Crowd presents the great Gildersleeve. A big starring Harold Perry brought to you by crowd, makers of parquet margarine and a complete line of famous quality food products. Starts tomorrow, and I want you to get to bed early. You need your sleep. Store up a little energy, my boy. You can't learn arithmetic without energy. Arithmetic? I ask you, what good is arithmetic gonna be to me in later life? Arithmetic is of great practical value. I use it everyday. I must have learned just about all the arithmetic there is. I've been studying it all my life. Why can't I quit school and start getting the benefits? Lee Roy, let's not have any more of this nonsense. You'll go to school tomorrow, whether you like it or not. And you'd better decide to like it. Well, we'll see about that. But before we do, here's a special message from Kraft. Whether you're having roast and ears of corn fresh from the glowing embers of a campfire, a stack of golden brown pancakes hot off the griddle, or just a plain slice of bread, it's the spread that makes all these good foods extra fine eating. And here's a spread that millions prefer for its delicious flavor. Parquet margarine, made by Kraft. Parquet is a favorite from coast to coast because its fresh, delicate flavor is still unmatched. Try spreading parquet on an ear of roasting corn. Find how delicious it tastes melted into a golden waffle. And remember, parquet margarine is always delicious and satisfying spread on bread, rolls, and muffins. So buy flavor fresh economical parquet. P-A-R-K-A-Y. Parquet margarine from your food dealer tomorrow. It's made by Kraft. Now let's return to the great gilder slave and his nephew, Lee Roy, whom we find in a silent deadlock over the question of going to the movies tonight. Huh, be joining the family for a while? I thought I might. Say, Anki. What is it, my dear? Oh, never mind. Hi, George. It's nice to have one of you kids grown up. Huh. Are you glad to be getting back to school tomorrow, Marjorie? Not particularly. Ha! That will do, Lee Roy. What's this, my dear? You've always been glad to go back to school? Summer feel high as awfully dead. Well, it's a very good school. Fine educational standards, good teachers, and good equipment. It's dead, just the same. Do I have to go there? Marjorie, I don't understand you. What's come over you? Oh, nothing. I know. You do not. Oh, yes, I do. She says it's going to be dead because Marshall Bullard isn't going to be there. Marshall Bullard's going away to school.  I thought so.  Now, children, is Marshall Bullard going away to school, my dear? Mm-hmm. He's going to prep school on the east. What the devil for? So he can go to an eastern college. It's the only way. Well, if the Bullards want to throw their money away, trying to squeeze their boy into Yale or Princeton through the back door, that's their foolishness. It has nothing to do with you. There are lots of nice girl schools in the east. Yes, and they can stay there, and you can stay here. Can I go to Culver, Uncle? Culver, no. In case there should be another war, I could be an officer. There isn't going to be another war, and you're going to the Summerfield Grammar School. But if I went to- And you're going to the Summerfield High School. Can I go to the movies? You go to bed. Uncle Mort, do you think I- You too. Heaven's sake. It doesn't matter with you children.  Sorry, Bertie. What's the matter? Has the cream seen better days? No, the cream's okay.  You want some eggs? No, thanks. No, thanks, Bertie. Glad it seems like this family gets crazy every day. Oh, good morning, Miss Gislees. Well, good morning, Bertie. Good morning, children. Hi. Good morning, Uncle. I'm glad to see you properly washed and combed, my boy. That's a treat I haven't had very often during your vacation. Oh, quit picking on me. Haven't I got enough trouble? What trouble have you got that I haven't got? I got old lady McCann. That's what I got. I'm in her room this year. Did you ever have McCann? No. What's the matter with Miss McCann, LeRoy? She's the worst teacher in the school. That's all. Talk about hard markers. Oh, now, LeRoy. She's not only a hard marker, but she has pets. LeRoy, that's just superstition. There's no such thing as a hard marker.  Every teacher tries to be fair. Are you kidding? What about the time old lady Cowley made me stay after school and write, I am a mischief maker 500 times? Wasn't me to put the mouse in her pocketbook? No, but, Arthur, I bet you thought it was a good idea. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I think it was a pretty good idea myself, my boy. It worked out pretty good. For everybody but me. If anybody ever pulled anything like that with old lady McCann, what?  She beats you with it if you do the least little thing. Oh, nonsense. You can ask any kid in the school. Hey, Al, what time is it? Huh? Let me see. You'll have to hurry, my boy. It's quarter of nine right now. Oh, gosh, McCann probably murders you if you're tardy. Hey, where's my report card? I left it right here last night. What does it look like? Like any report card. I'd have to have it to show I got promoted. It's on the mantelpiece and the parlor. Yeah? Gee, thanks a lot, Mark. Well, yes, I have. I have to have it, Uncle. Write down the stuff we have to get. Thanks. Say, can I have some money? Money, what for? To buy tablets and notebooks and all that. How much? Well, everybody but me has a loose-leaf notebook. The ones with the three-holes are best. They cost 25 cents more, but they're the best. Why are they the best? Because that's the kind everybody has. And if you're out of paper, you can borrow some three-hole, but nobody's got any two-holes or you're dead. Yes. About a buck and a quarter will cover everything, Uncle. Here's a dollar, and I'll run along. But a dollar is a... Oh, come on, LeRoy. I will be late. Oh, for corn, Craig. Come in. The door's open. LeRoy, we don't know who that might be. We know now, Craig Bullard. Get out of here, Craig. I can't play. I've got to go to school. I want to go to school with you. Now, Craig, I'm afraid you'll have to stay home and play by yourself. Craig's starting school today. I want LeRoy to go to school with me. Get out of here. Wait a minute, LeRoy. I promised Mrs. Bullard yesterday that you'd take Craig to kindergarten this morning. What? Why doesn't she take him? Because Craig said he'd rather go with you. I want to go to school with you, LeRoy. Well, come on then, but you'll have to run. Boy, how did go today? How was school? Oh, everything was fine. Huh? I'm just finishing up my homework. A theme I have to hand in tomorrow. Homework the first day? Isn't that unusual? Well, maybe, but I don't mind. You haven't got a fever, have you, LeRoy? Oh, no, I feel fine. What's the subject of your theme? How I spent my vacation. I'm writing a pip. Five pages already. You don't say. Bye, George. How do you spell patriotic, Uncle? Never mind. I'll look it up in the dictionary. Yes, that's a much better system. You'll remember it longer that way. P-A-T-R-I-O-T-I-C. That's what I thought. Well, I'm all finished. You want to hear it? Uh, five pages, you say? Well, four and a half. Won't take long to read. I write pretty big. Suppose you start reading it and we'll see. Okay. My vacation by LeRoy Forester. That's the title. I see. Well, get to the meet LeRoy Forester. Okay. My vacation in the summer of 1945 was not only enjoyable, but useful. During the summer, I tried to relax in order to prepare to return to school in the fall. That is one purpose of a vacation, and I was very anxious to be full of enthusiasm by September. I relaxed by playing baseball, swimming, hikes, and other amusements. My second purpose was to make my vacation useful. Our country needed surplus fats, oils, and waste paper since we were at war at that time. I collected these objects and gave them to the people in charge, so my vacation was therefore enjoyable, useful, and patriotic. That's all. How do you like it? My boy, I think Miss McCann must be a very remarkable woman. Who? Your teacher. If she's produced this magical effect simply with the length of rubber hose, I'm going out and cut myself a piece of it right now. Oh, you're talking about old Lady McCann. We didn't have her. We had a new teacher, Miss Wynne. Oh? What's she like? She's a darn good teacher. She's super. She appointed me head monitor of the class. Well, how did that happen? Well, she didn't know anybody in the room, so she just took a chance. Yes, yes, yes. She says it means I have to be a model of department and a model student besides. You think you can handle all that? I'm sure gonna try. Gee, Miss Wynne is nice. Well, well... I'll answer it, Uncle. Hello? I never saw Leroy like this before. Yes, my boy. Say, young. What is it, Leroy? You all through with your homework? Not quite. I'm trying to finish my science report. Oh? And there's one question. I can't seem to find the answer in the dictionary or any of the kids' science books around here. Just ask your uncle, my boy. A year of physics and a year of chemistry in college ought to qualify me to handle your difficulty. Well, sure. All I want to know is, why is the air thinner at 15,000 feet than it is down here? Uh, why is it thinner? Yeah. Well, my boy, it's on account of the altitude. Is that all you know about it? That's all there is to it. Unless you want me to get into all kinds of complicated theories and details that you wouldn't understand. Okay, Uncle, thanks. I'll look it up in the library tomorrow morning. We'll now see here. You expecting anybody, Uncle? Nobody in particular, but I'll see who it is. A little late for you, isn't it? I want Leroy to play with me. Leroy's busy now, Craig. He's doing his homework for school. I want him to play with me. Am I a Craigie, old boy? How'd you like school today? I didn't like it at all. You want to play, Leroy? I can't now, Craigie. I've got to get ready for school tomorrow. Aw, what do you want to do that for? School stings. Well, I know how you feel, Craig. I used to feel just the same. But you'll get to your like school after a while. Now, you come by in the morning and I'll take you to kindergarten again. How's that? You come by about a quarter of a night, okay? Atta boy, Craigie. I'll see you in the morning. Good night. Leroy, I don't understand you. Well, Miss Winn says it's up to all the bigger fellas to be extra nice to the kids in kindergarten up. It's part of my job, that's all. Uh, I must be dreaming. The Great Gilder Sleeve will be back in just a moment. You know, from coast to coast, women are praising the fine, fresh flavor of parquet margarine. That's right. And here's a letter that proves the point. It's from Mrs. J. J. Keen of Chicago. Shall I read it? Yes, please do. I've tried several different spreads. Even the most expensive ones. But for my money, there's none that can match the delicious flavor of parquet margarine. It's just grand. And I know because I spread parquet on hot toast every morning. Sounds great. But does she say anything about the freshness, the delicacy of parquet's flavor? By sure. She says, our whole family likes parquet margarine because it always tastes so fresh and sweet. We like it too because it's so easy to spread. Thank you, Mrs. Keen, for all those nice things you've told us about parquet margarine. Of course, as you say, the amazing thing about parquet is that you get the fresh, delicate flavor, smooth texture, easy spreading, and the splendid food values too, for only about half the price of costly spreads. No wonder millions of homemakers are insisting on delicious economical parquet margarine. Try it soon. Tomorrow by parquet, P-A-R-K-A-Y, parquet margarine, made by Kraft. Now let's return to the great Gildersleeve, who has been entertaining Judge Hooker at dinner. Full of good food and goodwill, our host sits at the head of the table, beaming upon his little family and his old friend, the Judge. Judge, how about another helping of Pete's Shortcake there? Yes, Judge, how about it? No thank you, Bertie. It's simply delicious, but I couldn't. Oh, come on. Yeah, come on, Judge. It'll do you good. Oh, I'm sorry. Pete's Shortcake Horus, the first since Pearl Harbor. I know, Gildersleeve. That's real whipping cream. You're right out of the cow. I'm sorry, but if I... Shortcake won't get you, though. You'll have to throw it away if you don't eat it. You'll just go to waste. That's just what I'm afraid of, Bertie. I'm afraid if I do eat it, it'll go to my waist. Oh, brother. Minds me, how about you, Maura, that Pete's Shortcake? Oh, no thank you, Uncle Maura. Leroy? Leroy, I guess it's up to you. Uh, none for me. Thank you, Uncle. What? I never heard of a boy who didn't like Shortcake. It's not that, but I think I ought to hurry upstairs and get back to my homework. So if you'll excuse me...  You're excused. Now... Marge, don't come into my room and bother me, please. I'm going to be doing my homework. Who's bothering you? Uncle, tell her to keep out of my room. Who wants to go in your room? It's the last place in the world. Now, now, my dear. Run along, my boy. We'll see that you're not disturbed. Well, quite a change seems to have come over Leroy. I don't know how long I can stand in this way. Now, Marjorie, let's not discourage scholarship. We'll excuse you too, my dear, if you dare. Thank you. Cigar, Judge? Don't care for Jill. Yes, Horace. I'm actually beginning to believe that Leroy is grown up. That's the funny thing about children. One day they're children, and the next day they're grown up. And the next day they're children. Now, Judge, this has been going on for three days. It's a whole new attitude. For the first time, Leroy has begun to show real interest in his work. I'm beginning to think the boy has the makings of a scholar. Well, that's fine if it's true. I'm delighted to hear it. I'm even thinking of sending him to college. Every boy ought to go to college. After all, I'm a college man myself, graduate of a state university.  Judge, will you kindly be serious? I'm discussing your boy's future. I'm trying to plan his career. Well, you needn't talk as if you were the only college graduating. Wait in the rooms. Tell me, Horace, what do you suppose it costs to put a boy through college these days? You think I could swing it? Well, I'd say it depends. If Leroy's as smart as you say, he is. He's smart, all right. Most colleges have scholarships, you know. A scholarship? Now, why didn't I think of that? That's what I'll do. I'll get Leroy a scholarship. I'm afraid that's something Leroy'll have to get for himself, Gillette. Well, I'll help him. I'll coach him. Yes, I'll study with him. After all, as I say, I'm a college man. I do find that colleges changed a good deal since our day, Gillette. The requirements are tougher. All right, I'll get help. I might talk with his teacher about it, or his principal, Eve Goodwin. Yes, she'd be glad to help me outline a course of study for the boy. Well, Miss Goodwin might be able to help. Yes, yes, indeed. I might just run over there tomorrow evening. I haven't seen Eve all summer. Besides, I owe it to Leroy. Not very peavy. I'm out a little early. We had an early supper tonight. Oh, you're out for a stroll, you think? Not exactly. I'm making a call, but I'm not expected quite yet. Calling on a lady, probably? Well, as it happens, yes. I understand Mrs. Ransom won't be returning to town till next week. I'm calling on Miss Goodwin, if you must know. Oh. It's not what you think it is. I'm going there for a definite purpose. I'm not trying to say it. I'm just wrapped this parcel. I have to deliver a thermometer to a customer, Mrs. Snyder. She called up about it, said to rush it right over. Well, PV, I put down $25 in cash on an encyclopedia today. Did you say $25? $25. Did you say encyclopedia? Encyclopedia. 30 volumes. Special paper and special binding. The man's been after me for months. My goodness. Well, I guess I'd better get this thermometer over to Mrs. Snyder. PV, wait a minute. Yes? I said I bought an encyclopedia today. Yeah, I know. 30 volumes. Get everything in it from A to Z. Anything you want to know, it's in there. Handsomely illustrated, too. Over a thousand color plates. You see? Here's a sample volume man left with me. I have to return it. Just heft that. Mmm. Heavy. It's not light reading, either. Well, I guess I'd better run over to Mrs. Snyder. Wait a minute, PV. Look at the special tooling on that cover. That is tooling. You see, this is the first volume. A to AUK. That means it contains everything of any importance beginning with A. You see? You're looking here. Has it got about the atomic bomb? By what? The atomic bomb. Well, no. I don't suppose it has. Pretty important. I usually go by the Corn Hill home and ask myself, hasn't got everything, but it's got much need. I better get over there with this thermometer. Wait, PV. This is full of interesting stuff. For instance, did you know that the moon controls the tides? Well, when I called all that, had the phases of the moon and high and low tides for every day in the year. Names of all the presidents, too. Well... All right. Do you know how ants communicate with each other? You know who our comedies was. Go ahead. Who was our comedies? Sounds like a Greek. That's not a complete answer. You know which of the highest mountains in the Western Hemisphere? Must begin with A. The Andes. Do you know how long it'll take a railroad train traveling 60 miles an hour to reach the moon? I doubt that it would make it. That shows how much you know. Tell me, Mr. Joe, this leaf. How did you ever fall for it? How did you come to buy this reference work? Because every house ought to have an encyclopedia, PV, to look up things. As a matter of fact, I bought this for Leroy. Leroy? Well, you needn't seem so surprised. Leroy's begun to show real interest in his schoolwork this year. He's turned over a new leaf. Must've turned over a new Leroy. Well, I'm for encouraging him, PV. That's why I bought this. I figure it'll help him in his work. For instance, do you know how many tribes of Aborigines there are in this country? Mr. Yellow, Steve, I'm not to go. I have a customer waiting for a thermometer. Her husband is having chills. I asked you a question, PV. Do you know how many battles Alexander the Great won? Mr. Yellow, Steve, I... Yeah, that's probably her again wants to know where the thermometer is. Do you know what country is the native habitat of York? Mr. Yellow, Steve, I'm trying to run a pharmacy here, not a quiz program. Yeah, I'm coming. All right, go on. The trouble with you is, PV, all you're interested in is making money. Well, no, I wouldn't say that. Oh, go on and answer it. I'll go and talk to somebody who's interested in intelligent things. Or would you rather sit out here on the porch? Well, it's such a nice evening, but let's go inside. Got something I want to show you. I was so glad when you called last night I've hardly seen you all summer. Yeah, not since the Jolly Boys picnic. That's right. Well, where shall we go? On the sofa here would be good. Fine. Tell you why I came, Eve. It's about Leroy. Already? The school only started Monday. That's not what you think. Something has come over, Leroy. I think it's his new teacher. Miss Win? Mm-hmm, that's her. I mean, that's she. She... Well, she's rather young and inexperienced. I was a little concerned about substituting her for Miss McCann. Listen, she's got those kids eating out of her hand. Oh, well, I'm glad to hear it. Well, she's got Leroy all steamed up. He can't wait to get to school in the morning and he comes home every afternoon and goes straight to his homework. I think the boy's going to turn out to be a student. Oh, splendid. You know, it's so inspiring when a boy suddenly takes hold like that. It's what makes teaching worthwhile. Right away, things are going. I'm planning now by George to send him to college. Oh, I think he should go, definitely. Well, I want him to have every advantage. So the first thing I did, today, I bought him an encyclopedia. Oh, how wonderful. The Britannica? The what? The encyclopedia Britannica. Well, no, this is called the New World Encyclopedia. Oh. It's 30 volumes, Eve. Cost me 69.50. Got everything from A to Z. They're delivering it tomorrow. See, here's a sample volume. Handsomely illustrated, over a thousand color plates. Hand tooling and so forth. Why is the Britannica better? Oh, I'm sure this one is very good. I'm sure if Leroy learns everything in it, he'll do very well. I just happen to like the Britannica. But let's have a look at this. Do you want to turn on the light there? That's better. Like me to show it to you? Yes, do. Well, let's shovel over a little, huh? Then we can spread it out on our laps. Kind of big. You see here, they begin with A. They usually do. Oh. Now, here it's all about Aaron, fellow in the Bible. And from Aaron, they go to kind of dull in through here. Let's look for some pictures. Oh, there's one. Now, here. Here's a picture of a, let's see. It says it's a picture of an ancient Abyssinian vase. Hmm. Busted. Over here we have... Eh, say, lean over again like that. Why? I like that perfume you're wearing. It's not perfume, it's cologne. I don't care, I like it. And it has nothing to do with the Abyssinians. Let's see what this other picture here has. Throckmorton. Eh. Well, are you going to show me the book or aren't you? I don't want to read anymore Eve, my eyes are tired. Hmm. They tire too easily, you should see an Oculus. Um, tell me Throckmorton, did you come over here to talk about Leroy's college education or for something else? Well, after all, Eve, you won't be going to college for five years. There's no rushes there. Oh, none at all. Why don't you come back again in five years? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yes, well, let's see here. Astronomy, astrophysics. I'd call you at the office Mr. Gillsleeve, but there's a man here with a truck that wants a dollar and seventy cents. Yes, sir. It's a crate and it weighs a ton. Oh, I won't open it. No, sir, I won't say nothing to Leroy. Encyclopedia, what? Well, I don't get it, but I'll just leave it laying here in the hall till you get home. Yes, sir.  I guess he must be all right. He said paid a man. Ready? Let me get at this. Why, it's books. My goodness, what names? This way to Leroy sees this. Will he be thrilled? Where is our little scholar? I don't know, Mr. Gillsleeve. He came in from school and went right upstairs. At his books, I suppose, we mustn't let the boy wreck his health. Ha! No, my dear. Well, I don't see why he has to make such a show of it. The first time in his life he's ever studied. Now, let's not discourage him. Leroy, I've got something for you. No, wait. Don't look yet, Leroy. Hand me that first volume, my dear. I want to write something in it. Write in it? On the fly leaf, just a little inscription. I'll go get my pen. Well, what do you know? Here comes Miss Goodwin. Miss Goodwin? Well, coming around, eh? I've got room. You sure are in, Bernie. I'll be right back. That's her. I'm Goodwin. Well, well. Good afternoon, Bernie. Is Mr. Gillsleeve in? Yes, ma'am. In his study. You'll be right out. Come in. Thank you. You've been kind of a stranger around here lately, Miss Goodwin. Well, I've been... Oh, hello, Marjorie. Hello. Uncle Mort will be right out. Well, you came just at the right time. Look out for that creep. Oh, I, uh... I came over, Throckmorton, because I wanted to explain to you about the whole thing myself. Well, that's fine. I'm just about to surprise Leroy with his present. Leroy, Lee. Explain about what, Eve? You want to explain about what? Didn't Leroy tell you? Tell me what? I've hardly seen the boy. I was forced to suspend Leroy from school today. Suspend? For a week. I didn't like to do it. But when a boy openly defies his teacher and calls her name... Leroy! I don't understand it, Eve. I thought he was crazy about Miss Win. Oh, this wasn't Miss Win. She was just a substitute. This was Miss McCann. Uh-huh. She's back. What did he call her, Eve? He called her a goon-faced old tomato. Leroy! Don't bother! I'm coming up! Audrey, what am I going to do with this encyclopedia now? $25 down and 10 months to pay. Well, I guess I'll just have to return it, that's all. How are you going to return it? Oh, that's easy. Just tell him to come for it. With this writing on the fly, Leith? For a good boy. To Leroy from his loving uncle. Reading maketh a full man. By George, he'll pay for it. He'll pay for it out of his allowance. If I have to raise his allowance to do it. The Great Gilder Sleeve is played by Harold Perry. It is written by John Whedon and Sam Moore. The music is by Jack Beacon. This is John Lang speaking for the Kraft Cheese Company. I'm inviting you to listen in again next week for the further adventures of The Great Gilder Sleeve. Yeah. Good night, everybody. For hurry-up meals and quick company treats, here's a sure bet. Serve Pabstet, the delicious cheese food. Enjoy Pabstet's mellow cheddar cheese goodness in sandwiches and salads. Serve slices of Pabstet with pie and fruit desserts. And see what a swell sauce Pabstet makes for egg and macaroni dishes. Pabstet is nourishing, digestible, comes in two delicious varieties. Golden Pabstet and Pimento Pabstet. Buy both kinds. Get Pabstet cheddar cheese food from your dealer tomorrow. This is the National Broadcasting Company.


I went to check my email on yahoo and I saw this on yahoo news and I said I absolutely must react and see if I agree so this is three reasons the WWE is doomed let's see if they're on point huge week for the WWE and it's about time stock up 20% after they announced they finally surpassed 1 million users subscribers to their network and they had some real rumble controversy a lot of insider stuff Brian the barber saws he joins me with three reasons why Vince McMahon's baby is still doomed so if the stock's up 20% well rumble's got a lot of chatter out there there's some heat there's some excitement I like the app which is always a good sign for a company and yahoo say Vince is doomed why well I'm dropping the body slam on here and WWE first of all they recently reached out 1 million mark they had a promo in November they're having another promo in February ahead of WrestleMania so essentially they've invested zillions of dollars to acquire free emails and I think these people are churning off but ultimately there's a couple long term problems here one is age and talent Hulkster might be 65 years old Ric Flair might be 120 so as those people which are still on camera and driving that connection with a lot of the millenials a lot of the baby boomers age they get off camera while you watch this program because the kids come in I have done some research on this I had a 10 year old boy up just for the sole purpose of watching wrestling with me or something and now that he has I realized he likes the young guys and I like the old guys well that's how that works it's a circle of life right I just I just feel so the connections to kids these days to see our Roman Reigns are not as strong as and we were growing up when we were growing up let's say if you're under the age of 50 you saw programming every week on live TV you got connected with it was the only cool thing on TV right now your WV is competing with a lot a lot of eyeballs okay and so you say aging talent you say the new guys no one likes the new guys and I think a lot of injuries I watch WWE I watch Raw I watch SmackDown I watch these papers I feel they're taking a lot of risks and a lot of these uncalculated risks to get keep the guest keep the matches non-repetitive right are going to lead it injuries one big one has been Daniel Bryan it was out for almost I believe a year if you're most popular wrestlers not on camera you're losing eyeballs but even analytically if you don't want to think about these things they have more their attendance is way down their ticket prices are under pressure that's for an analytical perspective that's very worry okay so from an analytical perspective but the point your third point is that Vincent Manis all they got which to me is the greatest selling point no one has lived their gimmick in the business sense or any sense like Vince McMahon the guy's been way ahead of his time I think the WWE Network is going over the top in a really creative way they've substituted out the pay-per-view model where you take your cable box and you pay people to straight online subs somebody's gonna be doing that HBO is trying to knock that off there are a lot of companies trying to do this Vince McMahon's the only one with the squash to go ahead and do it himself is not having this man on your side a good thing well let's think about if it's been that were dropped dead today who steps in is it triple H he's been leading the creative team is it Stephanie man we don't know I don't think that succession plan has been very articulated to Wall Street ultimately everything you see on TV each week is the byproduct of this man who remains very in the trenches we tweak and if you pull it out like a Starbucks if you pull Howard Schultz out of the trenches what happens to the company in longer term and I don't know we'll die Brian it's when those people take over they've been running them the company has been kind of churning along it's the circus if you just kind of give a Vince exception in the stock itself if you look at it just on cash flows you look at just kind of what they do as a traveling little troop all the time first you come to the inclusion of trades and discount it should be private because it's got this McMahon lunacy discount attached to it which we can argue about all day but but really this is not a company that's very expensive on the stock side it was last year in the 30s but they're trying a lot of experimental stuff and they've got huge margins it seems like a buy story well proof to me I think that the net the company's proof to me that they can acquire viewers for the network without giving things away from free and I think their turn rate is very high the chair is basically people that come on and drop off after their free trial they need to show me that they're making money on that but secondarily they need to get their live attendance back up and push through higher ticket prices not just in the US but also globally and I'm worried about those things are not happening all right he says it's not happening I say it is two guys who definitely will both watch WrestleMania arguing about the WWE did we confer you you're gonna check out you're gonna short the stock running let us know in the space down below all righty so what I want to do here is I want to read the accompanying article okay I did not include the video because I couldn't snatch it off the website but so it has been a good week for the WWE subscriptions for their online streaming networks are past the one million mark and the stock surge 20% but all is not well in Vince McMahon's kingdom according to Brian the barber sozees of Beluce Capital Advisors so he says that the key one million mark only came because of the free promos not proven ability to attract paying customers so he has three reasons the WWE is still doomed but yahoo finances Jake Mackie remains unconvinced check out their verbal throwdown which is what we just saw now gonna go over cuz good it says a little bit in detail those three reasons all right so it's aging talent Hulk Hogan 61 Ric Flair 65 both have recently been brought back in front of the camera in an attempt to bring back the over 30 set of the WWE fold well no I don't know about that I think they're a just nostalgia act and yet doesn't get us to watch but I don't think if we didn't watch it would bring us back solidly because they're only on once in a while you know but so he points out that they will continue to age and have to end their own camera days when that happens which is pretty much now anyway the key over 30 demographic will stop watching since they don't connect to the new set of WWE superstars we we don't connect to a lot of them already yes yahoo's finances Jeff Mackie disagrees arguing that WWE is programming for both people like him and his 10-year-old son he likes the young guys and I like the old guys it's a circle of life so see unrelenting as the title belt match argues back that in this new media landscape WWE is no longer the only cool thing there that there is for preteen boys that's true right now WWE is competing with a lot of eyeballs well they say they don't have any competition correct injuries they're taking a lot of risks to I guess keep the matches non-repetitive so they argues those risks could lead to injuries in fact they already have one big one which has been Daniel Bryan talked about this in the veil you know he's been out for almost a year your most popular guys and on camera gonna lose eyeballs I don't know how much eyeballs they lost because of him being out but I do know that Brian did leave lose a little bit of steam but as soon as he came back I mean man let me tell you something when I was at the Royal rumble those yes chance were just as loud as I remember them being when I was at WrestleMania what 28 that night at the Raw when we had left and they were just shit man look anyway those injuries maybe a part of the reason attendance is to go down the last is Vince McMahon I says Mackie says WWE CEO Vince McMahon in the leagues biggest is the league's biggest asset as a wrestler promoter announcer and more McMahon is seen as the heart and soul of the Empire he's the gatekeeper I knew that don't nothing get on TV unless it goes through him from what I understand so to those says that makes him a huge liability it's true he's a genius and he's his own worst enemy all at the same time if this big man were to drop dead today who's to step in wrestler turn executive man executive Paul Levesque better known as Triple H is running creative would he step in big man's daughter would she step in ultimately everything you see on TV is what make you know isn't McMahon's that's true so what you think watch the video then through the article was slightly more detailed in certain sections but pretty much so the video said do you think that it's still doomed I personally don't think that it's doomed one thing with them is that they've always made new superstars let me tell you something I never thought that they will come back when I mean after the Golden Age the first Golden Hogan Warriors Savage I never thought they would ever come back I thought it was dead dead product and then all of a sudden attitude there oh my god these new superstars are being born new wrestlers we got Stone Cold Steve Austin you got the rock and so on and so forth is just like whoa I never thought it would happen again then they had another minor surge with Brock and John Cena you know that area you know the ruthless aggression era and you know but it wasn't as big you know it wasn't as big as the attitude there or the 80s you know Golden Era so you know and it really hasn't hit and something's not right right now I don't think the aging talent has anything to do with it but it is part of it in that guys like Hogan flair undertaker rock you know these are guys that are nostalgia acts these are guys that are part-timers these are guys that you know even brought you know they come in from time to time but they're such a huge hit the ratings probably spike but they're not their long term and I really don't know if I mean well it's it's been shown that the current guys can't or have not at least shown the ability or maybe it's just the booking you know so what what I'm saying is what they're doing with their current roster is not meeting or beating what they did in the 80s and in the 90s it's not you know I mean so and then they got the injuries you know Daniel Brian did get hurt you know and he does have a point with that because now that I think about it with Reigns being hurt and he was out he lost a lot of fucking steam and he just came back at the wrong he came back and then you know he had lost steam and then what Brian being introduced again he just lost I mean you know the crowd turn on and you know and then he's making dick comments and you know he's not ready he's not you know and then Vince yeah so I mean I think you have three legitimate points of the aging talent one you know the whole Hogan and Ric Flair thing it's it's not we don't even all of us know that we're not counting on Flair or Hogan to make us watch every week because they're only on once in a fucking while once in a fucking while but I wouldn't say aging talent but I would say Nostalgia acts you know like they're bigger biggest stars only Chris Jericho you know got you know they only come back once in a while and we know that they're going to be gone they're not going to be with us you know for a long run and you know it's just you know the fact that they don't have talent that can you know run run things without Nostalgia acts coming in you know like for example back when you had the rock Kurt angle Stone Cold Steve Austin Chris Jericho the undertaker back when you had all those guys right there in that era if Hogan came in hey he would have been a great addition but he wouldn't have been like oh yo Hogan's gone you know I mean you know like when you find out the rock is good you're like you're not gonna be on the night I'm watching guys I know that don't even watch wrestling call me like you know the rock so yeah I know I watch every week I know he's gonna be on but they tune in the casual watcher viewer which is what they say the only thing they care about tune in to watch them so anyway you know back then they wouldn't have needed Nostalgia acts and now they need them that's the fucking problem I recovered the injuries you know slowing down rains and Brian and we already I could talk all day till I puke coat hangers about Vince being not out of touch I mean like I said he's the genius that built the place that gave us so much at the same time he shoots himself in the foot plus there's that argument also when you look at the attitude there that they would have never made those changes unless they were forced to good competition makes you better and right now I wish there was competition that made them better unfortunately their best competition right now is NXT and they own NXT so it's not competition it's just another one of their product that they're not pushing mainstream yet they need to because triple H is doing a damn good job with that post comments down below let me know what you think about this article press the like button subscribe


The summer months in Japan can get very hot, but that doesn't stop Yacosca sailors and their family members from getting out in the sun, playing games, and having cookouts. Staff from Yacosca Naval Hospital enjoy seeing people staying active, but want to remind people to stay safe from summer dangers like heat stress.  Just because you are not showing signs or symptoms of being dehydrated doesn't mean you're not. Usually when you feel the thirst, you're usually 30% dehydrated. You need to make sure you drink more water than you drink soda or tea or anything like that. You need to make sure you take care of your body because heat exhaustion can creep up on you really quick without you knowing. The real heat of the Japanese summer is almost upon Yacosca. So be prepared and stay safe in the sun. Heady Officer Kirk Putnam, Yacosca Naval Base, Japan.


Drugs cause the brain to adapt, to change, because they sledge hammer the brain with signals that nothing natural does in the same way. And once the brain adapts, if you remove the drug from it, you can feel very uncomfortable, you can no longer feel normal, and you want another dose of the drug to get you back into that state that you were before. That adaptation is what drives addiction for most people, and that's one of the most critical things to recognize. In some cases it's irreversible, in some cases it's completely reversible, but above all, people who don't start never have to walk down that path. Welcome again to our seventh season of the John Seaman Had Buttons School Conversations Discussion Series. My name is Mark Sokol, I'm the president and CEO here at JCC Greater Boston. The series invites distinguished figures to engage in unique exchanges around controversial and sometimes very difficult topics. Our panelists are always led by expert moderators through respectful, thought-provoking discussions on issues of concern to the Jewish community, the general community and to our world. They offer insights into so many important and meaningful things. The hallmark of this series is civil, respectful dialogue and conversation. Tonight, we present another program that is both timely and touches nearly every corner of our community, America's Opioid Epidemic. The situation in Massachusetts is especially dire with the fatal overdose rate more than double the national average and among the highest in the country. While the extent of the crisis is easy to see, the cause is harder to pinpoint. Our panel tonight will examine the origins of the worst public health crisis of the 21st century and expose the role of pharmaceutical companies played in pushing addictive opioids into the American market. They will look ahead to what needs to be done to stem the crisis. Finally, two things. Jonathan Seiman, for whom this series is named, was a leader with a unique ability to get people from different sides of an issue to sit together and to listen to each other. In this spirit, we ask that our audience please be respectful of all thoughts and all opinions shared by our panelists. As I always say, this is not a Red Sox Yankees game, no cheering, no booing, and no popcorn. So once again, welcome to our panelists, welcome to our audience, and I'd like to turn things over to our moderator, Barry Mair. Thanks to Mark and to everyone at the JCC for making this possible, and thanks to all of you as well for coming out tonight. As a personal aside, I consider this evening a success already, since the last time I was at a JCC was right after I was bar mitzvahed. And so it's a kind of a return to my roots as well. So, you know, we're here to talk about the opioid crisis, and we are hearing that term virtually everywhere on television, radio, in newspapers. And it almost sounds simplistic when you hear the term opioid crisis, but it's a very complex situation. It's really kind of a hydroheaded one. It's a problem that involves not only prescription drugs, but illegal street drugs like fentanyl. These are these drugs are the drugs that are driving the current increase in overdose deaths. And because it is a complex problem, it's also a very complex, there are many complex issues involved with it. And those are some of the issues that I hope we're going to talk about tonight. And I hope there's going to be, there will be things that you'll take away from this discussion as well. I mean, we're going to talk a little bit about how the, with our experts are going to describe how this crisis began and where we are today, what addiction is, the science of addiction, what we can look for in our own homes and our family members to understand the signs of addiction and ways to prevent that. And also deal with other aspects of the opioid crisis, which is how do we deal with people who are in pain, who are suffering from legitimate pain and the types of treatments that are either available to them or that are being restricted and not available to them. So I'd like to, you know, also make the same point that Mark made, which is that I'm not a legislator, a regulator, a litigator. And I hope we can approach this conversation in that same spirit that we're here to learn about an issue and hopefully take something away from it. And so with that, I'd like to just turn to all of you. And maybe we can start with a simple question of how do we get here and where are we through your own particular lens? And since Rich, you were introduced first, why don't you take that on first? Thank you. And thank you all for having us. I think this is really important, particularly as a community. You know, I became addicted to heroin quite young. I was around 15 years old and, you know, it was new. It was just coming into, you know, the Boston area out by the suburbs and Brighton and what I call the suburbs. But and we didn't know. I mean, the thing that I think is the same today as it was then is that nobody knew what was about to happen. Opiates are much more dangerous than people can think. When I had taken my first bag of heroin, you know, that was it. It was utopia. I changed the way I felt and I never looked back. And it got worse and the losses came and the trouble came and the incarcerations. My parents had no idea what was going on, you know, but there was hope. There were people out there. There were people out there working, you know, making those connections, responsible connections to recovery. And, you know, there was a lot of slipping and sliding and falling. And, and, and Dr. Dr. Matters, maybe you can jump in here and talk to us about that same question, but from the perspective of a research scientist, someone who's been following this. Well, I've been following drugs since 1963 when I got my first collection of LSD from the CIA experiments. And I was asked to find out how they work. And the most important thing I took away from that experience, which carries me to this day, is that drugs cause the brain to adapt to change because they sledgehammer the brain with signals that nothing natural does in the same way. And once the brain adapts, if you remove the drug from it, you can feel very uncomfortable, you can no longer feel normal, and you want another dose of the drug to get you back into that state that you were before. That adaptation is what drives addiction for most people. And that's one of the most critical things to recognize. In some cases, it's irreversible. In some cases, it's completely reversible. But above all, people who don't start never have to walk down that path. And Andrew, you're sort of on the front lines dealing with people who are addicted to drugs, trying to help them get off of drugs. So how, in the terms of your professional work, has the picture changed over the past decade for you? You had also started by asking how did we get here. And to talk about how the picture changed and how we got here, I think it's important to talk for a moment about where we actually are and what the opioid crisis really is. Because as you mentioned, we can't open up a newspaper without hearing about the opioid crisis. It's on the radio, it's on television. And over and over again, we're hearing about the opioid crisis, but what is it? And I think it's important to understand that the opioid crisis is not a problem of drug abuse. This is not an epidemic of people taking dangerous drugs because it feels good and they're accidentally harming themselves. I think the opioid crisis is best understood as an epidemic of opioid addiction. And as Dr. Madras mentioned, once somebody becomes addicted to a drug, they need to keep using that drug to feel normal or to avoid feeling awful. And while some people did become opioid addicted taking opioids because they like the effect, many people became opioid addicted, taking opioids as prescribed by doctors. And what we're really dealing with when we talk about the opioid crisis, the array of health and social problems that we define as the opioid crisis, I believe has been driven by a sharp increase in the number of people suffering from the condition of opioid addiction. And if you frame it that way as an epidemic of opioid addiction, then you'll understand that the reason we're experiencing record high levels of opioid overdose deaths, the reason we're seeing heroin and fentanyl flood into non-urban communities. The reason we're seeing a soaring increase in infants born opioid dependent, children winding up in the foster care system, outbreaks of injection related infectious diseases, the driver behind all of these problems has been the increase in opioid addiction. We've had addiction all along. There's a history of addiction in this country. It tends to travel from drug to drug. Certainly in this current crisis, the seeds were laid through what was probably the over-marketing and over-prescribing of prescription painkillers. But there are other factors that play into it. There's a recreational factor. A lot of people get into drugs recreationally rather than through prescriptions. So why don't we talk a little bit about, maybe start with Dr. Madras to expand a little bit on the process of addiction and then maybe, Rick, you can follow up on how it feels as a person becoming addicted. People become addicted to drugs because of a combination of themselves, who they are as a person, whether or not they have a psychiatric problem, whether or not they're stressed or anxious, whether or not they've suffered childhood abuse, whether or not they've had many setbacks in life. So the personal is a factor that's very important. The environment is another factor that's critical. Who your friends are, who your influencers are, whether or not drugs are easily accessible. When I was deputy drug czar of the country, kids were doing farming parties, P-H-A-R-M-I-N-G. They would go into their parents' cabinets, medicine cabinets, raid them and put out a large glass bowl, dump all the pills they could find and just pop them and figure out whether or not they like them or not. So access, the environment is a critical one and obviously the third is the drug itself. We know from a lot of studies, thousands of studies now that drugs can produce changes in the brain that compel using and using over and over again.  But I think we're talking about addiction. And by definition, addiction means more. And, you know, I didn't wake up one morning and say, I can't wait to be a heroin addict and end up losing the love and affection of my family and being incarcerated. But what happened was I started out with other drugs. And I think that's really important for all of us as a community to know, I don't think people just wake up and become heroin addicts. You know, I think for me and for the friends and the people I hung around with, it was a slow process of, you know, drinking on the weekends.  Well, what was the first thing that when you made that change? Because we all drank, we all, I smoked when I was a kid, but you went the extra mile as it worked. And what did you do over into that? I drank the extra mile of Juana, even at that point, for a different reason. I think you did it maybe to socialize. I did it to change the way I felt. And so what happened was, and I didn't know this was happening to me, this is only in hindsight. And so anything that could do that was definitely for me. And heroin really ended up doing it to the point where, you know, it was like a euphoric marshmallow kind of really laid back. I mean, I could stand up on a corner, wait for my dealer and just nod out. Right. And Andrew, you see people coming in all the time and is the type of person changing or is the psychology of the person changing? Is there any change in the nature of the people that you've seen over these past 10 years? Yeah, so in my experience treating opioid addiction, I treated, I mean, if I could roughly break up the patients I've treated into two groups, an older group and a younger group. The younger patients that I treated became addicted to opioids, either through recreational use, mostly through non-medical recreational use, although some became addicted through medical use, they had serious medical problems, and that's how they got hooked. My older patients had become opioid addicted almost entirely through medical use. And when it comes to highly addictive drugs like nicotine or heroin or hydrocodone or oxycodone, just about anyone who repeatedly uses the drug is going to be at risk of getting addicted. Opioids are not like alcohol. Alcohol can be a very serious problem for a significant subset of our population, but most of the population can be repeatedly exposed to alcohol and doesn't get addicted to it. About 10% become addicted. A lot more than 10% have risky drinking and health problems, but addiction occurs in about 10% of alcohol users. With the highly addictive drugs, the individual's characteristics become less important, they're important, but less important. The drug's inherent addictive properties and the repeated exposure to the drug become more important. One of the things that, when I first started reporting on this back in 2001, that long ago, one of the things I was most struck by were calls I would get or people I'd meet who had lost a child, a son or a daughter, who had overdosed. Maybe they went to a farming party. Maybe they tried a drug like oxy for the first time. I was shocked when I would hear these stories. The problem is now we're hearing these virtually every day. We're hearing about a kid getting addicted. We're hearing about a kid overdosing. Perhaps many of the people who've come here tonight have had family members that have become addicted, who have overdosed. From your experiences, and again, we'll start with you, Dr. Rogers, what should one be looking for? You've got a son, you've got a daughter. What are the signs that someone might be drifting towards overusing or becoming addicted to a drug? Well, I think the most important thing for every parent to recognize is that the initiation of any drug is already a flag. If you're under 18 and you're using alcohol, you're smoking, you're using marijuana, that puts a child at tremendously high risk for progressing onto other drugs. We don't know why, but it seems as if drugs, they're very different. They have different effects on the brain, different targets. But most people who are addicted to opioids are polypharmacists. That means they use many drugs. And when people do postmortem studies, they study what they died of. They don't find only one drug in them. They find alcohol, they find marijuana, they find benzodiazepines, cocaine. So what we have to recognize is that the use of any drug by a child whose brain has not fully developed is one sign. They're friends. Who are their friends? Have they changed their friends? Are they becoming more secretive in the house? Do they tend to lock their doors more often? Stay behind closed doors? Is the relationship with you getting different? Are they less open with you? Are they sleeping less? Are they spending a lot more time away from home? Are they on social networking sites more? There's a whole list of flags that every parent should be aware of. And Rick, you should be an expert on this, right? What do you know to look for? Not on my own experience, but I have six children and I have three children in recovery, responsible recovery. And I went through this with them and I was an exempt from those signposts. And I also was an exempt from the denial that comes with this. I didn't want to believe that my son was doing something or my daughter was doing something. And I'm on the front line with this stuff every day. But it was the door, you know, not coming out of your room sleeping. Sleeping to two o'clock. You know, the friends sneaking out at night. They're coming in and not wanting to talk. You know, there's a lot of signposts and a lot of this stuff you can get online. You know, I know the Massachusetts organization of addiction recovery more has a number of links to sites like this that you can actually go on. Because I think it's important in how to confront a son or a daughter and when to do that and how to do it professionally. There was a character in the book. I wrote an actual person, a mother. Now her daughter became a stone cold oxy addict. She was stealing from the family. She was falling apart. And the mother, as many mothers are or parents are, was in total denial. So Andrew, when you're dealing with families, which I take if you are in your practice as well, how do you deal with that aspect of things? Having to have them confront what a relative may be going through. I'm not sure I totally understand your question, but an important point here is that because I think when you're asking this question and the answers you got, which I agree with and I thought they were very good answers. It sounds like this question about how do you recognize when there's a problem and what should you do about it and how do you confront that individual. Typically that discussion is focused on parents and what to do about their kids. And it's really important to recognize that this is not just parents worrying about their kids, but seniors are another group that have been hit very hard. There are a lot of adults who need to be concerned about their parents. And how do you deal with that? It can be very difficult. It's easier when it's a young person and it's illicit drugs. It's much harder if it's an older person and they're receiving prescriptions from a physician. Often the individual who may be addicted to the prescription will have a harder time accepting that they're suffering from addiction because they're receiving a legitimate prescription from a doctor. And they may even be taking it as prescribed. We might still consider them addicted because they actually look in many ways like the people who we've just heard about. They're having a decrease in the quality of their life. They're no longer engaged in family. They're on the sofa all day long. And so it can be very challenging in trying to help people. And the other messages I would just have are that if you suspect that there's a problem and that there probably is a problem and you should act on that concern, what do you do? I'd say my advice to answer your question would be to try and engage that person as empathically as you possibly can. You let them know that you love them. They're going to very likely feel ashamed about having this problem because of the stigma of addiction and to let them know that you want to help them and support them and that you're there for them, I think is probably the most critical thing. So you're all very empathetic and I think compassion in both the treatment of addiction and the treatment of pain are sort of important guideposts going forward. So again, for each of you, we're here at this moment. We're confronted with an epidemic. What would each of you like to start see happening? How do we start working our way out of this? You mean at a national or local level? Either one because I think it has to happen on both levels and sometimes I think it has to happen on the local level. What does a community like this need to do? Let's not wait for Washington to act. What do people on the local level do? So there are three areas that absolutely need help in this country. One is prevention and prevention has many, many, many faceted solutions. One is reducing unnecessary prescriptions. One is preventing children from initiating drugs because you can never predict no parent has a crystal ball that will predict whether or not that child is going to start with marijuana or alcohol and then progress straight mainline either to heroin or to prescription opioids or to cocaine. Prevention is critical. We also have to educate in our communities the most simple fundamental things. I've given last year I gave 70 presentations on the Opioid Commission. Many of them to audiences that were not in the field. And I would say here is a list of drugs. How many of you know these are opioids? And half the audience didn't know that every single drug I listed there were over 25 were opioids.  And someone should be telling you this. Somebody should also be telling the community that a pill that is not bought in a drug store could be a fake pill. There are pill presses being made in China. They are imported here. The logos for the pills are very well known and easy to reproduce and these pills have fentanyl. Somebody I know, Eric Bowling's son, got one on the campus of the University of Colorado because he was anxious and his friend said, here's a little tranquilizer that will help you sleep in your first week in college. It had fentanyl and he died within an hour. There are so many ways in which prevention is critical. I won't take up all the time, but I'll get to intervention and treatment later. Alright, so Eric, your turn. What would you like to see? I'm going to pick up where she left off is intervention and prevention. There are ways today to intervene. Describe what those terms mean. Intervention is whether you're a parent or in the community we have now, diversion programs, we have set up prevention programs to be in the schools, in the high schools, and we're trying to get down into the middle schools just to educate and to raise the level of awareness as to actually what we're dealing with and where we're going with this. Whether you become addicted to opiates and the end run are immediately, there's a lot of other things that happen to particularly children before that. My whole thing is addiction is whether it's opiates, whether it's marijuana or alcohol, you know, does it make your life unmanageable? Does it take away from you the opportunity to be all you can be? And that's where intervention has to come in. And you can do it on a family level and there's plenty of people out there that do it. We have, and our recovery coaches in the law office, they are interventionists too. And they'll educate, they'll sit with the parents before they'll intervene with the individual. And then they put a plan together to do that. And what should we do about the opioid crisis? Try to keep it simple. No, I can because I really do think there is a simple answer to that question. The solutions are complex. It's a difficult problem to tackle, but the big picture strategies for dealing with the opioid crisis I think are very straightforward. And you know, if you understand that the opioid crisis is an epidemic of opioid addiction, what we need to do about this epidemic of opioid addiction is similar to what we would need to do about any disease epidemic. Think even about an Ebola outbreak. What would you do about an Ebola outbreak? The strategies would be to contain it, meaning prevent new people from getting the Ebola infection. And to see that the people who have the Ebola infection, the people who have the Ebola infection are receiving life-saving treatment so it doesn't kill them. What we need to do about the opioid crisis is really the same. We have to prevent more Americans from becoming opioid addicted, really reduce the incidence of opioid addiction. But how do you do that? More than anything else, to prevent people from becoming opioid addicted, I agree with what's been said, but I think the single most important strategy for preventing opioid addiction is to promote much more cautious prescribing so that doctors don't directly cause addiction in our patients and so that we don't indirectly cause addiction to another area that I wanted to touch on with all of you. And that is the treatment of pain. Pain is a significant problem. There are people that suffer from severe long-lasting pain. Many of them say that they are, in some ways, the victim of the crackdown on painkiller prescribing. So how do we sort of balance those problems, address those problems? Well, I think the most important thing is to, as Andrew said, to prescribe very cautiously because, for example, in the past and still in the present, Governor Baker was with me and complaining to me a little while ago that somebody told him a dentist was still prescribing 60 or 90 percocets for a tooth extraction which takes one or two days for the pain to disappear. There is still too much prescribing of opioids and I think that that is a major problem. I think the, so we have to be very judicious on whether or not the pain merits the opioid because there are so many alternatives to opioids in terms of dealing with pain. For example, a study was just done showing that ibuprofen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are just as effective as opioids in relieving knee pain, lower back pain, joint pain. The most common causes of pain that, and until very recently, someone just wrote a script for opioids, it obviously was completely unnecessary. We have to find alternatives. There's research now at the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, that is trying to find alternatives to opioids, but we already have many alternatives to opioids for pain relief unless it's severe, intractable, end stage. There are many caveats to that. There's sometimes when only opioids will do. I agree and thank you for your efforts in trying to reduce the number of opiates in the marketplace and there are alternatives. I know there are alternatives. Personally, I cannot take opiates. Well, you're ruled out at this point. I mean, I just would never do it because I never would want to trigger my addiction. So I have to look for alternative pain medication and I do when it's available. My son had major surgery and he was recovered from opiates from oxycodone and he had blockers. But it was interesting to me because for him to get that prescription to Beth Israel Hospital, they didn't have it and they had a wait for permission to use it. I think there's a lot more stuff available that we're not really, that they're not using, that they could use. And Andrew, you were mentioning about older patients who have become dependent, addicted on opioids through long-term medical use. Is there a point or is there some argument to be made that if that person is doing okay, let's just let them and that drug is helping them with their pain, let's just leave it be or where does the intervention start when you're dealing with an older patient? Well, older patient or middle-aged people, the fact that they may be doing okay on opioids, there are many people who are put on opioids, they're taking them around the clock and they're not doing well. And there's really good reason to believe that opioids are not going to be effective for long-term use because of tolerance to the pain-relieving effect which would mean that in order to continue getting pain relief you need higher and higher doses. The fact that there are people who could be on opioids long-term and seem to do okay is not surprising because that's the basis for treating opioid addiction with opioids. There are people who can take opioids and do okay. That's very different from saying that they're continuing to get pain relief. There are many people on long-term around the clock opioids who are convinced they're getting pain relief. They will tell you that they're getting pain relief and they're not lying. But what they're probably experiencing when they take the opioid is the relief of the withdrawal pain or the relief of pain hypersensitivity because when opioids are wearing off or when you're going into withdrawal, everything hurts but especially if you have a reason, a chronic medical problem, that pain problem is going to be much worse. So these individuals take the opioid, that pain is relieved and they can be convinced that the opioid is helping them as far as how to handle this population. And you could take people with conditions like fibromyalgia or low back pain with a normal spine or chronic headache. Three of the most common reasons are people are on long-term opioids. The medical community is now recognizing that we shouldn't have put so many people on long-term opioids for these conditions. It's more likely to harm the patient than help them. That doesn't mean, though, that we should force these people off rapidly. Many of these people may not be able to come off of opioids. Some of them, if they're on dangerously high doses, I think even if it's a really dangerous dose, a doctor is not going to want to keep giving it to them. So I think some of these people we can maybe manage on the opioids that they're on. Some of them we can help come off. It's a lot of work. If you can get them completely off of their opioids, often they have a significant... I know you're aware of this because you wrote a book on the topic, they often have a significant improvement if you can get them completely off of their opioids. But many can't do that so we have to really work with them. And yes, some of them, even though I think they may be doing well, despite being on an opioid, not because of the opioid, I think some of them maybe we really should leave them on that opioid if it's a modest dose. When we talk about alternatives, and I'm going to veer off a little bit here, something we were talking about over dinner, medical marijuana has often been raised as an alternative pain treatment to opioids. It's also being raised as a drug that should be legalized. And there are some people that claim that if we legalize marijuana, we're going to reduce the opioid problem because people start smoking pot instead of taking opioids. But what do we know right now pros and cons about marijuana? Its benefits, its risks, or we are trying to solve one problem, are we about to open another Pandora's box? Well, the most recent data says that people, there's a few longitudinal studies. What that means is you follow people for one to four years rather than just interviewing them and saying, does marijuana help you? And they'll say, oh yes, I've stopped using opioids. A longitudinal study means you follow that same person over a number of years, and in these cases, there are a few very good studies that have been done that have shown that people do not reduce their opioids and their pain does not get better if they top off the tank with marijuana and they are more likely to develop a marijuana use disorder. They are more likely to have an opioid use disorder and they're less likely to stay in treatment for opioid use disorder. So, at this point, there's one study that came out a few years ago that said states where marijuana has been legalized as a so-called medicine, those states have lower overdoses, but that is a completely, from the point of view of statistics and scholarly look, that is just not the way you do it. You have to follow the individual, not the state level, and since that study came out, another one came out in probably the most prestigious science magazine saying that the states that have legal marijuana, the opioid overdoses in fact, have increased. So, at this point, one has to say that the evidence is not in favor of, and when you say medical marijuana, I don't know what that means. Is it 90%? Is it 10%? Is it THC? Is it Hindu Kush? Is it blue-purple smoke? You know what it means. No, there's no standard. This is not an approved drug. There are no randomized controlled trials. This, it does not come close to what FDA standards would require for putting the signature of a large body of professionals in endorsing. Rick, are you seeing sort of with the marijuana that's out here today is much more powerful than the marijuana I remember encountering? And what impact is that having? It's having a big impact. First of all, my question always is we have legalized tobacco, we have legalized gambling, we have legalized alcohol, we have legalized pornography. How's that working out for us? I mean, this is just another drug in the treasure chest of things to use, abuse, and become addicted to. My wife is 15 years in recovery from marijuana. And, you know, her stories are no different than the stories of my son who was addicted to oxycodone and people addicted to alcohol. Addiction takes away, it robs you of the opportunity to be who you can, to be a good son, a good brother, a good parent. And that's what it's really about. Whether you're addicted to marijuana or oxycodone, I mean, if it takes away from your life, this is something that needs to be prevented. And it's best prevented early on. I mean, that's what we're finding out.  Right. And Andrew, in your treatment, how is it playing out? Well, you know, it's interesting because both sides of the marijuana debate are trying to use the opioid crisis. So the pro-marijuana folks are saying that marijuana is the answer to the opioid crisis. And folks opposed to marijuana are saying that it would make the opioid crisis worse because the argument is that it would be a gateway drug and more people would wind up ultimately on heroin. My own view is that I don't believe it would make the opioid crisis better or worse. I see it as its own separate problem. I have serious concerns that with an industry promoting use because of a financial incentive through legalization, we would see, and I think there's evidence we're already seeing, a sharp increase in use. And marijuana is less addictive than opioids, but as more people use it... You're basically creating another drug industry. More people would get addicted to it. And although marijuana addiction doesn't kill people the way opioid addiction kills people, it can really mess people up. So I don't see it as helping or hurting the opioid crisis. I see it as its own separate problem. One thing I would say, though, is if I was treating a patient with severe chronic intractable pain who was really suffering and had tried everything, I would sooner consider marijuana for that patient than heroin. And when we prescribe opioids, we're basically trying heroin on that patient because the effects produced by oxycodone and hydrocodone are really indistinguishable from the effects produced by heroin. I was out in Ohio a couple of... maybe six months ago giving a talk at a university and for all of you who are not aware of this, Ohio really is the epicenter of the opioid crisis in our country. I believe one out of every six deaths nationwide takes place in Ohio. And they're just being brutalized by the... It's at the point where when people have overdoses, they can be rescued from that overdose with a drug called Narcan and the cops carry it, and EMTs carry it, and firefighters carry it. And they've gotten to the point where they don't even want to revive people anymore because they keep coming back and reviving the same person four times a week. And they were very interested in knowing what they could do in their community. Like basic grassroots efforts that people there and people here can take. I have some ideas, but I'm going to turn it over to you guys first to see what your ideas are. Well, the police station and Gloucester that is an open house for people who want to get treatment is, I think, one of the most interesting models for what people can do with the grassroots movement. There is a fellow at Boston University professor who is beginning to copy the model in about 300 places throughout the country where people go to police stations and say, I've got a problem with opioids and can you help me? And they immediately try to get them on to medications that is going to get them off the dangerous drugs of unknown quantities, whether or not they're laced with fentanyl, and also get them into treatment. I think that we have to do a lot more. We have to revolutionize our entire system of treatment for opioids. I think every single hospital in the nation should have an addiction center that deals with substance abuse, substance use disorders, and they should have specialists that include psychiatrists, addiction medicine, people who are behavioral health specialists, recovery coaches, and so on. There should be a safe place where people can go and begin to get help on demand. If you go to an emergency room, you'll be treated. If you have an addiction and you show up somewhere and say, I need help, there's not anywhere in the country where it's automatic that you will have help on the spot, except in a few places in Massachusetts and a few other states. And I think we have to revolutionize the entire system of addiction treatment using that kind of model, of an integrated model that every single community hospital, health centers has a place, a safe place for someone to go. What would you like to see happen here? In this town? Yeah, well, I don't differ with the doctor, but I'm an abstinent-based person in recovery. And I'm not alone. I mean, there's tons of people that I know I could fill Fenway Park up with the people, because we had no choice back then, too. There wasn't a lot of other pathways to recovery. And I really push that even if it is under medication-assisted treatment and people are on medication-assisted treatment because I really want them to have what I have. You know, I woke up and there was the gift, the greatest gift of all, which was life. And Andrew, what steps here in this town, Newtom or in Altam or in wherever, small community, what could people at this grassroots level be doing? Well, actually, there's a lot being done at the local level across the country. Many counties across the United States have a task force to address the opioid crisis with membership on that task force from the medical community, from law enforcement, from policymakers. And I'm seeing across the country places where I visited really good work being done. I think the bigger problem is that we haven't really seen the help needed from the federal government. And I don't think local communities can do this on their own. They need help from the federal government, the resources, maybe money from a settlement against Purdue Pharma and other drug companies could be used. But this is a very expensive problem to create the kind of system that Bertha was just describing. And I can tell you that under the Obama administration, there was almost total neglect of the opioid crisis until very late in President Obama's term. Under the Trump administration, there's been a lot more attention paid to the problem. But we still aren't seeing what I think we really need, which is a commitment to long-term funding and the resources we need to build out the treatment system that Bertha just described. Now, before I get to a final question, I'm going to ask me, Barry, what would you like to see? If it sounds like this, communities like this, I think that people, the type of people, people like you who have come here tonight can play a tremendous role in reshaping this crisis. And it can be very simple. It can be from the standpoint of going to your employer, or if you are an employer, making sure that the insurer, the person that's providing you or your employees with healthcare provides them the best possible pain treatment, provides them an array of pain treatment. And walking away from that insurer, part of this problem was caused by the insurance industry, by their realization that they could make the biggest profits by simply just approving the prescription pills, not approving any kinds of other treatments for patients. So that would be a major step that businesses and employers and just individual employees could make in trying to kind of turn this ship around so as we move into the future, we're doing it on the basis of better, more scientifically sound treatments than the types of treatments that got us here into the dilemma that we now face. So I've said my bit.  There's all this litigation going on. Purdue Pharma has already paid up or agreed to pay $270 million to Oklahoma. There may be billions that come out of these lawsuits. A certain chunk of it obviously is going to go into the pocket of lawyers, but presuming that there's something left over, how would you like to see that money spent? I'd like to see it spend three ways. Number one, as Dr. Kaladney said, we have to help the people who currently have a problem. And I'd like to see a much, much better, much better treatment center services than we have. We have 14,000 treatment centers in the country. About a third of them offer help with regard to medications for opioids. Very few of them offer psychiatric services. Very few of them offer anything close to what are called principles of evidence-based treatment. And I think either the federal government which subsidizes many of them just literally closes them down and starts all over again. The model that I really like which is completely integrated within a safe medical healthcare system. We've got to do that. We have to work on prevention. Prevention of young people. We have to work on prevention and supply. Those of you who are here who haven't really heard the word fentanyl, be aware that fentanyl is now the number one reason why people are dying in the country. And this fentanyl is not prescription opioids. We haven't even touched on this. The vast majority of fentanyl is being made in China. It is being shipped to Canada and to Mexico and from there or directly to the United States and that's what's killing most of the people in Massachusetts right now over 80%. When I served in office we had a fentanyl crisis in 2006 and we developed a rapid response team to figure out what was happening. What we found out was that there's one lab in Mexico, in Toluca, Mexico that was producing all the fentanyl and then when that lab was taken out the overdose deaths went to near zero due to fentanyl. We still have the prescription. So there were many many problems that we face but prevention, intervention, treatment, evidence based, rigorous decent quality treatment all of these are essential. Ditto. What Bertha is talking about is really a hope that we all have and I think with this type of advocacy too we will see the day when that happens but it also takes a community like us to be able to do that. When people are reintegrating themselves back into a community especially from addiction issues or abuse issues or something it really is on us to accept those people and to be able to work with them in jobs and housing and education. So we can do this as I say, addiction may not be a choice but recovery is in that we do recover better together as a community. I know that for a fact as I said here today but I really believe in the holistic approach and I believe we are going to see that in the future with this kind of push. Andrew you have a billion dollars excuse me how would you spend that money? I think that we need to tackle the opioid crisis by preventing opioid addiction and treating people who are already addicted. We've talked about the need for a new system we want to make sure that people who are opioid addicted more easily access the most effective treatment for their addiction more easily access treatment than heroin, fentanyl or prescription opioids. Someone who's opioid addicted when they wake up in the morning they're going to be feeling pretty sick and they know they're going to need to use and if they've got 10 bucks in their pocket and they know where they can buy a bag of dope that's what they're going to do and if finding a doctor or getting treatment for their addiction is expensive and difficult they're just going to keep using. But really the other thing I would do with this money is I think this money settlement money or judgment money if any of these cases go all the way in front of a jury I think that a significant portion of that money needs to be used to correct the record. So you know you mentioned insurance companies and I think they were part of the problem it was too easy to write an opioid prescription but really the reason we're in the midst of a severe epidemic of opioid addiction is because of massive over prescribing. As the prescribing went up millions of Americans became opioid addicted and the reason the prescribing took off is because the medical community was responding to a brilliant multifaceted campaign that minimized the risks of opioids especially the risk of addiction exaggerated the benefits of long term use and it wasn't just doctors hearing these messages from attractive sales reps working for Purdue Pharma if it was just the sales reps we would have been less gullible we were hearing these messages from pain specialists eminent in the field of pain medicine from professional societies So you're thinking about spending some money on an educational campaign or how would you address that? We've got to get to a medical community that has been very seriously misinformed and that continues to over prescribe we have to get them accurate information about the risks and benefits of these medications. So in the opioid commission there were 56 recommendations and because I wrote a significant piece of it I'm quite familiar with it 26 of them were to reverse engineer the mistakes of the past which includes pain as a fifth vital sign press gainy scores value based purchasing all of the things mental health parity medical education pain management education and so on. So many of what you've recommended were in that commission report This is an interesting question that let you all take a crack at because it's not opioid per se but it's about drug abuse it's about a story that I've read a couple of stories about which is there's a drug called gabapentin and a gabapentin I believe is an anti-seizure medication it's been approved for anti-seizure use but also was prescribed off label if I'm correct as a tranquilizer it's very good if you have fear of flying I can tell you that from personal experience but it's also become quite a big recreational drug on college campuses and so the question is how did gabapentin become such a widely prescribed drug of abuse or a drug that's being abused outside the medical setting and what can be done to address this the reason I think it's pretty clear why it was so prescribed Pfizer illegally marketed Neuront and Gabapentin and was even found guilty of criminal charges for the off label marketing of Neuront and paid an enormous settlement in the hundreds of millions of dollars for promoting an anti-convulsant drug that was really indicated for treating seizure disorder for promoting it for sleep anxiety and every possible condition and even though they paid that fine, I believe they probably still did better financially for having promoted the drug improperly and so the drug does have some abuse potential, significant abuse potential people who take it they feel a set of effect from it and so yes it is it does have street value and is particularly popular among people who might be struggling with opioid addiction because it may relieve some of the anxiety that you experience when you're before your next dose of an opioid. Okay you know one of the areas that I always struggled with when I was reporting about opioids is that there's very little scientific data in fact most people aren't familiar with it but the fact that when the drug OxyContin was approved by the FDA there were no long term studies about whether this drug was effective over the long term or what the consequences of using it over the long term might be and this is a problem that is not simply limited to OxyContin it affects a lot of a lot of opioid information so the question is what are the data gaps concerning epidemiology evidence based interventions that is how does one type of treatment say for back pain and opioid care to acupuncture or biofeedback or exercise how do we weigh these various competing treatments and what evidence is there to support those measurements first I'll begin with an indirect answer the indirect answer is that Governor Baker today sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration telling them that they have to relabel opioids in the packet insert to say that the evidence for long term use doesn't exist and these really have been approved only for short term use so kudos to our Governor for doing that absolutely the evidence is so thin on long term use and it remains that way and one of the worst things that we did I think with the Food and Drug Administration was for something as powerful as opioids which we've known about that they're addictive and they can kill you we've known about it for 200 years was not imposing side by side comparisons with alternatives before approval so we now are beginning to see side by side comparisons with alternatives there are some alternatives where the evidence is pretty good like physiotherapy exercise therapy non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen but there still has to be in terms of long term use we need much better data with regard to this class of drugs anyone else want to weigh in on that not me so you're asking about different treatments and I think the critical point is that when you're talking about a dangerous treatment you really want evidence that it's going to help people treatment decisions are based on weighing risk versus benefit and when it comes to opioids as Bertha just mentioned we're lacking evidence that this is helpful when taken long term but we have overwhelming evidence that it's dangerous and the higher the dose the more dangerous it is and if you think about any medical intervention whether it's a surgical intervention or medicine if you don't have good evidence that that treatment is going to help a patient but you have very good evidence that it's dangerous those are treatments we should prescribe rarely unfortunately opioids continue to be routinely prescribed for conditions where we're lacking that evidence of effectiveness so you know along with the opioid prescription opioid problem the rest of you have mentioned the other face of the opioid crisis which is the traffic and growing traffic in a legal way. There's a lot of things like opioids counterfeit opioids like fentanyl that are coming in from places like China and Mexico and they as we know unfortunately are now the biggest driver in the growing numbers of overdose deaths and so questioner wants to know what is the government doing to control how the Mexican lab in Toluca Mexico was taken out that was simple because that was there were some sources in California but the Mexican lab was the major source currently there are multiple sources from China that are coming in through multiple venues the U.S. Postal Service does not have a tracking system like FedEx does or UPS so the Postal Service has been commissioned to develop a tracking system so that packages that come from China have to have a point of origin there are many many pressure points today one of the ministers in China just agreed to schedule meaning put into a restrictive schedule all fentanyls many people are unaware that fentanyl can be made into a thousand different variants and the when fentanyl is scheduled you can make a car fentanyl or a furanel fentanyl, butyral fentanyl and so on so the Chinese today and I believe this is pressure from the U.S. government the State Department and from the White House itself to for the Chinese to put a restriction on every possible variant of fentanyl now that's a first step we've tried to extradite the five major chemical manufacturers in China the Chinese refuse to let them come to the U.S. to face trial but the fact that they have restricted fentanyl is a first step I wait with baited breath to see whether or not they're actually going to oppose the law on their own chemists and it's basically a law enforcement problem I mean it's not a problem I can be dealt with in the medical setting this is basically having you know, interdicting these drugs or these starting materials starting chemicals for the drugs in before they get yeah Charlie Baker under the new criminal justice law on bill I had strengthened the penalties on fentanyl and the distribution of fentanyl in one month I do court appointed work in one month I had two cases tolling eight kilos of fentanyl in the mass turnpike eight four and four wow and I stood at the cases for only eight because they were also illegal and they were going to probably be deported at some point but the number the amount of fentanyl that's still coming into this country has to be stopped it does make a difference as you were saying that you know every time I saw one of these guys and I have to represent him I'm a defense lawyer and I do it but also my advocacy is with the street addict and the person looking to connect to recovery and I'm looking at this and I'm saying you know this is going to kill so many people so one kilo will kill a half a million people so eight kilos do the math four million a month just in the one month that I was in that court so there are there are some people who believe and you know there are questions about an issue related to pain patients who are you know not being given alternative therapies it's not available to them either they live in places where it's not available not accessible or they can't find doctors who provide it there are people out there who feel that they've been abandoned much in the way that addicts feel they've been abandoned so how do we address those people you know there's a problem with the way you've just framed that question well I don't think it's a problem where I've framed it it's a problem the way you might want to answer it well I mean I've been treating opioid addiction for more than 15 years and I've never once met an addict I've met people who refer to themselves as addicts but I've never met an addict if by addict we're talking about people who are continuing to use and don't care who they hurt because they're having so much pleasure using opioids what I've treated are people suffering from opioid addiction some who became addicted because they it was pleasurable and that's how they got hooked some who became addicted through medical treatment and when we when you use the term addict to me it's not just stigmatizing because you're defining somebody with this disease like calling somebody with Schizophrenia Schizophrenic I think it is I don't like that either but with calling someone with addiction an addict in my opinion it's even worse because I think it's very misleading and so to ask your question about well there are the addicts who feel abandoned and the pain patients who feel abandoned is already accepting really what the sacros were trying to promote and their framework of the opioid crisis you know I think with all due respect that's ridiculous well let me finish my you know you agree with me I mean addiction and substance abuse and opiates is is not doesn't have a monopoly on addiction right you know people are addicted you know by nature through a obsessive compulsive behavior whatever it is and we don't know the answers to all of those and those are challenges and I understand the opiate crisis but I've never met an opiate addict that didn't use heroin Suboxon methadone Gabapentin these guys every day in the courthouse and it's an array of you didn't meet my patients I've always believed that people who have the disease of addiction and people who have pain need to be treated compassionately I've always approached that as a reporter I've always believed that as a person I believe there let me finish there should be a compassionate treatment for people who struggle with substance abuse and there should be compassionate treatment for people who have pain and the only question I'm asking is and you cannot choose to answer it if you want how do you deal with people who are not getting the pain treatment they need the problem with your question you're continuing to do this is you're acting as if it's not possible for someone to have both addiction and pain many of the people I'm not acting that way at all you're saying there are the addicts and the pain patients you're asking the question is if we have these distinct groups and we don't necessarily have distinct groups there are many people who have become opioid addicted some because they took it because they like the effect some because they were suffering from chronic pain and so of course of course people who are opioid dependent whether they wound up stuck on opioids because they did it because they like the effect or they wound up stuck on opioids because the doctor prescribed it to them we need to help that population we need to I'm not going to litigate this with you I'm going to ask Bertha to answer the question in any way she wants in terms of like how do you know you're I'm trying to pose a question one of the audience members is asking I think one of the most important things we have to remember is about 90 million people in the country currently are prescribed opioids and probably 10% of those have trouble in terms of compulsive use and so on and so forth so the vast majority of people who are prescribed opioids for acute pain post-surgical pain are not in trouble what we are worried about are the people who got the opioids either through legitimate prescriptions or through diversion taking the 50% of the people in the country who are misusing them take them free from friends and family or buy them it's that population that we have to worry about and my feeling is that that population is susceptible for a number of reasons that have to be dealt with they are susceptible because people who have opioid use disorder there's a much higher incidence of pain in them they have much higher incidence of anxiety much higher incidence of stress much higher incidence of psychiatric comorbidity so there is some people get addicted I think you're a poster child because the drug literally changed your brain but there are some people who have so many confounds and I think that those people have to be treated with much much more subtlety and much more integrated approaches to all the problems they have rather than just pain or illness that I think would be my answer good so I thought we'd end on a kumbaya moment we didn't but nonetheless thank you all very much for coming tonight I hope that it was time well spent and that you'll take something back and factor it into your lives going forward for our panelists I want to formally thank all of you for giving us education and giving us information and giving us stimulating questions and issues to think about but most of all we are at a Jewish community center and I'd like to end on my thoughts and Bertha you said this to Rick when we were having dinner you put your hand on his arm and said you give us hope and I think if there's a thought that I want to end on we have a country that we're connected to that's over there about 6,000 miles away it's called Israel and when Israel was deciding what they should choose for a national anthem they chose something called hattikva which means hope so after all we went through for 2,000 years let's always sing about hope for how many years or how many moments tonight how many tough questions in conversation we end on this notion of hope thank you for bringing us hope this evening and thank you all for being here