The necessity of having a homegroup at the Men Among Men Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland

Well, we wanna get started here so we don't run out of time. We've got one little last thing we'd like to, present. Our home group back in the States is the Hermosa Beach men's stag and we like to call it the greatest alcoholics anonymous meeting in the world. And recently, since we've had more spiritual growth, we've stopped saying that. You know?

But, yeah, except for this this this last time that I just said it. Yes. And, this meeting I think we've got some slides here. This meeting started in 1948. Okay.

And what we're gonna describe to you is, the explosion of that meeting. And, we'll get going here. We'll give you a little bit of history of it. And what happened is, the meeting blew up over a specific incident, and what some of us did is we put together an effort and we did a group inventory to try to resolve these issues. And what this is to us is the the actual, a living experience of the traditions and of unity.

Jay, alcoholic. Yes, Jay. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, we've been talking about working the steps, sponsoring, how do you do it correctly. And, so I I grow up in this AA meeting that's an old school meeting. It's a chaired meeting, which means we don't recognize hands.

Okay? When you're new, you sit down, you shut up, and you listen no matter what. People with under a year do not participate. Now when I came to the meeting, it's an hour and a half meeting, never get up and get coffee, never go to the bathroom. You stay seated and listen to the participation during the entire meeting.

Very important. You can't stay sober if you don't follow those rules. When I came to the meeting, there were, like, 7 guys at the meeting. So I'm number 8. It's a 90 minute meeting.

Never was I able to participate, because I had under a year and, obviously, I had nothing to say. Of course, I had a wealth of experience. And it was it was very, very hierarchical. Now the other thing that was great about this meeting is is the meeting starts in Hermosa Beach. And then about 11 years later, they opened an Alano club in the neighboring community, Manhattan Beach.

I come to the meeting. It's still the Hermosa Beach men's stag. It met in Manhattan Beach for 40 years, and it stayed the Hermosa Beach men's stag. Just a little rigid. We didn't like change at all.

In fact, in 1988, it broke up over moving into a large room. In the Alano Club, there's 2 rooms. There's the small intimate room where you can really tell the truth, and then there's a large well lit room, which is obviously not conducive to carrying a message of depth and weight. So you can imagine this is in Southern California. Every many people are still smoking back in these days.

And so we've got, like, as the meeting starts to grow, because it really did have a message, everybody's jackknifed into this thing. There's like 65 guys. Everybody's smoking. It's summertime. There's no ventilation.

It's a nicotine sauna. Yeah. I'd come home, I'd have to wash my hair 3 times before I could get in bed. And we don't see that. The meeting is getting very, very factionalized because we're doing AA correctly.

We're going out and saving the world and, you know, we're always talking about, you know, steps, God, and sponsorship. And then all these cocaine addicts come in. Have you seen these people? Now I am from an era where cocaine was not addictive. We just did it all the time.

We weren't heir to the technology that some of you have enjoyed. So when we a bunch of guys wanted to move into the large room. We had a vote, and it was voted down. So those guys started another meeting. 2 months later, we had another vote, and we moved into the large room because we're brilliant.

And, One of the things that happens in Alcoholics Anonymous in general, and it certainly happened in our meeting, is the meeting becomes everything. Now, that's kind of a natural progression. It's my home group. It means a lot to me. I've been going to that meeting for 22 years, so I get I get real protective of it, and kind of the community of it.

Well, one of the things that started happening is the common welfare of the group becomes secondary when you're focused on the structure of the meeting, because what you're trying to do is get the people to adapt to the structure. And some of the things that'll come out of that is is that there are things that you believe threaten the structure of the meeting, therefore, threaten your sobriety. And, chanting principles before personalities, god could and would if he were sought. In California, we read chapter 5 and chapter 3, portions of it, at every single meeting, constantly. It's just it's a tradition, and what people will do is they will chant the last few lines of a given statement out of the big book when that is read.

There are people that feel that chanting is a threat to Alcoholics Anonymous, and which is bizarre to me, But these people feel it. We actually had a vote in the meeting, and it's in our format. There will be no chanting or chiming in. So when the reader reads that format, everybody repeats and chiming in. No.

This is a difficult thing for me to describe to you what all this means. It's the way it is. I know it's not like that in Reykjavik. The correctness of it becomes foremost. So what began to happen in our meeting is is that factions began to be set up in the meeting.

We had cocaine corner. There is entrenched power in the meeting where certain people sit in the same place all the time. You know? No matter what. No matter what.

So when I walk in there and somebody has taken my seat, I get a little pissy about it. You know? But I try to cover it up. You know? The attraction of this meeting when you I've I've came to this meeting later than these 2 guys.

But when you come into the meeting is there is clearly a message. There's a strength in this meeting that's attractive. So when you go in, it's like I made the the grave error of never having been to this meeting of sharing about a problem I was having with my girlfriend. And the the error went out of the room. And a guy leaned over to me and said, we share about recovery from alcoholism after that.

Told me that and straightened me out. And I was embarrassed, and I was afraid. You you you will if you come to our meeting and someone shares and they said, when I first came here, I didn't like it here. That's a common theme. When I first came here, I was afraid of you guys.

We've been called the dickwaggers meeting. I think that's not fair because what unifies that meeting is there's examples of Alcoholics Anonymous program in progress. Everybody in there or I'd say a larger percentage than most meetings are sponsoring people. Not everybody in there. That's not true.

Many, many people are working the steps in there. It's rare to find anyone who hangs in with that meeting for very long who's not actively working the steps. It's hard. It would be hard to do, you you know, to do that. There's an examples of sponsorship.

We actually do now. We voted into our format. At the end of the meeting, we say, who in this room is available for sponsorship? If there's a 100 guys, 98 guys raise their hands. The 2 guys with one day are like, what?

You know? And, but they can't say I didn't know how to find a sponsor because there's a guy on either side of them going, hello. And then the enthusiasm for the newcomer. EJ said at the close of yesterday's talk, if you wanna know how to get the newcomer when you walk into the meeting, talk to guy who you don't know. If you see a guy standing off by himself, it's hard to stand off by yourself at the Hermosa Beach men's stag.

You get surrounded. And if you share that you're going out of your mind and you might drink or you're new or you're new to the the town, if you're a visitor, you will leave the place with more phone numbers than you know what to do with. That's the attraction and the strengths of this group. You wanna do super righteous? So because we're the greatest meeting in the world, we don't do a lot of self examination.

We have steps. We have concepts. We have traditions. We don't have to really look at ourselves. And I really believe that what we're describing is the same thing that happens.

I know it doesn't happen here, but it happened to me between the time that I had about 10 14 years sober. That the inventories that I was writing, that way I was looking at myself was very rote. I knew what my problems was. My sponsor knew what my problems were. My wife would be happy to tell you what my problems were.

You know? So it was all self evident. No reason to do any real introspection. So what happens is if you don't have any real introspection, super there's this community that I call the we got this from Ivester, the super righteous. These are the people that believe that the meeting is the most important thing.

They're the ones who believe that, that they don't have to participate in a lot of the Alcoholics Anonymous community work. Then there's the drug addicts. Who are they? Do we test them? You know?

Then there's out in AA. They're hiding out in AA. Then there are what I like to call myself, the informed. These are the people like myself that I've sponsored and that they've sponsored. And see, one of the things that that that if I sponsor you, at some point, you gotta go do your time in general service.

You have to spend a couple years in general service. You have to spend a couple years in central service. You have to spend a couple years in hospitals and institutions. And if you got sober at the Alano Club, you gotta serve on the board at the Alano Club one time too, which is a whole other form of self flagellation. But, but the thing is is that I believe that it's really important to be informed about where you're at.

All the parts of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because I'm gonna spend my life here. And I'm not saying you do it all at the same time. That's about 10, 12 years worth of work right there. And it's not a lot of work, but it's it's irritating and inconvenient like the rest of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And then there's what I what I like to call the unaligned, which are people that are very, very in love with the meeting that come, but that aren't sponsored by people in the meeting, but they just love to hear the message and and, and that are involved, within the community. Every Monday Every Monday night, you've got the meeting starts at 8:30. You gotta get there by quarter to 8 to get a seat, to get in it. Very popular, very powerful, very strong. But there's a whole faction in the group that is beginning that feels that they're not being heard.

And I don't mean just by not sharing in the meeting, although that's part of it. It's a led meeting, so people pick on people. And there's a certain people that get picked on all the time. And there's a whole faction in there that aren't being picked on to share. But what I mean by not being heard is they're not they their opinion of the meeting and what's going on is not being utilized.

It's not being tapped. They're not really participating in what's going on. And they're beginning to feel that way. They feel set aside or pushed away in some form or another. The insular part, the self righteous, there's a whole there one particular icon, but kind of him and his lieutenants and a large part of the group of the meeting, guys that I really looked up to, several of which were very close friends of mine, did not participate in AA.

When I look back on it now, I mean, they're just going to meetings. They're sponsoring each other, but they're not showing up at the Labor Day picnic. They don't participate in the variety show. They don't do any take any commitments at the, at our local roundup. You know, they don't help us put on the Christmas party we do every every December.

You know, they they kind of pooh pooh that. They make fun of it. You know? You pass the clipboard around, and they don't they just, Jesus. What that what's that crap?

As if it's something other than AA. So they're not really part of the community. They've got their own little setup, and they only nothing comes into that group that could shake their vision of what AA is. If you approach them with something that looks different, they'll just blow you off, turn, and walk away. They don't wanna hear it.

And in that fashion, that part of the group got quite large and very dominant, and began to enforce itself in the meeting. The chanting thing came up. That group said, no chanting. It's killing AA. It came out of the hospitals and stuff, you know, and I was secretary of the meeting.

At 5 years sober, I ran a campaign to become secretary of the meeting. It was frightening. I had little suckers that had a flag on it that said trust Bill, and I passed them out. I told him you can't do this. He tried to have me impeached.

You know? He really did. I mean, it was really but I figured, you know, in my in my pursuit of becoming president of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, that that becoming secretary of the Hermosa Beach men Stagg, was a huge rung in the ladder. You know? I mean, if I became secretary this is where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.

You know? And if I could run this meeting and I and yeah. Well, they're into they're into sheep here. You know? They know sheep.

You know? Lots of sheep. Anyway, it's an outside issue. So I got elected. It is by far the worst year of my sobriety.

I mean, the the reason that this is a sensitive issue to me is because when I became secretary, if there were any problems in the meeting, they came to the secretary to talk about it. I mean, each one of these groups, if they had an issue, they did not deal with the issue themselves, because that would have meant direct confrontation, like, true human interaction. They come to the secretary and say, you gotta do something about this. You gotta you're the sergeant at arms. You're the boss.

You gotta kick him out. You gotta do this. You gotta you know? And it was awful. I mean, I got almost got into a couple of fist fights.

The focus on doing AA correctly, well, you know, there's there's a couple of things about that. You can determine what correct is. And then if the other people around you think correct is something different, that's called war. And they're you know? Because the This is Europe.

It's yeah. And it began to get flaky around the edges. It got pretty shaky. Actually, Bill, you were there for this. What happened was, this was 3 years ago, about 3 years ago.

1 of the guys in the group, kind of a fringe player in the group, shows up to the meeting with a 15 or 16 month old girl child. And he comes into the room, and he he his marriage was breaking up and he was having some trouble, and he wanted to come to the meeting and he brought the kid with him. So he comes and he sits down, and the meeting starts. 1 of the icons of the self righteous group got pissed about this. Said, you know, we can't have this.

This is a violation. You know? And he goes to the secretary and says, you gotta tell him to leave. Take the kid and get out of here. This is for men and alcoholics only.

Right? So the spirit of the law, the spirit of that law or that rule or whatever you wanna call it, I mean, the whole idea of a men's stag is a violation of the traditions. You know, if you stop in a large part of the world does not agree with having men's stags because the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking. Right? Well, if you make it a requirement that you gotta be a man too, that's a violation of the 3rd tradition, isn't it?

These guys these guys, the self righteous ones, don't recognize that. They use the traditions however it fits within their framework of doing AA correctly. So now, this becomes a violation of the traditions. Now, if the spirit of the law is is that we don't want women in the meeting, do you suppose that spirit includes 15 month old babies? Do you think that's what they were thinking about?

To this day, these guys will hold fast to the reason the meeting broke up is because that guy brought the kid into the room. I think there's a lot more to it than that. So it blew up. We actually took a vote right in the middle of the meeting, and and it got voted the vote was, should we kick this guy and his baby out of the room? I don't know about you, but I had a real hard time voting for kicking some guy out of an AA meeting.

It just didn't sit well with me. So when the vote didn't go their way, the icon and his lieutenants walked out of the room. And for about another 15 minutes afterwards, was a slow trickle as guys were sitting in there wondering, oh, wow. Should I follow him or should I stay? What what about the I don't.

You know? And I'm sitting in there, and you slowly watch him go, well, fuck it. I'm out of here. You know? You know?

The people nobody knew really what the hell okay? So the icon, this explosion and go on with our allergy to change, or we had to turn and start the introspection that we had not been doing. And the the irony of all this so there was the denial. We're good. We're fine.

It's okay that a bunch of guys who do the program very well and who are are good sponsors and are good AA members left, we're gonna pretend that that doesn't reflect on this meeting. We're gonna pretend it was the kid. Then there was the fantasy. I don't really understand the fantasy. Well, that that we could bring it back together.

That we could just ignore it without doing anything, and it'll all come back congealed together. Half the memberships left. It was a big full room. It's half empty now. Desire to recapture the past.

We're just gonna make it like it was. This is a good thing. It's gonna be like it was. Then the irony of all this is that we had a steering committee, and a guy who left said, you know, there is a a little known thing in Alcoholics Anonymous that meetings do inventories, tradition that Is the the the tradition that that the argument is about is that the group comes ahead of the individual. Are we behaving correctly?

Are we sincerely doing Alcoholics Anonymous the way it should be done? Lot of guys didn't wanna look at it. They said don't pick at the wound. Don't pick at the scab. It's okay.

They left. It's okay. We're okay. There were questions that we posed. We had meetings at Bill's house.

We got the format for the for the for the inventory as a group. People were against it. The interesting thing was the people that showed up for the steering committee that were most vocally against it were people who had not worked inventories in their own recovery. How can I let the group do an inventory when I haven't done an inventory? Clearly, the inventory is wrong.

So we asked the questions. We did some homework. We looked up how you do this. We met at Bill's house, and we just discussed, first of all, we have to get the group to vote. It's a group conscience.

It's not 4 or 5 or 10 of us. I think about 10 of us. Us. So we're gonna tell the group we're doing an inventory. That's what got us into trouble in the first place.

So we had to present this to them and ask them, are you willing to do this? And people came to the steering committee. There was some debate, that kind of debate in AA that can go round and around and around. And we finally decided that we were gonna do this. So the informed you know, I mean, this is going at Bill's house.

I sponsor Bill. I'm, believe it or not, one of the other icons. I know you can't believe that. And, and so, see, having had experience of general service for 8 years, going through and doing all the different commitments. You know, I'm not afraid of this stuff.

I think it's been something that I've wanted our group to do for years, but these people that were rigid, they really didn't wanna take a look. And and so, you know, this this whole question of what is the purpose of the group? Well, we know what the purpose of the group is. We're gonna do AA right, and we're gonna enforce it on everyone. Is that really it?

And then this question about what can the group do to what more can we do to carry the message? And, you know, for us it was it was what kind of meeting environment are we providing for people? Do the new members stick? Is the turnover excessive? Well, the truth was in the old days and the problem that we've got now is you can't get a seat if you're new.

If you look at the the, the meeting directory and you show up to this meeting at 8:30 because it's a closed men's stag, you can't find a seat if you're there at 8:15. Can't do it. Are all the members given an opportunity to speak? That was clearly not happening. That was clearly not happening.

And are all members able to participate in group activities? I think we did a real good job of that. I I think that was one of those things that we were we were pretty clear that we were that we had done a good job. But this was the the the questions that we gave to every member of the group. We printed them out.

We had a steering committee meeting. And then at the meeting for couple weeks, we made sure that there were copies of this so that everybody would go home and do their homework. I know you'll probably find this difficult to believe, but I was kind of from the background pushing this thing in a certain direction. I had a vision. You know?

And and I was having fits over it. And one night, in particular, I was at home, Karen and I, and, I said to her, I says, you know, if these people don't do this, I'm out of here. I mean, there was a lot of resistance to the inventory. And my position was if I if the if they will not allow themselves to be enlightened and do this the way it should be done, I'm I'm gone. Jay and I both 1 years before this, Jay came to me.

He goes, I gotta get out of this meeting. It's not going. And I told him, I said, you can't leave, man. You can't leave. You just can't get up and leave.

Then years later, I went to him and I said, I gotta get out of it. These guys are pissing me off. And he goes, you can't leave. You know? So now here's our opportunity to really get this thing going in what we feel is the right direction.

This is what should happen. So I said to Karen, I said, you know, this is it. I'm I'm just if they don't do it, I'm out. And she said to me, you say you believe in this stuff. You say that God really does manifest himself as the group conscience in these meetings.

You say you believe that. So why don't you take this thing, lay it before the members of your home group, and then step away from it? And if they don't do it the way you want to, don't take your ball and go home. I've never hit her before. You know?

Another reason why I love her, she can tell him the truth and get away with it. I have to pay publicly. I wanted to talk about this thing. 1 of the one of the biggest resistance behaviors of Alcoholics Anonymous as a group is, what about the newcomer? You know, we we had this thing in California where smoking became, you know, bad, and it must be stamped out.

And, you know, I mean, it really is you know, like I say, the best sponsors in the world still smoke because they can always be right. But it it was a horrible thing in the Alcoholics Anonymous community. And people were actually saying, we've got to keep smoking in the meetings because of the newcomer. Now we all know that all newcomers smoke. I mean, that's true.

They smoke crack. They smoke but but but the thing is is that they when they're at work, they can't smoke at work. When they're in the house, their wives or girlfriends or their dogs probably say, get out of here. We all just smoke it in here. But somehow in the meeting, they had the divine right to smoke.

Odd. We don't wanna change because of the newcomer. I belong to an 11 step group. Little sidebar here. It's one of the great meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the world.

And it really is. It really is. It has yes. It has nothing to do with the fact that I attended on a regular basis. Every Thursday night in Manhattan Beach, you're welcome.

7:30 PM. But what what happened in that meeting is Wayne's friend, Bill's friend Wayne was was made secretary, and he had the audacity to say in this meeting that had been going for 40 years, why don't we meditate at the 11 step group? You would have thought we said let's have sex publicly. I mean, the group just went crazy. And it was all about, what about the newcomer?

Now this meeting, which was not the greatest meeting in the world at the time, had become a thing where about the same 18 aerospace engineers and realtors met on a weekly basis to kvetch and bitch about the pricing of their real estate. It was it was not focused specifically on the 11th step, and then they went out for pizza. We had a group conscience, and all they were holding forth about, yeah, what about the newcomer? We can't be meditating in the meeting. The group conscience was screw the newcomer.

We're gonna meditate. The meeting went from 24 to 90 in a room that can hold 60. And most of the at least half the room had under 6 months of sobriety because they wanted to have an experience of meditation. You know? And one more time, here was this thing about what about the newcomer being used, against the evolution the spiritual evolution of the group?

So one of the one of the, things argument about, we wanted to do the inventory in the meeting, not in an outside area. We wanted to do it in the meeting because we felt that if we did it somewhere else, no one would show up. All these people that were against it would not participate. And we wanted to manipulate this thing so that they would have to participate. So it became important that we do it in the meeting time, and the argument was is, well, what about the newcomer?

Well, we're having one of these steering committee meetings, and this new guy who's been coming in and out of AA for about 10 years is standing outside. 1 of the guys that didn't agree with the inventory who was standing outside sent the newcomer into the steering committee meeting. The newcomers sitting in the meeting as we're debating whether this would be good for the newcomers. And he stands up and he says, this is incredible, man. I've been coming I've heard about this stuff in AA.

You guys are really serious. You really care about your group. I'm impressed. And a silence fell over the room, you know. I mean, this guy looked like a newcomer.

He was disheveled. He had 1 or 2 days sober, something like that. He's still sober, this guy. He's an active member. It impressed him.

I mean, you couldn't have asked for anything better. You know, the voiceless ones, in this process of putting the inventory together, in this process of putting the inventory together, of coming up with the format, the voiceless ones, the ones that weren't being heard, rose to the surface. All of a sudden, there was this core group of members in the group that we were kind of insensitive to that came to the surface and began to take con charge of this whole effort that we were starting to do, of putting this inventory together. They became the primary supporters of what it is we were trying to do. The question came out, Jay and I, what are they up to now?

What are they trying to do now? Now, this was something that we tried to get our group to do years before. We wanted to make this meeting. We wanted to turn it into a group and start other meetings and make it larger than it was. And this was just pooh poohed and blown off, you know, just just sit down and be quiet, you know.

Don't don't rock the boat. Well, now what was happening is in this whole effort, there was this thing, well, these guys are manipulating this. Bill is manipulating this. Jay is manipulating this. So we extracted ourselves from the process.

About halfway through it, we just backed right off and got out of it and let them run with the ball. When we had the actually had the inventory when we actually did the inventory, a very odd thing happened. Everybody went along with this ultimately. We passed out the questions, everybody was to go home and fill out the answers. When we got to the meeting itself where we were gonna do the inventory, we put some names in the hat, and we pulled out one person that would run the inventory.

So it was a blind draw. And, of course, the good lawyer's name came out of the hat, which was really cool. You know, it was divine intervention. And this guy, was to lead the actual inventory as we did it. We had a 3 minute timer.

No one was to go beyond the timer, and and there would be this kind of, unaligned leadership role that would happen in the meeting. An odd thing happened that evening. The timer never went off. No one went over the allotted time. Everyone was able to participate.

All the questions were answered. We had 2 guys that were their job was to take minutes in the meeting. In the process of putting this meeting together of the steering committees, there was yelling and screaming that happened. 1 of the members came up with a civility statement. He sat through one of these things, and I think maybe I might have yelled at somebody.

I'm not sure. You know? And he came up with a civility statement that we started reading at the beginning of each meeting. And we read it at the beginning of the inventory about how we're to behave. The civility statement was honored.

No one yelled at anybody else. No voices were raised. And we prayed before the meeting. Steve and I And Steve and I, in particular, looked at each other and went, what was that? What the hell just happened in there?

Those aren't the same people. It was an incredible experience. It's something that you that it is truly experiential. You that it is truly experiential. You're to scribe it, if you weren't really there to really witness it happen to see everything just along.

People participated. The voices were heard. So what's the group like now? We had a lot of empty chairs, we did that inventory and leading up to that inventory after we blew up. We don't have any empty chairs now.

A lot of young people. We have a we have a a a panel of the Salvation Army. There was an interesting story. A guy that I sponsored, we call him dude because he is such a surfer. He had been to he'd be very good looking.

He'd been to the Salvation Army. He'd been through the Salvation Army program 3 times. And I said, you know, you really start to gotta give back to Alcoholics Anonymous. And he took a panel by himself to the Salvation Army for years. Every Wednesday night, we asked him to give us the panel.

We wanna take it as a group. And from his clutched fingers, he let us take the panel. We started a new meeting on Friday nights. We became a group. We got to be bigger than the meeting.

We're the Hermosa Beach Monday night group. We're not a men's stag anymore because on Friday night, Karen and her group and the women that she went to her people and said, we wanna start this, group about the 12th suggestion, sponsorship. And we have a guy or no a guy come one week and a woman come the next week and talk about active sponsorship, and there's questions and answers. Yeah. Like I said, we had a 110 people.

We went down to 45 people. Now we have a 110 people, and there's people standing outside of this meeting. It's an attraction, not promotion. 66%, I'd say that's very close to correct, or under 5 years sober. And 23 years old, there's a fire in the belly of this meeting with young people that came to this meeting as this process was happening.

There's a particular, we call him Morpheus. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, an African American guy named Deandre. He's he's called Morpheus, and he brings well, we call him that.

And he brings, his flock. And like I said, at the end of the meeting, when we we've now put into the format and I also wanted to say about the unheard. It is, for a long time, been a format of this meeting that somebody who shared last week cannot share this week. So it isn't that the same, you know, 20 guys share. It's the same 40 guys because we alternate every week.

And now, when it's a new thing in our format that at the end of the meeting, it says, if you're willing to sponsor or available for sponsorship to sponsor, raise your hand. And and you to understand the power of that is we talk about Alcoholics Anonymous program of sponsorship and the 12 steps all throughout this meeting. We talk about it all throughout the meeting. There is an ever invariably new guys, and they raise their hand and introduce themselves at the beginning of the meeting before they know what's gonna happen. And they raise their hand, and then we talk about sponsorship.

They have to hear it. And then we say, we're here. Here's your sponsor. Here we are. It's a big net.

A couple other things happened in the meeting, format that couldn't have couldn't have happened before. Number 1 is is that we also instead of just we always had just AA announcements. But now since we're a group, we could also say we'd like announcements. Is there any, announcement regarding members of the group? So now people that have moved away that it's their birthday or somebody whose wife is sick or whose mother is in trouble or who's, you know, going to court or whatever can say, would you pray for me, please?

This is a wonderful service that people can put whatever it is that they want before the group. It's not a share, but they can state a problem or something and that they they can have the spiritual power of the group with them. And it's said just moments before we say the prayer. So what's happened to this this this this group that was busy doing things right? Have we become a bunch of hippies?

No. Don't worry. No. Don't worry. There is more ink and more leather in the meeting that is safe to be around, just so you know.

And there's a lot of lot of unaligned metal too. But, Bill Wilson would be proud about what this meeting is. It's embraced the future. We have no fear about who it is we are. And one of the things when we were putting this together is we saw that we really needed to do this again.

That like what what we're what I'm suggesting is. I know that here you don't have this problem. But our meeting was not taking inventory. And just like when we talk about sponsorship, we were sponsoring ourselves. And we weren't taking a good look at ourselves.

And we saw that we need to do this again. And so we're really we're really future. In other words, these kids are coming to us not because we're we're holding them down and saying, okay. This is the way to do it. There's they're attracted to the power and the joy of recovery that the older members demonstrate.

And what's the fruit of it? The Tweakers have become alcoholics. You know, they tweezer. Oh, excuse me. A tweaker goes like this.

Generally, after smoking methamphetamine or or or or rock cocaine or any other things, any anything that, like, comes from a glass pipe, they all kinda look the same if you put them in the thing at the same time. Question was, what's a tweaker? You don't have tweeters here? What do you call them? Speed freaks.

Speed freaks. Yeah. I do erotic pieces. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Sputniks. That's a really old one.

I have to come up with that. But, anyway, that they have become alcoholics. These young drug addicts, you know, that always had a 40 ouncer with them while they were smoking rock, they have they have become members in good standing of our group. And it's not because they're just being good. It's because they want what we have.

And not only do they want what we have, but now they have what we have. And they're there to pass it on to others. Just in closing, this is a great statement here. Don Pritz was a former, trustee of of Alcoholics Anonymous and a and a great member of AA, part of the Denver Group Movement and a very structured kind of a thing. A great man.

Truly a great man. He died here recently. Every problem in Alcoholics Anonymous can be solved through intelligent, informed sponsorship. I need to know where I am. If I know where I am, if you come to me, I can tell you where you are.

What the rules are, what the parameters are, how to behave, how to show respect for the program that you're part of. One of the things we heard Tom Ivester, recently, Jay and I were doing this thing at a another event. And Tom said that when the hospital programs really exploded around the country, when they became big in the late seventies and the eighties, Alcoholics Anonymous did not handle that very well. We became adversarial to a large degree. We positioned ourselves against the hospital programs.

We didn't like the fact that all the newcomers were coming out of hospitals instead of right off the street. Now Tom and Sandy Beach will both tell you that people talk about the good old days. There were no good old days. You know? That's a fantasy.

I mean, when you were having to take somebody through withdrawals in your living room, that wasn't fun. You know? It's much nicer to have a place to take them to where they can have some medical treatment. Bill Wilson would have been ecstatic about the hospital programs. This is something that he fought for for years.

He called it the big twelve step. Him and Chuck Chamberlain, Tom Pike, many other people went to Washington to try to get them to acknowledge this, to get the insurance industry to do this, to not criminalize the alcoholic. Well, when the hospitals came into being, we didn't handle it well. So let me ask you this. What are we gonna do now about these young people coming into Alcoholics Anonymous?

Are we gonna handle it? Is it true when we say, when anyone anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of Alcoholics Anonymous to always be there? Is that true or not? Wilson fought for that in 1965. He wanted that statement made as part of Alcoholics Anonymous' lexicon.

I sponsor guys now that are 5 years sober and they're 21 years old. For a while, I said, will they see me as a father figure? No. They see me as a grandfather figure. You know?

They look at me with those eyes. Oh, you poor, lame, old dude, man. It's, like, it's painful. I mean, I had a Christmas party over at my house, and I'm sitting out in the front yard. We put a bunch of furniture out in the front yard, and all these young guys are sitting around.

We're all around together, smoking cigars and talking about women and doing what men do. Men being men. And, boys being boys. And we're all sitting there, and my kids show up, and my son's standing there looking at me. And I realize these guys are his age.

I mean, it doesn't strike me. You know? These guys and my son looked at me and goes, I had no idea you were hip. This was like and I went, oh shit, I could've told you. You know?

So when Jay says the Tweakers have become alcoholics, how does that happen? How do they know how to behave? We tell them. We let them in. You can come in.

You're welcome here. We like you. We wanna help you. We let them in. Let's not screw this one up.

If these young kids want sobriety, if they wanna change their lives, if they wanna be safe, let's help them do this. Now the guys that left the meeting think that these kids are destroying AA. They see a dilution. You'll hear people say that the success rate back in the old days was 75%, and we've lost it. It was not 75%.