>> >> So I won't bother introducing myself. First thing I wanna say, a very important thing. We wouldn't be together if it weren't for Taylor Lambert. He's not here with us. I don't know if he's gonna tune in or whether Rich will get him on one of his videos.

But Taylor, we wish you the best. We constantly hope you'll be able to get yourself together and get back here another year. But a lot of what I'm saying is dedicated to you and the inspiration that you gave me. That said, I wanna start off by saying we're talking a little bit about books.

I worked with the great Bill Bernstein, Dr. Bernstein, here this morning. And he did something that was kind of mean-spirited. >> >> The book Vogel on Mutual Funds has been the number one book on Amazon since the day it was published, seven and a half years ago, and it continues to be the number one book today.

It's amazing, I don't know any other book in any category that has that sustained kind of leadership for seven and a half, going on eight years. Applause, so that's common sense. It's a little book, but it's the one that does so well. That's number two, by the way. >> >> So Amazon's a good guy, I think it's as good as any.

A lot of volume goes on there, probably 40% of the books sold in America, maybe 50. But it's a pretty good test, and obviously I'm pleased with that. But Bill, darn him, brings out a book on Materna, Are You Ready? I think it's called. It's a great book, it's a short book.

He gives it away, he's number one. >> >> Don't do that to me. >> >> Not a mini Vanguard there, man. >> >> Cutting costs all over the place. But in any event, I think everybody that exists now owns Bill's book, so I can come back to number one again.

I do want to concede that on the mutual fund list at Amazon is not in the same genre as, say, Fifty Shades of Grey. >> >> Now, you shouldn't have read that. >> >> You must know what's in it when you're laughing. >> >> But in any event, it's been great to see those books do so well.

And they're three of my books of the most wished for books on Amazon. And still selling, and I think it ranks in all books. Obviously, not number one, but maybe number 2,500 or 3,000. And they have, I think it's 5 million books on Amazon. So it's pretty good, and it's an awful lot of fun to have done that.

And to have it work out so very well with the acceptance of shareholders. There are two more books coming out, even though I promised my wife. >> >> I probably told you earlier I wouldn't write anymore. These aren't real books, but we're gonna give you, with your loyalty to being here today, we're gonna give you copies of each of them.

And they're out there, but we don't actually have them now. You should all be reading them. >> >> And one is a very short one, more of a pamphlet than a book, called The Man in the Arena. And it's the transcript of a follow-up to the Legacy Forum. They had a 60-year legacy party they had with me at the Museum of Finance in New York, and we had four really distinguished people who took a day off.

And basically, they come to New York and talk about me. It seems kind of amazing to me, I'm sure it seems kind of amazing to you. >> >> It was Alan Blinder, Professor from Princeton, Head of the Center for Economic Studies, Center for Economic Policy Studies. Professor there for many years.

Former head of the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal regular, contributor to the Wall Street Journal. We had Cliff Asness, a hedge fund manager, probably the biggest group of hedge funds in America, who had a little side story. He tells this story in The Man in the Arena, in this transcript.

He says he has a license plate on his car that says WWJD. And someone says, wait a minute, Cliff. Aren't you like a Jewish? What is Jesus doing there? And he said, no, it's not Jesus, it's what would Jack do? >> >> He's got a great sense of humor.

>> >> And the third one was Jim Grant, the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. A brilliant writer, not just about financial stuff, but many other things, he's got a biography of John Adams. Biography of the Speaker of the House of many, many years ago. And he was there, and his thing was about Bizzaro Vogel.

Do you all, are you familiar with Bizzaro? Anybody here? Well, Bizzaro is the anti-superman. They used to talk about him on Seinfeld, and I had never read it. Never watched Seinfeld, but he's the exact opposite of who he's supposed to be. So Jim Grant's thing is a little riff on me and following a different career for different reasons.

And my career is such that my son decided, my career's a hedge fund manager. Bizzaro, the opposite of what I do, and it was superseded. My son then thought, that's not the right way to run a business, so my son started the first index fund. >> >> And his last line was something like, whatever the case, it's all about the money.

>> >> And the final one was Dick Silla, a professor of finance and basic corporate history at NYU. And he compared me with, I hate to tell you this, but it's silly, but it's nice, with Alexander Hamilton. And I think I came off well in comparison. >> >> But that's in the man of the arena.

And then I was like this, and thanks to Mike Nolan, my wonderful assistant, who's here somewhere over there, we self-published. You know selfies, well, this is a selfie. >> >> I just decided I'd like to put this kind of between the covers of the article I have in the New Journal of Portfolio Management called Lightning Strikes, this remarkable coincidence of in two weeks, in late September, early October of 1974, starting Vanguard, Paul Samuelson's article, the very first edition, 40 years ago, Journal of Portfolio Management, saying, would somebody please start an index fund?

And the bottom of the bear market, all that happened very quickly and set the stage for this new company. So that is in there, turns out I've also written 13 essays. I've printed them also in here, and so you can read what I've written in the past. And then two of the most outstanding articles, the outstanding articles of JPM in two particular years.

And if you get that awesome treat, you're asked to write a retrospective five years later, essentially. So there are two retrospectives of how the idea is that won these prizes. And one, interestingly enough, the very JPM, it's a very, very quantitative magazine, and yet of all those 13 articles, really 12 because this one hadn't been reviewed yet, of the new one, Lightning Strikes, all these quants, and they were the ones into the subscribers to JPM, were the ones who picked by least quantitative works.

It's good, one was called New Sherry Duty, No Man Can Serve Two Masters. And the other one was called, You get what you pay for or something. Well, there's an idea so important that you can't think about anything else. And that was the title of it. And so that cost the pension system.

And then without a lot of big data in there and a lot of complicated formulas, those were the ones they selected. And then I printed also a sample of the original article. And one more nice letter from Paul Samuelson to me on my 80th birthday. And that's about it, that's in the book.

And that looks like this. And I thought you'd be interested in the dedication. Which I thought about doing a little bit late, just for the last minute. And I think I'll read this, it's not very long. I've often said ideas are a dime a dozen, but implementation is everything.

Well, this book is focused on the ideas that inspired the creation of Vanguard, the index fund. This dedication honors those, quote, honest to God, down to earth human beings. You've heard that expression before, who implemented those disruptive innovations. And those who inspire our crew, who came to place our clients' interests first.

So a hearty salute to those who serve in our Vanguard crew. Those who are responsible for the hard, well, thankless task of getting a day's work done. Extraordinarily nice people who do their work with loyalty to our founding values and commitment to serve our shareholders. And a second hearty salute to those whom we at Vanguard as trustees and fiduciaries are pledged to serve.

Placing their interests first and foremost. So 20 million families who have entrusted their wealth to our care. We teach them, as well as learn from them. Notably from 30,000 vocal heads, the core of one of the most active financial websites in the land. That's the dedication, so it's to you.

And we will have that for you later on. Self-published, and therefore instead of taking six months, when should we get this to the press, Mike? >> Friday. >> >> Is this a great country, or what? >> >> Jack, I just heard from Taylor. Can I interrupt and just read the message from Taylor?

It says, dear Mel, in March 2000, you and I organized the first Global Head Conference of 21 investors in my Miami condominium. Where Mr. Vogel honored us with his presence. We never imagined that 14 years later we would be chairing a conference, approximately ten times larger, and forced to limit attendance.

Participating in Jack's noble crusade to give ordinary investors a fair share, has brought meaning and enrichment to our lives. I'm sure it will do the same for every local head who has made the journey to this year's conference. I send my affection to each of you, and especially to my dear friend and mentor, Jack Vogel, signed, Taylor.

>> Well, that's very nice, a nice response. >> >> Yes, so what I'm gonna do is talk a little bit about the personal side of things, a little bit about Maine Arts history, and I wanna do that first, because my deck of slides may run a little long, and that may have to take a short trip, although those slides will be available to anybody here that wants them, maybe take two or three hours to get them created, or something like that, but the title I picked was entitled, for all but together, Human Beings and Algorithms, as Vanguard's 41st Year Begins.

So going back to the beginning, the title of the introduction, I'm really drawing heavily from the introduction to the book, is entitled, It's the Best of Times, It's the Worst of Times. Always a good idea to throw Dickens in there, and so as September 1974 drew a close, and October began, there was a fortuitous moment in financial history that was taking place.

A new star, not in the big star sense, but just one more entry in the universe, entered the mutual fund department, a company that had just come into existence, and incorporated on September 24th, 1974. It had a unique, you know this, truly mutual structure, owned by its fund shareholders, and operated on an annual basis, and it was called, of course, Vanguard.

A week later, October 1st, the first issue of Journal of Portfolio Management was published, under the leadership of founding editor Peter Bernstein. One of the major papers in that issue was entitled, Challenge to Judgment, by Professor Paul Samuelson of MIT, America's first Nobel laureate in economic science. He could find no root evidence, as he called it, that any mutual fund manager had consistently earned returns that surpassed the returns of the unmanaged S&P 500, and basically demanded somebody somewhere start an index fund.

In retrospect, his essay powerfully echoed my early 1951 rudimentary statistical research in my Princeton thesis that reached a similar conclusion. And I witnessed further, much more important than that, my own personal experience. I'd witnessed firsthand the abject, even catastrophic, failure of the new breed of professional fund managers, following the collapse of the go-go era, back in the mid-1960s, a terrible chapter in this industry's history.

Together, his inspiration, and my experience, with his being Dr. Samuelson, shaped my decision to create the world's first index fund. It would be a logical basis for an investment strategy that follows from, and would be fully consistent with, Vanguard's business structure. Strategy follows structure, as I've said so many times, which is consistent.

Two days later, October 3rd, the third fortuitous event took place. In the long sense, counterintuitive. At the end of a long, harrowing, banned bear market, 50% decline, and from an early 1973 high, very few managers at the funds anticipated that decline, and many funds declined a lot more than that 50%, the fund industry had failed the investors who had trusted its money managers.

And fund assets would decline almost fatally, like 40%, 53 billion to 31 billion, and only bailed out later on by the money market business. Amazing story. So in that two weeks, the moment for a new structure, a new strategy, for a failed industry began. Amazing. Times were bleak. Yes, the opportunity was deeply hidden.

It was, to some people, totally invisible. And yes, the industry was in crisis. The rest is history, recounted in the essays that are in this book here. The new entity managed 1.4 billion of other people's money, OPM, in October '74. And four decades later, in October '14, 2014, it's now $3 trillion of other people's money, the largest-run enterprise in the world, and more than $1 trillion larger than its closest peer.

The Financial Analyst Journal is also celebrating, of course, its 40th anniversary. They published 13 of my papers, and I republished all of this in this anthology. And it turns out-- I'll make this a brief here-- there's three very different phases of focus in these papers. The first phase, 1990-1994, was establishing reasonable expectations for stock market returns in the coming decade.

I continue to use that to this day. It's proved to be pretty good. And dividend yield, initial dividend yield, plus subsequent earnings growth, plus or minus short-term speculative return, plus market values change. P/Es go up and down. Put them together, and they get the total return on the market.

I'll talk a little bit more about that and show you the data later on. The second phase, 1992-2002, I didn't plan. And the papers that I wrote during that period focused on the investment performance of actively managed mutual funds compared to passively managed index funds. And I guess I was getting a little more confident about the index funds.

And here, I focused on the relationship between returns and risk and the power of the role played by both of these costs. Then, in this third phase, the most interesting phase, the focus of my interest shifted again, veered sharply away from data on stock market returns and mutual fund returns to the counterproductive structure of the mutual fund industry, in particular, and in general, to the appropriate role of the U.S.

financial system in modern society. I wrote four papers on these matters in my writing strife. As I think I mentioned, I did mention two of them became quite popular. Why did I change? Why did I change my focus? I don't know the answer to that, of course. As I say in the book, it's perhaps my growing idealism, which is still unshakable, and certainly it must have helped, that is now free from the rights and responsibilities of running Vanguard.

My readiness, as always, even eagerness to speak out, from my self-created bully pulpit. And if this talk isn't too solicistic, a realization that if I didn't do it, there were few, if any, others who would take up the cudgel's grip on it. The Lord knows there is much room for reform in our system.

Our nation's underfunded retirement plans. Our industry's failure to give individual investors a fair shake. The conflicts of interest that permeate and inhibit the appropriate regulation and legislation of our financial system. The reluctance of our money manager agents, that's what they are, who collectively hold voting control and 70% of all of America's corporations, the stockholding of America's corporations.

To use that power in dealing with, among other unpleasant issues, excessive executive compensation, loose accounting practices, and undisclosed political contributions. Each issue is like a maniche for a federal standard, fiduciary duty for all those responsible for OPM. And in short, there's enough work to do now that I continue to speak out and not fully quote, but for the next two decades, or three, or four, or more.

And I don't usually look bad, and I don't think most financial writers do, at my works in retrospect. But because two of these won the financial best article awards from JPM, they ask you to do this five years later after you've written your article, to take a look at what it looks like.

Every five years, these winners are asked to present a retrospective on their winning papers. And this little document is published every five years. So I did that with the speeches that I wrote, outstanding articles in 2008, and again in 2009. Now, that first retrospective, early in '29, was on a 2008 paper at the time.

Well, so I didn't really have a lot of time to think about it. The question's so important, I finally got it right here, that it should be hard to think about anything else. It was included in the five-year cycle, 2004, 2008, only a year before I was asked to write this essay about counterproductive support, counterproductive actions for financial intermediaries.

It had already, within a year, garnered very broad, high-level support. I'm not sure that it was so inspired by me, but it happened almost immediately. A major article in the New York Times, an essay by Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and Buttonwood, the incisive columnist of the Economist of London.

And that's all terrific people adopting this idea of the role of our financial system in subtracting value from the returns investors get on its own behalf. I concluded in that retrospective, expressing my pleasure, the escalating, rent-seeking, even rent-gouging by our financial intermediaries, never one to waste an adjective, had been recognized, initiating as I wrote the title, Of Course, from an idea whose time had come.

And you'll see this in the documents I'll show you later on. Not enough, but it's beginning. And in 2014, just this year, I was asked to write another retrospective of my award-winning 2009 essay, The Fiduciary Principle, No Man Can Serve Two Masters. Here, the tables were turned, because I had fully five years to consider the impact of what I'd written.

And in retrospect, what I liked about that paper was the most naked presentation of my native idealism that I've ever dared to write. Focuses it was on the need for integrity, principle, and ethical responsibility in finance, in a phrase, fiduciary duty. And particularly, I was proud, I hope it's okay to be proud, of citing similar wisdom from some of the greatest men in financial history.

Adam Smith can't beat that, John Maynard Keynes, and Ben Graham, and of course, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Bistone, whose 1934 essay, The Public Influence of the Bar, provided both the inspiration and foundation for that paper. Yes, as he wrote in that essay, writing in 1934, "There is nothing more vital in our own day than those who act as fiduciaries should be held to those standards of scrupulous fidelity which our society has the right to demand, as it does." That was true in 1934, it was true in 2009 when I wrote that article, it is still true in 2014, and it will be true forevermore.

Now, there's a lot more in here, I guess I could say. There has been yet another shift, partial shift, because I have busy days and I'm trying to get a lot done, and I do want to say thanks to Michael, who is an unbelievable help to me, because Michael and me and Emily, and she'll be here later, you won't know her if you've been here before.

My amanuensis, I think that's the right word, look it up, and she will be here. And the three of us, plus Sarah who is in the parking lot, crank out this huge amount of work, so I'd like to publicly express my thanks to you, Michael, for doing such a fantastic job.

You've been to a vanguard, it's around 13 or 14 years, you've been with me for three and a half, and I couldn't do it without it, I could go on about it. Kevin is out here somewhere. My long-lasting, probably long-suffering, are you here, Kevin? Somewhere back there. Yeah, there's Kevin, Kevin Lawson.

I couldn't have done it without him in those days. These guys really made my life a lot more fun, a lot more enjoyable, and they're unbelievable, they're playing the computer like Paderewski. I just couldn't do anything without them, really. So, another shift, and I'm spending a lot of time, with our crew.

I do, crew teams will come into my office, you know, they ask me to dance, and there may be seven or eight of them, they can bring you an extra chair, it's not that big, you can hold, I guess, ten, if you are willing to stand, and we'll come in and just talk, and they'll ask me things from now on.

And, you know, one day, it's ten crew members, the longest-serving of whom, have been here since 2013, the longest-serving. And I say, "Who has the gall to marry, to ask for a meeting with me?" And, then I did one luncheon with five ladies, who have been there for an average of 26 years, in a group that works together, and they're all fun, they're all enjoyable, and they can talk about anything they want.

And, I talk to the teams, I talk to retirees, when I'm asked, I always say, and the same thing is true, of the Award for Excellence winners, I talk for an hour and a half to each of them, and I talk to anniversaries, if someone has a 20th anniversary or something, and I always say, when I get invited, "I will come if the coast is clear," if you know what I mean.

I have no reason to fuss about management, they're getting in their way, I'm just saying, I know what you mean, yes, the coast is clear. So, I show up, and I don't want to waste a lot of time, but the human side of business, has become so important to me, as this company gets bigger and bigger, I'm going to talk a little bit about that now, but two recent ones were really, amazingly interesting, totally different.

One was a 25 year anniversary, along with the man who was going to retire, he's retiring after 20 years with us, they were on the night shift, they were the tech guys, that keep our machine reworking, all night, a thankless job, but great people, I got up there, went over to the Stefano Center, made that long walk to the back, a long walk around a long corridor, I had to take the elevator to get upstairs, at this stage of my life, and there were these 25 people, and it looked like the United Nations, old, young, black, white, Chinese, Indian, Latino, every human was a male woman, male, female, and it was a great, great evening, in which they turned back and said, I haven't had this many pictures taken since my wedding, including, the now popular, selfies, and they seemed to love to do the selfies, and it was just a wonderful evening, and I got a note back from the retiree, saying, I think he used the phrase, big shot, no big shot, the Vanguard has ever come to see us before, and I think that's awful, and I was happy to fill the gap, and to make the more than happy, ecstatic, I could hardly sleep that night, I was so excited, and particularly, this is a little sidebar, particularly since my wife, does not like me to be going late, I have a time when I'm supposed to arrive home in the afternoon, which means getting out of the office at 4, and getting home at 4.30, and resting a little bit, sometimes even taking a nap, and she doesn't want me working so hard, and she doesn't want me working at night, she doesn't want me not being there for dinner, and she's right, by the way, in all counts, and she said, what a great thing to do, she understood the difference between, a lot of other things I could be doing, and dinner for big shots, and photo, or something like that, which I just don't do anymore, and the other one was, for a 26 year retiree, who just wanted to have a couple of people stop by, she had three pizza pies, and we were all going to have just a bite of pizza, she didn't want a celebration, she didn't want me to come, so of course, I showed up, and there were two people who were sitting around, having a pizza pie, she was a lovely woman, and she said something that broke my heart, you made it possible for me to retire early, with her retirement plan, and I said, oh boy, that's a mixed emotion, so I'm getting rid of you, because we're losing you, because we made it easy to leave, which we call a paradox, so I started to talk a little bit, about these things, 25 year things, I opened T's on my telegram, I'm sure they remember it, because I used to speak at every billion dollar advance we made, and every 10 billion, and I said, Susan, I know you'll remember some of these speeches, and it's amazing, speeches all those years ago, I'm not embarrassed about it at all, it's a great consistency of theme, and I just read a couple of things out of the books, and kid around about a little thing, and she came to us with her assets worth, 45 billion, so I thanked her for the remaining, 2 trillion, 955 billion, and I started to talk, and I guess I have kind of a loud voice, and this was just like, all the little cubicles of people answering the phone, and that kind of thing, and the next thing I look around, like five minutes into my talk, very very informal, it's like a flash mob, there must have been 120 people there, how did this thing happen, you just can't have better days than I have, being with the people that do all the hard work, so, I remind, it gives me a chance to remind our crew, our corporate values, our corporate structure, our corporate history, our investment strategy, and I try to explain to them the story of Vanguard, I want them to know how hard it was at the beginning, we got a trillion and four billion, God I still can't get it right, a billion and four of assets at the beginning, and our shareholders were so impressed, that they took out 400 billion dollars for the first three years, there's a vote of confidence for you, and I'm capped off by an article in Forbes magazine, talking about the new separate organizations of Wellington and Vanguard, and it was entitled, you'll notice it right out of Romeo and Juliet, a plague on both your houses, and they did apologize, but I did, if I know why, it took them 23 years to do it, that's a long time to wait, I'm a patient fellow, I'll make sure to live that long, but it's a story of contrarian opinion, opportunity deeply hidden, introspection about an industry that was losing its way, I guess some courage and stubbornness had to be there, in so many ways, the story of that serving, you know this again, human beings, with their own hopes and fears, and financial goals, it's a story of trusting and being trusted, and realizing through all that great fog that we see today, or money values, there is in fact, remain issues, that are white or black, right or wrong, and I say, don't compromise, I've never been good at compromising, I guess there may be a time for it, as one of our directors used to say, never compromise on matters of principle, I didn't spend a lot of time, I don't think four years ago, wondering about whether or not I'd be around to celebrate our 40th anniversary, obviously not everybody lives much beyond 85, and the odds are not improved, when you've been beset by profound cardiac challenges, it began 14 years before Van Gorder was even born, when it began I must have been wearing blinders, to ignore the odds, entrepreneurs as it said, are as risk averse as everyone else, fundamental characteristic of an entrepreneur is risk seeking, it's self confidence, entrepreneurs may recognize, probably do, that starting a business is risky, they just believe their innate skills will win out, a third of all entrepreneurs according to a survey, thought there was no chance, zero chance they would fail, looking back over my own decisions in the early years, I think it's a very receptive observation, I guess you could say I just don't scare very easily, yes, some great ideas, structure and strategy, central to our ability to change the world, investing for the better, it's very clear that's what we've done, but I yet repeat as I say in the beginning, in my previous introduction, ideas are a dime a dozen, implementation is anything, is everything, so I'm shameless about taking every opportunity to be with our crew members, to provide what leadership I can, the commitment, they provide the leadership, the commitment, the loyalty, the professional skills and the human values, that have been essential and remain essential to Vanguard's success, and whatever further success we might achieve before we celebrate our 50th anniversary, and God willing our 100th, which I also expect to be around for, and then maybe I'll be satisfied with well I'm just having this 88th anniversary this year, so maybe I'll be there for this one, who knows, but these crew members are our legacy, and they are the keepers of our value, leadership, Tom, really can keep those values, you can try and reinforce them, but it all comes from the people who are working day after day together, so there's been great joy in my life, you can probably tell, in these past 40 years, I love the joy of the battle, I love working on the firing line with the crew, those who do the hard work, thankless work, often thankless serving our clients and owners, and I get such joy every day of going over to our galley for lunch, waving to our crew, chatting with them, meeting with them on so many fine teams, and I mentioned large and small, and visiting on their anniversaries and so on.

So, um, let's say a couple more things before we get all whistled, um, as the days fly on, of course I age, I reckon I don't really feel it, he says, well maybe I feel it, but not in my mind, uh, I recognize the time will come when I won't be able to engage in the mission, but I said to myself, to continue to speak out for truth and integrity and character in the global plans, striving to build I really do, a better word for investors, not just Vanguard investors, but honest to God, down to earth, you've heard this before and I'll repeat it again, human beings deserve a fair shake.

One's strength to carry on alas, does not, cannot go on forever. In my case, the spirit is more willing than ever, but the flesh weakens. So, for me, the human beings have been part of my long career, including all of you, including our Vanguard crew, and have been by far its most important aspect, particularly these most recent years.

I'm not sure I was as considerate of everybody, very arbitrary, high-handed, dictatorial, and when Vanguard started I thought I had to be, it's my nature anyway, but I've learned a lot about dealing with human beings, and I've often said, I like human beings better than algorithms. And I like judgment better than process, not the Garcia I say, Nick's blessing, you don't require an awful lot of algorithms, you don't require an awful lot of process.

Neither has ever been my strong point. In its early years, we were young, beleaguered, scorned, but by the mid-80s we developed the momentum, and it's continued ever since, building the same bullies and whereabouts strategy of power destruction. So, in this rapidly changing world, how many firms can say that?

They're doing the same thing they've been doing for 40 years, and it still works. Especially in those early years when success was by no means assured, as I told you, my highest priorities were the need to be optimistic every day, no matter how many reverses there were. Set the standards for commitment, I basically had to be the longest working person there, I had to be the first one in the morning, and the last one out at night, and I was probably not quite the first, but I was usually in the office at 6.30, left at 6.30.

No, that didn't mean I didn't work at all. It's 6.30 in the morning and 6.30 at night. But, um, to communicate openly and to give the crew the strength to carry on, turn about as fair play, and today it is our crew and all of you at Fogelheads who are giving me the strength to carry on.

The tables have been turned. These have not, these recent years, have not been the easiest for me, surprisingly, but I carry on because of your confidence, our crew's confidence, your collective way to improve, your respect, your admiration, and as some crew members have put it, maybe you too, your love to have a life and possibly be more rewarding.

I quoted this song in my 63rd anniversary in business, beginning with Wellington, earlier in summer, I guess, which was the day of July 9th, my 63rd anniversary at work, and I concluded with a nice little song. Sometimes in our lives we all have pain, we all have sorrow, but if we are wise, we know that there is always tomorrow.

Lean on me when you're not strong. Lean on me and I'll be your friend. I'll carry on. I'll carry on. And at the end of that, you know the song. Lean on me and I know I lean on you. So it's been a fabulous time. I am very reflective of it.

I'll lean until I'm going to need somebody to lean on. So, thanks Bobleheads. I lean on you, you lean on me, and it's been a very rewarding part of life. The main thing I've tried to do is I quoted that document. The main thing I've tried to do since we were founded in 1974 is create a working environment and an investment environment based on integrity and service and values.

A place where each of us, after Abraham and Lincoln, first inaugural, each of us are touched by the better angels of our nature. So, that concludes my rather lengthy remarks. Before we even get to the deck of slides, which Michael will help me with, so we'll just pause for a minute.

We should take maybe a five minute break and we'll get these slides together. Is that okay, Mike? Sure. Okay, let's just sit and relax here.