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Pattern precognition

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David Weinberger is posting interesting notes from a high-powered TTI Vanguard conference here in SF.

This post on Eric Bonabeau’s presentation caught my eye:

  Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem says that we tend to believe that the future is present in the mass of data and we just need to find it. But we use existing patterns to search the data, which can’t turn up new patterns. Humans are amazing pattern-detecting machines but we’re terrible at exploring alternatives. Eric suggests selective breeding: make new combinations, look at the results, pick the most interesting results, recombine them, etc. He does a live demo that discovers a “hidden bagel” in a 50-dimensional financial data set. (I have no idea what that sentence means once it gets past the word “bagel.”) It helps not to know what you’re looking for.

I’ve heard Bonabeau, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference (coming up again soon), give a talk on emergent behavior (among ants and in other places) and he’s always fascinating. This notion — that, since “we use existing patterns to search the data”, we’re blind to new patterns — has echoes and analogues all over the map, all the way from the little copy-editing exercise that Dave Winer periodically challenges us with to the disastrous failure of American policy in the lead-up to the Iraq war (a mistaken pattern so potent that much of the population still believes in a patently untrue scenario). Our minds fall into existing patterns like wheels in a rut; we “see” words spelled right even when they’re misspelled, and we “see” events unfold according to the sequence we expect, even when the information parading across our eyeballs tells us otherwise.

What interests me is applying this insight to journalism. We all know the hack’s drill: First you decide what your story is, then you go out and find the facts and quotes to fit. The sad truth today, however, is that this approach isn’t just for hacks: Most reporters in most newsrooms don’t have the time, the freedom or the resources to cover most stories in any other way. This is one of the big causes of the much-vaunted credibility crisis we hear so much about in the blogosphere and all of its attendant conferences. For an astonishingly high percentage of professional journalists, the news they recognize is the news that fits the pattern they have already selected as the template for their coverage. This keeps working until real news starts dancing in front of their eyes — and they miss it. (For instance, the story of the ringer reporter from Talon News was sitting right under the eyes of the entire Washington press corps. But it took a swarm of Web-based sleuths operating collaboratively across multiple blogs to piece the strange saga together and discredit President Bush’s friendly plant in the White House press room.)

“It helps not to know what you’re looking for” ought to be the proud banner of the journalistic generalist — the writer who can step into any situation, ask the right questions and get out with clear explanations for the rest of us. But reporters have tight deadlines and editors telling them what they want and, often, instincts dulled by years of repetition — and all but the very best and most creative end up coming out with what they went in for, rather than something unexpected.

One of the pacts I’ve made with myself as I’ve worked on my book is: Don’t go in with the story. Give myself the freedom not to know what I’m looking for. It’s less efficient, everything takes longer, there are blind alleys and extra interviews. But, if I’m persistent and lucky, maybe I’ll end up with something other than the same old patterns.

Newspapers and magazines and Web sites aren’t, can’t be, books, of course. They’ll always have deadlines; they’ll never have enough bodies or money or time. And more and more, the news that they miss is being covered by amateurs and solo operations on the Net. So forward-looking people in the business are all abuzz about new approaches to “citizen journalism” and “we media” and other ideas for harnessing the Internet’s many-to-many dynamics. Books are being written (congratulations to Jay Rosen, who has announced one that I will look forward to); new ventures planned.

Will some hybridization of old media and the new swarm dynamic help more hidebound publications find their souls again? I’m optimistic about the creative possibilities, skeptical about the business realities. But I don’t doubt that journalists could learn a lot from Bonabeau’s ants.

Blogging for fun and (not) profit

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Jay Rosen has posted a walloping trilogy of responses and reactions to the recent Bloggers, Journalism and Credibility conference at Harvard. (One, Two, Three.)

It’s clear that a lot of editors and news execs got their minds opened a little wider, and some number of bloggers got to see that the monolith of the so-called MSM is made up of real, dedicated people. There’s no war here, except when an occasional provocateur decides to stir things up (inaccurately, says Rosen).

As my five-year-old son Matthew likes to say: “Whatever.”

But there is still, I think, a gulf in understanding between journalistic professionals and blogging amateurs. Professionals have been conditioned for life into thinking that “reach” equals value and that news and information that is not commercial is news and information that is not significant. Amateurs typically don’t care as long as they get to do what they love. (Some amateurs do care, but they are not true amateurs — they are simply aspiring professionals, pros who just haven’t yet been hired.) So pros fail to understand the significance of the vast reaches of the blogosphere that do not compete with pro journalism and don’t wish to. These multitudes may have tiny followings; they may desire slightly larger followings — who doesn’t want to be heard? — but they don’t dream of stardom or of quitting their day jobs. (Not, at least, in order to blog.)

When a New York Times Magazine writer declared last fall that “nobody reads” most blogs, he casually flattened the space between “mass or niche market” and “nobody.” This formulation shoves everything that falls below the threshold of media significance into the null void.

Pros — stuck on the understandable but by now, one hopes, discredited idea that blogging aims to replace journalism as we know it — often can’t kick the habit of valuing blogging purely as a business proposition. Some quotes from Rosen’s roundup illustrate this.

Here’s Jim Kennedy, vice president and director of strategic planning for The Associated Press: “The real ‘ecosystem’ of news — with reporters, editors, bloggers and wikipedians — won’t truly flourish until we figure out how to support it. Can we provide services to each other, form business partnerships, generate mutual traffic benefits?”

(But the ecosystem is flourishing now — just have a look!)

Here’s Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard: “…I think that the brand and distribution power of the mainstream media will be even more important in an increasingly crowded blogosphere.”

(Yes, if your aim is to corral eyeballs. But there are other standards.)

Here’s Faye M. Anderson, , former national correspondent for PoliticallyBlack.com, former vice chairman of the Republican National Committee’s New Majority Council: “Bloggers’ credibility will be established by the market. If readers find us credible, they will come. If not, we’ll be left with a community of fifteen people.”

(Millions of blogs, each with a community of fifteen people? That adds up to a rather large sphere of communication.)

Ethan Zuckerman seemed to get what I’m talking about: “This conference reminded me that both camps [bloggers and Wikipedians] are firmly in the ‘amateur’ camp — where ‘amateur’ doesn’t mean ‘unprofessional’, but ‘motivated by love, not by financial remuneration.'”

Blogs are superficially similar enough to newspapers, magazines and commercial Web sites that professional journalists can talk about them while hanging onto their old yardsticks and habits of thinking. To a lot of editors, a blogger just looks like a byline in search of a paycheck. But the Wikipedia‘s nameless, recompense-less multitudes can’t be dismissed as easily.

That’s why, I think, the Wikipedia seems to have blown so many pros’ minds at the conference. Gee — maybe this stuff really is, you know, new. And different. And worthy of, if not outright preening, then close attention.

Change is gonna come

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I’ve been following some of the coverage of the Blog Credibility Conference at Harvard (from, Weinberger, Jarvis and Winer, among others). It continues to amaze me how much of this debate is a retread of the mid-’90s, when journalists first moved online and discovered that the Web moved really fast, had different norms, gave their readers new voices and made their own voices sound stuffy and institutional. First I think, “Come on already!”; then I think, “Oh, it’s okay.” Lessons that change one’s professional habits need to be learned from experience, and a much wider population of journalists is being exposed to these changes now that blogging software has drastically expanded the universe of personal media.

This post by David Weinberger puts some of this in a smart perspective — focusing, as I and many others often will, on the critical fact that the vast majority of blogs (like the vast majority of the Web itself) represents stuff created not to “aggregate eyeballs,” build traffic, produce revenue, compete with the pros or otherwise challenge or replace the existing order of the media. People are building something fundamentally new, something that had no opportunity to exist before, and that will — as all such new developments in media do — end up changing but not replacing what’s already here.

There’s another disconnection between the “we’re-changing-everything” bloggers and those newsroom veterans who don’t understand what the fuss is about, and it has to do with scales of time. If you run a newspaper or a TV news operation you have spent your whole professional life in a stable structure, one whose supporting beams of business and technology have never fundamentally shaken or broken under you. The world of professional media has experienced such changes only across the span of a century. But the world of the technology business experiences big changes on a scale of decades — an order of ten faster. Dominant companies rise and fall, new technologies change the rules of the game, and habits of doing business get tossed in the trash every 10-20 years instead of every 100-200 years.

As a lifelong professional journalist who jumped headfirst into the tech-industry world a decade ago, I’ve made my choice. I don’t see getting anywhere by putting one’s money on the idea that change in this field is going to slow down rather than speed up. Which means that, if I were sitting in a newsroom today, I might think it prudent to listen a little less to the voice that says, “Who are these upstarts telling me what’s wrong with my work?” — and a little more to the one that says, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do things differently?”

Link to it, own it? I don’t think so

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Atrios argues that “you link it, you own it” is an “unwritten but well-understood blog issue.” (Referenced in comments on my post below.) Not in my neck of the Web. I own my own words. I don’t own yours, and I certainly don’t own yours just because I happen to link to your page.

I guess that just shows you how tough it is to generalize about the blogosphere. Here’s the thing: Linking is all about context, right? What words do you link on, what do you say about the site you’re linking to. If I just posted a link in my blog here, without comment, to, say, an anti-semitic Aryan Nation site, that would leave my readers at the least scratching their heads and quite likely thinking I’d lost my marbles. But if I were posting a long commentary on the subject and referring to such a site as an example of a particular kind of right-wing rhetoric, for instance, I’d link to it. I wouldn’t “own it.” If I didn’t link to it, (a) I wouldn’t be using the Web to its full extent to document my argument, and (b) I’d just be making my life hard on my readers — I’ve got the URL already, why should I make them go to Google?

The context for this discussion is not experienced bloggers, who tend to understand how and when to link because it’s in their blood, but non-Web journalists and editors moving online who get their heads in a tizzy because linking is new to them and they don’t really understand it. Telling them “You link it, you own it” is tantamount to telling them, “Go back into your holes, don’t even try to link, because once you start linking we’re going to hold you responsible not only for everything you publish but for everything everyone you link to publishes.” This is a good way of shutting down the Web’s giant conversation, not opening it up.

Furthermore, the “you link it, you own it” principle would spell legal disaster for bloggers if it became widely accepted. It’s just a bad meme, all around.

Here’s what Atrios might be trying to say — or rather, here’s a reworded version of his principle that I could get behind: “You link it, you ought to check it out.” Say you stumble upon some crazy rumor about, er, a politician’s sex life, on a site you don’t know much about. You could, in ascending order of rectitude, do the following: (1) Instantly publish a link to it without comment; (2) publish the link but say that you have no idea if it’s true; (3) publish the link only after you have satisfied yourself that the rumor’s original publisher is trustworthy; or (4) get out your notepad, pick up the phone and try to verify the rumor yourself. Different bloggers will do different things here, and their choices will affect their credibility. Those choices will also, to be sure, affect how widely they’re read. There’s a reason Matt Drudge has such an unmatched record for high page views and low trust!

POSTSCRIPT, Thursday A.M.: Atrios clarifies with some good points, and I think we’re pretty much in agreement at this point. The following seems to be the practice that he’s focused on, and I imagine it is more common in his particular realm of the blogosphere than in mine: “If I link to something saying ‘go read this’ then I’ve put my stamp of approval on it. It’s bullshit to come back two hours later and say ‘uh, well, I didn’t write it, I just linked to it… not my problem.'” The point here is, it’s the “Go read this” that’s the endorsement, not the link itself. A small point, maybe, but these distinctions matter…

1968: the year of the blog

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Having heard Alan Kay’s inspiring talk at the 2003 Emerging Technology conference, I already knew how much of modern computing Douglas Engelbart‘s famous 1968 demo of the NLS (“oNLine System”) contained within it — and how far we still have to go to match the stuff Engelbart showed off then, not only in its individual elements (graphical interface, hypertext, advanced input devices, distance collaboration, and so on) but in their total integration.

What I didn’t know was that the NLS appears even to have had a kind of blog capability as one of its many tricks.

I’ve been watching the amazing videos (shot by Stewart Brand) of Engelbart’s demo — all available online, here. If you take a look at this one, you’ll see Jeff Rulifson explaining that the NLS programmers — who, in true bootstrapping fashion, seem to have maintained all their code within the NLS itself — kept a kind of bug log. Since NLS tracked who was using it and what everyone did when, each entry in the bug log has a little subscript line, flush right, with the name of the person who posted it and the time it was posted.

Sure looks like a weblog! And if you were logged into NLS you could even add comments. (I’d clip a still from the Real stream but haven’t been able to do a screen capture — perhaps part of the Real format’s DRM, or I’m too much of a klutz. Anyway, the video clip is under a minute.)

Links without fear

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There’s a conference at Harvard this weekend about blogging, journalism and credibility. That’s a reasonable topic. The invitee list has caused some discussion in the blogosphere — too many pros? not enough bloggers? Some of this, I think, is just natural “why wasn’t I invited?” peevishness. (I froze through enough Januarys in Cambridge to cure me of any envy.) But reading Rebecca MacKinnon’s FAQ on the conference leaves me with a small sense of deja vu.

There are questions about how blogging and journalism intersect that are worth talking about more, even though we’ve already talked about them endlessly. But there are other questions that arose ten years ago when journalism and the Web first collided (pardon me for donning my old-timer’s hat, but it happens when you’ve been doing something long enough), and that ought to be settled by now.

For instance, MacKinnon asks: “What happens if one of your news organization’s blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate (despite being interesting)…?” This question was first raised in the mid-’90s by mainstream news editors who were hostile to the Web. They asked it because they already had their answer: Links were scary, so let’s not link at all, or only link after a committee of poobahs has said that it’s OK.

The notion that a link is an endorsement is something that died a slow death in the mid and late ’90s, as people who actually spent their working lives on the Web — as opposed to the editors who ran newsrooms and still didn’t know what an URL was — came to understand that an editorial link (one chosen by a writer rather than paid for as part of a business relationship) can be a reference, a courtesy, a footnote, a means of documentation, but that it is not an endorsement. The “endorsement” concept enjoyed a brief revival when Google came along and people worried that if, say, they linked to a Nazi site when they were writing a story about anti-Semitism, they were helping that site out by boosting its page-rank or “Google juice.” Google’s new scheme to defeat comment spam provides the ultimate technical fix to that problem. But even without it, choosing not to link to a site you were writing about, but didn’t approve of, was never much more than a discourtesy to your readers, who’d now have to go Google the site themselves.

Links are part of the vocabulary of writing for the Web. Telling Web journalists they can only link to “approved” sites, or sites whose accuracy is pre-vetted, is like saying, “You can only quote people who you agree with.” If a Web journalist or blogger links to a site and later discovers that it’s “not accurate,” why, then go edit the original story or blog post (and note that you’ve made the edit). Or post again with the new information about why the original link was inaccurate. Or both. The answer is, and has always been, more information, not less linking.

I sat through many conferences in 1996 and 1997 and 1998 that hashed all this stuff over. I’m sure the folks at Harvard have plenty of new controversies to explore; I hate to think Web journalism will be reinventing its own wheels every few years.

Blows against the spampire

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Another turn of the technodialectic: Google implements a new HTML tag to defeat comment spam. Congrats to the Google/Blogger developers for implementing this. On first glance, looks like a smart solution: The rel=”nofollow” tag as an attribute in an HTML link tells Google not to pay attention to the link for pagerank purposes. If your blogging tool is set to automatically insert this code into any links created by commenters on your blog — and we should expect that now from SixApart, Blogger, Userland and anyone else in the biz — then you pretty much have shot the horse out from under the comment-spammers, and they ought to go away. (Though Chuq Von Rospach says they won’t as long as there’s even a tiny fraction of vulnerable, un-upgraded blogging software.) More comment from Dave Winer, who loves the news, and John Battelle, who’s not so sure.

Will this tool also somehow lock-in existing blog power relations, as a commenter on Battelle’s blog complains? I dunno. It seems to me that there’s still plenty of room in the blogosphere for links created by blog authors to point to newcomers. And commenters can still link away — their links will only be followed by live readers, though, and not the Googlebot. On balance, sounds good to me. Of course, the techno-dialectic being what it is, the comment-spammmers will figure out some new, more devious scheme to subvert Google before long.

Follow the money talk

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I have studiously avoided commenting on the flap over Zephyr Teachout’s post about the Dean campaign’s payments to a couple of bloggers, because the whole thing seemed like a minor inside-baseball dustup fanned by the right to try to defuse the Armstrong Williams scandal. (Tim Grieve in the War Room walks us through it all. And Teachout’s more recently posted FAQ provides needed context and defusing.) The payments to Kos and MyDD were disclosed at the time; I remember reading about them; there’s just no ethical equivalency. (Nor is there a financial equivalency: Total Dean payments to two bloggers appear to have been around $12,000, compared with $240,000 to Armstrong Williams — and who knows how many other Bush payola plants still to be outed?)

But the discussion resulting from the controversy is worth having, so let’s at it.

Jeff Jarvis talks about the need for disclosure in a post that parallels my thinking on a lot of this stuff, and asks whether we shouldn’t have metatags for people. (This is actually what Marc Canter has been talking about forever, and the digital identity people keep trying to find an approach that will stick.)

That’s all well and good. But before we even get to something as complex as machine-readable personal tagging, there are simpler and bigger problems at hand: How many times have you followed a link to a new blog and been unable to figure out who’s writing it? I’m not talking about blogs that are intentionally anonymous; I mean bloggers who just haven’t gotten around to posting a “Who am I?” page or link, or who have chosen some sort of willful semi-obscurity even as they blog openly about their coworkers and friends and projects. This is ground zero of transparency, and it seems to be beyond a significant portion of the blogosphere. “Who or what made this page, and what should I know about them?” is the first question to teach everyone about being a smart user of the Web, and it applies just as strongly to blogs as to any other type of Web site. I wish more bloggers made it easier for their readers to find the answer.

So let’s put that aside and look at the more complex question of so-called “blogola.” Starting point for this discussion should be the simple fact that everyone’s perspective is potentially influenced by their financial interests. More so than political leanings or personal relationships, financial involvements are generally understood to be the A1, top-of-the-list category of conflicts of interest. So it will be relevant, for instance, for readers of this blog to know that I earned my paycheck until recently from Salon Media Group — or that, for the moment, I’m on leave working on a book, and living on a book advance from my publisher. My readers here have a right to know that — or rather, if I choose to hide where my living comes from, my readers have a right to be suspicious, to not grant me their trust. If I have a financial entanglement with someone I’m writing more specifically about, I better reveal it — or sooner or later, someone else will, and my readers will rightly feel betrayed.

In traditional professional journalism, these questions are obviated by the interposition of the media company between the journalist and his paycheck. The media company collects cash from advertisers and readers, pools it and pays its reporters and editors. In ethical terms, you could describe the media employer here as a sort of money launderer — by the time the dollars land in the journalist’s checking account, they are supposed to have lost all the potentially compromising markings of their sources. A New York Times writer doesn’t know which of his paycheck dollars came from Macy’s and which came from the used-car classifieds, and so the provenance of his wherewithal cannot (theoretically) influence his work.

In blogging, this buffer between dollar and writer vanishes. The best bloggers, understanding this, do everything they can to disclose their financial interests; this doesn’t automatically grant them credibility — that’s earned post by post — but it is a necessary precondition. It says, “Here’s what you should know about my interests as you consider what I have to say.”

Blogs take a multitude of forms: only a small fraction are close to traditional reporting or commentary; many are personal diaries; others are platforms for companies, political campaigns, movements or organizations. And so the effort to apply the ethical yardstick of traditional media to all blogs is doomed: It mistakes the publishing technology for the published contents. It’s like saying that newspapers follow one set of ethical practices, so all entities that publish on paper — be they mailorder catalogs, government publications, free shoppers or your Uncle Joe’s annual Christmas letter — need to follow suit.

Now, if your government publication tried to pretend it was a newspaper, you’d have a right to complain. (This is precisely where the Bush administration has played fast and loose, with its “Karen Ryan” video press releases masquerading as independent press reports.) When categories get blurred and things enter a fast cycle of change, as has happened in today’s publishing world, the central ethical principle — the only ethical principle that you can be sure will apply in all cases as the ground shifts under you — is disclosure and transparency.

If you reveal your interests and you don’t dissemble — if you tell your readers where you’re coming from and you don’t pretend to be coming from someplace else — you’re likely to do fine. This approach works as well for the “standalone journalist” as for the corporate executive or the P.R. person or the political advocate. The only people who stand to lose are those who were profiting from a system that allowed them to keep their sources of cash relatively obscure. (Why does the word “lobbyist” spring to mind?)

It seems to me that efforts to categorize bloggers are ultimately futile; there are as many different kinds of bloggers as there are bloggers — which is why generalizations about them so often err. That’s why I take issue with this passage from an otherwise extremely good Chris Nolan piece on these matters:

  What’s now known as the “blogosphere” is about to fracture…. There’s going to be a division between folks writing online with lots of editorial experience and tested news judgment and those who are coming to this with an agenda or a set of very specific goals. Sooner or later — it’s already happening, really — the activists will break away from the editorial folks.

I don’t know what Nolan means by “break away,” and I don’t really get how the blogosphere can fracture; it’s already in a million pieces. The two categories Nolan describes can never be fully disentangled. Consider, for instance, the work of Josh Marshall. He is as well-credentialed a “real journalist” as anyone blogging today. Yet his blog, which has provided some of the smartest commentary on the Republican effort to dismantle Social Security that you will find anywhere, has most recently spearheaded a campaign to identify and list those “fainthearted” Democrats in Congress who might be considering breaking ranks and supporting Bush’s plan, so readers can contact them and try to get them to line up in support of Social Security.

What sort of tag would you use here: Activist? Journalist? Or something for which these older labels are inadequate? We’ve got “tested news judgment” and “a set of very specific goals,” together, right there.

These waters have run together; you won’t ever divide them again. It’s one big pool. We’re never going to be able to sort people out and put them in neat little boxes, and that’s okay. But we can try to keep the water clear.

Taggers vs. spammers

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Technorati’s new tag feature is the talk of the moment, and rightly so. First we had the Semantic Web, with its notion of using RDF metadata to organize the universe. But RDF’s complexity seemed to daunt even the uber-geeks, and it’s still not easy to find an RDF-based project in wide usage outside of research environments. As the Semantic Web’s formalisms failed to catch on, the human-readable simplicity of RSS and the informal folksonomy approach of Flickr and Del.icio.us took off like gangbusters. Now Technorati is trying to pull together various islands of simple, bottom-up metatagging into one big information pool.

It’s fun and interesting and worth following. (David Weinberger’s comments are valuable.) My big doubt arises from my memory of a previous metadata experiment. As the Web took off in the mid-90s, many of you will recall, Web publishers were encouraged to tag their own pages with keyword metadata to help search engines organize them. We dutifully did so, but the whole thing got polluted very quickly by metatag hijackers — the metadata equivalent of spammers — who tried to boost the visibility of their pages by appending high-profile metatags (inevitably, most of them were X-rated) to every page in sight. (I’m sorry to say that even Salon, under the prodding of a long-departed marketing executive, briefly participated in this self-destructive game, though that’s now thankfully ancient history.) Things got ugly so fast that the search engines quickly started ignoring metatags; finally Google came along with a better, harder-to-game system, which today legions are still hard at work trying to undermine.

What’s not clear to me is how the 2005 version of keyword metatags can avoid this fate. The moment financial value starts to be associated with the new folksonomies, won’t the spammers come out of the woodwork? If they can debase something as simple and seemingly non-commercial as blog comments, they can debase anything.

In pessimistic moments, I sometimes think that every online enterprise must sooner or later sink into the spamosphere. When I’m feeling sunnier, I simply conclude that any networked technology designed to be open enough to harness contributions from multitudes will inevitably also be open to spam-style manipulation, and that this struggle — what my colleague Andrew Leonard long ago labeled as “the techno-dialectic” — is simply as open-ended as life itself. The trick is to enjoy those parts of the cycle where legitimate users have gained a lap or two on the forces of spam evil. Now seems to be one of them.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I see Technorati’s Dave Sifry offers some arguments for why tagging might be less prone to spam pollution than meta-keywords for Web pages. I hope he’s right…

Dan Gillmor’s new venture

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Congratulations to Dan Gillmor on his announcement that he’s leaving the San Jose Mercury News to launch a new venture in the field of grassroots journalism/citizen reporting. Whatever Dan comes up with will be worth watching. Gillmor writes:

  A friend who knew about this ahead of time asked the question I’m sure some others will ask: “Are you nuts?”

That is precisely the question people asked me and my colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner when we left nine years ago to start Salon. I’d been at the Examiner roughly a decade, the same amount of time Gillmor’s been at the Merc. I haven’t regretted the leap into a more entrepreneurial fray, and I don’t think Dan will either. Perhaps being nuts is, you know, underrated.