AA Land and the Big Book – Big Book Workshop – Montgomery – Part 3 of 8 – Local AA Speakers

Howdy, buckaroos. My name is Myers Raymer and I'm an alcoholic. What a treat it is to be here. I just remember times in my life when I didn't know anybody and it's an amazing thing to walk back in a room and you feel like you know half the people already that you've met over the years and see it's kind of like when you're down here, it's like coming home. It's like being in with a bunch of family, and it's pretty cool. I want to thank, before we even get started, I wantto thank Amanda and John for schlepping us from the airport, and pretty amazing. A morning spent with Amanda, and I needed a nap, and I took that nap, and man, I don't know whether it's Amanda's going faster or I'm just getting old and slowing down, but it's just like pretty amazing stuff. Guys, my home group is the Primary Purpose Group in Dallas, Texas, And my sobriety date is January the 15th, 88. And what an honor. We're going to do a little bit of story stuff tonight and a little kind of collect up and kind of set the stage for what we're goingto do tomorrow. And we'regoing to get in a littlebit to the step stuff tonight. But a lot of this I think is so important because I think it's important to see why this stuff sets up the way it does. It would be, I think that as people stay sober for a period of time, you end up forming a doctrine based on your experiences. Some of you guys came up through AA land where you were going to a bunch of meetings and it was all fun and games and it still is even today. And so your doctrine stays connected to that idea that the fellowship kept me sober and this kind of stuff. There were some more of us, some others of us that sort of struggled with some of that. And we'll talk about it a little bit like this. But I think if you can see kind of where some of this is coming from, it will make it easier tomorrow as we kind of go through this thing. One of the things that I've come to not like very much in AA land, I'm just being real transparent with you, is that the more roundups and this kind of stuff I do, the less I like them because I've got one chance to talk and one chance to make some comments. And it seems like no matter how hard I try, there are still people that misunderstand what I say or so vehemently disagree with what I say and because I've got 45 minutes to carry the message or 50 minutes like this, then I'm screwed. I just find myself in a situation where what are you supposed to do? It's just like anybody ever say something and later somebody else said something and accused you of saying something you never said? But this happens with such frightening regularity that after a while you just go like, why even do that? And this is the reason why I love doing this because it's an opportunity to talk about the steps. We can talk about The Big Book. We can talking about the power of God in the middle of this deal. And if you misunderstand something or if you don't get something, we've got plenty of time on break. We've got many times tomorrow during the day that we can collect up this stuff. If you get something sideways in your crawl in something like this and leave with it, that's your bad because I'm here and Chris is here and we can talk abut this stuff and we kind of see what the deal is. It's not like we're presenting something weird. It's Not Like We're Presenting... But I'm telling you guys in my travels, I'm blown away by how often just a piece of big book... Larry probably understands this and sees this stuff too. You can present big book and sometimes people don't dig it at all because they don't know any big book. They don't even know what it's about. And so it's a frustrating kind of a thing to be into. But we'll see. There's plenty of time to get into it tomorrow. I think for a lot of the stuff My story lines up with a whole lot of you. I want to say this. Sometimes it's frustrating because I run into people who came to AA and they sobered up, and it's still fun and games, and years later it's Still Fun and Games. They're having a great time. And, guys, my story didn't line up that way. I'm a third-generation alcoholic, and my grandfather was a drunk, my dad's a drunk. My identical twin is, yeah, identical. And it's like I can remember sitting with Chris at the Mason Jar Restaurant in Houston, Texas when we were 18, 19 years old, and both of us fully knowing and understanding that the alcoholism had already manifested itself. We already know that we're alcoholic. And I remember talking to Chris one night, and I said, Hey, Chris, we're drunks just like Pop, aren't we? And he goes, yeah. And I said, so what are we going to do about it? And he says, well, eventually we're going to have to stop. But not now. But you get that. I mean, it's just like why stop when it's working? And for a whole lot of us it worked like magic. I'm so painfully shy that I cannot even – I couldn't get a date with a shotgun. I just can't – I just cannot talk to girls. I cannot do anything, and I drink, and I can talk to girls, and they don't necessarily talk back. But it didn't seem to make any difference. I mean, it just didn't seem to. It's just like, y'all get that. And so it all felt better. It was all a warm and fuzzy deal for a long time, right up into the point that it wasn't. And so imagine my surprise in 1987 when my best drinking buddy, Chris, gets sober. There's a guy that works for us at the bindery that was in AA and he 12-stepped Chris and took Chris to his first meeting. And then two months later, Chris would take me to my first AA meeting. And it was a pretty amazing deal. Don't have a lot of story on this stuff. It's an amazing thing. At the end of the day, most drunks tend to have stories that are, I mean we're real sloppy, we're sometimes dishonest, sometimes we do things that are kind of crazy and this sort of thing, Chris had introduced me to the joys of some outside issues which sort of sped things up if you catch my drift. And there's nothing that would make things crazier than me all jacked up and I'm built like a jackrabbit. I don't have three muscles on me, but I have the loudest mouth in the room. And so it's like everywhere I go, I always seem to be getting in hot water. I can't keep quiet. And so we go to a party, I'm going to be the one that gets in trouble. We go to an restaurant, I'm the one who gets in troubles. It's just crazy. We go a party and I have to touch your date. Listen, I could write a book about this. I've been sober for 26 years, guys, and I've thought about this a lot, but I don't understand what it is genetically that makes certain men... It's like I can't communicate with you unless I touch you. But, you know, it took me a while to connect up that men don't like you to touch their date. And so I'm always at odds. I'm all over the place. I always have somebody mad at me because I'm over there leaning on their date? It's just crazy. And the date didn't like it. He didn't Like it. And my beautiful wife didn't Like it. She wasn't digging it at all. And so the last two months that I drank, I got in trouble with the law twice. Both of them for physical altercations with people that I shouldn't have been messing with. And it wasn't even fun stuff to talk about. It was just, I'm going to try to kill that man because he embarrassed me. I mean, it's just simple stuff. But the law doesn't like that, and society doesn't dig the fact that you're trying to put your hands on other people. And so it just got more complicated and more complicated. And so when Chris finally sobered up and he took me to AA land, guys, I've got to tell you, there's nothing in the universe that I've ever dug more than 12-step recovery, than AA, when I got there. I thought it was the coolest place in the world. Big old long shotgun room with pressed tin ceiling, and everybody smoked cigarettes. I mean, it was just like you could smoke in the meeting and everybody had... Listen, guys, I don't smoke. And I'd light a cigarette up sitting in a meeting. Just sitting there like that just because everybody else was doing it like that. You know what a number 10 can looks like in the restaurant business? A number 10 cans, those great big old things like this, where they had them running down the center of this table and they'd be so full of cigarettes, but they'd been falling off onto the table like that and it was heaven on this crazy people talking crazy stuff and I thought it was the coolest thing in the whole wide world. And I managed to stay sober for a long time doing just that. I've got one sobriety date, but stick with me. So this sobriery date would take me to a place to where the lowest part of my existence on God's green earth was seven years into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And let me just, I'm just here to tell you, if you think you were crazy drinking and drugging and doing some of that kind of stuff, you hang on. Because let me tell you something, some of us get really, really sick sitting in the rooms doing absolutely nothing but glad-handing people and smoking cigarettes and just acting a fool. And that's me. And so imagine my surprise. Imagine what it was like at Fort Raymer, at my house. I'm seven years from my last drink and I'm writing hot checks all over Denton County. I got a burn rate on credit cards and on a bank account that would just... Let me ask you, how many of you guys have ever bought something you didn't need? Men, when I die, I promise you they're going to dig through my garage in an aircraft hangar and they're going to go through all that kind of stuff and they are going to find 20 hacksaws. Why is it a man needs 20 hacksaw? But it seemed like I was always buying this kind of thing and this kind of stuff that I didn't need. It was just treating an internal condition but I wouldn't understand that for a while. This deal with every woman in the room is more exciting than my wife. I mean, it's just, I can't, I love AA. I'm going to six or seven meetings a week. I love this stuff but I seem to not be getting there. I seem not to be, It's not as fun. They start talking at the first of the meeting, and I find somebody to judge. And so I'm looking at this guy, nice guy like this. They don't even know him like that. And yet I'm sitting here. By the time I get halfway through the meeting I've crucified this guy. I'm trying – listen, there was a guy in our group named Horse Jim. And I used to – he was one of the nicest guys in the world like this, but he was – I thought he was an idiot. And when he would share, he'd share this crazy stuff like that and so I would think for the whole meeting I would just sit back there and figure out. Now, because I've not done any real jail time, if I killed Horst Jim and I buried him out behind this meeting hall, how much jail time would I really have to do? And I would spend a whole hour thinking about that kind of stuff. I mean, that's... Mr. Spiritual, that is right. I'm nuttier than a squirrel turd and can't figure out why. I mean, I just – so Chris comes up and saves my life twice. I'm going to tell you, and I always – I mention this not to embarrass Chris in any way, but I love to see him squirm. But Chris would save my life once in AA. He 12-stepped me and took me to my first AA meeting and saved me from sheer death and certainly divorce. And then seven years into the gig, he would insist that I do something about my crazy behavior and contact somebody that actually knew something about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I did. I almost drank, and it scared me real bad. And I called Chris, and I won't get into a bunch of this because I've got a bunch of other stuff I'd rather talk about. But to make a long story short, I met an old guy who scared me to death, was not friendly, was not really nice in my estimation. I wanted a big old hug and, you know, this kind of stuff, and that's not what I got. But Krusty Cliff was really, really direct with me. And he would ask me questions and it was always really embarrassing. I mean, let me ask you a question. What would be a simpler question to ask a man that's been in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous for seven years if a man walked up to you and said, well, can you tell me who the co-founders of AA are? I mean everybody knows that. Except Myers-Ramer, seven years sober. I just told him. I said, it's, I don't know, shit. Some old dudes. I don' t know. I've seen some pictures. I had no idea like that. I don''t know because we're not. I had a book. I didn' t have it. I didn't know where it was. I hadn' t read it. I didn''t care, guys. I just didn' te care. I'm too lazy to read it, I see no reason to read and I'm in a group full of people who validate it. I'm not being ugly. I'm just telling you the way it was. A whole lot of people that just validated my behavior and validated this meeting makers make it thing like this. And right before I emotionally sobered up with Clifford helping me on this kind of stuff, I remember breaking down in a meeting one night, and I'm weeping like a little kid sitting in that meeting, and this guy looks at me like this, and I started to share something, and he said, I remember it like it was yesterday because it was still, it was just, I'm not having a nervous breakdown in the meeting and this thing. And this guy goes, oh, Myers, Myers. Come on. Don't do that, man. Just all you need to do, you know what you need to do. And I said, no, I don't know what I need to do. And he said, all you needs to do is just go to some more meetings and you're going to be okay. And I remember looking at him like this and I remember the inside, it's just like I just shrunk. And I just, I remember saying, well, all right, thank you for the advice. I appreciate it, guys. I love you all. I'd already made up my mind to leave. I walked outside and I got in the seat behind the steering wheel of that old Toyota Land Cruiser and I just wept. I just sat there and wept and wepped. Guys, I don't want to be a drunk. I don' t want to die like this. But I can't seem to figure out any way to get past it. Everything in me says run when Cliff starts asking me these questions like this and there's another piece of me that's saying this may be your only chance to do this. This may be the only way that you're ever going to get clear of this is to stop. Just listen to what he has to say. So I spent 20 minutes with him asking me questions, and I didn't know the answer to any of them. And finally I said, Mr. Bishop, I don't know anything that you're talking about. None of it makes any sense to me. And he said, you're finally starting to get honest. I said I'll tell you what, why don't you meet me at the meeting tomorrow night? Don't you dare walk into that room without a big book and I'll see you at 730. And that was 20 years ago. And I remember walking into that meeting like this and I judged everybody in there. I thought it was the biggest bunch of pious, self-righteous, big book idiots that I've ever... I'm just judging everything like that. They're sober, they're happy, but I'm going to judge them anyway. I mean, it makes perfect sense, right? And what eventually happened was is that I would sit there for a couple of weeks judging you and then finally there were some things that were said one night and finally I just kind of let my guard down and I just realized that as I looked around the room, I said, you know what? This may be the happiest bunch of people I've never met in my life. I've always been around. They can't seem to stop laughing. They all seem to be engaged. They all seemed to be healthy. They're not making bad decisions like me. And maybe I ought to just listen. And I stopped. I stopped with the judgment for just a second. And what began to happen quickly, within a couple of weeks, I began to connect up dots. And it's like I can't hardly explain it. There's a piece of me, ego and arrogance-wise, because I've been in the rooms for a while, that wants to still slip back in there every once in a while and say, well, you know, you don't need to know this. You don't needs to know this. I have this already formed idea of what AA doctrine looks like. And everything that they're telling me is butting up against it. It's nothing but conflict. Every night I'm looking at it going, God, I didn't know that. God, if I accept that, then I have to accept that. And if I have a problem, if if I accept that I have to accept that. And pretty soon I've got a head full of chaos around what's real or not. And finally these guys just kept saying, this isn't personal opinion. You make this sound like we're making this crap up. This is not, we're not trying to jack you around, kid. Why don't you just simply read the text and let's study? That's all they did. I mean, three meetings a week, and there were two book studies and a step study on a Saturday night, and that's it. No discussion meeting, just the literature. And it's it, and so once I let the dead gum guard down, I could begin to soak up some of this stuff. So listen, one night we're sitting in there like this and Philip Files said something and we're reading page 44 and we go through this stuff And I remember like that. And afterwards, he walked up and he goes, we're putting chairs up. And he said, Myers, are you okay? And I said, Phillip, I'm an alcoholic. And he says, good. Keep coming back. I don't know what to tell you, Myers. And he just walked off and he was laughing like this. And I was kind of like, you jerk. But I remember going home and I kicked the front door open and scared Londa to death. And I says, Londa, I am an alcoholic! And she goes, no shit, Myers! And I went, no, no. Sweetheart, seriously, for the very first time in the rooms, I understand what alcoholism looked like. I understand that I was one. There was no ambivalence. There was nothing like this. Because I'm thinking, well, since I didn't have a DWI, I can't be an alcoholic. Since I didn' t get thrown in jail, I'm not an alcoholic Since I did' n black out every morning, I am not an alcohoic I had a whole list of these things that separated me from you. And some of you guys got those right now. Some of you guys are working with that premise. Some of You are not, but it's an amazing thing. Every room I talk to, there's still people in there that are dealing with this. And it's a really frustrating thing to want to be a part of something and still have part of your head saying, You don't belong. You don' t belong. You're not supposed to be here. And it' s a frustrating deal. Everything about my life changed at the moment that I did this, guys. Everything shifted the momentthat I came clear that I belonged in the room and that I had a reason to be there and that there was indeed something called a common solution that they talk about on page 17. And nobody had ever even introduced me to the idea. Guys, come on, stick with me. I understand that we're connected, that we have a common problem. We understand that. We're all little drunks and crazies and whack jobs and stuff like that. I understand what holds us like this, yet Bill was really clear that that would never be enough to hold us together as we're now joined and that that there would be a common resolution and I'm going, holy cow. Does that mean that we all have to be robots? That we all had to be doing everything exactly the same? Not on your life. All God's kids are different and we got a whole bunch of different folks in here like that. You got loud ones and quiet ones and gentle ones and assholes. I mean, you got everybody under the sun like this and we need every one of them to do what it is that we're doing like that but at the core of that, the baseline of this thing was this idea of a common solution and so the question would become and quickly came for me was how do we... My problem was not learning the big book. My problem was unlearning seven years of opinions and ideas. Seven years of opinions and ideas, by the way, that were hand-delivered to me by some of the nicest, gentlest, kindest people that I'd ever met in my whole life. Listen, if they'd have been jerks, it would have been real easy. I'd just go, man, they're jerks. These were people that loved me to death. And they just shared a lot of ideas. So is it possible that every piece of information you learned is wrong? I don't think so. I think it's a mixture of a whole bunch of stuff. Y'all get that? And I think this is why this thing gets funny, is that there's this idea, there's this concept that perhaps what we could do is just take everything that we think we know already and investigate it. But stick with me guys, because some of this stuff is It's hard to do, and it takes some real courage. And some of us didn't quite come to the table with a big old dose of courage. And so sometimes it's much easier to go, I'm going to be all right. And there's a piece of ego in there and a piece of arrogance that flows in there with that, that sort of conspire to keep you in a weird area. I want to give you a quick example. There's a group of men that I've sponsored for a number of years now in Dallas that come from other groups that meet me over there at Primary Purpose Group on Tuesday night. And we've been meeting at 630 for a long, long time. And there's five or six of these guys. And they're all... The youngest one's 58 and the oldest one's 72. And I'm 60. And so these guys will all come and we just do a little book study before our book study and we kind of talk about some of this kind of stuff. And we were in there one night like this and it's funny. They get real... In the beginning, they were all just real stoic and they just wouldn't... They just, because they don't want to admit anything. They don't wanna admit that maybe they didn't know anything. But I'm from that school. I mean, I understand that emotion that wants to hang on to that. And so I said, listen, before we start, you guys do me a favor. Let's look at Jim's story real quick. Jim's Story and Fred's Story. There's a common theme that runs through a little piece of this. Let's talk about that specifically for just a minute before we starts this other stuff like this. I said you guys go ahead and get your big books out and let's do that like this and so these guys are like this and they're back over in the back of their book and they're going through story by story by story like this. Are you all with me? Here's a collection of old dudes that have a total sobriety of way over 100 years. One guy's been sober 32 years, another one 27 years. There's over 100 year of sobrietry sitting right there and they didn't know where Jim's story was in the front of the book. And I finally just reached over like this and I grabbed the book and I said, here, let me show you back up here. You remember Jim's Story and Fred's Story? And these guys are looking at me like I'm talking Russian. I mean, they're just like that. I've gone right here, guys. And see that? Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. And then they're just kind of looking straight ahead like this with red faces like this because they've been they've being called out and they realize and after the meeting, I mean it was an interesting thing. We talked about it. One of the guys said that he was totally embarrassed and he wasn't going to come back. Period. He didn't. He thought that I'd insulted him and I said all I did was to get you all I need All I did was ask you to turn to a page in the big book that you ought to know by heart the second week you were in AA. You should have known at least where it was. And here you are all these years into the deal and don't know anything about it. The rest of the guys have stayed with it like this, and it is an amazing thing to watch these old dudes transformed into ferocious carriers of the big book. Collectively, that same group of people, collectively they'd sponsored five men. Collectively. Over 100 years of sponsorship, I mean 100 years of sobriety, and they'd sponsored a total of five guys. One guy hadn't sponsored any man. Twenty-three or twenty-four years in the room and he'd never sponsored one man. How does that happen? You see? This is the stuff we're trying to gather up. If we could investigate what we know, and then we just ask ourselves the question, is this doctrine? Is this real live big book? Or is this just something that somebody said that's kind? It doesn't mean you have to throw it out completely. It doesn'T mean it's garbage. It Doesn'T mean it's trash. It Doesn't mean anything like that. It just means that we've got to be careful if we're talking about a common solution dig then you got to stop sharing that you stay sober practicing yoga and that's how you stay so I'm just I'm not ragging on yoga come on now I've practiced for years and I don't I'm I'm saying that but we got to be care what we're sharing in terms of the the deal though guys I gotta I did a talk. I'm not going to tell you specifically where some of this is because they'll come kill me, and I want to be real careful. But I did. I just I did it. Talk in the panhandle of Texas one time. And I left there and came back to Dallas. And when I got back, there was an email email waiting for me. And this lady said, can you call me? And so I called her and she said, I'm sorry I missed you. I really wanted my husband to hear you. And we just flat. We didn't know you were in town. And we talked a little bit, and she said, my husband relapsed after ten or so years. And I said, well, how's he doing? And she goes, well he's doing okay. And I say, well is he sponsored up? Is he back in the rooms and stuff? And she says, oh, well no, not really. And I says, well what do you mean no,not really? And she said they won't let him back in AA until he's been sober for 30 days. So I start doing my own investigating And lo and behold She was right There was a whole group of little AA buckaroos up there That had made this conscious decision That they wanted you sober for 30 days Before you got to AA Come on guys That's crazy And what I wanted to do was lock and load I wantedto go kill those guys and see it. But that's what Texas guys do, okay? I mean, that's how we deal with this stuff. It's crazy like that. The people charging money to hear fifth steps. Guys, we could spend hours talking about the atrocities in our rooms. Now listen, stick with me. The problem I've got is that we sit back because we don't want to be intolerant. We just turn our gaze the other way and let this stuff happen over and over and over and over again. Guys, there are some groups in Dallas right now that are so toxic and so deadly for women to be there because there's so much he-in and she-in going on like this that a woman can't get sober. She cannot get sober there and there's not one strong man in the room that will stand up and say Hoss, sit down. You ain't going nowhere unless it's sitting right next to me. Nobody will take a lead in this because we don't want to hurt his feelings. We don't want to run him off. I'm saying I wasn't going to do this I just got a little worked up sorry I've got three daughters one of them is already in the room and I get real emotional about that stuff I want to tell you a story real quick. I love to run, and some of you guys are going to scratch your head and go, I don't see the point of the story, but you will. Just stick with me. It's real short anyway. I love To Run, and so every other day I try to run. I work a part-time job down in south Texas at a treatment place, and they've got kind of a seawall down there and I run along that seawALL when I'm down there. And so during spring break of this last year, I was running down along that seaWALL like this and there's like 15 or 16 kids in a big cluster in the middle of where I usually run like this. It's chaos. It would have been a good day not to run anyway like that. But so I go around them and as I go round, I get right in front of these guys again like this and step on a shoelace because I'm too lazy to tie that damn shoelACE up. But that's another story completely. But anyway, so I fall. And when a 60-year-old man hits the ground, it's like... It sounded like a big old bunch of sticks dropped on the ground like that. And so I'm thinking, man, I don't know if I'm going to... And I'm looking to see what's bleeding or not. But what got me was is that I was listening and behind me I could hear a couple of kids laughing and then a couple more kids laughing. And then pretty soon, everybody in that group, I'm sitting up on my knees looking at the group and every one of them are just sitting there laughing at me like I was a comedy act and like I'd done this intentionally like that. And it's weird. About that time, this guy picks me up and he's a local drunk from the island. He's always there and he'S just kind of an amazing sort of a guy, badly deformed face. And he had picked me up, and he said, old-timer, are you okay? And I went, yeah, I'M fine. I'M all right. And so he kind of dusted me off and he SAID, YOU WANT ME TO RUN WITH YOU FOR A MINUTE? And I said, nah, I'm all right, buddy. Thank you like this. I mean, he showed me great kindness there in front of all these kids. And the kids just, they didn't keep walking. They just stood there and laughed like that. Well, so I start running again, and I kind of hobbled off. And then as I'm running, I spent the next hour thinking about what had just happened. So stick with me, okay? I'm not trying to be provocative. I'm não estou tentando ser provocativo. Eu não estou tratando de ser malvado de qualquer forma como isso. Mas deixe-me te dizer o que é a minha hipótesis aqui. O que é que eu estou pensando que é. I think that some of those kids were raised better than that. I think dassome of thosekids had mamas and daddies that told them better and taught them better than what was exhibited right there. But all it took was a couple of guys laughing and the other guys picked up on it like this and they were looking around and pretty soon they would do that. Now, listen, I'm not judging it because how many of us in our own respective AA rooms have made decisions based on where everybody else voted? Did you ever wait in a group conscience or a business meeting and look around the room to see how everybody else is voting and then you vote like this kind of stuff. Guys, here's the problem. Identifying the problems in our program, identifying the problems in our fellowship is a great thing, but it's no thing if we don't have the nads to just step up and change it, to do something about it like this. Wrong is wrong. Could we get on the same page? Can I get an amen? Wrong is long. Why is it so hard for us to get this idea that we're not being mean old bad guys If we just say your behavior is atrocious, we can't do anything about your behavior, but you can't doing it here. You see? Why can't we just simply... Why is it that the new guy in the room has to pay the price for the idiot in the ring? I mean, it sounds weird, doesn't it? Some of you guys ain't digging this at all. We'll talk about something else in a minute. I promise you. It's all about love and tolerance. Listen. And it is, but the question always comes up like this. At what point does love and tolerance slide over into apathy? D.A. Carson, one of my very favorite theologians, did a talk one time and in the middle of this talk there was a line that said we drift towards compromise and call it tolerance. Let's just call it what it is. It's a compromise, you see. And to the extent that you will allow yourself to do that, You will find yourself accepting and going along with things that normally you would just simply not do. To change the course of anything, you need to be able to have some backbone. You need to have Some courage to do some things. And so some of you guys are already going, but I don't see any reason at all to change anything. It's all fine. I love this thing. It's cool. Leave it alone. I would respectfully disagree. So hear me out. We have a fellowship worldwide, tens of thousands of us in the trenches doing this deal like this. And we have crazy things going on and nobody says anything about it. We have success rates that are as bad as anything I can imagine, depending on where you are geographically. You guys may be lucky and you may be from an area where there's lots and lots of cool stuff going on in AA land. Or you might have sobered up in Dallas, Texas, the armpit of the AA world as far as I'm concerned, where there was so much apathy and so much middle-of-the-road stuff that people just simply can't get sober, you see? And so depending on where the deal is. How many of you guys maybe have run across areas where I can name you two or three places in the Midwest where there are geographic areas where there's two or Three Counties where one woman is sponsoring every girl in three counties? There's just simply no women wanting to step up and take any deal like that. You'll see them in the room like this, but there's only one. Who's your sponsor? That girl? Who's her sponsor? Is there anybody else that has another sponsor besides this lady right here? She's the only one that will do it. And you wonder why some of us fizzle out and just burn out like a comet while we just get roasted in the deal. There's only so much you can do, you see. One of the most contentious arguments that I ever had was from a podium one night. It was after a talk, and this guy had walked up, and he said, Marge, I could not disagree with you more. And I said, okay, next. And he goes, no, no. Hear me out. I said, I am 100% convinced that you can effectively only sponsor one guy in your entire AA deal. And I said wait a minute. So what you're saying is if I stay sober 35 years, 40 years, I can only sponsor 1 guy? And he said well maybe 2. I went wow. Wow. Did it ever occur to you? He said I think because you sponsor as many men as you do that it's just arrogance. And I said, oh, wait a minute now. I know I look scrawny, but I'm a scrapper. I said don't, come on, don't do that. Don't do that. Because the reality is if he would get off his lazy butt and sponsor more, I wouldn't have to sponsor so many. And that's the truth of that matter. You see? We get it. I'll tell you one more story and then I'll get back into some serious stuff like that. I was talking to a little brother a minute ago. We were talking about this doll thing. Some of you guys have heard this story, but I want to put this into perspective, okay? I did a talk in – I can't tell you where it is. I'm still waiting. All these years later, I'm Still Waiting for them to come get me. In the middle of the night, they're going to lynch me at my own house because it's on a big lake and it's a big rural area. It's a kind of rural area, but it's got a lot of boats and people and cutoffs and this kind of stuff. And so I drive out there from Dallas to do this AA talk, and I got there. Man, I drove right to it. I couldn't believe I actually found it. And I'm still unclear why they have to hide AA clubs. They're always in some of the craziest places in the world, and this one was no exception. And so, I get there about an hour before this meeting is supposed to start, and I'm dressed just like I was tonight, except I had a tie on, and I walk in. Now, as I walk into the room, there's a guy that's pulling in front of me, and he walks in, and as he walks through, There's a back door to this place, and he walks through. And I said, hey, how are you doing? And he puts his hand up like this. He hadn't turned around. He just puts his hands up like that and walked straight out the back door. And so I'm in the hall all by myself, and I'm just sitting there kind of looking around. There's some tables up front like this, and we're looking, and then I go, well, maybe I'll make some coffee. So I got up and made some coffee and stuff, and pretty soon another bunch come in like this and they're doing a little talking like this and I kind of waved and said, but hey, y'all, and we're just doing what we do. And this guy goes, hey, and back, and then they start their conversation and I'm sitting there like this and I've got a coat and tie on sitting in this room. There's not anybody there that knows me and nobody's saying one word to me. And I made the coffee. I mean, they could at least say... In grades. I wanted to walk back up there and put a booger in it too. It's that kind of passive-aggressive thing I've gotta deal with still. But I get through the whole thing, and we're sitting there. It's like 15 minutes to 8, and the room is starting to fill up with some people like this. And I'm thinking sooner or later, the guy that asked me to do the talk is going to come over and say, hey, I'm glad you're here. I'm Glad You Drove Forever to Get Here. But nobody did like that. So pretty soon this lady walks in, and she's carrying a big plastic doll under her arm like this She's got it under a deal. And she walks over, and She's sitting at a table, and She catty-cornered across from me. and she's just sitting there and pretty soon she's over there talking to the doll like this and I'm thinking man you don't see that in AA every day you know a couple of minutes later this other girl walks in I think it's mother daughter but I'm not sure but they look a little bit alike and she walks in and she has she's got a great big old doll I'm talking big plastic dolls like this and she gets in there like this and they're sitting over there like this and pretty sooner and now guys you've got to picture this I've got set this up for you like this There is not a sound in that room. Nobody's talking. Nobody's doing nothing. The room's got 30 people in it, and the only sound in this room and the sound in the room are these plastic dolls walking on the tabletop. They're walking around like this and they're starting to do doll talk back and forth between these dolls and they start going like, whoa, whoa, Whoa, Whoa! That's all I'm hearing like this. And I'm just like, and I'm going, oh, Lord, I was like, I got this isn't happening let me put your finger on that thought for just a minute were any of you guys old enough to hear the outer limits we're watching the outer limits or maybe it was twilight zone and there was aliens came down and they were getting people and there was this stinger thing coming out of the back of their neck and you could tell who had been possessed because they had this little stinger coming out of the bag I was looking around at the back of people's necks wondering Ten minutes past eight, this guy stands up and goes, well, we were supposed to have a speaker tonight. And I looked at him and I said, I bet that's me. And he said, okay, good, good. Thank you. And he sat back down again. No introduction. No thanks for driving. No nothing. It just like, and I got up. I've been wondering what I was going to say to this den of crazies and the reality that's the place that Spankathon got invented it was a bloodbath guys, I'm telling you man I took no prisoners it was scorched earth and every time I tell that story because I'm looking at it from this point I see your faces and some of you guys are going he's got no right to judge those people They got any eat me. I'm just saying I have every right to judge bad behavior. I have Every Right To Judge Something That Might Kill Somebody Now Let Me Tell You When This Got Real It Would Be Two Years Later That My Oldest Daughter Would Walk Into The Rooms For The Very First Time How Many You Guys Got A Relative That's In The Room Didn't it get real personal? Didn't it get real, didn't it sort of, I mean, I can, there's a lot of things I can tolerate until my daughter got in the same room. And when she was sitting in the same room, I had to look at it from a completely different perspective. I'm going, buddy, what do we do with this? How do we deal with this?" Is she going to hear the message? Is she gonna hear the clear-cut voice from divine inspiration? Or is she gonna um, is she not? Is she's gonna miss it all? Is she just be a meeting makers make it kind of gal and come to a bunch of meetings until the pain of being untreated in her alcoholism becomes so great that she has no choice but to use again. Is that how it's going to roll? And for so many of us that we do, guys, we see this worldwide. I see this exact same kind of behavior like this. The people will come. We'll watch them get enthusiastic. We'll watching them get all fired up and ready to do this thing. And then we watch them just go like this and they just start getting a little sicker and a little stickier and a lot more sicker until finally one day they just simply don't come back. And then it just seems like there's always, it's just like it's scripted. There's somebody standing in the back of the room going, oh, that's all right, booze will drive them back in. And guys, I'm going to tell you, I just want to get up and choke the guy. I just wanted to go give him a big old noogie. I just quit saying that. Quit saying that we listen, guys, they should never have left. And if we did, if we had taken care of our end of the deal, then that stuff wouldn't happen to happen. if we'd have taken the responsibility for whether or not they were getting a clear, accurate message of what the steps look like. What they do with it is their business. I'm not saying that people don't come and then decide that they don't want what we have. What frustrates me is how many people came, wanted it, and we didn't give it to them because we're too busy telling stories. We're too busily doing all the other things that we think are so important at the expense of what's really important, which was giving them an idea of what this stuff was. How did I stay in AA? hey, how was I in the room for seven years and still didn't know what alcoholism looked like? Chris is going to talk about this stuff in just a second. How did I not understand this stuff? How didI think that what defined me was my drama? If you think I'm making this up and if you think that I'm being too... to make a too big a deal out of it like this, do me a favor. You can be part of my lifelong experiment with this stuff. Walk into an AA meeting and as a topic throw out there why you're an alcoholic. And watch where the conversation goes. It will take now to now, that fast, for somebody to start sharing their story. I got a DWI. My husband left me. My kids left me, I lost my job. Like you fill in the blank on this kind of stuff. Do you understand what I'm saying guys? But some of you don't agree with this. I'm just saying guys, your drama does not define your disease. And that's the stuff that drives me crazy. It doesn't. This is the reason why we end up with so many people. We end up losing so many guys. In Australia, what a country. It's just amazing. And they've got lots of AA. Lots of AA I don't know if any of you guys have ever been there, but I'm telling you it will blow you away. Ninety-eight percent of all the meetings in Australia, continent-wise, from shore to shore, ninety-eight% of these meetings are what they call ID meetings where all we do is we start talking about our story, how we got here. How we got there. How we get here. How we go here. Your story is important. I'm not making light of it at all. On a Friday night at a podium or in a 12-step call, you better have a story. If it ain't a good one, make something up. I don't care. I mean, it's just like... I don' t care. But you need a story and I'm saying that piece of your experience is not amazingly powerful and how we move people along the line. But the big part of this thing, guys, is that... I'll tell you what, do me a favor. Stop and think for just a second like this. In Jim's story and Fred's story, there's a repeating theme that comes up and they say it in both of them like this and there's an example of that. There's a line that comes out in there like this that hit me like a ton of bricks one day like this so Jim or Fred won. I can't remember which one relapses and when he comes back, what is it that the cats say in the deal like this? He said, We told him what we knew about alcoholism My favorite line in all the big books like that. We told him what we knew about alcoholism. Because Bill Wilson and those cats expected us to know what alcoholism looked like. You see? On page 19, there's a piece in there that said we were going to share our combined experience and what? Knowledge. Our experience and knowledge. It wasn't our experience, strength, and hope. My mama can share experience, strengths, and hopes. You understand what I'm saying? I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying that I think the guys that wrote it hit it on the head. We were going to share our combined experience and knowledge. They assumed that once you got sober, you were going to get to a place. That's the reason why Bill wrote The Doctor's Opinion, more about alcoholism. There is a solution. These are primary pieces that will tell you what alcoholism looks like so that you can tell somebody and identify one-on-one with this kind of stuff so that we can start doing what we used to do, which was so amazingly effective, which for some reason we've decided we don't want to do anymore, which is qualify the new guy when he comes in. Please. Why is it that qualifying the new guide and helping him see her truth or his truth seems to be viewed every time as exclusionary? Guys, come on. I've been spanked from the podium enough. I mean, I get emails. I get hate mail. I got a file that thick with nasty letters that people send me because they just simply don't agree with that. Our stories is all we have. We you're a moron. I'm just saying, quit saying that. Quit saying that because it's not true. If your story is all you have, we're in trouble. You need to be able to explain what alcoholism is and we'll spend a bunch of time tomorrow talking about that kind of stuff. And what happens is that the more you know and understand it from that perspective, the easier this all gets. This stuff gets amazing if you just simply understand what it is where you're coming from. You see? Some of you guys already know that, and I'm playing with you. I want to make sure that you know, that I know, I'm crystal clear that a lot of you guy's already know and understand exactly what it is that I'm talking about. You know this book better than I do. My problem is that when you end up with situations, how does a whole continent with thousands and thousands and dozens and thousands of meetings, How does it get to where The only thing that's important Is how you got there At the exclusion of everything else How about we talk about How you stay here How about We talk about Some other stuff That needs to be Talked about Those guys At Primary Purpose Group When I finally got done With my tirade Judging them all It was an amazing thing To watch how quickly My life was transformed And how quickly I became to embrace The idea Of what sponsorship Was going to look like and what it was going to be like to be of service to somebody else. We're going to talk a whole hour tomorrow about just that, about this idea of what it's like to actually be of surface. Because listen, we're up against a tide guys because there's far more people over here that think that service work and 12-step work is subjective. There's so many more people over here that think that it's something that you do if you're retired or if you just have a whole bunch of spare time or something like this while the rest of us you know, cook chicken dinners and go to meetings and do the rest of our stuff like this. Y'all understand what I'm saying? We just have so few people that want to actually get involved in trying to be involved, try to sponsor and dothe rest of this kind of stuff. I want to read something to you real quick. Bill Wilson in 66 wrote this letter. It was reproduced later. The grapevine in those days was producing some pretty amazing stuff And it later ended up, as Bill sees it in the deal, just a little piece, a little short piece called Whose Responsibility. You can get it online or I can e-mail it to you if you want to e- mail it. But I'm amazed at how clear this was. I want to set the stage for this real quick, though. By 66, Bob's gone. The traditions have been published and out. We're still in a time, this is pre-Internet, obviously, and everything is still coming back through Bill Wilson. And if there's a problem in a group, it still goes back through Bill. If the idea of the nonstop discussion meeting was already in full swing, the meetings were being changed from a talk on Friday night from a podium, which was what most of the meetings Were, to this situation where we would just sit and share our day and this kind of stuff. And there was some appeal to it. It's not that I don't get the appeal. You know, I mean, I get that. The problem was it was just kind of off the chain, some of the things that we were talking about. and we had a lot of people that just weren't getting better. And so Bill saw the problem, and so he wrote this. Listen to me. An AA group as such cannot take on all the personal problems of its members, let alone those of non-alcoholics in the world around us. The AA group is not, for example, a mediator of domestic relations, nor does it furnish personal financial aid to anyone. Now, though a member may sometimes be helped in such matters by his friends in AA, the primary responsibility for the solution of all of his problems of living and growing rests squarely upon the individual himself. Now, should an AA group attempt this sort of help, its effectiveness and energies would be hopelessly dissipated. This is the little part that I want you to remember if you can. This is why sobriety, freedom from alcohol through the teaching and practice of AA's 12 steps, is the sole purpose of the group. If we don't stick to this cardinal principle, we shall almost certainly collapse. And if we collapse, we cannot help anyone. Dig? So stick with me. Listen to this. This is why sobriety, freedom from alcohol through the teaching and practice of AA's 12 steps Is the sole purpose of the group We're supposed to be there to teach the steps And yet we find ourselves in situations I'm reminded every time I read this There's a friend of mine in Houston, Texas That sent me a text message one time And he said, Myers, you might sit down because this is going to make you sick I just left my 17th straight meeting with no mention of the steps and no mention of God. I know, but some of you guys are scratching your head going, so? If they want to talk about their day, they ought to be able to talk about their date. Listen, stick with me a second. I'm not saying, I think sometimes people think that when I talk about this stuff that I'm thinking that the stuff in your day, the fact that you're having trouble getting along with your mother-in-law or that you'RE having trouble finding a job or that your wife left. I'm not for a moment making light of those situations, guys. I'm telling you, my heart bleeds for you. I want to cry real alligator tears with you. I just struggle with this idea that the meeting is the only place that you need to dump that stuff. I think that a much better place would be is to call Krusty Cliff or call somebody that loves you, call your sponsor and say, buddy, I'm dying here. I'm simply dying here and he knows you and he know where you are in the steps and He knows where you are on a spiritual path and He can help gather you up and collect everything up like this. I understand that it makes great fodder for discussion in meetings. I'm just not so sure because guys, let me tell you something. Listen, again, I'm not trying to be provocative. I'm Not even I'm not trying to be mean in any form or fashion but for the brand new guy that just walked in the room that's just he's detox and sitting in the AA meeting he doesn't give a rat's butt about your divorce or whether you get along with your mother-in-law. He doesn't. That's where everybody's hair catches on fire and they leave, like this. Come on, stick with me. I just want you to look at it a different way and look at a deal. I think there are great times to share this kind of information. And I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not a meeting hater, and I don't hate the discussion meeting format. It's not that I hate that kind of stuff. I just wonder why there's so many of them at the expense of. Go back and look at any metropolitan area and look AT how many book studies they have compared to how many discussion meetings they have. And after a while, if you're thinking man or woman, you're going to sit back and go, why are there so many OF these meetings like this? We have 1,500 meetings in the Dallas-Fort Worth area every week, 148 groups, 1, 500 meetings in The Dallas- Fort Worth area like that, and 90% of them are discussion meetings. And unfortunately, the ones that are labeled book studies, most of them are just places where you pick up the book, read a paragraph, and then use it as a launching point for your discussion so that the discussion starts looking like this. Well, I know Bill felt that way, but, you know, for me, and we just head off into a deal. We're not studying the text. We're nicht studien die Doctrine. We're niet studien what a common solution looks like. We're just using it as an launching point to a discussion. Too much? All right. I'll be nice. I promise. I just, there was an old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song that was talking in the center of this song. There was a line that said confusion has its cost. And I just think that we love the song and I love the idea that we could recognize that sometimes we're our worst enemy, sometimes within our fellowship. As I've gotten older in this, I think some of you guys are like me and some of your gals that have been around the rooms for a little while. As I'm here longer, I tend to step back more and look at the bigger picture of AA. I tendto look at what we look like to everybody else. Remember, who is it? Charlie Sheen that slung all that crap against AA a couple of years ago. And there was some crazy-ass stuff said. And there have been a couple other guys, movie stars and stuff, high-profile folks, that have said some amazingly unkind things. The problem is that when you go back and look at some of the things that they said, they're right. Some of the things that we do in AA look pretty strange in certain areas. You may have a stand-up kind of group that doesn't allow that and you're on page and I'm not talking about you but I think that each and every one of us if we're open and honest with ourselves have been around AA groups that were just kind of off the chain that just did some crazy stuff like this but you have to understand that in any situation the world at large judges us. We got this thing where we We hope at some point in time that alcoholism and drug addiction is dealt with on par with everything else that's out there like this. So it should be no different than a man that's got diabetic, that's diabetic, he drew a genetic bullet, he has a predisposition to the disease, there it is, and it's no different with our own addictions like this, and yet sometimes we get so crazy out there doing so many crazy things that it gets embarrassing. And sometimes you think we ought to be our own police and just pay attention to what we're doing. And if it gets out there too far, let's just kind of correct it, move it back a little bit and see what the deal is. I want to wrap this up real quick. I had been at Primary Purpose Group almost two years, and I'm sponsoring a couple of guys there at the group, but I'm still not doing any 12-step work at all. And we're going to talk about this stuff some tomorrow. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time talking about it like this, but I want you to be clear on something is that the book was really clear what we should be doing and we need to look at that and then ask ourselves the questions. I'm now almost nine years sober, doing much, much better. I've got two years of big book underneath me. I understand the text. I understand how to teach it a little better. I understand kind of how things line up better, but I'm still not doing any 12-step work like that. Let me ask you this question just between buddies. Y'all can be honest with me, okay? How many of you guys ever did something in the arena of 12-stepped work, like you drove a bus for a treatment center or you picked somebody up or you did a little stint in a group office like this and then didn't do it anymore, but you played it forever? You just liked it? Am I the only guy that ever did that? I drove a bus one night for a treatment center by Denton like this, and I'm telling you guys, for ten years, I'd go like this. I'd throw that bus up there at that deal like that. It's like I'll milk it for everything it's worth like that, and sometimes we do that. Sometimes we don't see the bigger picture that our sanity around this stuff is directly connected to this idea of being of service to somebody else. There's some great, great information out there. But for a lot of groups, it's kind of dissipated like that. How many of you guys belong to groups that do no 12-step work whatsoever? Some have some commitments. Some have no commitments. When I travel, I'm in lots of AA groups, and I'm amazed at how many times I will look at bulletin boards and chalkboards and stuff, and there is no indication of any 12-stepped work anywhere on the deal. I'm not judging it. And I'm just saying, as a group, sometimes the healthiest thing that you can do to change a group's course is to go ahead and get some commitments and get those young buckaroos excited about the idea of going out and carrying the message. And so finally, I got sick enough again. I started feeling myself getting goofy again in AA, which leans back heavily into the idea that self-knowledge will never be enough. I don't care if you can quote the big book. Self-knowlege is not going to be enough, and I found myself getting Goofy again, And I remember talking to Clifford one night and asking him about it. And Cliff just told me, he said, Myers, I've been trying to get you for two years to engage with us and to do 12-step work. And I said, Clifford, I don't think you're being fair, brother. Who do you think drove you to Salvation Army last night? And he goes, well, you did, Myers. Thank you very much. Who do YOU think did the talk? You did. Who do You think stayed 30 minutes later and passed out big books and answered questions? You did Who do YOu think spent on text messages and emails all day long answering the people that we talked to last night. Well, I guess you. He said, thank you. Thank you. I mean, driving me around is some nice piece of service work, but it's not the 12-step work that Bill Wilson... I mean otherwise Bill Wilson would have wrote it on the deal. Step 13, drive an old dude around while he does 12-stepped work. I mean it's... That's stupid. That's crazy like this. And so what he would do is he would force me over... He had forced me to go do it, and I didn't want to do it. And I did it, and my life was transformed. Guys, I can't... I'm trying to put this into perspective like this because some of you guys have experienced it. You know exactly what it is that I'm talking about. The moment I got off my rear end and started doing something for somebody else in the rooms, the moment I stopped saying, I've had a crappy day, I need a meeting, the momentI stopped saying that and I started saying, in a couple of minutes I get to go down to the meeting hall and try to help some folks, The moment that it shifted off me and what I wanted, what I thought I could get, the moment that I made the distinction, everything began to shift and my life got instantly transformed into something that was worth living. It's an amazing thing. Some of you guys make life pretty tough going like this and some of you will stay frustrated just like I was because you can't hear what you need sitting in a bunch of meetings and you're staying frustrated. A lot of times we want our sobriety to come from an external source like that, and it's not going to happen. Sobriety, true emotional sobriery, this cool stuff that makes you get up in the morning excited to be alive, this stuff comes from an internal thing that happens once we do something which looks like let's see if we can kill self. Let's see si we can demolish ego. Let's si if we set aside everything that makes me want to stay comfortable. Because, listen, we'll talk about it some tomorrow. But isn't at the end of the day, isn't this the big problem with most 12-step work? I don't want to be uncomfortable. I'm afraid you're going to ask me something I don' t know. I'm afraid that maybe I'll mess this up. I don''t... Let's see. Reruns of Storage Wars or going to the Sally to carry a message? Storage Wars? I don'T think I've seen that Storage Wars. I think I'll stay and... Really? You have an opportunity to change and affect life like nothing else in the universe. A chance to do something so profound that it would change everything in another person's life. And we're going to choose storage wars? Really? I'm not judging it, guys. I did it for a long time. Long before there were storage wars, there was... I mean, they got a gig one time that they wanted me to go to and they'd been asking me and asking me and finally they stopped asking me and one night on a Friday night I was sitting at home watching cartoons on TV. Cartoons! cartoons on TV. And it made perfect sense at the time. Perfect sense. Did I have a little moment of guilt? Yeah, but there's some badass cartoons, man. I need to, I need to. It's just, it's just amazing to me. And I watch what happens and I watch the way that this thing sets up and I see these guys and I See the lives transformed. I can't tell you there's not a week goes by that I don't get text messages or emails or personal visits from people that I talked to 10 years ago at some of those wind-up joints in Dallas, and they'll walk up and go, you know, I know you don't remember me, but... And they'll tell me about when I met them and this kind of stuff, and I'm just going like, could anything be sweeter than to know that you had a hand, had a part in transforming somebody's life? It's an amazing deal. Your ego says, I don't want to do it because I'm going to feel uncomfortable. And what you have to do is, for some of us, you haveと just simply believe that there's enough of us that love you enough already to tell you the truth. I've got nothing to gain except maybe a healthier fellowship, but in the bigger picture, nobody pays me to tell you that if you'll get off your dead butt and go help somebody that your life will be transformed. And yet we still have people that don't want to sponsor, people that do not want to do this, people that do not walk on. The only thing standing between you and the life that you dreamed of is your own ego, your own arrogance, and comma, your own old ideas. You see? And this is part of what we're going to do. We'll spend a bunch of time tomorrow talking about this idea of how to get clear of some of these old ideas that are set up like this. Old ideas can be a lot of things, guys, a lot OF things. Do you ever stop and think about this thing? I mean, we're scouts on her. I'm almost done. Honest. Do you ever stop and think About how often We find ourselves in a situation Where How many of you Think that you're born a bigot You're not We learn how to be a bigOT We learn what jealousy looks like We learn How to lie We learn How to be dishonest And for a long time These can work to our advantage So we hone them Practice them We work on them just like it was a musical instrument we were trying to learn how to play. And it's the craziest thing. And it is no wonder that some of us get here, sober up, and then look in the mirror and go, holy, what is that standing there? Because how many of you guys thought that every character defect you had was connected to booze and dope? Me. I thought the moment I put all that stuff down that my wife was going to say, there's the man I've always wanted. And what she did was, she looked at me seven years sober and she said, Myers, you put the cray in crazy. You are a fruitcake. And she was right. She was right and so the hard part was unraveling all this stuff and unlearning a bunch of old ideas and that's pretty cool like that. You will see a life transformed like that and then you will look at yourself sometime and you won't even know yourself. Other people will, it'll usually come through somebody else first and they're going to go, golly, you used to be the most selfish guy I ever saw in my whole life and now you're not. Remember? How many of you guys would lie even when it was easier to tell the truth? I mean, sometimes the disease takes you into this kind of stuff. Sometimes that's part of just being, our survival instinct is tied to this sometimes. But the reality of this stuff is I'll never forget what my wife told me one night. She said, Marcia, you have no idea how cool it is. I'm always delighted that you don't drink and do that other crap anymore. I'm so excited that you're there. But I've got to tell you, the fact that I can trust you to be where you're going to be and mean what you say is the most amazing thing in the whole wide world. And I get to travel all over the world, and I getと be gone a whole lot like this. And I asked her one time, I said, Do you ever worry about me? And she said, Nope, for two reasons. And I said What is that? And she says, A, You're the ugliest guy in the room, so I don't worry about you with girls anymore. And I started laughing, and then I said what's the other one? And she Said, Because you're an honest man. And I went, holy shit. He's right. She's right I love you guys Let's go smoke a fast one and we'll come back in a few minutes like this and Chris will do this Thank you