Scott Beckner- Final Cut

This is a podcast called Open Forum in the Villages Florida, where they interview leaders in the community and discuss what's happening in the Villages. They are listener supported and use AI voices for the show. They interview Scott Beckner, who has a podcast called The Nye Gossip, where he talks about different groups and clubs in the Villages. Scott shares his experience of moving to the Villages and getting involved in various activities. They also discuss the growth of clubs in the community and the importance of promoting them. They mention the Mercedes club and the improv club as examples. Overall, they highlight the variety of activities available in the Villages. 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. We hope to add a new episode most Fridays at 9 a.m. We are a listener supported podcast. You can become a supporter for as little as three dollars per month or you can choose to pay more. To become a supporter go to openforminthevillages.com and click on support in the black box. There will be shout outs for supporters in episodes. In season 4 we have made some dramatic improvements and changes. First is a clarification of the podcast's title. It is Open Forum in the Villages Florida to make clear that this is a regional show independently produced for folks who live in Central Florida and the villages areas. Second is a dramatic increase in the use of AI in the creation of each episode. In fact the show's announcers are now all AI voices including me, Emily. This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in the Villages. I'm here today with another podcaster in the villages, Scott Beckner. Scott's podcast is called The Nye Gossip. Correct. Scott, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself first. Well I moved to the villages about three years ago actually full-time. We lived in Georgia. I worked at Georgia College and State University and we came down here. It's about a five-hour drive and we lived on a lake and the lake was 422 miles of shoreline. Wow. I had friends that I worked with that I'd get my boat and drive 30 miles an hour to their house and it took me an hour to get to their house on a boat. So we're thinking about where would we like to retire. What was the name of the lake? Lake Sinclair. Oh okay. Okay so we so we came down here we want to check it out. We heard all the, we read about it, saw it online and we came down here and we actually bought the first day that we were here. You didn't take the trolley tour did you? No, we didn't take the tour. We had a realtor from the villages show us around and we also had an outside realtor show us around and we bought a patio villa, two-bedroom down over in Fernandina. Then we decided okay there's not enough space. Okay you figured that out pretty fast. We figured that out pretty fast and we had our in 2016 we had a house built over here in Osceola Hills. But we were still working. I was up in Iowa and my my wife was up in Iowa with me and obviously and we were working and when it was time to retire we moved down here about three years ago now full-time. Okay and how long have you been doing the Lenai Gossip podcast? I started Lenai Gossip in probably February. We did our first one in March and recorded four of them at the same time. The same night we had kind of a party at my house and we'd go out to Lenai and do it and I started doing it because my doctor said Alzheimer's runs in your family. It's wiped out everybody. You've got to learn something different. Something different that your body, your mind's gonna say hey I gotta learn this and keep going. No crossword puzzles. He said no. Crossword puzzles he liked but I don't like doing them. And so I said I work at Captiva and I see a lot of people come in with all these groups and stuff and I said well I could do like an infomercial on their group to help their groups get more involved and get more participation. And so I started getting all these groups and I said this would be a great opportunity to segment on all the groups we have in the villages and maybe get more participation in the groups. You know one of the reasons I moved down here at the time there were 2,000 clubs and activities and now there are 3,800 or something. So many, so many clubs and I'll see people come in and they'll like look in and an example is tap dancing. These people want to tap dance but they look in and they go ah I don't and I just I go you got to go in there you got to say hi and they want you in there. They don't want you to not go in and same with the billiard room and the card room all the game rooms we have everyone's looking to get more members and everybody's welcoming and so I'm just trying to have that little lanai gossip video out there that if people are interested they could take a look at the video and give them a contact information so they could start the process of getting involved. Yeah that's pretty good. We're in the improv club we're always looking for new members okay and someone comes to the door try to see what's going on on the rec set that we always welcoming me. Yeah you know and doing this podcast like you do it it's opened my eyes to all the clubs that are out there all the different type of people that go to the different clubs right totally I would never go to some of these clubs and then I actually went to the Beatles mania the other day which I'd never even heard of mm-hmm and I enjoyed that you know they went to Liverpool and they had a little vacation there and a bunch of them went and it was really interesting for someone that really didn't have anything to do with Beatles or being a maniac about them I thought it was very interesting. Right right I have at least one friend who's a member of that club for our own reasons improv I decided to take a take apart the list of the 3,000 clubs last year to find out how many clubs there really are and I was quite surprised to determine that there were about 600 that really weren't clubs but they were really activity mm-hmm okay whether it was ping-pong or another sport like pickleball yeah okay they weren't like clubs correct their activities they have yeah pickleball at 10 o'clock at Eisenhower we play that's our club mm-hmm well it's not the same as the Model T club in the village no or the how about convertible singles club you have that then they meet and so everybody's so nice here too we actually went to the we went to a local bar and we just set up our equipment and we just talked to people and it was just amazing how the different backgrounds that everybody has and that was that was kind of interesting we'd like to do that again sometime yeah that sounds like an interesting exercise this is Mike Roth with dr. Craig Curtis for today's Alzheimer's tip dr. Curtis several new medicines have been approved by the FDA for the treatment of Alzheimer's how effective are they so the effectiveness so far shows an approximate 30% slowing of Alzheimer's disease when these medicines are used in patients with the very earliest stages of the disease 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 Craig Curtis MD comm or call 3 5 2 5 0 0 5 2 5 2 to attend a free seminar and we're back with Scott vector so you distribute your podcast by a YouTube YouTube yep I have my own YouTube channel when I gossip I have a couple of clubs that I'm already I can in the ambassador of I guess you could say or the I do the we do golf on Sundays we have card night which we have a euchre night every other Friday at Burnside and we also do bowling down here at Leesburg so that's kind of how I I've always kind of been a guy that got involved and I do like being kind of in charge which is a good thing or a bad thing but if your brain active it does you know I try to make all the clubs in the hole so I have my clubs but I also have my when I gas up that I'm gonna try to get more people involved in the clubs and it's kind of what we put the object is of why you know what we're here but my wife and I we love the villages so we always promote it it's always positive that's good that's good you invited me to come on him yeah I can talk to you forever about the Mercedes club you got the Mercedes club you got a the improv you got a lot of stuff to talk about your podcast so that'll be an interesting interesting interview we're looking forward to it yeah we when I came down here in the end of 17 I got a little bit frustrated when I discovered there was no Mercedes-Benz car club here and I complained the Recreation Department and they said well you fill out this form find five people who want to join put the names on the form and we'll turn you into a club exactly and and how far has it grown from five people we went from five people in March of 18 when we started to about 350 members now and just amazing it keeps growing it does you know and something like that but you didn't really have a problem growing but it would be that's what my Lennai Gossip will do it'll give them kind of a commercial about what their their club does and how to get involved and future events yeah that's that's very important the the villages Recreation Department would be Davison cut out the description of the clubs and what they do to save space yeah I feel phone calls daily when I'm working of what what does this club do what is this about you know just say Samba is anybody invited you know they are but they really don't know I did a little podcast of what we have at the rec centers and we have every game you can think of you can walk in there but just nothing in your hands and play any game and learn the rules so you just a group of people and a lot of people don't know that they think they have to have all this stuff I have a card night where you play euchre and they supply the cards hmm and I didn't know that I was bringing cards in for about a half a year till they finally said hey yeah we have cards look in the back closet I had to start working there figure that one out okay yeah well there's a lot well a really wide variety of activities here in the village I think it was a recall we had a party holiday party for the members of the improv club and it was one of the standard villages potlucks and we arrived early to set up in the room and we get there and the guy behind the desk says well I can't let you go into the room yet still in use and we had a pile of stuff that we had to set up uh-huh and so we walked down the hall to see what was in use I opened the door and there's a fencing club going on people with sores big that go ahead for one another I said okay they can have the room until it's time for them to break down but you never know what's going on no and the rooms get used a lot you know there's there's some more useful or being used than others but yeah ours is very busy at Captiva yeah the number of activities just range ranges a full gambit from learning how to want learning how to swim to learning how to play pickleball or yeah and I don't know anything about woodworking but they got two woodworking shops now and we're gonna do a podcast next week on that very interesting and I'm sure they have the best equipment I've heard they've had the best equipment you can get for woodworking so that'll be interesting yeah yeah I bet if they had an automobile shop there'd be a lot of people want to put this play in that club that would be a good one and I'd like to see in the future maybe a indoor basketball courts I know they play at the they play at the churches now mm-hmm it'd be nice if they could get in there but I heard maybe down south they might so well that new rec center mm-hmm is it be called the Olympia I'm not sure I've heard it's called Olympia I haven't substantiated anything about what that's going to be because I've heard things but I heard I've heard some things yeah from reliable sources okay let's say it's going to have an indoor rock climbing wall that's that's cool cool but I just can't think of very many people our age Scott that would want to climb a rock wall strapped into a harness yeah I've never did it in my life now I'm six years old now so I probably well I've never climbed rock walls when I was a kid I climbed chain-link fences yeah but you know that was when I was a kid right right different story altogether that's for the grandkids probably well there's a lot of stuff up at that first responders Center which are oriented more towards children yeah but the displays up there are wonderful mm-hmm and the Eisenhower Center is almost a museum yeah not really a museum it's beautiful spent a lot of money on that yeah look most of the rec centers are very nice they're very nice yeah I you know people nitpick a little bit but I'm like there's no place like it no place like it I that I know of I visit my brother in Sun City Arizona and they've got one golf course at 20 pickleball courts all together and one rec center and we got all these no no we don't have one swimming pool we have a hundred and five swimming exactly we don't have one 18 hole golf course yeah I don't know what the number is whether it's I think 20 now it's a 20 18 hole golf course yeah I mean that's a lot of golf course plus the plus the pitching putts yeah plus the nine hole executive course tremendous amount of activities on the sports side although I could never see my wife plays golf most weeks with a group of ladies but she dropped out for the summer too hot too hot too hot and I play year-round and I don't mind taking the golf cart to a 20-minute golf cart right or even a 40-minute golf cart right because it's easy relaxing and you get to anywhere you want to go to in a golf cart at most places have a golf cart path you know special roadway that's reserved for low-speed vehicles that works out extremely well yeah of course we do have some unsafe golf cart operators I think it was last night I was over at the circle on Christine Way and Morse Boulevard and I was trying to get off Christine on to Morse and a guy in a golf cart comes through the circle oh you know that lost I've I've kind of got not distracted but just kind of got used to driving one way and when I was coming home from Publix you miss that golf cart turn off and now you're in the road and you got to go to a turnaround you know and now you're on Morse Boulevard and all you can do is get to the next exit to get off it because you can't jump the curve and sometimes I in my car I start turning just you know for a second start turning into the with a golf cart lane oh no I'm not in a golf cart now I'm in a car that's a that's a big mistake around here I think that when people come down for the winter all these snowbirds should be run through a at least a one-hour course in driving a golf cart in the villages and another 30-minute course on how to drive a traffic circle in the villages oh even us even us old-timers we we messed that up once in a while to know now where I worked I worked at university most of my career and we had traffic circles we had mopeds we had people crosswalking you know in the crosswalk students in the crosswalk we had them jaywalking a bicycle so it's my favorite okay I got I got kind of used to just always looking for something right so down here it's kind of the same and I did it for 30 years so it's kind of ingrained in me just to look for walkers or for motorcycles for golf carts for now they got scooters here you know so yeah it's if you're not used to that segways yeah you're not used to that it can be pretty daunting right right we have a lot of different kinds of intersections but I went to the thriller concert down at Oh sawgrass it was Edna's on the green with Petrina and the thriller dancers Bonnie's led by Bonnie Stein Bonnie's been on the show and she must have been a thousand people there that's a lot of people a lot of people and so I got up to check out what they were serving on the trucks and for refreshments and there was no line at the trucks to get food so I was easy that was easy mm-hmm then I looked at the line for alcoholic beverages there must have been a hundred people in line they need new servers he's got her servers yeah more servers you would have thought they were giving away free marijuana or something the size of a line that was really quite surprising you know it's not something you said earlier reminded me of it of one of the little scenes we're going to do in the improv show coming up on November 7th 630 p.m. at Ezell at that show we're going to do a skit based on an old George Carlin routine George Carlin did a skit called the seven things you can't say on TV yeah okay I remember that one yeah our skit is named the seven things things or phrases you can't say in TV or the villages it's very funny it's very funny it is improv improvised so it always comes out different but you never know what the players are gonna say how many players do you have show up for a show on stage we'll have 16 players who will be the major players in the in the cast the club has about 40 members there'll be a fellow who plays keyboard this will be the first show that we're incorporating a live music performance into the show and we've managed to come up with about five of our members who are willing to sing oh and improvise style when the time comes yeah that would drop me out singing I got kicked out sixth grade for course yeah so the funniest thing was our keyboard players it's a really great musician and composer Wayne Richard and you know Wayne says to me Mike the only one problem what key are they gonna sing it and that's what I did I started to laugh I said Wayne they're gonna be singing in the key of K whatever you start with and they'll be putting in a different and it was a scene with three singers they may all sing in a different key yeah I'd be like key what's key mean that's what I'm doing a lock on the door I know what I know the word that's as good as I'm gonna get right right I used to have perfect pitch I played the trombone in high school and just the time I was getting good I was in engineering school and I needed all of my time mm-hmm so I would pass my courses so I dropped it out is there anything else you want to tell our listeners about the little I gossip show yeah if you'd like to come on and promote your group how do they contact you really contact me at the email me at Commissioner at lanai gossip calm I was voted you know a top five Commissioner in the villages for five straight years now so I'm pretty proud of that that's why I call myself Commissioner number five it's just kind of a how do you get voted as a Commissioner of the bill oh you know I kind of run the vote you kind of run the kind of run the vote I have three clubs we got a lot of people I got a five on my golf cart but no that's kind of a running joke say I'm on top five Commissioner and everybody has to be running when you say that but anyway no and so if you want to come on the show that would be great get a hold of me Commissioner at when I guess of calm you can email me what's the average length of your episode well we talked for about a half hour in my lanai and it is kind of you know lawnmowers weed whackers you just can't you know you just got to go through all that stuff but so the sound you know you've got great quality sound in here this is this is an awesome studio you got here well mine's kind of outside the Sun kind of affects me like when we do it and then of course the lawnmowers or anything going on mostly floors yeah you know we've got if we do it during the day I have to worry about that and I have to worry about air conditioners and our pump for our pool but with the technology now you know you can kind of drown some of that stuff out if you want to come on and it's kind of like an infomercial for your for your group so if you're a club leader club leader you want to contact Scott Beckner at when I got so it's going to be Commissioner at lanai gossip calm or you can that's the best way you told me also some people who they can just they can also just go on on one of my shows and just do a comment hey Scott I'd love to be on your show you read all the comments yeah I read all the comments you know hey Scott you know I'd love to come on your show or and that's how I kind of get word of mouth to us hey I'll interview somebody they'll say you need to interview this person you need to interview that person but membership does increase if people do come on our show also what I do is it's it's all positive you know your shows positive my shows positive the segment that you'll be on will be positive it's not kind of a getcha type of you know it's all good stuff so we cut out all the bad stuff well yeah you know I edit it we don't do it live because I look bad but I always like to include a joke for my grandson Evan since Halloween has just been with us what is a witch's favorite subject in school Scott which is favorite subject in school mine was lunch no yeah let's go with math spelling okay nice joke he'll enjoy that one yeah well thanks for having me on and thanks for being all you know but yeah Scott how do people get a hold of you talk about being on the night gossip probably the easiest way is to give me a phone call four seven eight three six three seven eight zero seven that's my phone number get a hold of me there or you can email me at commissioner Evelyn I gossip calm good you could also just put a comment I read all my comments and say hey I'd like to be on your show so those three ways you can get a hold of me and the telephone number a cell phone so that can they text you with that number as well text me also yes that's my cell phone number right we have a couple of people in our Mercedes Club who really love to text me yeah yeah but I'm old-fashioned so texts get read read last oh do they yeah emails first well kids don't answer their phone nowadays I got a text my own kids well yeah I want to talk to my daughters yeah I don't call them anymore I send them a text and say hey Janet we got a talk exactly that's how I do it too yes and they respond right away if I live a voicemail message for yeah days they don't get it so well thanks for having me on the show Mike I appreciate it thanks for coming over Scott thanks thanks remember our next episode will be released next Friday at 9 a.m. should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions please contact us at Mike at Roth voice calm this is a shout out for supporters Greg Pangean tweet Coleman Dan Capellan Ed Williams Alvin stencil 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 Roth voice calm we thank everyone for listening to the show the content of the show is copyrighted by Roth voice 2023 all rights reserved