Peter Bernard - Part 2.intro-outro bridge to part2

This is a podcast called Open Forum in the Villages Florida. They talk to leaders and interesting residents of the Villages to get perspectives on what's happening there. They are asking for supporters to help keep the podcast going by making a small monthly donation or by rating and reviewing the podcast. They also discuss technical issues with things like thermostats and doorbell cameras. One person helps their neighbors with these issues and also does maintenance on water heaters. They talk about making homes more accessible for disabled residents and they include a segment on Alzheimer's tips. Welcome to the Open Forum in the Villages Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to get perspectives of what is happening here in the villages Florida. We hope to add a new episode most Fridays at 9 a.m. We are a listener-supported podcast. There will be shout outs for supporters and episodes. As a supporter you will get a direct email link to Mike. In season 5 we are making significant improvements and changes on an ongoing basis. Now you can help me afford to keep making this podcast by becoming a supporter. First a quick note about the podcast. It's available because I absolutely love doing it despite the fact that it cost me probably more time than I can actually afford. Now I can't buy back my time but there is one thing that you can do that would be really helpful and that is help me to afford making this podcast. You can do that by going to the website openforuminthevillages.com and clicking on the supporter box and making a small donation of three to ten dollars a month and you can cancel at any time. Really a small donation of three dollars will still make a difference and I'd really appreciate it. If you can't afford to do that I completely understand. It's economically tough times for a lot of people but there is something that you can do for free that can really help. If you want to you can rate the podcast. You can give it five stars or maybe even give it a review on whatever podcast application you're using. That will make a huge difference because we will be discovered by more people. If you're able to do that we would massively appreciate it and it would help keep this podcast going in 2024. If you have a book that you would like to turn into an audiobook, let us know via email to mikeatrothvoice.com. Hope you enjoy today's show. This is Mike Roth with Peter Bernard. Thank you for coming back for our second episode Peter. Now why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about what you've done since you've moved here to The Villages. Aside from some improvements to the house, I've become involved with The Villages Tesla Club. I'm also helping my neighbors who have problems with technical issues in their house like we have Ecobee thermostats and some of them have Alexa devices and become quite versed at solving those issues. So I've been to a number of Tesla owners houses and helped them with things. Either that or they come to my driveway. Some folks have had trouble with the Ecobee thermostat and you can put them online so you can use your voice with Alexa to tell what you want your house to be temperature wise. Now that's probably the next issue that I have to deal with is integrating, picking the Wi-Fi thermostat to integrate with Home Assistant. A lot of people have said Ecobee and then I looked there were a number of different models of Ecobee. Right, well we use Ecobee light and that's we meaning The Villagers builder put those in. It's fine. You don't need the top of the line. It works just great. I can say Alexa set the thermostat to 72 and it says the thermostat is set to 72. So it's easy to do but if you're not technically oriented, obviously we live in a retirement community, so folks who are of our age sometimes are not quite versed on some of that stuff. I looked at the installation instructions and it was talking about a C-wire. A C-wire, yeah. You have to have a C-wire. Are the houses in The Villagers built with C-wires? They are where we are. I don't know about here. I'm gonna guess you are too because they've been in existence for a long time. You have a heat pump here, right? I guess so. Okay, well probably has a C-wire then. Yeah, the other issue I was trying to figure out is how to get the old one off the wall without breaking the wall. It'll probably just snap off. Most of these thermostats, you just take them with two hands and give it a good pull. Now if you get much, if you do that, don't come calling me. Later I may have you show me how to give that one a pull. I would also suggest that if you don't want an Ecobee, the Nest makes a real good thermostat as well. Well, don't buy Google. Well then I don't want it. No, you're an Android guy and that's Android all the way. Yeah, well, you know, on the front doorbell camera, I wouldn't buy a ring camera. I used to have one of those. It works pretty good. Now I have the Google version of it and I love it. Yeah, I put in a Reolink camera. I saw that and I don't recognize that brand. It's a Chinese brand with American backing. Okay. It has its own built-in SD card in the doorbell cam and it's fully compatible with Home Assistant and it's got its own app so it lives on the Android phone. I would suggest people who are listening to this podcast, if you're considering a camera for your front door, get one that is wired if you have wires going out there already. Don't get the one that you have to bring in every now and then and recharge the batteries. You will forget and then your system goes down and doesn't work anymore. Normally they will alert you of a low battery but people, I've known people who have had these and it goes dead and they wonder why their doorbell camera is not working anymore. Yeah. Most of us have either, I think it's 6 or 12 volts. It comes from a transformer in your attic and so therefore it's really easy to do. Right. It was a very easy installation and the Reolink camera came with two ways to install it. You could power it over Ethernet. I wasn't crazy enough to pull an Ethernet cable down. If your house is pre-wired, that's quite a feat. Yeah. Especially down the door jam, no way. That's a really crazy idea. Your question is what if I'm involved with my neighborhood, I'm involved with the AED program, automatic external defibrillator. Great program. I've gone around to some of my neighbors and descaled their water heaters, their gas tankless water heaters. They need to be descaled once a year. How do you descale a water heater? It's very simple. On most of the modern ones, there are little connectors on there that you can hook up a submersible pump and then you use white vinegar and run it for 45 minutes and it descales it. I've done probably seven of them since I've lived here. We recently had an AED fundraiser and I offered to do two of them for somebody giving a donation. When I'm finished with this podcast, I'm going down to his house and descaling his water heater. I didn't realize you had to descale that frequently. Once a year, it's not bad. With the electric power water heaters in most of the villages, if you change the anode rod once every five years, which is a pretty simple thing to do if you have a big ranch. Yeah. They sometimes call that an element. I've never attempted one. You will get calcium carbonate buildup on there and you can tell because they pop and whistle and wheeze and that means there's usually some kind of calcium carbonate buildup. I just let it go five years, pulled it out and three quarters of the rod was gone. Okay. It's sacrificial. Then I put a new flexi rod in so it was easy to do and easy to replace. Mike, one of the things I'm proud of, in my neighborhood there's a couple who are disabled and I got to know them very well at some of our functions. When I was sitting at their house, I was looking around. One's in a wheelchair and one gets around with a walker. I said, I can make your house so that you can do a lot of the stuff here by the sound of your voice. They said, oh really? They did. They went out and bought the stuff. I installed it and got it online. You talk about job satisfaction. Obviously, it wasn't paid for this but I felt real good knowing that she can say, Alexa, turn on kitchen. Alexa, turn on pantry. With her limited mobility, I was able to make it so that they were able to live a better life. That's good. We had another fellow on the show if you want to listen to the whole show, listen to Jim Bodner, his first episode with me. He talked about converting one of the villagers home so that it's fully wheelchair accessible with zero steps in it, even from the step from the outside to the inside. It's amazing to me that the villagers doesn't build houses that way automatically. Well, they don't but this couple that I was referring to, they got involved in the building stage and so there are no thresholds in their house. To go from one place to the other outside, you go to their pool in the back, there's no step or bump and that's great for her in her wheelchair. Even to the outside? Yeah, oh yeah. Okay, that was done right. Now, we're going to take a short break to hear from Dr. Greg Curtis. He's going to give us his Alzheimer's tip of the week. Been popular in the culture is drinking red wine or dark chocolate for health. Will that help your brain in any way? Great question. So, both red wine and dark chocolate are loaded with polyphenols. Polyphenols are plant micronutrients. There are about 8,000 different polyphenols that if you follow a Mediterranean or mind type diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and berries, you will consume large amounts of polyphenols. So, there's a polyphenol in red wine called resveratrol that we've actually looked at for memory loss. The studies haven't shown that it worked. However, these studies probably required more time in different dosing. So, we won't get into that. But in red wine, there's a polyphenol called resveratrol that seems to be very important. And polyphenols, the intake of polyphenols are probably where these diets really shine. That along with omega-3 and omega-6 intake. With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate the Villages community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, CraigCurtisMD.com or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar. There are a lot of restaurants in here in the Villages, from the country clubs to the squares, 500 restaurant reviews. On Yelp. That's a lot. Yep. What kind of things do you look for when you go out to eat? My opinion of that is it's really simple to do the right thing. Be attentive, have good food, and have a little follow-up. Be friendly and smile. How many times you've been to a restaurant and your water's down to its last sips and they don't come over and refill it? Or they come over and ask you after you've been eating a little bit, say, is everything cooked to your perfection? Do you like it? So, I take little mental notes. I take notes of what music's playing and how loud it is, if it's too cold. I can't tell you how many times I've been to a restaurant and I'm shivering. There's a place in Leesburg, we love it, but I have to bring a coat in to eat there. Which place is that? Wolfie's. Wolfie's, I don't know that one. Yeah, it's right on the main drag there. Love their food, they're super friendly, love it, but I brought my family in there the other day, my mother-in-law and my wife, and they were sitting there with their ship and you had to go back out to the Tesla and grab coats. Yeah, well, every place I go here in the Villages, I take a sweater even in the middle of the summer. Right. I have a sweater assigned to the trunk of each car because I know, especially in the summer, you walk in and they have that rec center turned down, real cold. Icebox. Icebox. So, it's a simple equation. There are certain restaurants that I go to and I know I'm going to get good food, get good service, there's not going to be any questions. So, what are your favorites? This is an unpaid plug. No, Oakwood Smokehouse. Very good. I love Oakwood Smokehouse. Harvest, pretty good. Fiesta Grande, pretty good. You're talking about the one in Connelly. No, Fiesta Grande is in Brownwood. Brownwood, yeah. There's some that I don't like, but I don't want to blast anyone on this podcast. Let's talk about the good ones. Okay, the good ones. Well, I mentioned, I love Wolfies, except for wearing a coat all the time. What kind of food do they serve at Wolfies? It's everything. It's a diner. It's a diner. Yeah, you can get a steak. That's the one that advertises as a 90s diner. No, no, it's a different one. That's where you get a free slice of pie with a coupon. So, there are certain restaurants that when I say, my wife and I are talking, where do you want to go to eat? We know our go-tos. Now, we are fairly new here in the villages, having moved in in May. So, we're still not versed on all the ins and outs around here. When I was in Pinellas County, I lived there for 33 years. I could tell you, I could rattle off seven restaurants right now that you could go to. I could also tell you some, stay away. Horrible. And I rank them on Yelp. If you're not familiar with Yelp, it's a place where you can give your opinions, and you give them stars one through five. You can also rate your plumber. You can rate your doctor. I do mostly restaurants, and as you've stated, I have 400 or so reviews on there, and people read them. I used to post them on social media, and people would call me or respond and say, hey, I saw your review on so-and-so. I'm glad I'm not going to go there now. I happen to like Paisanos. Ah, that's one of my favorites. I gave them a great review, and in that same plaza on the other side, there's a place called Kumo. Hey, that's the Japanese place. Yeah, Asian. Excellent. Oh, yeah. Their service is superb. Their food is good. I think their prices are reasonable considering the price of going out these days, which I think is ridiculous. Everything starts at $17. It used to be $13, $12, but I guess the price of food is causing that. But I've never had a bad meal there, and everyone is very courteous and cordial. I love it. I love the food there, too. The improv club, every Monday at 8.30 after our improv session, takes a short drive from Rohan over to Paisanos for something to eat and drink. We had 12 of the 25 people come over. It's a really good socialization place. The food is good. The atmosphere is nice. And in nice weather, you can sit out in that screened-in patio. It's beautiful. You can always tell, Mike, a good restaurant when there's a wait on a Wednesday night. There's not a wait at... We had a wait last night on a Monday night. There you go. So the word is out. Yeah, yeah. It's a good restaurant. And we have a lot of good restaurants here. Lopez is good. Palmer's is good. Havana Club. Havana's excellent, especially if you like monkfish. It's one of the few places you can get monkfish. I haven't been to some that you've mentioned because I'm fairly new, so I'll have to try some of those. I have been to Lopez. I've been to Havana. At Bella, the new place up in... I've heard good news about that. Oh, fantastic. Absolutely fantastic service. The food was just as good. The Primo Steakhouse in Brownwood, excellent. Tremendous improvement from what they had before there. I think when I leave here, I'm going to go get a bite to eat. There are a lot of places. But you have to come on Monday, the 4th of March. We're going to have the first Mercedes show of the year at Lake Sumter Landing. We do Tesla shows, and I did my first one a couple of months ago. It's fun because people come up and ask you, I'm sure you've seen this, where they go, what about this or what about that? And there's a lot of misconceptions about electric cars. Did they catch fire? What happens when you run out of batteries? A lot of electric cars catch fire. Well, very few per capita. Gasoline cars catch fire. Yes, they do. But much more than electric cars. I was driving in a gasoline car on the freeway in Cincinnati on a winter's day, and the darn car caught fire and was totaled. Wow. You got out okay. Yeah, we got out okay. But, you know, surprised the heck out of me. Yeah. During this last winter, there was a lot of whoop to do about Tesla in the cold. And I will tell you right off the bat that cold is not a friend to battery cars. You do lose some range. Hopefully, you're smart enough to top off your car before you go on a trip, so you have that little buffer zone. You know, I fly airplanes, and I would never think of taking off in an airplane with a quarter tank of gasoline in it. You fill it all the way to the ground. Yeah, all the time. You want that buffer. What if where you're going to land, it's too windy or something happens or it's closed? You need to have plan B. Or plan C, too. Yeah. Yeah, it's really important. Electric cars bring a whole new level to that, especially the ones that they put out, like the Chevy Bolt or the Nissan Leaf that have extremely short ranges and slow charging times. True. Yeah, they haven't developed that 240. Well, they have 240, but they don't have the DC quick charge that a lot of other cars have. Right. The Bolt, I used to have a Bolt, and they ended up recalling every single one of them because the battery made by LG Chem was catching fire. They were telling owners to not park in their garage or near other cars for a while. Holy crap. That's horrible. Yeah, software error. That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. But they wouldn't call it that. No. That would be just a manufacturing error. Yeah. This is Mike Roth with Dr. Craig Curtis for today's Alzheimer's tip. Been popular in the culture is drinking red wine or dark chocolate for health. Will that help your brain in any way? Great question. So, both red wine and dark chocolate are loaded with polyphenols. Polyphenols are plant micronutrients. There are about 8,000 different polyphenols that if you follow a Mediterranean or mind type diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and berries, you will consume large amounts of polyphenols. So, there's a polyphenol in red wine called resveratrol that we've actually looked at for memory loss. The studies haven't shown that it worked. However, the studies probably required more time and different dosing. So, we won't get into that. But in red wine, there's a polyphenol called resveratrol that seems to be very important. And polyphenols, the intake of polyphenols are probably where these diets really shine. That along with omega-3 and omega-6 intake. With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate the Villages community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, craigcurtismd.com or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar. Peter, why don't you tell us a little bit about your early years as an actor? My favorite thing to talk about was when I was a freshman in high school, I auditioned for a role in the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera production of Oliver. Our star was Ron Moody, who played Fagin in the movie. And our artful dodger was Davy Jones from The Monkees. So, yes, I knew Davy Jones. I was with him on stage for six weeks in Los Angeles. And then we took the tour up to San Francisco at the Curran Theater, if you know that place. In Los Angeles, it was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which is the music center. So I was in that. That was fantastic. My dad, being a musician and a writer, he wrote a movie starring Chuck Connors and Stella Stevens and Eartha Kitt called Synanon, and he cast me a role in that. So I'm in that movie, and I have a DVD of it that I play every now and then. I was about six or seven. I don't remember too much about doing it, but it's fun to have been in a movie when I was young. I did a whole bunch of stage when I was young. I think it prepared me for the television career. I'm not afraid of getting in front of people and talking. Nerves are not part of my vocabulary. The only time I ever got nervous about television is if I didn't know something was solid that it was going to happen. Like, for instance, if I was introducing a story, and they get in my ear just as we're about to air it, and they say, we don't have your tape, we don't have your story. And I had to wing it and try to make sense of a minute and a half in the course of just me being on camera without notes about what... So that made me nervous. But just being on television or being in front of people on stage doing this, I'm comfortable talking to folks. Yeah, I can see that. I live by the motto that shrinking violence is not going to get ahead in life. You've got to put yourself forward, and you have to be boisterous and confident. Those are words that I've always used when I auditioned for the Oliver gig and the other things that I've done in life. You don't look down and say, aw, shucks. You look people in the eye and give them a good handshake and say, I'm your guy. That's how I got the Tesla job. Did you? Yeah. Or were they just desperate for another salesman? No, no. They had a lot of people try to get the job. As a matter of fact, when they called me, I hung up the phone and said to my wife, OS, in that I wasn't really sure what part-time was. And it was four days a week, eight-hour days. And I'm thinking, oh, my God, I thought this was going to be part-time. Eight-hour days, four days a week, that's almost full-time. Yeah. 32 hours a week. Oh, yeah. So eventually I quit because, one, my boss was kind of getting on me for stupid stuff. And I thought to myself, Peter, at the time, you're 62 years old. Why are you putting up with this anymore? Yeah, exactly. You don't need it. You don't need it. Unfortunately, yeah. And people in my last few years, my last few years doing reporting, people would come up to me as I was on stories and yell to me, fake news, fake news. And I'm telling you, Mike, that hit me in the heart because I prided myself as telling it straight, not having a biased opinion on what's going on. And furthermore, what's fake about a murder that I'm covering? How could I possibly be faking that up? Well, I know what they're doing. They're parroting what some politicians have said. And it hurt me because I am very proud of what I did for 40 years. Never once did I get caught or say anything that was off-base or biased. Now, sometimes I get my fact wrong and it would keep me up at night. I'd wake up in a cold sweat at three in the morning saying, did I just, did I say so-and-so? And people will catch it. There's a lot of ears and eyes out there, eyeballs, watching television news. And if you say something that's not right, they're going to get caught on it. And then the next thing that's going to happen is they're going to call your news director and he's going to call you in the office and say, what the heck was that? Yeah. I get, I turn off a lot of national news people because they express personal opinions as opposed to news. Yeah. And we covered that and that's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's mixed together. In the sales training business, in the beginning, probably the first year I did sales training and the next 24 years I did entertainment. Okay. Okay. You have to entertain them to keep their attention. I broke the material up into 10 or 15 minute segments. And in between the segments, there was always a joke or a magic trick. Right. Okay. So it forced me to learn a lot of magic. Well, you know, along those lines, Mike, there's a thing I call dancing bear syndrome. People's attention span. Yeah. You're making faces. People's attention spans are very short We've been trained as Americans to have shorter and shorter attention spans. So there was two ways to combat it. One, I wrote my copy so that it came out and a sixth grader could understand it. The sixth grade mentality, I would not use any big words, no four syllable words, and I would make it so that there was always something that became a surprise. Usually I had a minute and 20 to tell my stories. I had every six seconds, I wanted the dancing bear to come out and say, hey, you better come over to your TV. And if you're not watching, you're missing this. And the best was to have what I call the Shazam at 118 or 120. And I called it a bow tie or Shazam. So I would end my story by saying, and, you know, I can't even think of a story right now. And he decided he's going to kill all the puppies. Peter Bernard, News Channel Eight. And it left people going, what did he just say? Yeah. And they talk about it at the water cooler next day. Do they still have water coolers in offices? But people, if they talked about it the next day. After COVID they came back. Yeah, right. So if they were talking about it, if they said, did you see Peter's story last night? And he said, they're going to kill all the puppies. What the heck was going on? I won. I got their eyeballs. I got them by the juggler and I grabbed them and I pulled them into that TV set. And they watched me for a minute and 20 without running and getting a piece of toast in the kitchen. Right, right. Well, they came back to the TV. Yeah, hope they come back. I hope they never walked away. My job was to keep them for a minute and 20. The rest of the newscast would be damned, but I was responsible for a minute and 20. Good. Peter, thanks for being on the podcast. A pleasure, Mike. Good meeting you. Good. I think we think alike. Good. Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9am. Should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike at rothvoice.com. This is a shout out for supporters Tweek Coleman, Ed Williams, and major supporter Dr. Craig Curtis at K2 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 at rothvoice.com. We thank everyone for listening to the show. The content of the show is copyrighted by Rothvoice 2024. All rights reserved.