...welcoming our special guest of honor, Jack Vogel. Well, I don't usually talk too much. I don't know. How are you? What's to be said? I guess the biggest treat of all, it's always wonderful to see all of you. But there's... honestly... I think it gives me quite a thrill.

As much of a thrill as seeing my dear friend Taylor Leckermore. He represents the best that's in this country, the best that is investing, the highest charity. He represents... well, let's put it this way, everything I want to be when I grow up. I don't have too much time to get there.

But it's great to see you all. And I'm gonna... Is pretty much everybody here tonight, so I don't have to repeat myself in the morning? Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to being with you tomorrow. I think Bill Bernstein is not going to be here. He's in the hospital. He's being operated on.

And Bill's going to probably show up in a wheelchair. Well, that reminds me of me. There are these two questions everybody asks me. What happened? How did it happen? The answer is very easy. I fractured scapula and stupidity. But three days after it happened, or four, I was asked to give the keynote speech to the 70th anniversary of the Financial Analysts of Philadelphia at the Constitution Center, which made it very difficult for me to resist.

That's something I've been involved in all my adult years, I guess. And so my wife said, "You're not doing it, are you?" And I said, "Well, I am." And she said, "Why?" And I said, "Because when I make a commitment, I'm used to keeping it." Not all is true.

This is the apocryphal part. She said, "Well, what if you were dead?" And I said, "Honestly, I think I'd do it anyway." I think I would. I mean, they're not going to keep me from being with you tomorrow morning. It's going to be a little more heavy lifting than I would want to do without Bill Bernstein's absence.

Unless he gets here, which we can't be sure of. So I'll be talking to you then. I'm having a good time, I think, trying to answer your questions. I always start by saying, let's have a lot fewer slides than last year. I think we have eight more. So we'll just do the best we can.

It's all very informal, as you know. I look forward to doing it. It gives me a chance to put some things down. Well, I don't put them quite down in black and white. But there'll be slides there. And I have a lot of ideas that I think I'd like to talk to you about.

Things that are going on now, things that are going to happen this year, and things we ought to be thinking about in the future. So it's fun to do all that. And fun to share it with a group of people who care so deeply about helping one another and observing what's going on.

My God, you're unbelievable. I was going over some of the background for tomorrow, and I happened to get to the thing about the front-line report on retired clients. And I look, and I'm thanking you for writing 262 posts. 262 posts. I didn't even dare look it all up before I came over here.

But we do have a bunch of questions from you in advance, which Bill--thank you very much, Bill--has succeeded in getting together. And then I think we'll also try and do what we did last year, and that is it's fun to get these questions from afar. But we also have some--we'll take some questions from in the air.

So we'll do live Q&A, too. And I will be--what's the phrase I want to use? Completely outspoken. A statement to which I aspire and, alas, don't always achieve. But there's a lot of interesting things going on in the world, in the government, to say the least, at Vanguard, and for investors in a kind of a time where the answers are not easy and the answers are not forthcoming, the answers are not written.

But in a way, that kind of uncertainty has permeated investing forever. Just different levels and degrees. So we put up with it. We do the best we can. And it works. And I get letters from the likes of you all every single day from shareholders without--nothing is a complaint.

Somebody purchased $500,000 for the Mendex 500 at the high in 2007, and thanked me for all we'd done for him since then. God knows where he was coming from. But he did stay with us, and now somebody can tell me the number. 20% cap income, 25% higher than he was then.

All very counterintuitive. And I could tell a whole story about one of the great bureaus at Vanguard, Gus Sillard. Is it okay if I tell a story like that? Around February 10, 2009, the market had gone down 55%. And I don't see nearly as much of Gus as I used to.

We happened to run into each other in the hall. And he was heading for somewhere, and I was headed for somewhere in our paths. And we got talking about the market, and the 55% declined. And he said to me, "You know, if I had to make a guess, I'd say this is going to be the best time to put your money to work in the stock market in our lifetimes." And I said, "Would you say that publicly?" And he said, "Are you kidding?" I only forget the ones where I look bad.

But we live in that kind of a world where it doesn't seem to pay to go out on a limb. I guess in terms of anybody in the business, I go out as far as one would dare. But I'm always not looking at today or tomorrow or the next day or the next decade, even longer than that.

So let me stop at that point. Thank you again for coming. It's great to be with you. And I'm looking forward to seeing you in the morning. I will be with you at 8.30 if you don't know. Thank you. I've got a story that you may really get a kick out of.

You know, a recent story that Anna did in the Wall Street Journal. She also did a podcast where somebody interviewed her, somebody from the journal interviewed her, and they had it posted on the Internet. And a lot of the bogo heads went and saw the podcast. And at the end of the podcast, the interviewer asked Anna if there was any special requirement to join the bogo heads.

And she said no. Anybody can join. They don't have a secret handshake. So somebody said, well, maybe we ought to get a secret handshake. Did you see it? That's it. Index finger. So anyway, I said, all right, let's have a contest to see who can come up with the best secret handshake.

This is good. He's good. And we got one entry immediately after, and I closed the contest. I thought it was the most brilliant thought that I -- it is an index finger shake. Victoria, where's Victoria? Victoria, there she is. You wouldn't pick mine, would you? So we now -- Now everybody knows.

No, here's the deal. I wrote down there that people are going to wonder how non-bogo heads will -- that will now know our secret handshake. And I said that anybody who's a true bogo head will remember, and anybody who is not a true bogo head will have instant memory loss.

Our secret is our secret. All right. In honor of that, she is now Lady Victoria. I had to explain it to Taylor. At least you got it. No, I was going to ask her, "What's a podcast?" It's just a video. It's all right. No, I got that far. I wasn't sure.

Thank you. you