Without History There’s No Hope — Knowing Where AA Came From Is the Only Way to See Where It’s Going – Sandy R.

Well, here we go. We're now on lecture number two, but before I get started, I didn't really appreciate the 11 of you that came over and woke me up to tell me that Jerry did a lot better than I did. That did not happen. I didn't think that was too funny. But we've done a lot together, and I know what wonderful perspective he has. And thanks, Jerry, for agreeing to do that. Part of what I'm going to talk about in this section on the society that we all belong to is the fact that in order to really... Be a completely well-rounded, mature member of Alcoholics Anonymous on a spiritual path, you really should know a lot about our history. And my favorite historian is Ernie Kurtz, and I'll talk about different books and stuff. And he said that without history, there's no hope, which is an interesting concept. And I see what he's saying, is that if you don't have a sense of our history and the course that we've followed through all these years, it can be confusing as to where we're going or what's happening as a fellowship, as a society. And... Um... If you're not familiar, there's history books that are written by the fellowship itself. A.A. comes of age, Dr. Bob of the good old-timers, and pass it on. And recently, they tried to come up with another history book that the fellowship put together, but nobody could do it. Nobody could agree on it. And it's going to become increasingly difficult for us as a society to agree on recent history. And so I don't know if we'll see another book that is a history book that is put together by our fellowship. That's just a guess. Yes. So we have to rely on... People. Outside the fellowship. And amongst them, there's about eight books that I think are really good. And Robert Thompson was our first historian. He just had a book, Bill W., based on interviews. And... The advantage of outside history books... Is that if they see something that deserves some criticism, they're going to include it. Whereas when you write your own history, you leave that out. Just out of modesty or something, you just... Don't want to include certain things. And so there's a plus to both. And... Bill spent a lot of time writing A.A. Comes of Age. And it followed a theme that he had, which I call a rush towards maturity. He just wanted, somehow, to have alcoholics, recovered alcoholics, and Alcoholics Anonymous. When people think of us, he was hoping... They would think immediately of very mature people. That's quite a Herculean task for anyone. But I think he really was obsessed with it. Because when you look at the themes for the General Service Conference for a number of years, it was coming of age, we accept maturity, our responsibility. And all these things. And of course, if you look in the 12 and 12, in Step 12, there's that wonderful comment where he said a group of eminent psychologists was asked to look at us as a fellowship, and this is in the 50s, and give us their feedback. And their feedback was, according to the book, that we were childish, immature, and grandiose. Terrible blow. Terrible blow. And I think if someone came to an AA group business meeting, an outside observer, they might conclude that right away, as they watch the petty arguments going on. And so, and Dr. Bob and the good old-timers, obviously, the focus is more on Dr. Bob. And they have the great photographs. And it gives you a sense of where you came from. Who put this stuff together that led to your sobriety? And Pass It On is about Bill. And there's more emphasis about his work, photographs, etc. And we're also blessed with a number of movies. The first one was James Garner and James Wood. And recently I saw the Bill W. movie that I thought was just wonderful. And so these are all part of the history that's available that as you move along, it really is necessary, in my opinion, to be a good sponsor, to be someone who is worth following. I don't want to say a leader, but someone who has got the complete roundedness to help set the tone in your home group and in your community. And to have some wisdom that is based on familiarity with our history. Now, my favorite, and I brought these two books along, is Ernie Kurtz. And he wrote this first, this was the first one. I'm preserving the dust jacket because this is the first printing. And it goes from the A.A.'s origin up to shortly before Bill died. And Ernie was a student at Harvard and wanted to do a Ph.D. on Alcoholics Anonymous. And they said, yeah, go ahead. So he went down to New York and asked if he could have access to all our files and they gave it to him. Which is amazing. Because he was able to see in there things that hadn't been reported in other history books. And he included them. This book is also by him and it's called A.A. The Story. And it picks up where this book leaves off. So it goes from shortly before Bill's death to 1987. So since 1987, that's 25 years. Without this type of history, I don't know if Ernie's going to, or is up to doing anything like this. Now these are quite detailed. It's a Ph.D., so there's more footnotes almost than there are text. And as you get more into it, and you get more familiar with this, you find the footnotes are more fascinating in some cases. He just dug out things that are quite remarkable. As the history sinks in, it serves as a navigational guide. Because you can just see, here's the path. And it started here, and we're here. And you can see that if we follow the same principles, it'll just continue on. And it gives you a sense of being comfortable where we are. So, in order to get this thing started, just to see how exciting we can make this talk, I prepared a list of history questions that I'm going to ask you all. And I was going to have it be a contest between this side of the room and this side of the room. But we can see that all the smart people are on the same side of the room. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, it wouldn't be fair to do that. So we're just going to open it up to anybody that want to raise their hand, just for the fun of it. And if you get it wrong, who cares? Some of them are very simple and others are so obscure. I'm going to have to read the answer off the page. Okay, here we go. We need some volunteers. Our co-founders are William G. Wilson and Robert H. Smith. What does the G and H stand for? Bingo. . Griffith, right off the bat, a winner. Thank you. . Did you get that? Middle of the dish hold. Okay. Now we're going out to Akron. Reverend Walter Tunks was the minister Bill called from the church directory in the Mayflower that led to the meeting with Henrietta Seiberling and Dr. Bob. What other two roles did Reverend Tunks play in our history? Ah, it got a little harder. Nobody? Even Bob? . Okay, he conducted Dr. Bob's funeral service and his church was the one selected by Firestone to have the Oxford group come to Akron, which was a big deal. So he was very involved with the Oxford and AA and a great lover of AA. . All right, I don't think anybody will know this one. Lois's grandfather was a minister in a certain religion. Bill and Lois were married in a church of this religion. Oh, I see the hands going up. What religion was this? Swedenborgen. Swedenborgen. Everybody's heard of that, right? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He was a regular guy. He had a job. He was about 52 or 53 years old. And God started talking to him. And he didn't really go and tell anybody. He just wrote down everything that he received over the next 15 years. And as he got older, he shared his notes with people. He had no intention of doing anything with it. But after he died, people said, hey, we got a new religion here. This came from God. And it had all kinds of differences with Christianity. The second coming had already occurred, and this was going to happen. And boy, the religion took off. And, you know, it came over here and went to a lot of different countries. And it has. There's still some of it left under a different name. We found a church near Tampa, and I forget what it is, the new whatever. Okay, what state were Bill and Bob from? Boy, the whole room knew that one. What is A.A.'s founding day birthday? All right, we got that. How about it? Dr. Bob had A.A.'s first slip while doing what? Medical convention. What was it? Drinking, yes. That's a better answer. I'm going to put that in here. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Thank you, guys. Which of our co-founders had a giant tattoo, and what was it? Dr. Bob? Dragon, sir? Dragon, a large blue dragon that went around his whole left arm with red fire, and a 16-point compass. And the rumors were that he got it while drunk. at Dartmouth. I had all those years in the Marine Corps drunk, and I never got a tattoo. I just don't understand that. All right, let's go to Clarence Snyder. We're halfway through. Why did Clarence Snyder disobey his sponsor, Dr. Bob, and leave the Akron-Oxford group meeting to commence a separate meeting in Cleveland, Ohio? Catholics? That's right. Everybody hear that? Clarence was a champion 12-stepper, and he was rounding up guys from Cleveland, new alcoholics, and bringing them down to the meeting in Akron. And a heavy percentage of these guys were Catholic. And when they got sober, the priests wanted to know what happened. You know, Larry, what's going on? You look wonderful. Oh, I'm going to Oxford meetings in Akron. Well, you can't do that as a Catholic, or we'll excommunicate you. So they were between a rock and a hard place. And the big book had come out at this time. And Clarence had brought a new guy down, and very often the wives went with him to all the meetings when it was Oxford. So he left the man to go through five days with Dr. Bob to get sobered up. And on the way back, he's commiserating with the man's wife that he's got these Catholic guys, and he can't keep bringing them down there so he'd like to start a separate meeting from Oxford so that the priest would give him a hard time. But he had no place to hold the meeting. The wife is thinking, gee, if I volunteer my home, my husband will have no excuse for not going to the meeting because it'll be in his own house. So she volunteers her house to Clarence and they started the meeting and Dr. Baum and some of the other Oxford people came up and tried to stop it. But the meeting went ahead and since the big book had come out they called that meeting Alcoholics Anonymous. Cleveland Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. And later on, Clarence noticed that he was the first one to start a meeting with the name Alcoholics Anonymous so he, not being very shy, went around telling reporters that he started AA. C'est la vie. Okay, who was the all-star catcher from the Cleveland Indians? Raleigh Helmsley. Somebody gave me a baseball card. Of Raleigh Helmsley. I think it's a great souvenir. He caught Bob Feller, if anybody remembers this. One of the first 100-mile-an-hour pitchers. And he was a great baseball player, but his drinking caused all kinds of trouble. As a matter of fact, reporters would follow Raleigh when he went out at night because he knew he was going to be in trouble. Because he knew he was going to be in trouble. Because he knew he was going to be in trouble. Because he knew he was going to be in trouble. They knew he was going to get in trouble and they knew they'd have a great story because he was going to do something that was worth reporting. Once while the team was traveling on a train, he went around and collected all the newspapers he could find, put them in an upper bunk, set it on fire, and went back to his room. So these were the type of things he did. And the manager heard that he was going to be in trouble. The Oxford group had sobered up some alcoholics. And this was valuable property. So they went to the manager. I mean, he went to the Oxford people in Cleveland and said, how much to sober this guy up? And they said, it's free. We don't charge anything. But he'll have to go to the hospital in Akron for five days. And the manager said, he won't go to hospitals. There's no way we can talk him into that. Well, unless he goes, we're not going to be able to do it. So they had one of their pitchers hit him during batting practice with a pitch. And then the trainer ran out and said, oh, God, Raleigh, you're going to have to go to the hospital. This is really serious. And they ran him off. And he never drank again. And he ended up in, I wish I had known this, he ended up right outside of Washington, D.C. Well after I got sober, I could have gone over and met him. But I wasn't familiar with history then. And he gave a talk in the Cosmopolitan group, which was one of the first black groups in AA. And I got a copy of the talk. And it's really funny because he was AA number seven. He said, this is AA number 78. That's pretty senior. And so someone passed this along to the leader of the group who introduced the talk. He said, this is AA number 78. And the leader said, well, I'm about to introduce AA number 78. We don't use numbers in our group. Having no idea. And then this was really AA number 78. And he gave a wonderful talk. Now, the reason, and this comes out a little bit later in another question. The reason he was important was once he got sober, the reporters had no one to follow. All the excitement was gone and his batting average was way up. He wasn't making any errors and they wanted to know how this was possible. And so in a press conference he announced that it was possible because I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. And this got picked up by all the papers around the country. All-star catcher joins AA. Batting average goes up. He's an all-star again. It's a big plug for AA. Even though it was an anonymity break. And I think it got as many inquiries as the Liberty Magazine article. So sometimes there's unintended consequences to screwing up. Okay. Who was Ruth Hauk and what role did she play in AA history? Bill's secretary? Huh? She typed the big book? Absolutely. When Bill, when he got Hank Parker sober, who was one of the early AAs in New York, Hank, yeah, he had, Hank wrote the chapter to the employer. And he wrote the chapter to the employer. In our big book. And it mentions in there that he was employed in a large corporation that had 3,500 people. I think it's 3,500 working for him. And then he got fired by Standard Oil. And he got a little resentment about that with his drinking and everything. So he started a little co-op in New Jersey. I think it was Honor Dealers or something like that. And Ruth Hauk, he hired as his secretary. And he was going to get gasoline stations and distributors in his area and form a co-op where they'd be able to buy at discounts and eventually get even with Standard Oil. Yeah, sure. So he hired Bill. He said, Bill, you don't have a job. Come on over. And the two of us, we're great salesmen. We're going to corner the market. And Ruth Hauk said that she was hired over there. Nobody sold anything. And that they just kept bringing drugs in. And they'd be in the back sobering them up. And then they decided to write the big book. And Bill would stand over dictating to her. And she, sometimes they didn't have enough money to pay her. So they'd give her stock certificates. In works publishing, which had not yet been incorporated. Here, Ruthie, here's 25 shares of stock for your thing. Well, anyway, unfortunately, Hank got drunk. He fell in love with her and wanted to leave his wife and all this. And when she turned him down, he just, lost it. Got a big resentment. He thought Bill talked her into not marrying him. And went up to Cleveland and started really bad-mouthing what was going on in New York. That Bill was going to make a fortune off the big book. And money was being stolen and all this. And he and Clarence Snyder created such a stir up there that the, uh, Cleveland contingent demanded that they bring the records up. That's not an easy thing to handle if you're Bill Wilson. And he brought the records up. And after everybody examined them, they saw that they were broke. Nobody was stealing anything. And they actually apologized. While we're on that, once the stock shares were divided between Bill and Hank and the members that bought them. And once the book caught on and they saw that AA was really going to be a significant success, they wanted to get the stock certificate back so that the fellowship could own them. We would own our own book. And most of the members were glad to give it back. But they got paid for it. But Hank didn't want to give his back. And if he didn't give him back, we, I don't know where we'd be in terms of our book. But he came into the New York office on a tear, complaining about something. And he looked at the furniture and it was his furniture from the oil company over in Philadelphia. He said, you stole my damn furniture. And Bill said, well, if you give me the stock certificate, I'll give you your furniture back in 200 bucks. And he took it. And that's how we got ownership of our big book. All right. During the period 1939 to 1941, a major effort was made by AA. Boy, my voice is gone. You guys are lucky. To secure publicity for AA and the big book. Some of these occurred on their own. It's just what were these major publicity that occurred between 1939 and 1941? The Cleveland Plain Dealer. That's the newspaper in Cleveland. Yes. Jack Alexander's Saturday Evening Post. Gabriel Heater on the radio. Rockefeller Dinner. The postcards were connected to Gabriel Heater. That was where he was. That's where they were announcing it. There was this one Irish guy, Ryan, who knew Heater. And Heater was a famous radio broadcaster. And in his little show, he would have a two- or three-minute interview with somebody. And Ryan was able to get him to book him. But Ryan kept getting drafted. He got drunk. And Bill was a little worried that he wouldn't show up for the radio show. So they put him in the YMCA in New York City with AA guard around the clock until the radio show took place. And they sent out the last $500 was postcards to all the doctors east of the Rocky Mountains. Telling them about this new fellowship. Tune in to the Gabriel Heater show. You're all about how to sober up your alcoholic patients. And get the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And when they went down to the post office box, I think they had seven postcards. A couple of them were from drunk doctors, so they couldn't read what was on them. And I think they got two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And things weren't looking good. Saturday Evening Post, I think most people know that, that the original mission was to go over and get the straight scoop on AA. Obviously they were pulling the wool over the public's eyes with all this good stuff. Oh, they're helping people. It's free. So Jack Alexander would like to do expos�s. And so he came over to investigate AA. And when he got through, he became one of AA's biggest friends and biggest supporters. And the article that he wrote brought in thousands of requests to join AA. Cleveland Plain Dealer was Clarence Snyder again. There's a book called How It Worked. It's out of print, but if you can get a copy of it, it's just about Clarence. Now granted, it's from his point of view, but what a character. He has to be one of AA's greatest characters. And Ruth Houck said that if he had been more hospitable or more in harmony with Bill and Dr. Bob, then we might have had three co-founders. Because he was the champion 12-stepper. His energy started the first inner group. Wrote the first pamphlets up in Cleveland. How to do jail meetings, how to do hospital meetings. I mean, it was just... His vision was that there would be centers around the country that would do their own thing. And there wouldn't be this one center in New York calling all the shots. Sometimes I agree with him. Raleigh Helmsley gave his Saturday Evening Post and the Rockefeller Dinner. Probably the Rockefeller Dinner should go down in history as the single event to remove the stigma of being an alcoholic. Because here's this man inviting all his friends, bakers or whatever in New York, and having it appear in the newspaper. It's all over. John D. Rockefeller has a formal dinner for drunks. And some of the reporters made fun of it. But in general, it gave legitimacy to Alcoholics Anonymous. And that is something to be very, very grateful for. And he never took his eye off of AA. And a lot of the people that were on his staff became trustees in our early fellowship. So there's a great deal that came about as a result of Bill complaining to his brother-in-law, who happened to know Rockefeller's personal secretary and set up the meeting. Who was AA number three? Bill Dodson. Does he have any other thing that we should mention? Lawyer. Yes, a lawyer. The man on the bed. The man on the bed. Who said that? Good answer. You know our picture, the man on the bed? That's the, who is being portrayed there. Is everybody familiar with the man on the bed, the picture? Okay. You can get it from New York. When did the practice of giving out chips originate? Sister Ignatia. Boy, we got sharp people here today. Sister Ignatia would give, when they finished the treatment with Dr. Bob, and she was a pretty stern little gal, and she would call each drunken and give them a sacred heart. Medallion. And tell them if they're gonna drink, they have to bring it back to her. And they think a lot of people stayed sober rather than go back and face Sister Ignatia. And from that it went on. There was some silver dollars that were common in different parts of the country. And they would drill a hole in it. Guy over at St. Pete, good friend of mine, on my anniversary gave me his with 50, I mean with 48 holes in it. It's just quite a nice thing for somebody to give you. And of course they don't, it's not the same all over the country. The white chip is, but the rest of them, depends on where you go, whether the blue one is this or the red one is that, or now we got boxes with two and a half months and all kinds of things. Would anybody like to have three months? Come on up, we got money. What was moral rearmament? It evolved out of the Oxford group and became huge. This thing that Buckman got started, they had one in Washington D.C. and it looked like the who's who of America was there. To continue with this, we can save the world by saving individuals morally. That if we transform individuals, we can transform countries. And of course, AA is certainly based on the transformation of individuals. Producing a society such as the one we're describing, it is the transformation of individuals. Why was anonymity originally adopted? I didn't hear that. Fear. Okay, fear of being overpowered by all the alcoholics that would want to join. It was an unjustified fear. Once the drunks in my neighborhood find out that I'm sober and willing to help them, there'll be a thousand of them at my doorstep. So I've got to stay anonymous for control purposes. And so we got our anonymity on really a kind of a wrong basis. And boy, look at it. It occupies two of our traditions and became just such a powerful part of our program. Anonymity is almost synonymous with humility. Getting, if I'm anonymous, then I'm nothing. You know, I'm just rich as Richard, an alcoholic. And you go, that's not much of an identity. I'm Richard, an alcoholic. That's like saying I'm John, just a child of God. Sort of a throwaway line. You couldn't have a better identity. And it was achieved by getting rid of your resume, which is most of us' identity. Who are you? Oh, here's my resume. Whoa. That's impressive. Went to Harvard? Yeah. Ph.D.? Oh. Worked over here? You know Senator Jones? Wow. This is really impressive. Impressive. Yeah, it is. A lot of people tell me that. It's very impressive. And then we come in here. We go, who are you? I'm Joe, an alcoholic. That's a much more powerful identity than any resume. And when we come up against that anonymity and humility, we can re-look at our resume and say, this is the talents that I have that might help your corporation. And this is the stuff that I could be useful at. And I'd be glad to come over and work for you. It's not demanding anything other than the opportunity to use these God-given talents in the best way possible. So you see, just by taking anonymity and humility and applying it to a resume, you can transform that document. Into something that has no ego in it. Which is really amazing. So history, if you're not interested in it, I really think it's something you should put on your list to consider. Kurtz, I've been, I've been just digesting his footnotes and digesting, and he just keeps emphasizing what AA is. What are the essential principles? And the more I read him, the more I realized that our preamble is way out of whack. We exchange our experience, weakness, and hope. We exchange our powerlessness. We don't have any strength. It comes from God. And it just, we are very limited. When we go on a 12-step call, we tell them how screwed up I am. So that you can listen to me. We don't tell them how successful I am. Hey, come join AA. You can be the president of a corporation like I am. And I do this and I do that. So it's really, we exchange our limitation as a human being so that the next person feels comfortable admitting that they may have some limitations. It's the first time they're comfortable admitting they aren't perfect. It's a strange thing. And granted, from our surrender, we have access to strength or power, but it doesn't come from inside of us. And so it's just, I like to get one on Grapevine editors, which is where that came from. But it's funny. I've been around a long time. I never saw that. It never dawned on me that there is no strength. There is no strength. The reason I brought up history in this part, which is the second part, it's almost as if all the unanswered questions, in your mind, about our society, can be found by studying our history. Where the same problem may have been addressed 25 years ago. And you'll be able to look at a solution. It is, I'll give you an example. Accidentally, one of our little discussion meetings turned into a history meeting. And it's a very simple thing to do. You just have people volunteer. They raise their hand. Okay, next Tuesday we need a volunteer. Tuesday after that, Tuesday after that. And whoever volunteered goes and researches some topic. They could have three months sobriety and they're out there researching. The internet's filled with, we got a lot of history sites, etc. Then they come back next week and they give a little 15 minute presentation. Somebody came in with a Rockefeller dinner and they had the menu. And they just go and give this little presentation and sometimes they have some handouts, pass it around. And then it's open for sharing and a lot of the new people don't really have something, but the old timers there can fill in and it starts developing this interest in history. And so I just pass it out as a suggestion because it just happened by accident and it's very interesting to watch people. Now one other thing, and Bob was talking about it, there's a whole website devoted to destroying AA. What's it called? Orange? A period of orange is what it looks like. Yeah, A period orange. This guy's been around for years and it's designed to just make it look like the worst organization and we're up to no good and don't trust us and we're liars. I don't know who would spend that much energy hating AA. But there was a comedian, geez I can't think of his name, and he had a line that said, no one liked me in high school because I was so popular. And maybe that's his problem, is that when you mention AA almost anywhere, you get a favorable feedback about our society. And that can be irritating to people. You know, nothing but good news. And so I think people go out of their way to try and find something wrong. The first one I remember, we're almost out of time, was some psychologist wrote AA Cult or Pure and came up with this whole thing, it was a big cult, and it didn't really do what it said it did. We have found a way to cure alcoholics psychologically and they had these experiments that they did and adverse reaction or whatever. And they had alcoholics sober for five years and did very careful studies. And some other psychologists about five years later did a study on it. And they found out that the, the results on how the alcoholics were doing was done by calling the alcoholic and ask him how he was doing. And some of them were dead and they were still being carried as doing well and all that. And so there's that aspect, but in, and the other thing I'll put in before we wrap it up, and I'll talk more tomorrow, is that AA as a society is in a bigger society. And the bigger society is not the same as it was when I came in. It's very different in terms of acceptance of religion, of spirituality, and so on down. Because AA was actually founded right around when Charles Darwin's ideas were being grabbed. And scientists were starting to be the ultimate word on what the universe is all about, whereas religion had been in the past. And in just the time I've been in, it's almost as if science is the new religion. It holds the answers to everything about the universe and who you are and all the questions. So alcoholics coming into AA today are being influenced in a way that wasn't there when I came in. This is just a whole different thing. So when they come in and want the prayers stopped, and all that, they have a bigger motive than anybody did in the 60s. And it's because of the peer pressure that many of them feel. The universities are just, that is the religion of the universities. So when someone comes into AA from that environment, I've had one gal from Harvard tell me that if her classmates found out she had anything to do with God, they wouldn't talk to her. Now that's a lot more pressure than I remember. There wasn't anything like that pressuring me. I was the one who didn't want to hear anything. But it was just that it wasn't convenient to me to hear anything. I didn't want, you know, my sponsor said, forget about the Lord's Prayer. You're going to love it. And about five years later, I loved it. I could hardly wait for the meeting to end and be part of that. It was just wonderful. And I think back, what if my sponsor said, oh, well, then we won't say it. Just look what I would have lost. But I didn't have the social background to feel that it was necessary to push for this. So you can see not only is our society subject to change, but the society that we're in is entirely different. We have consumed an hour. And I can't think of anything else to add to this part. And so I'm going to say that when we finish this, I want to say a few words. So if you want to say a word, say it now. Any word at all. I want to say just a couple things if you've never experienced silence. You pick up any spiritual book, and it'll tell you that silence is the language that God speaks. That that's where God lives. That the more we can become comfortable with the silence, the more we can listen to what's going on in the silence. Feel free to smile at people. And if you're at dinner and you want to pat somebody on the back and whatever, we can communicate with smiles or we can just stare at our dinner. It doesn't matter. But if you've never done it before, I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised when the time is up and you realize that you may have learned more in this three plus hours than you've learned in the last couple months. There's a surprise waiting for you in there. So don't feel apprehensive or anything. So let's just start the silence. And I like this sign behind me. Simply allow everything to be as it is. It's a wonderful thing to reflect on. And from this moment until we meet out there at quarter after eight or in here, that's it. Thanks for listening.