The Man, The Brand, The Plan To Rule TV

He says now: "It doesn't bother me at all. I love it, I laugh at it, if somebody makes a joke -- fantastic, that's funny. 'Saturday Night Live'? Doesn't bother me. If you are me, or you are you, you know who you are. If you didn't know, the jokes might bother you, but I do know, and most of the things are so far from the truth, they don't bother me at all."

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The more jokes there are, the more inescapable the name "Ryan Seacrest" becomes. It's good for business.

The face is profitably inescapable, too; Seacrest popped up the other day in a toothpaste commercial, yet another source of income feeding into the Ryan Empire. "I choose the products very, very strategically," he says. "That toothpaste is a Procter & Gamble product, and I want to have a relationship with Procter & Gamble because they have so many different products. We have inventory in this new syndicated radio show that I'm going to launch and I'd like to sell some of that back to P&G directly."

For his part, Cowell has compared Seacrest to a yappy little Chihuahua. Every now and then, Cowell told an interviewer, you have to shout or shriek at the dog and swat it off your lap. The analogy might be cute, but it's lopsided. Ryan Seacrest is the one with the world in his lap, and if anyone does the swatting, it will likely be he.

Before our conversation ends, Seacrest is told that there's new evidence he's truly making an impact on popular culture: He was featured in not one but two separate feature articles in the latest issues of the National Enquirer. "Is that how we measure success now?" he asks. One article dealt with his proclivity for face peels at every opportunity. "I've never had any work done," Seacrest says. "I've had a facial or two because I've got to get that makeup out of my pores. Otherwise, I'll look like Pizza Face."

As for his career and what he declines to call his fabulous success, Seacrest says self-effacingly: "I can't complain. I put in a few hours, but I get a nice return. I have the time to stay home." Naturally, it's a pretty nice little home -- a huge villa in the Hollywood Hills that was named by a previous owner: "Casa di Pace," house of peace. Maybe he's working so feverishly and ferociously now so that he can retire at 50 and do nothing from then on; that would make sense.

"I am not that guy," Seacrest says emphatically. "I sleep with my BlackBerry. When I'm on holiday, I bring it along and check it frequently." People magazine says 2008 is the year that Ryan Seacrest ought to involve himself in a big hot romance. They haven't been paying attention; he's already got one.