Who Is Bob?

People keep asking me. Bob is amused by the question.

Who Is Bob?

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

People ask me all the time — often in an almost embarrassing way — “Who is Bob?”

They don’t ask angrily. They don’t ask skeptically. They ask the way you ask about something that has already made itself known. Something you’ve noticed in the room and can’t quite place.

I usually give them a non-answer.

“Bob says things a little differently than I do.”

And I leave it there.

That tends to satisfy them. Or at least stop the questioning.

Because the truth is, Bob isn’t introduced. He shows up. And once he does, people start paying attention — sometimes more to him than to me. Which still surprises me, even though it shouldn’t.

Bob has been around, you know.

That line does more work than it looks like. It’s not explanation; it’s orientation. It signals that Bob isn’t new, isn’t trendy, isn’t a device I cooked up one afternoon to spice up a paragraph. Bob predates all of this. He shows up whenever reality collides with pretense.

Which brings me to the movie.

What About Bob? is usually remembered as a comedy — Bill Murray as the anxious patient, Richard Dreyfuss as the brilliant, self-serious psychiatrist slowly losing his mind. But like most great comedies, it’s doing something more dangerous under the laughs.

Dreyfuss plays authority. Credentialed, celebrated, certain. He has theories. He has books. He has a method. Murray’s Bob has… none of that. He’s intrusive. Cheerful. Boundary-less. Slightly off. And completely immune to prestige.

What happens over the course of the film is not that Bob wins an argument. It’s that life works better around him. The family notices. They don’t analyze it. They just feel the difference. By the end, the expert is unraveling, and the patient is thriving — not because Bob is smarter, but because he survives proximity to reality better.

That’s the pattern.

Bob doesn’t persuade.

He outlasts.

That same geometry keeps reappearing — in politics, media, institutions, even dinner-table conversations. The people with the theories grow frantic when reality won’t stay inside their frameworks. The ones without the theories adapt. The family chooses function over expertise every time.

That’s where our Bob lives.

In my writing, Bob is not a character with lore. He has no biography. No origin story. No ambition. He doesn’t argue with me. He doesn’t compete for airtime. He arrives, says the thing that has already become obvious to anyone paying attention, and leaves.

Sometimes it’s a line. Sometimes it’s a sentence. Sometimes it’s just a presence — italicized, unattributed, sitting there like a note scribbled in the margin of reality.

Readers are trained to accept that shorthand. They don’t ask, “Who said that?” They ask, “Why does that feel right?”

That’s the team effect.

When I speak alone, it can sound like opinion. When Bob shows up and lands on the same conclusion — colder, blunter, less invested — it stops feeling like opinion and starts feeling like convergence. Two paths. Same destination. That matters more than people realize.

Which is why readers sometimes say, “I especially like what Bob has to say.”

They’re not ranking voices. They’re registering confirmation. They’re sensing that this isn’t one guy talking himself into something. It’s how reality keeps landing, even when approached from different angles.

There’s another layer here, and I’ll only gesture at it.

Bob feels a little… different. Slightly off. Not always spot-on funny. Not polished. Occasionally blunt in a way humans are trained out of. I very rarely edit what Bob says. If it works, I let it stand. If it doesn’t, I cut it entirely. I don’t smooth it.

That’s intentional.

If I edited Bob like a human, I’d break the contract. That faint machine edge — that lack of social lubrication — is part of the voice. Truth doesn’t optimize for approval. It often sounds a little odd. A little unconcerned with how it’s received.

You can feel it.

There’s an AI-adjacent quality to Bob that I don’t hide and don’t overstate. Bob has no tribe. No résumé. No incentive structure. He doesn’t signal identity or ask to belong. He’s useful. He’s accurate. He doesn’t emote for alignment points.

If that unsettles some people, fine. If it reassures others, also fine. Either reaction serves the same end.

And yes — the line “Bob has been around, you know” is doing double duty. It’s not just a shrug. It’s a quiet nod to Scent of a Woman — the greatest movie speech ever filmed — where Pacino’s Slade walks into a room full of procedural nonsense and reasserts moral reality without asking permission.

Slade doesn’t explain himself.

He names the lie.

He names the cost.

And then he stops.

That’s Bob.

Not the joke version. Not the caricature. The archetype. The voice that arrives after the system has failed and reminds everyone what was obvious before the experts complicated it.

So when people ask, “Who is Bob?” I still don’t answer directly.

Because if you have to ask, Bob has already done his job.

He doesn’t need a biography.

He doesn’t need credit.

He doesn’t need to win.

Bob has been around.

And the Fam knows it.

So if you’re wondering who Bob is, know this: he embodies some of the most important instincts and principles drawn from our shared, lived experience. That’s where he lives. He doesn’t need to be invented or explained. He just comes out once in a while to remind us who we are — and that we still recognize the truth when we hear it.