DECIPHER.com : Radio Free Decipher

Transcript of Special Interview with Warren Holland 10.05.01

WH: Let's talk about the decision, there have been all kinds of things out on the boards (message boards)... issues about our license and all this other kind of stuff coming up. None of that has anything to do with Deciphercon. The total issue about Deciphercon with me was the safety issue with players and you guys know I kind of went through the same decision internally. 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 we really want to travel... we need to go to this business meeting and we think it's safe and all of those kind of things. I 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. It's not that I think this is a long-term thing, I don't think is a situation we'll be 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 different people and there's a lot of different stress 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 have email that says "I'm really disappointed... I wanted to come but my spouse is real happy because now I'm not traveling." Everybody isn't in that place but they have somebody else who's going to be impacted but a lot of people are. It's also not just the people coming to Deciphercon, it's also the employees, a bunch of volunteers, and you guys know we're in a heavy military area and the security alerts around here are different. The military is on very active high alert and I thought it would be irresponsible. I knew everybody would be disappointed, in fact we're enormously disappointed.

Let me give you an analogy of something I've used internally. We live on the East Coast and recently we've had a lot of shark attacks... what happens when those kind of event happen is that people go out of the water... they don't feel safe going into the water and yet sharks are out there all the time and these kind of activities happen all the time and it's not that if you put a million people on the beach they think they are safe because they swim all the time. But for some period of time there's a psychological impact and I kind of have thought of this decision is almost like Deciphercon is an event that's floating out on a barge outside of the coast and saying "swim on out... have a good time" and you know... a million people could do that and it could be fine because they're not going to have that problem... but there's a psychological aspect of "you want me to swim through the shark infested waters to get there." I know everybody doesn't feel it but a lot of people do. That's why 50% of the people aren't flying now.

RFD: This does pretty clearly address actually one of the first topics that we get a lot of feed back here in the emails was "But I think it's safe."

WH: Right. I think it's safe too, but there's a difference in the terms of responsibilities. If Deciphercon was floating out on the water and I said swim on out... then that's one set of responsibilities and the other is to try to change the venue on 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 who has those issues doesn't have to swim out... then that's fine. We can certainly explore those things but the reality is I want to serve all of our players and there's lots of different groups of players in this decision. There's players that were coming to the tournaments, there's players that were coming to the convention just to see friends, there were people who were coming for there first time and didn't know what Deciphercon was really all about. For the hardcore players playing in the tournaments... they are the ones impacted the most and they are the people we care about at an enormous level and they are the people having trouble understanding the decision because they would personally choose to do this. "It's not a risk, I'm an early adapter, I'll go in the water, I'll swim out to Deciphercon barge... why would you possibly stop this?" It's because I think we have an obligation to try to serve everybody and I have an obligation to the safety of our employees.

RFD: That basically sums up the first point. There was another email that said "Don't you think it's the player's right to choose to come or not?"

WH: Well, yes and no. Yes in terms of personal decisions but no in terms of the structure. If you choose to come there are a lot of other people who have to be there to support those activities. Your choice to come may be fine but some of those other people may or may not want to come. Another analogy that was important to me was people have said 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 are looking for rational responses. It's very difficult to do that. I had this case internally as well where one of the people that drives into Decipher said to me that there were very happy when Decipher people were not allowed to fly because their spouse was very worried about them traveling. We were sitting down talking about the reality of it and the reality was it was probably more dangerous for him to drive into work than it was for him to get on a plane. The psychology is different and the psychology is that kind of travel created a stress at home that wasn't even apparent to me, I wasn't talking to that particular individual but I knew that individual from the conversation was impacted. A lot of people are responding by 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 that my responsibilities are broader than that. That's totally... that's it. There is nothing else other than that particular issue.

RFD: Which I think leads pretty clearly into the next big chunk of questions we got. There were a lot of people that were concerned that there were other issues in there.

WH: Right. I saw all the emails and people were talking about the license and emails about us saving taxes, financial issues. Absolutely none of that was in the decision. I've never looked a spreadsheet... I've 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 you are seeing right now, you know this is a far bigger issue and I knew that this was going to be a big issue. 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. We're going to go on, it's not going to stop. It's just that if something happened at this time the responsibilities would be enormous. Somebody would come back to me and say how could you do something so irresponsible and I feel that.

RFD: There are a large number of events being cancelled all over.

WH: Yes, actually Janet Jackson just cancelled one of her European Tours. Apple cancelled MacWorld in Paris. There were about 500 conventions cancelled. Two or three hundred were in Las Vegas.

RFD: A lot of book publishers have cancelled signing tours.

WH: A number of stars have cancelled events around movie openings.

RFD: 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 Essen and come with us to Deciphercon. There were a lot of people excited about that and then September 11th came and nobody wanted to go anywhere.

WH: Right. Using Janet Jackson as an example, I'm not sure any terrorist is necessarily going to target a Janet Jackson concert. That's the rational side of the argument that says what are the chances of any of this ever happening. The other side is even from her perspective in the press release that I read, her concern for the employees and the people that were traveling had to take precedence over that.

RFD: That leads pretty clearly into the next group of questions: Why cancel the event and not just postpone it?

WH: 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 I can promise, I don't have alternate sources of this because decisions for me deals with the time 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 that the easier it is to start thinking about those alternatives and seeing what kind of options we have. The first decision was for me to say I can't do this. 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. I don't know if you guys are old enough for this or will remember this but were you around when the U.S. didn't go to the Olympics?

RFD: Yes... in Russia.

WH: I've been thinking about that a lot... long before I made this announcement. For those of you who don't know, when the Olympics were held in Russia the U.S. backed out and didn't go. Unfortunately all those Olympic athletes that trained all their life for it had this event just pulled out from under them. They spent a lifetime training for that. The initial uproars and disappointments were big. Then eventually people bought into the reasons that that had to happen. None of our players have spent a lifetime of doing this but it feels like that.

RFD: Sure... it takes a lot of time and preparation.

WH: Absolutely. The passion and the dedication and the tournaments.

RFD: There are people who spend more time with cards games than I do, that's impressive.

WH: The emotional feelings are exactly the same and again this is something I thought about before ever making the decision. It's like I know this is going to have that impact. But I don't feel like there are options and we can certainly try to explore options as we go forward but I absolutely felt that the safety of the players was more important than anything else I could do. Again if something happened, even to one player, it would be a disaster. I don't expect it to happen. If we held Deciphercon tomorrow, I wouldn't expect it to happen but nobody expects any of the events to happen likes September 11th, it's just the uncertainty of it all. It's too big to take that kind of risk.

RFD: In addition to the fact that those issues don't diminish soon, there are also logistical issues even if we wanted to reschedule Deciphercon.

WH: Absolutely and there are issues about people saying why don't we move it? Well, moving it doesn't prevent the travel from people all over the world. It's not like we were running an electrical convention in Virginia Beach that had all the local people from Virginia driving down, we were talking about having people fly in from countries all over the world. A con of people literally all over the world. 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, to do this, or the Tidewater area. I'm not sure that that solves the issue. In the short term.

RFD: This goes into the next major point. There's been a lot of talk of fan-run championships. Decktech has been organizing something. There's been a lot of talk about something happening in Virginia Beach the same weekend for all the people who have plane tickets. There's also been talk of something happening in Vegas. A lot of the questions say what do you think about these? Would you support these and what advice would you offer to these people?

WH: There are two decisions. 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 that how could I support that? I mean if I could support that I could support Deciphercon. So I can't say this is something I would encourage anybody to do and I don't. I wouldn't encourage anybody to do that but as we explore over the next couple of weeks about how everybody feels about this decision and some people will agree with it, some people won't, some people will change their opinion, and they'll be positive and then turn negative or 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 and if I didn't care, I wouldn't do this. If I didn't care everybody could come to Deciphercon and it wouldn't be an issue for me. I wouldn't have even had to think about this. My email stuff is going to stay open. We can leave the email stuff 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. I don't know what that solution is right now. You know we may find that there's some news event that happens in a short period of time and there's some alternate thing that we could do but I don't know what that is.

RFD: There also was a quite a bit of emails that were in support of the decision and there were people asking about the charities that were going to be given to and if there's going to be some sort of formal process with that.

WH: Actually, yes, there is. Some of this is in the process of starting and some of it hasn't started yet. In terms of the prize money the initial plan was to have all the 300 or so champions have an opportunity to choose where that money goes. We will set up a system for doing that so that maybe they will select a group of charities and they can choose for that group or maybe we'll just ask them what charities they want on the list.

RFD: You're referring to champions being the winners of Opens, State events, people who had already qualified for some seat in anyone of the games.

WH: 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. The decision is very short term. It creates a lot of dynamics internally for us. What I hope to do is like I said, move that party from out of the water and bring it on the beach. When I bring it to the beach we can serve everybody, hopefully, the people that want to swim and the people who don't. Somehow what I want to do is take that to the local environment. I noticed that one of the email thread that kept coming to me was "that's just for Lord Of The Rings". I never conceptualized that it was just for Lord of the Rings or if it was for everything. We still have to work through those details. There's a possibility that we can do a structured system of having events all over the world that raise money. Maybe they are all at the same time. Maybe they are all over a one-week period. All of those funds would also go into this pool and be donated in the names of all of our players.

RFD: Someone also specifically asked if somebody wanted to send donations to add to what we are giving to the relief effort where would that be sent to?

WH: 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 that we'll put up on the web that will hopefully tell people how to do that.

RFD: But first there's going to be this period of all the effort that was going toward preparing Deciphercon and trying to shift to get this going.

WH: Yes, this was a shock to people in the outside world and it was a shock to people inside Decipher. When you think of Deciphercon of something we plan for for a year, we deal with different aspects of it over the whole year and all of the sudden that's not there and the logistics of dealing with that issue kind of thrust on everyone's shoulders but the issues of now setting up a different system of dealing with that is thrust on everyone's shoulders so it'll take us a week or two and we'll certainly make announcements about it.

RFD: Not to mention making Essen still happen for our people who are in Europe.

WH: Absolutely. Another part of the announcement was that we are not sending any Decipher people to Essen. We have volunteers there and Decipher staff that are enormously capable of running that show. That creates a different dynamic as well.

RFD: So even a little more work has to go into that show.

WH: Right.

RFD: Well, there was one other question I thought was relevant to the discussion was why was the decision made now and not sooner? September 11th was a little while ago.

WH: Actually it's been brewing for a long time. You will notice that we have not sold tickets on the web. The web team actually had that stuff ready to go a week or so ago and I said hold off I'm brewing some stuff. It's actually been happening 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 something would kind of happen in the world that changed my mind. It really made me kind of think this is an over reaction and a safe thing to do and I really need to do this and I know that a lot of people want it. I absolutely know a lot of people want it. Every one of our customers that were coming wanted it, I wanted it, all of you guys wanted it, and everybody at Decipher wanted it. I kept hoping that in a way some of those things were going to change. One of the things that actually did kind of confirm this for me was some of the stuff about even our own government saying be prepared that other things are likely to happen. I had this hope that things would turn in a way that just didn't quite happen for me. Again you have to put this on these kind of rational and irrational scales. From a rational side I could tell you that the possibilities of somebody actually getting hurt, flying over here or flying back, or going to the convention or being in Norfolk or Virginia Beach is really very low. I don't think anything would happen to somebody. And yet it's all those uncertainties.

RFD: Do you have anything else you would like to tell anyone out there?

WH: You have my email address (ceo@decipher.com). Feel free to do that. We are certainly going to try to explore options. I don't want everyone to feel like this was just a cancellation because there are things that we need to do to shift the focus.

RFD: I know in talking with you earlier today, we were talking about options of do we want to reschedule it for a later time and it was like we can't do that yet. It's too early. If you said we could do something in March now... we don't know where we are going to be.

WH: I would love to tell you here's a date and here's when we are going to do something. I think the reality is we need a certain period of a week or two to even try to formulate internally how we are going to make all this stuff happen. And we need a time for people to respond, send in emails and try to tell us other options. Somebody might come up with something that's very creative. I was saying in one sense of the word that this was really sad for me that this kind of occurred now because if it was like 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 be the social aspect necessarily. But of course we don't have time to do any of that. But somebody out there... and there's a lot of people that care a lot about this event and tournaments and somebody may come up with an idea that could actually work. But it absolutely has to deal with the parameters of these issues.

RFD: Somebody wrote to ask how could you guarantee that a big event like this won't be cancelled again. That's part of why details of what's next aren't there yet.

WH: This is a national and world issue, I don't mean to get off onto that because I want to concentrate on the Decipher aspects but I don't think this will last forever. There may be certain changes in our lifestyle that last forever. There's even certain freedoms we are 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. I'm willing to do that but hopefully what we'll be able to do is make people comfortable that there is no conspiracy, there are no backend motivations for anything. That's one task and kind of get over those things then hopefully we can take the aspect of turning some of this into a really positive thing for the charity stuff which is a component of this. Then maybe we can try to find some solution that deal with some of the player issues too. Nothing would please me more but I don't know what that is.

RFD: So there you have it. If your question was not answered you can direct it to: ceo@decipher.com

WH: I think in closing what I'd like to say is that whether anyone disagrees or agrees with the decision is totally their choice. I support that and I understand the 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 is our corporate responsibilities as well as our personal responsibilities. The players and the customers who aren't players are number one. That's the thing that makes this decision so difficult.