The topic of Spirituality through the Steps

Is it possible to turn the house lights up a little? A little more? That doesn't affect it, does it? Because it's really difficult to talk at an AA meeting without seeing other alcohol. And it's kind of a feeling of show business when you just have spotlights and dark crowds.

And the lady said to me before I got up here, she said, and she's a lovely lady, and I know that she meant well. And she said, I've told everybody how good you are, so be real good tonight. And and I understand that, but I also understand the danger. If this ever gets to be show business, we're a real problem. And, so I don't think good has anything to do with it.

I'm just gonna tell you about, my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. And, I had prepared to give a glowing, acknowledgement to the committee for the 40th Annual Florida State Convention. And I was gonna get up here and tell you how wonderful it was, and then they read Ann Landers. Oh, god. I get to a lot of conferences all over North America, and, and conference committees would be well advised to come here and take, a lesson to how to run an AA conference.

It's been a really close. It really is. I don't say that to be ingratiating. It really is. Everything's on time.

There's no hocus pocus. There's no unnecessary stuff except for reading Ann Landers. Now I'm going to forgive you for that, but not today. But it's an honor to be here, and it's a privilege. It is my privilege.

Now if you're new to Alcoholics Anonymous, and you've attended this conference, I know what must be going through your mind. And that is you you you listen to very intelligent, very gifted, orators. People who can communicate communicators who were in, eloquent in being able to explain to you how they were and what happened to them and what they're like now. But the comfort level of the beginner and the comfort level of the speaker is diametrically opposed. And if I'm new to Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm listening to all these polished speakers, I have to say to myself, my god, I never could be able to do that.

I'm never gonna be able to get up in front of all those people, and I'm never gonna be able to talk like that. I don't want you to be intimidated by the speakers that you hear at conferences such as this. You can be inspired by them, and that's perfectly okay. But I don't want you to be intimidated by them. And, it was funny that Ernie reminded me of, of something that, Clancy had told him and I knew about.

And that was one day, a person walked up to Clancy. I don't know if you know who he is, but nevertheless, there is a guy now called synonymous named Clancy, and and somebody walked up to him and said, Clancy, are we all just freaks? And he said, no. Just those that we asked to talk. So don't measure don't measure Alcoholics Anonymous by speakers such as me.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a diverse conglomeration of all kinds of people. We, we don't have jobs. We do have jobs. We live in, average homes. We don't have a place to live.

We live in the White House. We're a strange group of people. Some of us are well educated, and some of us have no education at all. We've been, nominated for the, Nobel Peace Prize. We have played in the Super Bowl.

We have given addresses as chairman of the most powerful committees in the United States Senate. We've lived in the White House, and we've walked on the moon. And we've slept in abandoned cars. And we've been ashamed, and we've been glorified. We are a conglomeration.

It is We are, but we are bright, and we are talented, and we're cursed with sensitivity, some of us that are just unbelievable. Now I understand that there are some people here who are new to alcohol synonymous. And someone told me that there was some large number of people in this room. Now I know that in the other rooms that will be true, and I can't look at them. But is there anybody here in this room that is less than, 90 days sober, and I'll call it synonyms?

Anybody? Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. How many? Sir, what is your name?

Hi, Joe. And, ma'am, what is your name? Pam? Hi. If I keep doing what I'm told, and I keep showing up, and I keep praying, On in the middle of November this year, people I sponsor in connection with my group, the Lamont Oaks Group, are gonna throw a surprise birthday on me.

And what the purpose of that is to celebrate my conclusion of my 25th continuous year of sobriety, and I'll call it tomorrow. When I'm through you're going to know that if I could make it you can make it If you've been through this entire conference, you've heard over a 100000 words, maybe 200000 words. And I'll venture to say that you can't remember 1% of them. I don't think you could remember half of 1%. If I gave you a pad and a pencil and I said, write down what you've heard at this convention, I would bet that you couldn't use 500 words.

Don't hear and try to remember anything I said. I'm gonna say listen to the music. Listen to the music when you attend functions like this. Listen to the music when you're new. He is the music of hope.

If you were like me when you're new, my mind wasn't capable of grasping any great understandings. I couldn't pick up the nuances of these polished speakers, These sincere people who had wonderful experiences, and they related them in a thick place way. I couldn't understand it. I heard the music, and the music said there are other people like me, and I never knew that. Until I walked through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous, I did not know there were other people like me.

It was a wonderful discovery, And yet I know that there's a lot of new people that are in these other rooms, this amphitheater and the smoking room, and so forth and so on, and I I and I want to address each and every one of them through Joe and through Pam. I'm a tell you a funny thing. I always, whenever I give a talk in Alcoholics Anonymous, in a function like this, I always talk to some newcomers. And a lady came up to me, and I don't remember who they are because I do so much of this. And a lady walked up to me yesterday.

Her name was Vicky. I don't know if Vicky is here, but it's really not important. But Vicky walked up to me and says, you don't remember me, but you gave a talk in Orlando, Florida. And it was 5 years ago yesterday or today. And I was the girl that you spoke to, and I haven't had a drink since then.

And she said to me, she said, because after you talked, I was afraid to have another drink. I guess I dropped some of those threatening lines that I used to use to beginners, but I don't we call them beginners where I come from. In my group, we have a meeting for beginners. We call it the beginners meeting. Some people call it sober school.

I didn't even I don't have any I'd share that meeting, and I have for a long time, and it has saved my life. It has given me great understandings in Alcoholics Anonymous, far greater than I could get myself. Because I learned how to learn in Alcoholics Anonymous. You see, I was a very smart guy when I got here. I was a very bright guy.

I was a successful guy when I got here, except my life was in rooms. And, I tried every way. I knew how to straighten it out. I couldn't do it. But I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I learned how to learn.

And I'm gonna teach you tonight how to learn, and it's very simple. If you wanna learn how to live sober and you wanna have a structure in your life that will work for you in all events, first, you have to listen, and you have to be quiet. When you go to your meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and you're new, just be quiet and listen. And when you leave those meetings, remember what you heard. And after you remember, in your life out there, practice what you learn.

The last element to learning is in your practicing of it. Teach it to someone else, because it's in the teaching of Alcoholics Anonymous that we hear the sound of our own voice and come to understand that, yes, I really am a real alcoholic. And, yes, I really know the music of Alcoholics Anonymous. It just works that way. You see, I know how it works because they read it every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, But I also know why it works.

This thing works because something special happens when one alcoholic speaks to another, and it doesn't happen that way in any other condition or circumstance. You may come here, Pam, and you may want to leave here, and you may not like us, and you may not like what we say. But you will never be able to leave here and say, they don't understand. So no matter what you do, no matter how you conclude what your right to live your own life and how if AA has a place in that, you're never gonna be able to say those people didn't know they didn't know how I felt. Here's the bad news, Joe.

Because there's good news and there's bad news. You know, it was hard to come here. It's hard to come to the alcoholic side of the aisle. It is, Pam. It's hard.

It's harder to stay here than it is to come here. Now that's the truth, and where I come from, we tell the newcomers the truth so that I arm them with the ability to take on this thing called alcoholism. And we have some pretty good results by telling newcomers the truth. It really is that way. If you wanted if you challenge me to write down all the things that I think were wrong about Alcoholics Anonymous or what I don't like about Alcoholics Anonymous, I'd have to get a legal pad.

Because I could fill a legal pad with all the things that's wrong with Alcoholics Anonymous. No matter how much I write, I can balance everything that I write about my criticism of of Alcoholics Anonymous if I look just to the other column, and all I need is a little scrap of paper, because all I have to write on that scrap of paper to balance off everything I don't like about alcoholics on, is simply this. AA works. And once you said that, you've said it all, and you don't have to say anything else. It's really true.

Now when I said it's hard to stay here, I I don't know how I could give you a better understanding that, but to tell you that when I walked into my first meeting of Alcoholist Anonymous on November 3, 1971, I was the person in the world of alcohol synonymous who had the least amount of time. I was sober 8 hours, maybe sober. I don't know. But I hadn't had a drink for 8 hours, from the time I passed out until the time I went to that meeting. So for all intents and purposes, everybody in Alcoholics Anonymous was sober longer than me.

And when I walked in that room, they gave me a book, And inside that book that says there are a 1000000 people, sober and alcohol synonymous. So I'm not a fool. I could count. There's a million and then there's me. Every few years up until recently, General Services in New York publishes a survey of the membership of Alcoholics Anonymous.

They don't do that anymore. In my understanding, they're not gonna do it anymore. Is that right? They are gonna do it? I'm sure they are?

I'm glad. I'm glad because the last survey indicated that I was in the top 2 percentile, which means that 98% of all the people in Alcoholics Anonymous have less time than me. Isn't that sad? Isn't that sad? The sadness is that here I've moved from 0 up 98 spots to the top 2, and I couldn't have done that if the people that were here when I came had stayed.

Had they stayed, I could not have moved up. Now don't you dare infer from what I'm saying that Alcoholics Anonymous does not work. Alcoholics Anonymous works just fine. And when they wrote and published in 1939 the observation that rarely have we seen a person fail, they were told the truth, who have thoroughly followed our path. And the cunning and the baffling and the mysterious thing about Alcoholics Anonymous and Alcoholics is that we won't do it.

This is the only disease recognized by any board or any doctors or any psychiatrist or anybody that the people who suffer from it have no enthusiasm for recovery. And that's what's so baffling. And that's why people die in Alcoholics Anonymous every day. And as fast as they come through the front door, they go out the back door. And often we don't even know who they are.

And that is not has nothing to do with the power of alcoholics and animals. It really doesn't. But I'm gonna tell you that I have to do some kind of, oh, 2 things we're gonna have to do. Number 1, I want, we've been here a long time, and I understand, and I'm a realist. Anybody that needs to get up at any time to go out of that room, just feel free to do that because I may do that.

And, Joe, you're sitting there, and you have a watch on. I want you to raise your hand 50 minutes from now. You know why? Because if I do that, I will not fall into the trap of falling in love with the sound of my own voice. And these people have just so much that they can endure.

Okay? So you do that. You raise your hand. 50 minutes from now. I had a pill, Joe, that could make you a social drinker.

Now this is a guaranteed pill. This is a pill that I have that I have researched, and it works perfectly. You take this pill and you are a social drinker, and you continue to be a social drinker the rest of your life. What do you think, Joe? How does that sound?

Where do I sign? He said. Thank you, Joe, because I needed that response to go on with the rest of this little silly story. Isn't that amazing, Joe, that guys like you and I have never really understood the meaning of the words that we use? I offered offered you a pill that would make you a social drinker, and you, without any hesitation, says I'll take it.

Joe, I don't think you take it. I really don't think you take it. Let's talk about it just for a minute, because maybe it'll help everybody that's in your shoes, new to Alcoholics Anonymous, maybe come to grips with these terminologies that we use. Social drinker. What do you know about social drinkers, Joe?

Let me ask you when the last time you thought you'd go out at night and you get a have some fun and you thought to yourself, let me see. Let me call one of my social drinking friends and Joe, if you're like me, social drinkers are bored. They hold no interest whatsoever for me. Why would I wanna go for out with a social drinker? There's no excitement.

Social drinkers got wanna know where they're going. I don't wanna know where I'm going. I have no idea where I'm going. They wanna know when they're coming home. I don't know if I'm ever coming home.

Joe, when you when social drinkers meet each other and they say, Hey, let's have a drink. You know what they do? They stop, They have a drink, and then they go home. Would you like to live like Joe? Joe, soaks the drinkers watch him at a bar, if you can get him at a bar.

And that's the the bartender puts a drink in front of him. Watch real close what they do. You know what they do, Joe? They talk. Now I had that experience in dramatic technicolor form, trying to do a talk for Cecil in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Now, Father, you know to get to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, you have to take 5 different airplanes. And I was coming from Naples, Florida, and that's really an experience, Naples, Florida to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. And in the last airplane we were on, it was such a rickety plane that the drinks were free. And on my left were 2 young men, and they ordered Molson Glager. Molson's a beer.

And I'm a connoisseur of beer. And this person, I couldn't distinguish if it was male or female, that was the steward person, poured this ale in these 2 styrofoam cups, and I watched the head of that beer rise. It's beautiful. And and they had little trays, you know, you have in the airplane. And I looked, and they talked.

And I thought, no. And I looked away, and I looked out the window at the frozen tundra of Manitoba. And it was, like, 10 minutes, I guess. It seemed like 10 minutes. Maybe it was 2.

And I just and the head was falling, and they hadn't picked up the drink. And I'm thinking, control yourself. And I look out the window, And I wait, and I turn around again, and the drinks are still there. And now the head is gone, the beer is flat, and I wanna kill them. How do you like to live like that one day at a time, Joe?

Social drinkers, when they're asked to have the second or third drink, you know what they say? This is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. No, thank you. It's not the punch line. Here's the punch line.

No, thank you. I'm starting to feel it. I have a look like that. Unbelievable. I'm starting to feel it.

I'm gonna give you this explanation, Pam. It's not really you don't have to be a rocket scientist, but I've learned this. Every person who takes alcohol in their system, alcohol has an effect upon them. Alcoholic or non alcoholic. It changes how they feel.

It changes how they look at their environment. A change occurs. You see, when people, social drinkers, feel that change occur after the second or third or first drink and say no thank you, the reason they say that is because, Joe, they like how they feel, and they like how their environment looks to them. And they don't want to change that. And when the change starts to occur, they say, no, thank you.

I've had enough. Joe, I don't like who I am. I don't like where I am. I don't like the environment in which I find myself. And when the change starts to occur, I say more.

And I will always do that as long as I live, because I'm an alcoholic. And Ernie said, to him that means I can't take, eat, drink safely, and I agree 100%, but it also means something in addition to me. It means that I am the type of person who has trouble living sober and drunk. And sober has never been my answer, because every time I got sober, I would then get drunk. And I always got drunk from sober.

So when you come and point out to me in Alcoholics Anonymous that I can have sobriety, I tell you that's not gonna work for me, because sober doesn't work for me. There's gotta be more here than just sober. And there is more here than just sober. And that's really the good news. I have to tell you a little bit about myself, only to qualify, because it's a nuisance that you have to do that.

But I'm not going to talk a lot about drinking. We heard a lot about drinking, and we heard a lot of stories this weekend that any self respecting alcoholic could relate to. But I'd like to do something that's sometimes, sometimes not done in AA meetings, And that is I'd like to talk about recovery. Yeah. Sometimes Sometimes we spend so much time talking about drinking, we don't get to the recovery, and they have left, and they never heard the recovery part.

Joe, if you're an alcoholic, there's nothing you don't know about drinking. You know everything there is to know about drinkin' if you're an alcoholic. Pam, do you think I could teach you anything about drinkin'? You know everything there is. Let me talk to you about how to live without having to drink to stand it.

Wouldn't that be a novel kind of an experience for people like you and I? To show you how that worked in my life, I'll tell you a little bit about my life. One day I was told by a sponsor, You'll learn about that later. And it's not really a bad thing. It just seems to be bad.

I had a sponsor who insisted that I take a 4th step. You'll hear about that too. Not from me, but you'll hear about a 4th step and a 5th step. And I was forced to write a searching and fearless moral inventory. Moral inventory.

Keyword, moral inventory. And I'm gonna start writing this, and I immediately start at the age of 6. Ain't that funny? That's just my story. At the age of 6, I was already into moral problem.

How did it happen? I don't know. I had an identity I don't know what my identity was when I was 6. I could tell you when I was 6. My dad told me what I was to do with the rest of my life.

My dad was a factory worker, and he never had any money, and we didn't have a lot of things. We weren't poor, we just didn't have a lot of stuff. And, my dear told me I was to be a lawyer, and I didn't know what a lawyer was. And nobody who's sick knows what a lawyer is. And, when you go out in the playground and the kids talk about what they're gonna do and they grow up, they wanna be police car policemen and firemen and, and, actors, and they wanna be, airline pilots, and on and on.

But nobody ever says they wanna be a lawyer because nobody at 6 knows who the lawyer is. In 1993, I retired after 32 years of the practice of law, and I had to get out of there because I couldn't figure out what the hell it was. All I knew is that I didn't fit and it took me 32 years to figure that out. Isn't that amazing? So one of the things you'll come to understand is we don't necessarily get brighter as we stay sober.

Okay? My dad said I want you to be somebody. Told my brother, I want you to be somebody. See, when you when you you don't have a lot of things, and my parents believed that the key to success was education, and they're gonna give their kids education. They're gonna give us goals.

My dad said, be somebody. Be somebody. Be somebody. And I know he meant well. I know he loved me, but here's what I thought I heard.

You are nobody. You have to figure out how to be somebody. Now he didn't say that. That's what I heard. I had a sense of nobody from my earliest recollection.

I don't know who Frank is. Frank is incomplete and not whole, I know that. But what he is, who he is, I have no idea, but I know that his search is to be somebody. I don't know why that happened, but it showed up in that inventory. Another thing showed up in that inventory, a guilt.

From the earliest recollections I have, I have guilt when I'm 6 years old. I shouldn't have guilt. I know guilt at 6 years old. I remember, one day, it showed up in my inventory. It was funny, but it it was important enough to be there.

My dad tells me I'm supposed to be a lawyer, and I build a tent in the backyard with a girl next door about a week later. And we got some old blankets, and we put them over a clothesline. And we got in that tent. And that day and that afternoon, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to be a gynecologist, man.

Really? From that day on until I walked into Alcoholic Anonymous and then for some time thereafter, Frank was obsessed with money and sex. Now I thought that was bad, but about 15 years ago, if I was really smart, I would have realized that an obsession for sex and money would have in time put me on a pretty good chance to be a TV preacher. I don't know where I got this idea of guilt and why it was always related to sex as a kid. I remember that I learned about God.

Father, I don't want to offend you, but I learned about God from a lady that walked into a classroom of little boys and little girls, and they were dressed in black and white, these ladies. I remember a lady said, I'm going to teach you about God and I'm going to teach you about sin. I was 6 or 7 or 8 years old, and she said, There are 2 kinds of sin. There's a kind of sin venial sin. If you do those things and you die, you have offended God, and you have to be punished, and you go to a place called purgatory.

And then in purgatory, you burn. Now I don't know about you, but I'm 6 years old, and I I don't like that concept. And and apparently, that lady in black and white saw the fear in my eyes, and she and probably the other kids too. And she said, oh, but it's not so bad. If you just do those things and die, when you go to purgatory, you can get out of there in 3 or 4000 years.

When you're 8, 3 or 4000 years seems like a long time. And it was like she unraveled a scroll, and on that scroll are hundreds of things. If you tell a lie, if you disobey your parents, all these things. And I'm I'm 7, 8 years old. I look at those things and I know I offend god.

God's mad at me. God's mad at me. I have offended him, and I'm gonna be punished. That's not a bad start. Couple years later, she's decided to teach us about another kind of a sin.

It's called mortal sin. These are there's less mortal sins. Thank God. It's like a scroll, but there's not as many things on there. But I'm about 9 years old in time she's telling me about mortal sin.

And if you do those things and you die, you're done, baby. I mean, it's over. And I look at that list. I'm 9 years old, and it looks, your neighbor's wife. I'm thinking, god, I wanna do that.

I mean, even when I'm 9, I'm thinking about doing it. I'm not even married, and I'm coveting my neighbor's wife. Now if she would've just left it alone at that, I probably would have been okay. But in the 6th grade, this lady in black and white walked into that classroom and asked the girls to leave. And I thought, here it comes.

And when the girls left, she looked at everybody, but I was certain she was staring at me, and she said, boys, god sees in the dark. And I thought to myself, yeah, but you can't see under the covers. I'm 36 years old, and I'm writing about that stuff. And yet, they did not cause this. I'm not an alcoholic because of some lady in black and white.

I don't know if any of those things ever were said that way. I just heard it that way. And I'm not here to tell you that I that's why I'm this and that. A aide taught me one thing. I don't have any time to try to figure out how I got here.

I got enough trouble figuring out where I'm going from here. See, because I may die while I'm trying to figure out how my alcoholism was caused. I don't know. It's not important. The point is, what am I gonna do with the knowledge that there is hope for people like me?

And am I gonna take any action? So that's that's really what happened. But I drank. I drank. I'll give you a drinking story.

It's no big deal. I, I drank. When I came into Alcoholic Sonoma, I was a shaker. Do you ever see shakers? They're kind of sad, But I was too smart to be a shaker.

How could you be a shaker? And I made more money when I was 27 years old than the president of the United States. How do you do that? How do you do that? How could somebody who's as bright as me, who's as talented as me, who works as hard as me, end up a shaker.

It's impossible. It can't happen, Joe. It can't happen to you, I'm sure, and it couldn't happen to me. But Joe, the funny thing about it is, it did, and I never intended that to happen. And it's funny about this thing called alcoholism.

It has nothing to do with what we intend. It just happened. And I learned a secret, Joe. I learned how to sit in boardrooms and talk about $1,000,000 cases with people and shake. And I tell you what you do if you ever have to learn how to do it: If you want to get rid of the shakes, you drink.

Because if you can get a couple of vodka martinis down, you will suddenly realize that the tremors will stop. Now, you'll intellectually realize that the drink is causing the shakes, but the drinks also make the shakes go away, And once you enter that world of uncontrollable drinking, there's really no room for argument about powerlessness or unmanageability. And when I came into Alcoholic Anonymous, I didn't have any of that. But I remember one day, I drank from the time I got out of law school until I was 34 years of age. And near the end of my drinking, which I didn't intended to be the end of my drinking, I lived a double life.

I like Ernie. I never got arrested, never went to treatment center, never got divorced, never lost a job. I I was the head of the firm. How am I gonna lose a job? The firm's named after me.

I mean, I don't fire myself. I'm not that crazy. One day I had to go to court on Thursday, and it's about 6 $1,000,000 And if I'm successful, I get 2 of those 1,000,000. Now that's not a bad one. And I say to myself, Frank, tomorrow's an important day.

Maybe you shouldn't drink tonight. And I said to myself, That's right! I shouldn't, but I have to go to the country club. Well, Frank, you're a smart guy. You can figure this out.

Yeah, I figured it out. I thought to myself, I'll go to the country club, I'll have a couple of drinks, and there'll be no problem tomorrow. I'll go into court, and I will get that money. But you're going to drink. No, I'm not going to drink.

I'm going to drink something I don't like. Well, what don't you like, Frank? Well, wait a minute. Let me think about that. I decided to drink a lady's drink, something that nobody would like to drink.

I came up on green cream de ment. Think about that. How much green cream de ment can you drink? Now what do you argue? I mean, really?

Save drink. You go, you chashe up to the bar at the country club, and they say, mister Mounts, what would you have? I'll have a green creme de ment on the rocks, please. How much green creme de ment can you drink? Let me tell you how much green creamediment I could drink.

The next morning, I got up, and my teeth were green, my tongue was green, and everything that exited my body was green. And I can't go to court. I never intended that to happen. That's a nothing. That's a throwaway story.

I'm not gonna do a 5th up up here. I can tell you stories that would shame me and possibly shame you just in the hearing of it, and I'm not going to do that because I have a responsibility standing behind this microphone. But I can tell you that it wasn't fun and joy, and when I was 31 years of age, I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I called Alcoholics Anonymous because I was afraid that I was going to go further in this darkness of trying to live and not drink. See, I don't know what's wrong with me, but by the time I'm 16 years of age, I have a I have a sense that my problem is definition.

I live in a world that other people talk about that I don't understand. They use words I don't understand. Here's a word. Hi, Frank. How are you?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. How am I? I don't even know who the hell I am. But I'm suited up, and I present myself as whatever you want me to be.

And whatever that is, I will suit up for that because I desperately need you to approve of me. See, when you don't have your own approval, you have to have the approval of others in some crazy way. If I can get enough people to approve of me, then somehow, in a boomerang effect, I will approve of me, and I never could get my own approval because I never could get enough approval because that's another one of those words, enough. What does enough mean? People say, have you had enough?

Enough what? I've never had enough power, enough money, enough prestige, enough love, enough sex? What's enough? I don't know what enough is. What I am is a conglomeration of things that were best described by newcomers to me.

One day, I walked into the beginners meeting of the Lamont Oaks Group of Alcoholics. We have a little intimate group. You ought to come and visit us. We meet on Monday night. We're right outside the city of Chicago.

And we I suggest that you come early, because we we only have 500 chairs, and they all get filled up. And sometimes we can borrow another 100, but that's all we can get. So we can only get 600 people at our regular scheduled meeting. We have a beginners meeting that is always full, and there's 200 chairs in that room, and they're full every week. People drive a 100 miles to come in that beginners' meeting, and the only difference between that beginners' meeting and other beginners' meetings is we tell them the absolute truth.

And the truth is that this is not a self help program. This is a God help program. We don't apologize for God, and we don't keep him a secret from you. We don't stress the fellowship. We stress the program of recovery.

Kind of an interesting thing, and we tell you and you know how come we do that? Because a lot of us didn't get it, and a lot of us are dead, and a lot of us are drunk. If I tell you what's in that book, I can't I take no risk whatsoever. I take no risk whatsoever. None.

None. If I don't tell you the truth, I cheat you, and I don't want you to be cheated. Do you know why? Because Ernie said it: We have to keep this thing alive. If the people ahead of us had allowed it to be diluted by the time we got here, we would be not here.

And, Pam, when you showed up, there'd be nobody to tell you that this thing worked. It's a very important thing we have here. See, people die of this. Not their heart stops. The the you know the terrible thing, Joe, about alcoholism?

You won't it won't kill you. Your heart won't stop. That might be a long way down the line. What it does is it kills the quality of your life so you don't care if you live or die. And the bad part of alcoholism is after it kills the quality of your life, it may take 40 years to kill your heart.

And the curse of alcoholics like me is that I may have to live with it. So when people say, if you don't stop drinking, you're going to die, I think when I'm new I say to you, big deal. If life has no value, what do I care if I live or die? Isn't that an interesting kind of a thing? I don't know.

I called Alcohol Synomics for the first time and I hung up the phone when I got answer. And I took an inventory that day. I remember thinking to myself, good for you, Frank, you called Alcoholics Anonymous. You know what I did? I called a number and I got a recorded message.

I live out in the suburbs. I got a recorded message, and the message was, good morning. This is and I hung up, and I took an inventory. I don't know if you ever took an inventory, Joe, but I'll tell you how my inventory starts. I'm too young to be an alcoholic.

I'm different. I got trouble. I got pressures. I came from the wrong parents. I got the wrong wife.

I shouldn't have been a lawyer. I shouldn't have been a gynecologist. No wonder I'm not happy. I'm too smart to be an alcoholic. I'm too strong to be an alcoholic.

I'm in good health. I'm too bright to be an alcoholic. Look at all those that wall with all those degrees. Alcoholics, we know what alcoholics are. They're Skid Row bombs.

That's my inventory talking. Frank, you're not an alcoholic. What you gotta do is you gotta figure out how to drink. And I think to myself, that's a good idea. I think I will.

And a year later, I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I got a live woman, and I hung up the phone. Because I remembered having a good feeling the first time, and I liked to have that feeling again, and I took another inventory. By this time, I was more successful than my dad ever thought possible. Ernie said it: We are overachievers.

You tell us, You put a handicap in our way as it has it to do with commerce or industry or dollars or avocations or vocations, and we will outwork and outthink anybody else. I knew how to beat those liars. I just stayed up all night and studied and read the cases and prepared what I was gonna say. And they played golf. You have reached the end of side 1.

Please turn to side 2 for the continuation of this program. Side 2, audio partial No way. And here I am, I'm a young man, I'm in my thirties, and I have more success than I ever dreamed possible, and I'm afraid to live because I know that I don't even care if I die. I remember when my 3rd daughter was born, little baby in my arms. Imagine, you know, how beautiful it is to have a baby.

There's this lady there with this little baby in her arms. And I'm holding this baby and I'm thinking, I don't care if I'm alive or dead. How can you feel that way when you're holding a little baby in your hand? You can feel that way when the when the disease that you're suffering has taken from you all dignity. You see, when I walked into that beginners meeting that day that I was telling you about, I asked the people in the beginners meeting to do something for me.

I asked them if they would answer a question. The simple question is this, what is an alcoholic? If you tell me and I tell you our understanding of what an alcoholic is, we will be on the same page, Joe. And from there, we might be able to determine whether or not, first of all, we ought to be here. Wouldn't it be nice if this whole thing was a misunderstanding and we could leave?

I mean, Joe, I I I don't wanna question your enthusiasm, but I had none when I was new. I mean, when they said, well, Frank, you have to go to meetings. I didn't think to myself, oh, I can't wait. I'm thinking, how many? 6?

8? No. Just you have to go to meetings until you wanna go to meetings, And then you don't have to go to meetings anymore. You just go to meetings because you wanna go to meetings. But once you stop wanting to go to meetings, you have to go to meetings.

I'm thinking, hey, this is Hocus Pocus. You're talking about the rest of my life. And when I knew that, it's not an exciting adventure. So I walked into that room, and I said, what's an alcoholic? Let's talk together, all of us.

And there's maybe 80 newcomers then. This is a lot of years ago. And nobody answered. So what I said to them, and I don't know why this happened, I just said, well, let me let's do this. In the laboratory of our mind, let's make an alcoholic, just so we have some idea what the hell we're talking about it.

I'm not sure if I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it.

I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it.

I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it.

I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. From their experience, their brand new Pam like you, how long are you sober, Pam? 31 days. Joe?

50 days. And who's counting? Right, Joe? So I asked them to fill the out of this test tube with the ingredients that they thought from their perception were necessary to constitute the making of an alcoholic. And here's what they did.

After some hesitancy and quiet, the first person that raised their hand was a little girl who was 16 years of age, and she said, put in fear. And a guy who was in his late sixties and new to Alcoholics Anonymous said, put in depression. And then the class, which we call it, or the group, came a fire. Put in anxiety, put in guilt, Put in remorse. Put in shame.

Put in perfectionism. Put in ego. Put in loneliness. And the hands were going up as fast as I could point. Put in inferiority.

Someone said over here and someone said, put in superiority. Now I'm thinking, my God. And they kept on going and they filled in. There was a lot of fathers. There was a lot of guilt put in.