Cataracts

Today, Doug Pike interviews Dr. Stephanie Handal about cataracts.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote
because you were the TV remote. Remember when music sounded
like this.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Remember when social media was truly social? Hey John, how's
it going today?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well, this show is all about you. This is fifty
plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health,
and what to do for fun. Fifty plus brought to
you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging, Informed
Decisions for a healthier, happier life, and by New Promise

(00:43):
Neuropathy Lose the Pain and Knownness, Get your life back,
New Promise Neuropathy dot.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Com and now fifty plus with Doug Pipe. All right,
here we go. Welcome to Thursday. Thank you all for
joining in. If you saw the post I put on
Facebook a few minutes ago. In the second segment today,
we're going to be talking about cataracts, and I hope
you will all jump in and listen, or stick around

(01:11):
and listen. I can't say jump in because if you
weren't here yet, you would have to not be here
yet to jump in, And if you're already here, you
already know what's coming. In the second second, never mind,
we could actually kind of call Thursday kind of call
today Groundhog Day, so far as weather goes, slight chance
of a pop up thunderstorm this morning or this afternoon,

(01:31):
excuse me, hi in the mid nineties, low in the
high seventies, blah blah blah. If you made it through yesterday,
there's a good chance you'll make it through today and tomorrow.
And then after that we get legitimate chances of rain
eighty percent each for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and we
all know how accurate those can be. That far out,

(01:52):
there's really nothing else worthy of discussion around southeast Texas.
That said, that little area of low pressure though still
down in the Bay of campeache it's moving slowly westward
toward land, and chances of development are less than ten
percent for the next week. So also, nothing really to
see there except for any days if you're happening to

(02:14):
if you happen to be going specifically down to the
west coast of Mexico or the east coast of Mexico
in the Bay of Campeachee. I've actually been to a
couple of places down there. One a horrifying story quick sidebar.
A couple of friends of mine and I in the
media were invited to a lodge that was going to

(02:37):
be when it was completely fixed up and built out.
It was going to be a dove hunting lodge with
access to fishing. The lodge wasn't complete, quite complete though,
when we got there, and we knew that going in
that was still under construction. But it was livable. I

(02:57):
guess you could call it, and I'd have to wrap
quotes around that. So we get there and all we're
gonna do is spend the night there once and then
we're gonna go down to the coast and do a
couple of days of fishing and then fly back up here.
So we get there and they're touring. They're touring us
around the facility and the property and whatnot. And as
we go by the pool, we can't help but notice

(03:19):
that there are these little pincher bugs. What do they call?
I don't remember the exact name of them. We call
them pincher bugs down here. They have that little claw
on their posteriors that they'll grab you with or grab something.
I don't know what exactly it's for, maybe climbing trees,
I have no idea, but they're about an inch long
and there may be an inch and a half for

(03:40):
the big ones. And there was a man standing on
the side of the pool. He had a scoo a
little scoop net, a pool cleaning net in one hand,
and a bucket in the other, and he had already
gathered just from the pool about three quarters of a
five gallon bucket of those bugs. And so of course

(04:05):
we all ask, hey, what's with the bugs?

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Man?

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Are they inside too? And there's this long pause from
our host, and he goes, well, yeah, kind of, we've
got the windows up in all the rooms. You can
see that. He points over to all the windows and oh, yeah,
there's a window. Sure, but they haven't been they haven't
been finished yet. They've been put in place, but there's

(04:27):
no seal around them, none of the trim work is
on them, there's no caulking around them.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
And so.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
We wonder how we're gonna get through the night, if
some of the couple of these bugs might get in.
So they hand each of us, well, you'll love this.
We're standing there trying to figure it out, and they
hand each of us a spray can kind of about
the size of a hair spray can or a an
insecticide can, and say, just spray this all around your room,

(04:57):
and that should they said, that should keep them out
for most of the night. So we'd get into the
rooms and they reek already of insecticide. God knows what's
in that stuff. There was a sculling crossbones, literally a
sculling crossbones on the can, and it was all in Spanish,
so I couldn't read it. I had no idea, but

(05:18):
I knew that it would kill something, either me or
those bugs. When you get in, you walk around, and
because they had sprayed those rooms right before we went in,
or maybe an hour or two and gone and cleaned
them up, didn't look too bad. Oh, inside's not near
as bad as that pool. Well about I don't know,
maybe midnight, one o'clock in the morning. I get up

(05:41):
and I need to go to the restroom, and I
figured there'd be some of those buds bugs on the floor,
So smart me, I slip into a pair of sandals
or something like that that i'd brought with me, and
immediately make contact with two or three in the shoes,

(06:02):
And as I start to walk across the room, I
can hear them crunching underneath the shoes, and I finally
get over there, I do my business, I crawl back
in bed, and what happens next was something right out
of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. These bugs start falling from

(06:24):
the ceiling onto my pillow, and needless say, none of
us got any sleep that night. But the fishing was good,
and it was overall other than the terror of lying
on your pillow and just feeling this and having two
of these creepy crawley things right in your face, it

(06:46):
was great. Food was good all right, very quickly, and
market seemed a little bit unsure. This morning. They'd climbed
back well into the green now, though Dow was up
by more than three hundred points just a little while ago,
the other three indicators I watch also well into the green.
Gold was down again another twenty five bucks, down to
forty one oh eight, which sounds like, holy cow, that's terrible.

(07:09):
It was five thousand a couple of months ago. Well, yes,
that's called fluctuation. It happens a lot in the gold market,
and thank goodness, it didn't happen to you. If you
bought a bunch of gold two weeks ago. Sorry about that.
You've lost some money. Hold on to it long enough,
you'll gain it back and a bunch more. That's pretty
much how that works. Oil West WTI West Texas Intermediate

(07:34):
Crude was around ninety five bucks early this morning and
unlikely to change much until we finish our business with Iran.
I'm gonna go ahead and get out of here. We've
got a lot of stuff do unpacked today. That great
interview coming up next with doctor Stephanie Handle about cataracts
if you saw it on Facebook on the way out.
Gallery Furniture and the z Cliner sleep Share still's Max

(07:56):
still over there every day waiting for you to come
in and buy one of those sleep chairs. It's a recliner,
it's a heat of massage, chair of bed, whatever you
want it to be. Ultimately, though, you will get the
ultimate relaxation and soothing experience out of that z Cliner
sleep chair, whether or not you avail yourself of the
power lift option. I think if you're gonna go ahead

(08:17):
and get one like that, get a chair like that,
go ahead and invest in the power option to get
you in and out of it, because you're gonna have
days when you're just so immersed in all of that relaxation,
you're not gonna want to get out, but you know
you need to because you've got a chore to do,
or maybe you need to run down the hall, or
maybe it's time to cook dinner, or whatever it is.

(08:37):
You might need a little encouragement to get you out
of that chair. This is high tech relaxation, like I've
been telling you, and you can get it today at
any gallery furniture locations. Z Cliner sleep chairs from Gallery Furniture.
Check them out now.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
They sure don't make them like they used to. That's
why every few months we wash them, check us fluids
and spring on a fresh coat of wax. This is
fit with Doug Pike going back to fifty plus.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Thank you for listening. I certainly do appreciate that. In
this segment, as promised, we're going to talk about cataracts
with one of the best in that field, and that
is doctor Stephanie Handel, therapeutic and glaucoma optometric specialist. I
had it, I just stopped on it, and uniquely I
would bet as promised at my Facebook post a woman
who turned to optometry after a twenty five year career

(09:26):
in music. Welcome board, doctor Handel. Uh oh are you there?

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Oh, I hear you. Now there was something weird about that.
I don't know what happened. So twenty five years, you
took twenty five years in music and you take a
sharp turn nine I did.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah, you're dating me here.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
To tell me why? You got to tell me why
you left music. I love music so much, you know,
long story.

Speaker 3 (09:57):
But I couldn't be happier with what I'm doing. And
I get to help a lot of people every single day,
and that is just that's just magic to me. So
no regrets. So you had a fun time. Music was great,
but I'm thrilled doing what I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
So you went from making people happy with music to
making people happy with medicine. That's there's a common thing here.
So let's dive into cataracts. What exactly are they?

Speaker 3 (10:20):
Okay, So we are all born with a tiny transparent
lens inside of our eyes that kind of looks like
a skittle and it floats around in the middle of
our eyeball. And when we're born, completely completely transparent. But
as we what I say to my patients is as
we have birthdays, that lens goes from being transparent to

(10:43):
becoming more opaque and sometimes yellowing. So you can think
of this, like if you've ever seen a sheet of
clear plexiglass that's been exposed to the sun and beautie
rays for a long time, how it starts to go
yellow and maybe little cracks and it opacifi. That is
essentially a cataract. So that lens that used to be
transparent is now opaque. It might be a little bit yellow,

(11:07):
and now it's causing our vision to be blurry. That,
in essence, is what a cataract is.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
You know what else I think of when I think
of something that used to be perfectly clear and kind
of turning opaque and yellowish car headlights?

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yes, yes, And you can think of that in the
same in the same things. Yeah, used to be transparent,
now it's just a little bit setsy.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
So how much do we know about what causes that?

Speaker 3 (11:33):
We know quite a bit actually, So the vast majority
of what causes a cataract is just UV light, and
the lens is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
One of the jobs of the lens is to stop
UV light before it gets to the red.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Okay, where'd she go? Where did she go? It's a
mystery hang top. We're gonna find her any ideas. Will
He's pushing lots of buttons over there that I'm not
qualified to push, So I'm hoping one of them becomes
the right one. Sixty minutes now, will No, we wanna

(12:17):
try and call her back. Let's do that. We're gonna
call her back, and we're gonna give her plenty of
time to finish up with these questions, no matter what
it takes, even if we have to hold her for
a segment, if she can do that. In the meantime,
while he's reconnecting with doctor Handel, I will let you
know because I'm sure all of you were on pins
and needles to find out what national day it is?

(12:38):
And today today, this is one of my favorites. And
my mother used to cook this all the time, all
the time. It was a staple in most homes back
in the fifties or so. And that is corn on
the cob. National corn on the cob day has to
be just drowned in butter for me. And if you
throw a few spices on it. I've been to enough

(12:59):
craffee spoils to know that butter plus spices on corn
is outstanding. Do we have her back yet? Not quite?
Not quite? So hey, if you've got corn in the
house or you want to go to the grocery store
and get some. And I don't understand. I'm not sure
whether corn. I haven't bought corn on the cob at

(13:22):
the grocery store in a very long time. But I
do see people over there shucking it before they take
it home. Is that and somebody shoot me an email
and let me know whether that's either that's for the
convenience of not having to do it at home and
not having to fill your garbage can with it. Is
there some reason why you would they're not selling it
by the pound, I would think, Or are they? I

(13:45):
don't know. Back when I was hunting waterfowl on the
Katie Prairie every now and then when we go scouting
the corn fields in the late fall and whatnot, I
can't remember exactly when it was we were out there
doing this, but those full ears of corn actually off
the stock. We'd grab one or two every now and

(14:06):
then take them home and cook them up. Now, it's
about the freshest you can get corn. Didn't have to
go on a truck ride from anywhere to anywhere else.
We're having trouble, aren't we will this is like this
is like being on on a Saturday morning. I don't
know why it is, but we have more technical Well
I do know why it is because when they start
to try to fix things that they don't think will

(14:26):
cause a problem but does. It's always on the weekends
because there's just not as much traffic. So there you
have that. We'll get back to the Cadillac or yeah,
the Cadillac thing, the Cataract interview as soon as we can,
because we were just gonna just about to get into
the good stuff. And by the way, when when doctor
Handel mentioned that the purpose of that lens in there

(14:50):
is to ditch the UV rays, that just made me
want to put on sunglasses every single time I walk
out the door. Now that's the last thing I'll want.
I'm I'm probably over the midway hump, almost certainly over
the midway hump at my age, but I still whatever,
Oh do you have her? You got her? Oh, doctor handle,

(15:11):
are you there? Nope? And then it went away again,
didn't it so close in? Yet so far away? So
in any event, uh, sunglasses I know will be a
high priority on her list. If you're out and about
and you can get into some shade somewhere too, now,
not just kind of thin shade, but something that really

(15:32):
protects your eyeballs from the sun. Hopefully that would work.
Don't tease me, will if she's either there or not.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
There?

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Oh my goodness, long time no here. Yeah, I had to.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
I had to tell everybody that today was National Corn
on the Cob Day. That's how desperate I was.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
You know, I could hear you, you couldn't hear me.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Oh gosh, I'm so frustrated by that. So I'm sorry
as well. So back to where we were with the
protection from the u V raised. That also raises the
sunglasses flag.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
Doesn't it correct sunglasses or some kind of glasses. Prescription
glasses usually block you V raised?

Speaker 2 (16:11):
So yeah, right, okay, well, thank goodness. Yeah, if you
lead these things unattended, how fast and how badly will
they impact somebody's vision?

Speaker 3 (16:22):
So that is something that we don't know. Sometimes cataracts
can come on kind of suddenly and they can get
bagged pretty quickly, and other times they sort of plateau
and they don't get worse, they don't really get better
once they change into that opaque cataracts, they're not going
to get better, but they may not get worse, and
they may not really be affecting people's vision. What I

(16:43):
tell my patients is that cataract surgery, except in a
few very rare and specific cases, it's not an emergency,
and we do it when patients are ready. So when
you feel like your vision is being affected, when you
feel like your glasses always dirty, or you're having trouble
driving at night, or you're becoming more light sensitive to

(17:05):
those oncoming headlights, you can't do the things that you're
accustomed to doing, your hobbies, your work, You can't do
those things normally and comfortably because of your vision. Then
it's time you start considering cataracts surgery.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Who's most susceptible? Is there an age group, Is there
anything with lifestyle or genetics.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
There are certain diseases, diabetes being one of them, that
we know can accelerate the onset and the severity of
a cataract, But in general, this is something that's going
to happen with birthdays. The vast majority of cases that happens.
We start seeing traces of them, usually around age fifty
fifty five, and they become visually significant where they're affecting

(17:50):
vision in a negative way around age seventy, sometimes a
little bit longer, sometimes a little bit earlier.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Fingers crossed for me, Doctor Stephanie handle on fifty plus here,
especially since AI came along. There's always there are miss
and misconceptions about every medical condition. What are some of
the common untruths about cataracts?

Speaker 3 (18:10):
So we see them all the time where there's advertisements
for drops that claim to reverse cataracts, and that's one
thing that's absolutely false. Once a cataract occurs, there's really
no way to reverse it except surgically. So any of
those advertisements, whether there are supplements like pills or eye

(18:33):
drops there, they're completely false. They're not going to do
anything to revent.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Hopefully, to put the people who squirm when they hear
about someone working on their eyes to rest. Talk about
cataract surgery and how it works.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
The vast majority of cases, patients are awake during cataract surgery.
That they give you the happy juice, so you are sedated,
and most of our patients really don't remember anything about
the surgery the next day. It's a very very quick
procedure and the again vast majority of cases, it's a
very common surgery and it's very safe. After surgery, patients

(19:13):
are a little bit sore the next day. A lot
of them complain about, you know, small headaches, a little
bit of eyelid pain, but most of.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Them do really, really well.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Now the month after surgery, there's going to be some
follow ups and you may be asked to use prescription drops.
But I will tell you that some of our doctors
now do something called a dropless surgery where patients are
just sent home after surgery and they don't have to
worry about any antibiotic drops or sterey drops or anything.

(19:44):
They just kind of live their lives to after surgery
on the whole, very easy, very quick.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Can I get happy juice at the grocery store?

Speaker 3 (19:53):
I wish we all could prescription only, indeed, I'm afraid.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
So what I'm recognizing from you here is that the
long term prognosis behind a successful surgery is very good,
isn't it.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
It's very very good, And it's even better if patients
go into surgery healthy, So the healthier you can be.
For example, for our diabetics, we want their blood sugar
under control. For hypertensive patients, we want their blood pressure
under control, as healthy as you can make your body.
The outcome is just going to be all that much

(20:28):
better and the healing is going to be that much better.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Fantastic, Doctor Stephanie Handle, thank you so much for your time.
If you could tell people in thirty seconds or less,
one thing they really need to know about cataracts.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
What is it.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
That it's not a disease. It's like the gray hair
and the wrinkled of the eyeball. We all get them.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
We're all going to get them sooner or later if
I live long enough. Well that's a goal. I want
to live long enough to have a cataract. That's what
I want, all right, Doctor.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Handle, thank you great, they're reversible.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
Okay, yeah, very good. Thank you so much. Really okay,
bye bye o uh huh, all right, that was good
once we got the wheels turning again. I really appreciate
her time. She's very easy to talk to. Midway Meat
Market out there on Old Highway ninety parallel to E ten.
You go E ten to the first Katie exit, which

(21:21):
has just past ninety nine. There's a lot of nines
and tens in these directions. Just use your GPS. That's
be the easiest way to find Midway meat Market, and
once you do find it, you will be pleasantly surprised
when you walk through the doors to realize that you
have taken almost a step back in time. If you
were to take away the electronics, you were to take

(21:42):
away the website, take away the tap to pay, you
might think you had just walked into the late seventies,
early eighties somewhere in there. Midway's been around since we're
for fifty seven years. Fifty seven years, and it is
still as comfortable to walk in, as friendly a people

(22:03):
as you'll ever meet. These are country people. A lot
of those people in Midway have worked there for fifteen
twenty twenty five years. They come there, they start working there,
they realize what a good atmosphere it is, and they
want to perpetuate that I walked in there. What was
it Monday? Yeah, I walked in there Monday afternoon, and

(22:25):
five seconds in greeted hi, welcome to Midway. And from
there I was actually looking for someone. I was looking
for Trish, the woman who owns the store, and she
was not there. Unfortunately I missed her again. That's two
times in a row. Now. She's a very busy woman.
She's got a lot of things on her plate and
so now and I know her and we just kind
of laugh about it when I miss her. So next time, though,

(22:46):
I'm calling first, I'm gonna make sure she's gonna be
there because I love talking with her. I love talking
with her about all the different products they have in there,
the beef, chicken and pork, the twenty five flavors of
premium sausage, the got the lunch counter where you can
get a delicious cheeseburger or a barbecue lunch. Just to
kind of let an hour or so of the day

(23:07):
go by, maybe just drop off your order for everything
you want to eat at the house for the next
few weeks, and then while they're preparing all of that
for you, you can go ahead and sit down and
have yourself a nice lunch. Eight am to seven pm,
seven days a week. Those boxes, well, it's the eleventh
now I think the boxes might be gone for this month.

(23:27):
But what they're doing at the start of each month
is preparing these like a pork box or a chicken box,
or a beef box or a premium meat box, whatever
it is. It's a healthy bunch of meat all cut
fresh and then frozen so that you could take it
home and pull it out of your freezer, just day

(23:48):
by day until you run out and you go back
out there to get more. So close, there's no reason
not to go out there quite a bit and get
everything you want very easy. It's a small store, like
I said, a country atmosphere. You're gonna love this place.
Midwaymeatmarket dot Com is the website midwaymeat Market dot Com.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Once life without a net. If I suggest you go
to bed, sleep it off, just wait until the show's over.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Sleepy. Back to Doug Pike as fifty plus continues, fifty
plush Dougpike here will over there We got through. I
was so glad to get through the interview with doctor
Stephanie Handle about cataracts because I know some people who've
had them, and I've been on the sidelines for that.
Knock on wood. Haven't had any trouble at all with

(24:34):
my eyes yet, although I am you know, I I
want to I want to say that I don't have
really any There's no major problem with driving at night.
There really isn't. It's not that big a deal. But
I have noticed, and I guess it's probably because there
are so many cars now with the Haligen lights that
are a little bit brighter, and especially when somebody's got

(24:55):
those on and has them on high beams there, they'll
just dealp penetrate your soul. A lot of these things
and more and more people I just I guess they
don't know any better, or they just don't have a
clue or care. But I'm seeing increasing numbers of cars
driving around with their brights on, and especially some of

(25:16):
the bigger jacked up trucks. I can tell. I can
still tell the difference between low beam and high beam
beam even when a truck is lifted a little bit.
But for heaven's sake, just make sure your brights aren't on. Okay,
that would be nice, That would help a lot. Woman
on TikTok went viral for revealing that she accidentally swallowed

(25:37):
her air pod. You ever swallowed air pod?

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Will?

Speaker 2 (25:41):
I haven't either. She kept posting updates as well until
the inevitable happened. She didn't actually get the get the
pod back, but she did get an X ray to
find out that it was no longer the iPod's mail
wasn't being delivered to her anymore. It's just gone. Here's

(26:03):
something very interesting if you are at Alzheimer's, if you
know someone who has Alzheimer's, or or you think about
it occasionally. Even an eighty year old woman with late
stage Alzheimer's disease took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms and
started speaking again. I want to know what she said.

(26:27):
I want to know what she said. You know what,
I'll bet she said, Well, you got any more of those?
That's what I'm thinking. All right, let me get back
to a little bit of news. You know, that was
just off the top of my head there. I didn't
even prep that. That was just here. We go from
a house hearing in Washington, D C. This week into

(26:48):
contributions made to an organization called Act Blue. It's CEO,
Regina Wallace Jones, repeatedly answered lawmaker's questions by plating the
fifth Act Blue is alleged to have accepted thirty eight
million dollars in illegal foreign donations and of advising staff

(27:13):
to accept fake name donations. I wonder where those came
from the House ju Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, in a
story from Fox Business, highlighted a pattern of other Act
Blue employees also invoking the fifth when questioned. You know what,

(27:33):
it's about time all this happened, to all this fraud
that we've had to deal with, they gotta go. The
gloves are off, the curtains being pulled back, and these
folks are in a trouble around the country, lots of them.
Always innocent until proven guilty. New Promise Neuropathy, that's the
newest member of this family of ours over here at
fifty plus. And I want to tell you that. Well,

(27:55):
first of all, I'll tell you that they have one
store already open, store clinic, one clinic all already open
up on the north side around Spring somewhere, and the
Missouri City location is either open or about to be.
I know I've been saying that for several days now,
but I'm pretty confident that we are fast approaching launch.

(28:16):
And if you have any sort of peripheral neuropathy, you
know the pain you can get, you know, the tingling,
the burning in your extremities, especially your feet. They's just
start hurting so bad you don't even feel like standing up. Well.
At New Promised Neuropathy, they're going to chart a course
to relieve it. They use non invasive holistic procedures. They

(28:38):
reduce dependency on nerve blockers then and just get people
back to feeling better. Maybe you want to just take
your kids, your grandkids, take your grandkids to the zoo
again and walk around. Maybe you want to dance again
with the person you married, or just walk just walk
around the block without feeling like somebody's stabbing you in

(28:59):
the bottom of your feet with little pins and needles.
Non invasive holistic procedures that really really do help. They're
FDA and medicare cleared, and they're gonna help you reduce
any dependency you may have on nerve blockers. They're already
up in Dallas and Fort Worth area. There's about ten
or twelve clinics up there. They're coming to Houston now

(29:22):
and if you're one of the lucky few who need them,
you got them. Get your life back. New promise neuropathy
dot com. That's new promise neuropathy dot com.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Old guy's rule. And of course women never get old.
If you want to avoid sleeping on the.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Couch, hey, well, I think that sounds like a good plan.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Fifty plus continues Here's more with Doug. Welcome back to
fifty plus thank you for listening. I certainly do appreciate it.
I've been on this planet for a pretty long time.
I really have pretty yeah, been around a while, and.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
I've never seen I'm speaking about the conflict with Iran
right now. I've never seen a regime or government anywhere
in the world that's so willing to kill its own economy,
even to kill its own people, which it started doing long, long,
long time ago before any of us was around. They're
willing to ruin the lives of their citizens just to

(30:25):
perpetuate a war that they have to know they can't win.
They're winning on the timeline, and they're winning on upsetting
a lot of Americans who feel like we need to
just either do it or not do it, but stop.
And I still feel confident that our president is going
to get us out of there with a deal that
will safeguard pretty much the rest of the world from

(30:49):
those lunatics for a very long time to come. They
have little or non navy. Most of its ships are
at the bottom of the sea. They have few and
fewer missiles and drones, and every time they fire one
of those things off, they lose a launch site because
we go blow it up, and its air force is crippled,
mostly upside down on the ground beneath where those planes

(31:11):
were shot down. Running leaders, though, I guess they feel
like they're immune from the mess because they're not doing
without anything. Their people are suffering. But the upper crust
isn't skipping a bead except for having to hide and
probably move every twelve or sixteen hours to stay away

(31:32):
from the reaper. Little difference in the lifestyles of the
rich and famous, little for them, and great suffering by
the people over there who want the same thing that
we want, a new regime over there so that they
can live free again. They've they've been stuck in this
rut for forty fifty years. I can't remember exactly how long,

(31:53):
staying here at home. And on a far more positive note,
by the way the FIFA turned the big old World
Cup kicked off today. Intended that just right off the
top of my head, I kicked off. How about that? Will?
There's genius at work somewhere in this room. I'm feeling
it from over by you though. That's what scares me
a little bit. You're one of those tricky guys. Yeah,

(32:16):
I got an eye on you and any of it.
FIFA starts at the World Cup starts today down in Mexico,
and the FIFA FanFest here in Houston also starts today
at twenty three oh one Dallas. Down there on the
east side of downtown. Did you know that will that
the east side of downtown, by the people who live there,
is called Edo. Really, I had no idea you lived

(32:40):
in Edo. That's kind of cool, I would be, so
so we Shoola Southwest sugar Land, or actually I'm technically
is shoe Lath. This is going nowhere. I'm gonna stop
now while I'm not too far behind. FanFest is gonna

(33:01):
be open for thirty four days, beginning today, No, beginning
June fourteenth, that says here that's interesting and running through
July nineteenth, said in the paper that started set online
wherever I saw this story that it started today or
maybe that was just a media release, I don't know.
In any event, it's gonna give people an opportunity to
go learn more about the World Cup, to watch on

(33:23):
big screens all the live games that are going on.
I bet it did open today. I'm sure it did.
No charge for admission, by the way, but no going
over there that The maximum capacity of the venue is
seventy five hundred people, So if you're number seventy five
oh one and nobody's left yet, you got to wait
until somebody leaves before you get in. That's what it's

(33:47):
supposed to be anyway. Our first games, by the way,
our first game is between Germany and Cursau. That is Sunday,
and additional games are scheduled every third day throughout the
early matches whatever they call them in World Cup competition.
It's gonna be pretty fun, it really is. To have
all these people from around the world in town, and

(34:07):
I hope that they are all treated respectfully and taken
care of. And if somebody asks you directions, maybe you
can tell them how to get there. There's one thing,
by the way that I saw that kind of blends
into this. See where is it? I'm looking for it? Standby? Oh,
I know it's on this last page. Oh gosh, you
know it is?

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Or is it?

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Maybe not? In any event, there is, I'm gonna skip
that to get to this though. This is important. From
Navarre Beach down around Pensacola. I've been there many many
times actually, uh, and a scene that's amazing to me
and I've seen it. I've witnessed it firsthand, but a
lot of people haven't, and they get scared when they
see this. And what I'm talking about is a shark.

(34:52):
There's video of a shark just wandering through the shallows.
It's clearly it's a hammerhead shark. Nobody else knows that
because they're not shark people, probably, but they're all panicking
and running out of the water like its jaws, and
all that thing was doing was looking for a sting ray.
It had no interest in the people, but they didn't

(35:12):
know it. So I'll talk about more sharks next week.
I gotta go, Audios.