Over the course of the last 12 months, I have read a variety of books and watched several documentaries about the career arcs of successful singers/bands from the 1970s-80s. REM, Billy Joel, Chicago, Carly Simon, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Linda Ronstandt, and others. While every one of these has their own story and unique twists, the career arcs are remarkably similar and look something like this.

Basically, the singer or band plays around with their sound for a few years in their teens and/or early 20s, people float in and out of the initial lineup, and some lone wolf talent scout/producer “discovers” them and signs them to a horribly one-sided contract that the singer/band never reads because they just want “to focus on the music.”

The singer/band slowly starts building a local/regional following before — BOOM! — they take off like a rocket. Top 10 hits. Gold records. Sold out arenas. The creative juices are flowing, and the group can do no wrong. The bandmates are all best friends and living it up.

Then comes the inevitable plateau. Things are still good. There are a few more hits and many records are still being sold, but cracks begin forming. Drug/alcohol use and late-night partying becomes more important that the music, in-fighting starts to occur, and everyone finally realizes that, “Hey, why aren’t we being paid very much money despite our success? Where is that initial contract anyway?” Fingers begin being pointed every which way.

This is when the decline begins. The group has been touring nonstop for years just to make some money after lawyers free them from their initial onerous contracts. Creativity and passion plummet. It’s no longer “all about the music.” The next record bombs, the record label threatens to drop them, and the band fractures. Maybe the lead singer decides to go out on his/her own, maybe the drummer who has been consistently late for rehearsals is replaced, maybe someone goes into drug/alcohol rehab (OK, pretty much always someone goes into drug/alcohol rehab).

Once things settle down, the singer/band may have another blip of success, but more likely settle into their role as a “nostalgia” band. They will often still record new material, but it’s rarely inspired or successful. The best of them will still play to packed arenas as they embrace sobriety and give their now-middle aged, moneyed audience a reminder of their younger, carefree days (Good God, Willie Nelson is still touring at 93!).

After watching the most recent of these documentaries, I got to thinking how CMEpalooza aligns to this sort of career arc. There are a few similarities. Certainly, Derek started CMEpalooza and I joined shortly thereafter with hopes for success but just a vague blueprint of what that might look like. As we gained traction, both with sponsors and our audience of CME professionals, we grew in popularity. You might say our “big hit,” ironically enough, happened during COVID, when the whole world was virtual and CMEpalooza was one of the few established events that continued unencumbered. The audience for our events basically doubled overnight.

In those days, we had a lot of creative ideas for sessions, and our blog stayed busy as we regularly emailed each other with “Hey, I’ve got another idea for a blog post this week. Wait, so do you? Great!”  We were rolling along.

Assuming we follow the trajectory of the musical superstars—presumably skipping over the stint in alcohol/drug rehab—this is about the time we should hit our plateau and, quite frankly, that is a scary proposition. No one wants to be on the decline in anything that they do, and dammit, we’re going to fight like hell to stay on top.

We still have spurts of creativity (admit it, you love the CMEslinger), although it can be harder to tap into at times (note from Derek: a lot harder). Our “Hey, I’ve got another idea for a blog post this week!” exchanges don’t come quite as frequently as they used to. Personally, what gets me excited most often these days is exchanging ideas with our community and getting them to challenge me to come up with creative solutions. We have a few sessions this Spring that are pushing the envelope and usual boundaries of education, which is always fun and professionally enriching.

Will we still be doing CMEpalooza on our 93rd birthdays? Probably! (OK, definitely not). But I also hope that we’re not going to be that nostalgia band who people watch simply for the memories of those good old days any time soon. I think we still have a few years of life in us.

I like to cook. I really like to cook. I often tell people with total candor that if I had learned to cook when I was younger (like most teenaged boys, about the best I could do was heat up a can of soup until I went to college), I think I would have tried to make a career out of restaurants.

We have friends and family over for dinner quite often and people know that whenever they arrive, pretty much everything they eat is going to be made from scratch. Doughs, sauces, desserts… everything. Admittedly, not everything always comes out perfect, but I don’t like taking shortcuts when I’m in the kitchen. Would that premade pie shell taste significantly worse than the one I’ve been working on for 4 hours? Perhaps not, but I enjoy the process of building a meal and getting my hands dirty.

Until recently, there was one minor exception — pasta. In my late 20s, I had bought one of those pasta rollers (it looks exactly like this photo) to make my own noodles and, well, it was a pain. My kitchen was too small, the process was too laborious, and the results kinda sucked. So, for many, many years, the pasta machine stayed tucked away in the basement of our new house, despite its much more functional kitchen and my improving cooking skills. Dried pasta from the store was, well, it was fine. It was a shortcut that I didn’t mind taking because it saved me from a task that I really didn’t enjoy.

Do more of what you like and less of what you don’t

There has been a lot of talk, basically everywhere that you go, about the impact of AI on our world. Certainly, this is a premier topic at basically every CME industry event that takes place these days, and it certainly will be discussed by some of our panels during CMEpalooza Spring (Wednesday, April 29, in case you forgot).

I am not one of those doomsday naysayers who will argue that AI is going to eliminate all of our jobs, nor am I one of those people who refuses to use AI to help me perform professional tasks. I guess I would consider myself somewhere in the middle — I use AI perhaps once or twice a day, but I don’t lean on it to do everything that it probably could to simplify my workload.

Why? It’s simple. I like to use AI to help me with those tasks that I dislike while I don’t like to use it for those professional duties that I enjoy.

For instance, I suppose it is very possible that I could have given one of my usual AI platforms a few ideas of what I wanted to say in this blog post and it would have spit out a very plausible and sensible response that I could have copied and pasted for you here (don’t get any ideas, Warnick). My work would have been done in 2-3 minutes. Instead, I’ve taken considerably more time putting my thoughts together and thinking through what I wanted to tell you. It’s not only because it would be extremely insincere to take such an insidious shortcut, but because I enjoy the mental challenge of writing these posts (well, usually).

I have met with a few CME technology providers over the course of the last few years who specialize in producing AI solutions. The general sales pitch is typically the same — you put us in your grant request and if your proposal gets funded, you turn over the nuts and bolts of developing the educational activity to us. We take care of the content development, the production, and the testing, while you just handle the project management and accreditation piece. For some people, that probably sounds great – very little work to be done. But I like working with new sorts of technologies and being innately involved in the content development process. I will never simply turn over an activity and give up the work that I enjoy most to another entity simply because it’s a handy shortcut.

On the flip side, there are some things I always turn to AI platforms to help me with. I am not terribly visually oriented, so when I have a vague idea of an image I want to create for a slide, for example, I have learned how to guide AI in such a way that it produces what I vaguely have in mind in a much cleaner format than I could have produced in an hour’s worth of time. That’s a big score.

Do more of what you like and less of what you don’t

One more quick story:

I was at my primary care doctor a few weeks ago for my annual physical. I’ve been seeing him for close to 25 years, so I know the usual routine. He comes in, we talk about tennis (we both play in the same circles), and then he sits in front of his computer, asks me questions about my health in the last 12 months, and types in the answers without making much eye contact.

But this year was different. As soon as he came in, he asked if he could record our visit so that AI could transcribe the conversations for his chart notes. Instead of staring at a screen for most of our visit, we spent the entire time sitting eye to eye and chatting. Yes, we still mostly talked about tennis, but he was more engaged and seemed to be in a much better mood than usual.

Near the end of our visit, I asked him how much of a difference the AI transcription service made in his daily routine.

“Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe how much better it has made things,” he told me. “I don’t have to spend hours a day typing up my notes, which I always hated to do. Now, I can focus on being a doctor.”

Do more of what you like and less of what you don’t

(Oh, and I broke out the pasta machine a few weeks ago to start making it from scratch again. It is messy and time consuming, but you really can taste the difference.)

(Yawning and stretching)

Man I love Daylight Savings Time. Losing that hour of sleep as we “spring forward” is such a joy. The sacrifices we make for the farmers…

Yes, we know everyone needs a little jolt of energy this morning, so we’ve got just the thing to go along with your large iced vanilla latte with extra foam (note from Derek: gross) — the CMEpalooza Spring agenda!

That’s right, today is the special day where we show you (most of) the education that we have in store for our Spring extravaganza, which is scheduled for Wednesday, April 29. Our live sessions will run from 9 am-5 pm ET, with the recorded versions available pretty much immediately. We rely on abstract submissions from our community for the Spring meeting, and we’re always pleasantly surprised with how creative people are in coming up with unique and fun ways to educate the CMEpalooza community.

Please check out what we have in store and open up your work calendars to mark those sessions you want to watch (you don’t have to watch them all live, though you certainly could/should). There are still a few holes in the agenda that will be filled in shortly. There is going to be a lot of creativity and interesting ways to bring forth interaction with our audience (that’s you). Should be fun.

Click here to check out the 2026 CMEpalooza Spring agenda