Welcome everyone to another episode of Kiwi Talks. It's an honor to have a special guest return, former chairman of PlayStation Studios and former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America. He is also a man who my wife says made me smarter after I spoke to him last time. He is the one and only Shawn Layden.
Wow, Reese, that's a hell of a burden to put on a fellow right at the beginning of an interview like this. Best regards to your wife.
Oh yeah, I'll pass it on. I'll pass it on.
Yeah, cuz I spoke to her maybe an hour or two after we spoke last time, and she was like, "Why are you speaking differently? Why are you speaking smarter?" And I was like, "Must be the Shawn Layden effect." So maybe that's something we can add to the English vernacular. You know, you got the placebo effect, the Dunning-Kruger effect, maybe the Shawn Layden effect.
I think Shawn Layden is closer to Dunning-Kruger, but yes, you're right.
Uh, but hey, thanks so much for taking time out of your day. I know you're a busy man.
Yeah, busier than I should be, that's for sure.
Yeah, but you got to keep busy, though, right? There's a lot of data that shows if you retire and you don't do anything, you kind of just end up going the way of the dodo. So you got to keep yourself busy and active both physically and mentally.
Owning three cats ticks the busy and active boxes, believe me.
Okay. Well, I'll keep that in mind for later on down the track. So, hopefully today we can tread some new ground. What I wanted to start off with first is because you've worked at different branches of Sony—you've worked in the US, the UK, and Japan—I'm actually curious as to what your views are of the culture and the business side of things between the three and how they approach it.
Yeah. Well, that is an interesting question. You know, I began my journey with Sony back in the '80s by joining right into headquarters in Tokyo, just a young kid coming out of college. I had a couple of jobs and then I took this role with Sony. And so I kind of grew up as a businessman where I was raised as a salaryman in a Japanese Tokyo context. Because of that, the idea of coming in at 8:30 and staying till 11:00 p.m. at night was just what you did cuz everybody else did it. And when you're new in a job or new in a company, one of the survival tactics is look around and just copy what you see.
Reminded me of when I was a child and we had to go to church on Sunday, you know, St. Barnabas Catholic Church. And back then there was a lot of, you know, when do you stand up? When do you sit down? When do you kneel? When do you pray? And all those things, and you're trying to remember all those cues. And one guy tells me, "Just watch the nuns. When they stand up, you stand up. When they sit down..." He said, "Fine, great." So going into a company, it's sort of the same thing: watch the nuns, watch your colleagues, watch what everyone else is doing. And in Japan in the '80s, what we were doing is we were staying at work until 10:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m. at night.
Working crazy hours. But much like what you said about games the last time you and I met, Reese, there were 12 hours, but I don't know if they were 12 quality hours. But being present was so much of the ethos there. So when I went to London in 1999 after spending 12 years in Japan and never really having worked in corporate America yet—that happened later in my life—that was a real wake-up call going to the London studio, working there coming from my Japanese experience and seeing that, "Wow, you mean we could all leave at 5:30? We're down at the Green Man by 5:35." That's kind of the way that thing seemed to roll. And it took me a while to get used to that. I was like the last guy sitting in my office in London until 9:00 p.m. And then over time you realize this is insane, and why am I doing that? And everyone else is living their life, and the job gets done, and the games get built, and the players are made happy. So learning to kind of take your foot off that extreme hamster wheel that was growing up in Tokyo in the '80s and learning about work-life balance is what I learned in London.
And what about America? America's not really known for work-life balance, is it? Depending where, which state?
Yeah, we talk about it a lot in America. It's definitely a topic of conversation. And then, laterally, we've had the whole COVID work from home, remote—that's kind of jumbled that whole thing up. But in the pre-COVID days, I came to America back from my odyssey, if you will, around the world for 20 years and got back to America in 2010 and started working in the US at that time. And it was sort of in between the extreme Japanese experience and the more social-friendly European experience. America was—there were some long hours and some long nights, but at the same time, people were keen on keeping their weekends sacrosanct, keeping holidays sacrosanct. If folks were determined to leave at, let's say, 5:30 or 6:00, quite often those kind of people came in early to work, you know, came in like at 7:00 or pumping in order to make that time schedule. So there were three different attitudes towards how the work gets done. And in the end, all of them were studios. We all got our games done; we just had different routes to getting there.
How was it when the headquarters moved from Tokyo to California? Cuz obviously you would have had colleagues in Japan. Were they upset about it when that happened? Did they understand?
I think sure. I mean, no one likes to lose pole position, if you will, or the headquarter nomenclature. But I think it was to meet the circumstances of the day. You know, we'd already determined that Hollywood's in Hollywood for a reason and the music business is in New York for a reason. And particularly with the growth of network gaming, online gaming, multiplayer, those sorts of things, the center of gravity for the video game business really became Silicon Valley or the West Coast of America, even more so than Europe or Japan for that matter. And it just seemed natural in order for PlayStation to keep like on the heartbeat, on the pulse, right where everything's happening, where the change is being made for gaming, moving the headquarter to Silicon Valley was inevitable, frankly.
There's something I want to get your view on because I'm increasingly getting a bit worried about developers in the US. I think for a long period of time, the caliber of skill in the US was largely unmatched. I kind of put Japan off to the side in its own bubble that can't really be replicated. But because of the cost of developing games, because American salaries are so high, and because of the introduction of engines like Unity and Unreal, the rest of the world is able to develop their talent. And I'm wondering if there's going to be a tipping point where the rest of the globe can compete with the US, at which point execs will be like, "Well, why are we developing our game here and paying this developer 180k in California when we can pay for like four Indians?"
Well, that's the question of the day right now, and frankly, it has been that way for a while. As you say, wages have gone up here on the West Coast, largely as an impact from, frankly, all the non-endemic players that have come into the gaming industry. When you look at gaming as being this $200 billion industry—we used to crow about that 10 years ago—then the big slumbering giants came over and, "My name is Amazon and his name's Google, and we're going to come here and spend a lot of money and show you guys how to do this game business." That didn't happen, but the lingering effect was that was a huge impact on wages, because for non-endemics or new players to come into the market and if you want to poach talent, what do you have to do? You have to outbid them, outbid for them. And that kind of drove up the salary table, if you will, across gaming, certainly in California, and has made it more expensive.
And as games get bigger—and we talked about that on your last program—the cost of making those games get bigger. And what are the costs of making games? People's salaries, pretty much. Some vendors over here and maybe some technology over there, and if you have a license like a Wonder Woman license or a FIFA license, that's a material cost to it. But by and large, it's salaries, wages over time. So yes, it's becoming increasingly expensive to make games in California or in America for that matter. But companies—and certainly COVID was a great accelerant—has forced publishers and developers to look overseas for outsourcing. Outsourcing was talked about for 20 years, and it's been happening for just as long, but you're seeing more of it instead of discrete asset farms making a bunch of 3D objects or making some environments. You're seeing overseas teams create entire stories and levels and characters, and are becoming more integrated with the core development process. And I think that only continues apace. I think those skills are leveling up everywhere.
But are we ready for every place around the world to create an entire game from zero? Well, look at what's happening in China; it happens there already today. Europe was doing it for a long time. You know, don't count Ubisoft out. So I think the real markets where we really haven't seen talent arise yet, but will happen, is in the southern hemisphere, whether it's South America, Africa, or most of South Asia. Their time will come too, and the cost of making games is stimulating some of that, but also the search for new ideas. If you still have the same group of people making the same kind of games forever and ever and on, you don't see the new stuff.
That's true. I mean, but even if you look at Rockstar, right, their biggest studio is now in India, and I can understand why, right? But obviously GTA 6 is an anomaly and Rockstar is an anomaly.
I don't think anyone else can actually replicate what they do.
Which is why every time I hear someone tell me they have the GTA beater, I just do the, you know, facepalm and go, "Sure, sure you do, kid. Yeah, tell me about that."
Have you ever had much interaction with Strauss Zelnick, just out of interest?
Strauss and I served on the board of the Entertainment Software Association, which is the domestic trade body in the States governing or overseeing the video game business. So, traditionally, it's the heads of the three platforms—Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation—and the leaders of like the top seven or eight publishing companies. So you have Activision there, EA was there, Sega and Capcom—some of the Japanese were on that too because they have large US operations—and Strauss was there. When I was there, Strauss was the chairman sitting atop the table for that, and he's a very effective leader in a room like that. His years on the East Coast and in New York City doing media business, I think gave him good experiences on how to wrestle all those varied interests that a board meeting for the ESA typically turned into. It was herding cats at an extreme level, but Strauss was quite good at it.
Well, he seems to be a breath of fresh air for me. He did say something that stuck out to me where he said, "My job is to hire the best talent and get out of their way."
And some execs I feel don't do that. They're too involved. I think you got to let the artists just make the art or trust them. And just my personal opinion, but I feel like that's increasingly happening less.
Yeah. It's a strange balancing act. I mean, the quote you gave to Strauss is not dissimilar from what I've told people when they say, "What was your job as chairman of studios? What does a chairman do?" And I said, "My job is to get on the road in front of the teams and clear the debris, clear the stones from the road. If there's people screaming and yelling, deal with those people. If there's a need for financial infusion, figure that out, but largely allow the teams to commune amongst themselves and get their game done and get it out there and not be bothered by all these externalities." I think Strauss looks at it that way. I tried to look at it that way when I was running it. But the balancing act also means you can't totally disassociate from the activity. You can't just, "I'm clearing rocks, but really don't like that game you're doing, or I don't think that game is going to be successful." If you have those kind of views, you do need to communicate them with the team.
You do need to go back and go, "I know I gave you guys creative freedom, but I'm just telling you right now, answer me the one question, the eternal question: where's the fun part? This I got to know so I can help you be more successful in the games you're creating." So on the one hand it's hands-off, but on the other hand, it's certainly oversight requires seeing. So you can't say, "I was in the ivory tower. I didn't see what was going on. It's not my fault, boss." You can't say that either.
But you also don't know what you don't know. Like you and Yoshida kind of came up in the ranks and you kind of know how all that stuff works, right? So you'd have a fair idea, I would think, of what a good game is as opposed to maybe some suit who kind of just got thrust into that position cuz they wouldn't know what they're looking for.
Well, I think as Clint Eastwood said in some movie, "A man must know his limitations," and I certainly tried to be aware of mine. There are a number of things with game development I really don't understand, and I'll be the first one to say it.
Like what? What's something you don't get?
Oh, are we going to build our own engine or are we going to use Unreal? And this is the pros and cons of using Unreal and here's the pros and cons using this engine, what should we do? I mean, I could look at that from a financial perspective: which can we afford to do? I can look at it and say, "Tell me about how this impacts timelines and hiring if we choose one of these two courses of action." But I couldn't look at it objectively and say, "Well, I think the spectral output of this sliding dynamic over here is certainly superior to whatever sort of spatial..." No, no, no, I don't have that.
Fair enough. Fair enough.
The Digital Foundry guys don't want to have a conversation with me.
Well, hey, I mean, they say some stuff that goes over my head as well, so totally understand. You can't know it all. That's why you surround yourself with people who are smarter than you usually, right?
Right. And what you do try to know is you do try to know that we're creating an entertainment, and entertainment has to engage people, has to make them feel something, whether that's laughter or terror or adrenaline. We have to know that that's what we're building here. And there was a time when it was games built by gamers for gamers. I'm not sure if that rubric works anymore, but certainly we have to build games for gamers, whether it's what we're fixing to do as our personal likes or dislikes. We do have to understand that there's a market we have to identify and go for and present for them. So, yeah, building games aren't easy, Reese. If it were, everyone would be doing it and being successful at it.
While also because there are more people developing games as well, you also have an oversaturation. I think there's like 10,000 games that get released a year on Steam. So it's becoming harder to kind of stand out and get noticed. That's a big problem with indies.
Indeed. Discovery is the final frontier for smaller teams, and particularly now. There was a time, certainly when we were building the business across PS1, 2, 3, where as a platform holder we spent a lot of time and resources, frankly, helping smaller game ideas come to fruition, you know, prosecuting a good double-A catalog to go along with God of War and Uncharted and things like that. But we'd also work with somebody like thatgamecompany with a game like Flower or Journey. Or back in PS1 days, Masaya Matsuura, this Japanese pop musician, wanted to make a video game. We said okay, and we get PaRappa the Rapper.
So those types of things used to be part of the wider remit of certainly the platform holders, but sometimes even large publishers, Electronic Arts or Konami, to continue to water the tree of creativity by bringing more ideas in and letting them come out and see if you can get a hit or excite some people. But over time, as each one of those bets just became 10x, 100x, 1,000x more expensive to do, large companies, large publishers certainly have seemed to have rolled up their strategy into, "We do blockbusters, period, full stop." And so a place where indies used to go and wait for that call from the ex-dev guys at Sony or the external dev guys at Microsoft to try to get a deal, not many of those calls are happening anymore from what I can see, and that's a shame.
And the whole industry is becoming quite risk-averse because there's too much at stake.
Yeah. Once you get a huge publishing machine which has its own running costs to keep the lights on, to keep the thing moving, and every game, whether it's a blockbuster game, whether it's a double-A game, has some fixed costs attached to it—whether that's a marketing spend, QA spend, or what have you, the allocations across there, and you allocate some finance spend and accounting spend, all that kind of stuff to the game projects—you look at it and go, if it's going to cost me the same operationally to get this game out the door, I'm better off getting behind a $100 million blockbuster because the chance of success is concomitant with the size of the swing. But if I do a bunch of $10 million games that are kind of niche or kind of crazy, they may be fun, they may have a great audience, but you may just cap out at a million units sold. That just may be the market for that. And for a huge publisher, doing those smaller plays to market are not financially rewarding.
But the thing is you can have a successful game and a studio still gets shut down or there's still layoffs, and that's the part where I don't understand.
Yeah, I don't understand that either.
And we were talking a little bit about this off-air, right? Like spreadsheet decisions.
And interpreting the data correctly, or I mean, even if you look at the data correctly, you can still make the wrong decision. And I think because games aren't traditional software, and what I find weird is every time you do these layoffs, you lose a huge amount of institutional knowledge.
And I just don't think either in Sony's case or Microsoft's case, they don't consider this at all. Or maybe they do, I don't know, and they still just make the decision anyway because short—
I'm sure they consider it. It's difficult to put a numerical value against it. You look at institutional knowledge and how important is that, or is sometimes institutional knowledge what's limiting your vision because you're all baked into these ideas you thought were fantastic 18 years ago and you can't get out of your own way? That's also a problem with institutional knowledge. But that is one of the intangibles. The other intangible is your brand, the value of your brand, what your brand means to your fans, and how you have to guard that with your life and understand that every decision you make, big or small, does impact that brand somehow. Sometimes it makes it go up, get bigger; sometimes you take a hit and you have to try to come back from it.
But if you're not constantly deciding, "These strategic moves will generate this much operating income or eliminate this much cost, or some other sort of numerical quantification on engagement or user value, but if I make that decision, what happens over here to my brand? Is this going to burnish my brand and make it look even smarter, better, and more fun? Or am I going to take a hit that's going to make my brand seem like I'm kind of disconnected from my fans now, or I'm really not too concerned about this sector of the gaming market, or these types of things?" You have to understand what those impacts are going to be and get in front of it to be able to explain that to your fan base: "We're doing this. Yeah, you're unhappy, but here's what we were thinking. This is how we got there. And we hope we're going to do this thing over here and make you happy about the outcome." I don't think those sorts of conversations are happening, or they're certainly not being surfaced outside their closed circle.
Yeah. I mean, well, there's a physical disc situation with Sony.
Just to name one idea, yeah.
Well, I think they knew that was going to blow up the way that it did. And I remember when we spoke last time, you didn't think that the PS6 would be discless. It's looking like it probably is now. And you said there would be a tipping point where they would decide based on, I suppose, the adoption rate of digital, and maybe the RAM crisis has something to do with it. They're trying to mitigate costs in every way they can possibly.
Yeah. You're always trying to mitigate costs. I mean, that's always a thing. Yes, I did say that I thought they would have discs going into the future because the PlayStation fan base is global, in a lot of places where your throughput isn't what it ought to be and your access to good internet isn't that good. I'm old enough to remember when people said 5G was going to change the world, and I'm still waiting for that to happen. So if they thought they could lean into just cellular or that kind of mobile networks in order to cover that connectivity gap, I'm sure they have better data than I do on how that's going to work. But yeah, that was a big step, and I think we're all still seeing what does that really mean to the future and to the brand.
Well, they're probably considering these costs continuing to go up as well, so I'm sure that would factor in. I heard of a rumored handheld by Sony, which I actually think is a very good idea. I think you could have a lot more success this time around, especially if it's a unified library. I think I remember Yoshida saying that a big problem with the PS3 and the Vita was resources were split between the two, right? So you can avoid that problem with a handheld. Do you think that there's ever a chance that Sony can kind of take back Japan in a way? Because it seems like Nintendo has a bit of a monopoly there now.
Yeah, I think when we came out with PlayStation 1, Nintendo was still very strong across Super Famicom. Then N64 and GameCube were maybe restarts for them. And PlayStation got a lot more traction in the Japanese market during that time. But now, certainly with the Switch and Switch 2, Japan is very much a Nintendo country. But I think Sony—yeah, I think definitely this pendulum swings back and forth all the time. All it takes is a couple of fantastic games to come out, and at the right time at the right price. As far as the handheld goes, I think the tricky thing about it—and only looking backwards now perhaps can I see this to be true, which at the time perhaps I couldn't see the forest for the trees—is that the company really struggles to sell two different pieces of hardware at the same time.
Well, but what about PlayStation Portable? That was a real success.
Yes. And while we were doing that, I was struggling selling PS3.
But even Nintendo had the same problem, right? Usually, with the exception of the Wii and DS, usually if the handheld was thriving, then the home console wasn't doing too well. So, yeah, I think you're right on the mark there.
It's not just development resources; it's also marketing resources. You almost have to set up two different companies to do it where neither one is worried about what the other one's doing; they're just trying to be successful in their own right. Because when you have one company managing both, inevitably there's stealing from Peter to pay Paul for something else, and, "Well, we'll move that marketing program over to this other game, which is going to be more successful than that game was." And all the tradeoffs, you just sort of lose your focus on what you're really trying to get done here. So, yeah, if Sony were to come out with a handheld, I guess maybe they just consolidate all their gaming activities around that midsize platform.
Well, we've reached a saturation point with consoles, right? They've stagnated. So they've maximized the capacity, I think, for home consoles. So a handheld, I'm guessing they saw the numbers Switch did and were like, "We need a piece of that pie." So I'm interested to see, because Sony and Nintendo have operated in different lanes for a while, but it does feel like this kind of might happen where they might end up being almost direct competitors again.
Again. I mean, that's how we started out. And over time, it became a tech race between Microsoft and Sony on the home console thing. And in that respect, Nintendo was never pushing the edge of technology on any of their platforms. But what they did do is the best game developers in the world, the best characters, the franchises we all love, and they have a really good nose for family entertainment. It's a machine that everyone in the family can be happy with, whereas sometimes in the bigger consoles or the bigger tech consoles, you get some content which is probably just more appropriate for the adults in the community.
I have a possible theory I want to run past you. I want to see if you agree or not. So I don't think that this is the full reason, but I would think part of the reason they may have pulled out of PC is because they need to ensure that they're creating FOMO for their console, right? And I think Nintendo's biggest weakness has always been third-party support, which I think is starting to alleviate somewhat with the Switch 2. Obviously, Square Enix has jumped back into bed with them, it's getting FIFA, it's getting Call of Duty. We don't know if GTA 6 is coming yet. If it does, I mean, that throws a spanner in the works. So if you're Sony, you need your first-party games to make you look like the superior competitor. And I mean, there's nothing in Sony's first-party arsenal that can rival Pokémon and Mario, right? So I think you need every advantage you can have. I don't know if you agree or not.
Insofar as the PC move, I think I said either on your show or someone else's show that when people talk about the PC thing, for me it wasn't—I kind of started it, I proved that before I retired. But that was really: how do I get people who don't know my games and my franchises and my characters and my content to learn about them if they're never going to buy a PlayStation? Surely I've got to go to them. I've got to be where they are to show them my thing because they're never coming to my house to see my thing.
So the idea of getting onto the PC platform a year post-launch, when the decay rate curve for actual sell-through data is pretty much flat and not moving at all, seemed to be one way to do that, one way to introduce people to these games that they would have never seen before. It wasn't really about making the money. The other reason to get on the PC for certain titles would be large intake-funnel, massively multiplayer games, whether they're free-to-play or not. Then yes, you have to open up the entryway to that if one platform can't aggregate enough players in an effective way. So going PlayStation and PC allowed a wider funnel for people to get into games like Helldivers 2, because those games need a lot of daily active users to keep them vibrant and alive and in people's minds. So that made sense. It was never the idea of taking a title and putting it on PlayStation and PC day one at the same time. That was never the strategy.
Yeah, that wouldn't be a good idea, I would think.
No, to the points you raise, exactly. Because then what does console exclusivity mean? What does it mean to choose your platform, to bring it home, and what are the benefits that accrue to that? It should be benefits like you get all the Naughty Dog games nobody else does, and you get all the Insomniac games nobody else does. And I don't think it was a real problem that PC got Horizon a year after it came out. But certainly if you ask the internet, that was a bad idea, and the internet's never wrong.
Of course, of course. Well, I think that's one of the problems Microsoft has with Xbox, because games are released day and date with PC. It's like, what's the FOMO for Xbox?
Yeah, it's a big, big problem. I wanted to ask something which might seem like a simple question on the surface, right—
—but it's going to go a bit deeper.
It's not a trap, I promise you. When you worked at Sony, were there ever times you were in a meeting and you thought to yourself, "Why am I in this meeting? I don't need to be here. This is a very unproductive use of my time"?
Yeah. I've got to wait for your answer. There's a reason why I'm asking this, but I'll wait for your answer first.
Sure. Whether it's Sony or whether it's any place else, any leader who's in a room, the primary question you ask yourself when you walk through the door and you sit at the table is, "Okay, what is this meeting again, and what are we here to do?" I was always very keen in those meetings to begin with the essential question: "What problem are we trying to solve?" And if we could articulate what that is, then I would really know do I have anything to add to that solution other than putting it on the table saying, "This is where you have to look right now." So I would try to get out of a number of meetings because I felt that not only was there nothing for me to do there, but my presence alone affects the dynamic of the room when you're the CEO.
And if I leave the room, I think there could be more team of rivals kind of fighting and squawking and batting around ideas in there. The one thing I did learn in Japan when I began my career there was that, by and large in Japanese corporate, when you have a meeting of any size, the highest-ranking person in the room speaks last.
Almost always. The department head or the SVP or the CEO, they just sit there and they just take it all in, and then they speak last. Because if you're a CEO or a department leader and you put your opinion out first—
...then what you've essentially said, anyone who doesn't agree with that opinion doesn't agree with me. So, you're going to be on the bad end of this. So, everyone shuts up. So that's—and that's not good, unless that's your tactic wanting to make this meeting finish in five minutes. I'll tell you what I decided already. Good, good, good. Okay, let's go.
Well, part of the reason I ask is because a lot of game developers have complained to me over the years of there being too many meetings that they attend. I think with creatives, they get into a bit of momentum, a creative flow. So let's say you have an artist working on environmental art for Uncharted 5 as an example, and then he gets pulled into a meeting with his art director, and regardless of whether the meeting has to happen or not, that upsets the creative flow, and there would be a cost associated with that in terms of time and money. And I'm wondering if you ever had discussions with anybody about this. Has this ever been something that's been—well, something that's been brought up at all?
Oh, always, in my company and I'm sure any place where you work with more than three people, Ree, it's the same thing. There are too many meetings. There are too few decisions as a result of those meetings. The meetings largely are too long. I mean, I would go to corporate meetings sometimes and be like, "This meeting's going to start at 9:00, and we'll have lunch, and we'll finish at 2:00 p.m." And you look at that and think, I can't maintain focus for five hours on a subject. In my own personal view, 90 minutes is the edge of pain. I can make a 90-minute meeting, but beyond that, you just forget what you talked about 90 minutes ago, and you begin to wonder why you are here and am I losing the will to live, and you know, things like that. So yes, I think questioning the purpose of the meeting, the frequency of the meeting, and again, to determine before the meeting, are we going to make a decision here, or is this just information sharing? And if it's the latter, let's just do it quickly and get back to work.
Yeah, that makes me wonder because Asha did that announcement recently saying that there's 14 layers of management at Microsoft and they needed to get rid of it. And I'm wondering if part of that was too many meetings and too many people meeting about stuff, and the conversation being lost, or Chinese whispers, or something like that. I don't even know how you get to that stage.
There are companies that I know of, and I may have worked for some, there are companies I know of that have like groups or teams where their whole reason for existence is to arrange the meeting. This is the meeting arrangement team. They arrange a quarterly meeting, they arrange that monthly meeting, they just arrange meetings and—
