Leveraging Thought Leadership Live featuring Stephen Shapiro and David Burkus

And welcome, welcome, welcome. We are on the LinkedIn Live today, and I've got 2 fun guys today who I know fairly well, Steve Shapiro and Dave Burkus. So let me introduce them both and we'll dive in. So Steve Shapiro cultivates innovation by showing leaders and their teams how to approach, tackle, and solve their business channel challenges. He's the author of— I forgot how many— 6 books now, Steve? How many books?

6 books.

Yeah, 6 books. Um, he's been on the board of National Speakers Association. He's in the Speakers Hall of Fame. We can go into all sorts of other credentials, but I'd rather talk to him. And then we've got Dave Burkus, who is one of the world's leading business thinkers. Uh, David Burkus' forward-thinking ideas and best-selling books are helping leaders and teams do their best work. Now, you're 3 books, David? How many books?

4 and a half. 4 and a half? Yeah, the half is I did a little thing with Audible, uh, right before the pandemic targeting leaders who have long commutes and that sort of thing. And then the pandemic hit and nobody bought it because nobody had a commute anymore. But yeah, 4 and a half. But I've never done a card game. Stephen's got me beat there.

Stephen has— I do remember working on— right, Steve, Steve, I think, holds the record for having one of the only business books with a deck of cards. Attached to it, which we'll get into on that. And David is also a world-renowned speaker. So let's just dive in, guys. So both of you, if we were introducing you 2 years ago, would be— oh, keynote speakers would be one of the primary labels, right? So let's start with what are you guys doing these days? I'll let David go first. Oh, all right, all right.

I mean, still a lot of that, just staring at this camera. August, you know, it seemed like the consensus was that after Labor Day of this year, so mid-early September for those watching internationally, everything was game on, right? And then Delta happened and our CDC kind of scared the pants off of everyone. And so now we're all sort of struggling to it. I guess the biggest change in what I do is that I've found I used to be probably 50/50 working at associate professional associations and that sort of stuff. And working internally with clients, and it's probably now 80% internal. And sometimes even designing multiple training webinars and that sort of stuff for folks, which is fine because I think the internal is what's going to stay virtual much more often. I think people are ready to get back to conferences, but companies aren't ready to fly 2,000 sales reps to the Bellagio for a week of training when they could do every afternoon over the course of a month instead.

Yeah. Sure, for a fraction of the price. And right, right. And what, and what are you doing to stay out of trouble, Steve?

Well, so it's interesting. Every year I choose a theme. And so in 2019, I chose for 2020, the theme was going to be virtual. Yes, this was before the pandemic. So this is actually something I wanted. I'm right now, I'm not in my studio, but I got a beautiful studio at home. I'm actually in a hotel. But this is what I wanted. And so 2021 was all around ongoing relationships. So what I've really been doing for past several years is transitioning away from the transactional nature of a speaking business to a relational nature of one where I actually work with companies to help them, you know, create a culture of innovation, deal with the most complex problems. So I would say most of my work— so Dave was talking about how he went from 50/50, 80/20 in terms of associations to employees of companies. I would say I've probably gone to, you know, 50% non-speaking revenues and 50% speaking revenues. And my goal is to switch that to 80% non-speaking revenues, 20% speaking revenues. Speeches to me want— I want it to be the start of something big rather than the end.

Yeah, so stay there for a minute because I think there's a couple of really good points there. Number one is, and it's not a reflection of anybody's personality or whatever, the speaking business in and of itself is a transactional business. Are you available on May 7th? Yes. This is my fee. Yes. Does it fit into it? Yes. Great. Come in, do your thing, leave. Everybody's happy, right? That is a transaction, right? The relationship piece is really interesting because as a speaker, you don't get to see— I mean, you get the immediate gratification of the applause and all those sort of the accolades and all that, but you don't necessarily get to see the impact of your work, of your ideas being implemented or processed or whatever. And so when you say relationship-based, Sort of unpack that a little, Steve. I mean, we were talking before we got live here, you're working on masterminds and things that are more longitudinal. So talk, maybe talk about that a little bit.

Sure. So I'll give you 3 different ways. One is masterminds, which are sort of cross-industry, cross-company groups, get people together, year-long program. Very cool. Second one is going really, really deep with my clients, certifying their employees in my approach. So I have one client, for example, right now, which is a year-long project. First 6 months, I'm certifying people in the company. The second 6 months, the people who are certified are now delivering that material to other people. And it's not a train-the-trainer. It actually is teaching them to think the way I think and do what I do. So those are 2 deeper ones. But the one which is just, it's still a speech, but it's still different. And it's been really, really popular during The pandemic is sort of the bookended experience. So instead of the speech being the start, the virtual speech becomes— or the end, the virtual speech becomes the start. Then we have what I call my 5-week challenge, where there's something which I have people go do. It's a competition. And then after those 5 weeks, we do a second one where we sort of do a debrief, reflect, some awards and things like that. And that's really powerful because people now have a couple of months to practically apply the concepts rather than just sort of listen and then hope they apply it.

And what about you, David? What are you seeing from the transactional to relational continuum, if you will?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think like Steve. I have to learn how to think like Steven in order to design some of these systems, right? So maybe I need to go to a certification program first. You know, I see the same thing. So one of the weird things that happened in what, March 15th, 2020, give or take a day, right, is that pandemic hit, everything shifted to virtual, layoffs happened across sectors. And what I really noticed was at least internally, a lot of the folks that got laid off were if you had an internal events production team or something like that, right? And so a lot of my conversations, just like Steven's probably shifted from talking to the events manager and what have you, and let's roll out a contract for this event.

Sure.

to somebody in HR training, organizational development, et cetera. And it was really a weird teasing out, right? 'Cause for one thing—

Right.

Their price anchor is a little different, right? Like they're used to maybe acquiring an off-the-shelf webinar or something like that. And so to convince them that you can bring a bigger production in, get people more involved, et cetera, was a little rough. But to Stephen's point, what worked for a lot of folks was to say, you know, like, I know you're thinking, you need a training, right? You just need a 90-minute webinar one time. But like, if you really wanna do this, here's what you actually need. So let's design this to where it's either, you know, a webinar and then maybe some activities to do and 2 weeks later, a circle back and let's answer questions and let's unpack. You tried the activity, how'd it go, et cetera, or something like what you're building.

Sure.

I find that conversation, at least for folks in our space, is a more productive one when you're dealing with sort of those folks. Now, the irony is we're starting to hire back set events managers. And come back. But I actually think what's interesting and what won't go away is that if your organization's large enough to have a chief talent officer or director of organizational development, etc., they're right back in the events conversations, which didn't happen before. Like a lot of internal events I would do, chief marketing officer has her annual marketing summit with all the senior leaders in the marketing division and no one from T&D or OD.

So, so yeah, so stay there for a minute because I think that's critical because The before days or whatever we're gonna, you know, when the dinosaurs were on the earth.

I say BC, before corona.

Before corona, yeah. So the event side of the house was not held to the standard of capabilities, takeaways, learning, etc. At the end of the day, I think sort of the dirty secret of the speaking business is it doesn't really impact behavior change. You got to get up there, you got to be smart, you got to be engaging for an hour. People will chat about it over the cocktail party, but there was no expectation, nor should there be, that on Monday they're going to go do a bunch of things differently. Now they're taking that same domain expertise, and each of you have different domain expertise, and saying, you know what, we are willing to invest in the capability development of our folks, but it can't just be 45 minutes on stage, because I don't care how good you are, in 45 minutes on stage in a live— a large venue, it's really about maybe awareness of the idea, getting people engaged, getting them entertained. And I like what Steve said earlier, it really should be the opening act. And I love these bookended approach where there's There's a place to introduce concepts, but until people can apply it to their world, their problems, their stuff, it's just, you know, it's no different than sort of watching Netflix or something.

Yeah, exactly. Like it used to be before that, if you're planning an internal event, let's say, like I said earlier, you're bringing 2,000 sales reps to the Bellagio and blah, blah, blah, then you're like, you're thinking, okay, they're gonna be sitting in boring meetings all day. Who can we get to keynote at 4? Right, let's get Roger Staubach, or let's get this Olympic medalist, let's get somebody to just engage and inspire and what have you. And maybe there's a place for those folks in whatever the sort of new future is. But Stephen was actually ahead of the game on this and thinking about—

Sure.

I mean, I remember before it was 5 Weeks, it was the 30-Day Innovation Challenge and those sorts of— and thinking about how can you apply those lessons offstage. I wonder, Stephen, did you feel like you were trying to sell uphill on that prior to the pandemic and that conversation's gotten easier now or?

It's definitely gotten easier. Uh, in fact, it's, it's so easy that pretty much I've convinced every single client with a few exceptions that the bookended approach is the right approach. Part of it is because the cost to do the upfront, uh, the first event— and I want to talk something that I do during the events that I think is really important— then I also create a custom password-protected portal for every event which has videos, downloads, tools, templates, and other materials. Then we do the challenge, and then we do the second one.

Mm-hmm.

All of that is basically priced to be a little bit, even a little bit less than one in-person speech. And so for them, it's almost like a no-brainer. And people tell me, clients who've worked with me in person say that they're getting even much, much, much greater value from the virtual.

Well, I want to add to that, Steve. It's not just the price, but as David alluded to earlier, wait, the training and development, the OD people are getting it. You've now opened yourself up outside of— because the events budget is what it is, and they used to be pretty fat and pretty healthy or whatever. But this TDOD bucket is a whole different budget that you weren't knocking on that door before. So when they look at it, because the way the TD folks work is a little bit differently, they're saying, oh, how many people will Steve touch? What's the per capita? Oh cool, that's a $500 per person initiative, or whatever the math is. Like, yeah, that's good, we have some training dollars for it, right? So it's a different— I love being able to find multiple doors and line items on a budget to go after. Yeah.

Now I will say the budgets are different, at least in my experience over the last 21 months, right? The events team back before the pandemic had a much fatter budget than the T&D team. So I think this has changed actually, to be candid. But when it started, it seemed like training folks were used to buying, I hate to say this, but not to say that Steven and I are giant names, but like a no-name trainer. In other words, somebody who focused on building a training business, not a reputation as a thing.

Sure.

And they're used to that conversation, and that's usually a lower price conversation, that's usually an off-the-shelf training conversation, etc., right? And so it took a while, I think, to get those 2 budget numbers to sort of merge, but we're there now. And so you need to learn to speak in a way that appeals to training for implementation, and then, you know, that's how you're going to get back to your events-level budget.

Well, and they're 2 different budgets, right? So there will be events where you can get your old keynote rate, and then there will be things more like training like Steve's talking about. But I think, you know, the other reality is while speaking was great, most speakers were a little bit dishonest from the standpoint of, oh yeah, this is my speaking fee for an hour. Well, if you live in Miami and the gig's in Seattle, it's 3 days of your time. You're only working for an hour. It's amazing now what I have found, how productive we all are. Right. And it's, it's, it's, you know, how even though we all had our hats when it came to travel in the club and doing all those things, it's kind of, you know, I, my days follow the sun. I start in Europe and then I come to East Coast, West Coast, and it's like geography is kind of irrelevant.

Yeah, totally. I mean, that's, that's to me what's beautiful about this. First of all, I look at my clients. I remember I was doing one event in Ireland. Originally, I was going to fly there, would have been 600 people in the audience. We had 3,000 people. So first of all, the clients love it because they're able to open it up to more people. And I think that's really exciting. But also, you know, I have days where I'm doing 3 speeches in 3 different time zones, 3 different countries. I wouldn't be able to physically do that in the past. So from my perspective, it's great. From the client's perspective, it's great. But I also— and here's— this is not necessarily the best measure, but one of the measures is I told you I create this password-protected portal for every event. When is a virtual event— We will get close to 100% of the people in the audience who go to the website, type in the password, download the materials, and use the materials. For the in-person events, it's a much lower percentage. So what we're seeing is, because the tools are right there at our fingertips, people are taking advantage of the digital tools and they're applying them. And I think we're just— I think we're actually getting greater results from the virtual world. And I'm not thinking of it as training, but I really think of it as we're building the ability for people to do something they couldn't do before and think in a way they weren't able to think in the past. I really just am very sold on the ability to do that digitally and virtually.

Cool. And what are you seeing, David, that, you know, coming up on the New Year? What are you, you know, sort of, what are you seeing the pulse? And again, we, you know, everything looked great around July 4th, and then we had the Delta curveball and all that sort of stuff. What's your vibe going into '22?

Yeah, I mean, so far it seems to be swinging back into BC. Like I said earlier, the divide for me seems to be internal versus association, right? If you're corporations, I'm having lots of conversations about still virtual things of that training, et cetera. I don't know of an association, a professional association, you know, like a for-profit event or anything like that that's still thinking virtual. I know a lot of folks in the event space who can't wait to go back because the, on the association side, right? Everything follows sponsorship dollars. And as engaging as we can make our content, there is no way to make an engaging virtual sponsorship booth. And so people are excited to get back to that. So that's what I see as the divide. Now, like what Steven said, what appeals to me about that is the opportunity, because you used to be— you used to have to say no to an internal event that might be just as simple as a webinar when you were on the road and what have you.

Sure.

Now, not only is it possible to put multiple different virtual events in a day, it's possible. I mean, I did this last week. It involved waking up at 4 in the morning, which was kind of awful, but speaking at an in-person event, doing an internal event for an organization on the road, not unlike Steven's doing today, coming at us from a hotel room. You take a risk, but also what's weird is I think there's more understanding for it too, right? There's more understanding for this idea that you're gonna be on the road and we'll just build some redundancy and what have you, right?

Yeah. So I want to touch on sort of a little bit of a different thought. So when you think about this sort of big picture, where are we now, 20 months or whatever this is, right? So I think one of the things that we've learned is you can deliver content this way. Now, it can't be the same way we did it before, but content can be delivered digitally. And I think companies have had a long time now to do the math and go, oh wait, that fully loaded number bringing Steve or Dave to event X isn't just the 2 days out of the office, it's thousands of dollars, air, hotel, whatever. And if it's only about content delivery, that's gonna be hard to justify. The pieces that I think are harder to do virtually are about sort of the community and then the connections, right?

Mm-hmm.

So I've seen all sorts of cool tools, and Steve, you've seen them as well, around connections, but there's still something about the randomness of, you know, bumping into somebody at the cocktail lounge or the bar or at the buffet line or, you know, things that you can't predict. But you know, with a high probability, everybody at this event has some similar interest, and I'm probably going to meet interesting people. So talk about sort of how you compensate for the connection and community elements that aren't as easy to deliver this way.

I mean, I'll give you my 2 cents. First of all, we need to understand the purpose of meetings and events. I mean, so is it primarily education, skills building, capability building? Is it networking? Many of them are hybrids, but I think it really depends. When you talk about associations like David did, well, that's— even though there's an educational component, it really is also a networking type of thing that becomes important. What I find is extremely difficult to do virtually is to get good networking during an event. So to me, what happened— look, you can do breakouts, or you can do Swapcard, you can do all these other things which allow you to—

Yeah.

But I don't think that The way that I get people to connect is actually when you give, if, again, if you view the event as the start, maybe the connections don't happen at the event; they happen right after the event. And so how do we keep those connections going? How do we keep them alive? Part of that's through gamification; part of that's through competitions; part of that's through a variety of other tools that we use. That, to me, is the key. And we can actually keep things alive for much, much longer if we use the right tools. The problem with most in-person events is People go home and they're done. Again, when we do the virtual, we can keep it alive longer. And I think that's really an important thought.

Cool. Do you have something on that, David?

Yeah, I mean, I'm mostly aligned with that, with apologies to everyone who sank venture capital dollars into all of these virtual meeting programs and that sort of stuff. When it comes to the human connection side, they're just— until Zuckerberg actually rolls out the metaverse and we're all there like in Ready Player One, and even then, I think it's an acceptable substitution for in-person, but not in-person. And I would say, the only thing I'd add is I'd go beyond just networking on that. So I think we're still gonna see, we may not see whole company meetings and that sort of thing, but I think we're still seeing senior leadership offsites. And when it comes to actually wanting to problem solve, et cetera, the tools just aren't there yet, if they'll ever be. So I like this idea that Stephen had about What we need to do is plan out how they're going to engage with the content afterwards, and that will keep them in connection with each other virtually over a longer period of time. I can't tell you how many times I've been at a conference and they ask me, make sure after you speak, you go into the virtual networking room and you go in there and a 400-person conference has 3 people, right?

Yeah, right.

And all of them are there awkwardly, and, you know, it's planned for 45 minutes and after 7 minutes everybody's done because they just— there's no energy there. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that's hard to do. Right, right. And well, there's no drinking involved in those virtual meetings.

Yeah. Now, to Stephen's point, even in a virtual thing, I've done the same thing where if I'm working with a client and we're doing a 90-minute or a 2-hour-long session where it's a little bit of content, and then I'll put you in breakout rooms to discuss a question. And almost every single time they get mad at me when the break room closes and they have to come back because again, they're conversing around that actual piece of of content, right? So then you take Steven's approach and you roll that out over 4 or 5 weeks and you've got something special.

So part of this is really about, as a keynoter, it's largely about you. You're keeping their attention, you're controlling the room. There's some, what's the word, you know, theatrics of the music, the lights, the slideshow, whatever. So you are part of the show. And I think we're moving to a world where how does the content does the IP stand up on its own without you and make it interesting and sticky and engaging enough so people can have these cool conversations? And I love what you said, David, when, you know, it's actually a compliment when you bring people back from the, you know, breakout rooms, they go, no, no, no, that was, you know, we were having so much fun, or that we were just getting into it, whatever, and you weren't even in the room, right? Right. Like, this is— there was something about the IP, and you also have to have the right people in the right rooms to have smart conversations. But, you know, how do you sort of make this self-service version of the thought leadership and the intellectual property and the content so that it sort of unleashes power in the rooms, the Zooms, the breakouts, wherever it may be. Cool.

Yeah, I mean, I think to some extent there's a shift in the hidden advantage. We saw, Steve and I, I know you saw this too because we run in the same circles, a flood to buy all sorts of live streaming equipment and do everything. And pretty much everyone should have made an upgrade, but we had some friends that were dropping $30,000 on multi-camera studios and switchers and that, and technology became how they were going to be engaged. I took a totally different approach. I was a business school professor for 10 years. I took courses in instructional design in graduate school. So as soon as it flipped from you're giving a 45-minute keynote to a 90-minute workshop, it was like, okay, let me apply all of those lessons. Little bit of content, structured discussion, questions, bringing them back. So that became the new killer app, right?

It wasn't okay, but you're an anomaly, David. So I think it's a critical point. So the classic path that a typical speaker makes is they've got their 45-minute speech, and then a client comes to them and says, can you do a 2-hour, you know, workshop? And they go, oh yeah, that's just like a long speech, right? So it's more about me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Can you do a half day? Yeah, I could probably talk for 3 days, right? But very few really have an understanding or an appreciation of the power of instructional design, because now the challenge is It's not about you. It's about transferring knowledge to others, and different people receive knowledge in different ways. And there is a whole art and science of instructional design that is, quite frankly, not understood by many. And when you move from a keynote to a learning experience, if you do not have those skills in the room, whether you have them or you're bringing someone else in to do it, it's gonna flop. Right. Or it's not gonna be, you know, there's only so much you can do with your woo-woo and your, you know, however charming, engaging, smart, or good-looking you are. It ain't gonna last for half a day.

Right, exactly. And nobody, you know, if they're actually on ESPN on a different screen, then they don't realize that you have 3 cameras, right? You lost them a while back. So thinking about that from the standpoint of that. Now, okay, that was an anomaly in that I had a hidden advantage, but other people thought the same way. Stephen started designing these longer experiences. I mean, it was everybody placed their bets, right? And some people bet on technology and some people bet on, I don't The conversation shifted and I, I don't know who's right. What I'll tell you is there are people who are getting higher virtual fees as a percentage of their in-person fee than maybe I am, but I'm getting that client 3 or 4 times, you know, because the experience is more engaging, what have you, and people end up going, that was awesome, can you do this for this division now?

Sure, sure, which wouldn't happen in the keynote world. I mean, exactly, the weird thing about the keynote world is, thanks, that was awesome, we won't see you next year.

Right, so you have a new book, we're not interested in you. Yeah.

Yeah, right, right, right.

Well, and I just want to build on something that David just said is I think, you know, engagement is really the key because if— look, you can go watch a speech in person and you just sort of kick back and you enjoy it. But virtually, if you do that, it just doesn't work. And so to me, it's like the way we engage with an audience virtually has to be different than the way we engage them in person. I actually love it. And I'll tell you a couple of things that I really love. I'll just tell you 2 quick things. One is I love chat. I know it sounds ridiculous, but what I love about chat is, first of all, it's an— it's a— anybody can speak, even the people who are the most introverted. If you ask a group, let's say, you know, regardless of the size, now we can have 1,000 people talking at the same time and everybody has a voice. And I acknowledge as many as I can. Obviously, larger events, it's hard to call out every single person's name.

Yeah.

But you want people to feel like if you create an experience and the chats aren't just, how's the weather where you are? That's stupid. No, these are like really mind-expanding experiments that I do with them. The second thing, and this is going to sound maybe a little strange, when I do an in-person event, I'm always looking at the audience, reading body language, and that actually puts me off my game a little bit.

Hmm.

With virtual, what I love is I'm just focused on the camera, delivering 100% the absolute best I can instead of worrying about one person on the side who might be looking at their phone and then start my brain start spiraling out of control. I'm able to stay laser-focused on what I need to do. I really do think that my, my virtual is just killer because I've taken the time to design it the right way.

So it's amazing to think about that.

Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

Well, I was gonna say, it's not just the design. I started thinking about it a little bit differently in that when we first started everything going virtual a year and a half or whatever ago, it reminded me of any time one medium goes to the next. So like The first silent films were like plays, right? And then the first talkies were like— there was the phase of almost adolescence or awkwardness. So, you know, if you think about, well, what are the attributes of a great speaker? They're big, right? So if you take all those things, you know, they're staging and they do all this sort of stuff. When you do that, when we're all living in a little box, it's like everybody's Crazy Eddie or everybody's the used car salesman on your local cable TV, and it just doesn't work. Yeah, right. So now everybody's come into their own, and I think the, the sexiness or the sizzle of the technology, and I can click a button and it looks like I'm in NASA or whatever— I mean, what we're looking at now on the screen is a typical television production today on CNN or something, right? So, you know, we're supposed to yell at each other more, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to contract, right, right. Except we don't have pros and cons. But, you know, this is sort of— it's fine. And not to Discount professionalism, but we need good lighting. I mean, there's some basic block and tackle things that you need, and above and beyond that, I don't know that you're adding value with all the slickness and the click of the buttons and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, no, I mean, I look, I saw the same thing in higher education, which I still kind of keep like one toe in because that was my background. When the pandemic hit, you know, basically March, everybody went on spring break and then got told don't come back from an undergraduate education standpoint. We're gonna do the rest of the semester. And what happened is you asked 75-year-old tenured professors to give Zoom lectures. And so they went, well, a Zoom lecture is an in-person lecture. Instead of the big noticeable difference you saw is that schools or whole universities that had some level of experience with adult education, in particular distance-based adult education, went a totally different route, right?

Yeah.

If you've ever been involved in online education, It's not attending Zoom lectures, right? It's for autonomous, self-paced learners. And so when you flip to that and you realize that that's what happened, but there were a lot of people that were like, yeah, I'll just put the lecture on Zoom.

Like, and then, right.

And then we wonder why nobody came back, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Steve, you had something there? Yeah.

Well, I'll build on that. Just one other thing is I believe we have the ability now to take advantage of asynchronous communication in a way that we didn't in the past. We always assume that if we want to do something, we have to get together people in room. In the beginning of the pandemic, basically everybody went on to Zoom or Teams or whatever version. One of the things which I spent a lot of time with my clients in discussing and strategizing is what happens before the event that we can do asynchronously? Is there a video that I shoot that everybody watches before the event so that when we get into the event, especially for more intimate events, we can have conversations rather than just me, one-way dialogue? Let's have a conversation, or not one-way monologue. We have a conversation. So it's really that use of asynchronous technologies That have really exploded in the way that I run my business.

Yeah, no, I love it. So as we start to wrap up here, any final thoughts, reflections, words of wisdom? We'll start with you, Dave. No pressure, but everybody's listening and expecting something profound and earth-shattering. Ready? Go.

Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of hit it where you talked about that every new medium, people just assume, let's take the old medium and shift it. I saw that in the event space, right? So people started thinking they have to do breakout rooms, they have to do this and that. Just do what you, kind of what you can do and don't pretend it. And to be honest with you, the biggest thing I worry about in this is hybrid. I worry about in 2022, us being so focused on designing hybrid events that when you feel like, when you actually pay the money to attend in person, you feel like you're a studio audience, right? I really worry about that.

Right.

Right? Let's get back to—

Laugh track not included, right?

Right, exactly. So either let's abandon the hybrid or let's get back to thinking about, What is the format we're doing and how does that change? It may be that you end up running 2 events simultaneously, which is a lot, so maybe you'll skip doing it. But think about the medium that you're in first and don't just think about how you can port what you used to do over to that medium.

Use that as a blank canvas to build off versus bringing everything over. Even your professional thoughts.

So I would say that And I don't know if my internet's a little wonky because everybody's head's sort of doing a little max headroom. So maybe there's an internet challenge. I think, you know, what we need to do is always step back and ask, what's the purpose? What's the purpose of the event? What's the purpose of the meeting? And let's reverse engineer based on the outcome and the goals, not the fact that it's an event. I think in the past, we treated all meetings and all events the same. And I think that's always been a mistake. And so let's not go back to perpetuating bad habits that we might have been doing in the past. Let's really rethink based on the outcomes, what is the best way to create the ultimate experience before, during, and after an event, asynchronously, synchronously? And then really just thinking about, like, what are the best tools to make that happen?

Thank you. We appreciate it. And thank you for sharing. Stay with us. So thanks so much, everybody. Thank you.