Eric Schmidt Allegedly Wants To Be CNN Talk Show Host

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Yep. Another. Eric. Schmidt. Story. (Hey, you wouldn’t complain if it was Steve Jobs.) According to an inside source who spoke to the New York Post, outgoing Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt, who’s set to remain on as the company’s executive chairman, has dreams of becoming a talk show host on CNN. And, get this, he filmed a pilot for the company back in August of 2010.

Allegedly, the computer scientist held talks with CNN super-producer Liza McGuirk and even filmed a pilot episode with her last year. But, according to the Post’s source, the pilot wasn’t so hot. In fact, they call it a “complete disaster”. So, I don’t know if Dr. Schmidt has a future in television, based on that statement alone. McGuirk is currently the producer of “Parker Spitzer”. Elliot Spitzer is the former New York governor who was ousted after an affair with a prostitute was made public – so McGuirk has a knack for the unconventional host, if anything.

To be honest, it’s hard to imagine Schmidt being a talk show host. Seeing him speak publicly, it’s obvious he is in the Bill Gates mold of a super-intelligent guy whose brain is going 200 mph and talking is just getting in his way. I mean, the man holds a PhD in EECS and worked as an advisor to the 2008 Obama presidental campaign, so he probably has the smarts, political and business, to run a talk show – but he probably lacks the charisma - in my opinion.

Plus, he’s also made some rather blunt and unrefined comments when responding to criticism of Google. Here are some of my favorites:

• One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market… and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.
• Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?
• Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.

Anyway, I think this story has to lend support to the idea that Schmidt is stepping down because he feels disenfranchised after he was (allegedly) vetoed by Larry and Sergei on Google’s decision to leave China. The story goes, Larry and Sergei wanted Google to pull out of China for ethical reasons while Schmidt took the calculating businessman approach of “Hey, China’s the biggest market in the world and growing.” Did Schmidt get embarrassed by Larry and Sergei and start thinking about different employment options (like hosting a TV show)?

Could you imagine Eric Schmidt hosting his own news talk TV program? Would you watch it?