 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. There are still some seats. So please, if you will, see if we can help you find them. I'd like to just welcome everybody here this evening. My name is Tom Johnson. For 30 years, it was my honor to serve as the chairman of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. In a few moments, you're going to hear from Avana Rahovic. Try to get that down. And the splendid director of the Center for Students in Recovery at the University of Texas. Then, yay, do it. Here she is. Then, following Avana, you will hear from former LBJ school dean Max Sherman, who will be the moderator of tonight's program. A longtime friend of Judith and Bill Moyers, Max is uniquely qualified for his role tonight, and he will tell you why. Now, before I relinquish this program to Avana, I'd just like a personal word. Bill Moyers has been my hero and my mentor since I was 25 years old. He chose me out of a group of 15 White House fellows, first class, class of 1965, to work with him when he was then press secretary to the president of the United States. That, in itself, was an extraordinary, unforgettable experience for me, perhaps the most mind-expanding experience of my entire lifetime. Later, Bill looked after my family. He arranged for a wonderful internship for our son Wyatt at the CBS Evening News in New York. Judith and Bill's son, William, worked with me, and when I say this adjective, he worked with me as an excellent reporter at the Dallas Times Herald, and later, as a splendid correspondent, again with me at CNN in Atlanta. No young person ever excelled more brilliantly than William, not in a newspaper, not in television news. I thought of him then, and I think of him now as simply the very best journalist of his generation. I'm also exceptionally proud that one of William's sons, Thomas, is named for me. What a burden that kid bears. A trajectory to the very top ranks of journalism was deflected, and I guess I like to think perhaps delayed by William's addiction. I remain hopeful that he may return to journalism one day, as you will see from his books, and I hope, if you haven't had a chance to buy them, they'll be available, both of his books. As you will see from that, he is a superb writer. However, as you will learn more about this evening, William discovered that even higher calling, an even higher calling, that of helping others with addiction began a new journey on their road to recovery, as he did. The most important member of the Moria's family who will be coming out in a moment is Judith Davidson Moriaz. Married to Bill for almost 60 years, she has been the caring and concerned mother of William and two other children for the past, in William's case, 55 years. Years of triumph, years of great crisis, especially at least at times when she and Bill searched crack houses to find William. Judith has been Bill's creative partner for 25 years and president of their company, Public Affairs Television. She was co-creator and executive producer of their PBS series, Close to Home, Moriaz on Addiction, and she now serves on the New York Board of the Hazelton Foundation. Now, before we get to all of that, to tell you about one of the nation's very finest recovery programs for students in recovery, please welcome its exceptional leader, Ivana Grahovic. Thank you so much, Tom. Good evening, everyone. My name is Ivana, and I am the director of the Center for Students in Recovery at the University of Texas at Austin. I am also a person in long-term recovery. The Center for Students in Recovery is part of the Division of Student Affairs at the University of Texas, and we are a recovery support center for students recovering from addictions. We're very grateful that UT is the first system in America that is expanding collegiate recovery programming throughout all of its schools thanks to the UT Board of Regents. Before I introduce Dean Max Sherman, I would like to say thank you so much to the LBJ Library for collaborating with us on this exciting event. I personally am very excited about this because William Cope Moyer's book, Broken, absolutely helped my family and my parents in the healing process of understanding what it meant to have a daughter suffering and recovering from an addiction. So to have this opportunity is truly something that I am so grateful for and that we all get to share in this wonderful triumph of recovery together. And now I would like to introduce the former Dean of the LBJ School and former Texas State Senator from Amarillo and a wonderful supporter of the Center for Students in Recovery, Dean Max Sherman. I thought maybe that I had someone following me, but since I don't, I'm going to sit here and do this. I think for the meeting that we have, I have a straw up and saying, hi, I am Max. I'm the father of a son who is an alcoholic and who is in recovery. Joining our son on his journey in recovery has been one of the most transformative experiences of my life. And one of the things that his journey has helped me to do was to get to know William, the son of old friends Judith and Bill Moyers, and to learn about William's two books, The New York Times Best Seller, Broken, My Story of Addiction and Redemption, and Ivana just mentioned that it's a powerful book and to his recently released Now What, An Insider's Guide to Addiction and Recovery. I should tell you that these are tough reads, but I can assure you that they will change your life. This evening is only the third time that Judith, Bill, and William have joined to talk about their own family journey and recovery. One was at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and the other was at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Our format this evening is designed to allow those of you in the LBJ library audience to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the Moyers. After a few introductory remarks by the Moyers, I will ask a few of the questions that you have submitted and we'll try to squeeze in as many as we have time for. So now let me introduce a father, a mother, and a son, Bill, Judith, and William Cope Moyers. Let me start by asking William why he wrote this second book and then why he asked his mother and father to do forwards in it. Good questions, Max. I am an advocate for Hazelin where I've worked for the past 18 years and in my role as an advocate for Hazelin, I help people who have been through what my family has been through and what I have been through as an addict and alcoholic now in long-term recovery for almost 20 years. And in being a public person, I've become a lightning rod for people who need help and don't know where to turn. And I discovered in the course of my own journey, both professionally and personally, that the most powerful story of all is the story that we tell about our own experiences. And yet at the same time I realized too that there's a lot I have to explain, not through my own experience necessarily but through all the resources that the community can bring to bear. And so I wrote this book, Now What, to help explain the following. Trying to make sense of addiction. Making sense of addiction is far from easy. In 2011, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, ASAM, updated its definition of addiction. On its website, its 3,000-word foot-noted definition begins this way. Quote, addiction is a primary chronic disease of the brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry. Addiction affects neurotransmissions and interactions within reward structures of the brain, including the nucleus accumbens, anterior singular cortex, basal forebrain, and amygdala, I can't even pronounce that very well, such that motivational hierarchies are altered and addictive behaviors, which may or may not include alcohol and other drug use, supplant healthy self-care-related behaviors. Addiction also affects neurotransmission and interactions between cortical and hippocammal circuits and brain reward structures such that the memory of previous exposures to rewards such as food, sex, alcohol, and other drugs leads to a biological and behavioral response to external cues, in turn triggering cravings and or engagement in addictive behaviors. Close quote. Wow, even I didn't really get it, and that's my brain they're describing. So I wrote this book to help describe what happens in the brain of somebody who can be raised with everything good as I was. I lacked for nothing emotionally, morally, financially, or spiritually growing up. And yet I still had a brain that causes people like me good people to do bad things, moral people to do immoral things, loving people to act out against the people that love them. And I also wrote the book for people like this, Max. I get thousands of letters just like this one. Dear Mr. Moyers, help my son is dying. I read your book broken that says to hate this disease, not the person, but so help me God. I hate him more than I love him right now, this mother wrote. And she signed off on this long free page letter with this to me. She said, I am begging you, if there is any way my son can be helped, please help me to find it. Please help Scott to save himself. Mr. Moyers, you are my last hope. And so I wrote this book to give people hope. I asked my mother and father to write the forward to this book, because as we know, addiction max is a family disease. Could I ask the two of you maybe then to respond about the family dynamics and looking and having read the books going back to 1889, 1989. It's 60 years they've been married. Addiction, addiction does affect the brain. Well, there's no doubt that addiction affects the entire family. It could even affect the entire corporation. We've had a lot of contact now with corporate entities who tell us, there's one I'm just going to tell you about, is a large electrical service company, ConEd, in New York City, who has a policy that any employee of theirs who comes to them and says, I'm in trouble. I need treatment for addiction. They send that employee to treatment. And then they give him or her the job back when they come home. And when asked, when asked about that, how do you afford, how can you afford to do that? How can a big corporation afford to do that? The answer was, do you think we can send guys up on electrical poles? Do you think we can have guys running nuclear power plants? Do you think we can have employees who need treatment and are afraid to ask for it? So I think on a smaller scale then we have the family. And we have families who have not made it clear that it's all right to ask for help. And when Bill and I were receiving treatment ourselves, because if you have somebody who needs treatment, you probably need treatment too. You need a lot of help for sure. We realized that we didn't cause it. We had to be convinced that we didn't cause it and that we could not control it and that we could not cure it. And you have to keep repeating that to yourself as a parent. And so then what was our role? Our role was to take care of our own health first, make sure that we were okay and getting the kind of care that we needed. And then to start out on that journey with our loved one. And that's the way the story started. We were totally ignorant as journalists, which we are. We couldn't believe how ignorant we were of addiction as a disease. We really didn't know anything about it. We didn't know anything about the real symptoms. We only knew about alcoholics that we called winos or bums. We knew about the people who slept under bridges. But we really didn't know about the upstanding marathon running, a golden boy, young people that we had had so much close contact with. We couldn't realize that our own son could have this enormous problem with such a challenge to his life. Just as war changes nations and families, so does addiction because it is a constant warfare with the temptations of a destructive lifestyle. And so I've been completely overhauled by what I've learned from our experience when I had a longtime friend in East Texas who had fought in World War II. And he didn't talk about the war when he came home. And finally he said many years later, everything I learned about war I learned in combat. And everything I know about addiction and recovery, we learned in combat fighting to help our son save himself. Judith had to find, track him down and find him in a crack house in Harlem. We had to track him down and find him in a crack house in St. Paul. And then finally, and perhaps the most tumultuous period of that 10 year ordeal, we had to track him down, stalk him, stake out and track him down with two armed detectives in a crack house in Atlanta. If you don't think that won't change you, I can guarantee you that it does. And there were times when I wanted to give up and give in and to say the hell with it. And I know that there were times when Judith did that too. All the more so because none of this occurred until he was 30 years old. And as Tom said, an accomplished journalist for the Times Herald and then CNN with all the promise that you would hope in a young journalist. He went off to college, an exemplary young man, a good church member, good community member, had jobs every summer. When he left, Judith and I hugged each other under the arch in our house on Long Island and said, we got through the drug years, didn't we? It was 1977. 1977. And we really thought we had done something supremely superior. And then of course, at 30, the volcano exploded and the next 10 years totally upended our family, our other two sons, you know, the other two children, our son and our daughter went through a lot of great tumult over this. So we had to relearn how to be parents, how to be a family, how to heal with the deep knowledge that we almost lost our son. They almost lost their brother. And my grandparents almost lost their grandson. It is a transformative experience and we're very lucky. The attrition rate is very high in this, in this world, as you know, for alcoholics and addicts, Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman is just one of many who have ended terminally in New York recently. The attrition rate is very high and he had been sober for 22 years. We consider ourselves exceedingly fortunate and are grateful to the doctors, to the counselors, to the friends like Tom who at time and again was there for us. But it takes, you know, it takes a village to raise a child and it takes more than a village to save one. And we've had to relearn how to live with that constant dread in our lives. Could I just ask you to maybe expand just a little bit because as parents, a lot of parents in the audience, how do you let go and not give up? It seems to me that's such a difficult challenge. It is a tremendous challenge to set boundaries and say, I can go this far and I really can't go farther than that. But you know, we all have to be thinking too about what spouses do and what brothers do and what bosses do in this. And I think the most important thing to me has been my own group work, my own professional help, I needed professional help. You know, as a television producer and really I think this started when I was four or five years old, I'm a fixer. I think I was born a fixer and I've made a really good living being a fixer. It just comes to me naturally. And I had to learn that, okay, you can go on being a fixer, but you can't fix people. You can improve situations, you may even be able to fix situations, you can edit and fix the television show, you can fix the dinner, you can fix all sorts of things, but you can't fix people and you have to learn. I had to learn to step back in a certain way and I couldn't have done that by myself. I think it would have been completely impossible. I still have to check myself like four times a day about that. So it, but I wasn't even aware, I wasn't aware that I was a fixer. So in this situation of course I wanted to fix him and we can all tell later if we wanted to about how we thought it would be fairly easy to fix it. The very first day that Bill and I went to the family treatment program at Hazelton up in Minnesota, the very first day they said relapse is something you're going to have to learn to deal with probably. Relapse is an important part of this. You don't want it to happen, but if it happens you must be prepared for relapse because in the beginning I said I know he can do it, no problem. He runs marathons for going to say he played all sports and was in all sorts of every musical thing there was at school and he liked to, you know, he liked to make unusual combinations of things that a kid could do. We didn't really have an adolescent breakdown with him. We had that with our other children, but I thought that that was good and I learned later no that wasn't good. You're supposed to have an adolescent parting of the ways. I didn't know that. It's a very difficult and delicate process because I for a long time said I would just, I wouldn't give up, I would just keep reaching out and you'll see in the first book that he did the letters that I kept writing, Judith wrote her own and I would say to parents today do everything you can to stay in touch. When you do stay in touch, you tend, as Judith said, to try to want to fix it and to think you can fix it. You fixed his bicycle when it was broken. You fixed his date when she needed fixing and he had abandoned her. You fixed his this and that for me. You just want to keep fixing it, but there comes a moment when you realize that trying to fix it is actually perpetuating the dependency and the retreat from personal responsibility that is a part of dealing with a disease. I have heart disease and had open heart surgery in 1994. I relapsed six months later. I was going back to work under the same circumstances with the same tensions and I relapsed and I had then to take myself out of the picture and spend four months, four days a week in rehabilitation and the person who's recovering from addiction has to do the same thing and you try to fix that for them by making it easy, but you can't make it easy as William can testify. The most difficult moment for me was the moment I realized that I had to stop. Now, if I'd done this earlier, we'd have probably, this whole process would if Judith had given up earlier and said what I'm about to say, we probably would have ended in disaster, but it was after the awful experience in Atlanta when we finally did get the police to help us locate. We had located him and she and I staked him out for three days and then we decided we had to go in with the police because it was a dangerous process. An off-duty policeman. Off-duty policeman, right. And they got him out from a very dangerous situation. I think another 24 hours he would have been gone. And in the van, on the way to the, with an interventionist, on the way to the clinic where he, we were going. I mean, he remembers my saying I hate him. I don't remember saying that. Maybe I'm in denial about that, but I know, I know that I was angry and I said I hate what's happening and I'm having no more part of it. He can speak to whatever effect that had on him, but I realized at that time that there was nothing else I could do. No more money, no more contacts, no more letters, no more telephone calls. He was going to die and I could not be a part of that. Now for a lot of reasons it was that experience as he writes about in both books that enabled him finally to find whatever, whatever inner force is finding necessary to do the right thing. And that began his recovery, but it had been 10 years of relapse and difficulty. Five years. Five years, yeah. But on that note, it was that morning of October 12th of 1994, which is the day that I got sober. I was looking at CNN and I disappeared in a relapse. Just for the record, there is no cure for addiction, at least not yet. The university might be trying to find a cure at the medical center, but at least not yet there's no cure for addiction anymore than there is for other chronic illnesses. And so it takes the responsibility of the sick person to be part, to move from being part of the problem to being part of the solution. And I had to go from being the addict and the alcoholic who wanted to get high all the time to being the addict and alcoholic in recovery who wanted to stay sober a day at a time. Nobody could do that for me. Bill and Judith couldn't. Tom at CNN couldn't. Any more than you can make a diabetic, stay free from the illness. Any more than you can make a woman with breast cancer free from the illness, it takes involvement on the part of the sick person to be part of the solution. And on that morning of October 12th of 1994, where it all fell in for me was when I couldn't answer the question now what. I remember being in the crack house and then coming out. You know, and I was raised to be able to answer anything. I had a good education. I was good on my feet. I'd been a journalism or newspaper reporter covering the police department, the criminal justice system in Dallas County during the heady days of the two newspaper wars in Dallas. I'd been gone on to CNN. My parents had raised me to be a resilient person. And there I was. I couldn't answer the question. Now what am I going to do? And it was in that moment, I guess you could say it was a moment of clarity and epiphany and spiritual awakening. We all call it different things. The key is that it happened and that we'd be receptive to it. And Max, in that moment when I said, oh, I'm in a crack house in Atlanta, the people outside, my parents love me, my wife loves me, I've got two baby boys at home, got a good job, and I'm dying. Now what? And I couldn't answer it. And that was the moment when I said, okay, I need to begin to be part of the solution. And for me, that meant doing exactly what I was told by experts who do a lot more than I did about the treatment of addiction and the recovery process. And then for 20 years now, it's worked. William, as you work with families and all, how do you help them cross this bridge? Well, mom and dad said it, it's a fine line. How do you watch the person that you love go down? And in some cases die if they're not lucky to go to prison. It's a fine line. And I'll be honest with you, Max, there's no one size shoe fits all. And you know what? Most of what I think we learned as a family, we learned from the mistakes that we made along the way until we finally realized what it was that we needed to do. And for them, it was to love me even though they hated the illness. For them, it was to let their son find his way. You stayed connected to me. And that's what I would prescribe for any family. It is tricky. There is a chapter in the book that's called relapse is not a dirty word. We sort of assume that when you have the acute crisis of the moment, which is what I had multiple times, an acute crisis of the moment, that I say, okay, I don't want to do that anymore. So it's all going to be fine. No, it you've got to work a program of recovery, whatever that program is. And oftentimes it means taking your medicine, whatever that medicine is that prescribed spiritual, you know, chemical familial, there's a certain dynamic in that. So I guess if I would say anything to any family, it's that relapse is part of the process. People fall down and get up with this disease all the time. It's important that the family members stay connected with the loved one. But as you all did, finally said, you know what, son, we can't do this anymore for you. And it was in that moment. I said, yeah, you know, they can't anymore than I can, unless I move from that problem to that solution. Keep the lines of communication open with the loved one who is struggling with the illness. That's the key for family members. There's a phrase that you use and now what seems to me it's in this same general area. And it's called the other side of yesterday. What exactly, how does that fit into this because you're looking at it from that point of view? Well, if I had another hour, I could, you know, extrapolate about that. But I, you know, Max, I don't know how to explain that. I know that I tell you how I stay in the bed, if you will, stay in the middle of the bed. I had a mentor in recovery that said, you know, Moyers, the key for you is to stay in the middle of the bed. Don't start going out to the edge because what happens when you go to the edge, you fall off. So I do that. And I know Yvonne, I was talking about being in long-term recovery. There are a lot of students at the university here in recovery and you're still really young. And how do we do it? I think all of us do it by never forgetting how bad it was the day before we got sober, the day before we started that process. And I don't start any morning without, you know, I was in St. Paul this morning where it was 15 below zero, don't complain. And I was filled with gratitude even though it was 15 below zero. Why? Because I drank my cup of coffee and sat on my couch and read my meditation books and I remembered how, I don't want to say lucky, I think it's more than luck, how fortunate I am that I've come to the other side of yesterday, that I, by never forgetting just how far I've come despite me and despite an illness that really did want to kill me more than once. Let me speak to that moment because he mentioned his meditation. I don't, I think there hasn't been a morning that I know of in the last 15 to 20 years that you haven't started your day alone with meditation, full as you've said to us later, gratitude. Gratitude. And I also know that you have grounded your own recovery in helping others find treatment. I've said this before, I couldn't add it up mathematically, but I know essentially it's true that I don't think you feel a day has been well lived, that you haven't helped someone find help on the phone in person. And at times as, you know, this is not all hallucin, at times at great challenge to your own family because people would show up on his front door in St. Paul and knock on the door and need help. Mr. Lutheran Minister, whom you helped and helped and helped me, finally took his life. And that was a real blow to you. But by helping others, and I extrapolate to say this is pretty important for a caring, civilized society, by helping and caring for others, you have helped, you have kept yourself on course. Am I wrong about that? No, you're absolutely right. I mean, giving it away, we get it back is a lot of us know. And I do because I happen to be in recovery for a long time now. I come from a family of prominence and means who've been willing to share their own deeply personal story. That makes me a magnet for people. I work at a facility that's very good at what we do since 1949. But mostly, I think the key is being public about it. We don't talk about it. This is an exception. Look at this auditorium. I bet that probably half of you were here to see Bill, a third of you were here to see Judith. The rest got free tickets. And one or two of you in the front row know me. And I'm teasing. But I mean, here we are at a presidential library. And all of my 18 years at Hazeland, I've only had an opportunity to bring this message to a presidential library twice. This is the second time. And I think that says a real testament not only to the library's commitment to the center for students' commitment, recovering students, but I think it says a commitment to the community that you all are here. We don't talk about these addiction like we talk about HIV AIDS or depression or cancer or anything else. So I guess I find great sustenance in that. I think it's so important that we stand up and we speak out and we share our own insides with the outsides. I'm so old that I remember when you couldn't say cancer. Remember we said the C word? I'm so old that I remember when you could not ever expect to say breast cancer. And then Betty Ford stood up and Happy Rockefeller stood up and made public statements about the disease of breast cancer. And then we had the HIV thing when you couldn't say AIDS. And addiction has been in that same category until pretty recently when it's become possible to talk about it. And that stigma has killed people. There's no doubt when people have not asked for help because they thought they'd get fired. Shame. The shame that was so prevalent. It's killed people. There are actually two other assassins of hope in all this too. One is denial that I just don't admit that my son 30 years old is an addict and is almost dying out there from overusing. And the other is stigma. I don't want to talk. I'm embarrassed to say my son is an addict. We've gotten over that, by the way. One of the great positive consequences. There we are. The positive consequences of our situation is that within the three of us in particular, talk has been very honest since then. Hope was great. I guess he learned it at the feet of the master. William Coat was a great manipulator when he was using. They're very cunning, right? Like the disease and very good with the believable story. And when I thought something was going wrong, he was sturdy. I said, let's go. His behavior at a lunch, we were having a celebration on our vacation of lobster. And he went crazy on the lobster. And his behavior was bizarre. And I said to Judith, after he left, something's wrong. She really was. I hadn't seen that before. So I called him up and said the next day, let's have lunch together on Long Island near news day. And we did have lunch. And so I was halting and fumbling and seeking euphonisms about behind which to hide. And I finally said, this is something's wrong. What's going wrong? He said, Oh dad, don't worry. I'm just having some marital difficulty. I said, and put my hand on his and said, let's talk about football. And we did. I mean, that denial and that stigma were deadly foes of my coming to grips with what was happening to our son and to our family. And to parents today, I would say, take those handcuffs off and the handcuff of denial and the handcuff of stigma. You all are right in the middle of one of the questions from the audience. I mean, we didn't ask it, but that is one that was asked about the issue of stigma and how it keeps people from talking. I'm the moderator, but if I might just mention one thing, I've started out by saying our son is an alcoholic. Lynn Sherman has said that he encourages me to bring it up anytime it's appropriate. And invariably, you have an open discussion of almost everyone at the table who has some issue. So do you see that as you work with people around the country now? It just somewhere it opens the door for people to be able to talk about it. It's the most liberating opportunity when we can talk about whatever it is that we keep secret. And for many people, and I would suspect probably for a fair number of people in this room, they've been touched directly by alcoholism or drug dependence. I'm not suggesting that everybody here stand up and speak out like we do up at the stage or I do in my role at Hazeland where I work as a public advocate. But it's very comforting to know that you're not alone. And that standing up and speaking out, even if it's in your church or your book club or in an auditorium is empowering because nobody should go through any illness, even the illness of addiction by themselves or behind the closed door. I have found one of the most empowering opportunities that I come across at Texas or wherever I am is sharing with other people our stories of addiction and redemption. And when we do that, we give ourselves permission not only to talk about it, but also, and I think this is key, when we talk about this illness as the illness that it is and the fact that people do recover from it, lots of people recover from it, what it does is open the door to hope. Hope. We often know that a lot of people don't make it with this illness. Some die in drunk driving accidents on I-35. Some die with a syringe in their arm, Oscar-winning actor Hoffman in New York City. People die of strokes of the liver. We know those stories. What we don't know is the fact that everybody's been touched. And then in reality, a lot of people do recover. And when you talk about not just the problem, but the solution, you inspire people that sense of hope. You know, one of the things that helped me tremendously early on after I first sought personal counseling, then I was convinced by the counseling that I got that I needed to get into a group. And I did that. And the advice I got was if you don't like the first group you're in, you know, you try to stick to it a little while. If you still don't like that group, you try another group because there are lots of groups until you get your group. My group turned out to be, after several trials, at Lincoln Center, in the Lincoln Center neighborhood. And because I'd been told make it halfway, make it so close to your home or your office that you can't avoid going. So I got a place halfway between our office and our apartment. That was right on Lincoln Center. And so I would walk there at the end of the day, six o'clock meeting with my, you know, I have a business suit in a briefcase. And I'd go in there and all the rest of my group had lots of piercings and different colored hair and antique clothes and so on. And I came to love those people. And they liked me. And I was the oldest person there by far. And then I was only in my fifties at that point. But there's something about the group that convinces you that you're not alone. Everybody has, they can share experiences and you find out how many experiences are similar or just alike. And do you remember, some of you might remember going to probably it was a PTA group or some kind of parents group when your child was in preschool. And in that group, you learned for the first time that your three-year-old was not the only one that did that. And up until that point, you thought, you know, have I got this really odd child or am I being a really bad mother? Because my three-year-old is doing this. You hear, then you hear all the other three-year-olds are doing it too. So in the group, you get this huge support and sustenance. I think that's the best thing a parent can do. And not only parents, we keep saying parents, but we're talking spouses and brothers and employers and many others. A group is the best way. Beyond birth and death, I think that addiction, as we've learned over the years, is the greatest, largest democracy in America. And we've done a thousand hours of television together over these last 25 years, but I believe the two most poignant hours we've done were the first two hours of our five-part series on Close to Home, The Moir is on Addiction. The first one, I think it was your idea, Judith. I said it was your idea. The second one was a better show is my idea, but it wasn't. No, no. We work just like that, just like you just heard. That's the way we are at work. And we're still married. But we were sitting there thinking, how do you put a human face on this? Our human face was William Cope-Moyers, who had begun in our home as an infant and crashed at 30. And that was our face. So we persuaded, took a good bit of discussion to talk to a variety of people who let me then sit for a week with them in a very spare setting in a New York facility and get them to tell me their stories, as he constantly tells his stories. I mean, it included prominent, well-known people, wealthy people. It included poor women from tough parts of town. The commissioner of drug addiction in New York City. And then we wove those together in an hour that really bespoke the democracy of this experience that no one is immune. The second hour backed that up. Well, we call that one the portrait of addiction. Portrait of addiction. Many faces. And one of the lessons of that hour is there is no, as William Cope said, no formula. There's no code. There's no, there's no solution for everybody that works for anybody else. The second hour, we called the hijacked brain because, and again, I'm paying a debt to my partner here. She had been at Hazelton and had heard this marvelous presentation by a Harvard researcher, Hyman, Steven Hyman. And his whole theory, he was coming forth then with a theory that has made him now celebrated and he's gone on to many other great breakthroughs on the neuroscience of the brain and how the brain is hijacked by chemicals. And that those who have these chemicals are much more likely to become addicted than those who don't. I mean, I can stop at two drinks. He can't. He just can't. And I can't. It's very hard for me to have more than two drinks. But that has to do with the wiring in our brain. And that particular broadcast called the hijacked brain reinforced scientifically the powerful personal stories that have been told in the first episode called Portraits of Addiction. I would say those two broadcasts have done more to awaken people to honesty and clarity about this and then to know that they need help if they are addicted through scientific, spiritual, and other techniques. Do you have other questions already, Max? Well, I was going to say something to follow up on that. I mean, that series. So I went to treatment the first time in 89. I was a treatment in 89. I was sober for six months. Tom, that's when you came out and visited me in St. Paul when I was living in a halfway house out there. And then I relapsed. And I went back to treatment a second time. And then I stayed sober. I stayed dry for three years. By the way, addiction is much more. It's a disease of the mind, the body and the spirit. And so just not drinking or not taking drugs. That's an important first step. But there's a lot more to it than that. It's kind of like being able to live in your own skin kind of stuff. That's another story for another day. But I mean, I got sober in 94 in Atlanta. After three years, I relapsed because I wasn't taking care of myself. I wasn't taking my medicine and I relapsed and I got clean. And I was really grateful to CNN for holding open my job for the 100 days that I needed to go to treatment. You know, I didn't get terminated. I would have been terminated if I didn't show up and get sober. But the powers that be at Hazelnut at CNN kept the job open for me. Four years after that, the Moyers on Addiction series came out in 1998. And it was really birthed as a result of not so much my addiction, but what had happened to me in relapse and the fact that you all really didn't understand it until I relapsed after all those years of recovery, the Moyers on Addiction series came out of 98. So it's been what, 18, 16 years ago, something like that. I travel all over the country speaking, prisons, LBJ library, homeless shelters, treatment centers all over the place. State legislators. State legislators. I've testified at the state legislature here with some people who are in the audience tonight, Cynthia and others. And the thing about it that still resonates with people all these years later is the first show on portraits of addiction and the second show the hijacked brain. And whenever I'm talking to addicts and alcoholics, they still show that series in treatment centers. Patients weep. They cry because now they have finally understood what it is going on up here that causes them to go down that road of destruction despite everything they or their families have tried to do to stop it. I think the science of addiction and reason why I read it at the beginning here, what's going on in the brain here is as important as anything in terms of understanding addiction and understanding the recovery process? Well, one of the several students here from the students in recovery here at UT and several from other schools. I think students here from Tyler, I think from San Antonio who are in the University of Texas Board of Regents has voted to have one of those centers at every institution. How important is it to have a center like that on a college campus? It's critical. And unfortunately, it's the exception rather than the rule still. We talked about it today on public radio and with the Daily Texan reporter who asked us about that. I talk to young people all the time who are making that very difficult transition from college student using to college student sober. And I say to them, you know how lucky you are? And they look at me like, huh? What do you mean I'm lucky? I'm 20 years old and I can't drink for the rest of my life. What I'm trying to say and I've been almost kicked out of school and my grades are bad. What do you mean I'm lucky? And what I'm saying to them is I know that's a hard experience, but they've still got their whole lives ahead of them. They're getting sober. They're going to treatment or they're getting sober. They're connecting back into a college environment. They're pursuing their academic goals and they're still 20 years old. As I say to young people all the time, I wasted the end of my teens. I don't mean completely wasted it, but from the time I started smoking marijuana at the age of 15 or 16 until I hit bottom. You did? From the time I smoked marijuana at the age of 15, yes, until I began to recovery process and until I got sober at 35, 20 years ago, I wasted a lot of opportunity that I can never get back as we know among us who are older people. And for young people at the University of Texas or Texas Tech, which also has a good program and other places to be able to get sober and still pursue their academic dreams while they're still young, you can't beat that. And I hope we can see that spread all across this state and all across this country. Before I started blaming myself for what happened to him, which is ultimately what I did for a while, I blamed Washington and Lee University in Virginia because when he left us, he was a pure marvelous, upstanding, outstanding young man and he came back from Washington and Lee changed. And so I wanted to blame the guy. How I wish Washington and Lee had had an obvious public, open, courageous, committed group of students like you have here who might have been there for him when he started down this long and lonely road. Max, we have something in New York I have to tell you about. I was trying to tell it fast. It's new. It's two years old now. We call it Tribeca 12 because it's in Tribeca section and 12 refers to the 12 steps. So famous. But it's called Collegiate Recovery Center. And any matriculated student in New York City region, if they've been to 30 days of treatment, can apply to live there. We don't call it a halfway house. It's not really. But it's a place for them to try. We can take 40 people. Now there are 500,000 college students in New York. It's metropolitan New York. And we can take 40. But if it works there, we're going to try that in cities and particularly college towns all over America so that when you come out of treatment, can you imagine anything worse than going to live in the dorm? So if you come out of treatment and you're not ready for the dorm or for an apartment life, then you've got a place where you have connections to recovery. You have constant group work. You're signed up. You're going to school. You're trying to make grades and you're trying to start your life over again. If that can work, we're going to try this around the country. And I hope that's the kind of thing we can look forward to. One of the things that you hear if you go to one of the student meetings, it's that they will many times refer to a higher power and you have a section in Now What About God. And I know that's been very much a part of your family background. And I think we have an ordained minister here. And what does that fit into what we're talking about? Well, you want to take a crack at it first? Well, it took me a long time to grapple with that because as you indicated, I grew up with a very fixed concept of God. And what I've discovered in this experience is that the higher power is an inner power. And it's those people like William Cope, whom I have personally gotten to know as a recovering person who speak regularly and appeal often to that higher power, are going deep within themselves to draw upon some intuition and some some transcendent reality that is a force in their lives in ways they often have trouble to describe and therefore fall back on the term higher power. I would imagine that higher power like God means different things to different people the way it does to Hindus and Muslims and liberal Christians and fundamentalist Christians. I mean, it's it's anything you want to name it. But there is something inside some inner force, which I have seen in him and felt from him and others like him. That is the sustenance is the nutrition is the fuel on which they thrive. I've always said, yes, I agree. I mean, and I was very fortunate that I never struggled with the concept or I never struggled with the belief in God. How could I? My parents encouraged me to go to church. Dad's an ordained Southern Baptist minister. When I was born in 1959 in Fort Worth, I think you were in seminary itself, Western, you all were pastoring a church in Brandon or somewhere in Texas. And so I that wasn't my problem. My problem was not believing in God, because I had that as a cornerstone. But in the recovery in the treatment in the recovery process, what I had to do is to make the great swing away from believing in God and starting to trust in God. Big difference for me. Trust that God could do for me what I could not do for myself. And what I had proven I couldn't do for myself was stay sober. And so when I had that now what moment in October the 12th of 94 in the crack house in Atlanta, I said, okay, I'm done. Have me. And that was true for have me community, have me treatment center and have me God. You know, when it worked, I say to people, you know, to each his own, everybody's got to find their own belief in that. But one of the ways I do that, particularly with people who are struggling with their faith is I always say, look, there's only two things that are more powerful than the human spirit. One of them is the drugs and the alcohol that are trying to kill it. And the other one is some power greater than that that's willing to save it. You call it what you want to out there, but it's, but if you don't believe that, then the odds are stacked against you. It doesn't mean that if you don't believe, you won't find redemption or recovery. But it's a heck of a lot easier to see it in the pecking order of human spirit substances and something up here that can save us. And that's worked, you know, for a lot of people who would claim to be agnostics or nonbelievers or have some other perception that I don't have. This is one from the audience that I think it touches for all of you. We've touched on it a bit, but knowing what you know now, is there something that you would do differently? Are you asking maybe for all three? Go ahead, mom. I think that the biggest thing that I would change is the dinner table conversation because we had a thing at our house that we had dinners. We had dinner together. And we talked about all kinds of things. You know, we talked about politics and religion and movies and everything, but we never talked about addiction, except that we would occasionally say, well, you know, poor Uncle Jimmy or poor Uncle Ralph, those were the two people we knew, my brother-in-law and Bill's uncle, who were alcoholics. And they were the kind of alcoholics you had to go get out of jail on Saturday. And we would say, poor things, isn't that pitiful? You would never want to do that. You would never want to be a bum. And I think we closed down the possibility that one of our kids would come to us and say, I have a problem like Uncle Jimmy or Uncle Ralph because we had taught them that that meant that they must be a bum. They must be a whino or a drunk or whatever we were calling it. And I think we closed down the opportunity for them to say to us, I might need help. Now they could come and say to us, I need help with geometry. I got to have a tutor. You know, that was fine. But never, ever did they feel, I believe, that we were open to the other kind of conversation. I want to be careful about this because I don't ever want to suggest that what is good for me works for anybody else. And every family dynamic, every parent, child dynamic is different. Her dynamic was different from Cope's and with Cope's mind. But I wish I had been more inquisitive. I wish I had been more an adult in terms of my relationship to my children when they were teenagers. I wanted them to like me. I wanted to encourage them. I wanted them to find themselves. And so I wasn't inquisitive about characteristics of behavior that were a signal, but I didn't take it, take them as a signal. And I wish I had not been so laissez-faire toward my children when they were teenagers in particular. And as they were growing up, I mean, it never occurred to me. And this is naivety as well as ignorance. It never occurred to me that you were trying, trying drugs at 15. I wish I had been more as inquisitive in one sense as I am with the subjects on my set when I'm interviewing them. I wish I had been more inquisitive. I'm glad I wasn't the subject. You want to hear interviews? Well, what about you? You know, people ask me that all the time, Max. They say, well, could anything have changed the spiral downward? I mean, you didn't come from a broken home. You know, you had everything. You had parents who were present for you, educated, successful. Why didn't they do more? Well, I think they did what they could do at the time under the circumstances. Hindsight is 2020, right? And so people say, do you think if they had done anything differently, it would have, it would have ended up differently. I don't know. The point is that we didn't talk about it, as mom said. We didn't really talk about it. Dad, sometimes dad is a prolific letter writer in my first book, Broken. Your letters, particularly, are notable in there, as is yours. But dad wrote me all the time, and I never could toss out a letter. By the way, print those emails out and save them. Because I saved all the letters that my parents wrote me. And I put them in a big camp trunk, and I hauled it around with me wherever I moved, from Washington, Lee, and Lexington, Virginia, to Dallas, to New York, to St. Paul, to Atlanta, and back. And when I began to write Broken in 2004 and 2005, I opened that camp trunk up, and I started to read those letters, some of which you all let me include in the books. And I said to myself, by gun, they were right. Because you would hint around it. You would suggest. You know, son, I think that if you are struggling, or if you have a problem, you might want to do this. There was never that sort of, I don't want to say confrontation, but it was, we never spoke about it directly like we are talking about it right now, among us. And I think that might have swung, or perhaps brought back up sooner, my downward spiral. That said, you know, I wouldn't change anything about my life if I could, and I've had a lot of heartache and a lot of regrets and made a lot of mistakes. And the reason why is because I'm right here. And there is something about that journey. It's never perfect. I've never asked you this, and it just occurs to me. Now, do you think that if we intervened the third relapse when you were almost gone, you think if we had intervened previously with, and by that I mean you hire an interventionist, a trained expert in how to extract people from the bottom and get them to treatment. If we had done that the first time or the second time, when your mother was looking for you in Harlem, if we'd had an interventionist and we had taken you to treatment, forced you to treatment, then do you think it would have made a difference? It might have. That's a great question. I think we know a lot more today as a community about addiction. Here we are, again, like I said, talking about it. We know a lot more than we do, than we did in 1989. I mean, it was only 25 years ago, but in a scheme of things. That was a long time ago. Interventionists are very professional. Interventionists are very good at helping a family, not just confront the problem, but move the sick person to the solution. Treatment facilities know a lot more now than they knew 25 years ago. We're using medications that we didn't have. Interventionists help the family or whoever. It may not be the family, and by the way, friends can do an intervention, right? Absolutely. Most of us don't know how to do that. Or don't want to believe it. Don't want to believe it. A professional interventionist prepares you to confront. Confrontation is not all that good an idea many times, unless you're prepared and you do it properly. An interventionist will help you know how to approach you. Remember, I think we all got the word interventionist into our vocabulary. It's been Betty Ford. You remember that? Hearing that story about Betty Ford's family had an intervention. Her children were grown. Her husband had been President of the United States, and they had a professional interventionist that helped them with that. It worked. Sometimes, if you don't have the right kind of advice and help, they can go very wrong. So, you want to be careful. I've been coached by someone here who tells me that you have a very good story that is very poignant about finding William in Harlem. Well, I don't know if it's more, you got more questions you would either ask, but when William's wife called and said, Judith, he hasn't called in two days. Now, he was a reporter, a newspaper reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Long Island is 150 miles long, and it has 140 municipalities. And so, she said, I'm really worried because he usually, and he was out riding with the police a lot and so on. So, he'd be gone, but he always called in. Always called home. She said, he hadn't done that. I'm very worried. So, Bill was out of town. So, I called our lawyer. He was a great friend, Bill Josephson, and I said, you know, could you just check to see if he's been in an accident? Maybe he's in the hospital someplace or with the police departments, the 140 of them. And I know I can't do that. And so, he did that, took him a little while, and he called me back, and he said he hasn't been arrested, and he's not in any hospital Long Island. So, he then coached your wife about what to do if you did call. And that was the lawyer's, that was before cell phones, you know, the lawyer's information about how you traced a call and so on, how you could do that. So, after a while, hours passed, but after a while, she had the information that was needed, and we located him. He was in Harlem somewhere. Harlem's big. And in 1989, Harlem was very, very, very unsafe. That's not true anymore, really. So, Bill Josephson and I drove in and we drove around Harlem until we saw his car parked. And we parked in such a way that he couldn't move that car under any circumstance. And then, we got out and we walked the streets of Harlem. Now, I don't know blue, linen, dress, and pearls. And I had white hair even then. And Bill Josephson's a one-armed man. And we walked, the two of us, we were the only white people on the street at that time. That's not true any longer in Harlem. And until we located a building, it was a good-looking building. It was a locked building. Many apartment buildings are locked from the outside, from the inside. And we were suspicious of that building. We, Bill Josephson, watched the back door and I watched the front door. And it's, after a while, it was the hottest day of the year, August. And after a while, a woman about my age came out and I said, if you've seen my son in your building, he's tall. And he's blonde and blue-eyed. And she said, no. About an hour later, she came back with a lot of groceries in her arms. And I said, I still haven't found my son. I see you're going back in there. If you see him, would you tell him I'm out here waiting for him? Because if I don't get to him soon, if he doesn't come out soon, I'm going to get the police to go in with me. Because I believe he's sick. And she said, I don't know anything about that. But in about 10 minutes out he came. She did know. And it was a pretty upscale crack house. But when my handsome blonde blue-eyed son came out, I would not have known him. I would hardly have known him. Because his blue eyes were not blue. They were yellow. And he had a look on his face I'd never seen before. And for the first time in my life, I had never seen him drunk. I had never seen him stoned. I saw him in this state. And it was horrifying. And I said, would you, I think you should go home now. You come home with me. I'll take you home. And he said, no. No, I'll go home on my own. And he did. And Bill Joseph and I followed him on the Long Island Expressway going really, really fast. I'm not sure I would have made it out of there that day. Even though I wasn't ready to get sober in 89, I don't think I would have made it out of there had my family, you know, given up on me or walked away. You're being there, started to plant the seeds that helped me to come to grips over the years with the reality that, you know, I was a sick person. You get well. The next day he walked into a hospital in New York and said, would you please lock me up? It was a psych ward in New York City. And they locked me up because they didn't know what to do with me. And I was kind of crazy. I don't say that lightly. I don't know. But I was not well of mind, body or spirit. And they locked me up for three weeks. They didn't know what to do with me in 1989. And so through a series of connections, I ended up going out to Minnesota to go to Hazeland where I got well. But I think to your point, Max, that my family's involvement in me even then was integral to the process that ultimately got me where I needed to go. You know, we started a little late. So we were kind of pushing it a little bit. But to have one question that comes out of the recovery community here, Austin in the center, and it's part and you were quoted, I think in a film that was done in regard to a project that former Senator Harold Hughes did out of Iowa when in 1970s, he started trying to get the nation to be aware of this issue. And it kind of folded and didn't quite reach its potential. Would you mind to comment on that and then let me just lead you into making a last comment and maybe to take both of those at once? Well, when I started working at Hazeland in 1996, the CEO at the time, been manned by the name of Jerry Spicer, he said, Moyers, I want you to go out and I want you to change public policy around addiction. When I said, well, don't clap because it wasn't that easy. I said, sure, Jerry, where's the money? And Jerry said, well, you know, we're not for profit and Hazeland's a healthy big not for profit, but we're still not for profit. And, you know, we just don't have the money to lobby these kind of issues. And I said, okay, no problem. Where are the troops? You know, Winston Churchill said, the scariest thing about being a leader is looking over your shoulder and saying that nobody is following. And we did not have the troops in the mid 90s to advance public policy that would end discrimination against the issue that brings us into this room tonight. We did not have that. We had lots of people in recovery. We had lots of families who have been touched, but nobody who was really organized around that. So I realized that if we were going to change public policy in Minnesota or in Washington DC, particularly as it related to getting addiction covered in health care and by insurance companies that we needed to stand up and speak out. And what better way to do that than for me to lead in my small little piece of the universe. And the very first time I ever stood up and spoke out about my own story two years before the Moyers on Addiction series was at a Rotary Club meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I'd put together this well-crafted speech about the impact of alcoholism. And I was standing there and I was reading this speech and I was watching everybody in the audience going like this. You know, they'd eaten their rubber chicken, they'd been checked in and they wanted to get the heck out of there. But there I was, 37 years old, and I was losing my audience of 120 Rotarians at the St. Paul Rotary Club. And I knew that the only way I could grab them back was to abandon this well-crafted speech and to say this. And what I did is I put that speech down and I said, listen, let me just tell you about this in my own experience. I said, I'm a recovering addict and an alcoholic. This is what one looks like. And I remember there was a banker at the back of the room who was trying to sneak out the back and he turned and he went, part of that was because I had a loan with him. But I'll never forget that. I'll never forget him being at the back of the room. And then there was a leader of the church community who looked at me as if I was the second coming of Christ. And then there were other people in the room who knew me in the community as an employee of Hazeland and on the board of a couple of not-for-profits and as a father of small children, as a homeowner, as a voter and all those things, but did not know me to be what I was. An addict and alcoholic. All those things, by the way, being possible because I was in recovery. And from that moment on, I learned that the power of telling our stories, sharing our experiences was key. And so we have mounted this effort that took many, many years, but is really sort of reaching a tipping point right now, I think. Don't you, Ivana? A point where we're mobilizing the masses to stand up and speak out. Not always at the LBJ Library. We're not so fortunate to always have this venue. But wherever we live, work, play, worship and all those other things, that is where we're teaching people and empowering them to stand up and speak out. Not as members of AA or NA or Al-Anon or any recovery group, but just as addicted people in recovery through our own experiences. And it's making a difference. It's making a difference. By the way, my mother reminds me, it's made a difference to the point that we got insurance companies to indiscrimination by getting George Bush to sign into law in 2008. The parody bill, which ended discrimination in private insurance against addicted people and their families. And then we lobbied hard by getting ourselves standing up and speaking out to get the Obama administration to put addiction into the basic benefit coverage package of the ACA. And no matter what you think about health care reform, it's the law in this country. And addiction is in there. So Max gives me the last word, but just before I give the last word, because you know, I always like to have the last word. I just thought, maybe, Mom, you might want to say one other thing or dad, you do before we close? Not really. I just want to say how grateful the Morris family is to Tom Johnson and his friendship through these years. Someone said to me once, of two friends are in different bodies with the same soul. And I knew that in 1965. And it's been proven to us over and again. We probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for you. Well, as long as I'm here at the University of Texas, I really need to say how grateful I am to the people of Texas in my time who provided me with a great education at public expense. I paid $40 a semester. And I had a scholarship that I didn't even have to pay 40. My first two years, I didn't pay any tuition at all. And can you believe that Bill and I have always felt how fortunate we were. We're up there grappling with Ivy Lakers and the elite institutions. We're fine. I want to say thanks to all of you for coming out this evening. Thanks to Tom for your friendship over the years and to the Crook family and to the Reeves family, I know, among others who are here tonight and to the Johnsons and others. I'm a fortunate son in so many ways. And to have this opportunity with the two people that have been integral to my life for 55 years now is a highlight of the journey of recovery. But I would be remiss if I didn't remind you what we also need, what I would ask that you all do. And it's to go back into your own communities and share your own stories. And so I'll close by sharing a story about the power of the group. Remember addiction is a disease of isolation. Addiction is a disease of isolation and the antidote to it is exactly what's going on in this room right now. A year ago this week, right after this book had come out, we did these two events. One was at the 92nd Street Y, as you said, and one was at the Press Club. And at the 92nd Street Y that night in February of 2013, it was in an auditorium like this. What I like about tonight is that we can see people out there, not specifically, but that night the lights were so bright that you couldn't see. And people were passing notes up to the front to the moderator, Susan Cheever, the daughter of John Cheever, the great actor, who himself was a person of recovery, finally. And so one of the note cards came up, the moderator, Susan took those cards and had a big stack of them and she went through them and she pulled out. I think it was the first one, or it was one of the early note cards that she pulled out. It was this one. And so Susan Cheever, who's also wrote the definitive biography of Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, many of us owe our continued existence to that program. Susan looked at the Susan looked at the note card and she could have easily answered the question, except that she realized that she better not. So she passed it to the person in the next part of the row, the man who's won 55 or 65 Emmys and helped a newspaper win a couple of Pulitzer Prizes and had a distinguished career in journalism. And Bill Moyers took a look at that card and he passed it to the fixer. And the fixer, who could have fixed it, looked at the card and passed it to the last person in the row, me. And I took the card not knowing what was on it, and I read it. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 words. And I looked at the card and I had about 30 seconds to decide how I was going to answer it, because the question that night in an audience just like this was this question. What do you do if you don't want to live? Well, there's a real narrow window of opportunity in that question. And I couldn't see who it was out in the audience who might have asked that question. And so I thought about it for a few seconds and perhaps with all the wisdom that comes with being on the journey for as long as I've been on it with the support that I've had unconditionally, I simply answered it this way. I said, turn to the person next to you and ask for help. How did I say that? Because I was in a room that night as I am tonight with people who care, many of whom have had experience, some who are professionals, but all of whom care enough about the subject to be there for somebody who asks, what do you do if you don't want to live? I never knew the person who wrote that note card that night, but somebody in the audience who was sitting next to him had had the presence of mind before he got up from the auditorium and bolted to write down his cell phone number. And after the event at the 92nd Street, why that woman who happened to be a nurse in recovery, I didn't know her, but she came up to me and identified herself and gave me the phone number. And in a city of however many people there are in New York, eight, 10, 12 million people, I called that number that night when I got back to the hotel and he answered. He answered. I said, do you want to live? And he said, I want to live. Help me. Well, I emailed them just an hour before we came over here tonight. I've been in touch with them since. He went to treatment in the days after that. We got him the help that he needed. And I said, so how are you doing? And he said, I have 68 days of sobriety, William. The point is a year ago he didn't want to live, but he didn't want to die and he didn't know what to do. And it was the community. It was the auditorium that night that was there for him when that alcoholic and that addict needed help. And so what I would say to you all in closing is you are a resource. You come from your own experiences and you're there for those who have the same perplexing question, whether it's what do you do when you don't want to live, whether it's now what or what now. The fact of the matter is that each and every one of us out there together as a community in a library setting in Austin and Dallas, wherever we come from in the community of caring, we're there for people when they need help. That's the key. And I thank you very much.