All right, we are live, I think. So welcome everybody to the almost last talk of the summit. Congratulations to those of you that made it this far and are still standing upright. We're going to talk a little bit about Interoperability Day and the mechanics of how we go about determining what goes into OpenSec's Interoperability Guidelines. So let's start off with a little background about why we care about all this in the first place. So if you've seen some of the material published by the TC, you know that OpenSec aims to be a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds, regardless of size, yada, yada, yada, right? Perhaps inherent in that ambition is the promise of some level of interoperability. So if we're using this thing to build lots of different clouds and lots of different kinds of clouds, part of the promise there is that we'll have some level of interoperability between them. And that's one of the benefits that you get by using it. So hopefully a code that you write up against one set of capabilities, APIs, et cetera, works on many different places, right? Well, as it turns out, clouds that on some level are the same, that are built from the same code, can wind up acting and looking very differently from one another. OpenSec has a whole lot of nerd knobs. This stat is a little out of date now, but as of late 2015, there were over 4,600 config options in just the TC approved release projects. So not counting some of the ones that aren't as widely deployed, but are still important to some people, right? And there were over 1,000 policy.json configurations, and that's just the ones that ship in the defaults, right? In default packaging, we can add more. So obviously a whole lot of flexibility in the way you control your cloud. And then it turns out people also put things in front of their clouds and on top of their clouds, things like firewalls, load balancers, API gateways, all kinds of stuff that goes between you and a cloud. And then mechanics of what's under the hood obviously can change behaviors as well. Different hypervisors support different image formats. Different storage has different capabilities. Different SDM platforms have different capabilities. And of course there's many different kinds of workloads that use different clouds in different ways as well. And at the end of the day, what developers want is to build a right code against all of that. So let's talk about the vendor perspective first. So most people that are using OpenSec Clouds today are getting them from a vendor, whether it's a distribution, a managed service, or even a public cloud. So vendors increasingly need to be aware of the interoperability concern. And it's something we've seen starting to crop up in some of the talks we've had with consumers of OpenSec as well. First of all, it's good for the users of the products. It helps promote the product. And it helps applications to be developed on the platform. Fostering an ecosystem around OpenSec is probably the most important thing that we can do for OpenSec in terms of its traction in the rest of the world. And by the way, it's now required if you want to call your product OpenSec. This is what we do not want developers to have to write ever. If OpenSec Clouds have no level of interoperability, this is what you wind up doing. Just to get a list of images, you might have to go through a five or six line deep if else loop to figure out what works on your given cloud. And keep in mind that that may change over time as well. As new API versions roll out, as different vendors move faster than others and adopting new releases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is a bad developer experience of what we do not want. So what's in a guideline? We mentioned interoperability guidelines. That's kind of the premise of the talk here. Interoperability guidelines are produced by the interoperability group of which I'm the co-chair. They list the capabilities that products calling themselves OpenSec have to support, the tests they must pass in order to prove it, and a list of designated sections of the OpenSec code that they must use to provide those capabilities. So basically, there's three important facets here. One is a list of things that a cloud has to do that end users can use. Two is a list of tests they have to pass so that they prove that they do it in the same way as others. And third is a list of code that they have to use to back back capability so that users know they're actually getting OpenSec code and not some strange Java fork of OpenSec that implements the API. And there's also a few other things in the guidelines. There's a list of exceptions, things that we found problems with, and things that might be required in the future so that you can start looking ahead to what you may be able to consume in an awkward way in the future. Keynes guidelines, they roll out every six months. They are offset from OpenSec releases by a couple months so that each guideline covers three and a half releases. Basically, because of that offset, when we roll out a new guideline, we will approve it for the current head in master and that will become a new release before the next guideline rolls out. The newest two can be used by vendor if they want a logo or trademark agreement from the OpenSec foundation. So when we talk about what's in the interoperability guidelines, we also have to talk about what's not in the interoperability guidelines. So some things that you will never find in interoperability guidelines are stuff that end users don't see or can't use. These are primarily focused on end users of clouds because that's the purpose that it was created for.  These are things that users can't see and don't consume directly. Obviously, it supports what they're doing, but these are not things that consumers of a cloud would touch. So you won't find those in the guidelines today. You also won't find stuff that's intentionally made pluggable by OpenStack. So for example, you will never see an OpenStack guideline that requires KVM or requires OpenV switch or requires some particular storage platform. Those are all things that OpenStack intentionally abstracts from the user. So when we look at capabilities, if we find out that gosh, of the 80 sender drivers out there, this capability is only supported by three of them, probably never gonna make it into a guideline. Needs to be stuff that actually works across what's under the hood. Because again, that's not directly exposed in users. You also won't find stuff that doesn't have tests. Remember earlier, it's great to say that you support these things, but we also need a test to ensure that that behavior actually works across clouds. And you also usually won't find stuff that's being deprecated. Occasionally what we find is that stuff that is on the path to deprecation stays there for a long time to give the sort of tooling ecosystem around OpenStack a chance to adapt to whatever's coming next. So these may stick around in the guidelines temporarily, but they'll generally have some kind of flag or disclaimer in there, a warning about that. So how do we decide what goes into these things? At the end of the day, it boils down to three important things. First, there's a list of 10 guiding principles. There's a list of 12 core criteria, and then there's this giant list of tests. So all the tests that you see run in the OpenStack gates are potentially a fair play for this. We look primarily at what's in Tempest. We've also had some interest in using in-project tree tests that have a Tempest plug-in interface, but primarily we look at Tempest first. And we'll also mention that new capabilities have to go through an advisory phase. Basically the first time they go into one of these guidelines that rolls out every six months, they're marked as advisory, and that's kind of a signal to the rest of the community. Hey, if you're a vendor or an OpenStack employer or an OpenStack end user, this is something that's gonna be required in the future. So if, for example, you are making an OpenStack-powered product, this is something that you're gonna be required to expose your users at some point in the future. If you're a consumer of clouds, this is something you can count on being interoperable in the near future. So the most important of those is probably the interop criteria. So let's take a look at these. Like I say, there are 12 criteria. They're kind of lumped into four different buckets here, and you can see kind of in the circle in the center there what they're sort of attempting to prove. So for example, one of the things that we want is capabilities that show proven usage. So we're not sort of requiring stuff that nobody ever touches or cares about, right? There are three criteria related to that bucket. One is that it is widely deployed. And for that, we look at things like what products support it. Do we get user survey feedback from people that say this is things that they use? We also look at whether it's used by tools. So things like, say, SDKs, like, say, JClouds or Fog, or maybe cloud providers for things that you would put on top of OpenStack, like, say, the cloud provider for Kubernetes. We also look at what's used by clients. If a new API is introduced in OpenStack and it doesn't have support in OpenStack Client and it doesn't have a horizon interface, then the only way to get to it is directly through the API it's probably not ready to go into an interoperability guideline. Maybe somewhere down the road when that gets done. So you can kind of see the universe of things here. Basically, we're looking for things that have proven usage in the real world. They align well with the technical direction that OpenStack is going in. They take a system view of the entire sort of whole cloud and they play well with others. We'll spend a little bit of time on the systems view one because that one's one that tends to need a little bit of explanation. Fundamentally, we're looking for things that are foundational. And what we mean by foundational is there's sort of core capabilities that everybody's gonna want, need or use. And when I say everybody, sometimes I'm talking about other pieces of OpenStack code. So for example, very high-level abstraction. It's awfully hard to use Nova if you don't have the ability to get an image into your cloud somehow because then you can't actually boot anything. So there's a lot of stuff that's built in around things like basic operations of creating images, creating servers, sort of those kind of things. We also look for things that are both atomic and proximate.  Rather than being sort of a bunch of operations kind of lumped into one. And proximity has to do with what other things call on that. So for example, it wouldn't make a lot of sense if we put create resource into the OpenStack guidelines and didn't also have delete and read and update. So those things approximate to one another. If you have one, it kind of makes sense to have them all. So how do these things get written and how do we decide what goes in there? Phase one is we start talking to each other. We'll talk about the timeline for all this in a minute, but usually the first thing we do when we start looking at capabilities for a new guideline is we go talk to the technical community. Typically the way that works is the interoperability work group kind of hands out assignments. We have volunteers that volunteer to work with say the NOVO community or the Glance community or whoever it is. They'll go talk to the PTLs and the developers and other folks from those development teams and say, hey look, what do you think is important? What's missing from the guidelines today? What do you think has been introduced in the last few cycles that people really are fundamentally gonna wanna use in the future? That we need to consider a sort of core capability for interoperability. And that's where the discussion starts. We also generally talk to end users. A lot of us happen to work for vendors, so we talk to people that are using our stuff in the field as well. We try to get as much perspective on this as we can. So phase one is really all about talking to each other. Part two is we actually start writing things down. The way this works is that we create patches in Garrett. So the interoperability work group works with the same set of tools that most projects in OpenStack do. And I thought we might just swap over to a browser real quick and take a look at what that looks like. So this is a patch that went into the interoperability work group a few months ago. And you can see this is pretty much the standard Garrett stuff, right? So we have approvals, we have plus twos, we have plus ones, we have a long string of discussions. You can see in this case the Nova PTL chimed in on this patch. What it starts with is a simple text file. So we have a text file and you'll see over on the kinda right hand side in the green there, there's columns of numbers and they're binary, they're ones and zeros. Those columns, if you look further up the text file, those column headers are the 12 criteria that we just talked about earlier. So basically somebody will go in and put in their opinion of yes, this is proximate, yes, this is atomic, yes, this is widely deployed, no, it is not foundational, blah, blah, blah, right? And then we have a little script that tallies up all the scores at the end of the day. And if we meet some minimum threshold that we determined for each cycle, it's gonna wind up going into those guidelines. In this case you'll see one here was marked with an 82 which is high enough to get in. And we'll see in the next file, oh this is just a CSV view of the same thing. We'll see this advisory status here. So basically we have three things that we looked at, we talked about, sorted out with the community and decided that these are things that should go into our next interoperability guidelines. First they go through an advisory phase, so that's why they're added here. And then toward the bottom you'll see there's actually one that we dropped here. For those of you that are familiar with Keystone, you know that they've long since sort of moved on from V2 of their API and that's a V2 API capability. If we look a bit further down, why should I see tests associated with each of those? So we'll see things like listing flavors and these are actually pointers to Tempus tests. They actually have, every test in Tempus actually has an idempotent ID associated with it. It's kind of like a UID, just a numerical identifier. So if the test changes names or changes locations, we can still figure out where it is. All right, so once we've written it down, we've agreed to it. We put it through scoring. Communities had a chance to give feedback on it. We decided to add something in. Once all that is done for all the projects and we're getting toward the end of that six month cycle, we bring it up to the board of directors. So I've kind of glossed over the governance model here a little bit. But the interop working group was actually created by the board of directors of the Open SAC Foundation and that is ultimately who asked to approve everything that we do. That's a little different from a lot of the development projects in Open SAC. But the reason is because the board of directors is who controls the trademark. So if you want to use the Open SAC logo, if you want a legal agreement giving you the right to license that logo and put it on your product or call your product Open SAC, you have to talk to the Open SAC Foundation. So this is one way that the Open SAC Foundation has put that governance process back into the community hands. So anybody can come participate in the interop working group and ultimately whatever we send up has to be approved by the board. So let's talk a little bit more about tests. There are a few requirements for the tests that we have today. First of all, they have to be under TC governance. So generally for the core projects today, we don't accept tests that, you know, some vendor wrote and runs on it on the side. And that's primarily again, because we want the testing to be in the hands of the community. If the community decides that a test isn't useful or isn't testing a capability in the way that it should, it's probably gonna get kicked out of Tempest, right? And if you look through our interoperability guidelines, most of the capabilities have multiple tests associated with them. And so we can add and remove from those over time. All tests today are in Tempest. This is kind of per the TC's request. The TC gave us some guidance awhile back that said anything that qualifies for the future direction criteria should be in Tempest. I'll mention briefly that we are considering some new programs for vertical spaces and less widely deployed projects that may or may not have that stipulation on them. But those are a topic for a whole nother talk. So we'll gloss over those for now. They must work in all the releases covered by a guideline. So remember I mentioned that a guideline generally covers at least three releases. That means that the tests must function against clouds running any of those three releases. And that also of course means that whatever capability we're testing has to be present in all three releases. Part of that goes into the fact that one of the criteria we have is that we're looking for things that are stable over time. So if an API is removed after six months of being in the real world, probably not something that we should require everybody to run. Never actually happens anymore, by the way. Anymore. It's not 2011. Typically we have folks run these via a RefStack wrapper. So there's another OpenStack project called RefStack which is a sort of thin wrapper around the Tempest project. It will run the test for you and then report them upstream to a server somewhere. So you can actually go out to RefStack.OpenStack.org and see which guidelines you meet. And we'll look at that now. So a brief look at what RefStack looks like. So this is the public RefStack server. It is an OpenStack project, so you can go get the code and spin up one internally inside your firewall if you want. But this is the public one run by the OpenStack Foundation on its infrastructure. What we're looking at right here is what's in a guideline. And again, you can see kind of the same things that we saw earlier just in a more human readable format as opposed to the JSON we saw earlier. And this tells you a little bit about what's in those guidelines. You can see each of the capabilities listed. Each one will have a set of tests associated with it. And then you can see which criteria it's stacked up against. And also which project it's related to. This is a view of an actual test run that somebody ran with RefStack. I happen to run this one, so I can speak a little bit about it. What you can see here, there are a couple of dropdowns for the guideline version. 2017.01 is the most recent guideline. And we can see right here, there's a nice green yes that says this cloud passed all the required tests. And then for each of those, you can actually go into each individual test and see those as well. Okay. So the next kind of natural question is, what if we get it wrong? What if it turns out we thought something was really widely deployed? And then we got a whole lot of feedback after it became required that, oh, hey, we don't pass that test because we don't ship that in our product.  There's always gonna be circuit breakers and feedback loops in any process in OpenStack. And this is one of the ways that we can do that. Tests can be flagged at any time, which means as soon as that guideline goes out and it's required of vendors. If we get feedback that it's not a good test, maybe it doesn't test things the way we thought it did. Maybe it tests a different API than we thought it did. Maybe a test has been deprecated and removed from Tempest at some point. Whatever the reason is, if we get feedback about that, we can actually insert a flag into the guideline at any time without going back to the board for re-approval. The flag marks the test is not required, and then we can kind of decide that test fate in the future. It may be that frankly this capability was just a bad choice and we should never have chosen the first place, in which case we'll drop it out of the next guidelines. In other cases, it turns out, well that test actually had a bug in Tempest, right? So nobody's gonna be able to pass it and it's not that they don't support the capability, it's just a buggy test. In which case that bug may get fixed in the future and at that point we'll drop the flag and it'll go back to being required. So there's sort of a couple of bullets there talking about reasons that we might flag a test. So let's talk about timelines. Typically the timeline, it's a little bit loose, but the timeline usually looks something like this. Three months before a summit, there's kind of a preliminary draft. It's usually a carbon copy of the last guideline with a few numbers and names changed and that's kind of our starting point. Two months before a summit, we'll start talking about new capabilities, kind of going through that process of saying who on the interoperability work group is gonna work with Nova this time around or whatever it is, kind of dividing and conquering so we can get all the projects that we need covered. About a month in, we'll start scoring capabilities and actually posting those patches up to Garrett and by summit we'll typically have a solid draft. If you look out at the repository right now, excuse me, you'll see a file called next.json. Almost all the patches that we have outstanding for that have now landed. So you got a pretty good picture of what the next interoperability guideline is probably going to look like. So now that we've got a solid draft out there, we'll have vendors who are interested go start testing. You can consume that next.json file anytime you want but now it's kind of a good time to go because we've actually got everything in there that we think is gonna make it into the next guideline. And that's again, additional feedback loop. We start letting vendors run this and see, oh gosh, that test as a bug or this isn't a thing we support. Maybe we should get on that and fix that. So those kind of things. Two months after summit, we'll probably, we usually do the test flagging. Flagging can actually happen at any time but this is kind of the point where we stop and take a look and make sure that we don't have any outstanding requests before we send something up to the board of directors. And then finally, three months after summit, we'll have a vote by the board of directors that hopefully ends in approval if it's not too controversial. If you look back in time, just kind of a note at the bottom of the slide, if you look back in time, 2015 was a little bit weird that we had a really accelerated schedule. That was kind of the origin of this whole process. So we kind of moved fast and had a couple guidelines in six months rather than just one. So the next thing folks want to know is why isn't this thing that is really important to me in those interoperability guidelines? Why can't I depend on it to be there across all the different clouds? There's not really an easy answer. So it's a little dependent on each individual thing. So you remember the requirements that we laid out earlier? It could be that it just didn't meet criteria. It may be super important to you but it may not be applicable to, you know, 60, 80% of the rest of the clouds out there. In which case it's not a thing that we would probably feel comfortable requiring of everyone. It may just not have been scored in time. Turns out there's a whole lot of research that goes into the scoring usually. I know I have spent a whole lot of time digging around it like J Clouds and Fog and Kubernetes and trying to figure out how they're using clouds and what capabilities they're using. So that actually does take some time. And again, there's a lot of time spent conversing with the rest of the community as well. It may be that it was an admin only capability. Again, we're focused on the things that consumers of clouds can use. So if it's only available to administrators, probably not a thing we're gonna get here. And kind of an important corollary to that is that there are some tempest tests that test capabilities that end users typically can use but they're written in such a way that they use admin credentials to do so. And so there's no way that an end user of say a public cloud could actually run that same test and get it to pass because he does not have admin access to the cloud. So in those cases, we can include the test. What we can do is start a feedback loop there, file a bug on the test and say look, this uses admin credentials for no good reason, let's fix it. And that has happened more than once. It may be that the project itself wasn't widely deployed. People ask about designate a lot lately. Designate is, as of the last user survey I think is deployed at about 16% of prod and non-prod open-site clouds in the user survey. Again, important to some people, and we do have some new add-on programs coming that will help guarantee some interoperability for them, but probably not applicable for the whole rest of the universe. It may be that there are some things that don't have tests or maybe it didn't score highly enough across all releases covered in a guideline. So again, we're looking at at least three releases in each one of these guidelines. It may be that in the earliest of those releases something really didn't have good client support yet. So people running, you know, that version of the cloud may not have good support for it yet. And sometimes it's a matter of nobody's brought this up. You know, we're a bunch of users in the community and we try to have a good read on what things people are using, but sometimes there are gaps. So again, there's a lot of feedback that's built in there and we just hope that the feedback comes. All right, so if I'm an exact developer I've got a really cool feature. How do I get it into those guidelines? There's a blog you should read. The link's at the bottom there, but to summarize it, what we need that capability to do is meet all the guidelines, all the capabilities that we use to determine what goes into the guidelines. So you can do things like document it really well, help foster adoption of it. You know, if the feature is completely undocumented there's a good chance nobody's ever gonna use it. It may be that you can help foster adoption by doing things like helping other people use it via an SDK. Maybe you can submit a patch to say J Clouds or work in Kubernetes or some other thing that uses Clouds. If lots of tools are depending on it it makes it easier for us to include. We've already talked about tests and then of course you also need to be a little bit patient. Again, this has to be in three releases. So if you have a new shiny object that just went into the latest release it's gonna be a while. So feedback loops. Again, lots of feedback loops built in to the scoring cycles. Anybody can come comment on our patches in Garrett. You can throw in your minus one plus one. The board of directors also gets a chance to offer their feedback. Most of this originates with talking with the rest of the community and talking with the PTLs and the development groups to see what they think is core. And then even after something becomes advisor or required there's another feedback loop built on there where vendors can ask for flags if we find out that there's problems. So plenty of ways to do that. Also kind of important to mention one of the things that we use when we're looking at some of these criteria is the user survey. And we also look at ref stack to see what test results are out there and what they actually support. So things that you can do are if you're running a cloud answer the user survey. And that way we'll know that a lot of people are running designator or whatever project it is, right? And if you submit your test results via ref stack then we can also see oh there's a cloud that supports all these other capabilities that we haven't even thought about yet. And if it turns out there's a lot of those maybe that's the thing we should think about. And of course you may also buy me a beer and then my year about that anytime. Quick notes about ref stack because we're running a little low on time. It's actually not very hard to make ref stack work. There's some instructions. There's a link in the slides. Basically you go download the ref stack client run a setup script, configure tempest for your cloud, point tempest at it, it executes the test and it uploads them to ref stack. There are now capabilities in ref stack where you can upload results anonymously or with kind of an association to your user ID so that you can only see them and make them public later. One thing that we've been encouraging people to do is run not just the tests that are required in the current guidelines but run all the tests. Frankly if you're gonna take the time to run a couple hundred tests, what's a couple hundred more? It's maybe an extra hour of your time, right? And you're probably going to have a cup of coffee in that time anyway. The more data we have about what's out there and what other tests clouds pass, the better decisions we can make about scoring later on. If you don't pass all the tests, it's important not to panic. A lot of times we figure out that some of the problems that people have are environmental. Maybe there's a timeout because their storage was slow or on their particular test bed. Turns out test beds a lot of times are not built with like first class gear. They're built with like the server you found in the closet, you know? So sometimes it's just purely environmental. Sometimes we find bugs in tests. Sometimes we find bugs in OpenStack. There's plenty of reasons why tests may fail. We actually have people who will come help you with that. One of them is the interoperability engineer at the OpenStack Foundation, whose email address is right here on this slide. So don't panic. A few links where you can learn more. Our two most recent board-approved guidelines are at the top there as well as the next guideline draft and links to all the stuff that I showed you in the slides here is there as well, including how to submit patches if you're interested in adding capabilities to future interoperability guidelines. So that's it. Do what I do, hold on tight, pretend it's a plan, and hopefully we'll have some interoperable clouds in the near future. And that's all I've got. Any questions? I think we have about one minute. All right, in that case, thanks for coming. Have a safe flight home.


It's a marvelous profession because it's a chance to do well by doing good, do well as and feel satisfied with a career, and you're doing good. You're actually helping a very particular audience, actually the principal audience for description of course is people who are blind or have low vision but it's been shown to be helpful to people on the autism spectrum, people with ADHD, people who are learning a new language, they're hearing increased vocabulary, different word choice and such. So we're really doing doing good, I think, for a number of populations, there's no good reason why a person with a physical disability must also be culturally disadvantaged. And I think audio describers are really doing a great deal to bring that to fruition, to make culture accessible to more people.


For video streaming, gaming, social media, plus smart home devices, and security systems, standard high-speed or cellular internet is just too slow, but Broadband keeps your home connected. Call or visit GearHard Broadband online. Many different hospitals in the area have already taken precautionary measures to ensure the safety of the public, their employees, and anyone who enters their hospital. I was able to speak to Dr. Maria Braiman, who is the Vice President of Medical Affairs and Chief Medical Officer for Appalachian Regional Health Care, on how their hospitals have already planned for weeks on how they will handle their operations in case an outbreak occurs. Business travel between those facilities, we also stopped any business travel outside of ARH. We changed our policy to be consistent with what the CDC has recommended so that if you're feeling ill and you have a temperature and respiratory symptoms, just stay home and self-isolate. So generally our policy has been that you require a doctor's nose and go into the doctor. We are making efforts to be good partners in the community and prevent excess numbers of people showing up in our physician's offices. We also immediately started preparations for a work from home policy that would allow any of our staff members that could easily work from home to be mobilized to do so as appropriate. For any of our ARH employees or physicians who are members of our medical staff who have traveled to any areas where COVID-19 is currently endemic, or there's community spread, or if they've gone on a cruise ship, we are requiring that they not return to work for 14 days, post returning back to a safe area to ensure that they're not experiencing any symptoms. So we've already started, we started that policy two weeks ago. We have a command center that we have created that is located in our hazard system center and that command center has a mixed representative group of operational leaders and clinical leaders and financial leaders from across the system. And we're working non-stop in preparation. We have an internet website that we have made available to all of our staff so that there's also communication where we're all getting the same communication immediately via that website. We have led educational calls with our first responders, our police officers and our EMTs as well as our school systems and non-ARH clinics across our regions to help share with them what we're doing to prepare and help them to be prepared. We're shutting things like schools down is not because our kids are actually the most vulnerable to this disease, but they're exactly what you said, Jeremy, they can be carriers back to our vulnerable members of our community and that spreads illness and if it's spread and it's spread among our sick and our frail, that can overwhelm us in terms of the ability to even care for them very quickly. If you're healthy and you're just part of it, call 1-800-722-5725. Information being spread on Facebook and other social media sites that's really scary and not true, so they need to be very cautious in running into that information. That's exactly right, Jeremy, that we need to encourage our communities to be calm, to know that they have people really dedicated to their safety and through the governor's office, through the state health department and in their local communities with their hospitals and their health care providers and we're ready and prepared to take care of anyone who does become sick with COVID-19.


back up a little bit. How are you man? Where are you? I'm good. I'm in Plymouth, Massachusetts and we're moving, we're building a house and it's a long story but we're kind of going back and forth from one place to another to another. My daughter just moved out. It's been crazy. But anyway, we're building a house and we're slowly moving into that house. In Massachusetts still? In Plymouth, yep. Wow. What made you move out there from California? Well, I moved there in 95, wanted to raise our kids in a different place. Having grown up in California, I felt like it wasn't a great area, especially at that time, even though we lived in a nice neighborhood in Fullerton, it just wasn't where we wanted to raise our kids. So we moved back here. My wife at the time, Kyle, she was from this area and I've been here since 95. So this is home to me even more so now than California. Wow. Wow. I always like to ask people because I'm born and raised in California and I always ask different people because I travel as a comedian and you get to some states and they're like, I could live here but you never really know until you dive in and do it. Exactly. No, for sure. And that's the same thing. I'm going to scoot a little closer to this wall here so I can simply lean against. Yeah, that's the thing. You never know until you do it. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It worked for me. I really like, the winters are pretty cold and pretty brutal but I actually like them. I like going from summer into fall, right now the leaves are all turning and the temperatures are dropping a little bit and then we'll go on the winter and get some snow and I really enjoy that. It just changes things up a little bit and makes it interesting. Well, it's funny to think about back in the day, now with the internet and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, you can really start a band anywhere and maybe get some traction if you have some luck but back then you had to move to LA to play in that sunset strip area, right? Well, I mean if you wanted to break where things are breaking or if you want to break where things are breaking, yeah, you kind of need to be there in the center of it all. And we just happened to be there because we lived there. I was born in Whittier, lived in La Mirada, Fullerton. We jumped in the car and in 35 minutes we were on Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard. So we were right there in the heart of it and once we formed a band and started writing and recording, we just went knocking on doors down on the streets of LA and started getting gigs at Ghazari's Troubadour and the whiskey and it was pretty interesting. We started really young. I mean, I think that the first time I played the whiskey, I want to say I was just turned 16. So we started really, really young. My brother was 19. He's three years older than me. So, but for me, I was a kid and playing the whiskey in the Troubadour. So I looked back on that and I think, gosh, I was very fortunate to be in that scene at that time. Were you going and hanging out at the clubs too and seeing stuff like Shark Island and Rat and all those bands that were kind of really grinding out there, Motley Crue, were you seeing any of that? All those bands, Shark Island, we played with often at Ghazari's. We played with Mickey Rat, who became Rat. They were a house band and we were a house band at Ghazari's many times on the same night, Friday or Saturday night. Saw Motley Crue. We performed, walked down the street and watched Motley Crue perform. Saw Guns N' Roses before they broke and Wasp. I mean, the list goes on and on. Quiet Riot. You go back further before I started playing the clubs. I saw Quiet Riot. I saw Yesterday and Today at the Starwood. Yeah. So I was in that scene, you know, we got to experience it, live it, see it firsthand. And it was really amazing. Yeah, I was in that too. And I just don't think that people really understand the magnitude of how you would go down to Sunset Strip on any night. And there would be thousands of people just out on the street and millions of flyers on the poles and, you know, bands just handing out flyers. It was wild, man, to see that. It was wild.   And it was a beautiful guy, you know. So yeah, it, a lot of guys with their hair up and their makeup on and their tight clothes on and everything. It was just a really unique time and scene. And it was an explosion, really. Because as you said, you go down there now and it's like, what happened? Where are all the people? It feels really odd to me, like almost the end of the world or something.  Well, Ghazaris was. And it literally, you know, it was like six people wide marching down the street. I mean, just tons of people. It was explosive and intense and insane. And what a time. It'll never be repeated again. Well, I don't think I've really seen it happen with any type of thing. That's what's really interesting to me. I'm 56. You're 59. But I haven't seen anything where there were thousands of people other than maybe Studio 54 and the disco scene in New York, where there was just thousands of people every night. Like there's just no, no thought of a job tomorrow. It was we're living for tonight and everybody was out of the house. Oh, yeah. And it was insane. It was amazing. It was just a really special time and all the dots connected right there at that place. And, you know, people talk about the scene they had in Baltimore, the scene they had, you know, in Boston or the scene they had in other areas. But man, they have no idea. Yeah. What, you know, what the scene was like in LA. You had to be there to believe it. See it to believe it. It was just insane. And we were there. And I look back on that, being able to grow up during that special time, it made me who I am today. It made us who we are today. So thank God we were in right time, right place. Well, there is an interesting thing also about it to where it really, I think, scarred a lot of people. I would say about 90% of the people, which I call kind of hair metal tumbleweeds, where they're just kind of like blowing around like, what happened? They never really grew as a person and they just live for those like five years of their life, which was so long ago now. Isn't that wild? It is wild. And, you know, without naming names, I don't like to do that. But I know I have a few faces popping into my head. And what you said, you hit the nail on the head. It's kind of sash to see.  And they're 60 years old. Yeah. Yeah. 61, 62. And you're just thinking, wow, what happened to these guys? But, you know, just the fact that they're still alive is miraculous. A lot of them aren't. A lot of them are dead and gone. And the fact that those guys are still here and cleaned up and getting help and whatnot, it's really good to see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that it could be maybe just the energy and the adrenaline of that era. It's almost like a cocaine high where they were just running on such a high gear of like, look at this to now where they're just kind of like, you know, like skydiving. I've skydived before and then you're like, well, there's nothing ever going to be like that. It's the pure lunacy, you know? Yeah. Totally. Completely. And I think too, you know, we as human beings fall into traps and become, you know, creatures of habit. It becomes a habit and it's hard to break that habit. You know, and that goes for whether it's drugs or lifestyle. You know, we're all susceptible to that.   Maybe when they hit 82 or 92. You hope they hit 92. Wow, man. Let me talk to you a little bit about I grew up in the Bay Area, San Francisco area and was a Booker of the Stone. Me and my good friend Jimmy Arsenaugh, who was a huge Striper fan, played in a band called Soldier. I don't know if you remember them, but I do. Wow. That's kind of cool.  Do you remember the stone at all? I do remember the stone and what's going on with the stone these days? I assume it's gone. Oh yeah, it was it closed about 93, I believe. John Nadie, who owned, Nadie Wireless had owned those three clubs, which was the Omni, the Stone, and the One Step Beyond. And he closed them, you know, just mostly because of, I think he wanted to kind of move on in life. And that was kind of a different era starting to happen. There was less club bands. But, you know, Sam Fran and California in general just had a mega club scene where you could play all over California and it would be a tour. Yeah, absolutely. No question about it. Even to a smaller degree, San Diego, so many areas.  And I'm thinking about it now and it's all coming back. And I went down there every weekend. There were times when I didn't have a car and I would literally get a ride from a friend and they dropped me off and I wouldn't have a ride home. And I didn't care. Not at all. I didn't care. I'd always find a ride home. I'd meet someone and they'd give me a ride home. They were gracious enough to give me a ride home. But those were some really amazing times, very special times. When you guys, I don't remember if I read this somewhere or saw it somewhere maybe about five years ago, but was there a woman manager or somebody that really started to get you guys going into the Christian thing and changing that whole flavor of the band? Am I right on that?  Yeah. Yeah. Vicki, that's right. I had her on the podcast and then I read her book. That's why I read that. Vicki Hamilton was helping us way back. I don't know if I'd say she was our quote unquote manager, but I guess she was briefly. And then we eventually wound up meeting a woman by the name of Darren Hinton. And Darren, her family grew up in Bel Air and she had some money and she wanted to invest some money into the band. And she really liked the band and fell in love with what we were doing and what we were all about. And she did, she gave us $100,000. We invested, we bought new equipment, we bought billboards, paid for advertising to promote the band, paid for our first album, all sorts of things. And she really was so integral and important in the history and the making of the band. And then Darren wound up co-managing the band with my mom and herself. Well, your mom was the manager. My mom was, man. She managed us for a while. And then we realized, you know, my mom did a really great job, but we realized like we were getting to a point where we were playing arenas and became bigger.  So we wound up going with Danny Goldberg and Ron Stone at Golden Mountain. Oh, yeah. And that was, even though they were obviously world-renowned and brilliant managers, it didn't work for us, you know? And we were with them for a short period of time. I think it was like a year, if that. And then who do you go with after that? After that, we took some time off. I left the band in 1992. Yeah, I left. I was basically planning on retiring for a while. Is that when you took that job at your wife's dad's place? Well, in 92, we didn't live here yet. That wasn't until 96. So between 92 and 96, I just took time off. I did release a solo album in 94, but for the first two years, 92 and 93, I didn't do anything except bake kicks for my kids, elementary school classes, walk in the school, go to soccer games, softball games, dance class. That's all I did. And I realized the importance of family and the importance of being a dad, even though I wasn't the best dad, I tried to be. And when I say the best dad, I mean, I was gone all the time. We were touring, you know?  I missed out on a year of my kids' lives, you know? And even though the music is fun and we love what we do, you should never put your band above your family. I don't care who you are. It's wild to think about because I'm 56 and I'm out on a tour right now. I'm out here in Selina, Kansas on a day off. And I have not done a 34-date tour in years. And I'm like, I'm like, this is too long. I'm a comedian. I usually go out on Thursdays and tour a city, do three, four shows and then come back. But this is 34 straight. And I look at it as, you know, as you get older, you're 59. You think about back in the day, like, I was gone one time for 10 months. Oh, I know. I couldn't, I don't even know how I did that. I mean, I literally flew in from my first child's birth and then flew about a few days later. And I was just gone all the time. And I didn't think much about it then because we were so caught up in the whirlwind of, you know, the fame and the fortune and the band breaking and all that stuff. But, you know, when you look back on it, if I could go back in time, I probably would have changed things. I do have some regrets about life and decisions I made. But at the same time, it's shaped me and made me who I am. I've learned a lot from it. But I don't recommend going out for long periods of time with your family person. I don't recommend that at all. I don't do it anymore. We go out two weeks at a time at most three weeks and even that's pushing it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I understand what you're saying. I grew up with a father not around. So and he wasn't touring. He just wasn't around. So I that's why I never had kids. I knew I didn't want to put somebody and put them into a insane world that I was in of like, well, you know, you're at you're at baseball and your dad's not there and your mom's not there because she has to work. So it's I don't have any regrets on it because it really formed who I am as an artist. But yeah, man, if you do have an option, I think there's and touring is different now that you're with like FaceTime and stuff. At least you can see it back then. It was like a pay phone, you know? Oh, I know it is. It is different. It with technology, it's a little easier. But you know, the thing is to be older, you know, we're all 60 ish. And you know, when we go out, we just did a run. We went out and we got three mini vans. We drove ourselves to the venues. We had four in a row. And we were getting up at, you know, four in the morning driving eight hours. And I'm going to tell you, man, we came home from that.  No buses or anything. You're just driving yourselves. That is gnarly. When we do when we do short little runs, we'll do that. Now, when we do a longer run, which we did this year, we toured for five weeks, we were on a bus. Right. Pulling a trailer. Yeah. And that's a lot easier because you can at least sleep. Yeah. That's what you need to sleep. Yeah. When we do these little mini runs in mini vans, it's brutal. And then you get on a plane and we flew to Costa Rica early morning flights.   You got it made. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. Let me ask you this, back in those days, because I was a singer for 25 years, when you were on those long tours, because your voice is absolutely fantastic right now. And it has been throughout what I've seen your career.   I mean, this new record, you sound unreal. Oh man. Well, thank you. That's really kind of you to say. I always have vocal problems. I mean, I've never had surgery. I've never had nodes or nodules or polyps. I've never had anything like that on my vocal cords. I get my cords checked every couple years. The only thing that I have, and they always say they look great, they look pristine. The only problem I have is I have a really thick post nasal drip. So I'm always going, I've got heavy mucus on my cords all the time. The doctors feel that that protected my vocal cords, because I, you know, they said my vocal cords look young in great shape. But you know, with age, your cords, like your muscles, they start to stiffen a little bit and they change over time. And I've just chosen my battles. I've learned how to pick and choose what I'm going to do.  If you've got, you've got something in your throat and your chest, you're in trouble. Get through it. You know, you tough it out and get through it.  I've had to do that multiple times over the years just to get through the shell. But I just, I'm very blessed and fortunate that I can still sing and accomplish and do what I want to do for the most part. My voice has changed a little bit, but not, not so much so that I can't sing anymore. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely guys out there that had no idea in 1981 that they were going to be out touring right now. And some of them really can't even sing anymore, which is, it's pretty brutal because they might have been ripped off from the record company and manager and they have to be out there. And then you got websites that are just blasting them like, this guy can't sing. And, you know, it's really harsh. It's so harsh, dude. I feel bad for people that are going to that. I've gone through it to a degree. If I have a bad night and, you know, I'm not hitting the notes right or not hitting them at all or whatever, people just crucify you. And that's the beauty of the internet these days. That's the world we live in. That's what you can do about it.  And that's the way it is. But, you know, some of these guys can't sing at all anymore. They're literally going out singing down an octave or just talking through the melodies. And gosh, I would say if I ever get to that point, and I might, I may, I hope not. But if I do, I'm going to stop singing. I will not sing anymore at that point because I'm going to end on a higher note versus a lower note. And the good thing I've got going for me is I'm a guitar player as well as a singer. So if that happens with my voice, I'll just play guitar and stand in the background and try to come out with some poser moves and we'll get a young fresh thing, you know?  Didn't work at all. He just wouldn't work. He was addicted to gambling and just a piece of garbage. But it's wild because you know, and I know I played music for years and then I went and got a regular job and then I became a comedian late in life.  And I always wonder like, look, I know that people are an artist, but you're really an artist if you're writing and recording and working all the time. I don't know if you're an artist if you're just out talking through your songs, you're not writing or anything, you're just out to get a paycheck now. It's wild that they don't just try to find a job doing something. Yeah, it's very strange to me. And everyone can figure out those people that are doing that. We all know who they are. The guys that literally just can't sing anymore. And they're out there and then and some people say, well, it's the nostalgia leaving alone, they're doing what they want to do. But me personally, I can only speak for me. I can't speak for anyone else. If I ever got to that point where I can't sing, I will not sing. I'm not going to humiliate myself and the brand and the legacy of the band, just because I'm selfish and I'm going to force it and go out and continue on, even though I shouldn't be. Like I said, I'll play guitar or I'll go do something else. There's always something else you can do. I could produce, write albums, I'm a writer as well. I mean, there's all sorts of avenues that I can take and go down and I figure it out. Rather than humiliate myself and my, like I said, my brand and legacy of the band. Early on, when you were shopping around for a deal, I know you guys were on Enigma, but then it was a Hollywood records. At any point did they ever say, hey man, get rid of this God stuff and you're going to be way bigger?  They did not. That was the beautiful thing about Enigma records is they didn't. They allowed us to do what we wanted to do and be who we wanted to be. Now, initially, when we did a showcase for them, they couldn't understand the words. And when we submitted the lyrics after they said, we'll sign you, we're interested. We submitted the lyrics. They did have a problem with that. They did come back and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. The lyrics you guys are singing about Jesus. What is this? And we're like, yeah, how could you not hear that?  Like how in the world did you not hear that? They just saw the pants and that look and they're like, we've got one. We've got one here. I guess so.  But we submitted the lyrics. They had a problem with it. And then we talked to them about it and they didn't have a problem with it. They're like, yeah, you know what, cool, let's do this. We love the band. We love the songs. And obviously, we proved them wrong because when the first album came out, it exploded. It sold, I want to say 150,000 copies as an EP and 84, like in a week, which for a small time band, it hadn't done anything. That blew their minds. They were like, what in the world? And then the next album came out and went gold and then that was it.  They were even talking religion. And we got our Bible, man. Thank God for striper. They were, they were killing it. You know, tell the devil's sold multi platinum. And by that time they were like, oh my word, you guys are getting so big that we got to bring in capital to help us. And they did, they signed a deal with capital for distribution. And then that was where it just really took off and exploded 87, 88, 89. Yeah. Now you're not one of those guys. Do you believe because in God we trust came out and it kind of didn't do well, but it was also right there where the quote unquote grunge was coming in. I don't believe that grunge killed that, you know, hair metal scene. I believe that it it had run its course.  So are you wanting to think back now that in God we trust maybe wasn't that good of an album? Because a lot of bands I say, well, at that era, your record just wasn't that good, or the label didn't promote it. There's two different things. You know, what are your thoughts on that? Well, here's my thoughts.  Right. Now the album, I think you're thinking of is against the law. That came out in 91. Right. And that's when grunge really started kicking in the in the gear. And that album did not do well. That album didn't go gold. To this day, it isn't gold. And what's interesting about that album is, you know, when I talk about it, some fans really get up in arms about it. Because to some fans, it's their favorite album against the law. And I think my only thought on that is those are probably fans that became fans with that album. Right. And they hold with it a very special memories, and there's the nostalgia that it brings to the table. But as an album itself, it's produced brilliantly. Tom Wehrman, amazing. Eddie Delaney, killer sounding album. But it's not Striper. It doesn't sound if you listen to that album and then go back and listen to all the earlier albums. Sounds like a different band.  But it sounds like a different band. Good or bad. Love it or hate it. More almost Van Halen sounding Van Halen album than Striper. And I think we lost a lot of our fans during that time. I don't think grunge killed us. I think some people would say it did. But then how can you argue the fact that firehouse broke during that time? Right. Right. Who was hair metal and poppy and ballads and they broke at that time. Slaughter broke during that time. Wow. So if it was grunge, they wouldn't have broken. And you know, so I think it was that album. We made poor decisions. We changed our colors, changed our sound, changed our look, changed everything, became a completely different band. We should have changed the name of the band as well. Then we might have broke again. Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, but that's what makes a great band coming up on like 40 years now. When you're looking back, you're like, Hey man, a lot of people hate Aerosmith done with mirrors. I think it's one of their greatest records. And there's just different errors in a band's career if they're long around long enough. Other than like, say, ACDC or the Ramones, where, you know, that's their sound. But there's bands that have taken chances or changed and they go up that that didn't work. But you have to, you know, check out other avenues, whether it be record company influenced or band members influence. You always get band members that are like, Hey, I'm tired of the black and yellow. Let's try something else. You know, and, and I get it. I agree. I do agree with that. You got to take chances. But at the same time, like, you know, you go back to like when KISS lost their makeup, right?  And you take that away and you're like, why did they take that away? That doesn't make any sense. So they obviously ultimately put it back on. Because it's such a big part of KISS. Same thing with the Against the Law album. I felt like the yellow and black is such a big part of who we are, love it or hate it and the sound, the guitar tone from those earlier albums, the style of writing, the music. And I think that we changed it up a little too much. That's just again, my personal opinion. Not everyone would agree with that. But, you know, I think numbers don't lie. It is our worst selling album of all time, literally. Can you take me back to when you did Dynamo? That had to be pretty special. Dynamo being one of the biggest festivals in rock and roll and metal. And that had to be pretty special, right? Going to Europe playing Dynamo. Yeah, it was a little scary. I mean, because I remember playing that festival and the crowd not liking us. Oh, wow.  And they were chanting expletives. And it was pretty scary at the time. But we wound up changing the set list. We lost first love. Yeah, let's take that out of the set. Let's put in the rock that makes me roll instead. You know, we made it more metal. Right.  That's wild to think about. That has to be scary.  And I don't usually do that, but I love this band that I'm out with, Marcus King band.  And you just, you figure it out, you know? You do. You figure it out. And we, that has to happen all the time for us. Like, you know, we're playing a festival and then we were opening for WASP. And then all of a sudden they changed the order and we're opening for anthrax. Oh, wow. Okay. Let's change the set list a little bit here. You know what I mean? So those things happen and you do figure it out. And there have been some times and situations that where it's been pretty rough, man. We've been in fear for our lives of thinking like, how are we going to get out of this one? And we always do. We always make it through. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. I was not a striper fan growing up because mostly because of the Jesus thing, but I really got turned on to you by when I went out to see Boston. Oh, yeah. And I knew you were in the group and you came out and you absolutely killed it. And I was like, wow, man, this guy's great.  And, you know, on the new record, I'm listening to the new record and I'm like, wow, man, this is this could be Judas Priest, painkiller era songs, you know, super heavy, tons of amazing guitar playing, great vocals, great songs. There's bands out there right now, heavy bands that couldn't even compete with this record you're about to drop, which is, you know, with their new records.  Well, you know what, man, we just nothing gets in our way.  And he knocks me down. I'm going to get up, knocks me down. I'm going to get up. I'm going to be that guy that keeps getting up all the way to the 12th round.   That's the mentality with this band. It doesn't matter what's said about us, what's done against us. I don't care. You know, we get no radio airplay at all. Does it matter? Nope, doesn't matter. Because you can't stop the machine. You can't stop the bullet train going 120 miles an hour down the track. And it's diapers, the bullet train. And we've been going for almost 40 years. We got no one's going to tell us we can't do it and that we shouldn't do it. And that's going to make us want to do it even more so. And we're driven. I'm a very driven person. And I think that's increasing as I get older. I really believe our best is yet to come. We have not released our best album yet that day will come. But it hasn't yet. What was it like being in Boston with that guy from the Home Depot? Because when I saw it, you could tell he was a Home Depot guy. He had he hit the notes. But boy, was he up there like, whoa, we're in like, I mean, it was at the universal empathy. It was huge. And he was like, whoa, there's people out there. You know, it's a lot different than doing karaoke. What was it like? Would you give that guy tips each night? And Tom Schultz, where you guys just like rallying around him? How did that work? Well, the way what happened with that, I've talked a little bit about what I'll talk more about with you. Yeah, I was that guy that they came to to try to help mold Tommy and shape him into a quote unquote rock star, you know, right? Came out originally in a white beater T shirt and baggy jeans, short hair. I think he had a little mustache and a bottle of water on a stand. And he was drinking that water like in between every line, you know, and just nervous. And I get it. I was nervous too. But Tommy's a sweetheart. He's a great guy and a good friend, although we haven't stayed in touch as much as I'd like to. Really good friend. So I literally took him out shopping. I was the guy that would take him out shopping for clothes that made him look cooler. And I helped kind of shape him into who he is and what he is today. And I became that guy. And Kim and Tom and management would come to me and say, can you can you do this? And and I would do it. But yeah, it was just a unique situation because that became the Home Depot tour. Right. Everything was orange. You know, there were aprons everywhere and signs everywhere. And I'm just thinking, this is Boston. Boston doesn't need Home Depot. Yeah. If anything, Home Depot needs Boston, you know, and it's weird to me. It's like every interview Tommy would do, it was about Home Depot. And it was just, it was a little embarrassing at times. Not for him because I get it. They found this guy on the internet. He worked at Home Depot. I get it. That's a story.  They're legendary. You don't need that. Almost like a gimmick. And what really upset me is at the end of the tour, when Tommy went to go get his job back at Home Depot, they wouldn't give him his job back. What? Yeah, he went to go get his job back and they denied him his job. And I felt like, wow, I literally did not step foot in a Home Depot. And I was at Home Depot all the time looking at light bulbs. I have a weird thing about light bulbs. I was there all the time, the OCD and over light bulbs. And I didn't go there for like a year and a half. I refused to go there. I'm like, these guys are the worst. What was the reason, do you know? They just wouldn't give him his job back. I don't recall, but I remember talking to Tommy and him being really distraught about it and like, wow, I can't even get my job back. I was there for so many years and they promised them they would give him his job back. The crazy thing about that right now is people listening to this podcast are like, wait a minute. He just went out and did a full Boston tour. Why would he need his job back? I'm sure he made $8 million. People don't know. He didn't make $8 million. We made more than we thought, but it wasn't as much as you'd think. Right. But that being said, the reason why he needed his job back is because Boston didn't tour every year. Right. So we toured in 08 and then in 09 they didn't tour. And then in 2010, they didn't tour and Tommy needed a job again. Right. He was in a position where he needed a job and he went to go get his old job back and the place that we promoted for the whole tour and they wouldn't give him his job back. Garbage people. I don't know what it was about that, but that's set so wrong in me. It really angered me. I was so mad about that. Especially like Home Depot. It's not like a corporate job or something. You know, it's Home Depot. Hey, show me where the two by fours are. Yeah, right over here. I mean, who would want it? I'm going to the Home Depot where the Boston singer works. Who's not doing that? I agree, man. I didn't get it. Now, in all fairness, he might have eventually gotten his job back later on, but I remember he went and tried for a while and they said, no, no, no, and we would have conversations about it. He was upset. I was upset.  So they wound up touring again and touring quite a few times since. I don't know if they're ever going to tour again. I don't know that as fact. I'm not an insight, but I can only assume because they haven't toured for three years, maybe four. And Tom's, I think 75 or six now, and he didn't like touring anyway. Right. Tom did not like touring. I had to talk him into touring a few times when he wanted to cancel the tour. Tim, so how about Gary Peel? How great is that guy? He's a great guy, great player, very level-headed, sweetheart, became dear friends with him and his wife. I'll never forget. I was the guy who introduced everyone on stage and I did this for a while. And one night Gary comes up to me on stage and whispers in my ear, Hey Michael, it's not Tom Schultz. It's Tom Schultz. Why were we playing like four players or something? And I remember just sitting there going, what? I was announcing him with the T as Tom Schultz. I always did. Yeah, it's Schultz, Schultz. Wow. Now, who was the woman? She was fantastic on bass. So like, where was her background? Was she a Boston musician or what? I don't know her and she was great. Yeah. Her name is Kimberly Dom and she, I believe is living in Nashville now. I don't know where she's originally from, but Tom met her before I was in the band. She was doing a gig in the Northeast somewhere and he went and saw her perform and really liked her talent. And hired her and she became a member of the band before I joined the band. And she was great. I mean, really great player, great singer, great person. And then once I left the band, not long after that, Tracy Ferry, who was our old bass player, wound up becoming a member of the band. But Kimberly's awesome. She's the real deal, man. And why they replaced her or why she left? I'll never understand that because I thought she was perfect and great. Yeah. I saw Boston on the Boston three record. And I'm still questioning if it was piped in audience or it was the loudest crowd I've ever heard. I've seen thousands of shows literally, but they played the Oakland arena. They came on and the audience was screaming so loud. I was like, what is going on here? You know, like I felt like I needed earplugs for the audience.   I know Kiss did, those are all secrets of the trade pretty well. On the live records, of course, you know, Kiss used like Super Bowl 13 or whatever, of course. But you mean live in person? Yeah, dude. I was at the show and it was insane how loud the crowd was after each song. I was like, wow. That was probably just real deal, man. I'll tell you, I've experienced that a couple of times going overseas in certain countries like Puerto Rico, for example. Strippers performed and the crowd was so loud. It just, it didn't seem real, you know? Yeah. You got a great guitar tone and you're a great player. You really were around during the height of the Char Ville era. What was your guitar of choice back then? And you've always played some wacky shapes right now in the new video. You've got kind of a small, weird looking mini V. That's almost like that Hamer KK Downey in era one. But were you a heavy Char Ville guy back in the day at Pre Jackson? Oh yeah, I've always been a Jackson guy. I mean, back when Darren Hinton invested that money into the band, my first thing to do, because she said, let's go buy some new gear. I went down to Guitar Center, Santa Ana, and I purchased a new guitar that had just come out, and it was a white Jackson Randy Rhodes V. Wow. A conchord. Yeah, this was back in 1983. And I bought that guitar, and that's what I played. My brother taped it up with yellow and black tape, put Manowar on it, varnish. And eventually it went, once we signed a deal with Jackson just a year later, Grover painted that guitar for me. And I have it to this day. It was stolen. I got it back. I have it to this day with the original paint and everything. Wow, you still have it. I got it back, man. I don't know how, but a guy sent me a photo. He bought it illegally. He didn't know it. Sent me a photo and said, I love your guitar. Thanks for having this guitar made. I said, man, that was stolen. I'd like to get it back. And I got it back. Now, were you a hardtail guy or Kailor or Floyd Rose? Hardtail and Floyd. I did have a guitar or two with Kailor system. I didn't care for because with those systems, the ones I had in particular, I could never pull up. It was always just dive down. Right. Right. But the Floyd's being floating the way I have mindset up. I can do a lot of vibrato with my Floyd. And it works great. I love it. But I love hardtail as well. I've got a bunch of guitars with no trim system at all. And I love those. I'm so used to having it there though, you know, and hitting it. It's like a part of my guitar. When it's not there, it's a little odd. What about amps? What are your amps? Were you a Marshall guy, Boogie back then? Are you into boutique amps like matchless or anything now? I'll tell you, I started off when I heard the first boss now when I was 13, not long after that, I started going to pawn shops and trying to seek out my own tone. And I wound up eventually when I was 15 or 16, I wound up purchasing a, actually I was 16.  I remember those, man. Yeah. And I remember Montrose, Rani used those. So I thought those are great amps. I always loved his tone. And then I found out BB used them and a number of guys used them. Allen Holdsworth used them at one point in time. And I saw that it had a little frequency, a parametric EQ, semi-parametric. And I thought, that's interesting. I bought it, brought it home, wound up eventually preamping, coming out of the preamp out of that into a Marshall. And that was instant striper tone. Wow. Like instant. And I used to hide that head when we'd play with rat, like the Zari's, all the guys would come up, Robin would come up and say, man, how are you getting that tone? And I would say it's that modern Marshall might have the lab series hiding behind the back. I didn't like lugging it around because it was a head. So I wound up eventually finding what was called a Furman PQ3, parametric EQ. I bought that when I was 17, almost 18 at Whittier Music. And I started preamping my Mesa Boogie Mark II C's with that. And that's when it morphed into the tone you hear on Soldiers Under Command. Wow. That's what about on the new record? Because it's really, I got to give you, I got to commend you on the sound of this record because there are some bands that have dropped records recently that were recorded during COVID that just do not sound good. You can tell they were passing the tracks around. It's all compressed and small. And that's almost impossible to get a shitty tone these days with how great Pro Tools and all the plugins are. So I don't know who's listening to these, but your record sounds incredibly violent and brutal, great attack on the guitars and the drums. Well, good, man. That's awesome to hear. We're always trying to get better with each album and improve from the last, but I'll tell you what we did on this album that was a little different from the others. We always miked the cabinet, the speaker, always. And this time around we did not. For all the rhythm sounds, it's a Captur X2 notes that we're going into with the head.  And I'm preamping the front of that with the Tech 21 Q-strip. So it's a single band parametric EQ pedal.  And then I went into the Captur X, the head right into that. And we did not feed a speaker cabinet. We went direct. And with the Captur X, you're able to go in and there's software with that. You can really fine tune the EQ, the distance, the mics used, the cab juice, all that stuff. And that's the tone you're hearing, man. And I did a track and then ours did a track. So two rhythms. And on some of the songs have three rhythms, one up the middle, one left, one right. And then on some of the songs, I did a track and then I did the second track, you know, like ashes to ashes. I remember ours had a little trouble playing the riff. You know, that riff. So I track, double track myself, but it's all double track or triple track. And it's, that's the tone, man. It's that striper tone, adding that EQ, 7 to 800, boosted to the front of an amp, a Marshall, Boogie, EVH, whatever amp you want to try, you're going to get that tone. What's the guitar in the video, the small type of V? Those are sullies. Oh. Guided by the name of John Sullivan, who learned how to build guitar and was inspired by Grover. He and Grover actually released a road style V together. Recently in recent times, but John Sullivan builds guitars that are just like the old Jackson's. Yeah, I talked to Grover Jackson for like four hours on the podcast, man. What a history. Oh yeah. Yeah. Crazy stuff. John is Grover again. Kind of, I don't want to say reincarnated, but he's like a young Grover and he is passionate for guitars. Same. And he's brilliant and he builds killer guitars. You go to sully guitars.com. You'll see. He builds guitars that kind of have that Firebird look, King V look, Rhodes look, awesome stuff. Let's talk a little bit about the, the band. Now, Tim Gaines is not, hasn't been in for years, right? He hasn't been in since 2016, end of 2016, maybe beginning of 17. That's when we decided to part ways. And that was the third, maybe the fourth time that he had been out of the band. So we have a guy by the name of Perry Richardson. Now we used to play for firehouse that we were talking about earlier. What's the problem with Tim? Is it personal or is he just doesn't like to tour or what's happening there? I think, you know, I don't know if I'd put it in the term of a problem with Tim. I think just over the years, for whatever reason, things just didn't work out with Tim. I remember the first time we parted ways. It was based on style of playing. And I've discussed that. You know, we got into the studio and we tried to track the bass. We had some drums tracks, some guitars tracks, and it came time to track the bass. And it just didn't feel right. So we made an executive decision, the band, I didn't get the bad rap for that. But in reality, and truthfully, it was the entire band that made the decision along with the producer. We decided to bring in a guy by the name of Brad Cobb. We auditioned bass players and Brad got the gig. And we tracked Brad on that album to help with the devil. And we were looking for a very defined sound, a certain type of sound that's very important. And we got that with Brad. So it was nothing against Tim. We just weren't getting it with Tim. And then, you know, I think that led to him being unhappy and us being unhappy. And eventually, he was replaced with a guy by the name of Matt Curick who played in Leather Wolf. And that didn't work out. Tim came back, played with us for a while. Then Tim left again. Just kind of an ongoing thing, you know, but I think it stemmed from that first time that he left. Well, what's amazing is almost 40 years now that you have three members out of the four. So that's already like three quarters more than most bands have, you know what I mean? So you're right about that. I remember seeing foreigner a while back. No disrespect, but there was one original guy on stage. Oh, it's my biggest problem with foreigner and, you know, it's and I don't knock them. And if people are into that, that's fantastic. But that's a cover band. And I'm not knocking them either because they're out there doing it and they're killing it. And they sound fantastic. Kelly's one of the best singers ever. And I love Kelly. We used to tour with her hurricane. But yeah, you kind of look at that and you just think, you know, it's different. It's interesting and it feels odd to me as a fan of foreigner and being inspired by foreigner. I get why they have to do that. They don't have the choice, but at the same time it is weird. But the fans in the audience don't know any better. They're just holding their beer up, singing along to the songs. They don't care because I think there's a lot of faceless bands out there. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Especially in the 90s, there was a lot of faceless bands. They don't know. They can't recognize the face. They don't care, but they recognize the song. That's all they care. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I don't, you know, and it's not really my deal to knock anyone. The way I knock it is I don't buy a ticket for it. That's it. I don't sit there and talk about it. I just, you don't want to see something you just don't buy the ticket. It's that easy. I remember, man, I went and saw them. They were playing, I think, their journey at the time, the Hollywood Bowl, and I was with my buddy Brandon Malale, an actor. He's that guy. You remember the guy in the Adam Sandlin movie? He buys the football team and he's doing the no daddy, no. The dad, he's whipping them with the belt. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'm there with Brandon and I tweeted something about the fact that there wasn't one original guy in the band. And I remember, I think Jeff Pillson saying ouch, like responding ouch. And I felt bad. I didn't mean it as a knock either.  I had Jeff on the podcast and that's when I brought it up with him. I said, hey, I'm not knocking there. And he's like, yeah, you are. And I was like, well, yeah, I probably am. But I'm just saying like, it's kind of weird. Let's just be honest. That's all I'm trying to be as honest out there, you know? Oh man, look at it is. And I felt that even with Boston, it was only Tom up there. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously, if you're going to have someone, it's got to be Tom. And thank God he was up there, but it still felt like a cover band sometimes to me, you know? Well, Tom did that whole record in his basement. So I never looked at it like that, you know, because it was him and Brad, you know? So Brad's gone. And in order to take it on the road, you got to have hired guns when it came to Boston. There was not dudes that were grinding it out in the clubs and doing demos for years. That's a total different thing, you know? So yeah. No question. I just felt funny sometimes up there because, you know, it's, it didn't have that fire that the old Boston had. And I was in the band and I remember six coming out and just killing it, man, every night. Even sometimes I felt a little ashamed to have to follow. Oh, man, six. Oh, you there? Yeah, I'm here. Oh, yeah. Okay. Cool. Let's get a little bit about last, I know you got to get out of here, but some health problems. How's Oz doing? He had some brain tumor stuff going on. He's doing great. He had his surgeries and bounced right back. Doing great, man. And it's so good to see. I had some eye surgeries myself. I'm doing fine. We're in a good place right now. We've been out touring and we're very thankful for where we're at physically and in terms of health. So it's a good thing right now. A good day right now. What happened to your ride? Some of the retina or some? My retina detached and I laid down for two weeks, face down. I had to do that whole eating and sleeping face down thing. And when I set up, I wrote the album and after I wrote the album, it detached again. Wow, how's that happen? I became very quick. Well, they said it was hereditary thinning of my retinas. But you know, I had injuries when I was a kid. I had a couple concussions. They said that played a part in it. And then I'm nearsighted. That plays a part because your eyes are longer. They're elongated and always pulling on your retinas. You're more susceptible to retinal detachment if you're nearsighted. God, man, I'm glad you're okay. It made for a good look on the video though with the patch. I was digging it. I was like, yeah, coming out full rock, you know, I'll probably patch out again at some point. But it's interesting when I first wore it, people were like, why are you wearing that now when I'm not wearing it? They're like, why aren't you wearing that? Well, hey, man, it was great to talk to you and congrats on almost 40 years of out there playing rock and roll and metal. And you got a good new record here, man. It kind of blew me away of how heavy it was. And I was surprised because I know striper from honestly, and the big ballad and the videos back in the 80s. And this came out and I was like, damn, this is pretty aggressive and good. Well, man, I'm telling you, it thrills me to hear you say that. And that makes me very happy because, you know, those folks out there that might not be big striper fans, we're still trying to make them fans. And if we if we're accomplishing that, even with one person, that's awesome, we'll take it. Yeah. Yeah, man. Well, you got tour dates coming up or anything? What's happening? Oh, yeah, we're doing the kiss cruise. We leave next week. Great. Doing the kiss cruise first week. And then we're doing two nights at the whiskey first night sold out. And when is that? That is November 4th and 5th. Oh, man, I'll come down and say, hey, you should, man. We just added a second night. I think it's the fifth. You can go to striper.com to confirm that. But I believe it's the fifth. And we're playing a second night tickets are still available for that, but they're going quick. And man, we'd love to see you. If you come down and then we're going to Mexico, we're doing a couple of big festivals in Mexico with kiss and mega deaths and Judas Priest and all these guys. That's great, man. It's it's good. It's good to see you. And then you got Instagram, you guys, social media people. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Michael sweet and striper. And yeah, man, it's we're very active. We like to keep our fans in a loop on everything. I'm on there daily posting daily, always mixing it up with funny stuff. And you know, I got a weird sense of humor. So I'm always putting funny stuff up there. But yeah, man, we love it. We're still here. We're still alive or blessed. And we're, you know, we're not going anywhere anywhere anytime soon. I don't think. Are you a stand up comedy fan?  You're Christian, obviously and everything, but can you watch edgy comedy or yeah? Of course, absolutely. I watch any comedy and right now I'm a big fan of the guy and his name slipped in my mind, but he's hilarious. I think Italian guy Sebastian. Dude, yeah, he's so funny, man. You know what it is with him? It's his mannerisms and his facial expression. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's great. He's great. I work with him quite a bit at the comedy store nightly, you know, work with him. That guy, I think he's brilliant.  I mean, I'm a fan of if they're funny, if you're funny, I'm laughing, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, hopefully I'll get to see you down there at the whisky and I'll come say hi in person and thank you so much for doing the show. And yeah, and when's the record out? It's out October 21st this Friday. So this goes live afterwards or I'm not sure when it goes dropping this Monday. So what's today Wednesday? It'll be on Monday. Okay, great. So the record will have been out by that time. And it's called the final battle. And it is not our final album, at least that I'm aware of. And we're super pumped about it. We feel that we've done a good job. And we hope the fans agree. All right. Thank you, man. And I'll see you out in LA. All right. But hey, great job. God bless you. And good luck out there on the road. Okay. Thank you, man. I got seven more dates and then I'll be home hanging with my dog. Well, good. But that's what you should be doing. That's the best, man. I love it. We're waiting to get a dog once we get into our new house, but we can't wait. What are you going to get? We're not sure. We're looking at papillons like a smaller dog. Yeah, yeah, I got a French Bulldogs small one. Yeah, our bass player has two or three French Bulldogs. Wow, really? Oh, two Frenchies and one Bulldog. But we're looking at a smaller breed, maybe a Papillon. We're not sure. We're going to just kind of feel that out and play it by ear. Our last dog, Caleb, he's like a 65 pound mix. Brendel looking lab. He was a plot how beautiful dog. Awesome. That dogs are the best. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Love and miss.  It's so true. And I think they really do make you a short date.  They remove the stress. They bring the stress levels down. Yeah, save me during COVID. That's for sure. Oh yeah. All right. Thank you. There it is right there. Michael sweet. I'll let them be taught. Get this new record. The final battle and check out the tracks. The first three tracks are going to punch in the face, man. Transgressor, see no evil here. No evil. Same old story and those videos form right now on YouTube. And I'm telling you, if you're into heavy music, you're going to dig this. Thank you, buddy. Thanks, brother. Have a good one. I'll talk to you soon, man. Okay. I'll see you at the whiskey. Alrighty. See you buddy. See you, man.