The Daily Interview: Earth's Biggest What, Exactly?

"I don't know what the hell we were thinking," Mike Daisey says.

Mike Daisey Playwright and ex-Amazon employee

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Daisey, an actor and playwright, recently brought his one-man show, 21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com, to New York (for more on the show, check out his Web site). The show chronicles his two years working for the company and takes a humorous jab at the dot-com culture that had him worshipping Jeff Bezos and thinking that selling 40-pound bags of cat litter over the Internet was a good business.

In the course of his ascent from customer service to business development, Daisey gave an entirely made-up PowerPoint presentation detailing response times at Amazon's (AMZN Quote - Cramer on AMZN - Stock Picks) competitors. His subsequent responsibilities included scrutinizing business plans that came in the mail, and the bar his superiors set was that any plan had to be as good as Pets.com for it to be considered. That company, of course, became one of the biggest flops on the Internet.

For more on this -- and why he likes low-hanging fruit -- read on.

TSC: For people who haven't seen the show, give us a brief summary.

Daisey: I happened to work for about two years at Amazon.com, and the show chronologically details my experiences at the company, starting when I came on board as a customer service representative and up through my ascent up the corporate ladder into business development. And then growing dissatisfied with Amazon, leaving Amazon while the stock was at its height, and the withdrawal I went through as I tried to re-adapt to life without the pace of Amazon.

Sprinkled throughout the show are letters I would write to Jeff Bezos that I would put in my drafts folder and not send him, because they were kind of crazy letters, some combination of love letters and St. Augustine Confessions sort of rolled together. If I had sent them, I probably would have lost my job. So I read those letters -- excerpts from them -- and they sort of serve as bridges between different inflection points in the story.

TSC: Do you miss the cult?

Daisey: Yes, I do. The last couple of days I have been in touch with a couple of people that are pretty good friends of Jeff [Bezos]. So I've been having this really nice correspondence with them, and they came and saw the show. They like Jeff a lot, but they were around Amazon from the beginning and can recognize the truthfulness in the depiction the show represents.

TSC: Has Jeff seen the show?

Daisey: Jeff has not come to the show, I think for image reasons, and possibly because he lives it every day. So I'm not sure he's really eager to have a biopsy performed before the entire thing is over. He hasn't been [to the show], but pretty much everyone else [at Amazon] has, it seems like.

TSC: What do you miss about it?

Daisey: The pace. I have the same frantic level of pace right now, as I did at Amazon, because I'm putting on a show in New York and I am trying to finish a book that comes out next year. But I no longer have lots of people doing the same job I am. It was very exciting to be working somewhere where everyone was so enormously earnest and frantically devoted to the same goals, and the idea that we were making history.

I'm no longer capable of sustaining the delusion that I am making history with the work I do. I'm now satisfied with doing good work and telling interesting stories. But back in the Amazon days, it was very comforting to have this delusional belief that we would change everything about the world, apparently by selling books and CDs. I don't know what the hell we were thinking. It really seemed that way. It really seemed like we were going to revolutionize everything, and the media helped a lot.

TSC: What is your impression of what people in the company think of the show? Are they upset?

Daisey: It's hard to tell. I don't think the people are [upset]. It's a PR problem, but probably not a huge problem. I get a lot of bemused enjoyment; off-the-record, I swear I've heard from almost everyone at Amazon that they've loved the show. I get the weird impression that maybe it would be in their best interest to shut me up, but nobody wants to pull the trigger. So everyone's like, he's sort of funny and it's kind of true, and so then, they sort of let it go.

TSC: In the show you talk about the fake presentation you gave to get a job in business development. Did you have any worries that you'd get busted?

Daisey: No, I never really did. And I was so audacious, I think I wanted to get caught. I did ridiculous things, like the report would say numerous times, "if you require additional documentation or information please contact me and I will be happy to provide it." I didn't have any more information. I didn't have a thing. But I had this feeling, this certainty, that the more audacious I was about saying very clearly, "of course I have the documentation, of course I did the study," I think it ensured that no one would ever ask me for it.

TSC: And it was a study about response times at competitors?

Daisey: It was response time at other online competitors. I said I set up 1,000 Hotmail accounts and set up an automated script to send common customer service requests, and then logged the response times. It was just really, really ridiculous. It was a huge thing. If I had actually implemented this project, it would have taken maybe six months working full time to do this thing. It was clear that I hadn't done any of the work. But it was also Amazon, where people are given impossible tasks and then accomplish them. Who could say I didn't [do it]?

TSC: And you gave a PowerPoint presentation?

Daisey: Yep, there was a PowerPoint component. It was mostly Flash and bright sparkles. I had a beautiful cover -- it had really well-written texts ... offset very nicely with full color charts. I had a beautiful PowerPoint presentation that I had burned onto CDs, so people could load them automatically if they wanted to at their computers. It was really over the top. And it worked perfectly. Its intended job was basically a cry for help -- "get me out of customer service, I can't take it anymore." And it did that job perfectly. I left customer service really soon thereafter.

TSC: Have you taken any joy or glee from watching Amazon's troubles over the last year?

Daisey: No, I wouldn't say joy or glee. I think I'm too attached to the company in my mind. I'm not by nature a very vengeful person. The show isn't an exercise in revenge for me. I was treated fairly well by the company. If I have to be angry with anyone, I'm usually angry with myself for subsuming my identity and my desires into somebody else's dream and losing track of what I wanted. I think it's just. Even when I was working there, I couldn't justify the market capitalization .

TSC: When you were in business development your job was looking over business plans that came in. And the bar that was set was that they had to be as good as Pets.com?

Daisey: That's correct.

TSC: And you bought that, you thought Pets.com was...

Daisey: A great company. I thought that it was a brilliant plan. I was very excited by that chart that showed how huge the pets market was. My god, I had no idea that many people bought pet supplies in America. It was a brilliant thing for us to get into. Everyone that gets books has dogs; this is a great overlap here.

Of all the things I believed that were wrong, that's the one I have the hardest time, even now, connecting to. What on earth was I thinking? How could I not make the connection that this was a terrible business idea? I still don't know. My only defense is that, hey, at the end of the day, I've got a degree in aesthetics, so I shouldn't have been there anyway.

TSC: What is your favorite New Economy catchphrase?

Daisey: I really like "low-hanging fruit." I like it because it sounds really silly. A lot of New Economy catchphrases are sort of words that have been turned into verbs, and those are pretty good, but I like the image of low-hanging fruit. And the thing I really like about it is that the reason it is used so often is because what it really means is, let's be lazy. What it really means is, "uh, we don't know how long it is going to take to make a real profit, so what can we do right now to actually make some money? What is easiest and right next to us and doesn't take a lot of effort?" That's the low-hanging fruit.