Where do I watch CMEpalooza Fall?
You watch it on the LIVE page.

Will people be able to hear me on the Hangout?
No. You are not on the Hangout. You are only watching a video feed of the Hangout. You can sing The Humpty Dance at the top of your lungs and no one will hear you except your neighbors, who might call the police, who might interrupt you while watching CMEpalooza. So, don’t sing The Humpty Dance at the top of your lungs while watching CMEpalooza.

Can I watch CMEpalooza Fall at the office?
Yes.

Can I watch CMEpalooza Fall at home?
Yes.

Can I watch CMEpalooza Fall in a conference room with 100 other people?
Please do.

Can I watch CMEpalooza Fall at the top of Machu Picchu? 
I doubt you can get wifi there, but sure, go for it.

Can I watch CMEpalooza Fall with Hillary Clinton?
I don’t know. Let’s ask her.

I guess she’s busy.

Do I have to pre-register or register?
Nope.

Do I have to pay anything to watch CMEpalooza Fall? I love paying registration fees.

No. You don’t have to pay anything to watch CMEpalooza.

Do I have to take a survey afterward?
Well, you don’t have to, but it would be nice if you did. It’s only seven questions and shouldn’t take you more than 60 seconds. If it takes you more than 60 seconds, Scott will bake you a shoo-fly pie and hand deliver it to your home.

How do I ask questions to the presenters?
Good question. There are three ways you can ask questions:

1. Send a text to the CMEpalooza text line at 267-666-0CME (0263)
2. Tweet a question using the #CMEpalooza hashtag
3. Click on the Google Slides link on the LIVE page and enter your question there

Longtime CMEpalooza participants will notice that option #3 is different than in years past. When Google in their infinite wisdom made the decision to drop Google Hangouts On Air and merge the Hangout platform with YouTube Live, one of the things they dropped was their handy Q&A app. We liked using the Q&A app with our CMEpalooza sessions and were disappointed when they discontinued it, but we’re professionals around here and we’ve learned how to deal with adversity. Here’s video of my reaction upon hearing the news:

Fortunately, the Google Slides hack for asking questions is actually quite simple and should be a nice alternative to the Q&A app.

Do I have to watch all the sessions?
YES! No. Watch what interests you.

What if I’m busy during the day of the live broadcast?
All the sessions will be archived on the website, probably within 15 minutes of the conclusion of the session. How are we able to do it so fast? We have a new intern who is a real crackerjack on the interwebs. Here he is hard at work, writing our latest blog post.

Is CMEpalooza Fall really 2 days away (yes)? Are we really ready (I hope so)? Have you registered for every session you are interested in (I hope not, since there is no such thing as registration for CMEpalooza)?

We’re a little less than 48 hours away from the start of CMEpalooza Fall and we’ll be throwing a few things out at everyone as we make our final preparations. Here is what you can expect the next few days:

• Tomorrow morning, we’ll be putting up the case studies that will be discussed during our 3 p.m. ET session sponsored by CME Matters, “Common/Not-So-Common Case Conundrums in CME.” Everyone is certainly invited to read through both cases in advance of the session, though we’ll be reviewing the nuts and bolts of each case during the session itself. Perhaps most importantly, tomorrow morning will be the first time that our case discussants will see their case — we’re trying to introduce some real-world time pressure into each scenario.
• Derek will also put together his usual pithy primer tomorrow on how to watch CMEpalooza Fall and answer some of the more common questions we receive. Hopefully, he’ll also briefly review the new way we’re offering live viewers to ask questions of our presenters, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he forgets. Either way, we’ll be including details on this during each CMEpalooza Fall session.
• We’ll be lighting up the usual social media channels with weird memes and promotional posts to remind you about all of the interesting things we have in store during our live broadcasts. Please feel free to help us by using the #CMEpalooza hashtag on Twitter.
• At 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, CMEpalooza Fall will officially begin with our kickoff session sponsored by Global Academy for Medical Education, LLC, “The Brief, Wondrous Life of a Grant Request.” Derek put out a call last week to submit questions for this session. There is still time to add your question to the queue if you’d like. Keep it clean, folks.

 

One of the nice features about YouTube Live (formerly Google Hangouts On Air) is that you get to gather presenters in a private, unrecorded “green room” prior to start of each official broadcast. Basically, until you hit the actual “Start Broadcast” button, what is said in the green room stays private.

Unfortunately, it was brought to our attention last week that while Derek and I were setting up for a CMEpalooza Spring session in 2015, one of us (Derek) unknowingly hit the “Start Broadcast” session and made our “private” commentary available to the outside world.

The video apparently has become recently unearthed, if only because our haters probably recognize that CMEpalooza Fall is coming up (next Wednesday, October 19) and they want to cast a pall over our tremendous event.

We’ve been receiving calls from major media outlets in cities such as Provo, UT and Rockville, MD, asking us to comment on our salacious discussion. So instead of waiting for the video and transcript to leak out, we’re being forthwith and presenting it to you, in full, today.

We’re not exactly embarrassed by it – I mean, the folks who run other CME meetings have told us way worse things in private moments – but it’s not something we’re necessarily proud of.

Warning: What you are about to read is the kind of locker room, guy talk that all of us know is totally harmless and meaningless. Proceed at your own risk.

(garbled crosstalk)

Scott: That meeting used to be great. Some years, it’s still very beautiful.

Derek: I tried to force it to move actually. Maybe to someplace in Palm Beach. I tried to force it to move and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and ruin it.

Scott: That’s huge news there.

Derek: No, no. No this was— And I tried to force it to move very heavily. In fact, I offered to buy furniture for all of their exhibitors. Exhibitors want nice furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’ I looked at the furniture they were offering – terrible. But I couldn’t get there. Then all of a sudden I see at the next meeting, all of their exhibitors have this fake grass and these big phony tiki torches and everything. They’ve totally changed their look.

Scott: Sheesh, what about this other meeting coming up? The one next month. That agenda is hot.

Derek: Yeah, that one, with the gold star endorsements. I’ve got to get out my credit card in case I want to register. You know I’m automatically attracted to great meetings — I just start registering as soon as I can. It’s like a magnet. I just register. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Scott: Whatever you want.

Derek: Pay the Early Bird reg fee, the full fee, the 1-day. You can do anything.

Scott: That’s right, my man!

As we wrote earlier, we are deeply embarrassed by our comments. We’re not perfect people and CMEpalooza is not a perfect meeting. We’ve said and done things we regret, and the words released today on this year-old video transcript are one of them.

Anyone who knows us knows these words don’t reflect who we are or what CMEpalooza represents. We have traveled virtually in CME circles throughout the United States talking about the need to change the way we educate our industry, but our events have also changed us.

Let’s be honest: We’re living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we’ll be talking about during CMEpalooza Fall. The Sunshine Act is killing us, pharma funding is getting slashed and forcing too many people to lose their jobs, and the maintenance of certification system is totally broken.

We will discuss this more in the coming days.

See you at CMEpalooza Fall on Wednesday, October 19.