons. He's hated me. He's had blogs about me as a Forbes reporter for a long time. And then when I got outed for doing Fake Steve. He was like Apple plug. Oh, he couldn't control himself so he now has a fake. I forget what it's called, but anyway it's a blog that's like an anti blog to my blog. Everything I post, he posts like why it sucks or why it shows that I'm a racist or I hate women or blah blah blah. So that's kind of. I read it for a little while but then I was just like how much of that can you take, right? And his is really mean, you know, it's like really like, you know I was, I've gained some weight. We had two year old twins, right? So I've gained some weight in the last couple years and I was on TV on CNBC when I got outed. And at one point in one of the shots I kind of tilted my head back, I was laughing and this guy froze frame of it and he's like look at this fat bastard, look at his waddles. He's got a waddle under his neck and he'd do a little thing around it. I was like oh man, dude, that's not cool, that's not nice, right? But so he's just got like, he's just, he's just got totally. And a lot of the Linux people. This is ideal Linux community that hate Linux, right? Which is like how do you hate an operator? I mean, I don't know, you know, they don't really care either way I use it. It's fine, it's nice. Forbes runs on it, you know, my TiVo box runs it. It's cool. But when I got outed, Groklaw wrote this really great. It's actually worth reading to go back and see this because it's fantastic. So they did this analysis, they said like clearly Fake Steve has been a Microsoft black ops operation from the get go. It was funded by Microsoft and if you look through the postings you can see that they often coincide with whatever Microsoft's talking about that month. Fake Steve's talking about it too, like making fun of peopleready or all this kind of stuff. And then they went around the bend to suggest that the book deal I had was probably a way for the Borg to fund me to pay me money but wash laundry the cash through Perseus books that published the book. And it's like, I mean it's just so around the bend that kind of thing is like how do you parody that? Like it's just like amazing. I mean it's already a Parody. Right. But I try to. Anyway, I've been trying to do, like, insane Microsoft paranoia stories about, you know, But I apply it to Apple. You know, clearly this must be a Microsoft operation because there are no fingerprints and no traces. So that's how you know it's Microsoft, because they're so good. You know, I was telling those guys yesterday, you know, like, you're the puppeteers who run the world. And really, I think they're the gang who couldn't shoot straight. And I mean that, by the way, I like Microsoft, but I don't think they're as demon, you know, devilish as people make them out to be. I'm sorry, another question if you. Yep. Well, at All Things D at this conference, he said Walt Mossberg asked him if he'd ever read it. And he said, yeah, I read some recently and they were pretty funny. But, you know, again, I think all those guys like you never. That's the whole reason the blog can be funny, is because those guys never say anything that isn't at least prepared. Especially Jobs. You're very careful. So I'm sure somebody in PR said to him, if you're asked about this lunatic blog, just say so. I think he. But I know one of his PR people had bought a bunch of T shirts from the Cafe Press Shop, and I think men's sizes, I think they were wearing them around Apple one day or something for a joke. And he probably gets a kick out of it. And at the time that he said that I had just posted, it was when he and Gates were going to appear together at All Things D. And I was writing these things about. And it was all supposed to be this, like, historic summit. These two statesmen of the industry are gonna meet and talk. But I was writing these things saying, like, no, Gates, I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna tear your head off. You know, And. And I had this thing where he's gonna. He was gonna let Gates get up on stage and then be really late and let. Let Gates sit there and sit there and sit there and get really nerdy and nervous. And then the door would fly open, the lights would come down, and, like, the Immigrant Song would come on. And, you know, Steve would come out swinging a broadsword like this, you know, And. And. And I was thinking, like, if the real Steve Jobs read that, I hope he would. I think he would get that. I think he's probably. Get a sense of humor. He'd probably think, like, yeah, that's pretty funny, you know, but if not you know, I don't know, because most of it's pretty harmless humor, I hope, anyway. Any other. Yeah, sorry. So what do you think the accusation that the Canadian guy is actually you and that this is just. The question is what do I say to the accusation that the Canadian guy is actually me, actually is writing the real fake Steve Jobs and I'm a front. Is that. No, no, no. You're posing as a Canadian guy who is actually like your. Oh, then I'm writing that Canadian. Creating a street cred for your superhero side. Oh. So the question is, the accusation is that I am secretly writing that Canadian basher blog. I'm bashing myself to drive traffic to me. I have no comment on that at this time. That's a good question, but I don't have enough time or energy for that. But. But it's a good idea because I could link to my own stuff. The other thing I was hoping to learn either here in Mountain View is I want to learn how to optimize so I can pop up on the search engines. Higher. And I think by linking to myself, if I created a little constellation and linked across myself, it would work. But I haven't had the energy right now. I can barely keep up with. I mean, even now I have to be here this week and I'm trying to blog from the road and I bank some up in advance sometimes, but it's hard even just to keep up with it. I try to do like five a day and it's hard to keep that pace. So what kind of assistants do you have? Do you have any? No, no, none at all. It's absolutely me. I've made up this whole world of like, I have these two fake assistants in Krasnodar, Yulia and Natasha. Right. And they always have them doing menial tasks and messing around with them and making them do stuff over and tell them that's shit, you know, or do it again. And then I tell them go back to the first way. But no, none at all. I have a friend in Boston who this week I gave her the logins so that she could check in once in a while and moderate comments. And I told her she could write a couple items if she wanted to, like, go ahead and, you know, because she kind of wanted. Because it's kind of fun. Like, once you start doing it, it's very addictive, you know, once you get the voice and it's like, you can for a while. I still keep thinking, like, I'm going to stop. I'm not doing this Anymore. This is insane. It's a waste of time. But then I'd wake up the next day, or I'd be in the shower and be like, oh, no, I have to write that one. Because, you know, you think like, oh, it's too good to resist. You know, like when sun changed its ticker symbol to Java. That still cracks me up. I don't know why you almost can't resist parroting it. I was so glad to cover that as a straight reporter, to be like, sun announced you're going to change their ticker symbol to Java. And like, what? How insane is that? What's next? They're going to like, sun announced we have a major initiative tomorrow. We're going to change our corporate color from purple to green. We think green's going to be the new growth color of Sun. Some of the stuff that happens in the industry is so bizarre and nobody ever covers it. And the weird thing is, if you've got a bunch of business reporters around, like the Journal guys and Businessweek and Fortune, everybody who covers this stuff, and all my friends in the trades, you know, we all write this straight stuff. But then if you. When we're all hanging around, we're all kind of. We all know how loony it is. Right? I mean, just like you. Right. I mean, I think that was actually what made the blog start appealing to people. Is people reading it, going like, yeah, that's actually kind of true. You know, like, you know, and you don't see it elsewhere, which is an interesting point about media and how media is changing and all that. But I don't want to get serious. Are there any other questions? I agree that Steve Jobs character lends itself fairly well to parody, and you prove that. But how much of your image of Steve Jobs is based on public perception or on personal research did you talk to. Right. Did you read any of the biographies, which are really interesting? There is a couple. Really interesting, yeah. I did early on when I decided after the first few weeks, I. The first. At first, no. And I was getting lots of stuff wrong. Like I had John Ives name with an S and I didn't know who was on the. I didn't know much about album. But then I decided if I'm going to do this. So I went and read a bunch of biographies which are really good and they have all the great backstories about the early days of Pixar and Next. And so I got a lot of the back stuff there. And otherwise, I know I don't have lots of sources, people Tell me. Only recently, I've started meeting people who used to work at Apple or people write to me and they say, I worked for Steve for five years. And, you know, he's just like that. But a lot of it was like dumb luck. Like, I basically was trying to imagine and I was really exaggerating. And I think, to be honest, I think that there's now there's Steve Jobs and there's me, right? And then, you know, more like. And then there's fake Steve. Is this character in the middle. I think fake Steve actually has become his own wacky little character. And he's an example exaggeration of Steve Jobs, but in many ways doesn't really have any bearing on Steve Jobs. And a long, long time ago, like, really early on, I started thinking of him as a fictional character that I could make him do whatever he wants. And the same thing with Larry and all the other guys. And the only way for me to really keep doing it was to think these are my characters now and I can make them do whatever they want. I don't have to be too beholden to what they really do. Although readers are very quick to call right in and say, Steve Jobs would never say that, or they really want you to stick to the conceit. I posted something about EMC recently, and I get a lot of comments saying Steve Jobs wouldn't pay any attention to emc. This is clearly Dan Lyons. Well, you know, it's fair criticism. It was true. You can't. People want it to stay to the conceit, but there's a big latitude in terms of what fake Steve would do. And he's like, now become this. Yeah, this weird kind of thing in and of himself, which is a guy. One guy wrote a very interesting essay about it, this guy who's an architect in Scandinavia someplace. And somebody sent me a link to it, a really interesting essay about being fake and that the fake becomes kind of its own thing. And he was talking about, I don't know, other. Other authors who have. Who have adopted these fake Persona and suddenly, you know, you can come alive with it. You don't want to be beholden to the real guy because then you're. Well, then you're not really writing fiction and you're just very limited. So you want it to be something, you know, that has its own life. But it's an interesting, interesting, interesting, weird world to be treading around in. But, sorry, what do you know about whose Steve Job is behind the scenes? Oh, I just make it up. Well, then Some things I've heard. I mean, if you read the biographies, you hear about him, you hear certain stories. Like in the book, there's an anecdote where it opens with him sitting in a meditation room, the Tassahara Zen room at the Apple center, which is. I don't think they exist, right? I'm making up all this stuff about Apple, but he's in his meditation room and he's gazing at a circuit board, and he's non thinking about his circuit board, right? And it's the circuit board for the iPhone, and it works, but he thinks it's ugly. And so he's telling the engineer, he's told his engineers, this needs to be more beautiful. And I'm going to meditate, I'm going to non think about it for a while, then I'll bring it back to you. And they're all pissed because they already works and they're electrical engineers. And he has a big fight and he ends up firing a guy over it. But. But the point is, that's actually a true story from one of the biographies. I lifted that in the sense that when they were building the first Macintosh and he got involved in the project, finally he went down and saw the motherboard and said, no, wait, no, you can't. That's no way. That looks. They can't have that. It's too ugly. And they were like, yeah, but it works. And, you know, there's a reason why this big chip's over here and the little chip's over here. And, you know, I don't know anyone. And he's like, I don't care. I want you to do it. This one should be here, and these two like this. And I'm like, yeah, but it won't work. You know, we'll have leakage and stuff. And he's like, just do it. Just try. So they actually spent like months trying to make a circuit board work based on what he thought was pretty. And of course they didn't plug it in. It wouldn't work. And they finally said to him, look, dude, it's just not going to work. And he said, okay, fine. And therefore, nobody's going to see it. It's inside. He said, but I'll know it's there. And that's. And they're like, you can't even open this box. It's going to be a sealed box. He's like, I don't care. Everything about this box has to be perfect. Which, I mean, so if you read that anecdote in a biography, Just think about it. Like, I mean, you could get a lifetime's worth of riffing out it. Like, what does that one anecdote tell you about that guy as a character? Right. I mean, it's phenomenal. So I use that as a direct lift, but then also in terms of informing how he must be around people, you know, And I've heard you hear enough stories of him. Like, you know, like the famous one. Famous one. Not famous, but one I've heard that captures him is, okay, some big business magazine. It wasn't us because they don't talk to us, but it was maybe Fortune or business. Somebody sent a photographer, do a cover shot of Jobs, and the guy gets there and he says, okay, scout around for a location. We're thinking here in the conference room would be good. And this is a nice background. He sets it up, and they set the lights up, and they do Polaroids and they shoot a guy. And then Steve walks in and goes, no, I don't like it. I want to go outside. But you already told us to do it inside first. We were going to do outside. No, no, no. Now I want to go outside. So they take everything down. They go outside, they set up the lights, blah, blah, blah. They do the whole thing. They take the Polaroids, and then somebody comes down and says, steve doesn't want to do outside. He says, let's just go back to the conference room where we're going to be. So they slept everything back upstairs. They set up the lights, blah, blah, blah. They take the Polaroids, and they come in and say, okay, we're ready to go. And say, you know what? It's four now. Steve will be here at five. Can you wait? Okay, five comes, six comes. Finally, someone comes down and says, you know what? Steve just doesn't want to do it. Steve just. He's not in the mood. Steve is just not in the mood today. He's going to. He doesn't want to have his picture taken. He looks too corporate. And then they all just leave. And that kind of thing of like abusing underlings. And I like to riff on the idea that he has this image of being this ultra perfectionist and this eye for detail, and everything is so perfect. So I sort of exaggerate that. So you can pick up traits just on what you read about him and just exaggerate it in a cartoonish way. So a lot of it is that. But I don't think anything in my book ever has actually happened or another thing. Exaggeration is. They're really Secret at Apple, right? They're really secretive and they never tell you what they're doing and they go to great lengths to not let anybody in the building and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I exaggerate that. So I have the iPhone guys working in this lead lined building where so spy planes can't do ultra, you know, whatever, see into it and Steve himself even can't go into the building and you know, you can just exaggerate all the, you know, the Israeli commando security squads and stuff. So you can really go broadly overboard about how Apple guards its secrets, you know. So I mean, you take a few basic traits. Preciousness, pretentiousness, blah, blah, blah. You know, you go from there. Any questions? So have you gotten any interesting comments back from anyone else that you write about on the blog? Like, I'm going to kill you when I meet you. Those kind of things? No, you know, like the Microsoft guys, as soon as I got outed, they, I had friends there for a while or people I deal with a lot who were writing me a while going like, dude, this is you, isn't it? I was like, but. Because they could tell like I did too much stuff about Linux and Open Source and stuff like that. And they kind of knew that was a giveaway. But no, they called me right away and they're like, dude, we want to have you up and you come up and give a speech and blah blah. They totally love it. And people often ask me like, what about this? You call Bill Gates a Beastmaster? I'm like, yeah, but I don't think he cares. First of all, I don't think he reads it, but, but like I think he gets it. It's a joke, you know what I mean? Like it's the exact, the joke is that, you know, Steve is so obsessed with like, you know, like Ahab with the white whale, right? He's like, you know, obsessed with jaw, with Gates and you know, blah, blah, blah. And why does they have, why do they have 95% market share when we have better stuff? So, you know, you know, I think they're okay. Son has never contacted me. Son, Son. And I deal with those guys. So I know them, but they have never, ever, never reached out to me at all. I think they don't like the My Little Pony thing. And the weird thing is that that came from Sun. I didn't know about that. That's a real nickname for Jonathan. Apparently inside at Sun. I was calling him Ponytail Boy. And finally somebody from sun wrote to me and said, you know, we actually call him My Little Pony. And here's a picture. And I was like, oh, thanks. So there are sun people who I think. But most of what I get is not, like, leaks from companies, I don't think. But no, look, I'm here, right? I mean, I definitely have made some jokes about Google and Sergey and his Legos. Now, I've never met those guys and probably never will, right? But Sergey had an Uncle Fetch. I had this fake character. Sergey had this uncle, this crazy uncle who came over from Krasnodar. That was the first link to Krasnodar. And Uncle Fetcha came over to live with Sergei, and he always had this dream to take a bath in a tub full of caviar with, like, two strippers or something. So Sergei says, oh, whatever you want, go ahead, do it. And I tried to imagine what would be the ultimate just gross thing somebody would do with all the money in the world. What would you do? I guess buy a jumbo jet and fly around. I don't know. And the goo guys are in the book, too. At one scene in the San Jose Jet center where Steve and Larry are hanging out with a guy who's something like Andy Grove. And they look across the room and there's the Google guys with, like, they just drove out on a bus with all these girls from Stanford, and they're all going to Vegas for the weekend, and they've got, like, Chad Hurley and a bunch of other, like, Web 2.0 guys, and the old guys are sitting there going like, we don't like them. You know, get a haircut and stop wearing jeans. And, you know, they're all, you know, Andy Grove is going on about how this valley used to be engineers, they used to be smart people, and now it's like, freaks like you. And, you know. But the Google guys are just having a good time and off for the weekend. So I don't think that's based in reality either. But I'm sure they work really. I'm sure they work really, really hard. But, you know, it's all a joke, so. But no, no, I haven't ever really had. You mean, like, did anybody call and get mad? That was awesome. Oh, yeah. Some people love it when you take the piss out of them. Like Fred Vogelstein at Wired. I did a thing once where he's doing a story about Microsoft and they accidentally sent him their dossier on him, which had. Do you remember this one? And it said all this stuff about, like, Fred's not the. He's not the quickest guy. A lot of it was not very flattering. And he wrote a story and then said, in the spirit of radical transparency, I'm going to publish my Microsoft dossier. Like, he published all this bad stuff about himself. So I thought that would be good. So I did one saying, well, Apple feels like we should publish our dossier on Fred, too. So I had. Fred's dossier was things like, you know, Fred lost his virginity at age 34 in Thailand. Fred is very sensitive about his clothes. Don't stare. You know, Fred's SATs, 520 verbal, 420 math. Just FYI, you know, Fred drives a Celica, doesn't know it's a chick car. And I think he was pissed at first, but he has since written to me and he said, like, dude, that's funny. And I'm supposed to meet him, I think, when I'm out there. And he was okay with it. I think I pick a lot on journalists, more so even than the executive kind of people. And I think that's kind of more fun. And most of them, I think, get it and they're okay with it. And, you know, a guy at the Journal I made fun of a couple times wanted to meet me in Seattle this weekend, but I didn't know if it was a trap, so I didn't go because I thought, you know. But no, no, I think most people think it's harmless. You know, it's like being in a comic strip. You know, whatever. Any other questions or. Nope, that's it. Okay. Well, thank. Oh, what does fake Steve Jobs have in store for Google? For Google? Well, I do actually have this org chart, this fake Steve version of an org chart that's a little upside down. And we're going to publish it. And like this Al Qaeda Most Wanted list, I posted this. I really do have this thing. Someone spent a lot of time making this. And as people leave, as they vest and leave, we're going to just put an X across them, boom, boom, boom, and keep coming back to it. So that'll be one funny thing. I don't know. Are you guys all, like, independently wealthy now and you're just, like, not going to work anymore next year or something? Is that the big exodus is coming yesterday? We've hired a lot of people in the last couple of years. Oh, they're not the big Richie Rich ones. Right, I see. Okay. But the guys. I went to a party recently in Atherton hosted by a bunch of. Oh, there was a bunch of Google people there. And, boy, I felt really Poor. I was like, what a schmuck am I? Like, man, look at these people. I mean, it's just like, sick. It's sick what they've done to the Valley. I mean, you know, as it says in the book, you know, of course people hate us. You know, they've got this whole generation of people driving around in Ferraris, you know, like nerds. Nerds with sports cars, you know. And Larry is going on about why people hate people like Larry. But anyway, his theories, they're just jealous. But anyway, so for Google, you know, nothing but love, really. You know, it's all love. And come on, somebody actually said something about, do you think they get mad? And I was like, come on, do you think Eric Schmidt gives a crap? Or Sergey Brin? Do you think they care? I mean, would you trade places with him and have some lunatic blogger make fun of you once in a while? Definitely. I would definitely take that trade. Absolutely. I would definitely love to be. Same with Gates or Balmer, maybe. I don't know. But no, actually, Ballmer's really great. Ballmer's like a really good interview. I have all these guys to talk to for an interview. He's one of the few who really let it rip. He's really, really a good guy. But no, I don't have any. And I don't have plans, like, in a sense of. I mean, I literally get up every day and I have no idea what it's going to be. And I just like, check my mail and blah, blah, blah. Some days it's like I've thought of something, like some funny scene you could do. Like, I had one with Larry, who's going to spend the weekend with Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle a couple weeks ago down in Malibu. And then, you know, it's kind of out of control. And Larry calls on Saturday and he's incoherent and he can't talk. He's like, oh. And you hear Clinton in the background and there's a party going on. But probably not very nice, right? But Larry is like the playboy best friend, the best pal, the sort of comic relief guy. So some days I'll wake up and just have a Larry idea. I never really know. I honestly have never any idea what's going to be from day to day. And eventually I think it's just going to run. I'm just going to wake up one day and it's like blank, right? Like nothing. And then just stop. But, you know, are there any other questions now? So have any other public figures Tempted you to another Persona. Yeah, Hillary. I think Hillary is ripe for one. And I mean, don't you think? I mean, she's the same deal. Because there's one face to the world. And then, you know, that behind the scenes she's like, you know, all right, here are the people we need to have killed. Boom, boom, boom. This is on YouTube. So, no, I think she's really ripe for it. And she'd be good. Somebody had a Schwarzenegger fake bug, but it was video. It was really good. Somebody in LA who probably works in the movie business. It was a cartoon head of Schwarzenegger and a talk, you know, voice, but a pretty good impersonation. And it was the same kind of stuff, like I do like, you know, but really kind of rude, but really worth checking out if you look up fake Arnold or something. I don't know what it's called, but it was actually good. Yeah. I don't know. What are the figures? You have to get someone who is kind of pretentious and kind of presents one thing and then is really a different way, you know, or just someone who's kind of preposterous. Like Posh Spice would probably be a good one for if you're into that world. Or Lindsay Lohan, I don't know. Britney Spears probably just because it'd be such a train wreck. But I wouldn't know enough about that world to write about them. Same thing with the politics one, like the Hillary thing. I'd like to do it, but I don't really know. You need to be sort of immersed in the world so you can get the. The thing about the fake Steve thing is all the gossip from around the whole industry of knowing how IBM is and I don't know enough about the world of politics and consultants and who those guys are to do that. Wall street, probably another one that you could do. There's got to be some preposterous figure on Wall Street. Hollywood. God knows there's got to be like 20 people in Hollywood you could do. Right? Michael Eisner, I think would be a good one. Or Michael Ovitz. Right. It'd probably be a good one. I don't know. But there is one. There's a Nick Nolte fake blog. Have you ever seen this? It's really bad. It's funny, but it's, like, sick. They may have been dropped. I saw it earlier on. You just do a Nick look for Nick Nolte's fake blog, and it's really off the rails and kind of Like, Nick's always out of control and he's got a sidekick. I forget the sidekick's name. Anyway, there's a what? Oh, really? Yeah, See, I think it's caught on now. Like, there's a fake Al Sharpton. Where? There's one in New York. A company called Newsgrover has a whole constellation of fake blogs. This is actually a really good fake blog story. So they did one with Al Sharpton, and when Michael Vick got arrested for the dog fighting thing, they had fake Al Sharpton blog on it saying, you know, this is racist. If Michael Vick was a white quarterback arrested for dolphin fighting with dolphins and spears on their heads, you know, he wouldn't be being arrested for this. You know, he'd be celebrated for that, right? So fine, fair enough. Except that msnbc, like, read this and picked it up and said, the Reverend Al Sharpton weighed in today on the Michael Vick scandal and read a real story about it. Like, quoted this, right? And the newspaper guys are like, yes. You know, like, like. Cause I've never been able to pull that up. I've never been able to actually fool anybody into thinking like, Steve Jobs. I was kind of hoping early on, like, somebody would pick it up and say, steve Jobs today weighed in, you know, on blah, blah, blah. But like, nobody ever fell for it. I did early on. I used to get email from people who thought it was Steve, really was Steve Jobs. Even now there's people who get, like, so carried away. Other readers have to remind them, like, dude, this is a made up thing, right? But early on I would get people writing in saying, oh, I'm so glad. I'm a big fan of your products. I'm so glad to see that you're blogging. This is great, and love your products. I want to ask you, in the next version of the MacBook Pro, could you have this feature and that feature? And I think it would be really great if you had this. And I was like, what do I do with this? So I would write back saying, I'm only one man, but I will pass this on to engineering and thank you for the tip and stuff. And then other people would weigh in saying, oh, you dummy, it's not really Steve Jobs. But that ran out of guess. Now the new thing is a foreign language mistakes and the geography mistakes, even that's kind of running out of gas. But I had a really good fun with the idea of there's so many people in the blogosphere waiting to correct your mistakes, you know, so if you intentionally make dumb mistakes, and I did one in Canada last week. Like, 70 comments within, like, that much of, like. Dude, that's Ottawa, not Toronto. Get it straight, okay? You know, I mean, people get really mad, but, no, I. Well, that's it for that, I guess. Any other comments? Any questions? Concussions or. No? Well, thank you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it.