How do you become an Internet legend?

My friend Judith Zissman went on a family vacation. She lost her camera. She made a blog. And then really unexpected things began to happen.

In case you didn’t see the original Palm campaign, it featured a naked woman in this identical pose.
Only she was more flexible than this model, so you couldn’t see her face at all in the photo.

The whole thing started when I walked into the New Media Magazine’s offices and asked if we could find a hair, tubby guy who would do the same naked pose. One phone call later and the answer was, “no problem.”

I love San Francisco.

It was recently announced that Terry Semel, former co-chairman of Warner Bros. Will take over as chairman and CEO of Yahoo! This signifies a huge changing of the guard. It’s time for the Old Economy entertainment mogul menschen to take over from the young technophiles. Because, at the end of the day, as they like to say in Hollywood (and as they are learning in Silicon Valley), you need to show a profit.

Unless Terry plans to go digital all the way, and operate the company virtually from LA, he will have to adjust to his new surroundings in Santa Clara at a company which has become identified as the symbol of Internet culture. This means Terry will have to leave a land of pampering, pedicures and limo rides for Silicon Valley’s ethic of personal control and do-it-yourself.

Having made the transition myself. I thought I’d offer you some pointers Terry. It’ll save you some learning time. And as you’ll soon find out, the Valley loves nothing like the appearance of efficiency. Zay gezunt.

• The deli situation is hopeless. You’ll have to fly it in from Canter’s or Nate ‘n Als.
• Technology CEOs don’t respond well to fruit gift baskets. If you want to acknowledge them, just be sure to say hi the next time you’re shopping at Fry’s.
• If the Valley were a sandwich, it’d be a ham and cheese with mayo on white. With the crusts cut off. And served on a TV tray.
• A personal assistant fits in your pocket. It does not get your dry cleaning or latté.
• Silicon is used for chips, not breasts.
• There is nowhere to “be seen.”
• “Doing lunch” means getting a tamale at the Chili’s in a strip mall on Corte Madera.
• Formal in Silicon Valley means: get fully dressed, then remove one piece of fleece.
• If you want your emotional outburst to be felt, have it translated into a 3-D pie graph.
• The closest Valley people get to the movies, is playing with their laser pointers on the screen at the latest action flick.
• Even the lightest delivery of “you son of a bitch” during negotiations, will not be interpreted as affectionate.
• No one knows any Yiddish. Just acronyms.
• Status gifts comes in the smallest, not the biggest, packages.
• A “plug-in” isn’t another way to fight balding. It’s software.
• In Hollywood, inaccessibility is part of the power game. Not only do Valley executives take their calls, they invest in very expensive services and technology to enable them to be reached anytime, anywhere.
• Forget your gut instincts. Everyone here wants to know what you think.
• In film production terms, it’s as if the grips ran the studios.
• Unlike Hollywood, everyone in the Valley is still under the impression things are achieved through a meritocracy.
• No unions. The employees work unlimited hours in exchange for speculative options.
• For engineers: the better it looks, the worse it must be.
• Forget the Oscars. Pride is having your expensive toy car win the Sandhill Soapbox Derby.
• They buy retail here.
• You will be expected to occasionally wear an embroidered denim shirt. And yes, you will have booth duty.
• In the Valley, the people are genuine. It’s only the business models that are fake.

It seems inevitable now that the coke frenzy that was the Internet bubble would be followed by a sobriety that challenges even the toughest Minnesota recovery clinic for an atmosphere of enforced calm.

For years I felt like the only person in San Francisco who wasn’t in recovery. But now that life here has bottomed out, I can finally recognize my tech addiction for what it was.

Like many junkies, my use was invisible while I was in the middle of it. It was my job, after all, to be plugged in and networked one way or another at every waking hours. It’s not hard to be a junkie when you’re surrounded by pushers.

But once the press-release pelting stopped, and the visual landscape of San Francisco returned, I could see that there was more to life than tech. Billboards, coffee cups and painted taxi cabs no longer scream dot com reminders at me “work damn you, work” every time I leave my computer or a meeting.

While others are leaving town for their recovery and spiritual reflection, mine is occurring naturally.

First, I had a bad case of repetitive stress injury enforceably limit my computer time. Surely, I can’t be the only one whose bubble-bound binges pushed me away from the keyboard and back into the unmediated world of communication. This meant that I went cold turkey on instant messaging. No methadone.

Then the city began to empty out of people. First the carpetbaggers left– the hangers on who used to scam their fixes– then those who could no longer afford what it takes to stay connected. The mass of lay-offs have sent scads of people to third world nations and email after email bouncing back to me. Even if I wanted to use all the time, the numbers just aren’t there to connect with.

Once economic reality settled in, people started to forego their cell phones. Personally, I’m on a tightly controlled number of minutes each month. It’s made much easier by the fact that the general communication urgency has died down. It’s ok if people can’t get a hold of me right this minute.

Even if there wasn’t this newfound patience, I could always tell people: “Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you, but my quadrant was hit by a rolling blackout.” The power shortage and surge in prices have made us all see how expensive info-works are.

Now with the price at the pump promising to reach $3.00 a gallon this summer, I’m walking the streets of San Francisco again. Why deal with automotive technology when you just face parking problems wherever you go? I’m actually hanging out with people, face to face, as it were. And we’re not interrupting conversation with phone calls and Palm Pilot exchanges.

No acronyms. No Blackberry paging. Just pure unmediated contact.

So it’s not as if you have to go away to rehab. San Francisco has been turned, overnight, into a city of sobriety. The temptations are gone. The advertising is gone. The magazines that write about it are folding. The dealers are gone. The old buddies you used to share information with and plug in have skipped town.

I’m pretty much clean now. But the old habits die hard. Even when I’m writing a column with old-fashioned paper and pen, I pause every so often to save.

Ah well, one day at a time.

In the midst of dot com insanity, I decided it was time to take a shot at the goose that laid the golden eggs. By the time we got to the 2001 Roast, the Internet bubble had just burst and the event turned out to be a perfectly timed wake.

Here’s what Salon had to say about it.

Roast the Net: 2001 @ The Ritz Theatre with SXSW

• Miss the IPOs?
• Lawsuits got you down?
• Weary of grim tales of dot-com downturn?
• Enjoy the bull humour market
• Options for everyone!

The Whole Damn Thing (1hr 52min)

1. Heather Gold……..Patrick Naughton (2.1MB, 12:19)
2. Lance Arthur (with a special appearance by the pets.com mascot) …………. (3.5MB, 20:13)
3. Liz Belile Net Work is like Sex Work (2.7MB, 15:36)
4. Thomas Scoville .Pink Slips and Ham (3.1MB, 18:23) (transcript)
5. Justin Hall ……………………. (4.7MB, 27:14)
6. True Stories of Dot Com madness…assorted members of the crowd, including the pig head winner—centralbooking’s Kevin Smokler…………………… (3.2MB, 18:29)

Roast the Net: 2000

Along with Her Domain and SXSW Interactive, subvert.com presented

The First Internet Industry Roast

Listen to:

• the entire 2000 roast
• an edited version of Heather’s material from the 2000 roast

Roast permformers

1. Heather Gold ………….Intro/rock star CEO/start-up dysfunction
2. special guest Adam Powell ……………………unWired
3. HG ………………….. romance in Silicon Valley/eating our words
4. Paulina Borsook …………living just enough for the city
5. HG ……………………………chachka economy/butter.com
6. HG + Elizabeth Belile ……..Poem for a World Wide Whatever
7. Betty Ray ………………………………………..lizard brain
8. Thomas Scoville …………………………..howl.com
9. Justin Hall ………………business opportunities I missed

Many thanks to the wonderful Roaster:

• Lance Arthur publishes at glassdog and the Fray. He is the David Rakoff of the Net. Except funnier and braver. Read him.
• Liz Belile bodyofwords.com poet fantastique, author of Polishing the Bayonet, the spoken word CD “Your Only Other Option is Surgery” and creator of Gynomite: named Houston’s Best Reading Series.
• Paulina Borsook is the author of “Cyberselfish/A critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high-tech.” As she said in her official bio for “The Best of Suck” years ago, she is basically a very nice girl who doesn’t understand why everyone gets so upset with what she writes.
• Heather Gold is a cross-platform writer/performer.
• Justin Hall, featured subject of the film Home Page, and so much more than can be described in one line.
• Adam Powell runs a little company called Angry Coffee.
• Betty Ray is the mayor of fuckertown.com
• Thomas Scoville (silicon follies, salon) reformed hacker, novelist, cyber-critic, and e-commerce conscientious objector. His favorite peripheral is his cat. For the Roast, Thomas wrote and performed, with beret, Howl.com

Je vous aime avec la technologie (comment autrement pourrais j’écrire une poésie française?)

Le plus cher amour, qui knoew que la technologie serait réellement un ami?

Il s’étend comme une veste au-dessus de boue dans la rue,
apportant le bruit de votre voix sans risque à mes oreilles, votre beau corps à mes bras.

Dans un instant il vous porte tout le chemin de New York.

Encore plus rapidement vous me transportez à un endroit que je ne connais pas

il me prend partout et
me goupille immobile d’un seul trait

plus puissant que même Internet, si difficile maintenant à écrire
wryly
sans cligner de l’oeil visuel
; -)

mes arrières voûtes

et mon souffle

mon gémissant
cela vient comme mystère

précipitations par l’air pour vous rencontrer

mais vous sensation il intérieur
comme si

Je frottais vos plus profonds endroits

mais je dis que je suis et vous
voulez-moi
et vous parole il est maintenant
et ainsi il est maintenant

et vous sensation il
grâce aux morceaux complexes de circuits a percé ensemble
par des affaires et des finances et l’ingénierie a rendu morbide par
argent et efficencies calculés cet engorge ces systèmes

mais ce soir

il est invisible et puissant comme

Dieu

because il est touché par l’amour.

=========

dearest love, who knew that technology would actually be a friend?

It lays like a jacket over mud in the street,
bringing the sound of your voice safely to my ears, your beautiful body to my arms.

In an instant it carries you all the way from New York

Even faster you transport me to a place I do not know

it takes me everywhere and
pins me immobile all at once

more powerful than even the Internet, so difficult now to write
wryly
without visual winking
;-)

My back arches

and my breath

my moaning
that comes as a mystery

rushes through the air to meet you

but you feel it inside
as though

I were stroking your deepest places

but I say I am and you
want me to
and you say it is now
and so it is

and you feel it
thanks to complex pieces of circuitry pierced together
by business and finance and engineering made morbid by the
money and calculated efficiencies that engorge those systems

but tonight

it is invisible and powerful as

God

because it is touched by Love.

When it comes to the juicy entertainment and information we all plan to get in the new digital world (some call it ‘rich’ media, others ‘broadband’ and still others ‘convergence’—all refer to the nirvana future in which you get the entertainment you want, when you want it, where you want it), conversation hovers around the question of what services, and the entertainment itself will look like.

We also have plenty of debate and discussion about connectivity and how and when enough people are going to have high speed connections that will be able to bring that fat, juicy entertainment to your front step or back pocket. Critical? Yes. But what generally gets forgotten in all of this connectivity-is-the-future service is the theme-of-the-New-Economy is the hardware.

While there’s no doubt that the recurring revenue streams, and maintenance of customer and audience relationships are in service, people have to get to them through physical devices.

Yes, I know that the margins in these ‘boxes’ as they’re called in the biz, are shrinking down to zero. Yes, I’m sure you’ve all been in meetings in which someone is talking about plans to give away free devices in order to get people hooked on their services. Mmhmm. Yes, there is a ton of jockeying right now to develop music services that can gain listener loyalty. All well and good.

The fact remains that computers as we know them now are inferior mechanisms for delivering entertainment (with the possible exception of the 22 inch apple cinema display). And it is the physical thing in someone’s hands or in front of their eyes that’s going to be the persons primary point of contact with whatever broadband wireless/ converged/diverged world we come up with. All that connectivity and entertainment needs to run to something physical. Somehow, in our eagerness to move business and creativity even farther into the intangible world, we lose sight of what is likely the most important factor in bringing someone important along: the audience. So before you plunk down that $2785 for the next conference get-together for all the darling denim-shirted brethren pulling their hair out over the last mile problem, let’s be practical for a moment shall we? Let’s ponder the place that mile needs to go anywhere: the last ten inches.

Praxil for Digital Anxiety

Hardware and interfaces are the place to combat peoples’ anxiety about technology and an increasingly intangible world. Even industries motivated by survival instincts (the entertainment business knows a little something about this), are having to overcome terrible anxiety and discomfort to move themselves forward into the new economy.

When creating an entertainment service or system for the masses, do not forget how important the hardware/interface is. In all likelihood it’s going to be a huge part of someone’s decision to use the service or access digital entertainment at all. The hardware and the interface can ease people into the intangible realm. The broadband era is only going to happen for entertainment creators and distributors if enough regular people take an affirmative step to enter it.

As long as we’re in a digital entertainment game dominated by the personal computer, then this tension-easing role is played by the software’s interface. The ease of use of a program like napster is a major reason it has spread so easily. There’s much less to get in its way.

And while it has made life difficult for the napster legally, the fact that it is dedicated to one thing—music—has also made it much much easier for people to use. Napster boasts the fastest adoption curve ever for a piece of personal software.

A Time to Collect

The acquisition of hardware is a moment when people are willing to part with their money. This has everything to do with its tangibility. Of course the device is only worthwhile when it gives one access to services and entertainment, and that package will affect the purchasing decision. But do not underestimate the importance of getting something real in one’s sweaty little hand if one is going to first have to dig into one’s metaphorical pocket, so-to speak.

Although napster has got the entertainment businesses wringing its hands over the idea that young people are being trained to devalue music, that isn’t the most productive question on which to focus.

If you’re examining how to get people to actually part with money for something they find valuable), then ask: when does someone feel like they’ve received something of value, or something (a device/service) that promises them more value? The music is still felt as valuable, but it needs to be combined with something that makes that experience easier. Right now the best thing on the block is the napster interface. If a piece of hardware or new interface can be designed that makes access to that valuable entertainment, then there’s a convenient moment to collect a purchase or subscription fee from the customer.

Both the seller and the purchaser of broadband entertainment via a device may be well aware that the margins are made on the service rather than the physical product, but the value of both to the customer/audience is merged in the purchasing moment. Hardware has something that digital entertainment doesn’t on its own. It is finite. It cannot be replicated and given away as easily as a digital file. That atomic item, the tangible device can ease a different kind of anxiety: seller’s anxiety about digital entertainment.

Smushing

The tangible moment of acquisition also provides an organizing and motivating point for connectivity. That’s certainly the case with all of the successful forms of one to many broadband we now have: Cable TV, DirectTV, and Satellite. To be sure the entertainment itself is a huge part of the driving force and many have observed that music is now the main instigator of broadband connectivity. But music has been available in organized form on the Net since the days of IUMA (Internet Underground Music Archive), which was pre-Web. It took a good interface and service like napster to open the floodgates. And physical devices that bring an even simpler interaction to those who don’t feel the computer is the optimal stereo will open the gates even wider.

The physical device becomes fused with the service and entertainment in the mind of the customer/audience. This is the most obvious in the communications (cell phone, pager, Blackberry) and gaming platforms (Dreamcast, Playstation, Gameboy).

The business world knows full well that it’s not the phone the provider makes its money on, it’s the service (just as it’s not really the film that directly makes the exhibitor its profits). But you’d be surprised at the number of people who choose to finally order the service because they liked that particular phone.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of broadband digital entertainment, is that there is an element of communication, or the possibility of communication hovering in it, over it or beside it. This can mean chatting with someone about the game while you watch it, or sharing music files. At times, communication can mean nothing more than choice of entertainment: selecting one of hundreds of films to watch. The more integrated communication is with entertainment, the more the connection with it because a “high-touch” activity. This means people interact with the screen and or device more often, so the device has to be something easy to understand and something people want to touch.

Control Shift

In the past, distribution networks have been controlled at the beginning of the road that leads from entertainment creator to audience. Networked broadband systems, peer-to-peer, and the lower cost of creation change that. The newer control of the average person’s entertainment experience is the one that comes closest to them: it’s the interface /screen and the device that holds it. The device of choice while there is competition (and the broadband entertainment race has only just begun) is the one combines ease of use and choice. This means that the power role in the entertainment game is moving from gatekeeper (ie. We only let out the entertainment we want) to enabler (i.e. We do the best job of getting you to entertainment and we make sure you can find and enjoy the entertainment we make). The entertainment family is moving from the Eisenhower era to the sensitive new age years.

In just 5 years of popular Internet use, we’ve seen a layering trend. Popular Internet services, like Prodigy and Genie, were overlaid by Web. Popular web sites and services delivered through them, have been surpassed by downloadable applications for matters of communication and entertainment (Winamp, ICQ), and then the growth of peer-to-peer connected applications (napster) has surpassed even these. Web success is not sustainable alone. Each new networked layer…getting closer to the broadband environment, shows that a new winner can come out on each level.

Gentlemen and women of the new entertainment world, I urge you to make great, easy to understand, nice-to-touch-and-hold things that will bring people along to the broadband entertainment era. Because otherwise, you are going to have to wait for everyone older than GenI to die off, and we’ll have missed some great new kinds of stories by then.

And, if you don’t do it you may lose your gatekeeper role. Because someone else is going to slap a device over your piece of spectrum or stream, or service, or movie, or serial narrative, or music, and charge you to flow through it.

Journalists are incredible gossips. Professional gossips. They dig into dirt with a delight that approaches Julia Child in the butter aisle.

Traditionally it’s been their job to take the gossip, and judge it, sift it, research it, integrate it, fact check it and verify otherwise unattributed information with two reliable sources, tell it in a well-written story and then stick it in whatever publication/distribution employs them. Then its not called gossip anymore, it’s called news.

But the digital era has struck at each of these points. The finding out, the composition, the sifting and most especially the distribution. The information economy and networked era, coupled with a population gasping for distraction, urges: FASTER PUSSYCAT, WRITE, READ!!

We are moving to a world in which anyone can make information or news media and distribute it to an audience. Meanwhile, the time between an event occurring, or information surfacing, and it being reported has already shrunk to zero. This means that media often is gossip.

A couple of elements are helping this movement along: the emerging Servant Media model and the Real-Time demand for instant business and the newest news. All of this adds up to a kind of massive questioning of authority. Who do we listen to? While the speed and neutrality of technology might seem to give us the circumstances for media nirvana, it will not replace the authority of more traditional media outlets which are aided by, but do not wholly consist of, technology.

Servant Media

So who makes the new new media in the networked digital era? We all do.

As a convenient way to describe this model of media production, distribution, and consumption, I borrow the phrase Servant from the original Gnutella developers. Gnutella collapsed the ‘server’ and client’ into one unit (thus, servant). This means every consumer is also a producer. All of these units are simultaneously connected, which means that every producer is also a distributor. (This is the model I called distributed serving back in January [please see ‘Infringement, The Web and Media Businesses: Part Two,’ Futuredays, digital mogul Volume 3, Report 1].)

With news and information, it works this way: each of us is capable of taking in and observing new pieces of information. We can easily create gossip, news and opinion and distribute it quickly to many in the networked world, by emailing this information to friends, to our own mailing lists, to a general listserv, to a web site.

In fact the human instincts behind gossip–showing you know something others don’t, sharing information–these are the same instincts behind all of the development in the technology referred to as P2P (which stands for person to person–isn’t it just like technophiles to come up with a way to turn people into an acronym?).

The information and opinion in a personal email or listserv posting hasn’t been verified by an external source. This ‘I’m pretty sure it’s true’ quality of gossip can add to it’s titillating nature and, thus, its distribution. This news doesn’t just go from a box to everyone. It moves from one of us to the next. Like gossip.

Surely you’ve get some email each week that looks like this…

Subject: Have you heard?

Subject: I thought you’d be interested…

Subject: FYI

Subject: Fw:……

Some of the most vibrant examples of Servant models–Slashdot, the pho listserv and FuckedCompany.com (FC)–have popped up in new subject areas that are within the new digital economy (Linux, digital music and entertainment, and bad Internet employment experiences and failing dot coms) which were not being covered well or at all by traditional media. Those who organized these Servant media outlets created skeleton structures that allowed many many contributors to add the results of the most recent press release or opinion about the latest rumour. These skeleton structures (a listserv, editorial sections or a system that makes a game out of reader contribution, by taking bets) does away with the expense of having actual writers or editors.

Remove little things like overhead costs and fact checking, add a subject matter that’s feeding a focussed audience with an insatiable appetite for the latest dirt, and you’ll find that Servant Media has the ability to grow at a pace far outstripping the traditional 5 year growth patterns planned for magazines and newspapers.

As each Servant Media outlet reaches a larger audience, some percentage of that audience become contributing participants in the Servant Media. The growing number of writers also means that Servant Media is better equipped than traditional media to meet the new Real-Time pace.

Real-Time

Real-Time is being ushered in by the digital economy.

Forces are orienting business and media outlets around the same principles of the technology underlying the changes. That technology tends toward allowing events and transactions to occur almost instantaneously. In terms of media, that means that the time between an event occurring and it being reported, collated and distributed (and sometimes analysed through Servant Media outlets) is approaching nil.

The value of news media is that its, well, new. The freshest, most immediate reporting is the ticker that flows from the stock markets. Ask one of the dozens of financial media outlets that have sprung up to service and further our speculative Internet lives: the closer to Real-Time, the more willing people are to pay for information.

The digital tools and networking increase the need for media. Changes happen more quickly than ever. There are more companies, more individual efforts and greater impact on our lives. So the tools that enable more people to make and distribute media more quickly also increase the demand for more media. This expansive kind of onanism synchs with what venture investors like to call the ‘network effect.’ The area of investment creates its own customer base/audience. This is why the people actually making cash money right now off of the digital economy, are those who publish its media, like F@stCompany and The Standard.

What is most important is that Real-Time cannot be commodified, like other forms of information or ‘content.’ In an era in which competitive advantage is getting more and more difficult to create or maintain, it’s hard to argue with something as absolute as Time.

Of course, the closer a media outlet is to Real-Time, the more it approximates a tool (ie. useful implement) and the less it looks like what the digital era has vaguely labelled ‘content,’ ie. some random creamy filling you stuff in and take your time experiencing. And, the information that comes in real-time about events is, almost by definition: gossip or a press release, because neither of these needs any time for editing, checking of contextualizing. The Servant Media outlet, targeted like a Slashdot or Fuckedcompany.com, relies upon the think organizational shell of the outlet’s narrow focus, plus the quick responses of many people, to function as context.

Fuckedcompany.com, is a kind of reverse NASDAQ without having to deal with government regulation. The site allows people to vent their frustrations and gossip about the mismanagement of various dot coms, and bet on the speed of their demise. FC is entertaining and has an augmented value (as recent eBay bids on the site show) because it gives gossip to speculators who then use it at their own risk, but who do look at it as an information source. FC is a mix of information and entertainment that reflects a trend we’ve been seeing for some time: that news is being used as entertainment as much as entertainment is being passed off as ‘news.’ Real-Time markets are inherently entertaining because they can be watched as sport and entertainment. They hold an inherent sense of serial drama and narrative.

But does this gossip media system supplant (or supplement) well-reasoned and researched news? It is all a question of authority.

Authority

Gossip is like sex or candy. Fun and enticing, but not sustaining on its own.

While the growth and influence of the Servant Media model has real benefits and cannot be stopped, it will not replace established traditional reporting and media. For what builds and conveys authority are a number of factors that the Servant Media model and Real-Time don’t support: consistency; context; ethics; journalistic independence; and most of all accountablity.

These factors depend upon time for reflection. Time also means money. The quality of writing and consistency depends upon the contributors and editors and the only way to maintain that is paid quality staff and freelancers. Without substantive editorial work, the signal to noise ratio becomes onerous for the audience. Even focussed Servant Media outlets can become cluttered with repetition, poor grammar, personal attacks and the same loud voices (not necessarily interesting or informed ones) shouting over and over.

The fact is that most people don’t have the time and certainly don’t have the contacts or the ability to piece all of this information together for themselves.

I imagine that even the most libertarian Servant Model proponent, suspect of any centralization, still read and rely upon the Wall Street Journal and watch CNN when it comes to their investments.

The abdication of judgement, editorial and responsibility may work for a pure communication tools–an instant messaging system for example. But it is judgement that is consistently well exercised that builds up reputation and authority of any kind of media outlet. Technology systems by themselves are not good at this kind of accountability. There’s too much nuance and context involved. God knows Amazon can’t even give you a decent book recommendation, never mind filter for truth or what’s really important to you to know. Trust needs to build in order for readers and audiences to convey authority to an outlet. Anonymity is of limited use in building trust because independence cannot be ascertained.

Anonymity is sometimes useful in questioning authority. And so the highest use of the Servant Outlets will be as watchdogs. It may even be a good idea for traditional outlets, to all have a servant web component running alongside them to keep them honest.

Heard any good stories lately?