Radio Free Decipher/Episode 99 transcript
Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 99 (5 October 2001) is a special edition in which Warren Holland, CEO of Decipher, explains his decision to cancel DecipherCon 2001 after the 11 September 2001 attacks and answers listener questions about it. Participants: Kyle Heuer (host), Evan Lorentz, Warren Holland. Speaker turns are inferred from the captions.
Source: Broadcast 99 - Radio Free Decipher (05 October, 2001): Warren Holland on DecipherCon and 9/11, Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 13 May 2022; originally released 5 October 2001). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript[edit]
[00:01] Kyle Heuer: Welcome to a very special edition of Radio Free Decipher. We have Evan here, as always—
[00:06] Evan Lorentz: Yeah, how are you?
[00:07] Kyle Heuer: —and we welcome Warren Holland into the show today.
[00:09] Warren Holland: Hi, guys. I really wanted to come in and talk to you today.
[00:12] Kyle Heuer: Great. So, well, there's been quite a bit of activity going on in the last couple of days. There's been a big announcement and a lot of people talking.
[00:19] Warren Holland: Right. Well, let me talk to you about it; that's why I'm here. I wanted to fill people in on some of the background for the decisions and talk about options and things like that.
[00:28] Kyle Heuer: Okay. A number of questions, of course, have come in, because in your original announcement you said that people could write those in. We are not going to read through all of them. A lot of them have similar themes, so basically we're going to condense those and talk about the major issues that were received.
[00:49] Warren Holland: Okay. Well, let me tell you what I've been doing for the last day or so. After we made the announcement, which I knew would be hard for people to hear, I have been answering personal emails—done tons and tons and tons of those. Some of those emails come in positive, some of them come in negative, and we'll talk about those a little bit later. I also went out on some of the public boards and some of our boards and answered stuff, and I'll continue to do that. What I want to do is make a personal connection to the people that are impacted by this decision and talk through the reasons for it. Some people will understand the reasons, some people won't, but I'm available, and one way to get in touch with me is just by writing to ceo@decipher.com. I've probably answered maybe 50 or so personal emails in the last day or so, so feel free to send stuff directly to me.
[01:44] Kyle Heuer: I'm sure you will get more.
[01:46] Warren Holland: I'm sure I will. But let's talk about the decision for a minute. There's been all kinds of things out on the boards, conspiracy theories, and there are issues about licensing and all this other kind of stuff coming up, and none of that has anything to do with the issue about DecipherCon. The total issue about DecipherCon for me was a safety issue with players. And you guys know that I went through the same decision internally a week or so ago—a couple of weeks ago I sent around this thing that stopped Decipherian travel—and that was the same issue. I had people come up to me and say, but we really want to travel, we need to go to this business meeting, and we think it's safe, and all of those kinds of things. And I still think there's a difference between an individual making a decision to travel and a company making a decision to do that, or to support that, or to support activities around that right now.
[02:38] Warren Holland: And it's not that I think this is a long-term thing. I don't think this will be a situation we're in forever, but we are there now, and we need to address it responsibly. A lot of these decisions, for me, don't have anything to do necessarily with an individual wanting to come. It impacts a lot of people, and there are a lot of different stresses that are created by it. I've had emails from a parent that said thank you, because I was really concerned about my kid traveling to DecipherCon. I've had emails from people that said, I'm enormously disappointed, I wanted to come, but my spouse is real happy, because now I'm not traveling. Not everybody is in that place where somebody else is going to be impacted, but a lot of people are. And it's not just the people coming to DecipherCon. It's all Decipher employees; it's a bunch of volunteers; it's other kinds of staff and support people. And you guys know that we're in a heavy military area, and the security alerts around here are different. The military's on very active high alerts. And I thought it would be irresponsible. And I knew that everybody would be disappointed. In fact, we're enormously disappointed. Every Decipherian is disappointed.
[04:02] Warren Holland: Let me give you an analogy of something that I've used internally. We're on the East Coast, and recently we've had some shark attacks along the East Coast. What happens when those kinds of events happen is that people get out of the water. They don't feel safe going into the water. And yet sharks are out there all the time, and these kinds of activities happen all the time, and if you put a million people on the beach, they're safe, because they swim all the time. But for some period of time there's a psychological impact of that. And I've kind of thought of this decision as: it's almost like DecipherCon is this kind of event that's floating out on a barge off the coast, saying, swim on out, come on out and have a good time. And a million people could do that and it would be fine, because they're just not going to have that problem. But there is a psychological aspect of: you want me to swim through the shark-infested waters to get there? And I know everybody doesn't feel it, but a lot of people do, which is why 50% of people aren't flying now.
[05:08] Kyle Heuer: This does pretty clearly address one of the first topics that we got a lot of feedback on in the emails, which was, "But I think it's safe."
[05:17] Warren Holland: Right. Well, I think it's safe too, but there's a difference in terms of the responsibility. If DecipherCon was floating out in the water and we said "swim on out", that's one set of responsibilities. The other is to try to change the venue of how we do the event and how we support the players, and move that to the beach. And if there's a way for us to move that to the beach, so that everybody that has those issues doesn't have to swim out, then that's fine. We can certainly explore those things. But the reality is just that I want to serve all of our players, and there are lots of different groups of players in this decision. There are players that were coming to the tournaments; players that were coming to the convention to see friends; there were people that were coming for the first time and didn't even know what DecipherCon was really all about. And the hardcore players and the players that were in tournaments are the ones that are impacted the most, and they are the people that we care about at an enormous level. Other people are having trouble understanding the decision, because they would personally choose to do this: "It's not a risk. I'm an early adopter. I'll go in the water. I'll swim out to the DecipherCon barge. Why would you possibly stop this?" And it's because I think we have an obligation to try to serve everybody, and I have an obligation to think about the safety of our employees too.
[06:52] Kyle Heuer: Okay, so that basically sums up the first point. There was another email, too, that said something to the effect of, "Well, don't you think it's the players' right to choose whether or not they want to come?"
[07:03] Warren Holland: Well, yes and no. Yes in terms of the personal decision, but no in terms of the structure. If you choose to come, there are a lot of other people that have to be there to support those activities, and your choice to come may be fine, but some of those other people may or may not want to come.
[07:19] Warren Holland: Another analogy that was important to me: people have said that it's safer to fly than it is to drive, and all those kinds of things. And again, we're dealing with irrational issues that we're looking for rational responses on, and it's very difficult to do that. I had this case internally as well, where one of the people at Decipher said to me that they were very happy when Decipher people were not allowed to fly, because their spouse was very worried about them traveling. And we were sitting down talking about the reality of it: it was probably more dangerous for him to drive in to work than it was to get on the plane. But the psychology is different, and that kind of travel created this stress at home that wasn't even apparent to me. And a lot of people are responding to not being able to come to something that they love, and I absolutely understand that. We had every intention of this being the biggest and best event that we had ever done. But I think my responsibilities are broader than that. That's it; there is nothing else other than that particular issue.
[08:41] Kyle Heuer: Which I think leads pretty clearly into the next big chunk of questions we got. There were a lot of people that were concerned there were other issues in there, and I know you've already said that repeatedly—
[08:52] Warren Holland: Right. I saw emails where people were talking about the license, and I saw emails talking about saving taxes, and I saw emails about financial issues, and there was absolutely none of that in the decision. I never looked at a spreadsheet. I never talked about costing. I've made million-dollar decisions before that didn't have anything to do with the bottom line of Decipher, and this had nothing to do with the bottom line of Decipher. In fact, just because of the response that you're seeing right now, you know that this is a far bigger issue, and I knew that this was going to be a big issue. And frankly, for me it's a better-safe-than-sorry thing. If one player was in some kind of accident because of us putting on this event at this time—and DecipherCon is an annual event; we'll do another one; it's not going to stop—but if something happened at this time, the responsibilities would be enormous. Somebody would come back to me and say, how could you do something that was so irresponsible? And I'd feel that: how could we do something that was so irresponsible?
[10:02] Kyle Heuer: There are a large number of events being cancelled all over.
[10:05] Evan Lorentz: Yeah, actually. Janet Jackson just cancelled one of her European tours. Apple cancelled Macworld in Paris. About 500 conventions were cancelled, about two or three hundred of those in Las Vegas. A lot of book publishers have cancelled signing tours for authors. A number of stars cancelled events around movie openings and things that they were going to do.
[10:27] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, actually, I was going through the process right before September 11th of trying to get Lord of the Rings celebrities to come with us to DecipherCon, and there were a lot of people that were excited about that, and then September 11th came and nobody wanted to go anywhere.
[10:44] Warren Holland: But, you know, to use Janet Jackson as the example, I'm not sure that any terrorist is necessarily going to target the Janet Jackson concert. That's the rational side of the argument, that says what are the chances of any of this ever happening. And the other side, even from her perspective—in the press release that I read—is that her concern for the employees and the people that were traveling had to take precedence.
[11:12] Kyle Heuer: Right. Which leads pretty clearly into the next group of questions we had: why cancel the event and not just decide to postpone it?
[11:21] Warren Holland: Well, that's actually a very good question, because I don't know that there isn't something at some point that we can do, but I don't have anything that I can promise. I don't have alternatives, because the decision for me deals with the timing of things. What happens tomorrow if we have military action? I don't know what happens a month or two down the road. I will say that the more time that goes on, the easier it is to start thinking about those alternatives and seeing what kind of options we have. But the first decision had to be for me to say: I can't do this, and I don't know when I can do this. And frankly, DecipherCon is an annual thing. We'll do one next year. Those things will come back.
[12:11] Warren Holland: I don't know if you guys are even old enough for this, but were you around when the U.S. didn't go to the Olympics in Russia? Well, I've been thinking about that a lot, long before I made this announcement, certainly when I was dealing with the Decipher stuff. For those of you that don't know: when the Olympics were held in Russia, the U.S. backed out and didn't go, and unfortunately all those Olympic athletes that had trained all their lives for it had this event just pulled out from under them. The rug was just pulled out from under them, and they'd spent a lifetime training for that. The initial uproar and disappointment were big, and then eventually people bought into the reasons that that had to happen. And none of our players have spent a lifetime doing this, but it feels like that.
[13:06] Kyle Heuer: Sure. It takes a lot of time and preparation.
[13:09] Warren Holland: Absolutely. And the passion and the dedication and the tournaments—there are people who spend more time with our games than I do, which is pretty impressive. So the emotional feelings are exactly the same. And again, this was something that I thought about before I ever made the decision: I know that this is going to have that impact, but I don't feel like there are options. We can certainly try to explore options as we go forward, but I absolutely felt like the safety of the players was more important than anything else I could do. Again, if something happened to even one player, it would be a disaster. And I don't expect it to happen. If we held DecipherCon tomorrow, I wouldn't expect it to happen. But nobody expected any of the events that have happened since September 11th. It's just the uncertainty of it all. It's too big to take that kind of risk, I think.
[14:09] Kyle Heuer: Right. In addition to the fact that those issues don't really diminish soon, there are also logistical issues, even if we wanted to reschedule DecipherCon.
[14:18] Warren Holland: Yeah, absolutely. And there are issues—some people said, why don't we move it? Well, moving it doesn't prevent the travel of people from all over the world. It's not like we were running an electrical convention down at Virginia Beach that had all the local people from Virginia driving down. We were talking about having people fly from countries all over the world, quite literally, and that just exponentially increased the problem for me. There was no driving solution to that. So it's not like I couldn't see maybe a safer place than Norfolk, Virginia, or the Tidewater area to do this, but I'm not sure that that solves the issue in the short term.
[15:08] Kyle Heuer: All this goes into the next major point. There's been a lot of talk of fan-run championships. I know DeckTech has been organizing something. There's been a lot of talk about another thing happening in Virginia Beach the same weekend, for all the people that still have their plane tickets. There's also been talk of something in Vegas. A lot of the questions say: what do you think about these? Would you support something like these, and what advice would you offer?
[15:33] Warren Holland: Well, there are two sides. There's a personal feeling of it, and that's: wow, wouldn't that be great? I would absolutely, positively love for something to happen where everybody had the opportunity to participate in the event like they wanted to participate in the first place. The other side of that for me is: how could I support that? I mean, if I could support that, I could support DecipherCon. So I can't say that this is something that I would encourage anybody to do, and I wouldn't encourage somebody to do that. But as we explore over the next couple of weeks how everybody feels about this decision—some people will agree with it, some people won't, some people will change their opinion; they'll be positive and turn negative, or they'll be negative and turn positive—I think we just have to work through this as a group. The goal always is and always has been to serve the players. If I didn't care, everybody could have come to DecipherCon; it wouldn't be an issue for me; I wouldn't even have to think about this. My email is going to stay open. We can leave the email open for the stuff that we posted in the article the other day. We can continue to explore options, but for me those options would have to deal with the fundamental problems of travel, and I don't know what that solution is right now. We may find that there's some news event in a short period of time, and that there's some alternate thing that we could do, but I don't know what that is.
[17:03] Kyle Heuer: There also were quite a few emails that were in support of the decision, and there were people asking about the charities that we're going to be giving to, and if there's going to be some sort of a formal process.
[17:15] Warren Holland: Well, actually, yes, there is. Some of this is in the process of starting, and some of it hasn't started yet. But in terms of the prize money, the initial plan was to have all of the 300 or so champions have an opportunity to choose where that money goes, and we will set up a system for doing that. Maybe we'll select a group of charities and they can choose from that group, or maybe we'll just ask them which charities they want on the list.
[17:54] Kyle Heuer: And you're referring to champions being the winners of opens, state events—people who had already qualified for some seat in any one of the games?
[18:02] Warren Holland: Correct. All of the games. The other part of the charity stuff is events that we have not even had a chance to schedule yet. I mean, the decision is very short-term, and it creates a lot of dynamics internally for us. But what I hope to do is, like I said, move that party from out in the water and bring it to the beach. When I bring it to the beach, we can serve everybody, hopefully—the people that want to swim and the people that don't. And somehow what I want to do is take that to the local environments. I noticed one of the email threads that kept coming to me was, "Well, that's just for Lord of the Rings." I never even conceptualized whether it was just for Lord of the Rings or for everything, and we still have to work through those details. There's a possibility we can do a structured system of having events all over the world that raise money—maybe they're all at the same time, maybe they're all over a one-week period, or whatever—but all of those funds would also go into this pool and be donated in the names of all of our players.
[19:08] Kyle Heuer: Someone also specifically asked: if somebody wanted to send donations to add to what we are giving to the relief efforts, where would that be sent?
[19:15] Warren Holland: We have not set up an address for that, but we will. Once we start the system of doing these individual events, we'll have a place, probably on the web, that will tell people how they can do that.
[19:28] Kyle Heuer: But first there's going to be this period of all the effort that was going toward preparing DecipherCon trying to shift.
[19:34] Warren Holland: Yeah. I mean, this was a shock to people in the outside world; it was a shock to people inside Decipher. When you think of DecipherCon as something that we plan for for a year—we deal with different aspects of it over the whole year—and all of a sudden that's not there, and not only is that not there, but the logistics of dealing with that are thrust on everybody's shoulders, and then the issues of setting up a different system to deal with that. So it'll take us a week or two, and we'll certainly make announcements.
[20:09] Kyle Heuer: Not to mention making Essen still happen for our people who are in Europe.
[20:16] Warren Holland: Absolutely. Another part of the announcement was that we're not sending any Decipher people to Essen. We have volunteers there, and we have Decipher staff there that are enormously capable of running that show, but that creates a different dynamic as well. So a little bit more work has to go into that show.
[20:36] Kyle Heuer: Right. Well, there was one other question that I thought was relevant to the discussion, which was: why was the decision made now and not sooner? I mean, September 11th was a little while ago.
[20:47] Warren Holland: Yeah. Well, actually, it's been brewing for a long time. You will notice that we have not sold tickets on the web, and Bill and the web team actually had that stuff ready to go a week or so ago, and I said, hold off. So it's actually been happening since a very short period of time after the 11th. The first phase of that for me was dealing with all the internal issues. And frankly, I was hoping that something would happen in the world that changed my mind, that really made me think: you know what, this is an overreaction, and this is a safe thing to do, and I really need to do this, because I know a lot of people want it. I absolutely know a lot of people want it. Every one of our customers that was coming wanted it. I wanted it. All you guys wanted it. Everybody at Decipher wanted it. So I kept hoping, in a way, that some of those things were going to change. And one of the things that actually did kind of confirm this for me was just some of the recent stuff about even our own government saying, be prepared, other things are likely to happen. So I had this kind of hope that things would turn in a way that just didn't quite happen for me. And again, you've got to put this on these rational and irrational scales. From a rational side, I could tell you the possibility of somebody actually getting hurt flying over here or flying back, or going to the convention, or being in the Norfolk–Virginia Beach area, is really very low. I don't think anything would happen to somebody. And yet it's all those uncertainties.
[22:33] Kyle Heuer: Well, do you have anything else you'd like to tell everyone out there?
[22:36] Warren Holland: Well, you have my email address; feel free to use that. We are certainly going to try to explore options. I don't want to make everybody feel like this was just a cancellation, because there are things that we need to do to shift the focus. And I know, in talking with you earlier today, we were talking about options—do we want to reschedule it for a later time?—and it's just that we can't do that yet. It's too early. If we said we could do something in March, we don't know where we're going to be. I would love to tell you, here's a date and here's where we're going to do something, but I think the reality is we need a period of a week or two to even try to formulate internally how we're going to make all of this stuff happen, and we need time for people to respond and send in emails and try to tell us other options. Somebody might come up with something that's very creative. I was saying that in one sense this was really sad for me, that this occurred now, because if it was two or three years down the road, we would probably have some internet ways to run tournaments. We could just immediately restructure and do a World Championship over the internet. Now, that would have a completely different dynamic to it; it wouldn't have the social aspects necessarily. But of course we don't have time to do any of that. But there are a lot of people that care a lot about this event, a lot about the tournaments—and so do we—and somebody may come up with an idea that actually could work. But it absolutely has to deal with the parameters of these issues.
[24:12] Kyle Heuer: In fact, somebody wrote to ask, how can you guarantee us that big events like this won't be cancelled again? And that's maybe part of why details about what's next aren't available yet.
[24:23] Warren Holland: I mean, this is a national and a world issue, and I don't mean to get off onto that, because I really want to concentrate on the Decipher aspects of all of this. But I don't think this will last forever. There may be certain changes in our lifestyle that last forever. There are certain even freedoms that we're looking at that may change in the short term, but I don't think anybody actually wants that to happen. Nobody that buys an insurance policy on their home for storm damage wants the storm to come through and hit. You do things for a certain perspective of safety, and I don't think this will last forever. We're not going to stop doing what we're doing. If a certain number of players decided they didn't want to buy Decipher products because of this decision, I would absolutely understand that. I would never want that to happen, but that's a cost that I have to absorb in the process of being responsible for the decision, and I'm willing to do that. But hopefully what we'll be able to do is make people comfortable that there is no conspiracy and there are no back-end motivations for anything—that's one task—and get over those things, and then hopefully we can take the aspect of turning some of this into a really positive thing with the charity component, and then maybe we can try to find some solutions that deal with some of the player issues too. Nothing would please me more, but I don't know what that is.
[25:59] Kyle Heuer: So there you have it. If your question was not answered, once again, you can direct it to ceo@decipher.com.
[26:05] Warren Holland: Absolutely.
[26:06] Kyle Heuer: And thanks so much for spending some time dealing with these very difficult issues and talking to the players.
[26:12] Warren Holland: Yeah. I think, in closing, what I'd like to say is that whether anybody agrees or disagrees with the decision is totally their choice, and I support that. I understand those differences of opinion. But there's absolutely nothing happening here that isn't trying to take the players into perspective and deal with what we think are our corporate responsibilities as well as our personal responsibilities. The players, and the customers that aren't players, are number one. That's the thing that makes this decision so difficult.
[26:50] Kyle Heuer: And there you have it. Thank you all for listening.