 You know, when you haven't seen people for a long time, what do you say? How have you been? What have you been working on? What happened since last we met? And there's a lot of common experience in the room, clearly. But I wanted to also use this opportunity because we're only going to be gathering for the first time, or re-gathering for the first time once. And there are a couple of things that are important, I think. Important to me to say, which I want to convey to you. Oh, sorry. Oh, I stole the clicker. Yeah, what you do with the clicker? Here we go. Thank you. There we go. So one of my goals for this session is to offer personal thanks to you and your organizations. A brief acknowledgement of this common experience that I mentioned. I'm going to talk about a few things that are different about the conference. Things that have changed and also some things that you need to know for the next couple of days. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about how things have changed for you. And I have seated this part of the conversation by asking some of my colleagues to speak up. But it's an opportunity for everybody to participate. As I mentioned at the beginning, I want to, I guess, re-establish some new context. Let us all just think about what the new context is. Because I think the notion of a return to normal is a little bit of a naive fantasy that we're going to return to some things that are the same as before and a lot of things that are not. And so we need to take account of much of that. My thank you, first of all, if you go back to March of 2020, we had a big conference, a biggest conference of the year coming up in late March. And around about the 13th or so was when, at least in the state of California, and I'm blanking now on what point federal restrictions and things came in, but the state of California said, okay, there are no, not going to be any meetings taking place indoors. Now, actually backing up a little bit before that, we had seen the growth of COVID creating anxiety amongst our audience. We came out with policies to try to provide some reassurance about what we were doing. We clearly underestimated at the time what the overall impact was, but there was fear amongst everybody in the world at that point, and we were getting a lot of folks canceling for the conference, and we were just sort of looking at this closing window thinking, we hope things don't get so bad that we have to cancel, but to get to that point. In fact, it got to that point around about March the 10th, which is a few days before the government regulatory restrictions. And as soon as we notified the hotel that this was going to happen, we got an invoice literally within 30 minutes for almost a million dollars for the cancellation obligations that we had, and we said, look, this is force majeure, this is an act of God, this is beyond our control. This surely must trigger the clause in our contract. Thankfully, the governor's ruling a couple of days later alleviated that obligation, but as you might imagine, we're not that big of an organization, we certainly couldn't afford to pay a million dollars just in cancellations because on top of that, everybody had given us their money, our sponsors, the attendees, et cetera, had given us their money. And our business model takes that money in, it pays it out, in salaries, it pays it out, in deposits. We had a large amount of money. We had deposited for catering, for audiovisual, for everything. My garage has like 10 boxes of t-shirts that we had all got ordered. So thankfully, we didn't have to pay the cancellation fees because of the governor's things, but then we had a lot of customers who were kind of like, okay, I've paid money to attend a conference, I can't attend, what are you going to do? And we had to appeal to some extent to the goodwill of our customers and say, look, could we handle it this way? We'll give you a credit for some of our digital training. We'll keep the credit that you've already paid to the next opportunity to get together. We said you could apply that anytime until 2023. We came up with some other creative solutions that provided people with value in order to avoid a run on the bank if you like because if we'd had everybody asking us for refunds right at that moment we would have been out of business within a few weeks. Same with our sponsors. We were able, thankfully, to convert them into some digital sponsorships and most chose to leave their money with us. The difference that made, frankly, in the willingness of folks like yourselves to say, okay, we trust you, we'll leave their money with you that enabled us to stay in business, that enabled us to keep our staff going. PPP kicked in a little bit off that and that helped also to keep some staff to keep our staff but without that goodwill from you folks, we'd have been long gone by now. And so I really want to thank you. All of you, obviously, were directly involved in that particular situation but three months later, this event was due to take place here and if you recall back in March of 2020, it was like, okay, everybody's gonna lock down and then we'll get back to business in April-May. That didn't happen. Then it was like, okay, well, the summertime is gonna clear things up and then things will be good. By the fall, we thought we'd be able to get going again. We had another event scheduled for October. That one eventually got removed from the schedule. We had another event in December, same thing again. Then in March the following year and each, you know, we kept looking forward three to six months hoping that things would fix themselves and then here we are, there's another strain a couple of weeks ago that's kind of rocking the boat. I'm grateful that we were able to run this particular event but there's been two years of fits and starts for us that I'm sure has been very frustrating for many of you. Thank you for keeping the faith with us. For those of you who've had money sitting with us for a while, we've had time to rebuild during that process. Our digital business thankfully has not filled the gap that was left by all of those in-person events but it's been very gratifying to me and my staff to have the trust that you've given us and that has enabled us to stay in business, keep people employed and eventually return to work this week. Thank you for that, really. So as I say, how do we... I mean, I've offered you a little bit of my gratitude for that but I mean this in the larger sense and I think, you know, one of the things that everybody seems to have taken the opportunity, if that's the right word, take this disruption to our normal lives to rethink in some sense how they view their own lives and obviously there's a lot of people who are resigning, have resigned from jobs that they didn't particularly like. Thankfully, I'm very happy for those folks. I mean, if you've taken this time to change the direction of your life in a positive way, I think that's fantastic. For me, my personal situation was that my wife, prior to COVID, I had a group of caregivers who look after her. She's confined to bed and so needs some support during the day just to look after her while I'm at work. And I work from home. So with COVID, all those folks had to stay home, couldn't do that. And I became her primary caregiver 24 hours a day. That was a period of a few weeks of profound reflection for me on my life and what was important to me. And I hope at this point, thankfully, I was able to bring back at least half of those folks to assist with Linda's care. But my home life has changed, my personal life has changed. It's also brought about changes to my professional life, which I think are mostly positive. And I'm sure all of you have had, to some extent, similar experiences for yourselves. And I guess I just wanted that moment of reflection on where we've been before we try to just ramp things up again as normal. I don't have any particular, you know, I'm not a mindfulness coach or anything like that. Although I did invite two mindfulness talks to the conference and partly for that reason is I think that this notion of living more in the moment, embracing the present, I think that's a value that's going to stick with me for forever at this point. And however you have chosen to acknowledge this period and help yourself grow, I'm going to wish you the best on that journey because I think it's really significant. Oh, I think I meant to show this image during that little bit of sentimentality. Because being back here, I mean, this is a fabulous image of where we are. Where's my pointer? Is that it? Yeah. You are here. There's the peak. So a few things that have changed for us this week. And I'm just going to... Oh, no, I can't still read it. Obviously, all that vaccination, pre-clearance, et cetera. That was a decision that we tossed and turned about for a long time until it became clear that, yes, this is part of the new normal. I hope that we can gradually drop some of the restrictions, but we're going to take a safety first approach beyond this event to our March event. Our March event, we've said, OK, things aren't going to change. That's our enterprise data world. Things aren't going to change in time for any changing protocols. So March will be the same. Then we're back here in June. This date here in December. For those of you who've been here before, you'll know, well, San Diego is in June. And then in December, we're on the East Coast. But this contract that governed this particular venue got bumped from June of 2020 to December of 2021. Of course, we thought by then everything would be cleared up and we'd be back to full capacity. So we have a bit over 300 people registered for this event. Normally we have about 600. I think under the circumstances, it's probably better that we have a little elbow room that we're not sitting entirely on top of each other. But it's going to take us a while to get back to that original number. That's OK. But a few things. We're going to have some virtual sessions. Now, after we announced the agenda, there were some speakers who said, you know, conditions have changed. That was around when Delta started to emerge. Conditions have changed. My company won't let me travel anymore. Or, you know, the vulnerabilities of people at home. I can't risk that travel. So we mostly told those folks, sorry if you can't be here in person. You know, that's not the meat. We're not running. We're not bringing people to San Diego to see a bunch of virtual talks. But there were a handful where the subject matter we felt was sufficiently unique and important and valuable. So we did enable some of those talks to take place virtually. Most of them are tomorrow. We tried to restrict that to one in every time slot. But 80% of the talks that were previously scheduled are going to take place in person. There are a handful also of folks who just in the last week for similar reasons related to Omicron decided, I can't take the risk. So we've managed to accommodate all of those with one exception, which is April Reeve session tomorrow morning. So that one has been canceled. All the others will take place. Just some will be virtual. Most of the virtual sessions will be downstairs. In tomorrow's keynote, we're actually going to have a couple of virtual panelists here. But the technology that we used for that is a thing called an owl, which looks like an Alexa device that has cameras and the speakers can see the room. It's a wonderful thing. We had two tutorials yesterday using this and it was almost like the speaker was in the room. The level of interaction was great. So hopefully very little will be lost in that transition. Wonderful new technology, too. We have these new projectors that can sit literally three feet from the screen and give you a fully squared image. That's just amazing. Totally unrelated to COVID, obviously. But there are other things that happened, since we met last. There were societal changes. So now we're offering buttons for those who wish to indicate their pronouns, for example. We debated whether we should collect that information in the process of registration. Actually legal advice suggested that we do not do that for the time being, but for anybody who'd like to grab a button, there's a few options there. The one that I'm wearing is actually a social distancing indicator. So red would mean let's keep our distance. Yellow means fist bumps, fine elbows. And if you choose not to wear anything, obviously that's a null answer, doesn't really give you any information. But at least for those who would like to indicate what their distance and preferences are, then we have that option here. I mentioned we added a couple of sessions on mindfulness. Matias yesterday was kind of an enterprise level. If you want to be a mindful manager, and she's going to be around today if you'd like to chat to her tomorrow morning. Session with Lance Silverstone, Zenwood Land. Very popular session. Plan is to have it on the beach, whether cooperating. Otherwise we'll move it indoors. But very popular session with Land that we've been running for some time now. I mentioned earlier the speaker COVID protocols. So for those speakers you can demask, but stay up front please. We were asked yesterday if we're distributing an attendee list. And the answer is no, we're not. If you want to connect to other attendees, please join the app. Basically this is a data privacy issue. So if we need to request for people to opt in to an attendee list, then the attendee list is essentially going to be incomplete. And of less value, we've made the decision not to have the attendee list at all. If you join the app, you'll be able to connect with other attendees. Or post something on a message board, let everybody know that you'd like to meet folks who have a particular interest. You'll see on the food service items that are wrapped. I hope it's pretty obvious why we've done that to enhance both the reality and the perception that it's safe to grab a muffin. We've tried to put things in place. One of the great things about this venue, I think at this point if you're data driven, you realize that most of the conveyance of virus is respiratory. And so ventilation is probably the more significant factor in that. And given where we are, there's a lot of opportunities to get some fresh air through. But we still have lots of things that you can use to protect surfaces. Also, there's a couple of things. If you want a lanyard for your face coverings, there's also little mask extenders and stuff. We've got all that stuff at the registration desk. I'm going to slide behind on all my things here. One thing to mention is that one of the adjustments being in December, the weather is not as reliable. The reason this room is set in rounds and the Roosa room downstairs is so we can do a quick change if rain is predicted. It is predicted at 85% probability today, so we're going to be running lunch in this room and also the Roosa downstairs. That's going to be a little bit inconvenient for Roosa folks because there's a session immediately beforehand and there's also sessions immediately after in both rooms. I'll just ask for your understanding on that and we'll do the best we can. How has data practice changed? This really is probably the most important part of this, but have I really talked that long? The one instruction I give to speakers is, I don't care what time you start, just finish on time. I've left myself with 54 seconds to get through about half my presentation. To all those folks I asked to contribute this morning. My bad. I know I got a little emotional about some parts of what I've been saying here, but I honestly thank you from the bottom of my heart and my colleagues, like I say, we wouldn't be here without you. I hope that whatever journey each of you is on individually, however that has been diverted, improved over the last year and a half, I hope that it continues successfully for you all. Let's try to get back to some normalcy now. We're going to take a break and get back to our track sessions. Please, if you would give yourselves a round of applause and thanks. It's been a pleasure.