Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs | Dan Lyons | Talks at Google

It's nice to think you give somebody a little chuckle at the beginning of their day and, you know, there's some value in that, I guess. Anyway, so the blog itself is basically a joke that got out of control and started snowballing and I couldn't stop it. That's really kind of what happened. So basically the backstory is I'm a print journalist. I've been one for 25 years. You know, I've got gray hair, I'm an older guy, right. And my markets or my industry is being disrupted. And as a business writer, it's like we're like the most clueless people in the world in some ways, like business journalists, because we have like five stories we tell over and over, and we've never had a job, we've never worked in a company, we've never made anything or sold anything. You know, we've maybe run a lemonade stand when we were kids. But we're all liberal arts majors. We don't know anything. And yet we get to like, you know, pontificate and tell big companies what they should do and meet CEOs and criticize them, right? So. And it's like how clueless I am that I'm writing these stories about, you know, suns getting disrupted by Linux. And I finally like clued in, like, wait a minute, like where I work is getting disrupted by the Internet. Like, oh God, you know, and I have to get over that. So I thought I better learn about blogging and I better learn about the Internet. I tried to get a job@forbes.com and they didn't want the old print guys coming over to the dot com site because they're like, they're two different worlds. They're really, really divided houses. They're actually in two different buildings, two different staffs, and they hate each other. I'm not supposed to say that. I'm supposed to say that we all work together to achieve synergy. But in fact, they hate each other, right? And the print guys think the dot com guys are idiots and losers who don't make any money. And the dot com guys think the print guys are overpaid old stupid idiots who don't know anything about the Internet. It's just bad, right? So they wouldn't take me. So I thought, well, I'll start a blog. So I started a WordPress blog. And I did under my own name. And I had my little stuff there and nobody read it. And then I had a family blog on TypePad that was like pictures of our kids, my wife And I have two year old twins. So I had a little blog written in the voice of my then one year old son with photos and he's a real menace. So it was really funny stuff like what he did today to torment his father and stuff like that. But it was only for family members, it had a password. And then on Blogger, I thought, well, I gotta learn how to use Blogger and that's this big software. And I had written about blog, Blogger and Google, so I thought okay. But I didn't know what to write. And I thought it was right about the time too that, well, there were two things that came together. One is, I was thinking, okay, it's a diary. And I don't know if any of you know this British humor magazine called Private Eye, but they have, if you ever read it, I used to subscribe to it. It's really, really good. And they always have the secret diary of some famous person like David Bowie or some preposterous person and they always like in the form of that person's diary, kind of take the piss out of that person. And I thought, well that would be funny, then who would you do? And at the same time it was when Scoble's book came out and all these CEOs, there were all these stories about should your CEO be blogging and should he not? And blah blah blah. And then some CEOs were doing it and I suppose he was all open and honest, but it was really just bullshit, right? It was complete hoo ha and PR spin. But I had this idea like if a CEO did do a blog, but he went nuts and went off the rails and just started writing what he really thought about stuff, right? And so then, so it was like it could be funny, right? So I thought, okay, that'd be cool. And then who would you do that to? And I tried Sergey Brin, but I didn't know enough about him, right? And you know, my wife speaks Russian and so I could get a little bit of. And we have a lot of Russian friends so I could get a little bit of Russian, but it just didn't work. And I tried a few others and then I thought like, I'm a big Mac fan and OS X kind of changed my life and I was. I know that's sad, isn't it? But it's true, it really is. Like, and I thought, oh, Jobs, you know, and I didn't cover Apple. I had never been to Apple. I've never interviewed any of those guys. I've never in like 20 years of tech journals. I've never written an Apple story, ever. I hadn't read any of the bios, anything about them, but I knew from being in the industry certain, you know, a little bit of stereotype about Jobs and the whole, you know. Yeah. So. Okay, I'll start riffing on that. So I wrote some jokes and I sent them out to. I sent links to two friends of mine, and I said, I just found this blog. And I didn't say I wrote it. I said, it looks pretty funny, right? And one of those friends has a blog, and he works in tech. He's a big PC maker. So he mentioned it on his blog. Like, oh, I just found this funny blog. And it started spreading, and next thing you know, this is not news to you. Like, this is news at Cody's bookstore in Berkeley, but to you guys, I'm sure this is not news. But it was news to me. Like, you know, it starts. I start getting comments and I'm like, where are they coming from? How do they even know it's there? Right? And people start finding it. And I did it for six weeks, and I said, okay, that was fine. I shut it down. Like, I know how Blogger works now. And somebody put it back up. Somebody relaunched the blogger, because I took it all down. I just erased everything. And somebody put it up and saying, what happened to this blog? This was really good, you know, who are you? Blah, blah, blah. And people started commenting. Then some other guy started writing Revi, pretending he was me writing. He was writing his fake Steve blog. Only it sucked, right? And it kind of pissed me off. He's like, this is really lame, you know? And even people were reading going, dude, this sucks. This is not the same guy. And, like, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. So then I said, okay, I'll do it again. I'll start up again. So I created a new URL because he already had the old URL. So I started fakesteve Blogspot. And I also thought if you call it fake something or other, it'd be harder to sue me, right? Because it's fake. It's pretty obviously parody. Nobody's really going to believe this, although people still did. People would write in comments to a blog called fakesteve.blogspot.com, dear Mr. Jobs, I'm a big fan of your products, and I'm really glad that you're blogging. And then they would ask me for, like, could you put this feature in the next version of the MacBook Pro? And I'd write back Saying, like, well, I'll pass your request on to engineering. It sounds good to me, but, you know, I'm only one man. And, you know, even though I run the company, I don't make all the decisions here. But I'll tell engineering, we'll see what we can do. And we're working on that battery life issue, you know, so. And then other people would comment like, dude, you don't really think that's Steve Jobs, right? So it was. I was having fun with it anyway, and so I put it back up and then it started. It really started growing. And then like, little things. Like the New York Times, I think, did a story about CEO bloggers that summer, and they mentioned John Schwartz's blog. And then they said, fans of Apple CEO Steve Jobs will have to make do with an impersonator, blah, blah, blah. And then, like, so my traffic started going up and then it was like, you know, then I was like, oh, crap, like, this is getting out of hand, right? And it grew and it grew and I started experimenting with the form. And again, like, as a print guy, like, delving into this new medium, it was really interesting to me, all the things you could do with it. So at first I was just doing jokes about, like, Steve Jobs. I found a picture of a guy in gravity boots on Google Images, right? Hanging upside down. And I said, oh, this is me. I had a meeting with John I've today, and we talked about our new designs upside down. It's so great. Like, stupid stuff, right? But then I started realizing things would happen. Like, things would happen in the industry that I couldn't cover in Forbes because we have such a huge lead time. Like, we're working on the late December edition now. So breaking news just doesn't fly for us. And even Forbes.com, i've got to go through all these people and pitch it, and editors, and they go, no, we don't like it, blah, blah, blah, you know, and it's too opinionated. So I was like, wow, suddenly had this outlet and I could cover news. Only I could do it through the voice of Steve Jobs, which is really twisted, right? And way more interesting than, like, what I would have to say about it, right? I mean, because you could say, I wonder, I really would wonder, like, what does Steve really think about Vista? You know, and like, you can kind of guess, right? So it's not that hard to make up. Like, I've always. People. Lately I've had people out here going, like, some Apple people came to this thing Thursday and they're like, okay, who's your source? We want to know. It's like, dude, you really think I have a source? Like, I'm making this shit up, right? Like, I don't have any idea, right? Like, I don't have any sources, right? But they really think, like, someone's in the house, you know, which makes me kind of get a kick out of that. I like the idea that there may be tapping phones. That's hilarious. But so I started covering news with this, and then people started reading it and getting like, some value from it, which was really weird. And then the other thing you could do with it is you could do fiction with this blog form, which again, is not news to you, but was news to me that, you know, I wrote two books of fiction before I went to work at Forbes, and I really wanted to be a novelist and I took the job at Forbes just because, like, you know, writing novels wasn't paying the bills and blah, blah, blah, But I still was trying to write novels. And so anyway, like, Larry Ellison and Bono and Al Gore all became characters to me, like, in this world. And you could create them and develop them and add to them and have a backstory for them, and you could have little storylines where something happens on Tuesday and then on Thursday and then on Saturday. So I could have, you know, Al Gore's wife kicked him out and he moved in with us and he's going to stay for a week and like now he won't leave. And like a few days later he's like, Al's eating meat and he's leaving food wrappers around the house and my wife's going to kill me and she wants him out and. And how do we get rid of them? So you could do these little comic strip kind of storylines, like a serial comic strip. And that part was so fun, I have to tell you. It's like, well, so much more fun than covering tech at Forbes, like covering IBM. So really, really fun. Like, addictively fun. And I just couldn't stop. And I just could not stop. And I couldn't make money either, but I couldn't stop. And that finally started to become an issue at home with my wife and the little kids and crazy dad off in his office blogging, right? So, like, you know, so I finally thought, well, you know, I'll try Google AdSense. You make a lot of money on that. As I'm sure you know, that is a real profit maker for bloggers. Really wonderful program. And I want to thank you all for that. Thank you so Much. Really, really great. I've made a fortune on those little adsense ads, man. People click on them. Yeah, terrific. Great job. So that didn't work out. So I thought, well, I'll try to find someone to sell ads. But then I realized I boxed myself into a corner a little bit because if you're doing an anonymous blog, it's kind of hard to sell ads, right? Hello, I'm using my voice to agent. Would you like to buy an ad? People don't want to deal with you. And then a lot of companies didn't want to deal with it. There's no way around it. So I realized at some point though that what I was doing was kind of creating the material of a book without knowing it, like all the time that I should have been working on this book that I had put aside to do this stupid blog. I realized like, oh, this kind of is becoming a book. A very silly book and you know, very kind of stupid book, but like a book nonetheless, right? And it was sort of a novel. Like this whole world existed, there were characters. So I wrote a book proposal in Christmas, over Christmas break. And in January I sold it and I think a lot of. And I was able to say I had 90,000 uniques a month on a blogger. So I could say, you know, I have kind of an audience. So I took this proposal saying, you know, and it turns out book publishers weren't so psyched about blog to book conversions. They haven't done very well, a lot of them, they haven't been big sellers. So it was not a big benefit. Anyway, some press took it and a lot of publishers were afraid of Apple and they didn't want to take it or they're still hoping to get Steve Jobs biography and they didn't want to piss him off. Seriously, it was a real thing. Like they said, you know, we don't want to piss off Steve Jobs. And I was like, yeah, neither do I. But you know, whatever, it's too late now. I'm screwed, right? In for a penny, in for a pound, right? You know, so the little press took it and fine. And then I realized, you know, okay, I've got this book deal and then I had to write it. Which is another bad moment where you realize, oh shit, I can't just put the blog between two covers. So I actually didn't write, I didn't do it. The book is actually a whole different thing. I mean, there's little bits of pieces of the blog, like stuff that I like that was on the blog or that could somehow fit into a narrative. But the story of the book is what I made up is that, okay, the SEC is after Steve Jobs. And in my mind, Jobs is this, you know, invincible man God, son of Zeus, born to mortal woman. You know, this all powerful, you know, can change the weather and stuff, and. But he finally finds himself in a situation where he can't control it and he can't stop it. The SEC is after him, the Feds are after him. He thinks it's bullshit, but there's nothing he can do. So I thought, I'll exaggerate that for effect and comic effect. And how do we get out of trouble? So that's sort of the plot of that. You know, you could build a plot around that. And then at the same time, he's trying to finish the iPhone. So the story of the book is the six months in Steve's life from when he. The last six months before the January announcement. It ends with the January announcement of the iPhone. And I'm not going to tell you the ending because there is a little trick ending, but that's basically the story. So even if you read the blog, you'll recognize the voice and the world and the characters. But, for example, a lot of people say to me, how come Beastmaster isn't in the book? Because Bill Gates really isn't in the book. Except in one dream sequence where Jobs says he has this recurring dream which he's going up to get the Nobel Prize, and as he's going up to the Peace Prize, but this time the dream gets interrupted and he's carrying a cross and he's walking up the hill, and then he's up on a crucifix, and next to him is Bill Gates. And he looks at Gates and says, I understand why you're here, but why am I here? And Gates says, you're here because you spent 30 years copying all my ideas. And then he says, I wake screaming. You know, that's like, so. But that's the only appearance of Gates in the book. So, you know, it's a very, very different story. It's really focused on this SEC thing. Okay, so part two of the story is that's how the blog became a book and how it evolved. Part two is, you know, what happened at Forbes, right? So they didn't know I was doing this, and I didn't tell anyone for a long time. And one of the first people who spotted the blog and started writing about it was Rich Karlgard, who's the publisher of Forbes. And he started Posting things, saying Silicon Valley's in an uproar about this weird new blog about Steve Jobs and nobody knows who it is. And I'm like, oh shit, he's my boss, right? He's my boss's boss's boss, right? And I know him. And so I thought, what do I do? Do I tell him? And I was like, nah, I'm not going to tell him. So then he kept posting. And then he and Quentin Hardy, our bureau chief out here, started having little contests about who they thought it was. Maybe it's this guy, maybe it's that guy. Then they offered a reward. So I'm like, oh my God, you know, like, like. And it was like a high end ipod, which I still don't think they've actually given to Brad Stone, but of the New York Times. So I thought I let it go for a while and it was getting more and more out of hand. And when I sold the book, I thought, I called this lawyer and I hired her for one hour, all right? I said, can I hire you for one hour so that you'll have attorney client privilege and you can't tell anybody who I am? But I was really bad at keeping the secret anyway. But anyway, so she said, okay. And I told her, okay, so here's the deal. I'm writing this blog I work at for. She was like, are you out of your mind? Like, she's in publishing, right? But she's like, you have to shut it down right away. Like, that's really bad. You're going to get fired. Your career, you know, you can't do this. So I posted a thing and she said, just try to back out of it easy, you know, you know, just fold it down and let it go. So I posted a thing in Jobs voice saying, well, you know, because of this SEC thing, the old Apple lawyers have told me I got to shut this crazy blog down because I can't be making fun of the feds while they're trying to put me in jail. It's only going to make things worse. I can't keep taunting them because I love doing that. I love taunting because don't you think that's how he probably thinks of, you know, like these sons of bitches, you know? But so I love doing, like, anyway, it's a nutty idea. But, you know, so I wrote this thing and I thought, okay, I'll kind of fade it out. And instead what happened is everybody read it thinking that Apple was after some blogger again, like they had already those other bloggers so suddenly all these media people start emailing me, like, is it true Apple's after you? Then they're calling Apple for comment, right? And Apple, of course, says, no comment. So it makes and think it's true, right? They're like, oh my God, Apple's suing another blogger. They're trying to find out who it is. I think they called Google to find out has Apple made any attempts to find out who it is through blogger. If they're sending people, you need to do blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh my God, right? And then my site meter's like, woo. Like crazy, crazy. Like big, big day. And then so I was kind of half happy, half scared shitless, right? And I was in New York when this happened. And I was in New York asking my boss on the print side if I could like, get a little bit better job and, you know, like, maybe have a column, get a little, you know, raise, you know, and they were saying, no, no, no, go away, you loser. Right? So I go back to my hotel in New York and I get all this mail on the Fake Steve account. And it's like, from, you know, Wired, we'd like to do something with you. We don't know who you are, but we love Wired. Loved it, right? And a few other magazines asked me, do I want to be a columnist? And then in the mail, and I swear to God this is true. There's an email from Rich Karlgard of Forbes magazine. And I open it up, he's like, dear Fake Steve, my name is Rich Karlgard. I'm the publisher of Forbes magazine. We think you're a genius and we want you to come work at Forbes and write a big column for us on the website, right? And I'm like, I'm like, yes, right? So I'm like, you know, this is awesome, right? They can't fire me now, right? Because I'm gonna save this email, right? Like, you're fucked now, right? So I catch you by the balls, right? And I. So. But I was also kind of scared, right? And I didn't know what to do. So I waited and I wrote back. And I was like, well, how much would you pay me, right? And he's like, well, we'll talk about money later. Blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada, right? So I'm like, great. This is great. So I had this long correspondence with Rich, and meanwhile, like, I had just been in LA at this Forbes conference, like, sitting, having dinner with him, like, hey, who's that Fake Steve? You know, like so fine. He now wants to hire me, right? I'm like, this is great. This is so great because Forbes.com wouldn't hire me, right? And it's, like, so twisted, I can't even believe it, right? And then I get mail like a week later from, you know, Forbes is part owned by Elevation Partners, this private equity firm out here in the Valley. So one of their guys writes to me and says, dear Felix, Steve, I'm at a private equity firm, blah, blah. Like, I have all this money. I'm a VC guy, and we think we could invest in your blog and make a business around it. I'm like, cha Ching, right? There's, like, so much stupid money out here. And I'm like, yes, I'm tapping into it. Yay. Right? You know, like, you know, Facebook, too. That's me. You know, like, all right, I don't have a product. I have never news. Who cares? You know, just, I got vc. So I thought, like, I'm gonna be so rich. This is great. And so I had my agent, my book agent, because, you know, trust me, I wasn't getting rich on the book. You know, just, you know. So the book agent contacted the Elevation guy and went back and forth, and we finally were gonna set up a meeting. I thought, okay, now I finally have to tell them, like, I can't keep, you know, pulling their leg. So I did. I called Rich Cargard and I called the Elevation guy, and the response was like, swear. It was like, it was on the phone, but I swear, this is where, like, the look was like, oh, like, yeah, all right. It's you, huh? Like, no, right? They were like, so hoping it was somebody cool or, you know, hip or inside Apple. And they were like, oh, it just says putts in Boston, right? This schmuck on our staff. But then I think it occurred to him, like, oh, shit, we don't have to pay him. Like, we already have him, right? Like, great. You know? Woo. Bargain of the century, you know? So I was on a panel a couple weeks ago at this conference, and someone said if I. Someone from a news organization said, we have writers who want to blog. What's the first thing we should say to them? And this guy said, you should say to them, we're not paying you. That was the basic ethos. But so we started working on a deal where they actually wanted to put it on Forbes or put something else on Forbes, like, maybe not fake Steve, but more like the Stanley Bing column in Fortune, where it's that back page of Fortune, but it's kind of boring and it's kind of like, you know, it's not that interesting. So they thought we could do like an edgy online version of Bing. We'll make up a character and riff on the news of the day. Okay, fine, but. And it just took months and months and months of like, that going back and forth and churning and all this bullshit, right? But finally we were just getting it together and the New York Times figured it out. And the way they figured it out, even though Valleywag was trying over and over. And by then there were like 100 people knew. Like, everybody at Forbes knew for, like, months, right? Not everybody, but a lot of people. And a lot of my friends knew and they were telling everybody. And ValueWag kept guessing the wrong guy, like, over and over and over again. I was, like, so amazed. Like, ValueWag would just guess wrong. Brad Stone at the Times got it because he used to work at Random House, and he realized if you've sold a book that you probably shopped it. And a lot of people looked at the proposal and he called Random House and they had a proposal. And it didn't have my name on it, but it had enough information about me that I worked at a business magazine, blah, blah, blah. I had some stuff about. I was on some list that granted did for novelists in the 90s. And so even without my name, you could cross that and figure out who it was. So it was like three days and Brad Stone had it. And then Forbes had to rush to kind of try to jump on the grenade and put their stuff up on the blog. So now I have this deal where it's not on the Forbes site, but they have their ads and their brand on my blogger site, and they totally leave it alone. They don't want anything to do with it. And I think the way they're looking at it is, like, I think the first generation of web media was, let's just take what we do in print and put it on a website, or take what we do on TV and put it on a website and sell ads. And they're kind of realizing, like, okay, that's something, but that there's a new medium, gives opportunities to do new things. And this probably, you know, who knows if it'll work? But, you know, I think they're smart enough to try to, like, throw a bunch of stuff out there and see if it works, and if it doesn't, who cares? So it's kind of interesting to me that this old media company, like a 90 year old company was really the one that ended up because there were other people interested. But Forbes was more interested in trying to stretch and expand it and see what happens and take some risk with it. And if there's problems, we'll deal with it. But that's kind of where it is. And for me, it's kind of cool because I got to meet all these people on this Internet world that I never knew before. Like Veronica Belmont, my big web crush. She came to this thing Friday, and I really think it's a really exciting time in media that there's all these young kids who are doing stuff that's really, really fun and interesting, exciting, and I get to meet them now when they're young and you know, they're going to build big things. So for me, it's been really fun to be able to become a part of that in a little bit and have some fun in the time. So that's about all I have to say. And I can just take some questions if you have them. But yeah, sorry. So have you ever met the real Steve? No. Would it ruin it for you? I think it would ruin it for him more than for me, but I haven't and I would love. So the question is, have I ever met the real Steve and would it ruin it for me? I would love. No, I sort of love. I would love to in a way, but as long as I knew it wasn't going to kill me, you know what I mean? Like, I met Wozniak Thursday night. They brought Woz in to do some event, and I was pretty worried because I do a lot of nasty riffs on Woz, right? Like, and he was totally cool. But then I thought, like, he's dating Kathy Griffin. He must have a sense of humor, right? And a pretty mean sense of humor, right? And I asked him that and he said, well, I don't really like her sense of humor, but, you know, I like yours better. But he didn't care. He was cool. He was very cool. I have a picture of him. I gave him a T shirt that says, dude, I invented the friggin ipod. Have you heard of it? And I had him hold it up so I could take a photo of him. It's like, classic. I'm gonna keep it for my whole life. It was a really great moment, meeting Woz. And I met Andy Hertzfeld. He came to this event, too. But I've never met Steve. And I don't know if he likes it or not or what he thinks about it. He said it all things D. That he thinks it's funny. I mean, I hope he does. If they. If I really thought, like, oh, he's sitting there, like, hating it, you know, I would feel bad about it. I want it to be kind of fun in a comedy strip. And sometimes it goes over the line and is a little too mean, and then I've actually erased some things like that. I want to keep it, like, fun. And mostly in a spirit of, like, Doonesbury. You get up and maybe it has a little point once in a while. But mostly it's just in a spirit of having some fun and celebrating the valley and the wackiness of the culture here. Any other questions or. No questions. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah, that's what. I'm phasing that out as of today, actually. No, yeah, that's a bad one. But, you know, people send you in these ideas and, you know, you go with it. But anyway, yeah. Any other questions? Yes. So as anomalous, you have to make sure your characters are consistent. Here's the additional problem. You have to sort of make it consistent with reality. Do you have any cases where someone does something or you learn something more about a character? Yeah. So the question. I'm sorry, the question is, as a novelist, you have to be consistent. You have to stick with your characters. And have there ever been issues where I felt like I had to match? I have the added challenge of having to match it to real people. Right. To some extent, early on, I decided that I wouldn't be bound by that and I would just make them characters. So Larry Ellison. I have no idea what Larry Ellison is like, but, you know, we've all heard the stories, right? So. And I just go with that. And I've totally made him up, like, and exaggerated him. And to me, he's like a character in a Woody Allen movie. He has no bearing on reality. And you know what I mean? Like, I can't remember if it's Manhattan or one of the ones where Woody Allen has this friend who's always calling him Max, even though his name isn't Max, and he's like, in LA and he's a screenwriter. And that's what I think of as Larry Ellison. Like the sidekick friend who's kind of the bachelor, wild guy. But no, but the readers are very quick to call you and, like, I'll do something. I did something once on emc just because there was a funny story about EMC in the Wall Street Journal one day, and I just couldn't resist. And I know those EMC guys. And I realized, like, Steve Jobs probably never thinks about emc. That's probably the last company on earth he cares about. But I did it anyway. And then you get all the things like, dude, get back to writing about Steve. This isn't Steve, you know, So I think what's kind of happened is this weird character has evolved in the middle where there's, there's real Steve and then there's me, you know, very, very different people. And then there's this fake Steve who's become this like weird little demon character who's in the middle, right? Who can take liberties that real Steve can and isn't really like Steve Jobs, but has things like him. And it's like I sometimes compare it to like Triumph the Insult Dog. You know, that puppet dog. I met this guy at Comedy Central who said, if you met Robert Smigel, who does that puppet, he said Smigel is like a really, really gentle, soft spoken, sweetest guy you ever met in your life. Toxic, not very funny. And then you put a dog puppet on his hand, right? And he becomes like, ah, like crazy, right? And he's really funny. And it's. For me, it's like that, like I, you know, my life is not that exciting or interesting or anything. And then, you know, fake Steve has become this voice that you can channel. It's kind of fun, but I don't think it has too much bearing on real Steve, you know. Any other questions or. Yeah, what's next under the book? Back to Forbes, Back to writing about IBM and the future of the mainframe and, you know, like, yes, I can't wait to do that. You know, the mainframe remains relevant because it runs Linux. Yeah, right. Or, you know, I don't know, man. Like, I'm dreading what comes next, dude, trust me. I'm like, you know, or, you know, sun, will that chip save them? You know, like, yeah, sure it will. You know, you know, Novell, can they take on Microsoft? No. You know, like, I also, I love those stories in the mainstream media. In fact, I have more fun in the blog making fun of other reporters and making fun of the news than I do of Apple sometimes. Because I love those stories that have this teaser headline that's like, will so and so do this and that? And you know, like, no, of course not. But they make your way to the end and they're like, well, basically now, you know, and we do those. We're very, very guilty of those. We do those at Forzu. And I sort of know why. Magazines and newspapers do it. But yeah, I've had so much fun making fun of reporters. And it's sort of like this self loathing because if you're a business journalist, you can't help but hate yourself, right? Because what you do is in a way so gross and terrible. And it's also so dishonest that like, if you met, if you hung out with the Valley press corps, right? If you read what they write and then if you hung out with them, it's very, very different what they talk about among themselves, which I also think is something I found very, very interesting. This isn't really a joke, but something really interesting about blogging to me was that in a really weird, profound way I could tell the truth on this blog in a way I could never do in forbes. Not only Forbes.com, which is a little loosey goosey, but definitely in print. And I know that sounds like I'm saying that we lie in print and it isn't that. And I can't quite get my head around how to explain it, but there's a way that you can tell the truth. And even now that I'm out, it wasn't like because I was anonymous, the anonymity was nice because you could keep up the suspension of disbelief. But like, you can just say stuff that's true in a way that you can't. Like, you can sort of dissect a news story and find out, like, why. Like why Yesterday Andy Rubin was in the New York Times talking about this new phone from Google. I don't know, how did that happen? Wow. You know, I mean, you know, this shit doesn't happen by accident, right? Or why, you know, Carl, suddenly in the Journal there's this big story about why how Motorola is all screwed up and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then way down at the end, you see Carl Icahn says he's very upset. He's trying to get rid of Xander, right? So he planted the story of the Journal. And that's the kind of dishonesty that I think is really, really funny to make fun of in the press. Like, the Journal doesn't tell you, here's how we made this story. You don't see how the sausage is made. Like, Carl Icahn and his people came to us and they're trying to get rid of Ed Zander. So they wanted us to do this story. So they lined up some stuff and fed us some crap about how fucked up Motorola is. So we'd write it and then we'd have to cover his ass by giving him a quote at the end that makes him look like he's just hearing this for the first time. Right? I mean, that's what really the story is, right? So I mean, that's how it happened. That's what the story. That's what that really story was. And it was really fun to be able to say after you read that story, like, yeah, dude, okay, let me explain. Or, you know, so I don't know how I got off on that long tirade. I'm really sorry. Yes, Question. What's the future of business journalism? Well, yeah, what's the future of business journalism? Is the story, I think what's happening, people, we tend to. And business journalists are most guilty of this. We tend to view everything as zero sum. So like, there's the blog. So mainstream media is dead, you know, And I don't think it's that. I think, you know, I don't want to wake up and find out that pick up the Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post and have it read like Daily Kohs, right? Or like Fake Steve, you know, I don't. I like having a paper that does real journalism. I just think there's room for more and there's room for a bigger pie. So I think business journalism is probably going to change and have more attitude, more humor. Like, that's the other thing. Most business journalists are so big. It was so terribly boring. And it's like the worst part of every newspaper is the business section on the aircraft dot com. Oh, the byte section is the bite section on the New York Times. A movement in that way? Yeah, I guess a little. It's more lively and interactive. But the great thing about online is I think what's going to happen is there's more interactivity. And what I've realized with this blog, and again, this is not news to you, but it was to me, is that you don't really have an audience with a blog. You have this community. Like all these people come to these. I went to Toronto and 30 people showed up who read the blog, they post comments and they want to meet each other and me and they wanted to talk about the stuff on this blog, but they're very much driving the blog now. I get so much mail every day with all the ideas just bubble up through the mail and I can't even sift through it all. But yeah, I think that's going to happen. I think business journals are going to become more lively, more fun, more interactive, better in many, many Ways and bigger. I think all of it can become bigger, rather than just one thing substituted out for the other. And the Journal is probably going to get very different under Murdoch, you know, but I don't know. For better or for worse. But that's. Yeah. Any other questions or. Yes. How many hours per day do you spend on. Yeah, it varies. Too many. A lot of days, like this week, not much at all because I'm traveling and doing stuff. And sometimes when I'm traveling, I'll get someone to try to cover for me, at least moderate comments. But if I'm home, like, and it just, like around the time of the iPhone, it was like, basically all I was doing and a lot of hours and this stuff was flooding in and the reviews were flooding in, so you just couldn't keep up with the. And I was trying to surf on top of that iPhone stuff. But some days I won't do anything at all. Yesterday I wrote one thing in the morning and it was like, you know, and I write them really, really fast. I don't labor over them, and they often have typos and mistakes in them, and I go back and try to fix those, but I just bang them out as fast as I can as soon as I think of it. I don't write them in Word and then upload them. I write them live in Blogger and just bam, pop them out and I grab some photo off of Google Images, you know, and. And try to put those two together. Oh, and I just thought, oh, no, I was going to say that the one funny thing I've learned about the Internet and the thing I love so much is as a reporter, I would always have these people who like to correct you. And I think the Internet is so full of incredible pedants and correction people, and it's amazing that the way they love to seize on any little mistake. So I realized early on, if I put an intentional mistake and if you made it sly enough that it looked like you just didn't know it was a mistake, you'd get swarmed with, like, corrections. And it's like my favorite thing. I think it's seriously, my favorite thing about the blog is being able to say, like, I said something the other day that Jobs wants to run for president. He says, you know, I think I could keep running Disney and Pixar and I could be president and, you know, without breaking a sweat. And I could solve global warming. I could get us out of Iraq and I could make peace with the South Koreans, right? And so I get all this Mail. Like, dude, it's North Korea. Like, oh, really? Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, you know, I had one with Portugal once where I made some stupid thing about Lisbon in Portugal. And it's better when, like, people who don't read the blog somehow get sent a link about it. So I said, in Portugal, somebody sent me a document in Portuguese saying there's going to be a store, an Apple store finally opening in Lisbon. So I wrote it saying, you know, the Portugalians are very excited about this, that they're finally going to get. I don't read Lebanese, but if you do, you can see that there's an Apple store that's finally going to open in Lisbon. And they're very happy because until now they've had to buy their Macs from neighboring countries in the Middle East. And that was so broad. I was like, nobody's going to fall for that one. I thought, well, that's just one everybody would get. Like, hahaha. No. I start getting comments like, from people in Portugal who don't know the blog, but they're really pissed, right? We're not in the Middle east, we don't speak Lebanese, we're not Portugalians. And then I started getting email too. I think it was like a chain letter around Portugal. People were sending this around and I was getting bombarded with stuff. So I finally had to write. I ran one of the emails that someone sent me without their name, but I ran emails from this very nice woman explaining to me where Portugal was. And you know, she knows I'm in America and we don't know a lot about the world here. It was like, oh, this is like, just like so good, you know, better than sex. This is so great, you know, like, I can't believe it. I literally sometimes be. My wife and I at home share an office. I work out of the house, but we have an office at home. Sometimes I'll be working at night and she's working, but back to back and forth, this little tiny room. And I'll say, oh, I'm about to send this thing. I'll be like, you know, c' est la vie, as they say in Latin, right? Or, you know, or I had like Napoleon crossing the Rubicon and saying. And saying, alia yakta est right? And I'll tell Sasha, my wife will be like, okay, I'm going to hit send. Like, let's time it. How long till some asshole writes in, right? And it's like, you know, five minutes, you know, the first correction is in. Yes, you know, and then, like, then you wait a couple more minutes and the first person making fun of the correction is in. And it's just like, woo, let it go. You know, it's just like. And again, if you write, you spend, like, I've spent the last 10 years, like, sitting there writing print articles that like, have to go through five editors and, you know, they get mashed and mangled and turned around and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it takes months. Like, the ability to do this is like so much fun, right? Like, you just mess with people like that. It's just unbelievably fun. And now people actually get paid for it. Like, just even more bizarre, right? Which is. I don't know if it'll last forever, but it's pretty fun for now. I'm sorry, other questions. I keep rambling. Yes, sorry. Where do you get your source material on how you think Steve would feel about these things? Or do you just make it up? Or do you read his biography? Oh, I read a bunch of biographies of Jobs early on. I thought, if I'm going to do this, I should learn something about him. So I read some biographies. And Andy Herzfeld's book Revolution in the Valley was a really, really good book. And he has. And the anecdote that my novel opens with comes from Andy Herzfeld's book. Where in 84. Is anybody here who was at Apple in the 80s on the Mac team? Are there any? No, but there must be people at Google. Anyway, there's a great story of they're making the Mac and Jobs comes down and he looks at the circuit board or the motherboard or something, and he's like, that's way too ugly. We can't. That's. No. And they're like, well, it's going to be inside. No one's going to see it as a sealed monk. He's like, no, no, it's out of the balance. The chips have to go like this. And they're like, dude, it won't work, right? Like, we're electrical engineers, right? There's a reason why he's like, no, no, no, you got to do it. So they actually spent like months trying to make a board that looked the way he wanted it to look, but it would never run right. That's in Herzfeld's book. So I open with Jobs. He's in his Tassahara meditation room at Apple, which I don't know. And he's gazing, he's non thinking about a circuit board. He's just looking at it. And it's the circuit board for the iPhone. And it works, works great, but it's not beautiful. And it has to be beautiful. And again, his engineers are saying to him, dude, you know, it's in a phone. It's locked up. You can't open it. And he's like, I don't care. I'll know it's there. So, you know, so he has to, like, redo this board, and he makes them redo it. And in the end, of course, it doesn't work. Same deal. So I sort of riffed on Herzfeld. He came. Herzfeld came to the reading Thursday, and I recognize him. I didn't recognize him at first. And he said, do you ever read Revolution in the Valley? I was like, dude, you're Andy Herzfeld. He was like, yeah. I was like, oh, we gotta get a photo, right? And I said, dude, of course I read your book. It's great. He goes, yeah, I know. I've seen some of it show up on your blog. And like. But, you know. But like, yeah. So certain things I ripped from books and exaggerated Jobs made a pilgrimage to India when he was, like, 19 and seeking enlightenment. So I have a chapter about that in my book where what really happened in India? And apparently in real life, what really happened? He went and it was really disillusioning. He thought he was going to go to India and get enlightened. Instead, he just got lice or something. Really. It was just really a bad trip. So I managed to exaggerate that in the book, too. So there's a lot of stuff you can take from the biography and riff on. Are there any other questions or. Oh, yep, sorry. Traffic on the blog site since you've been outed, how has that changed? Okay, the question is. That's a good question. The question is, how has the traffic changed on the blog since I got outed? So it's gone down is the short answer, but not appreciably. I basically had a big June because of the iPhone, and then big July because of the iPhone, and then a huge August because of the outing. Like, one day in August, I had 500,000 visitors right on the site. And then now after that came I went back down to like, pre iPhone level. So, you know, it's okay. It's still, you know, a really. For me, a really big audience. For Forbes, it's a drop in the bucket. You know, I kind of thought I had this big. I got all these readers and they. I realized, like, my page views per month are like what they do in an hour on a big story, you know, so. But it's gone down, but it's sort of holding. It's going to dip this month because I'm not blogging as much. I think that the, the big traffic you get is out of volume. You post a lot and a lot and a lot. And I'm just not able to right now. But as soon as I get home next week, I'm going to start trying to fire it up some more and get it going. And just a little AdSense anecdote. The day of the outing where I had all those hits, I was driving home from Maine. I was in Maine on vacation. I promised my wife we'll go away and we won't do any work. Won't do any. I promise you, honey. Because I was writing this book and I haven't been around and we have two year old twins and they're crazy, right? So we didn't even get to Maine and then I got a call that Brad Stone of the New York Times was working on the story. Literally had to spend a day and come back and it was just a nightmare. But I was on the phone with this woman from I think the San Francisco Chronicle on the way down from Maine doing an interview. And I got home, I said, hold on, I'm going to check my traffic. I'm going to go into the house. So I checked and I was like, holy God, 500,000 people are on my site today. That's incredible. And I said, let's see what we did on AdSense. It was like $17.36. I'm like, how can this be? So I wrote to the Google guys like, dude, is there some kind mistake here? How can I get 17 bucks out of this? And they're like, well, people aren't clicking on the ad. You know, you get, you get the Google boilerplate like who believes here? Blah blah, blah, you know, so but anyway, yeah, and now, you know, I'm doing, I still do feedburner and I get a little bit of money out of that. Which is also a Google thing now, right? I think it is. So, questions? Anybody have any questions here? Is Forbes paying me better? They couldn't pay me worse? No, I'm like, oh, this is on YouTube. Hello Forbes. No, the deal is now they still have my job in print and they still pay me for that. And actually I have a different job. I'm now a columnist. Our gadget guy happened to go away about the same time this was happening. So I Inherited the gadget column. So now I'll be writing about things like new smartphones that companies make. And that's basically the same deal. And then what we did is on the dot. Com side, it's just the deal that any of the publishers do. We'll pay you some amount, and then we'll go try to sell ads and recoup that by selling ads against your traffic. So, yeah, so in effect, they're paying me, basically. Really what it is, is I have two jobs now, and it's not really like I got a raise. I just have another job, and it happens to be with them, so it's cool. You know, it's. Yeah. I feel weird talking about money here. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, you know, I've been out to Atherton. I've seen the houses. Okay? So, you know, and I know you know, and I know not all of you are billionaires, but. Or have jumbo jets, but some of you do, right? And which I think is great. I'm so happy about that. Like, you're like, the Forbes ideal. Like, we just love this. Anyway. And seriously, it is sick to go to. Like, I live in Boston. I live in Medford, if any of you know Boston. It's like, you know. You know Medford, where Tufts is. And it's like, really, you know, affordable, right? And then you come out here and you go to, like, dinner at someone's house in Atherton, and it's like, holy crap, you really have a lot of money, don't you? And they're like, yep. Mm. Yep. You know, like, I stayed in somebody's house, and we got there the other night, Thursday. He's like, oh, I'm gonna put you up. Get to the house. And it's like, whoa. And then he's like, oh, I'm gonna put you up in the guest house. I was like, why? You got, like, 400 rooms in this house, right? So then in the morning, his wife said to me, I came in, he was gone. His wife was there. She said, oh, is everything okay? I was like, everything okay? Your guest house is bigger than my house at home. Like, it's huge. Yeah, it was great. It was fine. Can I stay? I'm moving in. I'm gonna go get my clothes. You know, Like. Yeah. I mean, God almighty. Seriously, it blows my mind out here, and probably some of you, it does too. I mean, still, I've been covering this for 20 years, and it still blows my mind every time I come out here and just see the culture here. And I think it's so ripe for parody and satire. That's why I wrote the book. It is, right? I mean, you're living it, you know it, right? You know how crazy it is. And so I have my next idea. I want to do a book about Facebook, but not really Facebook, but something like Facebook. And it's like the valuation keeps going up and up and up and nobody can quite figure out why. But like, well, let's not fuck with it, you know, so, you know, So I just think it's like, can you imagine being inside there now? Some of you probably will be inside there soon, right? But from what I hear. But no, I just think, like, can you imagine being in a place like that? So I think it would be really, really ripe for a funny book. So I might do something like that. I'd like to do a couple more of these funny books about the Valley because I also think nobody's ever plumbed that. Really, Nobody's ever captured the insanity of the Valley. They either do these sort of hagiographical sort of books about like these wonderful CEOs, or like, soul of the New Machine kind of books, but nobody ever just like makes fun of it, which I think is really, really easy said. Easy? Yeah. Like fish in a barrel, man. You know, But I mean. And like, I can't believe he's just hanging out there, you know, like, woo. So I'll probably try to do more of that. And even if fake Steve kind of goes away, which I think eventually I can't imagine, I'll be 70 and still making Steve Jobs jokes. Like, I hope not. I'll try to do something else like it. Because it is a lot of fun. Yes. Now you've got big company backing from foam, so we're going to make real fake iPhones and real. So the question is, now that I have a big company backing me, will I make real fake iPhones and fake ipods? That's not a bad idea. Like little paper ones or something. Could somebody at Google get on that? Could you guys? Don't you have 20% of your time free here? Right. All right, give me your card. Afterwards, we'll talk about this. And if anybody else wants to make T shirts, because I have a shitty T shirt shop. I have the world's worst T shirts. I actually have the world's worst site. I was going to change it and make it nice and then someone told me, no, dude, that's. We like, it's so ugly. You know, leave it like that. It Looks like crap. Yeah. You know, and apparently that's part of the joke. I didn't realize that it's only on blogger because I was so, you know, such a moron. I didn't know how to do anything else. And then somebody told me, no, that's the joke. The joke is that, like, this big, powerful CEO would have a blogger blog, right? Like, oh, okay. So I said, okay, I'll, you know, leave it there. But you know what I mean. Question down back. Yes. Do you ever worry about something bad happening? Yeah, I would stop that day. I've already thought about. No, no, I'm not joking. I've already thought. I've thought a lot about that. And I would stop that day. I would. Yeah, I wouldn't go there. I actually really like Steve Jobs. You know, I tell people I wouldn't want to work for him, and I wouldn't want to live next door to him or be related to him, but I'm really, really, really glad he's on the planet, and I'm glad that other people work with him, you know, and deal with him and, you know. But no, but I actually admire him. I think he's a genius. And I think that, you know, there aren't many of those people. I don't think there's anybody who could have done what he's done at Apple in the last 10 years. And I think to do what he's done, you can't just be like, the big complaint is, oh, he's a dick. Right. Basically, bottom line, one sentence is, you know, he's hard, he's difficult. But I don't think you could. You think you could do that without being difficult? Could a nice guy do it? No. You know, so, no. I have huge, huge. I'm like a big Apple fan, and I love Apple products and I really admire him. So. No. And I have no desire to, really. I mean, I like taking the piss out of him a little bit. That's okay. But no, if anything like that happened, it would be over. Like, I'd write one last post and that would be done. No, and I have another rule, which I never write about people's families or personal lives or their spouses or who they're having things with, even in a fictional way. I mean, I'll make jokes about, okay, I want Ron Burkle and Clinton and Larry Ellison are down in Malibu and they're, you know, that was a little out of hand. They got a little carried away. And, you know, I have had Sergey and, you know, running around with these giant trucks full of Stanford coeds. But that was really. That was just. That was just me projecting, like, what I would do if I were in his shoes, you know? And, like, yeah, you know, I would have that. And I made up a fake uncle for Sergey. I had an uncle Fetya who had come over from Krasnodar. And I have a really good friend from Krasnodar who lives here now and in Piedmont. I saw them yesterday, and I was telling this, and I thought, well, you know, Uncle Fetcha would be like, you know, kind of. I found a photo on again, Google Images of this, you know, old Russian guy with a beard and kind of dirty and stuff. And, you know, his one. Sergey says, you know, you're here now. You're in America. I'm a billionaire. You can have anything you want. And he says, well, I've always wanted to sit in a bathtub full of caviar with two hookers. So Sergey's like, you can have it. That's great. You can have it, you know, and. And then he wants his own van full of hookers. And that's where he just drives around, drives up and down, like, the 280 with a van full of hookers. That's so broad. I feel like that's fair game. You can go there. But I hate Ballywag for the stuff they do about people's personal lives. I don't want to go there. And I actually also don't want any leaks of real stuff. I met a bunch of Apple people, and I don't want to know. I want it to be fiction. I don't want it to be. There's a whole bunch of sites that'll do, like, what the next ipod's going to have or this and that, and they're always wrong, first of all, because I think Apple leaks some fake stuff to fuck them up, which is. Come on. I only figure that because that's what I would do, right? Like, if I can think of it, they can think of it, right? But no, I don't want any real Apple leaks. I don't want to be a rumor site. I mean, I have some stuff once in a while that's sort of, you hear something. But I really want to keep it fictional, and I want to keep it away from people's home lives, and I don't want any of that. So. Any questions or. Yes, except for Woz with Cassie Griffin, right? But, like, Woz can take it, and he likes it. It turns out Woz loves that stuff, right? I mean, seriously, he told me. He's like, he really, really loves those jokes, and he thinks they're hilarious. And did you see the one where they were dressed alike at that casino in Las Vegas? She has him dressed in a black suit with a black tie. He looks like Regis Philbin on who Wants to Be a Millionaire? You know, it's like, oh, Waz, you know, don't do this. Don't go Hollywood and try. And he's looking really uncomfortable. He has this deer in the headlights look, like at the Oscars, like with Kathy Griffith. Ha ha, ha. You know, like, just like, dude, just give it up, you know, and. And I've been. I've, again, I've had jokes about, like, how Woz has been married 11 times. And, you know, I don't think it's 11. I think it's only seven or something, but so, you know, you exaggerate for effect. But I think. I think he likes it. And, yeah, I wouldn't. I, you know, but I don't know anything about really Woz other than the Kathy Griffin thing. And that's out in the public domain. That's in the news. So you can make fun of it, but, like, if I knew Woz had some girlfriend named Jane or whatever, and he was, you know, I would not. Like, they were spotted at some restaurant last night having dinner, and they were holding hands, like, who cares? I don't give a. You know, like, I don't want that kind of stuff. There was another question. I think someone have. No. Oh, yes. You going to be speaking at Apple anytime soon? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The question is, am I going to be speaking at Apple anytime soon? Probably under subpoena or under oath, right? I think, you know, probably. Maybe not at Apple campus, but at some lawyer's office up in the city, I'm sure. Yeah. No, I don't think so. Although, you know, I never thought I would be at Microsoft speaking either, or here, for that matter. So, you know, stranger things, things have happened. I think I met some Apple people and they said that they read it and they like it and they get the joke, but I think there's also. I don't know, maybe it could happen. I guess it wouldn't be that unheard. I think it would be hilariously funny. I mean, how much of them are coming to your talk tomorrow? They are tomorrow at LinkedIn. I haven't talked to him. He said a bunch of them are coming. Yeah, it's LinkedIn sponsoring it, but, yeah, I'm doing one tomorrow at the Computer History Museum. And so a bunch of Apple people are coming to that. You say, okay, I just got a call from that guy because they first said the room would hold 300 people, right? And then I called him today and the last I knew, he said, well, we got like 100 RSVPs and it was a while. So I called him to. He's like, what's going on? He said, dude, we have 800 RSVPs, right? I was like, holy crap. I called the book publisher. You better get some books down there. Right? But. And of course, the book publisher being, you know, the book industry. Well, we have a hundred and we can't get any more for two weeks. Like, great. Oh shit. This is on YouTube. Bad news. I'm like, also one of these guys. Like, oh, shit. Like I always do this. I was at Kepler's on Thursday night and I said something about my old. My two old books are available on Amazon. And they were like, you know, like, you never say the a word in a brick and mortar bookstore. And then I like. And I was really. They were really pissed. They weren't like fooling, they were pissed, right? And I was like, oh, shit. And then they were like, well, are the books still in print? Like, no, you know, not really, but anyway. But yeah, it's like down here. It's crazy. Like up in the city. I did these readings. Like 20 people would come, like, Bike Helmet Girl came. Do you know if you know Bike Helmet Girl? The real Bike Helmet Girl came Friday night again. Like, she was a yelp tard that I was making fun of. Like dancing with a bike helmet on inside. And I said, she must have some condition where she falls over so she has to wear a bike helmet. She was like in her underwear in a bike helmet with a guy on a leash. And I was like, I love this woman. I have to meet her, right? And so I had this long distance, you know, this pathetic thing where Steve is in love with Bike Helmet Girl. Anyway, this girl started writing to me, the real woman. And she's really cool. So she came Friday and we went out for dinner. She came out with these Apple guys and she's like really, really cool. And I had my picture taken with her and Veronica Belmont, as a slow boy are, you just have to know, like, my life at home is. I have two 2 year old twins and I'm changing diapers, right? And like I get to come out and hang out with Bike Helmet Girls. It's like really, really aghast. But. And again, I don't know where, how I got to that end. I don't remember what the question was. Oh, are there any other questions? You can see I'm really experienced at public speaking and I've got my stick down. I'm also one of these guys that get in trouble, trouble with it. Like, I'm a reporter, right? So we always, you know, we hate pr, supposedly we hate PR people and we don't like Spin and blah, blah, blah. And so now I have to have a PR person. The book company has a PR person. And like, she's my trainer, you know, And I'm like her nightmare client because I just say anything, right? And I get on the phone with these reporters and they're like, oh, we know the same people, you're at the Chronicle, blah, blah, blah. And then I say stuff they shouldn't say and it shows up in the paper. And so, yeah, I'm like a bad, bad client. But it'll all come out in the end, I guess. Are there any other questions? That's it. No more Google questions. I was warned that I was going to get some bad questions about Linux, but I'm getting out of here before that happens. So thank you for coming and I really appreciate it. I had fun. Thank you so much.