Exploring The Villages: Health, Improv, and Innovation S7,#2

Exploring The Villages: Health, Improv, and Innovation S7, #2

Season 7 Kickoff: Clubs, Health Insights, Improv, and Tech Updates

Welcome to the second episode of Season 7 of Open Forum in The Villages, Florida, hosted by Mike Roth. In this episode, Mike outlines upcoming shows and discusses his passion for sharing knowledge and insights with the community. He highlights next week's video episode featuring Peter Bernard and Dr. Gerard Acloque, focusing on GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. The show also delves into local improv events and future podcasting and AI courses. Mike shares a brief Alzheimer’s tip from Dr. Craig Curtis and announces a new podcast, 'Mature Adults with Donna and Mike,' set to launch on August 5. Additional segments cover practical advice on product purchases and tech updates, including Windows 10 support ending in October 2025.

00:00 Introduction to Open Forum Season Seven
01:00 Upcoming Special Video Episode
03:57 Improv Festival Highlights
06:50 Upcoming Courses and Workshops
10:04 Alzheimer's Research and Tips
11:23 New Podcast Announcement
16:52 Tech Tips and Troubleshooting
20:22 Conclusion and Supporter Shoutouts

FALL IMPROV - UNSCRIPTED FUN AND GAMES

 If you are a Villager, I wanted to remind you about our great new improv show coming up on September 29th at 6:30 pm at the Rohan Recreation Center.  The show is for Villagers. The funniest show ever.
Reserved seating at tables of eight. Bring your own snacks and favorite adult beverages. Get Your Tickets at My.AllEvents.in/improv92925   but remember  it is only for Villagers who like to laugh!

Transcript

Exploring The Villages: Health, Improv, and Innovation S7. #2

[00:00:00] Nancy: Welcome to Season seven of Open Forum in the villages of Florida. In this show, we talk to leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live in and around the villages. We also talk to people who have information vital to seniors. You will get perspectives of what is happening in the Villages, Florida area.

We are a listener supported podcast. There will be shoutouts for supporters. 

[00:00:33] Mike Roth: This is Mike Roth. Listeners, I'm thrilled to share with you this podcast, my passion project for you. This podcast brings you knowledge, inspiration, and things you need to know about the people and the villages here in Florida.

 This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in The Villages, Florida. We're recording Season seven, show number two. This show is gonna be dedicated to a lot of different topics, but first I wanted to tell you about the show that's coming up next week 'cause it's a really special show. I very rarely do video episodes.

Next week is gonna be a video episode. I very rarely have more than one guest on at a time. Next week we're going to have two guests on video. We're gonna have, Peter Bernard, who's been on our show before. Peter has been taking. Zep bound a GLP one drug for the past six months and has lost 46 pounds.

When I saw Peter for the first time since he started taking the drug, I said, Peter, it's you, but there's a lot less of you. And along with Peter, we're bringing a YouTube sensation, a concierge doctor from Miami, Florida whose practice is. Limited to weight loss and health, and he has hundreds of thousands of patients on one or more of these GLP one drugs.

His name is Dr. Gerard Acloque, and he will be talking from the perspective of what you can expect if you decide to go on it, what the side effects are, how do you mitigate the side effects, and we'll have a little bit of A discussion as to whether or not it's suitable for everyone. These drugs are not covered by most insurance most of the time.

Peter Bernard had preexisting conditions, so his drugs are covered and there are various sources for the drugs you can get. You can get them from Eli Lilly directly. You can get the drugs through a compounder or you can get 'em from your pharmacy if you. And withstand the bill.

Our next show, show number four is going to be an audio episode and I'm gonna bring on concierge Doctor Bayoan Martinez-Cruz, who is a concierge doctor here in The Villages, Florida. He also has a large number, more than a thousand patients on the GLP one drugs, and we will talk to him about his experience and the risk rewards of going on a drug like that.

I think that, Dr. Martinez Cruz will give us a fair explanation of what is entailed if you decide to go on the drug. He is a concierge doctor, and we will also talk about what's the difference between a concierge doctor and having your primary care physician thru something like The Villages Health.

Or whatever's going to be called Center Care for Seniors by Humana. It's a very interesting transition that they're going through there. Some of the things that I'm involved with make a lot of sense to talk about too. I've just come from a, uh, two day improv festival in. Sarasota, Florida, where on Friday they had three theaters operating with shows at five o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, nine o'clock, and 10 o'clock.

And on Saturday the show started at four o'clock in the afternoon. So there were probably. A hundred over a hundred improvs from all over the country. And it was an international festival because we did have people from Canada and it was really great. One of the things that I personally participated in on Saturday during the day were three.

Seminars or training exercises for improvers. The first and most important one I think I took was on how to add music to your improv performances. So if we get a good keyboard player, who can show up at our rehearsals, I think we, we were ready to take that plunge.

With at least an opening number, which will be an improv first for our group here in The Villages. Our next full show will be September 29th at the Rohan Auditorium, and those tickets are on sale now. So if you haven't picked up your tickets, I suggest you do. So. It's a reserved seat show and. The website to go to is My.allevents.in/improv92925 

that will take you to the ticketing site. This is a reserved seat show. There are 32 tables with eight seats per table. You can choose your own seat from those seats that are still available. I will say that good seats are still available right now as I'm recording this in mid July, by September 1st. I expect most of the show to be sold out.

 We've added two new players , that will have between them over 20 years of improv experience. So I think you're going to see a better show. It's going to be all improv shows are different. This one is called Improv Unscripted, because there is no script. We have an idea of what scenes we're going to run, but that depends on how well they receives them and how things are going because there are always last minute changes on the fly. Since you're at round tables of eight with seated with your friends, you can bring your own snacks and adult beverages.

As far as what I'm doing.

I have another podcasting course coming up. I believe it's in January, and that's in mid-January.

I believe it's on Wednesdays, and then in February. I have another AI course coming up. Frankly, the AI course is getting much more difficult to teach. When I contemplated doing the course, there were only a total of a hundred sixty eight AI companies.

Today there are over 70,000 and existing vendors are adding AI back into their products that they buy from someone else. So I think we're dealing in a boom market in AI and this will be a hands-on course. You'll have the opportunity to bring your own laptop tablet into the course to run through it.

We're only gonna have about 25 seats

because it's difficult to handle a hands-on course with more than 25 people in the room.

We do have a course coming up in September in AI for that course. It's all sold out.

It's all sold out. There is a waiting list. If you want, you can go to the Enrichment Academy and put your name on the waiting list. Usually one or two people drop out, before the course starts. You need to have three browsers on your device, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Some of these are optimized for one of those browsers.

Others just plain don't work unless you have the browser that they like. For those people who are using Apple devices although Safari is a nice Chrome based browser, it's not Chrome, and many times people have had problems with it, so I'm strongly suggesting no one used Chrome.

I also suggest that don't plan on coming to the hands-on course. If you're gonna use a cell phone, the screen simply isn't big enough. Before you come to the class, you'll need to go to the Lake Miona Recreation Center and get your device set up to run on the enrichment Academy SSID network and.

Password and prove that works when the class starts. We won't have time to help everybody get on the network. That's something that you'll need to complete before coming to the first class. The class is going to cover Some of the same ais that we've talked about before, but we're gonna spend a lot more time on script.

The script has created a audio video creation tool, which brings together a lot of AI technology, and in fact, their whole AI engine is now called Underlord. And it's generative in the sense that it can generate pictures or avatars so that you don't have to put yourself in front of a camera. Pretty cool.

It also is illustrated to me how easy it is to alter what people really said because the script has a voice generator built in. Which makes it a lot easier to use. So those are just some of the things that are coming up. Let's take a, quick break and listen to a Alzheimer's tip from Dr. Craig Curtis.

The Most Feared disease in America more than heart attacks.

[00:10:14] Dr. Craig Curtis: It's a very feared disease because its and strokes kill more people. That is true. It's the number one killer of men and women in the United States. Alzheimer's disease is also the only one of the top 10 killers of Americans that we currently don't have a way of modifying significantly.

 But through these prevention studies, we're hoping we can find some more answers. We're also looking at removing this amyloid before someone gets symptoms. We talked about tau and that protein, how it spreads through the brain. We currently have a research trial where we're testing a vaccine to see if we can halt the spread of tau.

It's a worldwide study and we're doing it right here in Tthe Villages, and we're really hopeful that things like this in the future can provide us some help. That study might be able to stop the progression of tau if it works. 

[00:11:06] Warren: With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate the village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life.

To learn more, visit his website. Craig Curtis md.com or call 3 5 2 5 0 0 5 2 5 2 to attend a free seminar.

[00:11:22] Mike Roth: Thank you, Dr. Curtis.

Before we sign off for this episode, I wanted to spend a few minutes and tell everyone about what's going to happen on starting on August 5th. I have a second podcast. This is a two person podcast where I'm the co-host with Donna Hoover. She's an EX-TV reporter and writer. And producer. Even did some on camera work.

Donna is a member of our improv club, and we're going to be talking about topics that are important to seniors, not only seniors here in The Villages, but seniors all over the country. Donna and I will be talking about everything from restaurants to health to eating right. We'll be talking about exercise, and we're going to bring two or two different points of view to many subjects.

I think it's a fun show. We've put together several episodes. The release date for the first episode, we'll be August 5th. It will be on bus Sprout. Again, the name of the show is Mature Adults with Donna and Mike. And if you listen to this channel next week, you will hear the easy way to get onto the show.

Now, we're still looking for supporters for this show, and if you haven't decided to sign up for your. Three or $5 a month, or even $10 a month donation. I really would hope you do. So it keeps the show interesting. Anyway, I can buy some of the new toys to upgrade the show. Some of the upgrades are invisible.

This year we're going to be upgrading the monitors in the studio to make them all easier to deal with. Right now I have four monitors in the studio and I'm going to take it down to three,

which would make it easier to deal with. We're also going to be upgrading the pre amplifier. Not that there's much noise or need to do that, but we wanna stay up to date with the latest and greatest. This year we've made the decision not to go to the pod convention in Orlando as last year. I spent a lot of time and money down there, and I didn't think the return on investment was that great.

Some of the ideas they gave us were not very good. Some of the things they should have told us to do. They didn't tell us to do so in the podcasting world, things change. Two years ago, YouTube listens to my podcast. This podcast were less than 2%. Now I can tell you that YouTube is averaging A solid 12% of my listens, and that's because I use an AI called Headliner to move my audio only podcast into an audiogram and post it automatically on YouTube.

So if you listen to this now on YouTube, and you're looking at my picture with the logo of the show behind me that was created. By an AI from the audio version. Nothing wrong with that.

I think there's a big difference between a YouTube video and a podcast. For me, podcasts are great because you can listen to them. When you're walking around and exercising in your neighborhood or your yard, you can listen to 'em in your car.

You can even listen to 'em at home on a set of earbuds. But it's really hard to drive a car and watch a YouTube video. I think it's really dangerous to go into the gym and attempt to watch a YouTube video where they're showing you how to. Solder it together, two wires, or cut a hole on a wall. Those things don't make good sense to me.

They're two different types of Media. I think podcasting is a great way to get intimate with people, to learn a little bit about 'em and to increase your knowledge base about what's happening in the world. And here in The Villages. And That's what we are going to be doing in the rest of 2025.

Because of scheduling conflicts during October of 2025, you may find some shows repeated from earlier. When I repeat a show that was broadcast earlier, I'm going to put the show through the latest AI enhancements so it won't quite be the same. But we will get the same number of episodes created each year.

We do have a feedback channel when you listen on Buzz Sprout, URL directly. And you can hit a button and it's something like feedback, and I get those messages and surprisingly few people have hit the button. But that's up to you. I will answer all questions and I will read all the messages. If someone has an idea of what we should be talking about on the show, please let me know.

One of the subjects that I'm thinking of including is landscaping because people spend a lot of money on landscaping here in The Villages. Sometimes it's called hardscaping, where they cut stones into and create tiers, in your front or backyard.

But I have some contacts in the landscaping business and they'll. I'd be glad to come on.

In terms of those of you who are using Windows computers the end of support for Windows 10 is in October of this year. I think it's towards the end of October. So either you have to go out and buy a new machine, a b. Keep the old machine, but recognize that Microsoft is not going to come up with any new updates for Windows 10 after October and live with the risks, knowing that you could be shut down in an instant by a hacker or have your data stolen.

The third option, which I actually may try, is upgrading a Windows 10 machine to Windows 11. Without having the appropriate chips on the motherboard, I know that's not a recommended thing to do, but I have a computer here that's, more than a few years old, probably 12 years old, and there's nothing on it that can't be replaced.

Everything is backed up, but it's a good experiment. And for those of you who are interested, let me know if you want to have a walkthrough on how to do that, I'll be more than, happy to create an episode or two on how to upgrade your Windows 10 Machine to a Windows 11 machine. Now, in that process, you may discover that the Windows 10 machine, although it can be upgraded, but run so slowly that it's pathetic.

That's happened to me before on other machines, but it's important to understand that when you're, I'm gonna call it playing with technology, sometimes it can bite you.

We just had a interesting situation happen. Our computerized water softener broke down the manufacturer wouldn't sell parts for their softener to individuals like me. The name of the manufacturer was Hydrotech. They claimed I had to go through their dealers who were plumbers, so I called two of 'em.

First one never showed up. Second one shows up with three guys. Two of 'em had never seen a hydrotech before. They take it apart. they find some parts that are needing replacement. They tell me they were gonna get the replacement parts for me. That was six months ago. Never heard from 'em again.

I had another plumber called Hydrotech trying to buy the parts. Hydrotech wouldn't sell it to them, so I replaced The computerized water softener with an older style. Mechanical water softener, mechanical gears and clock, but all of the parts are available through plumbing supply houses.

So that made a big impression on me. Whenever you're buying a product, make sure that the parts of the product are going to be available for the duration that you expect to keep it, whether it's, , three years or 10 years. And it's an important consideration. We had an incident here with our microwave door not being recognized as closed, and we were able to buy replacement switches on Amazon and see how to replace the switches from a YouTube video or two, and it made that job of saving the microwave.

From a failure of a 50 cents switch to a doable deal. Unfortunately, Amazon charged $10 for the switches, and unfortunately I damaged two of the switches as I was putting 'em in. But that's another story altogether. but at least the parts were available

and you didn't have to be a Whirlpool dealer to get the parts. I've rambled on for about 20 minutes today. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We'll see you next week because I will see you or you will see me as it will be a video podcast and you'll be able to watch that on YouTube.

There will also be an audio only version of that podcast, but we will give you the to listen. Or watch that video 'cause Dr. G is an interesting guy. And if you wanna go back and take a look at the old Peter Bernard from a year ago, and then look at the new one, you'll see that the guys a lot thinner.

That's all I have to say for today. Thanks for listening.

[00:21:03] Nancy: Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9:00 AM Should you wanna become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike@rothvoice.com.

This is a shout out for supporters. Tweet Coleman, Ed Williams, Duane and Dr. Craig Curtis at K 2 in The Villages. We will be hearing more from Dr. Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week. If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mike@rothvoice.com. The way our show grows is with your help.

Text your friends about this show. If you enjoyed listening or just tell your friends about the show. We thank everyone for listening . The content of the show is copyrighted by Roth Voice 2025, all rights reserved.