Welcome to The Metal Voice and a return to an iconic guitarist and fellow Canadian and Montrealer Frank Moreno.  Frank, welcome to the show. I'm trying. I'm trying. Frank, before we get into anything, how's the health? How are you doing these days? I'm hanging in, man. I'm hanging in. Just waiting for things to get better. We're kind of worried about you. I think a lot of people are worried about you, especially in the music community. There's a lot of love for music, there's a lot of love for you, and we're all praying for you and hoping for you that you got better. You know what? I'm really excited to see that you have been productive. These pedals are very exciting, Frank. How'd you hear about them? How I heard about them, I was on YouTube the other day. Okay, so you heard the interview. I did hear the interview, and I go, Frank's back. That's the first thing I thought. It was kind of like a relief that you're productive. A lot of people were scared, and they were scared for you. The only thing I had stopped was touring, really. I mean, it's hard to play sometimes, that's true, but I hadn't stopped that. I think it was sort of like you made a statement, and then when people make statements, their imagination goes wild, right? And I guess people think the worst, right? But I'm sure a lot of people, and me and Alan for sure, we're saying it's great to see that you're back, at least in some way or form, right? Well, I mean, yeah, back is a weird word. I wasn't really, I mean, I was gone from touring, and I'm still gone from touring, at this point. But I'm still thinking of music, and I'm still playing, you know, I'm still who I am. It's just that the illness makes it really hard for me to, particularly, to tour and to go do gigs. Now, if it subsides, and it has been subsiding slowly, then maybe we can think about doing something, you know? But in the meantime, I wanted to stay somehow connected, and I figured the best way was, I thought about my pedals, and I thought about over the years, so many people had asked me, how do you get that sound? And I would always tell them, well, I built my own stuff, and I designed my own stuff, and I started thinking, well, maybe I should take these designs and rebrand and rebuild them and let people, let people have a chance to use them. I remember our conversation that we had before COVID when we did an interview with you, and you're telling us about pedals, how you make pedals. You've always made pedals, and not only computers, but everything. And amplifiers. I put out an amplifier, too, and I put out my amp, too, if the laws weren't so stringent about it. There's very stringent laws about putting in an amplifier. You've got to pass all kinds of electrical, you know, by these electrical licenses and stuff like that, because you're using high voltage and stuff, you know, so I don't have the ability to do that at the moment. But I figured pedals, pedals really were the, you know, the sound in the 70s that I had was pedals, because in the 70s, I didn't use a Marshall, I used a transistor amplifier, which is a very clean amplifier, an acoustic 270. And I just used it to amplify what was my pedalboard. My pedalboard was basically making all my sound. So when people heard, you know, the live album or Johnny B. Good or whatever, they weren't hearing an amplifier, they were hearing my pedalboard. And then later on, I decided to design amplifiers that sounded like my pedalboard. And so now I can use a smaller pedalboard with the three or four or five main pedals that I use. And I figured I'd take three of those, which are distortion pedals. And there's three types of distortion. And I would put them out and see if people would like to use them. And the first one, well, not the first one, but one of them is basically a clean boost that drives the front end of your amplifier. It doesn't have its own distortion within it, but what it does to an amplifier is very interesting because it makes an amp sound really good. But Frank, let me ask you this. What would be an example of the first one? If there was a song in your catalog, that would be a good example of the first one. Well, I would use the first one driving the front of the amplifier.  King B, right, but not necessarily the solos, you know, like the rhythms, the tough rhythms of like Johnny B. Goode or King B, the other pedals are the pedals I would use for the solos. Turn them on for the solos. One of them has a full equalization base and treble. And nice gain, really beautiful gain. And it would be what you would call from a light aggressiveness to a mid to hard aggressiveness. That would be the thing I would use if I was soloing in, let's say. He's calling or. Something's coming our way or something like that, you know, yeah. And then the third one is a medium and heavy aggressive gain pedal, like it's and it's got two modes, softer mode and harder mode. And you would hear that when I'm doing electric reflections of war, when I'm doing bombs and I'm doing all of the really wild, really, the feedback and all that kind of stuff.  Oh, someone's calling. The doorbell. Who's doorbell is? What do you think of the idea? I think it's an excellent idea. Alan. I mean, you've been known for your sound when reading all the comments on the Internet that people just keep talking about your guitar playing, your guitar sound. So anytime you can share that, get it out the genie out of the bottle and then share it. I think it's a good thing for her for everybody. So I think it's a great way to preserve your legacy as well. You know, I think it's a brilliant idea. I think it's in your wheelhouse. This is what you do, at least from what you told us many, many times. And how are you manufacturing these? Well, I'm doing it all myself. So basically these are handcrafted, not manufactured like in it. I didn't team up with a company or anything like that. I have one helper, a kid named Ryan, who helps me. And basically I'm putting together everything myself. I'm going to sign them in here. Like I'll sign the inside of the title. They're very boutique. They're all handcrafted. The designs are all my own. I did the schematics. I did the board layout. I had the boards printed because I wanted I wanted boards. I didn't want all point to point wiring would have been a mess. So I have the boards printed. And basically I make the case and I have it painted beautifully. It really looks good. Like these look really, really, really professional. They look great. And they sound exactly right. You know, we did some. We did some A being, you know, where we could actually press a button and have me going through the new pedal and the pedals I'm making and the pedals that are on my pedal board right now, the ones that I built 40 years ago. And you couldn't tell the difference. Oh. There was no, it wasn't like, oh, well, this one's a bit fizzier. This one's not as strong. This one is a weird mid peak or something like that, which you'd expect with two different pedals. Like if you if you tried to be like that with two two different pedals, you'd notice instantly that they didn't sound the same. For instance, if you took a blues driver in a big month or something like that, you know, but these when a deed with their original counterparts were really, really identical to the point where I didn't know which one was on. So they're they're they're right up there. Are they going to be OK? Go ahead. I'm sorry. What's the go to market strategy, Frank? Is it's got a custom order? Or how are you going to? Yeah, yeah, make the order for sure, for sure. Because how many can I make in a day? Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm I'm literally sitting there doing this, you know, this is handcrafted and so it's not like somebody could say, oh, I want 10. Well, that's going to take me a few days to make those 10, you know, and put them together and make sure they work and, you know, all that stuff. And we've got really nice packaging for them and instructions. And they're very, very it's very pro like it's a very pro kind of setup. It's not doesn't look homemade or anything like that. But but it is. Well, if there's one thing that you're known for, it's a tone.  I think it's a wonderful idea. And you know what? It's probably. Did it keep you busy during covid? Well, the problem with with covid was I was going through my own problems, you know, like I I wasn't at all worried about covid. As a matter of fact, I'm not even I'm not even vaccinated. So, you know, in some ways, it turned out for the best because let's say I just said I was going to tour. They wouldn't have let me into the States. Yeah.  And then all of a sudden covid happened and I wouldn't have gotten into the States because of covid. Even if I was well, because I wasn't going to take the vaccine. Yeah. And I still haven't and I won't. You know, how do people order these? How do they get these? Well, there will be a page. It's not the page is not out yet. The thing that I'm waiting for is I'm waiting for I have to trademark. The names so I can't actually put them on the web until I've gotten my not I won't get the trademark, but I get I've got my application, you know. Yeah. And once I get that, as soon as I get that, then we'll make a beautiful web page and some YouTube videos of me demonstrating the pedals. And, you know, there'll be people will know at that point how to get them, but it'll be direct. It'll be direct to me. You know, people will be buying them directly from me. And like I said, I have one partner who's helping me. And I did have to to get some people that I know to put up some money to be able to do this. So so there are other people involved in terms of of, you know, the fact that they're going to make some some some money off of it. I'd like to sell them really, really inexpensively. But my partners my partners are saying that that's not something I should do. Handcrafted by Frank Marino. No, I think you should go the other way. I agree. That's exactly what everyone's saying. And I don't I don't really understand it. And I don't know what the numbers should be. And I've been asking a bunch of people about it.  I guess they'll tell me. But yeah, they're handcrafted by me. They are my designs. They are my sound and then they're signed. Now, you know, when someone suggested that I sign them, I didn't know what they meant. Like, do I sign them on the outside? That'll make you look bad to be a signature on the pedal. Like that would be like. So they said, no, no, you signed them on the inside. Like on the inside of the cover or something like that. OK. So is that is that how that's done? You tell me, guys. You know, more than I. This is not something I do. I'm a guitarist. You don't get asked very often for our signatures, Frank. So we you're asking the wrong thing, guys. Frank, how about this? I think there'll be guitar players who will be interested in the pedal because it's a pedal and it's by you. And then there'll be collectors who just want to buy the pedal because it's handcrafted and it's signed by you. That's my opinion. And if the price point is right and I'm not saying it's got to be cheap, I'm just saying if it's a right price point where it's affordable, then people will. Yeah. That's my opinion.  Well, one interesting thing I noticed just the other day was I took the small one there, the clear boost, the clean boost and I tried it on a base. And I was astounded at how good it made the base sound like it really, really had a full, full range, deep, deep frequency response. So I'm wondering if bass players would be very interested in this pedal, too. It's not the fuzzy distorted pedal. It's the clean boost one, you know? And and I was wondering, I was thinking, wow, this really, this bass all of a sudden sounds like really, really, really good, you know, with this thing. So maybe bass players would be interested in the in the first one as well. There. You've already got a marketing strategy. Why limit yourself to guitar players? I'm happy we had this brainstorming meeting here today.  And now to be building pedals, I've only ever built them for me. Yeah. And many guys have come up to me over the years and asked me what I thought of their pedals. So, for instance, I did I did a favor for Tigtronics because, you know, I had I had spoken to them about one of their pedals and they made some changes based on what I had said. And so I helped out by demonstrating some of their stuff, you know, and I did that for a couple of other things. But then there have been other guys that have come to me and said, listen, we want to make a pedal with a signature, I guess they call it a signature pedal with your name on it or your signature on it. And here's the pedal we make and we'll put your signature on it. And I said, no, because the pedal they made just didn't sound good. To me, you know, it's not the one I made. So I never really considered putting my signature on. Pedals or guitars or amplifiers. If I didn't actually approve the way they found it, you know, even even though they offered me, you know, good money to do it. And apparently this is what they do with a lot of guys. They just offer them really good money and they put their name on it and the guys get a little help here or something. But I'm really very, very interested with the sound being accurate. Yeah. And you should say to somebody, listen, I'm playing. He's calling and if you use this, you're going to sound like he's calling. I want it to be true. You know, what seems to work well with pedals is limited edition.  Well, they are pretty limited to production. Yeah, I'm not going to be. I can't see me doing this. A lot. How much I don't know, but right off the bat, it's going to be limited to those who who order it. And you know what? I don't know when that stops. It's not like I can say there's going to be 20 or 30 or 50 or a hundred. I can't. I don't know the price just went up, Frank. The price just went up. Yeah, I know, but it's going to really depend on like once it starts. Let's say perfect, just run a perfect example. I started, I put out the page. I get an order and somebody wants all three pedals. All right. Now I've got to build those three pedals, so I've got to get the parts, build the pedals, test the pedals, make the pedals, you know, do all that stuff. At that point, I've delivered it to that particular person. Now, how long did that take me? Did it take me a week? Did it take me two weeks? You know what I mean? Did it take me a couple of days? I don't know yet. I'll know when I do it. And that's what's going to ultimately be the factor which says these are limited or not limited because I don't. I'm not trying to start a pedal company where I have an open ended. Hey, you can always buy these from now until forever. I'm sure at some point. I won't want to be doing this all the time. You know, maybe I'll want to be playing gigs. So in that sense, they'll be limited, but I don't know what the number is supposed to be. Well, I mean, does it take you more than two days to to put it together? Let's say somebody wanted three pedals. No, no. Well, it's it's it's hard to say. One pedal. They're not simple inside. They're not. There's quite a few connections to make. It's not just a couple of transistors or something, you know, like there's a lot of a lot of connections to make. There's, you know, over 30 resistors, 20 capacitors for switches, all kinds of JST connectors. You know, there's there's all these the jacks, the light. So this is not something I'm going to build in an hour. But but. You know, it might take a day. Might take might take I might I might be good at it enough that I could do two in a day or three in a day. You know, but then again, Ryan is helping me. So without Ryan, I'd really be screwed.  Well, you've got to put the price of how long it took you to, you know, make them. And that's just basically what the cost is going to be. And that's that, right? Yeah, like right now at the moment, I'm not even thinking about about price or anything like that, because it's all been cost. Basically, I had to borrow a lot of money to get the parts, get the cases, get the paint done, you know, get all that stuff done, the machine work. I'm right now, it's more a cost thing than a profit thing. But at some point, we're going to decide, OK, here's what the price is going to be. And hopefully people will buy them and will pay off the costs, you know, I'm, I'm this, I'm the. In the whole team, I'm the esoteric guy. I'm the spiritual guy, you know, I'm the one that's talking about the sound and the tone and the blooming, whether it blooms under your fingers or not, you know, pedals have to make it easier for you to play. You can't have, you don't have to, you don't want to have to fight with them. Yeah. They almost like turn you into a better player if they're well made. And you found the secret formula because I can't get my head around the fact that you're building a brand new pedal that sounds like your original pedal from 40 years ago. That's amazing. Well, they are, they are direct copies of what I built. They are going to sound the same, you know, like there's a few different parts because some transistors aren't made anymore. So I have to use substitutions, you know, but I went through a lot of different substitutions to get the closest thing possible so that it wouldn't wouldn't be noticeable. And so that's why we did the A B test, you know, had I had every single part exactly the same as 40 years ago, I wouldn't have even had to do a B test because I would have known what they were. But doing the A B test tells me that, yeah, these, you know, these really sound like they're supposed to sound and they really do what they're supposed to do. And quite honestly, I could go out and gig with these pedals now and not have to have my pedal board. Yeah. When do you call me over to his house or for a jam session, I just put these three pedals under my arm and go now granted when I play, I also use other pedals like echo, delay, reverb, sometimes chorus, those I those I would have to bring also. But I'm thinking of building a fourth pedal, which is this special compressor that I had built for myself a long, long time ago, because I figured some guitar players would like to have this compression. So we'll see. I don't know about that yet. I want to see how this goes first. And if it goes really well, then maybe I'll go to a compressor, you know, go to a compressor or even a flanger or some phaser or something.  How's that? So people get a feel of what each pedal represents. Does that work for you? Well, yeah, I can know, but I can I can do it the other way around, like, like I can tell you that because the pedals right now have names. I'm just not allowed to say the names until I have the trademark, right? So we'll call it one, two, and three, all right. But they have names and they have and the names that I use are the names of my songs. Oh, okay. So I can tell you that, for instance, I have a song called Ain't Dead Yet that a lot of people like. They listen to it a lot. It's from the power of rock and roll. That would be pedal number two. From the solos? And I have I have a song called Most of Them Would Be Pedal Number Two. Well, let's put it this way. Do you know the difference between doing quote the end of night guitar solo and the guitar solo within a song? So that's pedal two and three. Like the end of night guitar solo is pedal three. It's the one where you really turn on the overdrive and you go crazy and it's amazing sustain and you can make it sound like a bagpipe or wild horses or whatever. And but most of the night you're not using that kind of wild wild overdrive. You're using a kind of an overdrive that's sort of mid-range-ish, you know, halfway there. And that's the kind of pedal that would be number two. So for any songs like that. And the number one pedal, the clear pedal, that would be, for instance, if I'm doing my version of Red House or I'm doing the we have an unreleased blues that we just put out. That was done the night of the DVD but was not released with the DVD. It's called Unreleased Blues on YouTube. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Nope, not yet. We'll check it out. Yeah, but that would be pedal one. I'm still trying to get through the... Look up Unreleased Blues from Frank's DVD on YouTube and you'll hear it. It's basically similar to my version of Red House on the DVD but much shorter. Hey Frank, I think once you said, you told us that, and I find this fascinating and correct me if I'm wrong, every solo that you ever played or maybe not all your solos but many of your solos, you came up with them in the studio. Like there was no planning. Oh yeah, all of them. There was no like map of what you're going to do but prior... Never, never, never, never. Not even once. Well, was that because you wrote the songs in the studio and you just kind of like were like sort of riffing off of each other in a sense and you were inspired or... Well, it's very much like when I play live. Like I don't really play the same exact thing every night but it's a similar thing because the song has already been created. So you want to have somewhat the same, right? But when you're first inventing, basically you just listen and it's like singing along with it. If you sang along the solo every night, would you sing along the same solo? Yeah, well, it'd be very a little bit. Yeah, I got it.  So let's say there was a new song that you guys went into the studio and you recorded and you played the rhythm track and it's going, you know, it's doing that and then you're supposed to solo over it, right?  You'd make stuff up as you go, right? Yeah. And it would probably fit. That's what I do. That's pretty amazing. Invented as I go. As a matter of fact, all of the songs are written that night. You mean like when you go in the studio? Yeah, yeah, we didn't ever go into, only there's been three songs, three, I believe, in my whole career that were being played before I went into the studio. Wow. And that was really early on, like way early in the Maxim days. And so were you able to get, was there a lot of hemming and hawing? What did we do guys in the studio or you guys went in and you just, you were able just to blast them out? No, I would just go in and say, here guys, here's the tune. Invented on the floor. Wow. And they play along with it. And then sometimes I'd say, okay, no, no, no, no, play this instead or play that. You know, everybody's been through that, right? And so they play what I say or roughly what I say, but in their own interpretation. And that would be the song. So like a song like Stories of a Hero, there's no mapping that's just strictly feel right in on the spot. Boom. That's the song. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, interesting song because that one had a change in the middle that went, you know, from D minor to D major all of a sudden. And that was totally spontaneous. You know, when it says, and the stories tell of bravery, it's a different kind of feel at that point. But you also must understand that under none of the circumstances of any of the songs did I write the lyrics first. I wrote the lyrics after everything was always done as an instrumental. Okay. That's right. How long did it take you to write the lyrics? Did you write them? Or was it was it like a lot longer than it took me to write the song? Sometimes it would take me all day because I wanted to write lyrics that fit the music and that said something that was interesting to say at the same time. I wasn't really good at it. I thought you're great. What about your singing? I don't know if you were early on. I thought early on I thought I couldn't sing at all. So I talked my way through a lot of the songs and then later on I started to notice that if I tried singing, I actually could hit the pitches. So I got better as a singer as I got older and because I got more confident and just singing in my own voice. So by the time I get to the last show I did, DVD, I'm probably singing better than ever before. No. I mean, I'm glad we're able to speak to you and delve a little bit further into this somewhat new career path. And I anxious to see when you've got the trademark and then the publicity when you're ready to launch it. So who knows how long it'll last. It might only last a week. We're only going to find out like when I do it, right? Do you foresee like I guess it'll probably take like a year at least, I would think. Take what? A week. A year, a year. Sorry, sorry, a year or two. A year to get it done. No, no. These are going to be out probably within the next two to three weeks. Oh, there you go. Oh, so you're finalizing the trademark then. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you just submitted it. Okay. No, no, no. It won't be, the way it works is as long as you've submitted that's your sort of your okay start, you know. It's pending, yeah, yeah. We could conceivably have these things ready to go. Well, we could conceivably have them ready to go in like the next week. We've got the boxes made and the covers and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I'm scared to name some songs because it might be one of the titles because it might be one of the titles. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, you're right. I might blow it all for you. I don't want to do that. I'll say had enough. Had enough pedal. I don't think that's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, had enough would be pedal too. There you go. Well, I wouldn't like ditch queen as a pedal, but I'm not saying nothing more than that. That would also be pedal too. Okay, all right.  Well, just remember that the pedal is part of the tone. You do have to have an amplifier. Yes. You're not going to plug the pedal directly into your computer or something like that, you know, according to a mixer. You've got to have an amplifier that you're driving the pedal with. So, the tone is, the tone you get is part of the part of the package, but the amplifier won't matter as much as you think it will. Like, as long as it's a decent amplifier, you know, it's going to, it's going to get you where you're trying to go. I learned something new today. You know, on another note, like me and Alan, we talk to a guitarist, artist, musicians all the time, and it always comes back to you no matter who we're talking to, like we could talk to Chris Holmes from WASP. We could talk to, I don't know, Lips from Anvil.  So many guys cite you as their influence and they're all from different, even Gus G, like, you know, he used to listen from Greece. There's so many guys from all around the world who cite you as as a huge influence on their sound or one of their influences we could also say, right? I mean, yeah, how does that sit with you? Like, do you think about that? I'm flattered by it, but it has more to do with time than anything else because when I came out, you know, I was a young person in the industry and everyone else was older than me. When I made my first album, I was 16. I was touring by the time I was 17.  So, you know, Strange Universe, Child of the Novelty, Maximum. My fourth album, I was only 20 years old, so I started doing all that touring in the big buildings. So a lot of the guys that saw me then, I was doing the shred kind of, I was probably one of the original guitar players, if you think back to that time, late 60s, early 70s, there weren't too many guys doing the shred thing, you know, like playing at high speeds and very violently. And so I was one of the original guys that did that because my confrears at the time didn't do that, you know, the Eric Clapton's and the other guys like that, they were more slow players, you know? I think that's what caused the influences you're talking about was the fact that I went out there a little further. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Alan, do you have anything else? No, no, no. I mean, I'm in sales, Frank, and all I hear is cash registers going off with your project. I mean, I wouldn't... I know you've always looked out for the fans and like you said, you're more of an artist and you're leaving the business side to other partners, but I think this is just a winning combination for you and your partner. Well, I hope it works. Yeah. You know, I hope it works. I hope that... I hope people like it, you know? Like that's really my biggest hope, hope they like it, whoever buys it. Well, I think first of all, they'll be excited that you're back on the radar. I think that's number one. And then now you have this other project, they'll be very excited and hopefully, hopefully, you know, you can tour, you know? If my health gets better and the government stops its stupidity of saying you can't come in without being poked, then who knows where it goes, right? Yeah. Well, I think they're supposed to remove all restrictions by May. I don't know if that's going to happen or not, but that's what they're saying. Well, they just stopped that tennis player, Jakovic, for the U.S. Open, he wasn't allowed in and he's like a 22-time Grand Slam champion. Wow. He stopped him, but I don't know when the U.S. Open is, if it's before May. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is. What are we going to do? What are we going to do?  No, no. I just I'm just glad to know that you guys are interested and like I said, if you check out the Unreleased Blues song, you'll hear pretty much what the number one pedal does. Sure. Great. All right. On that note, oh, there was one more question I want to ask you. Oh, that's what it was. You know, you read on the internet these bizarre sort of things like you were the incarnation of Jimi Hendrix and yeah, sure. Jimi Hendrix was, you know, you know, what someone who you appreciated his work, but what do you say to that? I say that the people that invented that don't know history because hold on, I'm just swallowing something. While it was true that I went to a hospital and it was true that I learned how to play guitar in the hospital and it was true that it all happened very, very quickly and it was true that the style I played was highly reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix, psychedelic basically. What wasn't true was what the newspapers made up in the media talking about spirits and reincarnations and the very reason that could never have been true was because I went to that hospital in July of 1968, actually August of 1968. Jimi Hendrix didn't die until September of 70. So there was no way to come out of the hospital within a few months and have some kind of reincarnation of a guy who wasn't dead. It's been clarified. It's been clarified. Well, I mean, I've always found it ridiculous to tell you the truth because the guy who wrote that, the first guy that wrote that, that got picked up on the wire and everyone started talking about it, made a huge thing out of it, they should be so ashamed of themselves. He made it sound like you said that, right? He made it sound like you. Well, they made it sound like it and that's why I started doing songs that were very tongue-in-cheek. I started basically rousing them. You know, I did a song called Making My Wave where I'm very tongue-in-cheek saying, oh yeah, yeah, I've come back from my grave. Oh yeah, wow, you know. It's like, I remember when I did All Along the Watch Tower, I did that specifically because I knew that I'd get a hail of people and then press screaming at me over Hendricks again and I could then say, well, it was a Bob Dylan tune. You know, I was always a little pugnacious like that. If people said things, I would push back a little, you know, but all in good fun, you know. But the guys that write the stories like that and reincarnation, then it turned into a car accident and I died and was resuscitated and saw the spirits. And, you know, one thing led to another. How could they not put together the years? The years, 68. Even the ones that said that that happened to me knew that I was in the hospital in 68. It was in their article. Would you call Hendricks more of a spiritual godfather? Well, Hendricks was just, Hendricks to me was the, the watershed like he was like the generational talent that comes along and changes everything and influences everybody in from a guitar perspective and not only from a guitar perspective but from a psychedelic sound perspective. The Richie Havens once told me who was, he was a big friend of Hendricks and he once told me Hendricks didn't play the guitar. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, he played the amplifier and it made perfect sense to me when Richie said that because that's true. Hendricks played sound. You know, people that do their Hendricks impression immediately go off at lightning speed and hit the highest notes they can, right? But if you listen to any Hendricks record, I don't think he ever played anything faster than an eighth or a sixteenth note. It's true. It was always very slow. But he had that sound and he had that ability to put the right note in at the right time. It's amazing notes out at the right time, you know.  It's just incredible. Did you influence him? Did he influence you? Or you just didn't even know about each other back then? No, I did a tour with Uli in the early 2000s. But I'm saying before in the 70s. I never knew about him before that. Oh, okay. I know he was into Hendricks. Yeah. But I never knew about him before that. You have to understand that I tried to stay away from the Hendricks thing at some point because it was just killing me, you know, like the press was killing me. The press hated me. And now, if I ever read that stuff again, I know the guy must be at least 75 or 80 years old, the guy that's saying it. He's got to be from that time. Because lately I don't get that from new writers. Have you been writing any new music? I'm always writing music. Well, how about this? To release? They're not always the same kind of music. Not always the same kind. I've written over 80 pop tunes. Pop tunes, real pop, with the Beatles. But they're not going to show up on Margeny Rush albums. That's for sure. Any chance of any releasing them in near future? You know, I wouldn't release them as me doing them. I'd probably give them to bands that would do them justice because they're, you know, they're pop. I don't really do pop. I mean, I do, but I don't do it publicly. But I've written jazz tunes. And I fooled around with the starting of Blues Album that I never finished. It's been half finished for 10 years. And it's a totally different kind of Blues Album. It's not a Texas guitar Blues Album at all. It's more like a New Orleans Blues Album with piano and B3 and horns. Hey, it worked for Rick Emmett, Frank.  It could work for you. Yeah. And just that I don't do these things in order to put them out because how do you put these things out anymore? Nobody, who's buying albums? No, that's it. That's a whole other discussion. Yeah. Yeah. An album now is like your calling card. It's like your credit card, like your business card.  But to try to say that you're going to make money off albums, who can do that? Yeah. Nobody. Yeah. I mean, unless your tail is swift, you're not making any money off that. That's for sure. You know what? On that note, I think the pedal is the way to go. That's the new album. Pish. Yeah. That's a new idea for an album, right? You sell your merch and it's something that people can use and something people can get inspired by. And it's or it could be a nice cool souvenir, right? And if I do another record, I might go with vinyl. Yes. They've outsold CDs, apparently. Yeah. In the last quarter. So why not? And just make vinyl. Don't make any other digital copies of it. Who knows, right? Yeah. The easy, the easy thing about vinyl making vinyl records, you know what it is? They're really short. Yes. Well, that's what that's what made albums so great was the length because, you know, once you start adding, you know, 17 tracks on an album, you know, you start, you know, it just loses the dynamic. I think it's going to be some filler. 10 to 8 songs is a perfect album. The greatest albums were 10 songs. Those were the greatest albums to make them. They're short, you know. Absolutely. And you give it all you got to on every song. Yeah. Frank, on that note, I think they're charging way too much for vinyl now. Absolutely. Like 45 bucks, 50 bucks. It's insane. But I mean, people are buying it. People are buying it. Look, you know, you could have a pedals on one floor and you can have vinyl on the other floor. And, you know, you'll probably make more money doing it that way than going on a record company. Yeah. Well, look, I'm never going to get rich off of pedals. That's for sure.  Yeah. And that's I'm sure there's a lot of work to it too. You know, you send out 10. They could be cheap to build. No, you can build them really cheap. You can build them under $100, you know, like if you use cheap parts and you don't care how they sound and look. But if you're thinking the way I'm thinking, where they've got to sound great, they've got to have good parts that last. They got to have a good sound. They got to look good. They got to weather the storm well. That's not something you're going to build with cheap parts. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we wish you much success with this, Frank. And we're anxious to see the packaging. And like you said, it could be as little as a couple of weeks from now. So we're definitely going to keep tuned and anxious to see it. Yeah. Stay in touch. You'll be hearing about it. Great. Send me the link to your web page when it's up and we'll post. And, you know, we'll share links and all that cool stuff. And we'll have you back on again to talk more about the pedals. And if there's changes or any updates, you're always welcome. That'll be great, man. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time, Frank. Thanks, Frank.


The proposed optimized model for the trajectory tracking control of a wheeled inverted pendulum robot, WIPR, system uses a kinematic controller to track a reference trajectory, a non-linear disturbance observer, NDO, to enhance the system's robustness to external disturbances, and an improved hierarchical sliding mode controller to control the forward rotation subsystem and tilt angle velocity subsystem separately. Simulation experiments show that the proposed method outperforms a common sliding mode control approach in terms of tracking accuracy. This article was authored by Ming Ho, Xue Dong Zhang, Du Chen, and others.


Hey what's up you guys if you're new here, hi hello I'm Lydia, welcome back to my channel or welcome to my channel if you are new. Today I wanted to talk about how I overcame slattery coverage from Amiv's breakdown. What I lot of you don't know is when me and Becca broke up, it pushed me very down and when I moved to Brighton I couldn't cope. I had a breakdown in which I tried to kill myself and I was admitted on the section to mental health for a year. How why it's important to talk about this is so many people go through a breakdown and they don't know how to cope with it. The way I recovered was through a lot of self-help, but medication changes and overall just becoming more myself. It got to a point when I couldn't walk. The important thing here is you're not alone if you're going through a breakdown or if you think you've got a breakdown coming up. There are things you can do to help yourself. Let's see if I cry at first, let medication be sorted, let's therapy, try not to isolate yourself. What a breakdown felt like to me was everything I'd worked hard to build up just getting pushed down. It took me a year to fully recover and I'm still not 100% there. You have to give yourself time to recover. Also I'm filming this on my new camera so I hope the quality is better. The important thing to me when I went through a breakdown was having friends and family to support you. For me it just felt like the world was ending. I didn't think I was going to come out with a breakdown and I nearly didn't because I didn't understand why I couldn't think. But what pushed me into the breakdown was the break up between me and Beckett. Using someone important in your life is a damn hard thing to deal with. If you are experiencing symptoms like worsening speech, head blur, dissociation, go and speak to your doctor and say, I think I'm having a breakdown. That's all I've got for this video. If you are new, make sure you hit the subscribe button, join the Broadway family. Turn notifications on so you never miss a video and I will see you guys in my next video. Peace.


Hi, everyone, Joe for Jasper's CaseBreaks.com. Coming at you with 2022 Capstone Baseball single-pack break number 36. Few different dice rolls happening here. First of all, we're giving away five extra capstone spots. So we only sold 25 spots outright. Second dice roll would be the break itself, and the third and final dice roll would be the nine finest team giveaway that unlocks picker team 11 coming up in the next video. So a big thanks to this group right here. Summer League is more trash than the wall. I went to Summer League last Friday, Chad. I guess maybe watching that in person is maybe better than on TV. All right, so let's do this dice roll first. So it's going to be the top five after 10, four to six, 10 times. One, two. So after 10 times, we've got Martin Shea, Daniel Daniel Evan, extra spots going your way after 10. A little buy one, get one scenario for you. That's nice. I'll try not to make you two to... I got to saw Wimbanyama. I saw Scoot Henderson. I saw Ran and Miller. I saw the top picks. Pretty enjoyable. All right, so let's... What's going on here? All right, so let's gather all these names here, and then now let's do the break itself. Let's roll it and randomize it. Four to six, 10 times. Maybe you need to improve your walls, Chad. Maybe make your walls a little more exciting. One, maybe a fresh coat of paint. Maybe a nice... Some wall art, you know? Maybe you can even go nuts, put down some painter's tape, get some stripes going. Get some stripes going, that'd look nice.  We'll get some good Cougar colors there. Your favorites. I got marked down to Shea after 10, and then 10 times for the teams. Two half-naked women posters. Rex is still 16. Chad is a grown man, he's an adult. All right, there's the first half of the list right there. No trade windows in these filler packs, and there's the second half of the list right there. Rex is still living in a Van Halen music video or something like that. Also, there's the internet, you don't need posters. It's also on brand for Rex. Oh, no paper. Too many breaks. Oh, no paper here. What? Oh man, we gotta pause the video for a little bit. When we come back, we're gonna have some more paper to put into the printer, BRB. Welcome back, folks. We got a ream of paper. This is copy and print paper. How many pounds is it? It's only 25 pounds. What kind of paper do you use at the office, Chad? What kind of, are you using 20 pounds? No, there's nothing like a, there's nothing like the feel of like a 60-pound paper stock. Paperless. You know what? Big paper does not like that. You don't care about the paper industry, Chad? Nothing too crazy. Is that karma? It would be karma if, like I stubbed my toe or something like that, which I did not. John used government, 400 bucks a box. What's the stock on it? We're using 20 pound. I mean, if you're using a nice, I feel like the government should use like a nice like 60-pound stock, 65-pound stock right there. That would make tight written documents just feel that much more official. All right, let's get a third and final dice roll going right here. And let's roll it and randomize it five into three, eight times. So it will be the top nine after eight with teams in finest. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. Three stock, like a three ply. All right, so once again, top nine. So from 10 on down, sad times, but I appreciate everyone in 10 through 30 getting in. Top nine, happy times, you're in the next break. Shay, you're in, nothing to worry about. Martin, you're in. So it's Mark, Shay again, and again, Martin again, Evan, Daniel, and Daniel. Congrats to the top nine. After eight, you're in the finest break. Let's match you up with the teams here. So then we'll put cap 36 next to your name. So Daniel with the white socks and the Phillies. Evan with the Padres. Martin with the Blue Jays. Shay with the Cubs and the A's. Mark with the Astros. Martin with the Nationals and Shay with the Twins. There you go gang, I'm Joe for jaskiescasebreaks.com and I'll see you next time for the next break, the finest break, bye-bye.


You guys know I'm a big old fan of the Wisecam. In fact I've sprinkled them all over my house and there's a gentleman at Wise who actually has a post-it note on his computer because of one question I keep nagging him about and I managed to find him here at CES. His name is Matt Stoneking. How you doing today Matt? I'm great. Yeah he says yeah you're famous with us. Well I like to bother people but that's fun. So I'm addicted to Wisecams. As many people are I think once you get one you seem to need more of them. It's an addiction. So I own this Wisecam. I own the Wisecam Pan. I got the Wisecam Black that was in special production for a little while. That was very exciting. But now you guys have something new called Max Drive. What is this? For starters no relation to my name. Oh okay. But this is going to... You're kind of narcissistic are you? You named it after yourself? Well you know they asked me what I wanted to call it. But this is going to be act as a cloud storage device to back up the Wisecameras to get your SD card footage backed up so that you can keep more of it for longer. Okay so you would still use the SD cards in the in the Wisecams to do the local storage? You'll be able to do both. So you can have the SD card and back up the short term stuff and then treat this as a more concealed extra backup to have more storage and that way if something happens to the camera you also still have a copy of the data. Okay that'll be even more important as we finally talk you guys into an outdoor cam. I understand that's the number one most requested item. Yes and it is coming. I've definitely seen work on it. Yes. Oh fantastic. Fantastic people. Our CEO put out an email at the beginning of the year saying that it should be out by the end of the year. I gotta tell you I love your CEO's emails. Yes. When the Wisecam 2 was was like a smidge late chipping we got all of these little updates saying okay well take a look at the sensor this is what we weren't real happy with and it was all nerdy and everything. I love those emails those things are great. Yeah he definitely believes in transparency so communicating with you guys because everybody likes to know what's going on. Yeah right you got information you don't worry. Yeah. Okay so tell me about what makes this cool. Well for starters you can use between one terabyte to a 12 terabyte drive to back up as much footage as you want from as many cameras as you want so I've tested up to 10 stably on my network without any issue but I'll be doing more stress testing before we get to launch to yeah to try and give a more solid number on that. So for the people just listening not being able to see this basically it's a it's a round box that's got a essentially looks like a drive toaster it's got a little slot in here you can put in a full-size drive or an sd I'm sorry an ssd. Yes. So what's the connectivity what do you how do you hook this on? It'll connect through ethernet so you'll have to hard line it directly to the router but then from there the cameras just have to be on the same network and it can back up wirelessly to them. So is there software running on the max drive that goes out and is sucking it down constantly? Yes exactly and it will be through your network so it won't consume data so it wouldn't be like sending it to a cloud service where you're going to keep piling up more and more data as you go on or have more cameras. So as somebody breaks into my house and they spend 20 minutes snatching all of the wisecams I've sprinkled all over the house they run out of the house with it my jewels I've got that backed up anyway. Exactly. Okay all right so what is the what is the ship date you're looking for on this? We're hoping for in Q1 or Q2 but we still have some development decisions we need to make on it we're still doing some software decisions as well in terms of how they'll interact so I don't have a solid launch date yet. But first half of the year looking good. What operating system is that running? This is actually running Linux. Okay good good good and then all the all the on Wi-Fi do you guys have a price point for that? Right now we don't have a solid price point but it'll be under a hundred dollars. Oh my gosh seriously well that is what's gotten you guys into everybody's home you start at 20 bucks and you're like well I must need more I'm pretty soon I've spent 300 dollars with you guys not not that many but I bought a lot of them. Yeah definitely and going back to our CEO again UN definitely likes to like our whole company motto is to give technology at the lowest price because we don't need to make a ton of money off of the product we just want people to have it and enjoy it. Okay that sounds like a great business plan to me because I am loving Wyscam that's W-Y-Z-E dot com right? Yep exactly. All right go out buy a bunch of them I'll give you my Amazon affiliate link for them. Awesome.


Safe pathways for regular migration play a vital role in preventing and addressing risks and vulnerabilities in migration. Across the globe, people migrate for myriad reasons. Climate change, family separation, and a lack of access to human rights are some of the reasons compelling people to migrate. Meet Nina, an eight-year-old left behind while her parents migrated to provide for her. Her elderly grandparents can no longer care for her. Unable to get a visa, she embarks on a perilous journey to reunite with her family. After a hurricane destroyed Rolando's farm, he took a risky journey to find a stable job in a different country. Tragically, he is abducted and tortured during his journey, traumatized. He needs psychosocial treatment but is turned away from hospitals because he is on documented. Sarish moved to her husband's home country and opened a grocery store. After her marriage ended, she lost her residency and risks deportation. She needs life-saving medical treatment that isn't available in her own country. Nina, Rolando, and Sarish all need migration pathways that uphold their human rights. Migration pathways are legal, policy, and administrative mechanisms that states it up to make it safer for people to migrate by obtaining a visa before arrival, obtaining a residence or work permit on arrival, or undergoing a regularization process for undocumented migrants already in the country. Imagine if there were pathways that allowed Nina to reunite with her parents without putting her life at risk. With a family visa, she is able to go to school like other children. Rolando gets a humanitarian visa for people affected by disasters and climate change, along with the rehabilitation services needed to recover from trauma. In recognition of her ties to the country and critical health needs, Sarish benefits from a path to regularization, ensuring she receives vital medical treatment. Here are key recommendations to guide states and stakeholders to open and expand pathways for safe and regular migration, which should be people-centered and firmly grounded on human rights, establish clear, transparent, and rights-based criteria, address challenges of accessibility, including language barriers and information gaps. Ensure that fees are affordable and the issuance of documentation is free of charge. Establish clear procedures and robust procedural safeguards for fairness, transparency, and access. Uphold individual decision-making processes based on clear and transparent criteria. Ensure that final documentation confirms identity before all government officials. Allow people who have a temporary residency to transition to a permanent or more secure status. Guarantee access to rights and services after an individual is granted regular residence. Enhance cooperation and incorporate a whole of government and whole of society approach in their design, implementation, monitoring, and review. By creating safe migration pathways, we can protect human rights and build inclusive communities where everyone can thrive.


This is, start with start friend. Just submerging yourself in 44 degree water for six minutes sound fun to you? I promise you only shake for the first couple minutes. Well, thanks to people like Wim Hof and Joe Rogan, this practice has actually been gaining a lot of popularity. The benefits of ice baths or cold water therapy include reduced inflammation, pain relief, and can even boost your immune system. Some people fill metal tubs with bags upon bags of ice, while some people like Diego have a blue cube. Blue cube makes high end ice baths to keep the water chilled, flowing, and filtered. So you don't have to refill your tub every day with hundreds of pounds of ice. In today's episode, we talk with David Haddad, the co-founder of blue cube about the early days of starting blue cube in a barn in Oregon. The science behind why cold plunging is good for your health and how long you should stay in an ice bath to reap the full benefits. So grab your towel or blanket before we plunge into this week's episode. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to David from blue cube. Thanks for coming on the pod. If people don't know, what does the company do? We make cold plunges, cold exposure therapy. It's awesome being here. Thanks for having me, Diego. Been trying to meet up for a minute. And we are pinnacle expression of cold exposure. That's how we like to see ourselves. So the cold thing, it sort of has taken off in the last probably two years where it's like next level, I have one now. People like Joe Rogan talk about it all the time in terms of like the benefits and stuff. When did you guys start the company? Or what was the thing? Were you guys always in sort of this cold immersion or what was the beginning of the company? So our founder, Thomas, he founded it in 2020 and he was looking to buy a high end bath for himself and being the entrepreneur that he is when he looked at the competition and kind of examined how they were being built. He's like, wow, I can. You can build one. I can build a better one. And he had, you know, taste and background in wood owning nice home. So for him, it made sense not only going high end but making it out of particular woods in a particular way that he wanted. He felt that other people would appreciate his taste. Because there's really nothing else on the market, right? There was no like higher end version. There was some competitors, some other people, but the way that they were building it, Tommy saw right through it and was like, wow, they're using really low grade parts but you know, charging an arm and a leg, I can do it better. Yeah. And then what was the first version of it? And was it always, so we'll talk about the moving water component to it too, but was it always, what was the first version of the whole? First version, we had stronger flow than everyone else, but flow was not the target. It was mostly stainless steel encased in basically a wooden cabinet or a wooden piece of furniture. We like to think about it. There was no tray dressing, no trim at all on the cabinet side. It was literally a stainless steel built into a piece of wood as a prototype. He wanted to make sure that the wood and the stainless and everything can kind of fit together how he wanted. And at the time, so 2020, do you guys think you're making a gamble on the cold plunge? Are you thinking maybe this is a fad? Are you thinking like this is for sure gonna hit? Like what is going through the process, like internal workings of the company? So Thomas, he already saw this category and his mind, it was already like, it's just a matter of time. He was hounding me at the end of 2020 and I actually did not believe this was gonna be a category. I was a MacGyver, I was doing my horse trough and the ice, I was doing the cold showers. And in my mind, I was like, why is anyone gonna be spending this amount of money when they can either do cold showers or do horse trough? And it wasn't until he invited me and I went up and I experienced it, I was like, ah, this is a cold dose that I'm not getting. And the way it simplifies my day where there's no setup times, I can get a predictable, reliable dose, I can go as aggressive as I want. I started seeing the feature set and I was like, okay, yes, over time, it's gonna formalize into an actual product category. But I was, I did not believe it in the beginning. And at the time, like how much research is out there? How much research are you guys doing in terms of the benefits? Cause it seems like everyone's an expert today, but at that time there was very little research. It was a Wim Hof. Wim Hof was the main, I think, proponent. And that was enough for me. And I think a lot of early adopters, relative early adopters, right? Cause people have been doing this forever. But I think the new phase really started with Wim Hof. When he got big, it exposed it to the masses. Yes. And then his, I think, his own study that he did, proving that he can regulate his immune system, how the cold was a powerful impetus for him to get over his tragedies. It was kind of like, oh, this is worth exploring. Yeah.  The only people that really had ever done this or the only time I had ever done this was in Florida when I was doing this cycling event. And we ended up spending a day at this like athletic, like the pure athlete gym. And this gym had everything. But it was only for like the elite athletes. We just got to go for the day because out of courtesy, we were doing this charity bike ride. And that was the first time I had done a cold plunge. And I like loved it. I like, I don't know why. Love the first experience, first plunge. I just loved it. And it was like this super beautiful spa type setting. It was next to a hot tub. And it was like, unbelievable. I was like, this is it. Like I really, and I felt it the next day. But then I had gone 10 years without ever sort of experiencing any sort of cold therapy at all. And then the Joe Rogan stuff starts going, popping off and then that leads me into this, this dark hole of, okay, research. And then it becomes like, which one do I buy? Right. And so the first step was like, okay, I could, I could get the trough and I could Uber Eats ice to my house every day and then add water. But that takes a lot of time and effort. And then so much time, not that fun. And then it also feels kind of wasteful. It's like a lot of people in LA don't, they don't have homes where you can just dump a tremendous amount of water. Like there's no yards. A lot of people don't have yards here, right? And so it's like the thought of doing that just also feels very wasteful. And then it's like, okay, do you want to just let the water sit there for two, three days? You know, let's say you're lazy, right?  And then a Titan LA. Mosquito breeding ground. Right. And then it's like the water's warm. So I'm like, that doesn't seem right.  And then you get to the point of like, okay. And then the blue cube has this, like the water's always in motion. Why is that important? What's the thing there? If you don't have the water moving, you'll cold adapt, I think within a couple weeks, maybe a couple months, depending on the person. And then you're not challenging yourself. You're basically cheating. And even if you use a lot of ice, you're self insulating and you can move. If you move around, you're breaking your thermal layer and you're allowing yourself a more acute dose. But ideally you're in a body of water that's moving. That way the heat is constantly being stripped from you. And per second you're adapting that much more to the cold versus, I don't know if you have tried like some of the other competitors or even still water recently, but I've been doing it just to always go back to like day one. And it's night and day difference. Is it really? Yes. It's so much easier. So much easier. What happens that your body just heats up like faster because nothing else is in motion? Like the first 30 seconds to a minute, it's like, okay, this is cold. And then you get used to it. And then it's like your body doesn't have that fight or flight going off.  I've been doing this thing recently. We're all dunked my head. And somehow that breaks it all up for me.  But I just do it. Cause it's like, when I get bored in there, I'm like, fuck, this is cold. I'll just dunk my head. I'll go underwater for a second. And it's like everything resets. I think it's the shock. It's like, I think your head's in shock again. So you kind of forget. You're like, you don't know how long it's been. You don't know the experience. And you do it, let's say after like a minute or two minutes or however long you're in. It's usually when I get bored and that usually is like 130 to two minute mark. It's in that window and then I'll do it and then I'll get bored again. I'll do it again. And that's how I know. I'm like, oh, I'm approaching six minutes. That's not a bad strategy. Yeah. What other science can you tell us? Like what's, when you guys think about this, do you guys geek out around the science? Do you care? I do. It's one of those protocols or one of those habits you can build that really is a primer to resetting your nervous system and your metabolism. I feel like it's the most elegant approach to that. And I think we're just beginning to understand all of the benefits. Obviously, you mentioned that you did it for athletics. I think a lot of people start there.  I don't really think there's anything like the cold that can help somebody ground and completely reframe their perceptions around their hardships, around trauma, around the difficulty, even of the day ahead.  And there's other tools like, you know, shrooms, psilocybin, mushrooms, I think are really powerful, but they come with side effects or you need to focus more on titration. Whereas the cold, maybe the only side effect is like hypothermia if you overdo it, but it's really hard to miscalculate or have a bad experience from the cold. I think there's gonna be so much about the mental space. So the thing for me is I typically do it more if I'm in like the middle of like a fundraise or I'm trying to close on a building because it's like, I tell everyone here, it's like, it's the hardest part of my day and I'm choosing it. And so there's something really beautiful about that where like, I'll start my day, I'll do the 9 a.m. thing. And then the rest of the day, no matter how much rejection I'm getting from the world around this idea I'm trying to bring into the world, to Los Angeles, it doesn't matter. It's like, oh yeah, that's just part of it. Cause I've already done the hardest part of the day. Right, right. And so there's something about the mental piece for sure. It's really interesting. You're like choosing torture is also really interesting. So like, I've seen Joe Rogan, he'll do it for as long as he can, like 11 minutes, or like 20 minutes at like 33 or 31 degrees or something. Basically just above freezing. Give people like that are listening a window into where to start and then ideally, like maybe where you're at today. That video that you're describing, if Rogan knew what he knew now, I don't think he would do that again. The only reason why I say this is somebody approached him nicely online and was basically like, that was complete overkill man.   So he was approached by some people and I think he kind of understood after that, okay, I don't need to be a Superman anymore in this. Cause it is a diminishing return. You don't want to do it to the point where you're spending half your day trying to warm up again.  There's a fine line and as far as like minutes spent in the cold plunge, what is that fine line? Where should people start? Give like the beginner's guide to it. Beginners I think in the fifties. 50 degrees. 50 to 59 degrees is an awesome place to start. And that feels like probably a cold ocean. Yes. For people, okay. Cold ocean and within a couple of minutes you start getting that fight or flight and then after maybe like five to six minutes you get a really nice dose. Depending of course if the water is moving, if it's still water, you may need to be in there much longer. But I think starting in the fifties is great. I think shooting for. 20 minutes, yeah. The research is suggesting this is Susanna Soberg's research, 11 minutes per week. In her cohort, she was also doing sauna sessions with those people for about 57 minutes per week. But it does seem like there is a threshold. You know, if you're at 59 or below Fahrenheit for 11 minutes per week, you're getting that metabolic activation or your body's going through some type of adaptive response. And you can break that up however you want. Yes. One of the hardest things that we had to do for this podcast is something so simple. It's to get chairs. We had been using these plastic chairs and they just weren't cutting it. And not only were they ugly, but they were also massively uncomfortable. So when we had the founders of Sundays on the podcast, it only made sense for us to get new podcast chairs. So they shipped us a set of count on me dining chairs. So if you're interested in upgrading your chairs too, whether that be in your house, office, podcast studio, or anywhere in between, check out the link in the description to pick some up yourself. We can't recommend Sundays chairs enough. To go back to the people if they're new to it and they're in the 50 degrees, how long should they be in that before they go into the 40 degree area? Or does it even matter? It's all based on your journey and your tolerance at that time. I think like I had one customer I was talking to yesterday, he started in the 50s and his goal was, okay, each week, I'm gonna go down to the degree. You know, I'm gonna give myself that grace. And he started in the high 50s, now he's at 44. And he likes it at 44. And that's where he's at. We experimented a little bit. We did this thing where I think we put it up to like 50 or like 48. And the beginning shock is still there, but, and we all do six minutes. At the end of it, the six, it's better at a lower temperature. We kind of concluded that. Like we all felt better at a lower temperature for six minutes.  Like it was like 38 degrees. And it was like interesting where the initial shock was more than the 42 degrees. But then it was kind of the same. Like after the six minutes, it didn't feel very different to like the 41 degree range. Interesting. And so now we just keep it in the four, like it's like, I think 41 right now. And it'll fluctuate between 40 and 42. At blue cube, I go in every day with Cheyenne and she's a bodybuilder. And she loves the cold because of what it does to her body and the priming it does. I definitely think the colder temperature leads to a more acute fight or flight. And definitely, I think temperature matters a lot in terms of if you want to get that maximum dose. But again, this is for someone like you have to build up to that, right? You can't just do that your first time. Right. And then expect everything to be fine. You may have a crazy response. When it comes to like the different versions you guys have, how many different versions do you have? Why the different versions? So we have the Malibu inline and the Corechill for now. There may be some other products that we release. The Corechill was inspired. We wanted to create like almost like a sub brand, something that could be pure residential. It doesn't have as much chilling power, but something that we can have just for residential purposes. The Malibu is almost like our overbuilt flagship type of product with the full deck, full chilling horsepower. And then the inline, this was putting the guts in line with the tub. We were inspired by like cars. That's why we called it inline. Inline mode, yeah. Yeah, inline motor, exactly. And some people appreciate that look. Okay. More than the Malibu. And you can change the temperature on all of them? Yes. And does any other company do that? Or are you guys the only one where you can change the temperature? You can change the temperature on the other ones. They just have not embraced flow rate as much as we have. We really embrace that because we think that that contributes to that pinnacle cold exposure experience. Other companies, they haven't pivoted. I'm sure it's going to be the standard. Yeah.  The flow?  Like I just, yeah. Because you definitely feel it. There's definitely a difference. You definitely get an intensity factor from it. And give people a window into the price of each of your existing units. So we start off with very high-end Malibu at 27,000 right now. And then our core chill is at 16,000. So that's pretty much our range. We want to go down market eventually, but just given our capacity constraints and wanting to build with integrity, we're kind of stair-setting that. And then for the people that I get text all the time which cold plunge do I get and why, right? And then I'm the guy that becomes like the spokesperson for the blue cube. How do you view that? What do you say to these individuals in a way where it's like, they're all good. They're all different. Here's why, like what's the sales pitch or what is the differentiator? Besides the flow, obviously the flow.  You're thinking the flow is just for filtration or you're just making things up, right? So no one at that level, that buyer doesn't understand the value of the flow yet. Maybe in a few years, they will over a few months. Right. But for that person that's just like shopping based on price, what do you? On price, it's, you know, we're not cheap. We're not billcheap. It's hard to convince somebody just based on price alone. But as far as other feature sets that I think were really competitive in ergonomics. So no other company has a tub that's really slanted where you can set, get into a set and rest position, comfortably extend your feet out, comfortably do a full plunge, easily accessible at 28 inches tall. Like some of the other companies either have to high step too much or you're gonna be low stepping. For the lower end models, the guts are completely exposed on the side. And it's not made out of, you know, schedule 40 piping. If there's any, let's say, failure points in some of the other machines, it's an arm and a leg just to replace the parts versus having unions, easily replaceable pumps or chilling motor if something were to fail. So I think as far as serviceability, accessibility of the parts, ergonomics, and overall experience of the coal plunge, we are superior. If someone values that, they're gonna get a blue cube. If they're looking for the most cost effective way just to start doing cold exposure, I would say, yeah, we're not, we're not gonna provide that value to them. What do you think the future is for the company? Like, what are you guys working on now? How are orders coming in? Is it bananas? Cause obviously we're still in a craze. It's definitely bananas. And the next step is getting a larger facility, getting more machinery so we can have our manpower be more effective and efficient on the job. If someone orders one today, how long would it take for them to arrive? 12, 14 weeks. Yeah, lead time is definitely a killer in this. Cause of all the craftsmen, the wood. Yeah. And so we want more machinery. Again, not to eliminate the hands-on but to allow them to do more. Yeah. How big is your space now? The manufacturing space? It's around 3,000 square feet. It's not that big. Oh, that's small. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, we started pretty humble. Wow. Like, total. Totally needed a bigger space. Yeah. We like to say we're in a barn in Redmond. It's not really a barn, but it feels like it. Yeah, pretty much. I want to go down the rabbit hole of athletic performance. I know we were talking a little bit before this. You know, I got introduced to cold lunges in college when I was a swimmer and we would do our practices and then we would go down into the physical therapy room where they had a cold pool and we would just sit there. And I think it was in like the 60 degree range. So we were down there for like 15 minutes at a time. And so I always associated it with recovery. And I'm curious if there's a benefit to doing it before a workout, just as there is doing it after a workout to reduce inflammation and swelling. From my personal experience, yes. From that of several of my customers who are either like Olympic athletes or professional basketball players, it does seem like it increases both stamina and power. And... If you do it before. If you do it before or if you're just on a schedule of doing it. Why? There's a lot of, I think reasons perhaps why, but it does seem like the mitochondrial biogenesis or uncoupling that occurs where your mitochondria gets so freaked out it literally, they literally divide and you have greater density of brown fat or even browning of muscle. So you just have more mitochondria density in your cells as a result of cold plunging over time. And if mitochondria are the battery centers of our cells, it kind of is logical to conclude that we can have more energy output as a result of that. So for power, for stamina, I do think there's gonna be evidence suggesting that it does increase those. I would imagine though, that you'd also need some amount of time after leaving the cold plunge before you start working out, like you need time to warm up and loosen up your muscles again because like if you go, you obviously don't wanna go from a cold plunge into a workout because that's a great way to injure yourself because everything's so stiff and you're still trying to recover from that. And I would have to imagine like, at least from my own experience, like at least like an hour or two in between just to get the body loose enough to work out again after that. Depends on the person. It could be even as little as like 10, 20 minutes. How's your snap back? Have you paid attention to like you go into the cold plunge and then you're in that state of being cold. You feel it going through your veins. You're trying to adjust. How long does it take for you? It depends on the day. So like I've done it on cold rainy days here and it takes a lot longer because I don't have the residual heat from the sun to warm me up. And on those days, I will be shivering for up to 45 minutes after the cold plunge. On warmer days, I can be fine within like 20 minutes and like start to feel like myself again. And so it really like cuts the time in half depending on the temperature outside. But I've done it personally where I think I cold plunged and then I two hours later went for a run and I felt great. And so that's where my own like two hours for a workout kind of like, okay, I need to give myself ample time afterwards. That's kind of like my snap back was between just trying it out before a workout as opposed to after a workout. Keep studying your body. I think it's different for everybody. For me, it's around, let's say I cold plunge, I come back in, put on the gym clothes or whatever it is that I wanna work out in, start stretching. Yeah, around 15, 20 minutes, I would say my body's in a position. It still feels cold, but I'm able to start working out for sure. And I think everyone's gonna be different to your point. Some people may be really stiff. I'm probably like 30 minutes, I think, probably 30 to 45. It's cold, I'll be shivering for a while actually. And if it's like hot outside in the sun, it's still maybe like 30 minutes. Owen's like immediately, it's amazing actually. He's like fine immediately. It's kind of crazy. Even with longer plunge sessions? Yeah, I feel like he's cheating. He's just like, I'm shivering and he's like, what's going on?  Like he's like fine, super weird. Some people, I don't know if you have Scandinavian descent. Yeah, some people are just really cold adopted. Wow. By nature, their ancestors had to deal with it. Some people can't even put it in their hands. The blood flow is so bad. Is it because of the receptors on your hands and your feet? That and your body's making trade-offs. So when you're in that level of cold, warming up your heart and your core is more important than your hands. So your body's literally like, oh, we don't need hands here. We gotta keep the core warm. And then my hands used to hurt like crazy. They still do, but I like it because I noticed my hands run hotter. So like my ability to tolerate cold in my hands has increased dramatically from incorporating it into the plunge instead of being out. Cause I used to do that too. My hands used to hurt like crazy. Okay. How did you and Thomas first connect? We connected here in LA, Santa Monica specifically. I was in another startup in time, cannabis-based startup, and he was going through a divorce and my co-founder was neighbors with him. So he was literally walking outside. He was looking kind of depressed and disheveled. And my co-founder was literally like, hey man, is everything okay? And he came over and he's like, you know what? Everything is not okay. I'm going through a divorce. This woman's taking all my stuff. Like, you know, I'm being cut in half, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, how are you guys? Like what's up? Right. And then we told him about what we're doing and he comes from a family of entrepreneurs. He loves startups. So immediately he was like, oh, have you thought about fundraising like this? Have you thought about the customers like this? And we started driving and he would come over and like cook dinner and just talk business with us. And after that cannabis startup kind of folded, we raised capital, but in 2020, kind of all cannabis investment dried and we were going to be partnering with Ease and some of the larger delivery companies. And they all kind of chopped all of their officers and were exposed for burning money. So we decided not to continue, but that's how I met Thomas. And then he kept hounding me that he's building this coal plunge in Oregon.  What's some of the most interesting science that you've stumbled into? I think we're going through evolutionary renaissance. I think Darwin is almost like coming back in a very big way and smacking all of us in the face. I think the hormetic stress response is by far what this decade I think is gonna be known for. Hot, cold, fasting exercise in combination is I think the ultimate biohack. Of course, good food, sleep, sunlight, family, relationships, whatever it is. But I feel like practicing the hormetic stresses on a daily basis is where it's at. Interesting. Do you have any anecdotal information on how your client's life has been impacted? Like just from a relationship standpoint, so not recovery, not just from a purely like I'm a better human type thing. I'll show you the video after this. Yes.  He calls it, this is a game changer. He thinks it's a complete game changer. His family's convinced that he's a much better human being. And he thinks that the cold is so powerful, like if someone is going through this every day, it fundamentally changes your chemical makeup. Again, he's not quoting science, he's not saying this is guaranteed, but from his experience he's like, my chemical makeup is clearly different. Like how I narrowly perceive the world is different. My wife would attest to that about me. She would say the same thing? I think I literally just became a better husband. Like I was easier to get along with. It was weird. Like I wasn't stressed as much. Yeah. You know, I think as entrepreneurs than you're doing, when you're trying to like, you know, hit home runs, let's say, when you're going for it, there's a lot of stressors on your life. There's something about cold planning that resets those stressors for you. And so then life doesn't seem nearly as bad. It seems more fun in fact. And so I just became like more fun in her eyes. That's fascinating. It's really interesting. For me, I just thought I was like, like things didn't really bother me as much, right? Cause it's like, I just cold plunge. There's nothing worse than that. Whatever happens now is, it doesn't really matter that much. I'm not in cold water freezing. You know, it's interesting. And so I'd say she'd agree. I love how she noticed that in you too. I think this goes back to the whole, I think the mental change is going to be what's talked about. Cause yes, for athletes and all that, the change is profound and it can save careers. It can elongate their ability to be competitive, whatever it is, but having your wife say, hey, you know, Diego's different. Diego, he's listening to me more. He drinks more wine now. He drinks more wine now. Nothing phases him. Yeah, it's weird. 100%. That's what's going to be talked about. When you think about what Tony, so Tony Robbins has been doing that, do you know his routine where he'll dunk himself in hot and then cold, but it's a quick dunk and then he's up. It's almost like a hole in his backyard that he has where he just goes in and out. But it's quick. He does it like three times, I think. Hot, cold, hot, cold or whatever he does. But every morning. But it's quick. So I would say maybe a collective 10 seconds of dunking. And then he's done. He's been doing it forever. He thought it was like a game changer. I guess the question I'm trying to get at is, is there any difference of being in there for what Tony Robbins does? Which is like a quick, quick dunk and then he's done. Or someone who's like doing it for six minutes. What have you seen in terms of like the time? Does that really matter at all? Cause the shock is the same. The shock is the same. I think it depends on what temp. And it depends, cause you probably experienced this too where you know you got your dose. I don't know when that happens for people. It could be 20 seconds. It could be 30 seconds. 40, it could be up to a minute. But you know when you're like, I got it. Like I'm good, I'm ready to exit because even if I stay in for another minute, great, but I already feel completely reset. So I go for that feeling. When that feeling is, I think it's different for people. But at like 37 degrees, people should be getting that between 20 to 40 seconds. So I would say a dip and then jump out is probably not nearly as effective as like sit with yourself for at least 20 seconds. Cause that 20 seconds is enough to, you know, your adrenaline spikes, the whole reset occurring if the temp is low enough. So that's interesting. Cause we always talk about it amongst the team where it's like the first minute to a minute and a half absolutely sucks. And then after then it doesn't really matter. And so are you suggesting that maybe we should, like after that minute and a half is over and we start to like get used to that feeling of cold. Like, you know, should we just hop out at that point? Again, it depends on, you sound a lot like Thomas by the way. Cause for Tommy, it's like after the two minutes, he goes to like another where he gets adjusted. And for him, it's like after four to five minutes, then again, the adrenaline spikes and it's like a new wall or a new thing you have to overcome. And I definitely think if you have the capacity explore that, you know, don't take what I'm saying as the gospel or what anyone's saying. Cause it's very individualistic. Yes, it is very. It's almost like weight training, right? What is the right weight training routine? Well, it's based on your strength, how long you've been training, what your goal is. I feel like cold is kind of the same way. So as a business, obviously we're experiencing a moment in time where the cold plunge is becoming a thing. People are aware of it. There's enough people talking, influencers talking about it. How do you guys approach marketing and selling, you know, you're specific, right? You have competitors, obviously. And so how do you guys think about that? What is the overall strategy around just getting these into more homes and more gyms, more spas?  I had an architect, several architects tell me they think every high home is gonna be complete only if it has pool, spa, sauna and cold plunge. So it's almost gonna be a standard for the high end home and I think highlighting that standard and showcasing that standard in beautiful homes, high end residences and resorts is something that we need to do much, much better job of. Does it more like marketing, social media, more videos, more? Yes, and more generated content. Yeah. And showcasing, you know, people using it in the high end homes. Yeah. All right, Dave, what else do people know? What else should they know about Blue Cube? What's the future look like? Where can they buy one? Visit us online, bluecubest.com, call me up anytime. Thomas I think picks up literally straight from the website. We could do a FaceTime over how these things are made and in general I think everyone should just start, you know, cold shower and slowly graduate. Yeah, you guys were great. I'll share the story, we'll wrap on this on how this happened. So I wanted to get one and so I called just the number on the website because the only question I had was will it fit through a normal door? Obviously, we have a studio here and so I wanted to make sure it fit because so many times these things don't. And so I get on the phone and I think Thomas picked up and then he passed the phone to you and you guys are like, tell me everything, where's it going? Oh, you have a studio, what's the studio for? And then I was like, guys, I just wanna know if it's gonna go through the door. That's it. And you're like, no, no, where's it going? Show us pictures.  And I'm like, I didn't call you to be upsold. I just called you to see if it fit through the door. And they're like, what's, you got a logo? And I'm like, oh my God, what is happening? And then it all worked out and you guys gave me a sweet deal. How did you find us speaking of? Yeah, no, I think I had just narrowed it down to the two I was gonna look at. Maybe just the one, I just liked the look of it. You guys had a cool look and then the flow, I realized the flow was important. And honestly, the thing that I was looking for the most was, obviously there's a team. To me it's like, it's only fun if you share these things. And so the temperature was a huge one for me. Being able to adjust the temperature, I thought was like game changer. Because you don't wanna force someone to, I guess get into something that's, maybe you can handle what someone else can't. So that was the thing I was looking for. And I was like, oh, they have it and they seem to know what they're doing. Well, I'm glad you found this. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, I appreciate it. No thanks for having me. If you made it this far, I bet you loved the episode. So you should join our YouTube channel membership for only $2.99 a month. This gets you access to one, the whole unabridged conversation. Two, you get the episodes on Monday, one day earlier. Three, you get two additional entries to our giveaways. Check out our Instagram to see what we've given away. And four, you get access to seasons one through three. That's over a hundred episodes of wisdom and life-changing advice. What are you waiting for? Join.


Well, what I want to do today is show you the steps that we've gone through to create parent accounts which are linked to their students, allowing parents to go in and see their students' courses and view student marks that have been put up in the mark book and so on. So I want to start by just saying a big thank you to the people who really did all the hard work, Mary Cooch who blogged the solution that I found online, Maxime Palettia who created the Moodle plug-in we use and Penny Leach who created the original plug-in. So the work's not mine, I've just put up a set of detailed instructions on how to do it. We had a problem, we had trialled having parents accessing their student work in Moodle and it worked really really well. Parents reported back that it was fantastic, they could log in, see the coursework, see how their students were going and they could use that at home to just keep in touch with their students and what was required. But Moodle requires you do that one parent at a time. You can bulk upload the parents but you then have to manually assign each parent to their child and the tasks, if you've done it before it just takes an incredible amount of time and so I thought there had to be some way of doing it and there isn't much out there. I found one blog with someone who had talked about these particular plugins which does allow you once you've bulk uploaded parents to automatically create and link each parent to each child. So what I'm going to do today is just quickly go through the steps. At the end of the PowerPoint there's a URL which will allow you to download the PowerPoint if you want it and on the Moodle Mood course I've got a full set of instructions with screen grabs and so on if you want to follow that. So the solution, you need to begin by creating a parent role and there are full instructions on Moodle for how to do that and when you do that the one thing we changed from the set way of seeing our parents was we took away their ability to edit their students profile. We just felt for privacy. It was bad enough parents viewing what their kids were doing or not doing. We thought we'd give that limitation that parents couldn't go in and change our student passwords and things like that. It's also we found worthwhile creating a cohort called Parents. So if you want to you can grab all your parents in one go and delete them or at the end of the year and so on. So we just found it easy to create that cohort right at the beginning. You'll need to create a CSV file of parent data and it needs to have a username for each parent, password, first name, last name, email and then you need to add the role which will be the parent role and the cohort you want to add them to which is the parent cohort. Now we grabbed our data from cases 21 which is the Department of Education's database of parent information and student information. We deleted any parents who didn't have an email address logged in there. We also carefully went through and manually removed any parents who had access restrictions to children which took some time. And for us we took the family ID as the username and added an F for a female and M for a male parent to create the family ID and a randomly generated password. If you're not sure how to create a random password I've put the instructions on that on the Moodle course. You then need to create a CSV file of parents, the child and the role you want which in this case is parent and you do need to make sure that each parent who has multiple children has to have an entry for each individual children, each individual child so that if there are two children there needs to be two entries, one for each child. And again we just grabbed that out of cases 21 and just manipulated it in Excel. You then can use the administration user option to bulk upload accounts to create the parent accounts and that's a nice and easy step. And then comes perhaps the hard part. So if you're not used to dealing sort of behind the scenes this is where you may need to get some assistance from someone who does. You need to actually make a change to the Moodle database. So this can seem to be rather frightening but if you make a backup first you shouldn't have any problems. I've done this many times and never had an issue but I always make a backup before I start. In fact I backup my entire Moodle course just to be on the safe side. You need to create a new table which you would call something like Moodle parent which has three fields, the parent, the child role and the role which matches that CSV file you've just created. I use PHP MyAdmin to access the database which is a really nice free download that allows you to access MySQL databases and then you need to import the data you've created in that CSV file into the new table in Moodle. And again if you've done it before it's really easy. If you haven't done it it's not a difficult process and it doesn't take very long at all. There's a plugin you then need to grab which is the Enroll DB user rel plugin and I've used it on Moodle 2.8 without any problems and I suspect it should work quite happily with 2.9 and you need to install that. If you haven't installed a plugin before it's fairly straightforward and there's full details of that on the Moodle course site. You then need to map the new fields you've created in that new table into the existing fields in the Moodle database. So you start by just going into the plugin and you add in your server username, password and so on for the database you've created and then you take the local subject fields which are the fields that Moodle has natively and then you add into those the three new fields that you've created which you can see at the bottom there parent child and role which are in the remote field and remote is the new table you've created. And if your plugin was like mine when I did this the last time I had trouble getting it to be enabled you go into manage and roll plugins and just click on the little line and make sure it's open and not closed. Then comes the part that perhaps is the trickiest of the lot you do need to have access to the command prompt. So if your Moodle site is hosted on an external host you may need to contact them about how you do that and they may need to do it for you. We host all ours internally so that's rather easy to do. You just navigate to the PHP directory that contains PHP.exe and you execute that rather long file there lined there PHP.exe minus F and then the path to your to the plugin you've just installed and if it works well which it has for us every time you'll see all the links being made between parent and child. And then we decided to send out an email to every parent that we created an account for so we used our original CSV file, used that with word mail merge, created a letter that said welcome to our Moodle site. This is what you can do. Here are details of your account with your username password. Here are my details if you're stuck and then we just did the bulk email out to every parent. Just be warned if you do that and the emails are incorrect which a lot of them are. You then get several days of those emails bouncing back to you filling up your email box. So we've been very careful to make sure we try and get those as accurate as we can when we start. And that's that's how we've done it and we've had great success. We have parents contacting us to say this is fantastic. They can see what their students are doing. It's worked very well. We still have some parents who didn't have emails registered with us who now want accounts created and we have to create those manually but it's only one or two every couple of weeks so that hasn't been a real problem. So if you want more details please check out the Moodle course. As I said I've put full details there so that you can follow those through. And that's it. So I'm happy to answer any questions if you've got them. What can a parent sleep when they get into? When they log in they can see their students their children and the courses they're enrolled for and then they can enroll themselves in the course and they enroll as a parent which means that they can see all the material that's posted in that course plus any of the forum posts that their students have done plus say if you're using the mark book they can see the results in the mark book as well. Did they appear in the grade book? No the parents don't appear in the grade book no. And they can only see their own child's results. Yep. Can we see the discussion forum or see other children's? They can only see their own children's posts in the forums. So there's no comparison? No. All context? Yep. Yeah all context that's right but there's a privacy issue there which is why I believe that's there. In the second year how much does that go through again? Look the second year when you run that that command line it actually deletes all the parent links and recreates them. So we've we've basically just started each year fresh so we delete all the parent accounts and by having them in a cohort you can just delete the cohort it takes the parents out removes them from any enrolls the subjects are in and then we just start fresh and send out a new email to all the parents and we've had no complaints and it's worked really well. Yep. Really interesting use of the Cureport Functionality in the parents' function. Have you tried out the new Cureport Functionality? Uh no. Yeah there's a function where we can so you sort of skip importing from the DB so you can upload a CSB and it'll just take care of it. All right I'll have a look. Yep. The issue is with students being over 18 and having other people access to their data? No look we haven't. I'm just trying to think if we have any students that well I suppose we do it year 12. No it hasn't been an issue for us. Perhaps I need to look at that so yeah I'll go back and have a look at that one but no we certainly haven't had any complaints from anyone. I think the only complaint we ever received was a parent who had moved away and was rather angry that we'd set up an account for a child that was no longer with us and that was simply because we hadn't checked our database perhaps closely enough. If the student actually had a problem with the fact that restriction on it so you would have deleted when the barren restrictions. Thank you Stephen.