Diabetic Eye Disease

Today, Doug Pike interviews Dr. Sam Dahr about diabetic eye disease.

Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:09):
You.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Remember when music sounded like this, Remember when social media
was truly social?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hey John, how's it going today? Cool?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
This show is all about you on the good die.
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.

(00:42):
And now fifty plus with Doug Pike.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
All right, don't go Thursday starts now. Welcome award. Thank
you for listening to fifty plus. As always, show that
just keeps on showing up right rhyner sean full intention
on our parts at least of informing and or entertaining
maybe both on a good day. Information and entertainment. That's
the essence, really a broadcast and with an occasional personal

(01:08):
reference to know, just to let you guys know that
I'm a human. As if my mistakes, my tripping over
my own words don't make you realize I'm full on human. No,
AI here I can guarantee you not entirely the same
as singing hit country songs. I guess, quick, look at

(01:31):
the weather today and tomorrow great again, then fog over
the weekend, then maybe rain beginning early next week, but
not for everybody. The twenty thirty, twenty percent chance of
rain on I think Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, something like that,
and twenty or thirty percent chances don't mean that many

(01:51):
people are what they mean that very few people, I
think are really going to see legitimate rainfall. If you're
one of the lucky ones, consider yourself lucky. And if
you're not and you don't get any rain, just run
the spink sprinklers one more time. In the markets where
the Dow broke new ground early today but has since
flagged a tad, likely from algorithmic profit taking, which is

(02:16):
that's the standard today. As soon as a certain benchmark
is hit. With all these algorithms that enable the investor
who had the savvy to buy in yesterday on whatever
was lower than it should be, they catch that rebound
and are satisfied not to sit around and wait to

(02:38):
see if it'll go higher, and hire and hire and hire,
like a lot of us would be us humans, these
algorithms are perfectly happy to just take a nice little
chunk of profit, no matter what it is, and then
go reinvest that in something else that looks like it's
really low for today, and take another little chuck tomorrow.

(02:59):
I wish I knew how to do that. That would
be fun, That would be fun. So hard though, same
with the other three majors. The DAL was down, nazdak
S and P what's the other one? I can't remember.
All four really, all four down this morning, but not
by a terrible lot. It's really hard to resist. It's

(03:23):
really hard to resist that profit taking. So they're doing
that and keeping things in flux. Oils up a little,
but still below sixty dollars a barrel. It was a
little while ago anyway, and gold was down a little,
but still well north of four thousand. It may have
been still north of forty one hundred. I didn't look
that closely. I had a lot of things going on
this morning, truth be told, and finally, finally our federal

(03:48):
government back up and running. Huh. Some people blame the left,
some people blame the right. Mostly people on the left
blaming the right, and the right blaming the left. And
Chuck Schumer likely picked the wrong horse time. My gut
says he's done with politics. He'll he'll write out the
term like Nancy. But he may have to. He just

(04:08):
may have bet so heavily on getting what the left
wanted that he may have to take an early exit
just to avoid I don't know if he I don't
know if he'll run again or not. If he if
he sticks around long enough, But if he does, who
he would quite likely lose to a can of corn
if one was put up against him. He's he's betrayed

(04:28):
the left, he's betrayed the middle, and he's betrayed the right,
all with that one insistence that it was an all
or nothing deal to keep the government open or closed.
Uh So, anyway, I want to go back to AI
in a little bit, but maybe not right now. Let
me find something I think will be what do I have?

(04:48):
Will about a minute and a half? Two five, three?
Oh sweet, let's go back to AI. Then, when I
heard about Rusty Bucket or whatever that artists and I
wrap that in quotes's name is breaking Russ. That's what
it is. I marked that down in my little mental
calendar as today human creativity. It didn't die, but it

(05:14):
suffered a crippling blow. And here's why. That whole song,
it turns out, was created by artificial intelligence, which pretty
much puts creativity in a precarious position live real human creativity,

(05:34):
because if we're going to champion the musical talents of
artificial intelligence, that championing of artificial intelligence only serves to
diminish the value of somebody sitting down on an old,
dusty in a chair or a way too worn out

(05:55):
sofa with a guitar and a notepad and a pen
and putting a song together. I don't dislike AI, I'm
not saying that, and I use it sometimes. It helps
millions of people do research, create websites present both sides
of stories well sometimes and already people who watch these

(06:18):
things closely have developed developed other AI counter AI, if
you will, that exposes the work done by AI, so that,
for example, teachers can tell when their students have cheated
and just said, write me a one thousand word term
paper on whatever, and ten to fifteen seconds, bam, it's there,

(06:43):
as many words as you want. And at some point,
and I'm sure it's already been done a million times
by now, somebody's going to say, hey, write me a
twenty five page children's book on something and it'll get published.
Oh and oh, by the way, AI create the artwork
for that thing too, So yeah, that really bothers me.

(07:05):
It's just people who people who use AI and use
it correctly. I don't have a problem with I've dabbled.
I've used it a little bit to help me flesh
things out if I needed something commercial copy. For example,
there's a lot of people who use that who use
AI for commercial copy. I don't read them verbatim because

(07:27):
they don't know. AI doesn't know how I typically speak,
and that's important to me. I'm not gonna just read something.
I hate reading. I like storytelling. That's how it works
out around here anyway. All right, Will says, I gotta go.
I gotta take a little break here on the way out.
And by the way, when we get back, we're gonna
talk to doctor Sam Darr about diabetic I disease. And

(07:50):
that's something I didn't even really know what was the thing.
So I'm gonna learn something, and so will you. Probably.
Cedar cob r V Resort done in Baytown is a
fantastic place spend a few days, especially this time of year.
Now that the nights are cool and the days aren't
so just blistering hot. It's down at the end of
Tri City Beach Road, near Thompson's Bake Camp, right there

(08:11):
on Galveston Bay, and it is it's opening year round,
of course, and summer, winter, spring, fall. It really doesn't matter.
It's still nicer to be on the water front listening
to a breeze blow through the palm fronds, or listening
to the little waves lap against the shore, or maybe
you can hear a kid down the ways hooting and
hollering because they just caught a big fish. Either way,

(08:33):
it's going to be a pleasant experience. All the roads
are concrete, all the pads are concrete, electric water and
sew up at a sewer at every site. And then
of course the free WiFi in the bathhouse with showers
and all of that stuff. Also a convenience store, and
it's hard to go on a trip for more than
about forty eight hours and not forget something. Well, whatever

(08:54):
you've forgotten probably is in that little store right there
at excuse me, it's Cedar COVARVW Resort. If you don't
own an RV in many, or if not most of us, don't.
Al Kibby and his wife, the owners of the place,
will rent you one. They have a nice arrangement with
someone who was good enough to kind of put it
into a rental pool that will calls B and B

(09:15):
on the bay. I love that term, and I'm gonna
use it for as long as i can to explain
exactly what you get. You and your family get to
go down there without having to actually go buy an
RV or rent one from somewhere else. You just drive
down there in your minivan or whatever you're in and
then walk right into your RV for the weekend or
the week or whatever. Cedar Cove Rvresort dot com a

(09:37):
fantastic place to go spend a little time on the water.
Cedar Cove Rvresort dot com. What's life without a nap?
I suggest you go to bed, sleep it off.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
Just wait until the show's over, sleepy. Back to Doug
Pike as fifty plus continues.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
All right, welcome back to fifty plus. Thanks for listening.
Certainly do appreciate that. And in this corner of the show,
we're going to talk about our eyes and specifically the
effects that diabetes can have on our vision. Since it is,
after all, diabetic eye disease month, who knew right? And
to help, I'm going to welcome in doctor Sam Darr,
a board certified optalmologist and director of the Retina Division

(10:15):
in the Rhees Ruiz excuse me, Department of Optthalmology and
Visual Science at McGovern Medical School. Welcome a board doctor.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Thanks for having me, Doug my pleasure.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
So I'll admit that in all the time I've done
fifty plus, I don't think we have covered this relationship
between diabetes and eye disease. Can you give us kind
of a brief explanation of exactly what this diabetic eye
disease is and what causes it.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
So the way to think about diabetic eye disease is
similar to diabetic kidney disease and diabetic neuropathy with all
of those, with all three of those entities, what's going
on is the tiny blood vessels called capillaries are being
adversely affected by those high blood sugars. And so what

(11:05):
happens over time is those capillaries become sick and then
they start to go away. And when you have less
tiny blood vessels in the retina, then the retina is
not getting enough oxygen and the retina. The cells in
the retina are very active because vision is so rich,

(11:26):
the visual signal is so rich, and so the retina
uses a lot of oxygen. And so when the retina's
not getting enough oxygen, it's not very happy. And what
can subsequently develop is the diabetic retinopsey can manifest in
different ways. It can manifest as bleeding in the eye.
It can manifest as diabetic rental detachment, it can manifest

(11:50):
as diabetic glaucoma. It can manifest as swelling of the
center of the retina from the reduced oxygen being delivered
to the retina. So there's different mechanisms by which the
retinopathy can show up in the eye. But the common
theme is that those tiny blood vessels are not doing

(12:13):
very well because of the high blood sugars.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
And since folks my age, you're pretty good about self examination,
are there any early signs or symptoms we could watch
out for. I guess no, pun intended.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
So that's the tricky part in the sense that the
diabetic retinopathy in its early stages is relatively silent, and
then as it starts to pick up a little bit
of a head of steam. There might be blurry vision
from retinal swelling. There might be floaters from what we

(12:46):
call vitreous hemorrhage or bleeding into the center of the eye.
But usually once that starts to happen, then the retinopathy
is getting a little bit further down the road, so
to speak. And so in the early phases, the retinopathy
can be relatively silent for the individual. And that really

(13:07):
speaks to the importance of regular eye exams.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
You mentioned floaters, doctor, dor, I'd see them sometimes. Does
that mean I've automatically got diabetic eye disease?

Speaker 2 (13:19):
No. We all have this jelly in the center of
the eye called vitreous, and as we get older, the
jelly becomes a little bit more strandy, and so we
all as we move through the decades, have more floaters.
But typically the floaters that can come on with a
so called diabetic vitrious hemorrhage, they come on suddenly and

(13:41):
very prominently, and they actually block out a portion of
vision in an eye.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Oh no, that's not me yet, Okay, so that's good.
What about the diabetes itself? And this is an ignorant
question to posed to you, but I think there's people
asking it, are people with type one more prone to
the condition and those with type two or is there
any correlation there?

Speaker 2 (14:02):
I think type one and type two are both fairly
equally prone. Usually type one. Those folks start having diabetes
often as children, and their retinopathy can often manifest in
their late twenties or early thirties. If blood sugars have

(14:25):
been running high for a decade or a decade and
a half with type two diabetes type two diabetes, their
retinopathy can often manifest a little bit sooner relative to
their time of diagnosis, because oftentimes their diabetes is diagnosed
and it's already been sort of going on for a

(14:46):
few years, and then they're diagnosed with diabetes. But both
are fairly susceptible to diabetic retinopthy.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Doctor Sam Dahar on fifty plus here, So what can
be done about the what treatment options do we have?

Speaker 2 (15:02):
So the really good news here is that we have
great treatments for diabetic retinopathy in industrialized countries and so
lasers for diabetic retinopathy have been around for forty to
fifty years. In the last twenty years, we have developed

(15:23):
injections where we inject special medications into the eye for
diabetic retinopathy. And so oftentimes we'll see someone in the
early stages of diabetic retinopathy and they actually don't need treatment,
They just need follow up and they need to continue
to work on their blood sugar, blood pressure and overall health.

(15:44):
But in the sort of more middle stages of diabetic retinopathy,
we have injections and lasers. And in the vast majority
of cases, if we catch someone at the right stage
and they get treatment and they keep the follow ups
with their retina doctor, they do great and the diabetic

(16:05):
retinopathy does not progress. And then for those patients that
do progress, perhaps their sugars have been uncontrolled for a
significant period of time. For those patients that do progress
towards more advanced manifestations of their diabetes, we have fairly

(16:27):
advanced surgeries where we can go inside the eye and
perform what's called vitrectomy surgery to remove diabetic hemorrhage in
the eye or to repair diabetic rental detachment. And those
surgeries are pretty good. They are not perfect, but they
are pretty good. And that technology has advanced as well

(16:50):
in the last twenty years, and so overall patients can
do awfully well. The key is see your eye doctor
and keep those visits.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
How often we've got a minute left? How often should
we see our doctor about this?

Speaker 2 (17:05):
So you know, some people ask does it depend on
how long I've had diabetes? Or does it depend on
this factor or that factor. Really the easiest answer is,
let's keep it simple. If you have a diagnosis of diabetes,
see your eye doctor for a dilated eye exam once
a year. And then if your eye doctor sees some

(17:27):
diabetic eye disease starting to brew up, they will send
you to a retina doctor. And then the retina doctor
will customize how often you see that person based on
the degree of disease. But let's say just once a
year for all of your life, have that dilated eye
exam and you should do.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Okay, I'm hoping I do. And thank you very much.
This has been very enlightening for me. I didn't know
anything about this before we started know a fair amount
now Doctor sam Dar, thank you so.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Very much, my pleasure.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
Thanks for having me bet alrighty then got to take
a little break here and on the way out, speaking
of places you can go and get great medical care
for things, that bother you as a senior. How about
ut Health Institute on Aging, about which I have been
speaking for ten years now, ten years and watching the
organization grow every year. It's amazing how many people, I guess,

(18:23):
because there are so many of us living into well
into seniority now, how many of us need exactly what
this Institute on Aging provides, which is dedicated care, specific
care related to seniors. There are heart doctors, or lung doctors,
or eye doctors, they're everything doctors. And then there are

(18:44):
the members of the Institute on Aging who have gone
back and gotten additional education, additional training on how to
apply their knowledge to seniors. That's us, and it's a
big deal that we have this right here in the
greater Houston area. Most of them in the medical center,
as you might imagine, but plenty of them working in
outlying clinics and hospitals and whatnot, so that if you
don't want to go into the med center, you don't

(19:05):
have to. And nobody really likes going in there. I
would think it's usually not a fun experience. But if
it's necessary, it's necessary, And by necessary, I mean getting
the exact help you need from someone who understands you
better than most other providers. UT dot edu slash aging.

(19:28):
Go there, look at all the free resources, look at
all the information that's there to make you live longer
and healthier. Even if you don't need to see anybody
right now, but when you do, go back there and
find out exactly where you can find someone who is
within that grouping the UT Institute on Aging utch dot
edu slash aging. Yew.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
They sure don't make them like they used to.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
That's why every few months we wash them, check us words.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
And spring on a fresh code. O wax. This is
fifty plus with Doug Pike. All right, welcome back, Thanks
for listening to fifty plus. Third segment of the show starts. Now, God,
where to start? I'll go with some kind of frustrating stuff.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Here we go again. I guess a workplace shooting that
left three people dead in San Antonio recently was carried
out by a drum roll, please hon Duran guy in
our country, illegally not supposed to be here. I'm not
going to go into great detail on these stories anymore,
not because I don't think they're important, but because it

(20:35):
would just I could do an entire show on things
that illegal immigrants have done to hurt or kill Americans
or even others who are here, just undocumented or not.
There are a lot of people who found their way
here who think nothing of getting drunk and driving, think

(20:57):
nothing of pulling a gun out and shooting some boy.
You're stabbing somebody or robbing somebody or whatever. And it's
just we're almost becoming numb to it. It used. The
first couple of times I heard about this type of
thing happening, I was just shocked and frustrated and horrified

(21:17):
that this was going on in our country. And now
it's almost every day. It's just like reading the weather report. Oh, okay,
somebody's gonna get shot tomorrow, and somebody else is gonna
get raped behind a tree in a park somewhere after
just going out for a jog. And then there's going
to be somebody stabbed on a bus, and this, that
and the other. But I am going to at least

(21:41):
acknowledge them when I see him, when I see an
incident where another person who has no business being here
has taken someone else's life while they're in our country
where he didn't belong. By the way, it never should
have been allowed in anyway. This guy had no business
being here, no no business whatsoever being even and put
in a position where he could do something like this.

(22:04):
But he was here. And we're trying to get those
people out first and then work with the rest of them.
And why so many people are just so vehemently opposed
to allowing that to happen. I don't understand that. I
really don't. Two things stand out as winter creeps closer

(22:25):
in the Northeast. I saw a little story this morning
about this, and it's worth talking about. First, the southward
exodus of that region's snowbirds has already started, as it
does every year around this time. This is as certain
a migration as that of ducks and geese. They're coming

(22:46):
down for the winter. They don't want to be up
there in the winter time, and anybody who can afford
to bail out for three or four months bails out
for three or four months. They've been doing it since
my grandparents moved to Florida back in the sixties early sixties.
I guess it was we started vacationing there. Would drive

(23:07):
all the way from Houston to pomp Ando Beach, Florida,
which is just it's kind of like pomp Anda to
Fort Lauderdale was then anyway, like bel Air to Houston,
small city kind of wrapped up and well, it was
just north of Lauderdale actually still is. Hadn't moved anywhere,

(23:30):
but I vividly remember that house, and I vividly remember
going there in the summer when it wasn't crowded with
people from up north. A lot of those people, wealthy
people then, just as now, had second homes down in Florida,
and that's where they did all their business over the
colder months up north. It's so much easier now too,
with technology, nobody really has to know where you are

(23:54):
at all. So long as you're doing your business, you
can do it anywhere, literally anywhere. So here's the deal, though,
the thing that's changed and this exodus that's leaving the
Northeast right now, specifically New York and New Jersey, the difference.

(24:15):
The difference is going to be that since the election
of Zorin Mam Donnie as Mayor of New York, the
effects of that election already being felt up there. And
what's really going to hurt New York and New Jersey
is that most of the people who are leaving ahead
of real winter, probably not coming back. They're packing up,

(24:36):
they're moving out and taking billions upon billions of tax
dollars with them. And those are the billions upon billions
of tax dollars that Mam Donnie probably thought he could
keep around at least for a year or two before
he had to come up with another way to tell
people that he's not going to be able to really

(24:57):
make good on his election promises. He's going to have
a big hill to climb if he wants to even
come close to delivering. Because that money, that money's going,
if it's not gone already, it's going. And that's something
I've been told by a lot of people, some of
whom live up that way, some of whom just work
with people up that way. And fat chance, there's no

(25:21):
way he's going to be able to pay for all
the things he says are going to be free. And
if he opens up city run grocery stores, nobody's going
to be buying anything in there, because of the law,
gets stolen before it even has a chance to get bought.
Probably he's done a really bad thing to New Yorkers,
and they don't realize it yet. The young and the gullible.

(25:45):
They just don't because they've never had to experience anything
like this. It's very frustrating, though, very frustrating and therapeutic.
News advances news that's kind of well, that was a
plumsily redundant thing. In any event, it turns out that
visiting an art gallery, and this is something I've done

(26:06):
a handful of times in my life. I actually took
a fine arts course my freshman year in college, and
that surprisingly as a kid who was focused solely on
baseball and I was just I was there to play ball,
and that was pretty much it. I wanted to be
a lot of different things, but not in an art class.

(26:28):
But it was surprisingly interesting to me, and I learned
a lot. I couldn't tell you if you showed me
a painting right now, there would be only maybe a
half a dozen of the grand masters and historically fantastic
artists whose works I could identify. There would be a few,
but there wouldn't be nearly as many as someone who

(26:48):
maybe works in a museum. The bottom line is, if
you visit art galleries and really take the time to
appreciate the works of these fantastic artists and look, just
study the painaintings and realize how many brushstrokes it took
to paint these things that sometimes are as big as
a wall. They are huge paintings down to very small paintings.

(27:10):
But the detail with which these painters painted what they
did is just incredible. It's just incredible to me. I
still get kind of like it makes me just want
to take off after work and go over to the
Museum of Fine Arts and look around. And here's the
reason why. It's not that it's just it's, oh, look
at the pretty pictures. What it is is that visiting

(27:34):
galleries truly can They have proven this now with scientific research,
they can reduce your risk of heart disease and boost
your immune system. Immune system. Good God, Doug, I may
try to get down to ours, so I'm gonna get
my wife in there. Neither of us has been there
in a while, and I think just to walk through
that art museum would be something that would not only

(27:57):
benefit us therapeutically clinically, as is proven now, but it
just makes you a more rounded person, and it gives
you an idea of what was going on in the
world before you were here. Now there's some modern works
and some of the modern art from the last twenty
thirty years is kind of a head scratcher for me.
But I most appreciate the older stuff, the actual depiction

(28:21):
of real things instead of all that art deco stuff,
and some of that confuses me. The banana on the
wall is the one that confuses me the most. Somebody
paid like a million dollars for it. We got to
take a break. On the way out. I'll tell you
about country boys roofing country with the K boys with
Z we are. I'm gonna call it with this a

(28:45):
knot just to be sure we're pretty much out of
the tropical storm season. God, I hate to say it
out loud, but I think we are. I think we've
crossed that hump a little bit. And now would be
a great time to get country boys out to your
house to check on your roof, to make sure that
lid up there is going to do its job all

(29:05):
through winter and then all through next summer. There are
little bitty problems that nobody really noticed because they haven't
let in enough water to be something you could detect. Yet.
They'll find that on that roof and they'll show it
to you. They'll take a picture of it and show
you what's going on up there, and then tell you
whether or not they have what they need on the
truck to fix it. And if they do, you can

(29:26):
go ahead and let them take care of that right away,
save you some time and effort, and if they don't,
they'll come back in a day or so and make
sure that your roof is put back in one hundred
percent effective no leaks condition. If you need a full roof,
that can cost quite a bit of money. As we
all know, if we've been in a house more than
about ten years, you probably had to replace roof at

(29:48):
some point. And fortunately John Aiman, the owner of the company,
was able to find a finance group that will make
sure that you can get that lid on your house
and reduce those payments into something you can handle. Every month.
You get the benefit of a brand new roof immediately
and for a couple of extra bucks, you get to

(30:09):
spread those payments out over some time. All you gotta
do is call him country boy. Well, go to the
website first, do that country Boys roofing, Country with a K,
Boys with a Z and by the way, first responder, educator,
past or present military. You get a fifteen hundred dollars deal.
You get a fifteen hundred dollars discount excuse me on

(30:31):
a full roof replacement if you don't qualify for any
of that. Just like I've told you before, drop my name.
When he's done showing you, here's all the figure in,
here's what it's going to cost, and he pushes it
in front of you, says, this is what you're gonna
owe us when we're done. He doesn't take any money
up front. By the way, if a roofing company wants
money up front, and probably don't want to work with them.
So in any event, he shows you that number and

(30:53):
you say, gee, I'm not an educator, I'm not military,
I'm not law enforcement. I'm just none of that stuff.
Just drop my name, take a thousand dollars off right
then and there. Countryboysroofing dot Com is a website. Spell
it however. It makes you feel good because I think
the Internet will find it for you. Countryboysroofing dot Com.
Old guy's rule.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
And of course, women never get old if you want
to avoid sleeping on the couch.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
Hell, I think that sounds like a good plan.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Fifty plus continues. Here's more with Doug All right, welcome back.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
I should have just sat here and sang that whole song.
I like that song. I like the harmony up there
in the front too. That's something I've greatly appreciated for many,
many years, and as you might well imagine, kind of
just couldn't believe what I was hearing when I started
hearing Pentatonics. That's that's the gold standard of four part

(31:47):
or excuse me, five part harmony. Absolutely is that those
that bunch the three Mitch what's it? What are their names?
There's Mitch and then there's the other four right now,
I'm sorry, I'm not coming up with the woman's name.
There's one woman in the group, and then the lead guy,

(32:09):
and I can't remember his name offhand. But anyway, the
arrangements they do are just fascinating to me, and they
truly do make these songs that they sing their own,
despite them being classics that have been around for many,
many years in some cases and some cases not. I
got to see them in concert here down at a

(32:31):
Smart Financial center in sugar Land several years ago, and
that was good. My son and I went and it
was just absolutely fantastic. He even enjoyed it, and he
was into music a little bit then. He was pretty young,
but he still appreciated it, and we both you know,
I was very fortunate and got some really nice tickets
down closed. I think my wife bought them for us

(32:52):
as a matter of fact. Anyway, we were right down
there where it was all happening, and a wonderful experience
in any event. I haven't heard much about this in
some time, but there was a brief time around Houston
when teenagers, this was probably six eight years ago. It
was really going on more than it should, which is

(33:13):
never but they were using four wheelers and motorcycles to
tear up the greens on golf courses. Happened several times
up at wood Forest. I think it happened a few
times over at Golf Club of Houston. And the recurring
theme in there is that these places have access along

(33:36):
maybe creeks or other areas where there's a way for
people to get in there and do the damage they're
doing without having to come right through the main gate.
Almost always happened at night, and I think a couple
of them got caught. And it happened recently down in Florida,

(33:57):
and I saw where this seventeen years had been caught,
probably camp. There's so many more cameras around now than
there were five, six, seven years ago. Even this kid
got arrested, and after having all his little fun ripping
up the greens, he found out that the damage that
he had done was estimated to be about one hundred

(34:19):
and sixty thousand dollars what he'd torn up in about
fifteen twenty minutes agoing green to green on that golf
course and ripping up fairways and ripping up greens. And
I just hope his family's got a lot of money.
A lot of money. That's what he's gonna need. Either

(34:40):
that or he's he just messed his life up. It's
so scary having a teenager like I do, and like
a lot of parents do, because they're old enough to
be able to do things that little kids wouldn't do,
but not quite smart enough yet. Especially the boys are
not quite smart hard enough to know what's gonna happen

(35:02):
if they get caught doing something stupid. So they just
they take a dare from one of their friends or
or see a TikTok challenge that involves tearing something up,
and they go do it. And if they get in trouble.
My son knows. He's eighteen now, and I told him, Man,
you mess up, most of most of whatever happens next

(35:24):
is going to be on you. I'll come get you,
but you're gonna have a lot of work to do
to get yourself out of whatever you put yourself into.
And he's very good about that. I'll give him credit
for that. I'm not at all scared and worried about
him being out even late. Sometimes he coaches a baseball
team with the guy who coaches his team, and so

(35:46):
he's out every weekend. He goes and runs around, gets
meals with his friends, they go work out together, and
so far he's made some really good decisions and not
very many bad ones. Oh, fingers crossed for getting around
a few more years that getting him into college and
getting him on back to do something that will give

(36:09):
him the money that'll take to take me on a
bunch of fishing trips and hunting trips when I get
a little bit older. Huh, what have I got? Will
two minutes? Oh? Twenty seconds? Oh that's not a lot.
That's not a lot. Will you know I'll save some
of these for tomorrow. I don't want to have to
rush any of this, because it's better than that. It
deserves more. I will be back, will We'll be back,

(36:32):
and uh we'll talk to you. Then, stay safe, have
some fun outdoors. Audios