Welcome back to the school of calisthenics. This is a follow-along yoga flow specifically designed by our head of yoga, Jude, to help us improve our calisthenics training. Tell us what we've got in store, Jude. So we've got a 15-20 minute flow that's going to work through all parts of your body that's going to help us build a little bit of strength for calisthenics. It's going to help us with some flexibility and some movement elements of calisthenics as well and you're going to enjoy it. It's going to feel nice at the end. So we'll just, I'm going to take Tim through it and there might be a few coaching points along the way where I stop and explain a few things to him. I hope you enjoy it. Perfect, let's get started. For our first practice we're going to start lying down. So make yourself nice and long, Tim, and have a shake and a shuffle. How's your lie down on the mat? So we're going to shake out the feet, we're going to bring the hand back at the hands just onto the floor, palms up towards the sky, just get yourself nice and comfortable. Now if you're doing this at home you can lie here for a minute or two until you feel ready to move. I'm not going to give Tim that long. We're going to start moving pretty quickly. So let's take our right knee up over the belly, wrap your hands around the front of it and we're going to squeeze the knee in towards the chest. So you should feel your lower back just flattening into the mat a little bit giving you a nice big stretch through the back of the body and into that right bum cheek, that right glute. We're going to keep our hand, our left hand on this right knee. Why don't you take your right arm away from your shoulder. So palm up towards the sky and you should feel that right shoulder blade just nestling down into the mat and that's going to stay there as we draw this right knee over the belly towards the left side. So a nice little spinal twist here. So take it as far as you can, Tim, but without that right shoulder blade leaving the mat. And you can turn to look over that right arm, get that twist all the way up through your spine, just take a nice deep breath there. From here we're going to roll onto our left side. So leave the knee where it is, take the right arm all the way over and press your right hand on top of your left. So you've got your kind of crocodile arms in front of you and your right knee is pressing down into the floor. So from here on a big in-breath we're going to take those right fingers up to the sky, our open book stretch. So all the way up to the top, all the way over the back and as if you're trying to rest the palm of that hand on the floor behind you. Now it might not get there, it might do. Let's take it back. And we're going to do two more of those. Big breath in, reaching high over towards that right side, coming back and one last time. And then coming back to the left, draw up the knees. We're going to roll over onto the back, keep hold of your left knee but lengthen out your right leg. So we're going to do the same on the other side. So give that left knee a nice big squeeze in towards your chest. So use a little bit of strength, get that knee as close as you can. We're going to keep the right hand on the knee, left arm away from the shoulder. And again, drawing that knee over the belly as we keep the left shoulder nice and close towards the floor. Good. Looking over that left arm perhaps, just to get that twist all along the length of the spine. Nicely done. And then let's take that left hand over to the right side. So left knee's coming onto the floor now if it wasn't already. We're going to roll onto our right side, left hand pressed on top of the right palm. Let's take a big breath in, reach up to the sky and take that left hand behind us. Should feel like a nice big stretch for that thoracic spine. Let's come back and do two more, Tim. Big breath in for the last time. Let's go back over to that right side and then push up to seated. Find a comfortable position on your mat. So we're going to just move the bum cheeks out of the way. When I feel these sit bones nestling into the floor, so I physically lift them up.  So we're going to have a spinal twist here. So let's start on the right side with the right fingers behind the tailbone. Let's take the left arm onto the outside of that right knee. As we breathe in, we're just going to find a little bit of height through the spine and as we breathe out, we're going to roll the belly to the right side of the mat. You might find you can look over that right shoulder. Let's come back to centre. Let's try the other side. So left fingers behind the tail, right arms long. We're just going to hook the elbow onto the outside of that left knee. Big breath in, reach high with the crown of that head and then let's twist to the left, looking over that left shoulder. Good. Let's come back to centre. Cross those legs for me.  So keeping the body nice and long, all we're going to do is walk these fingertips forwards. Just stretching through the back. You'll probably feel this in the lower back. You might feel it in the knees and the ankles as well. For some people, this would feel really nice. You'll be able to get the nose all the way down to the floor. For others, you might find you can come a couple of inches off centre. Doesn't matter. Just go with the way you feel. Just breathe into that space for a breath of two. Does that feel all right, Tim? Yep. And then walking slowly back up to centre, we're going to have a side stretch. So fingertips are the side of these hips to begin with. Just walk them away from the hips so that you can feel a little bit of a tug into the shoulders. We're going to take the right fingers up to the sky. Keeping that right sit bone glued into the mat, let's bend over to the left side. So we're keeping the chest square to the front of the mat. We're not going to turn the chest to face the knee. We want to get that stretch through the lats and into the side body. Coming back to centre. Left fingers reach high. And we're going to take the left fingers over to the right side. That's it. Nice. All the way back to centre. Let's bring the fingertips behind the tail bone. So I'm going to turn to face my back to the camera, but you can do it from the front. So fingertips nice and close together behind the tail. We're just going to push the shoulder blades together and lift up the chest, see if we can show the chest to the sky. So stretching through the front of the chest, squeezing those shoulder blades. Good. Coming back to centre. Well done. Still feeling all right? Yeah. From there, we're going to plant the hands and step the feet back into what we call downward facing dog. So it looks a little bit like an inverted V pose. The feet are hip distance apart. The hands are shoulder distance apart. We're going to spread the fingers as big as we can. So Tim's going to spread his hands as wide as possible. And you'll see that he's got a lovely inverted V shape here. Now if your hamstrings are tight, what you might find is that your legs pull you into more of a U pose. So if that's the case, keep the knees nice and soft and send those hips all the way up to the sky, to the top of the room, wherever you're practicing. Let the head just hang in between those biceps. Give it a shake. So we're going to take a look at the space between the hands and have a big step forward with the right foot. Now if you can't step that right foot forwards in one big step, then the thing to do is to bring it as far as you can and then drag it forwards if you need to. So using a little bit of core strength here, we're going to reach the fingers forwards and then float all the way up into our high lunge. So sinking into that nice lunge position. That right knee stacked on top of the right ankle and my hips are nice and square to the front of the mat. Shoulders are relaxed. So sometimes when we take the hands above the head, the shoulders come up to the ears but we're going to just draw them down the back. You see how much space Tim's got between his ears and his shoulder blades. And to challenge the balance a little bit, you can take a look at the space between the hands. Now we're going to have a little bit of a fun with some balancing here and for that, which is hard enough in the wind and on the grass, but for that we've got some blocks that are going to help us. So if you just place that block about eight or ten inches or so in front of your baby toe, it's going to help us just to get into one of the positions that we're going to transition into in a moment. So let's cross the hands across the chest and what I'm going to ask you to do Tim is just push into your left big toe and begin to transfer the weight onto your right foot. And then let's see if you can just lift those left toes and then float down into what we call warrior three. So your toes, your knees and your hip bones are all pointing towards the floor. So flex that foot for me. Nice. And your hips are nice and square. Your hips are going to want to just lift up a little bit. We're going to push it down ever so slightly. So try and keep that standing leg as straight as you can. Nicely done. And from here we're going to make a little transition into our half moon pose. So bring your right fingers down towards that block Tim and then we're going to start to turn the toes, the left toes, towards the left side of the mat. And you'll see how your knees start to turn to the left side, your hip bones start to turn to the left side and then we can perhaps reach that left hand all the way up to the sky. Nicely done. Good. Now, this first time Tim has done this, he's doing really well, but if you, as you practice this and get used to it, you can start to take a little bit of pressure out of the right fingers, maybe release the block all together. Nicely done Tim. Fabulous. So let's drop that left foot to the floor behind us. Arms shoulder height, big bend in that right knee, that right knee tracking towards the baby toe side. So just take that right foot ever so slightly forward so that we've got the knee stacked on top of the ankle. Nicely done. And we're in worry too. We're going to turn the right palm to the sky. Without moving that lower body, let's just inch forwards and take that right hand all the way up to the sky. Good. Reversing our area. Left hand is just resting on your left leg. Brilliant. From here, we're going to wind all these arms, plant them either side of that right foot, pick up the left heel and step back into our down dog. So you can have a little paddle of the heels here if it feels good. Stretching through the body, down dogs and resting pose. So take a moment or two just to find that nice long breath again and we're going to do the other side. Are you ready for the other side? So taking a look at the space between the hands, big step forward with the left foot. Reaching forwards, we're going to float into our high lunge. Good. So sinking when we get there, that knees on top of the ankle, nice and strong through that back leg, hips nice and square to the front of the mat and these shoulders are relaxed. Good. Let's bring the hands together over the chest. We're going to make that transition into our balancing posture. So warrior three. So push into that right big toe. Let's move our weight onto the left leg. Now if this one big leap feels a little bit too much, you can shuffle your right foot forwards and then just have a go at floating into that warrior three. Really good for developing strength in that standing leg, for developing our balance, our proprioception. And then let's try that transition into half moon then. So the left hand goes down to the block, Tim. We're going to start to roll the right toes to the right side, the right knee, the right hip. Maybe reach those right fingers up to the sky and then see if we can let go of that block altogether. Some of you might not need the block at all. I find it just helps with the transition. Let's drop that right foot to the back of the mat. We shouldn't make our way back to something that looks a bit like warrior two. Turning that left arm to the sky, let's reach forwards and reverse that warrior right hand resting on the right leg. Lots and lots of space down the left side of the body. Let's win all these arms. We're going to step back into our down dog and just pause there for a moment. Still feeling okay? Yeah. Brilliant. So a little bit of work for the core. Let's float into a high plank position. So the shoulders are coming back over the wrists. We're going to squeeze the bum cheeks together so that the heels, the hips and the head are all in a nice long line. So we've got a couple of variations with this. If you're new to side planks, then we can drop the right knee onto the floor and roll onto that right knee and reach the left fingers up to the sky. If you feel a little bit stronger, let's come back to plank, Tim. We'll do the other side. We can roll onto the side of the foot and reach those right fingers up to the sky. Final option, if you're feeling super strong, let's roll back onto the right side. We can reach that left leg up into the sky as well. Good. Hands and toes back to the mat. Let's drop the knees and send the seat back to the heels. Have a bit of a stretch in extended Charles pose. We're going to swing the legs around and sit on our seats. Let's take the legs a little bit wider. So a little bit of work for the hips, hip mobility, some forward folding and a little bit of side bending as well, which is also a really helpful posture to do for any niggles around the lower back. So we're just going to push the heels away so the legs are nice and active. I'm going to slide my right hand down on the top of that right shin. Maybe just hook it around the top of the ankle and my left hand is going to go on this left hip. So I like to think about taking my ear down towards my knee because that starts to get me into this side body. So can you feel that? So if you find that you start to take your chest to the knee, it's a completely different stretch. So we want to get that right ear down towards the knee and if that feels super comfortable, then we can take the left hand over the ear and reach for those right toes. Perfect. Nice. Let's come back to centre. Try the other side. So sliding the left hand down that left leg. Right hand on the hip. Let's take the left ear down towards the left knee. If that feels all right, let's see how it feels to take that right hand all the way over the right ear and reach for those left toes. Coming back to centre. Let's have a forward fold here.  We're going to keep the front of the body nice and long and just like we did with the cross leg fold, we're just going to have a little walk forwards. So stop when you start to feel the tug. We talk about playing with the edge in yoga and you feel something that feels like it's just at the edge of what's comfortable. That's where we want to stop and breathe for a few moments and you might find that you can just inch into that posture a little bit more. That feeling all right? Usually on the out breath we can just inch those fingers forwards a fraction and don't worry if when you first try this you're kind of just an inch or so off centre. It's perfectly normal. We just need to spend a little bit of time and be gentle. Just coach the body into these shapes. Walking back up to centre. Let's pick up these knees and lengthen out of the legs. So I'm just going to shuffle towards the front of the mat because we're going to roll down. So we're coming back to where we started our final posture but we're just going to roll down to get there. So push your heels away from you, take the arms nice and wide and we're going to pretend that we're wrapping the arms around a big beach ball. So draw your belly in towards the spine, wrap the spine around it, wrap the arms around it and then ever so slowly we're just going to roll the spine back down onto the mat. So imagine you can visualize that spine just lowering super slow, as slow as you can. So you take your time if you're following at home. Take as long as it takes and once your shoulder blades hit the floor we're going to bend the knees up and hug them into the chest and have a little rock from side to side. And then lengthen out the legs, give them a shake, pick up the shoulder blades, let's spread the shoulder blades apart, rest the backs of those hands on the floor again, turn the palms up towards the sky. Let everything go, so fingers are soft, curling in towards the palms, close your eyes, flick the bugs away. And again if you're at home you want to stay here for five, ten minutes as long as you want to but Tim that's you done for the day. Done. How's that feel? Three, five minutes. Back in five. So we hope that you guys enjoyed following along with the yoga flow. Just remember that everything that we do in calisthenics is often focused around strength and stable positions but the real foundations of that is actually having that movement options and yoga is so good for helping to keep you moving well so that when you want to introduce a new movement or do something different you've got the raw basic movement capacity to be able to teach yourself to move in a new way. So we designed that flow today to be quite short so that hopefully you can fit it into your training schedule relatively easily. If you can get around to doing that three times a week even more if you can then I think you'll find it will really benefit your calisthenics training. So nothing else to say until next time. Class dismissed.


Hello and welcome to the Drum History Podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today we are joined by Bernie Stone of Stone Custom Drum. Bernie, how are you? I'm doing okay. How are you doing today? Good. Good. Thanks for being here. We are talking about your involvement with the classic American brand Slingerland in light of the recent acquisition of Slingerland by DW Drums. And I want to say right off the bat that this has never happened before that I was recommended in the same day by two people, Steve Hatfield and Rob Cook, both same day said you need to talk to Bernie. So I know something right is happening. But yeah, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement with Slingerland and take it away? Okay. Well, you know, as a young man growing up taking drum lessons, some of my first drums were secondhand drums and among those were Slingerland. I get actively playing and by nature I'm interested in how things are made and I acquired an old radio king snare drum and eventually become friends with a gentleman named Charlie Donnelly. And this is way in the early days of when modern drummer came out and Charlie was a consultant to the magazine back then. So I got a great education on the history of Slingerland from Charlie and then eventually got into the collecting thing like a lot of us are today.  And that led to me getting a part-time job at Columbus Pro Percussion, which I became the guy who did the repairs and you know, I did that for a couple of years and I worked with Jim Rupp who's a jazz legend drummer and Bob Brighthop who is a dean at Capitol University. From there, I started finding myself doing, you know, really special projects for percussionists, marching bands, schools, then that started leading into doing a lot of custom finish work and early on I discovered, you know, just from knowing people in the industry, discovered the Keller Shell and that led to doing a lot of custom snare drums and so on and so forth. Well, after being at Columbus Pro Percussion for a couple of years, some of us older guys, we know the Percussion Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Well, Neil Graham, the proprietor of the Percussion Center, gave me a call one evening and said he'd like to talk to me about coming here and working. After a little bit of negotiation, I found myself at age 22, moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana and immediately, I mean, I'm talking from the day I walked into the door in 1984, my responsibilities were dealing with high profile touring bands, doing special projects for Tama, for Ludwig, some of the largest drum cores, you know, largest universities, that stuff was my responsibility and I did that for about, I believe I was employed there until 1990. So, you know, after the Percussion Center had some problems later on, Neil Graham decided to keep the manufacturing portion of that and I more or less found myself unemployed. So, I started running ads in modern drummer, you know, custom drum work, you know, Bernie Stone calling me and I did that for several years, well into the 90s, about 92, 93 and had a little shop at my old house, 24 by 24, two-car garage, had it set up as a little custom shop and I did a lot of stuff during that period. Well, having a young kid and having a kind of working for myself and at the time I was playing quite a bit, the opportunity to take a corporate job came up, which I did and then shortly thereafter, I landed a premium playing gig, which I still have today. Well, the corporate job I took because it had benefits and so on, so forth. So, I started really laying off of the custom stuff. Well, fast forward to around 2001, come home from a gig one night and my guitar player sent me a message, hey, did you see this on eBay? And it was the Slingerland equipment. And so, I'm like, wow, that's interesting. And of course, I didn't really know what I was looking at. What I did know is I seen similar equipment in use at the Ludwig factory back in the 80s. I actually went to Chicago one day and walked in the front door and said, hey, can I take a factory tour? And they're like, what? And I said, yeah. So some old man about 80 years old took me around. I spent the whole day at Ludwig just walking around looking at stuff. And one of the things that fascinated me most was the drum shell making assembly line. And I remembered looking at that going, I have to know how this works. So when I'm looking at this stuff in eBay ad, I'm going, you know, that's exactly what, like what I've seen at Ludwig. Well, anyhow, the original listing that we looked at, I believe the reserve is $30,000. And I'm going, well, you know, yeah, yeah, that's not something you, yeah, that's not something you put in your garage. You know, and it got up to about $12,000 or $13,000, if I remember right.  And then I seen the reserve was $10,000. Well, it got up to about $9,000 and went off no sale. Well, a couple of weeks later, it went up at no reserve. I go, oh, now you're talking. Yeah. So, you know, of course, like, like usual, I didn't really ask my wife for permission. Of course. I started bidding on this stuff, right? And lo and behold, I won it. And they called me right away and said, were you just bidding on this or did you intend to buy it? I said, well, I intend to buy it. And the guy says, okay, well, it has to be off of our premise, December 21st. I go, dude, that's Saturday. This is Thursday. He says, if you don't want it, I'll relist it. And I said, okay, I'll be there. Yeah. Once again, this didn't go over well with my wife. No. Geez. Well, let me ask you though, like before you go on 2001, you said, right, why were they selling this stuff at that point in time? Do you know what happened? Like the factory, like it was just sitting in an old factory then? Yeah, actually, I can tell you exactly what it was. The reason my guitar player was following these listings is he's a gratch guy. He was seeing this stuff that was being listed by a company called MusicalCloseouts.org or something like that. And every once in a while, he would see Slingerlin stuff. Well, as most of us know now, Fred Gretchen bought the Slingerlin name assets and holdings and it was in Ridgeline, South Carolina. Well, he said every once in a while that they would show Slingerlin stuff and then this stuff popped up. So I, you know, make arrangements with the guy from musicalcloseouts.org, had to pay for it before I got there with certified funds and it had to be off the premises December 21st. First of all, I said, well, where do I need to go? And he gave me the address, whatever it was, Kings Highway, Ridgeline, South Carolina. I go, dude, that's the gratch factory because you are to understand that you are not purchasing this from Gratch. This is from musicalcloseouts.org. Oh my gosh. And I go, okay, yeah, whatever. Yeah, who cares? So, so I had a buddy who was a truck driver. He said that's not that's because that's about 12 hour drive. I've been there before. Yeah. Yeah. So I rented a truck, drove it down to Ridgeline.  And there's another guy there. He bought some older drum shell manufacturing equipment, Slingerlin's production stuff from the 1920s. Wow. And yeah. And we got to talking and, you know, he, he bought that stuff and I bought the radio frequency stuff.  I don't have a place to put it. A buddy of mine, who's an electrical engineer says, well, you can put it in my pole barn and we'll take a look at it this spring. So spring comes along and he was a plant engineer at Dana Axel Corporation. And he said they used a lot of, a lot of similar equipment and heat treating and metal forging. And when he was in the Navy, he was a microwave sonar and radar technician. So he knew a little bit about it. And the first thing he said to me, he's, he says, well, I hope you didn't pay too much for it because something this specialized, you have to know how it works. And you don't have a schematic diagram and you don't have an operator's manual. He said, but you do have about $7,000 worth of scrap here.  So it's very worse. I could have scrapped it out and got my money back. Well, spring comes along and we're looking at skids of stuff, you know, the only thing that you could really recognize were the radio frequency generators and the molds. And it took us a couple of months to figure out what parts went where. Okay. So, you know, summer goes by and we're into the fall. We've got one machine kind of assembled and it works on industrial three phase power, which we didn't have, but we figured we could run it on single phase. Well, Jim calls me one day and says, I need you to come out here. I got something to show you. I get out to his pole barn and he's got the machine up and I noticed there was wiring going to it. And he says, flip the switch. And I flip the switch and the tubes come on, operates on tubes. And I go, wow, that's pretty cool. He goes, well, do you know how to make drum shells? I said, man, I don't have a clue. Well, that started the process of, well, drum shells are made of wood. Where do you get the wood? So we get into the end of the year and I kind of figured out that buying veneer was a learning experience. I actually found a guy here in Fort Wayne that had a cabinet shop and he had a whole, whole skid of veneer. He sold me for like 70 bucks, you know, four foot high and 10 feet long. So I started by putting veneer into the molds and glued them up with just regular wood glue. And boy, the process works. There's a, there's a inflatable bladder that drops down inside to put air pressure to it. And you're supposed to get a drum shell. Well, every time I turned the machine on, it would, all the red lights had come up and it would say plate overload and nothing. And this went on for a year, year and a half. Could never get it to do that without going into an overload. I'm about two years into this and it was failure after failure after failure. You know, we knew how the machines went together. We could get them to turn on, but you put wood and glue in it. And so I started, you know, started digging around on the internet and I couldn't find anybody that knew anything about manufacturing with radio frequency. What I could find was the company that manufactured these machines. I called them, they thought they had the schematics to them. They spent a couple of weeks looking and they informed me that those were on microfilm and they had a company fire a couple of years earlier and those were burned up in the fire. But she did say, she did say, I do know that Slingerlin had three of those machines and so did the Ludwig drum company. Well, I made a phone call to Ludwig and they weren't really interested in talking to me. No. Well, here, pause for a sec. Can you tell us how our radio frequencies use to actually make a drum shell? Yeah, let me, let me give you a real dissertation on that. What you're doing is you're taking, you're taking raw wood and if you know anything about woodworking, the moisture content is everything. So to have a stable wood piece, the moisture content needs to be 4% or below. Well, a lot of situations where I get it, it's much higher than that. Well, radio frequency is great for that. Plus, you need a glue and the glue has a catalyst in it that responds to the radio frequency and what the catalyst does, it distributes the radio frequencies equally through the glue, through the glue line. And the way, the way this works is every other piece has a glue line in it. And if you're making plywood, of course, to have your grain run the same way, it's an odd number of panels, okay? If you're using six plies, you have to invert one of the panels in order to make grain run the correct way. And I can elaborate on that later.  You can't just put it in and inflate it to something and you have to have a known PSI. Some of this stuff is real proprietary and I won't elaborate on that. Sure. Once you get your stuff into the mold, like I said, you've got up to a five minute cycle time and you have a microwave oven, right? What happens when you put your food in? The plate doesn't get hot, but anything that has moisture content gets hot. A radio frequency does the exact same thing. The radio frequency passes in a sine wave through the load in the mold and what it does is it cures out the glue line. It doesn't heat. It doesn't heat. Heat is a byproduct of the process and heat is a byproduct, steam is also a byproduct. So what comes out is a piece of molded wood, formed molded plywood and when it's done, it should have a relative moisture content of less than 4% and the glue lines are glued out and it's actually the best way to manufacture multiple pieces of wood. Like I said before, I started looking for everything I could find about radio frequency on the internet and I'm about two and a half years into this and I talked to some guys online and they give me little tidbits of information, but never enough to really help me. A lot of this stuff, there's a lot of math involved and I stumbled across a paper from the Library of Congress and it had something to do with a plywood company that helped engineer this process in the late 1930s and the process was for making flat plywood because prior to World War II, plywood was done in a cold press and the the warehouser wood company somehow got involved in this process and it was to make plywood for like the D-Day landing craft and for stuff for the military because they knew that it was going to be a war pretty soon and this information at one time was classified in top secret, which I thought was kind of interesting. So after World War II, manufacturing with radio frequency became a real common process in a lot of industries, most likely the wood industry and what's involved is to make use for making molded plywood products, which we hardly do any of in the United States anymore, and what you do is you take your wood panels, you press them together and most molds have a male and female part and you sandwich the plies in the glue between the you know the forms and then turn them out your piece when it comes off and it was used commonly for making molded plywood products. Now to make a drum shell it's a little similar to that except your male and female part is your exterior mold and your bladder. So I started piecing all this together and believe it or not, my daughter who was in middle school at the time was helping me with the mathematics because it has some complicated math. Yeah, what I was able to figure out is no matter what you're making there's a there's a formula for load resistance and load resistance has has to equal ohms value and so on and so forth and that was actually real crucial to know because one day I had my daughter out of the shop looking at this stuff and she said dad did you see this I said what and she found she found some mathematical equations on the inside of one of the machines and I said what is that she said well this is a this is an input formula for voltage to resistance to ohms and it gives you a gives you a maximum power output rating and I'm talking about a 10 year old kid. Wow. So like I said I started putting things together with the mathematic formulas I found in in the warehouser document and what my daughter was able to teach me and and then you know I get some news from my buddy Jim that he's retiring selling this farm and I needed to move my equipment so I had to disassemble everything move it out towards New Haven Indiana and I set up shop in the old international harvester factory it's like a big industrial park now and I'm I'm in the center section of it then about 5,000 square feet. One how I get set up out there and you know we fast forward to about 2008-2009 and my kids are getting older the demands of my corporate job are are much less and I've got a little bit of spare time I get out there every night trying to trying to make drums and I'm I'm still failing at this right so one night I'm out there waiting for my kids to get done with soccer practice and had a couple hours to kill and I put some wood and glue into the molds filled them up and then I thought well you know this thing has to work because I'm just doing something wrong and well you know you're you're in you're in a sound engineering and believe it or not I thought well when a when sound engineer walks into a room he's never mixed before he EQs everything flat you know he neutralizes every setting on the board and then he works from there so everywhere that I knew there was a calibration on a machine I put it I put it to right in the middle between zero and 10 and I thought well we'll start there did the whole thing like I've done at least 200 times before wooden glue inflate the bladders this time I hit the switch and no red lights all green lights the gauges come up and it's it's just making this humming sound and I'm going oh my god and then I then I put my hands on the mold and I go oh man it's getting warm and uh you know these machines have a five minute timer on them so I'm sitting there and I'm you know watching the timer it clicks off and the mold's warm I go to take the bladder out and I'm going oh man the bladders glued to the inside of the mold and I literally I literally had to puncture the bladder to get everything out wow well from there I knew well I know how I know I know this thing works so so I started really looking on where to get wood glue so on so forth I did a little bit of research and found out that there are certain glues out there that you use with radio frequency and there are certain glues that you don't well right around the corner from where I'm at was a guy who had a glue factory so I walked in there one day said look uh I've got this radio frequency stuff uh he goes yeah this is what you need you give me two gallons of glue and said take this and cry it and he explained to me that uh it has catalyst in it if it doesn't have the catalyst in it it won't react you'll end up with a mess which is what I had so I took the glue uh got into my skid of wood and dimensionally cut everything and uh believe it or not man that was the first drum shell come out pretty good so I started making shell after shell after shell and I said well you know piece and little pieces of veneer together there's got to be a better way to do it than this and eventually you know my contacts led me to a place that does rotary cut veneer you can buy it raw and have it cut to your specs and then when I stumbled into that I started making some pretty nice shells uh the problem I was having though was like I said the drum the machines have a five minute timer on it I know it works but I don't know how to calibrate the machine for each drum shell size sometimes it would take me an hour to make one drum shell I said man there's no way you ran a production with making one shell an hour so during this period of time I got with the Indiana Center of Small Business Development I started Stone Custom Drum as an LLC and I started the process to get the black oval and I with my first name show I maybe had 25 shells and fly out to Anaheim I got a booth I've got a table and stack them up on the table and got a banner hanging up and so I come in the next morning and my shells are scattered everywhere and I got figure prints all over them I'm like what the hell so I'm in I'm in the booth you know and people start drifting through and so I've got my little story I'm telling you know well you know I make drum shells and I thought there was an alternative to what's out there and and they would inevitably ask well did you make these yeah I made them well how'd you make them so well I purchased the original slingerland tooling man they their eyes get real big the next thing you know people are coming over and they're they're wanting to know the story I say yeah and then I think Rob Cooke was among them he says I had no idea you were the guy who bought this he says you know everybody wondered where it went from the old eBay auction I said well I've had it for some time and it's taken a while to put it together and make shells and now here I am well this was 2011 I kept going back to NAMM every year and year and first I started doing drum shells and then I did snare drums and and after first NAMM show I did a few shells for uh well I actually landed a big account for a company called Kala brand and I was building uh banjo ukulele shells for them for a couple of years cool and yeah that was I was doing okay with that and I'd get a lot of guys you know who were doing the color shell thing looking for something different and I underestimated I I assumed the need for boutique type shells was much larger because I what I was getting a lot of is one of this two of that one of this it's really hard to do that you know sure so I thought well next year I'm going to go back with snare drums so I did and guys are like why didn't know you built drums too oh yeah you know I've got a deep history in drum building well I ended up getting with some marketing people so we started marketing stone custom drum by this time I'd secured I'd secured the trademark for the black oval and and that they had no challenges uh no opposition uh you know at the time Gibson had owned slingerland so I researched all that heavily and I found out that you know that was open and available and was in a case of abandonment and my thinking was well you know I have a lineage to slingerland I should you know I should run with this yeah you know I'd also like to point out it was never my intention to be to be slingerland or be just like slingerland I just wanted to I just wanted the heritage aspect of it and to this point in time that's what I feel like I've done but you know I should probably I should probably back up a little bit after my first nam show that I told you I'd had some issues with making drum shells in five minutes I just got back from the nam show and a guy called me and said hey I understand you own the original slingerland tooling I say yeah that's right and he goes can you describe it to me I go well it's two Reeves RF generators uh they're about yay why gay big uh I've got a whole series of molds and bladders they look like this and he goes my god that's it and I said yeah why he goes well I'll have you know that when I was in college I worked at slingerland for a couple years I go really he goes yeah I go did you ever see this equipment in operation he goes yes I go did you ever operate any of this equipment he goes no do you know anybody who's ever operated this equipment he goes yes I go is that person still alive he goes yes that person is my dad and he ran a woodshop at slingerland for 22 years I said I need to talk to your dad I go do you live in Chicago he goes we live in Chicago so I had it over to Chicago I met Jim took him some shells and then uh I showed his showed his dad he's a very nice gentleman I said these are the machines I have I have questions so I started asking him and he would say have you ever done this I said yeah he says well when you do this you got to do this this and this so I started really taking notes and he says does the machine ever make this noise I say yes he goes when it does that you got to do this this and this and like I said I started putting everything together and when I when I got home from that trip to Chicago I drove straight out to the factory put some wood and glue into the molds bam I was knocking them out in three minutes that's awesome wow and uh Jim Moritz's dad had a couple of the key pieces of evidence that I needed and you know I may have stumbled into that later on but uh the stuff he told me was crucial in order to to run the shells the way I do that's funny I should say that that's Jim Moritz who was on a very early episode that everyone can check out I think it was called growing up slingerland and it was in the first five episodes um so that's Jim of Chicago drum great guy great family um so carry on just want to give Jim a shout out oh yeah well uh this same year like I said just got back from Nam and just got some crucial information from Jim Jim and his dad and then uh Rob Cook calls me and and he says you know uh you haven't been to the Chicago drum show in a while and would like to have you here and I said well I was planning on coming this year and he goes well good I'll get you a booth set up and would you like to you know give a presentation on on the equipment and I said yeah I'd love to so I did that and that kind of you know everything starts snowballing after after this and now everyone knows that I have the slingerland equipment and I'm getting more of these boutique guys who want shells and and so I'm doing okay and what I'm finding out is now I've got two machines up and running and I'm running out of space and I'm making a little bit of money and I'm buying more equipment and actually moved into a larger space at the industrial park then I go to another Nam show and this time you know I've got drum sets man I've got a full booth looks really really well and I'm up up in the middle where everything's happening and I'm picking up more and more clients and things have gone that way ever since pretty much that's how stone custom drum come about the ultimate goal for me was to uh you know have a brand that represents you know not only do I have the the DNA heritage of a great American company but I'm also not stereotype is that that I'm doing my own thing I believe I've kind of successfully done that because really you know I've got things that we started to refer to that nobody else does I refer to the three ply shell with the reinforcement rings as as a chicago style shell then I started doing the nile style shell which is a five ply maple poplar and and since since I started referring to the nile shell you know those two terms have become synonymous with my company now not only that I have several other shell platforms that I do uh I've got a seven ply that you know is based around a solid cherry uh center core with razor thin mahogany it ends up being seven ply and uh well and along with that I've done a lot of uh you know hardware fabrication the ultimate goal for me is have everything every nut and bolt manufactured in the united states yeah yeah and that kind of goes with that old school uh you know the way drums used to be where things would obviously be you know done a lot more in-house and not done as much overseas um and they're beautiful drums um which I recommend everyone goes online to your website um and check some out which that's stonecustomdrum.com correct right yeah and and there's some really cool pictures um it's wild how this is from the factory and just how you found how jim's dad was the guy who could help you because he had to be there because there was no other way to figure this stuff out my 10 year old daughter you know yeah you know first of all um I really love history and knowing that I own a crucial part of American drum history is huge for me and you know building my own brand and and having that dna legacy is also huge for me uh you know with the recent purchase of the slingerland brand name from gibson by dw and I didn't know why for the last couple of weeks but man my website has been has been getting hit real hard along with my facebook page and then when the news broke I guess it was two weeks ago monday man I found out like at eight oh five in the morning probably right after it was announced several people hit me up and did you hear this did you hear this and so I'm like well that's interesting well yeah let's talk about that because I'd love to get your opinion on that because obviously um well let me ask the first question was the slingerland name something you ever went after acquiring I know you've said you wanted to do your own thing and be your own company which you've successfully done did you ever want to try and become actually actually yeah I looked into it very seriously and what I found out was uh of course we know we all know how gibson was mismanaged and nearly run into the ground I actually had people in place at high levels that were feeding the information on all this at gibson so I got some inside information about it and plus all the all the documents that you could actually find if you research it online and what I found out was the brand named slingerland was tied up in in leans I guess you would say bank of america actually owned it we actually contacted bank of america and and the way my attorneys explained it to me they'll have a big garage sale of this stuff if whoever had it originally you know goes into failure or default so we tried looking at it at that angle and then uh as we all know uh jc curly stepped in uh they restructured gibson and from what I understand gibson's doing pretty good right now they sold off a lot of stuff that was dragging them down uh some of that was uh the warehouse in arkansas where a bunch of the radio king stuff was stored hmm from what I understand they had no idea they even owned that warehouse yeah that that's how much in disarray it was yeah it's such a I mean gibson's a mega company slingerland was a large company I you know that's kind of weird they don't know they have that stuff but I could see that where it's like oh yeah you can see that you know yeah now in the last couple years I've been relatively quiet about everything like I mentioned I took a corporate gig and two years ago I was severely injured on the job and I've had two major shoulder surgeries and it nearly cost me my business uh because at the time I was doing a lot of volume through sweetwater and you know without getting real into it I ended up losing sweetwater and I had about 50 grand out and man it nearly it nearly destroyed me yeah you know like I said I'm huge on the history thing and to lose this equipment as a business failure would have been real painful and but the easy thing to do would have been go bankrupt let the bank sell everything off you know change my name move to fiji never be heard from again right yeah of course I I take the hard path so in the last couple years I managed to sell off almost all of my pre-built inventory you know at one time I was able to have 10 guys on the shop floor uh right now it's just Jeff and myself you know I mean it was pretty hard hit to take oh sure and but but things are looking real rosy right now uh in the last week I've had several several people come at me about investment capital and oh so I'm yeah I'm looking at uh bringing in investment partners and expanding yeah well that's amazing because I guess you know I think when Slingerland or any company is in the news you're in the discussion and because it's the real deal equipment um now then the question would be what's your take on DW doing it what do you think how do you think that's going to go what do you what do you think about that whole thing actually you know my situation isn't too unlike DW's humble beginnings you know you remember they had they had what they thought was camco and they got into a legal battle with tama and it is the way it turned out you know DW ended up with the the hardware and all that stuff and tama just ended up with a name you know it's kind of that same situation you know DW makes a makes a fine product in the last couple years they've they've got a huge distributorship that there's several brands that fall under their umbrella uh you know john good has been very good about you know how they market DW that questions come at me and I'm I'm not really sure what to really think about it other than I know DW makes a high-end product and make a nice product they had humble beginnings like myself and then I get a lot of this well maybe you should work with DW well that's something I would consider now be quite honest with you I don't know that john good even knows who the hell I am yeah you know I mean that's that's a tough they've got a lot going on obviously but I'm thinking maybe they'll look deeper into the slinger lens stuff like that or maybe they'll just say we've got the name we're going to try and match the quality and build it in a similar way but um did slingerland always use the RF shell production yeah well that's a good question I mentioned earlier on that uh when I got down there a guy had purchased the uh the old uh cold form stuff and the weight the weight yeah the way that process worked is they they took a large you know a large tube mandrel and they just wrapped three plies around it and then wrapped a piece of canvas around it and let it sit till the glue dried wow slow process there I'm sure slow process yeah and that the way I understand it and this was from Jim Moritz and his dad was that system was being used up until about 1956 or seven uh Jim's dad was a little cloudy in what year they actually got the new RF equipment and Jim's dad also confirmed with me that they had three machines okay uh and he pointed out that the two machines I have were the best ones that's good and yeah and I also pointed out to him that I have what I think are the remnants left over from a third machine I have several parts and pieces that I know went to a different machine so now Jim's dad also pointed out that one of the machines went to Shelbyville Tennessee and for a while they built drums down there and the way I understand it they were three ply with oak reinforcement rings okay so the only thing I can you know demise from that is that you know that that didn't work out so well they got the machine back and uh took it out of commission and that's why I have spare parts well it's good to have a donor you know like donor parts because I don't think uh you're going to get on craigslist and find um parts for your Slingerland uh RF machine sitting around well you you know what uh the funny thing is like I mentioned in the 50s and 60s this was real common technology today it's not so common and to find anyone who knows anything about it uh they're either those guys are either in their 80s or they're dead yeah so uh I've probably I've probably become the country's foremost leading authority on manufacturing around plywood now now with that being said you know one of one of the things that was real fortunate that came my way was about a week after I got back from meeting with Jim Moritz I got a phone call and this guy says hey I need somebody to come over and tune a drum set for me and I go thinking to myself good lord I can walk you through that on the phone dude you know this drum set for my kid and uh I saw your ad and how much do you want I'll pay you whatever you want and I surely thought well nobody would give you a hundred bucks to tune a drum set right so I say yeah how about a hundred bucks he goes can you be here at noon tomorrow I said yeah all right yeah I find out he lives about a mile from me so I'm walking over and it's a pretty exclusive neighborhood and walking up the driveway there's a Ferrari in the garage I'm going man I should have charged you more money we get down to his uh basement and it was a pearl export kit and you know with the with the Paul Jameson rack and stuff and you know set it up and there's a nice array of zildjian symbols and you know he says yeah I paid like 2000 bucks did I get a good deal I said yeah man it's a great deal because there's three thousand dollars worth of zildjian symbols yeah yeah so I put them together and tuned them up and I'm sitting there kind of looking and I spotted a couple pieces of electrical equipment then I spotted an RF meter and I said hey uh I don't want to be nosy but what do you do for a living well he says I'm an electrical engineer and I specialize in microwave radar and uh radio frequency I said radio frequency he says yeah he says uh mainly uh security systems satellite systems RFID tags I go do you know anything about this I got my laptop out and showed him some pictures of the insides of one of the machines and man his eyes got really big he says those have tubes in them I said yeah he goes when can I see it I go anytime you want yeah so it turns out you know you're familiar with invisible fence the dog fences this guy basically invented it whoa yeah he's done really well for himself so this guy's a successful entrepreneur and he sort of took me under his wing and when he's seen the machinery he goes uh because you know I have an idea on how we could do this with another machine and so we started building solid state machines and I use them for uh I use them mainly for really large bass drums uh bass drum hoops and then we build a machine where uh we use RF and we have a handheld unit that I glue the reinforcement rings in because they don't have to sit all night man that's awesome you're kind of modernizing the process um it makes me wonder how many shells could Slingerland have been pumping out per day with the old RF machinery yeah Jim Jim Moritz his dad told me uh on a good good day man he could make a hundred uh hundred shells a day himself wow and if you've got three machines in operation you know you're knocking out 300 shells a day that's that's some serious demand yeah exactly and this would have been at the peak of that kind of like gene group uh drummers or the celebrity kind of uh era right but what what I'd also like to point out is I can do stuff that fast also but let's step back in time uh the build quality on a lot of that stuff isn't like the build quality that I'm expected to produce yeah so yeah I mean build quality is much more you know much more proficient nowadays when you're competing with uh hand-built stuff and stuff like say what DW and Ludwig produced today I mean it has to be top notch yeah so me cranking out a hundred snare drums in an afternoon well I could do it but you know build quality is not going to be there geez yeah you know one one of the other things I do is uh I do uh you're familiar with the old Brooklyn style Gratch yep I'm an OEM manufacturer for a company who sells sells those type of drums and they hit me every once in a while with big purchase orders and I've actually I've actually run 65 shells in a six hour period start to finish myself and that's that's that's cutting the wood making the shells uh sanding them and putting them in the box oh man it's just you better focus and get it done yeah that particular shell is really hard to make because you have to steam bend you have to steam bend the maple first and yeah well one of the one of the other things with the radio frequency equipment is instead of taking days and weeks for a steam bent piece to cure out you can do it in 15 minutes gosh you can cycle yeah you can cycle it three times and it's done I mean again that's just so cool and and it helps you stand out to by using that process as kind of your thing because if no one else is doing it that's really cool well I was going to say that the only two companies in the world that are even doing it are myself and Ludwig so Ludwig still does it is that correct yeah down in a row yeah wow okay well that's good to know yeah because I've the the the process of creating the actual shell I know a lot of companies don't even do it they use color they use things like that so it's it's cool to know that you know the DW process is real similar to what Tama and what they were doing at uh Sakai and those molds are heated like a george form and grill and what they do is they put a a heat set type of resin in with the wood panels and that's how they're done the big difference is you know you're baking something in that situation more or less and what I'm doing is you know I'm passing radio frequency through it and I'm actually drying the product and drying the glue line at the same time so those would be the main differences that's interesting well um as we wrap up here I should tell people that they can um like I said before they can find you online at stonecustomdrum.com and I'm assuming you're going to be at the Chicago drum show this year yeah again which will be the 30th anniversary um which is in May of 2020 so um that's where you and I met originally and I think people can find you and check the drums out and and all that good stuff and just to wrap up I think from what I heard it sounds like there's not hard feelings with the slingerland thing I in my opinion it's better that it's just gonna come back rather than sit in limbo and just be in you know the closet of Gibson forever right I don't know if you agree with that it's just it seems like there's such a shame for it to be wasted well everyone's familiar with DW yeah I think however they approach it you know whatever their slingerland product will be you know will be a nice top-notch product yeah you know it might not be a period correct like mine and like I said you know I never set out to be slingerland yeah exactly I'm just happy to have a lineage to the company DW stuff I'm sure is going to be great I hope they do it right and it's not like sometimes you think of like a band who broke up 30 years ago coming back and starting to release albums it's like it's never quite I don't think I think slingerland's got it's it's history and it was there and then what happens in the future will be it'll be new slingerland and I mean Rogers is coming back with new Rogers stuff so it's well I was I was going to point that out that you know the new Rogers stuff is really pretty nice yes yeah you know it's not quite exactly like the old stuff but I don't know do you really want it made like it was in 1965 exactly it's that was then this is now like I said today we expect better build quality out of everything so yeah yeah awesome well again Bernie Stone stone custom drum Bernie thanks for being on the show today I've had a blast talking with you and learning about your process and it's fascinating it's science right yeah actually there's a lot of science involved and anyone who wants to set themselves apart from being just a boutique Keller guy no matter what you're doing look at look at the science go back to your physics classes and whatever everybody else is doing look at that with a skeptical eye and you know design your product around what you know what you're good at and basic science yeah science and history are the two things that have kept me through this whole thing just yeah turning away at it so perfect well this show is all about history and this falls right in there so all right Bernie then I will I will see you with the Chicago drum show in May and we'll get some pictures with the drums and thanks again for being on the show look forward to seeing you then and I'm pretty excited about hearing the podcast oh yeah people are gonna love it all right bye bye bye Bart I want to give a huge shout out to my good friend Afonso Penne of Delta percussion in Rio de Janeiro Brazil he pretty much instantly became a top tier patron on the patreon page also shout out to his wife Simone his father-in-law Manuel who started the drum shop and he's got a baby girl named Elena on the way so if you're in Brazil in the Rio de Janeiro area you should head over to Delta percussion it's been around since 2006 has one of the largest selections of drums heads sticks everything percussion in that area and it's just a big family so head over there and tell them that drum history sent you


Look guys, the internet is filled with all these lists of the blank number of habits of highly successful people. Now following in line here I figured I'd share my own BS list of the XYZ habits of highly successful people. But specifically, this comes from not only reinventing my own life and focusing on the worst habits blocking my fulfillment and success and happiness, but on top of that, this is based off of coaching hundreds of people in their 20s to help them have some self-insight into what was holding them back. So let's jump in and I want to share these 21 habits. What's up guys? Alex Heim, author of the book Master the Day. Now if you are interested in being more successful and kind of plowing forward in your life, check out the free goal-setting worksheet in the description. It's going to help you plan out how to have your best year ever and the exact rituals and goals to help you do that. You'll also get an email every three days on goal-setting advice that you can use right away. So check it out right there in the description. Rule number one, to live an uncommon life, do what most people are unwilling to do. By definition, if you do what every guy does in the bar to try to get a girl, you're not going to get a girl. If you do what every other person does to try to get a raise at their work, you're not going to get a raise. To become the uncommon, do what very few are willing to do. Number two is produce instead of consume. The reason I've gotten to where I am now is because all day when most people consume the news, the media, YouTube, blogs, podcasts, I produce media. Spend your day producing works, producing creative things, producing something new in the world rather than consuming. Number three, be faith and excitement driven, not fear driven in life. Most of us are driven by fear. We get married not because it's the right person, but because it's the right time and we're afraid. We get this job because the fear of not being able to pay our rent rather than the love of I love this field so much. Be driven by excitement and love, not by fear. Number four, the perfect time is right now. Remember you said you were going to start learning salsa lessons? Remember you said you were going to work on that introverted trait of not being so comfortable meeting people in public areas? Remember you said you were going to get fit or start the business or write the book? Well guess what? The perfect time is right now. Rule number five is to do what you love with an asterisk on that. When you talk to many, many highly successful people, you will not hear that they do what they love. But you talk to many, many, many other successful people, you will hear they do what they love. The difference is you always want to show up for the 10 hour a day job you will have even if you don't like it for the next 60 years. You've got to show up to work somewhere. It might as well be doing what you at least enjoy because then you can focus on being really, really successful.  There's a lot of people I know that do what they love but they are lying to themselves because they are not doing the work required to be successful at what they love. It doesn't mean if you do what you love you're never going to work.  It's just going to be a lot easier to be successful because you'll put in the time required to actually be great. Rule seven, outlast everyone else. For me building my business, it was very unsexy and uneventful. It took three years to quit my day job to even make a low income to replace it.  When are you going to stop shooting videos on the internet? Well, five years later now, I'm the one who's laughing and smiling and it's just begun. I can't imagine 10 years from now. Sometimes all you have to do is outlast everyone else. Rule eight is to be the exception. This goes with rule one. If you want the life that only 5% of humanity has, you have to live like them in terms of their habits. So if you want to be the exception in terms of your financial life, what are your friends doing that is giving them average results? How can you save or earn more money in terms of habits they're not doing? If you want an exceptional relationship or marriage, look at the habits of the average or bad marriages or relationships and do the opposite. Study in terms of practical habits and philosophies. What does the average person do? What does the exception do? Rule nine is let your work speak for itself. Early in my business career where I didn't have any success to show, I was always eager for my ego to get validated to say, oh, look what I had done, like this little snotty little type A kid that wanted to get validation from the world. But if you can be so intensely focused on your life improvement and your mission that it doesn't matter if it takes five years for a world to see what you've done or 10 or 20 years, that's great because you don't have to prove anything and you'll put your head down and do the damn work to become the best.  Rule 10, don't try to impress anyone else other than your own soul. Any goal you try to achieve for anything other than your own soul, you will regret because you're doing it to compensate emotionally for some other core need you have not met in childhood or adulthood. Do not do anything to improve mommy or daddy. Guess what?  Don't do it to improve friends, family, spouse, anything. Do it for yourself. Rule 11, review your goals every single day. Sometimes the simplest things are the things that work the best. And I know for a fact that most of humanity does not have a little piece of paper with the goals they're currently working on and the game plan to get there. If you just do that, you're already ahead of 99% of people. Rule 12, when the wolves come run against the hermit. You know, most people when adversity comes, when the wolves come and they attack the flock of sheep, all the sheep run. But the sheep dogs, they run towards the danger. The sheep dogs run to protect the herd. So when the wolves come, when adversity comes in your life, look at how other people crumble and that's the time you have to decide to be brave and make the hard decision. Whether it is taking the extra job, whether it is getting up earlier and feeling cranky, but you have to do it to live a better life, whatever it is, when adversity comes, while the sheep run, you need to be that sheep dog that runs towards the wolves, towards the danger, towards the adversity. Rule 13 is to follow your gut and also follow logic. I'm a big believer in a career with Freud who said that in the small matters of life, follow logic. But in the big matters, like in the choice of a career or calling and the choice of a life mate or partner, choose following your gut. It doesn't mean that you ignore your logic in these things in life. It means your intuition should have a recognition. I really do feel like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, this career. I really feel like this person, this is it. I just feel it. There's no cold feet. Rule 14, don't push work, love, or friendship that isn't already working. Along the lines of following your gut, if you're with friends and you always have to do something for it to work. If you're in a career and it's just like this never-ending push, if you're dating someone and it's just like the pieces just don't fit, don't push it, move on. Rule 15, if you think about success and growth every day, that's what you'll get. I was listening to this interview that was based around Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in the world at the time or maybe the richest. And he said that if we think about what we want, think about the difference here. I have employees that work for me that say they would, they just want to make a living. They just want to get their days worth, their money's worth. So every day their affirmation is that I just want to make a living. So where do they get paid? The bare minimum to live. But if they said I want to make this much money to live my awesome life, I want to increase my income every year, that's also what happens. So if you focus on just making enough versus I want to increase every single year. Those two things will both happen. Rule 16 is to recognize the signs of overwork. The signs of overwork typically are mood changes and personality changes and then sleep changes. So when I noticed in my entrepreneurial journey that I was becoming someone who was a little bit more serious and snippy and irritable and harder, it would felt harder to feel emotions. That was a red flag that I had been overworking for way too long. I've been ignoring how my internal insights felt and I had to pull back. And I was having sleep problems. Pay attention to those two things cause those are your canaries and the coal mine. Rule 17 is to make sure to take regular time off to disconnect from work and allow new intuitions and hunches to come to you. Like a lot of other people I found that my best ideas for how to improve my life come when I'm not in my life. When I'm on a beach in Thailand with my girlfriend and I'm reading a book on how to just think about the things that I want to build in my life. There's that space, we're having fun, I'm getting a lot of sleep, new ideas come and that is the impetus for improving my life. Rule 18 is to follow a simple set of virtues. John Templeton was a billionaire investor but the thing I admire the most about him was the fact that he had long marriages, he conducted himself well in life, was a religious ethical man, was someone who tithed and gave generously financially and someone who just was not swayed by materialism despite that incredible wealth and despite being around people that flaunted their wealth. So have your own virtues and stick by them because that will make you a rare individual. Rule 19 is hang around people who are growth oriented. At the end of the day, if you hang around people who are just achievers, you'll probably become an achiever but the other spots of your life may suffer. What you want is to hang around people who are oriented around growth. They want to get better. There's nothing wrong with those friends that want to hang out and drink beer and play World of Warcraft or watch the sports game but the problem is every year they're the same person and you want to be a new person every year that's gotten better. Rule 20 and if you don't know anyone who's growth oriented, start your own wolf pack. In my mid-20s I started a weekly mastermind call with four or five friends who are both growth oriented and business owners and every single week we talk for an hour on what the goals were working on, what struggles come up and how we can improve this following week.  Rule 21 is that you are the most successful person that has ever lived but if you don't believe it, you'll never try. At the end of the day, a lot of us don't go after that thing we feel like is our calling in life because of fear. All kinds of different fears but ultimately it's fear and every successful person, every fulfilled person, every person that's fulfilling their potential in life that you admire was once in the same boat as you are afraid to do that thing for whatever reason, whatever story they told themselves. But you already are the chosen one. The path is there for you. You have to follow your intuition and you have to have the courage to follow it because you may not be able to explain that to other people but following that intuitive gut hunch and being brave is what will make the difference between you becoming the kind of person you can become but you can't listen to fear. So if you don't believe that there is some mission there for you you've been given, you'll never try.  If that's what you want, great.  Those are my 21 rules that I wish I knew in my 20s. And again, click the first link in the description for a free goal setting worksheet to plan out having an awesome year. You're also gonna get a weekly email on how to use goal setting to radically change your life. So check it out the first link in the description and then my most recent video there and the related one right there.


All right, good morning, cyber traders. Happy Friday, everybody. Oops, looks like I got my camera all wrong here. Hold on one second, let me just fix that. All right, there we go. A different setting's going on here. Hold on one second fellow traders. All right, let's see if that worked. Yep, there we go. All right, just wanted to do a quick audio check. Everybody hear me okay? Just give me a chat back. Good, good, good. All right, everybody, well, welcome back everyone. Happy Friday. I'm always excited, I love Fridays because weekends here, we get a couple of stocks that make us some decent moves. It's been overall a pretty good week on certain stocks. A lot better than last week though. And one thing that was really exciting today is you know what, Josh came to local, came down and we had a nice little dinner. I want to kind of share that with you before we start going through the watches. Here is a little photograph, you guys can see us on my Instagram. I don't know if anyone saw that. Josh, there you are, there we are, have it. And somebody should probably, a lot of you probably should know where we are, we're at that famous restaurant. If you came to onsite, Sandro's, but they made that nice fresh pasta. So he came down there, yeah, it's pretty cool. So good to see, see, see, you know, Josh coming down. Rich couldn't make it, unfortunately. He had to, you know, so he was a little bit out east, but that's fine. We'll go from there. You know, he had to get his teeth cleaned, but I don't want to ruin his pearly whites, if you know what I mean. I told him I was going to abuse him today, he didn't show up. But anyway, let's get right in to see what's moving on this morning. Anyway, what happened yesterday? A couple of good little stocks that made some nice moves. It was overall a pretty decent day. Bitcoin obviously, you know, hold back right now is below 67,000. Listen, the thing ran up like ridiculous, almost like 20,000 dollars, you know? So with that, everything else came down with it. Coin obviously trades almost exactly to the T with it. That came back down. CLSK, you know, you could have got to short on that one too. So a lot of these stocks are trading side by side with Bitcoin. Those all did pretty good. And honestly, it was a couple of cheap little stocks that moved pretty nicely early this morning. You know, yesterday, 8 p.m. was one of them. That one, you could see it. Not bad, five dollars to nine dollars. That was a nice little move early month. Mover, made you money, boom. I really like this one too, the PBM, which was obviously was pretty good right there. PBM was obviously a really nice move. Dollar stock to $1.80. Nice, slow, steady moving stock. That was pretty awesome. Kind of like that one too. And then what else we had that moved up pretty nicely. Oh yeah, the MDAI, which moved up pretty decent. It's moving up again this morning. This stock is obviously still going on the watch list. I think it's not going. This one also moved pretty nicely. MDAI was a really, really nice pop. And it's going back on the watch list today. It's moving, the AI stocks are obviously they're moving and then some of them backing off. Some of them are moving up again. So they're all looking pretty good right there. All right, so going through a couple of stocks that are moving this morning. They, I went, there's a couple of them that are a pretty decent gurn on it. This one, I don't know what the story is. It's kind of like not doing anything in pre-market. It's kind of flat over here. So kind of like, kind of like not really the stock I want to look at, even though it is the big percentage gain or almost looks like a buyout actually, but I don't really like that one right there. This one's a lot better though. The GTAI is moving up really, really nice. Now I'm looking over here on some orders and what I've seen here, let me bring it up over here and show you what we got. So this one has some pretty good iceberg orders over here. It looks like it's testing this dollar order over here. You know what? It's another AI stock. It's another AI, let me just take a little bit. All right, there's another AI stock. So it's like always finding a new AI stock that's moving. If it was BB AI and GX AI from the day before, now we're getting another one out there. So this one is going on the watch list, the GTAI. This one's a nice little mover right here. And you know what? If it holds its support levels right around here at a dollar, it could probably make a good decent move. It's also traded over 21 million shares. It's the biggest percentage gainer and number two on the second biggest percentage gainer and the number one biggest volume leader on the exchange. Another one that's also looking like it's moving a pretty good two this morning too is this one right here, CDXL. Let me bring up to see what's going on CDXL, I mean LX. So it's kind of like did a lot of its pre-market. I guess it's an earnings announcement right there. There is a 10,000 share buyer that showed up here at 11.50. You could see them right here down at the bottom. Not really seeing too much up there. You know what? I'll put this on the B list. I don't like to how it's trading pre-market right now, CDLX. So that one, I'll probably put it on the B list. STI was a nice little pop yesterday.  That was also a nice little mover. She's moving again this morning. The only thing I don't like about it is once again, we like stocks to have a consistency of been trading for a while. This stock obviously because it was a new IPO, came back down, but STI, you know what? Good volume. Got to see what's going on here on the orders too. STI. So a couple of big orders that did just show up right here.  Couple orders starting to show up here at $2. Some guy just pulled his order for several thousand right here at $1.45. So it looks like it has a good, pretty good iceberg orders. I kind of like that one too. So that one way to keep an eye on that. It is Friday, so we want to be careful on that too. All right, what else have we got here? MDI, we already know about that one. We put that one on the watch list again. AKBA, not too crazy about that. We're at 16%. Once we get close to about 10%, we pretty much want to end it. WW, not looking too well right here. Is that Weight Watchers? No, it can't be, is that Weight Watchers? No, no, WW International. That one's not looking too good, but it's up a little bit today. And VDO, we traded that. Roma, we traded that a while ago. Yeah, everything else doesn't look good, pretty good there. The stock is taking a big hit right now. No, we're not going to be trading this one. Can't short it.  I haven't seen that in a while. Wow, Adobe had a really, really big, big support levels right here, so it's expensive, but I'm putting it on the watch list. ADBE, ADBE, let me see, it's going to take a while to load up the level four on it. ADBE, let me look it up right here. Let me see what I got right here on Adobe. Yeah, there's a big buyer right here, 500. You can see them right there for 3,000. That's not a lot, okay? But we're going to keep on that. Adobe shares are trading lower if a company reported first quarter financial results. Diane, it's okay. Well, is the news on it. We just posted up there for everyone to see in the side of the group room. And if you are in our social media, oh, thanks a lot, Rich, for posting that up there. Good, all right. Anyway, we're at a big support levels with Adobe. First of all, I don't know about you, but I was a huge fan of Adobe. We use their products, but they're really expensive. I mean, they were probably the smartest person that started getting into the residual business instead of buying the platform like Microsoft did, but they're getting really expensive all of a sudden. But I remember this stock a couple of years ago was like $80. So it's been a really, really good swing trade. New York Stock Exchange, what's going on over here? Anything over there? Nothing there looks attractive. One stock I do wanna bring up that is also very, I wanna keep a close eye on is this one right here is Tesla, okay? So Tesla right here, you could see it, I noticed some people here that own Tesla, and I just wanna make this comment about it. Right now, there's a 66,000 shares buyer out there. Yesterday, I posted a picture of, do I still have it up there? Should I still have it? It was from yesterday. Where is it? Do I still have it? Is that it? Oh, that's lately that night. Anyway, I posted, there was a half a million share buyer at 160. So that is a very, very big, big support levels. So if you're looking at that stock right now, you know, that's really, really, really a good buy if it holds there, like anything else. So I would keep an eye on that stock right there, Tesla. Right there, there we go. And you can see it's kind of hovering right around that 162. This is a very, very, very critical number right here. Another stock that I think we're all also keeping an eye on too was Apple. I don't know if anyone's been watching, you know, I did a really, a really cool short on that. I posted two big shorts. We'll post the link up in there again. So I'm ready to post up that Instagram one of that real and on the YouTube, actually, that Apple had a really big, big buyer at 170. And it was kind of holding there for a while. And sure enough, you could see it's at 173. Another very, very important number. So these numbers are very, like some people always think like, is it too late to buy it? Are they gonna continue to go higher? Listen, it's all about having, you know, getting at a good price, you know, and you didn't want, as much as let's say Apple will go to 200, because 200 was a very, very big resistance levels on that one too. But you know what, with this opportunity to buy something that you always wanted to get, just be patient, know where those iceberg orders are and then go from there. Now regarding a couple of the stocks that some of you guys are bringing up into Cyber Group Room, I want to just show that. F, was it, Kathleen says FCX. So FCX has been a really good swing trade also, but as a day trade, you know, obviously not really that, not so much. Ted GXAI has, you know, it's kind of flat, Ted. Nothing really much going on out there. So I would probably say no. So that's the link right there for some of you on that YouTube channel. If you want to watch something about the iceberg orders, that I did a really good video on that. And I know a lot of you here are also trial members that joined us this past week. It's funny how most people started to realize, wow, it's not really that complicated, just follow orders. Just see where the big block orders and have a game plan. Cause that's our motto, that's our style. Because when you trade, you gotta know where the orders are. Don't try to outsmart everyone else. But let's get ready for the market, open up, listen, it's Friday. We always warn you about Fridays, it's the weekend. A lot of people don't like to come out with big news. Earnings are really not as much on the weekends. Companies don't like to come out with news going into a weekend. Friday afternoons are pretty good. So if something does come out news, we do get good movement. So Friday mornings, just be very, very careful. Just focus on the nickels and dimes, like we always say, all right? So once again, make sure you subscribe to the channel. If you're watching on social media, you can get your phone, you can scan that QR code at top left hand side. You can join us all day long. In the meantime, cyber traders, if I don't see you, I'll see you back on Monday. In the meantime, we'll start commentary once the market opens up in about 15 minutes. So don't go anywhere. Good luck, everyone.


Everybody for us tier ripping 21 22 upper deck artifacts hockey hobby 5 bucks number 4 random team style I'll show you the results of late and sports cards or you see the late and sports cards calm There's a Lincoln chat And here they are for you. Let's get started. I want to one of you nice. We had two Bruins to 10 in the last break so God Sabres Jack Eichel to 499 Sabres Eichel. Oh boy. No hitter No hitter before Forsberg Flyers to 499 Miro Heiskenin stars to 599 Nice Heiskenin Let's get those football breaks filled up everybody Spectra 2021 Spectra random teams and the Sunday fun day football mixer to 75 Drake Batherson Senators Which has 2020 flawless 2021 flawless 2020 and 2021 National Treasures. It's got 2021 select 2018 contenders 2019 contenders 2021 contenders rookie for the Knights is Pavel Dora Fayev or Dora Fayev. It's got signed helmets. It's got elite. It's got luminance. It's got Artifacts jersey rear one sweaters Ty Smith devils. We got gold standard first off the line immaculate collegiate first off the line It's a good one you guys dual patch rookie auto Panthers Gregory Denisenko 37 of 45 Nice hit Panthers Recolor patch of the right there game worn Player worn nice Denisenko. Good stuff, man NHL remnants for the pens Chris LaTang This has been a really good case for autos got Yann Yannick or Yannick 2 of 2 of 99 coyotes rookie You don't like that. There's two teams named the Panthers in North American sports Lightning dual jersey Andre Pilata 249. There's two Cardinals also Dual jersey Keynes Dougie Hamilton 15 of 15. Oh, I did I did randomize nine times. We're gonna have to go to six then The results are wrong. Yeah, the results are wrong We have to go to six then So I'll re show them here one sec guys. I'm very sorry about that let me just Actually, let me just delete it. So the results are wrong. Let's delete that Gonna have to go I'm gonna show you guys right here This is gonna stay under the camera right there, but I'm also gonna screen share It's gonna be on the overhead. I'm gonna screen share right here We're gonna copy it over so Here are results again from this random I rolled a six we can go back you can go back and see that I did roll a six. I randomized nine times and just now realized So we had it here, but we need to go to six because we randomized supposed to be six times here So I'm just gonna copy everything and move it over and then Those are your results guys Right there So Peter H. Sabres, Kerry K. Jets, Scott F. Nights, Kirk L. Rangers, Justin T. Hawks D-Woo, Canucks, Von B. Leafs, D-Woo, Caps, Paul P. Bruins, Jimmy T. Kings, D-Woo, Pens Brandon T. Preds, Von B. Oilers, Candler S. Flames, Brandon A. Starrs, Kevin P. Flyers, Brandon T. Islanders Kevin P. Wilde, Kevin L. Dux, Farhan, Lightning, Hank B. Yotes, Kraken, Candler S. Avs, Brandon T. Sends, Jeffrey R. Sharks Brandon T. Blues, Lewis S. Canes, Timothy M. Redwing, Stephen K. Bluejackets, Jeffrey R. Panthers, Brandon A. Devils, and Scott F. With Montreal. I'm gonna repost this I'm sorry guys. That is my mistake. That is my blunder But that's correct right there. I did roll a six. You can rewind the stream and look at it I just put the wrong number in I guess Sorry guys Yeah, I'm sorry guys I didn't I'm not intentionally doing this Didn't intentionally do that. I would not do that But here you go again I'm sorry Kirk Yeah, Kirk. I'll I'll get you some break credit, buddy. I'm sorry, man Yeah, I'm sorry guys No, thank you for letting me know. It's even if if it didn't get done now. It just would have gotten worse I'm sorry guys Let's keep going. I'll get you some break credit, Kirk. I'm lint home for the flames I'll send you an email after the break too Uh, Muzzin for the Leafs to 99 So the results are correct on the site now Um, and that was them right there guys Uh, Barthol Islanders to 499 I am sorry about that Artifacts McKinnon to 499 For the abs nice one abs Wade Allison flyers rookie to 999 Oram for the wild Carioca presolve A rookie clear card here is Valeno for the for the red wings Red Wings jersey Dylan Larkin Good box for the red wings Got Cary Price jersey for the canadiens nice Cary Price A Lucas Raymond dual jersey rookie auto red wings nice hit red wings two out of 35 Dual jersey devils Nico he sure to 249 Jersey car Dubois for the jackets A Hendrix LaPierre rookie to 999 for the capitals Got devils Bernie Nichols to 499 March of salt base Threads threads threads of time Taylor Hall Oilers Taylor Hall Threads of time Patrick Lynae Jets Jack Eichel for the Sabres on the jersey Carioca presolve the 599 wild Jamie Drysdale rookie for the Ducks to 65 Spencer Knight rookie to 499 for the Panthers And Anton Lindell rookie for the Panthers to 999 Rookie devils Dawson Mercer to 999 Let's get these football mixers filled up guys or these football breaks filled up Jack Eichel Sabres to 499 here was just still 17 Jersey card coyotes Clayton Keller A Spencer Knight rookie to 999 for the Panthers Adrian Kempeh Kings the 85 Rookie Ross Colton lightning to 999 Stars Pavelski to 499 Devils Ty Smith to 499 Look at that quad jersey for the um For the Ducks here you got John Gibson Sam Steele Troy Terry and Cam Fowler to 999 That's pretty cool There you go Ducks That'll do it. Let's do a quick recap We had the Quad Ducks Relic there Keller for the Yotes Eichel Sabres Lynae Jets Taylor Hall Oilers Heesher dual jersey devils Pure Luke Dubois for the Jackets Kerry Price Montreal God Dylan Larkin Red Wings Dougie Hamilton Hurricanes Andre Pallott Lightning Chris Letang Penguins Ty Smith Devils Dennis Sanko dual patch auto to 45 for the Panthers And Alugus Raymond dual jersey auto red wings to 35 And that is going to do it. Thanks again everybody We got football coming up next