Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Eric Schmidt Plays Oprah With Tina Fey (Video)

Now that Eric Schmidt isn’t running Google anymore, he has time for this kind of stuff: An hour-long interview with Tina Fey, conducted last week at the Googleplex.

He’s good at it, too. Or at least, he’s good in this one, where he’s paired with a great interview subject.

Some good stuff here very early on, as Fey explains some basic rules of improv comedy, all of which seem completely foreign to the engineer interviewing her, and the ones in the audience.

And, if you like getting outraged about location tracking and don’t have a sense of humor, here’s some red meat for you. Check in around the 25 minute-mark, where Fey starts talking about her kid and mimes using an iPhone (later on she admits to using many Apple products).

Schmidt tells her she should be using Android. “We want you to use a more powerful phone,” he says. Then this:

Schmidt: “As your daughter gets older, you can keep track of your daughter with your phone. Trust me. You’re going to want our phones.”

Fey: “Ah. Subdermal chip, that you guys…

Schmidt: “That’s been proposed, but we’re not quite there yet.”

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus