Reptile Fight Club - Starting a new project with Ron St Pierre and Allen Repashy.

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

In this episode, Justin and special guests Ron St. Pierre and  Allen Repashy discuss the pros and cons of starting a new project. Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

okay welcome to another we're on yeah welcome to another episode of Reptile Fight Club. I'm Justin Julan, your host. And unfortunately, Rob couldn't be with us today, so I had to find these two scrubs off the street that kind of scab in for him. And so we're happy to have a couple of guys to fill in. You know, it takes two to fill in for Rob. Rob's shoes. Yeah, exactly. He's got big shoes to fill in. It takes two to fill in for Rob. He's got big shoes to fill. Thanks for coming on, guys.

We've got Ron St. Pierre, a familiar voice on this podcast, and then we're adding Alan Rapasci. We had to bring in some big guns. Thanks for coming, guys. A voice you never hear on podcasts. He's buried down under a big ass rock for a long time. Yeah.

I know. It's, it's, you know, I've been afraid to come out of the woodwork and, you know, have people realize that, you know,

you and I have a history together. Protecting the reputation. Yeah. You know, people know I've known ron all these years that's gonna just ruin my reputation i sold your first frill dragons man yeah you did yeah i have to say you know ron and i go way back and yeah i don't know how far like when did you guys uh meet or um like find out about each other an ad in reptiles magazine and like the back section that he was

advertising stuff in florida and that had to have been 92 when when was andrew 92 92 so sometime around around i think i think i might have known or had made contact with him before that. Through David Blair. And then there was a large period of silence when Andrew came. Yeah, there was that. Knocked everything out. I have to say, I don't know

where I'd be in this hobby without Ron other than I'd be in a better place. And I feel exactly the same yeah that's crazy 92 a lot of listeners probably weren't even born then so yeah you know it was a different you know everybody oh back in the day but whatever it was it was it was fucking different it was yeah yeah you know you wanted to you wanted find something, you had to find somebody. You couldn't just say, oh, I want to find frill dragons. It's like, oh, I need to find somebody that knows something about frill dragons and where to get them.

But back then, when those frill dragons came in, that was kind of the first time in history that they had started coming in. And these are Indonesian from Indonesia? Yeah, these are mostly Indonesians, yeah. So you ran to the telegraph station and sent a... Yeah, just about, yeah. Smoke signals. In the day of classified ads and telephones that had cords on them. And that was pre-email even, I think, wasn't it? know that was pre pre-email even i think wasn't it that was

that was yeah it was pre-email yeah because i what was like the birth of the internet kind of where people actually like had computers in their houses and stuff it had to have been early around that time i think it probably started so yeah kind of late later night or mid 90s at least that's when i got my first email, I think. I was a late adopter because I didn't believe that it would turn into anything. You called that one. Yeah, I called that one. I can tell you that

I wish it had never happened in so many ways. Especially when I'm raising a kid. I'm a first first time father at 50 and now I've got a daughter that's turning 12 next week or next month

and just seeing like how much their lives are just glued around the technology and texting and emails and YouTube and I mean like my daughter is limited to one hour a day of, uh, of, uh, internet stuff. And, and, and to her, I'm like the biggest Nazi on the planet.

She doesn't have a phone number yet. She, she has, she has an iPhone that I control all the shit on, and she can text with other kids that have iPhones, but she doesn't get to know anybody that has an Android, apparently, because without a phone number, you can't text except an iMessage, I guess. So I don't know all of it, but she finds ways around it. They always do right yeah but i can just set her phone up so it's like you get one hour of of internet access uh you know a day yeah i know she was messaging my daughter for a little while yeah that's right that's right yeah so you might want to talk about when you what was that two years ago uh was it i think it was longer than that wasn't it yeah time goes by i mean yeah whatever and whoever knows when people listen to this so 20 years ago i've been i've had a property down in ocatillo um which is right um in the heart of

you know um per know country down there S2 where everything happens and I'm there for not just for that but because it's a great off-roading spot and so we've had this property down there and we started building on it you should see it now we've got

a big I got a 3000 foot shop oh nice we have a 2400 square foot house that is a barn dominion. We put up steel buildings. Yeah. And then one of them is my shop for my car stuff and everything. The other one is we're framing it out like a house inside. Yeah.

I remember you talking about maybe doing a Herp Airbnb. Yeah, that is the plan. And actually, I've been talking to Philippe and I've kind of got another vision for doing a Herp thing. I guess it would be Herpeton 3, I guess, because it never really happened. happened but yeah but we've been we've been talking about kind of going back to basics and just doing a like like burning man version of herpeton and have everybody come down to our property and camp out and i mean i've got a shop that's big enough we could put 100 seats in it if we wanted to but yeah i'm over really caring how many people show up but i'd love to have a couple of dozen people come down and we can do talks around a fire pit.

That'd be cool. And then take a break and go herp and come back, you know, because, I mean, it's like we do it like in late April, early May, which is like the perfect time down there. As you know, the only nemesis down there that time of year is the wind. Oh, yeah. We pitched a tent on Alan's property and about got blown to, like, anytime you see windmills nearby, it's probably not the best place to set up a tent. Is that Santa Ana winds or that's its own thing out there?

It's seasonal. It's the spring. We get pretty strong winds down there. Because of the canyons funneling. Yeah, we've got just directly three or four miles to the west, we've got the backside

of the mountains that separate the coast from the desert. The wind comes off the ocean, it's that, and the temperature changes and it drops and it just starts blowing across the desert. We're kind of right in the trough where it comes down the mountain and hits the desert so um a couple months out of the year it can be it's hit and

miss too you just never know it can be perfect one day and then blowing 50 60 miles an hour the next day yeah well that last time we came out there with Rob and Eric with us and a couple others, there was no wind. Like that night, the previous night or previous couple nights had rained and were pretty windy and stuff. And then that night was like still as could be. We saw nothing, like no reptile movement. So I think the winds are not a bad thing when you're looking for the yeah if you're prepared for it and and uh you know my my thing my idea with this thing is like people can just rent rvs and come and we've gotten i've got a big giant uh almost a football

size uh area that i've um put down road base and and you can kind of like circle the wagons like all my friends that we offer with come with their their tow rigs and we then park in a big circle and we get get a good number of people down there and we put up three c containers down there since you've been down there 340 foot height containers uh in a horseshoe yeah around the patio that was there so it makes a really good wind break as well nice yeah perfect count me in yeah i'd love to do that again that herping on one was a good good event yeah maybe we can get ron out but i don't know if he's ever flown again since that one that one plastic yeah no heather's made

me get on planes so i'm curious like what what were you up to at that time ron when you met uh alan what was going on in your your i mean i was i was already he was a whore selling the doles for a living there that's kind of true i mean yeah you were both established in in the reptile world right at the yeah yeah i mean i ads you got to be you know i was i'm 92 i would have been 20 you you had other than this like his main living back then was you know i don't want to tell anybody secrets or anything but he was he was catching catching anoles uh like cuban anoles yeah supply of the trade yeah and even even uh you know the other the other more common anoles and catching caimans out of the canals

and stuff like that turtles and stuff that go I mean he was like I'll do it I'll climb a tree and wrestle an alligator if I don't have to go to school today that's absolutely true

I never did well taking I don't have to go to school today. That's absolutely true. I never, I never did well taking, uh, I mean, I've never really worked a job either. I just, I'm just not cut out for that shit. Yeah,

no, that's you and me, you and me both. I, I found a way to, Hey, don't let go. I started my first business when I was probably 13,

taking care of fish tanks and doctors's offices and restaurants and stuff. And I went to college, got a four-year business degree and got out and sold office supplies for like three or four months because my parents told me I needed to get a real job. And the whole time I was doing it, I was planning you know and i'm like why did i sell my fucking uh fish tank business i was i was making like this is 1985 and i was making like a couple of grand a month just cruising around with a bucket and a siphon hose and working like two days a week you know and then i get a degree and get out of college and like, oh yeah, you could make $1,500 or $2,000 a month maybe if you get a 16 hour, 16 hour a week job. And I'm like,

I was already doing that. I was making money backwards for four years. If I had grown my business for another four years, instead of going to school where would i be but do you think the degree helped out at all in your business acumen that's the thing you just don't know yeah it's like college college gave me i mean the biggest thing i got out of college was was um social skills i, dealing with other people because I was always kind of a loner. And so I went from being a loner beach rat to being in a college fraternity and, uh, and, and the politics of, of a group of people that was kind of,

I mean, a fraternity is kind of like a juvenile version of a corporation really. You've got, you've got authors and you've got you've got drama and you've got you've got committee meetings and you've got all this stuff and those are those were actually like real life skills yeah working with different personalities i learned i i learned some of the key things i learned were were statistics, which I took and used all throughout, you know, like figuring out the math for reading stuff. It's like statistics and basic math and accounting. You know, you can't get rich if you can't count your money.

You know how much to spend and how much to save. But yeah, so it's like, well, you know, did I get the confidence in school to go out and chase after my dream? Or would I have chased it anyway if I didn't go to school? I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, it's an impossible answer. All I know is that if I could do it again, I wouldn't do it any different because everything I did made me the person I am today. And I'm perfectly happy with that so there we are okay so um you guys uh you you messaged ron looking for frilled lizards in the in the 90s and and became yeah actually we had a music i didn't message him i wrote him a letter i meant telegraph message i probably picked up a phone and called

yeah actually david blair who uh used to be a cycler breeder i don't know if he still does stuff but um okay he's not related to rick blair is he the utah colubrid breeder i don't think so okay i'm pretty sure dave was uh but he was down there in san diego with this guy and maybe rick claire the wrestler but um yeah at the time i was commercially kind of like alan you know i i dropped out of school when i was 16, though. I didn't go to college or anything. I was making so much money catching on holes by then. I'm like, why the fuck am I doing this shit?

You know, so I just kind of started doing that. And it just kept, you know, I guess from my upbringing, I grew up in inner city and, you know, I grew up in the hood. I had lots of friends. It's kind of a hustle culture there and so i was always kind of good at that that was just part of the thing so you know i would just make contacts with other dealers and and i eventually were shipping supplying those all those invasive and old species to every major dealer in the u.s and it was probably because there were about four or five guys that did it, but most of them were fucking drug

addicts. So I don't even smoke cigarettes, so I was able to clean their clock. They all sold to Knowles to buy drugs. Ron sold to Knowles to buy more reptiles. Yeah, pretty much.

Just a different drug. Pretty much. Pretty much that's the worst addiction right you see to get high in your own supply you know dude i i had those guys at times they would see me driving they'd see me get out of the car and pulling it all out of a tree and they would fucking come running up to the car fucking making threats you know this is my neighborhood i'm like get the fuck out of here first of all i live three houses over there bitch and uh literally my neighborhood oh yeah it was it was it was miami was fucking nuts back then but by 92 i had been at it for six years and i was just starting to really i started breeding my first like pythons 1988. I was Burmese, or 86.

I remember when I came to see... When did I come out there? I think I was 93. You had blood pythons then? Probably. Yeah, no, you did. I remember that. I had a lot of... I wasn't a snake guy, and he was trying to show off his fancy.

Not blood pythons. Oh, blood boas. That was the blood boas. Yeah. That was, that was 92, 93. Yeah. He was trying to show off his fancy boas and I wasn't, I wasn't really, you know, getting the response that he was hoping for.

But by then I was doing a lot of Cyclera, which is how I knew Dave Blair because he was a Cyclera guy. I was doing a lot of Boa Constrictors and Calubrids and stuff. This guy wanted to get into Frilled Dragons. I had recently just talked to Dave Blair.

I'm like, dude, they're fucking importing Frills now. It's amazing. I can't believe we can get it. Strictly's bringing them in, and Strictly's right down the street. Like, it was literally, like, three miles from my house. So I was there all the fucking time. And so basically, he contacted me. He wanted some, so I would go to Strictly. I picked him out the sexes that he wanted, I think, right?

And I sent them to you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they were, mean for back then they were they were they were a thousand bucks or something back then um and they were they were fucking excuse the french but they were in bad shape like i mean i'm sure i'm sure out of what came in ron picked me out the best stuff he could but they were still they they looked like they'd been sitting in like metal tubs or some kind of cages for a long time yeah i'm picturing some of these collectors they

something that's hard to collect they go out and they collect one and then they go out and they get another one the next week and after a month they've got enough for a shipment but the oldest ones have been sitting in a box for a month and and they had all these all these um like hard cysts all over their their legs and stuff where they've been sitting on you know on the bottom of a galvanized tub or whatever it was but they came in a pretty rough shape and uh um thankfully you know between ron getting me some good ones and me building a rainforest in my garage to set them up, we ended up being the first people, the first person that bred them, as far as I know. Yeah. I still remember that Reptiles article that came out.

Oh, yeah. Gosh, that was one of the very first reptiles magazines i think yeah yeah that one stuck with me yeah like yeah that was that was when like for me until that point reptiles was i i had my screen printing business and i was already doing pretty good with my business and reptiles was just a curious distraction and something fun because i'd always always had stuff you know and i'll just add you know local stuff that i could catch or i mean i had some exotics i had jackson's chameleons when i was like 13 that basically

lived outdoors in our yard and so in la jolla and they did just great outside on neglect and stuff. But the first animals I ever bought were a cyclura and then the frilled dragons. And so I set up this elaborate walk-in cage that was about, well, it was the whole front half of my two-car garage, and I had two big sliding glass doors that I used for the cage front. So it was the size of two six-foot sliding glass doors next to each other. And it was eight feet tall and only four feet deep, I think. I've planted it out and put in a misting system and planted it really

densely with live plants and big branches and played literally had a loop tape of tropical jungle music playing. The whole thing. Because to me it was like, oh, I want to build a rainforest in my garage. Yeah. These things bred for me and I just, they started cranking. And, uh,

I remember I called Ron up and told him, you know, the first time I had eggs and he was like, you didn't believe me, I think. And I think it was, I think the first eggs I got were from a gravid female that came in. Is that right, Ron? Yeah. I mean, I had got some at the same, either around the same time or shortly after you got them. It took me about, I mean,

I threw mine outside a big outdoor cage and I was in Miami and just, but once they did settle in, I think I was about eight or 10 months after your initial ones. But I wasn't sure that we would ever be able to get those to breed initially because we knew nothing about them. Yeah. And then you are getting eggs like within months of getting them. And I was like, oh, well, that's like super fucking positive because that means that they adjusted this quickly. Then they're relatively, relatively you know there's something

that can be produced and it's not going to be one of these like you know fucking slogs where you try to figure out exactly those weird those weird tree dragon you know yeah voids and stuff that are just super cryptic and and don't like don't like to bask and stuff like that. These were basically just bearded dragons that needed more space and more elevation in a lot of ways. But they were different in a lot of ways, too. I mean, absolutely. But a Pagona is a Pagona is a Pagona. Yeah, I mean, we breed those today um and we've got two huge walk-in enclosures that have them they they it's they're eight feet tall and they spend most of

their time all the way at the top on the giant branches and but they're cool as fuck when you put them in an enclosure like that then you can really enjoy them because they're they do a lot of shit and i have them right outside the back porch. So where the monitors used to be. And now when people come over and they sit on the porch, it's like mostly banana pectin on it. And then the end one has a frills and everybody focuses on the frills because the frills are, are doing all kinds of stuff. It's pretty cool when you've got them in an area where you can walk around.

And that was like the neatestest thing when i first saw one in in the field in australia it's like they if they see you and you walk around a tree they'll just scoot around the back yeah and just perfectly time it then if you you know you gotta trick them and then they come around a little far and they see you then they go back but but they'll just go around and around the the trunk of the tree and and then if you, then they go back, but they'll just go around and around the trunk of the tree. And then if you get them behind the tree, you can literally walk straight up to the tree and just

reach out. Reach around and grab them. Yeah. You demonstrated that in Iron Range, like right when we got up there. Well, that's right. You better get it right, though, because if you get them around the waist, then you're going to put the curtain for certain.

Yeah. They have those almost like fangs. That's right. You went up that tree like that. Yeah, it was not the most effective way of grabbing one, trying to climb the tree after it. In your high-tech climbing flip-flops. I did redeem myself on a trip with my kids in 2016.

My daughter Kate spotted one up in the top of a tree. This one had branches, at least, that I couldn't hold on to, so I didn't have to climb a trunk for 20 feet. But I actually got that one and brought it down for him so that was good but yeah nothing like coming down into feet you know sliding down the trunk of a tree in your flip-flops so were you able to um sell them for more than the imports were costing i mean did is that yeah yeah projects? The imports, it was like a lot of stuff. It comes in and it's super expensive.

And then they sucker in all the people to pay the big bucks and then nobody buys them again. And then they come in. So they came in for $1,000 and I bought them. And then nobody else was as stupid as me. And then they came in the next time and they were like $250. Yeah. And then you're like oh damn it but then i'm looking at like you know 60 or 70 eggs in my incubator going well i can still make

this work yeah and that was kind of the first time i looked at reptiles ever is like maybe this could be a business um was because of the fro dragons because um because yeah i ended up getting uh about a grand a piece for the for the for the babies that first year and i sold you know i sold probably 50 babies or so and and that was just like holy shit you know i can i can scale this up maybe and and uh and he did when i flew out when i flew out there he flew me out there like a year later. This fucker had a whole wall of baby frilled dragons.

Like giant cages, glass enclosures full of them. I was like, oh my god. Yeah, that was down at my factory, right? That was at the factory, yep. That was impressive. At the screen printing factory? Yes.

It was full of old offices and divided each office into like two cages basically oh really yeah eight so i had eight cages that were you know six feet by eight feet by eight feet and had the um small groups at each in each cage and i also had a couple of cages. I don't know if when you were there, Ron, if it was all frilled dragons, but I also did some. No, you had Ackies and Tristis and Gloward Eye. Some green tree monitors in those cages, the big ones at some point.

But, oh, yeah, so you saw the Ackies and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. By then you were buying shit from frank and pete yeah yeah you had all this stuff and it was impressive he had he fucking noob and within a year he's got everything i ever wanted all in one i was like you son of a bitch yeah and it all came from reptile money like i made my initial made my initial you know uh stretch buying those frill dragons and then everything i just said okay well i'm just gonna you know keep a separate set of books and take the money i make from reptiles and put it back

into reptiles and within a couple years i had a you know i had a lot of stuff. Yeah, the little monitors became pretty quickly more of a focus than the Frill Dragons, just from a space perspective. I can do so much more with monitors in this space than these Frill Dragons, and I didn't feel like the Frill Dragons deserved to be downsized. Yeah. With their, you know, certain things like a bearded dragon. Yeah, you can have arguments for a two-foot by six-foot cage for a pair or a trio of dragons.

But when you see how the frilled dragons, you know, interact and stuff, you realize that you're doing a pretty big disservice to them to try to scale them down from anything other than that, than a walk-in style room. So. Yeah. I remember the first time I saw bearded or frilled dragons in the flesh was at the Berlin zoo. And they had like this huge, you know, walk-in enclosure and, you know, a couple, three or four tree trunks and, you know, branches and stuff. And they had like 20 of them in there. And I seriously just sat and watched them for probably a good hour.

Just, I mean, they just run and climb and then one would get freaked out and run away. And it was so like entertaining to watch. But yeah, I couldn't imagine them being in much smaller than that. You know, you wouldn't see those behaviors and that it just wouldn't be as cool. You know did you, I imagine like when, you know, you talk about setting them up kind of like a rainforest when you saw them in the wild, did you did that change anything or, I mean, did that. Well, you know, in the wild, like you've seen,

I think the ones that you and I saw were in queensland wasn't it yeah yeah yeah and and then when you go see them in in uh kakadu you know they're they're in a completely well not completely different but much more lush uh area but yeah i i i uh i i did realize that hey that that's more of an open woodland than a rainforest. You're not going to find them, you know, where you find the chondros in Iron Range or anything like that. At least, I don't know, have you ever seen or heard of frills? No, yeah, it's always been in the woodland type. Yeah, it's more of an open woodland type stuff. But still super high humidity.

And kind of seasonal rain. Like you did that factor in. Yeah. So, you know, that was everyone that everyone that hurts, like if you are really into something, you need to go see where they live because you just can't,

you can't just go on the internet and look at the weather and the humidity and say, Oh, this is what it's like there. But, yeah, you cannot learn more than you can learn in one day going in situ and seeing where the stuff lives. Because I realized it's like, hey, and I went to Australia a couple different times of the year. I went when it was wet and when it was dry. I went when it was summer versus winter. And I realized that it's all about the food, the availability.

To me, it came down to it's about the availability of their food supply, which is insects. And the availability of insects is directly related to not necessarily temperature, not the length of the day it's about the rain if there's water there's insects if it's dry they all go in the ground and and and the the lizards have to go dormant when it's when it's 100 degrees out if there's no food around so the the the activity of the reptiles is directly related to their food supply and if the food supply goes away they estimate they do what they can to conserve until the food comes back again and so in australia you know that's

the wet and dry and and it doesn't it doesn't and, and you're in an equatorial area where, where we don't have like, you know, in California here, we go from eight hours a day to 14 hours of dark to the other way around. And I don't know what it is up there, but it's kind of all the same. It's pretty much, yeah, 12 and 12, like it's light at 5am and dark at 5pm. And the temperature in Australia in those areas doesn't change a lot. The thing that changes is the wet and the dry. And when it's dry, everything, just nothing happens. And then as soon as the water comes and the rains come, everything comes out and just flourishes. Yeah.

See, that's something I've always understood really well, because commercially collecting all these species in Florida, because we are a wet, dry season state. And in the dry season, you can go outside and there's no fucking bugs. They don't bother you. There's nothing around. No mosquitoes, no horse flies, nothing. You don't find it, but you also don't find any many lizards either yeah a man when it when the rains come and the bugs are out then the all the anoles are out all the geckos are out all that shit so that kind of i think has been one of the things that has allowed me because i put in a large amount of importance on the rain and that's why we have built-in rain systems now that come massive above you know 10 foot in the air sprinkler systems that go over uh various sections of the property to keep to so i can

simulate rain if i need to if we go through like a drought yeah a lot of trouble not to interrupt you rob but a lot of tropical places um you have the afternoon monsoon or a lot of places, it mostly only rains at night. And so these animals have to be, if they're in areas where there's not standing water, they've got to be out at night when it rains so they can hydrate. Well, they also take advantage of dew cycles. So when it's dry, you generally still get dew cycles and they do come out. Diurnal lizards come out at night, 2-3 a.m. and drink water off leaves.

I've seen that myself. So, yeah. What did you say, Ron? You do that yourself? Yes, all the time. Drinking the water off the leaves. Actually, while we're doing this, it's fucking pouring out there right now. We're in a serious rainy season right now, like really bad.

We were just down there in South Florida. My parents did a cruise, and so Heidi and I went a couple days early and went herping in the Everglades a couple times. And, yeah, there were bugs everywhere, but we also saw a lot of good snakes and lizards and crocs and all sorts of stuff. It was a lot of fun. Yep, I used to make all my money about six months out of the year and then have to live off of what I made for six months. So it was kind of like being a commercial fisherman. But, you know, instead of pulling up tunas as I was pulling Cuban and holes out of trees for

four months, five months and stocking up the money to be able to live the rest of the year. And supplementing that with handpicking stuff at strictly. And, uh, and, and I mean, for me, like, you know, we've talked about and we'll probably talk about here tonight or today, whatever it is, about the differences between being a herper out here and being a herper back there and stuff. And, you know, I lost my train of thought. I know Louis Porras got scared out of Florida or took off out of Florida and came to Utah.

Yeah. So I got to know him when I was there. Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a totally, totally different vibe out there. Yes. Out here, I knew where I was going. We didn't really have – we had LA Reptile, but they were mostly just importing bread and butter stuff. All of the exotic stuff came in through Florida. And so if you wanted the connections on getting the good stuff,

you had to have somebody down in Florida. I mean, no offense to some of the people that had some of those places back then, but if I just called up out of the blue and said, Oh, I see, you've got, you know, whatever, such and such a lizard on your list. Can I sit, you know, can I get 10 of them? And, and yeah, they're going to, they're not going to go in there and pick out the 10 nicest ones. They're going to pick out the ones that they want to get out of their place before they're dead so having a guy like ron and there weren't a lot of guys like ron that had enough

you know that's a fine line working between between making me happy and making the seller happy because if you know if you're strictly or whoever and you got a guy that's coming in and all he does is hand pick the cherry stuff and all your other stuff doesn't get sold um you know they're gonna be like hey man you're just picking all our good shit we can't sell the rest of it so he's gotta he's gotta appease them and make it make it better for them i don't know give them more money or give them give them like Ron brought them other stuff they wanted. So here's a bag of green and old. Now let me cherry pick out of this bin. And so having him with the relationship he had with those importers because of the business he was, allowed him to be really good at what he did.

And there weren't a lot of people like Ron that could have carte blanche and go in and just pick out the good stuff for people. And if you didn't have someone like that, it was a challenge. It was a challenge. That was the wild, wild west. And there were no rules. There was no PETA. There was no nothing. The first time I went to Florida and went and saw some of the stuff, I was just like, yeah. It was a wake-up

call, for sure. John's laughing. He was like, this place is so fucking gangster, man. They're all a bunch of mob they're like mobsters and shit. Yeah. I mean, that's that, but that was normal to me. And when he flew me out to his place, I was like, oh my God, this is how like middle-class

people live. It's all like fucking nice. And there was garbage. There were no hookers on the road. There was no gang bangers in front of the 7-Eleven. It was like so fucking weird. And I was like, man, you know, maybe I ought to think about getting my daughter, who was just like two at the time.

I was like, maybe I should start really considering getting the fuck out of this place. Yeah, I can hardly keep a straight face when I went and saw it. The first time I went out, I could be wrong because i didn't realize what i was getting into and i mean he just he didn't live just in like you know south for i mean he lived in in the hood i mean it was it was uh yeah it was uh it was an experience i'd never been to you know as a california beach kid i'd never been to well i mean i'd been up to la and you know watts and stuff like that and around some of the gangster stuff there but you know that's like you go in and you and you look around and you and you get out as quick as possible but to go like you know spend time with someone that lives there and live and stay in it,

it's like, wow, this is sketchy. You wake up because there's gunshots and stuff. I'd never experienced anything like that. Yeah, I saw a guy get murdered. I personally was shot at three times before I was 18 years old.

People shooting each other over fucking cubit and holes. I mean... three times before people shoot each other over fucking cuban anoles i mean now uh ron is your neighborhood right i mean that's that's like that's getting jacked for a bag of anoles i mean yeah ron did you have did you kind of build some like street cred there like people didn't mess with you or did you always kind of have to watch your back you know if you live there they you know that you don't really get fucked with you? Or did you always have to watch your back? If you live there, you don't really get fucked with. All the times that I did have issues, this was before I was 18.

There was a period of time between when I was 16 to 18 that I may have been playing in a world I shouldn't have been playing in. I brought a lot of shit on myself. We were in and out of prison so much then, too. You fucking know.

But I did get arrested two weeks after I turned 18 for trying to steal a Trans Am, and that ended my career at that. I got lucky. The arresting cop that took me to jail uncuffed me

halfway there and put me in the front seat, and we just talked. He's like, man, you know, you can't do this shit. And then six months later, I had my trial and he came to my trial and he spoke on my behalf and asked them to give me. So that really up until that point, I hated cops. I had a specific word that I use specifically for cops. And it was, you know, it was, and that totally changed my perception of everything. And so when I walked out of that courtroom that day, I was like,

fuck this. I'm never doing this shit again. And then I went home, I severed all ties with the people that I were, that I was hanging out with. And that's really probably one of the most, other than hurricane Andrew, that was probably the biggest pivotal moment for me as far as taking this, the reptile thing seriously. I was like, okay, now I can, I cannot fuck around no more car stealing, no more bullshit, no more prostitution, no more. Yeah. No more prostitution no more yeah no more prostitution um and uh so i i realized i really have to get serious and make this fucking reptile thing work and plus by then my wife at

the time was pregnant with my daughter and there was there was all these things that were at play right around that time so um yeah i i would i mean i i have regrets on some of the things that i was involved in and that i did up until that point but i learned a lot from all that and uh and i've used that you know plus growing up i mean like like he said i lived in a really bad place we my house was 675 square feet and it sat right on the side of I-95, which is a huge, major thoroughfare, you know, a freeway that runs up the East Coast. And so it was crazy. Like it was a crazy place to live. I had to have my windows had had great sprued into them to keep people out from being

broken into and so god forbid if there was ever a fire we would have all died in that house no air conditioning i remember it was like yeah 98 degrees and i was sleeping on a couch and there was a fan that sounded like a turbo helicopter blowing on my face and i was like man yep yeah i've got it yeah thankfully those days are long over but uh the reptile business allowed me to dig i went home and had a greater appreciation for what he'd accomplished and i kind of was like man i gotta uh i gotta um you know because i i felt like i had certain certain skills and stuff that I could help him with. I'm like, man, I need to help him, like, you know, getting himself in a better position and situation and stuff. And so, you know, we kind of became pretty good friends.

And, you know, how to, how to look past, you know, how to look past what's for breakfast tomorrow and try to figure out what's, uh, what's, what's in, you know, what's down, down the road and how to make lists and, and, uh, you know, take a, take a, take a, take what looks like a giant goal and break it down into steps that you can accomplish each one. And if you can say, yeah, this is a huge goal to do this. And if you look at it as one big jump, you can't do it. But if you break it down and say, these are the things I need to do to get to here. All I got to do is whittle away at them one at a time and I'll get there.

And, uh, and, uh, sometimes people just, you know, need, need, uh, need to not have the skills to do it, but have the skills to understand the process. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. Well, and I think, I mean, that's, that's kind of one of the big things that I can see, you know, you guys, pioneers, you know, in the industry and have done, you know, a lot of things and brought a lot of things out and started a lot of new projects. So I thought, who better to talk about, you know, kind of the pros and cons of starting a new project or starting something that really has legs and can do well. And hopefully people listening can, I'm sure they'll get, can do well. And, and hopefully people

listening can, I'm sure they'll get, you know, a ton of good information out of that. So I thought maybe that could be the topic for discussion today. And, um, so we'll go ahead and flip a coin, see who, are we, are we on a, are we on any kind of a schedule? I don't know how long do your thing? Um, I, I need to be out of here in about an hour and 10 minutes. So that's about the only limiting factor. But, you know, usually our show goes about an hour. We better hurry then.

We got both of you. All right. So we'll flip coin, see who gets to kind of take maybe more of the con side or the hurdles or things to be aware of. And then the other one, kind of the pros and what kind of take maybe more of the con side or the hurdles or, you know, things to be aware of. And then the other one kind of the pros and what kind of things to shoot for, if that sounds good.

Okay. Who wants to call it? Who's feeling it? Ladies first. Fuck you. All right, heads. Heads. It is heads.

You are the winner. So which, what, what aspect or what side do you want to kind of. I'll take the cons right now. Okay. He's a good, he's always a good con man. All right. And then as the winner of the coin flip, you want to start us out or do you want to let Alan go first? No, we'll let, we want to let alan alan go first no we'll let we'll let dickhead

here go first i'm not sure exactly how this format works so you know just kind of bring up yeah some pros or or of starting a new project uh kind of all right um well i think the most important thing you can do is, I guess it depends on, you've got to decide when you start a project what your outcome desire is, whether it's for personal satisfaction or whether or not it's for commercial viability. And then the ultimate is, of course, to be able to do both within the same project. So, you know, a lot of people I see like, you know, all pythons and leopard geckos, even crested geckos, which I'm guilty for. people oftentimes just look at it purely as like the animals are just a way to a me, the way to the means, I guess, and you just bring them in because, because they're going to make you money. And, and, and, and you're not really, you're not really into the animals. They're just an investment and something that you're going to take care of.

And, and, and, and to me, that's, that's, that's not, not the way to start a project, I guess. It doesn't seem like that's very successful. I've seen a few of those kind of businesses where they just pumped a lot of money into projects and bought up a bunch of different animals or morphs or whatever. And they're like used car salesmen. They didn't know much or the, or they partnered with a reptile person and put up all this money and just never really seemed to pan out you know you didn't see those guys going very far you know you almost have to have that passion for for reptiles to make it work out so i guess how do i make that into a positive thing to say uh um no i mean i think that's that's the idea is like

keep that in mind you know that's that's what's important is to make sure you have that passion for it. Yes. Have the passion. I imagine, though, that, you know, once you start or once you're successful, like, you know, the longer you have a project, it kind of becomes old hat. And maybe you're not as excited as you were at the first. I mean, is that a thing? Yeah. Well, that's another thing.

It's like, okay, why am I losing interest in this project? Is it because these animals aren't rewarding for me anymore or because they're worth less and I can find something else that's worth more? Yeah. And, I mean, do you have examples of those kind of projects in your past where you've just kind of found the time i mean crescent geckos are are kind of like the i mean they're the ultimate success and failure story in my life i'm gonna grab a coffee i'll be right back okay keep talking yeah um you know i started out with the crescent geckos just purely out of passion Didn't know if they didn't even think about them being, you know, having high fecundity and turning into, you know, what they have become. I just thought they were the coolest gecko I'd ever seen.

And I wanted the challenges of reproducing them and stuff. And then, you know, they, they turned out to be fairly easy to breed and, and, uh, and super polymorphic. So we had all these different traits that were coming out and, and I got super excited about them and, and, and wanted to share them with everybody. And my goal, when I started was to just, because there was so few of them, uh, were, were brought in originally. Um, but my biggest goal was to enjoy them and

establish them enough in captivity so that they wouldn't be lost and that everyone else could enjoy them too. And then at some point I realized just how much, how productive they were and how easy it would be for me to scale up and produce them on a large scale at any price. I mean, the first ones were $5,000 a pair in 1995. And then I was selling the first babies I produced. I was selling for about that much. And then it took probably four or five years for them to get down to around a

couple hundred dollars a piece. And I still, I still was enjoying them. And then I met a long story, but there's a whole nother tangent here with my relationship with Bob and Sam and Bob and I becoming partners and bring bearded dragons and white tree frogs to the market. So then I was exposed to this commercial part of the business yeah well while the crescent geckos i always had thought of as my own personal side project and we were doing so well with you know bob was the bob invented the bearded dragon i mean for the most part right and i guess you

could you could also say i invented the crescent gecko kind of under the same pretense but um and then bob really invented white street frog um but what bob did was he was focused on us on a smaller scale of selling direct to retail and then i came in the picture as one of Bob's friends. And then I had a friend, um, guy named Todd Gwynn. That was a buyer of,

um, reptiles at Petco Petco had two or 300 stores. They were just a starting up growing company. And, uh, we were like good friends. We hurt together and stuff. And,

and, uh, I didn't really talk too much about what he was doing at Petco, but he was always complaining about, you know, not being able to get good sources for animals and having to sell imported stuff and having lots of losses in the stores and stuff. And so I started prying a little bit because I was, you know, I owned a screen printing manufacturing business at the time. And I had I was 30 years old, and I had 30 employees, and I was printing 10,000 shirts a day for the action sportswear industry. So I knew scalability and numbers and how to do things. And so he's like, I wish we could get captive bred sources of this stuff. And I'm like, well, how much do you pay for a tree frog? And he's like, oh dollars and fifty cents and how many can you sell in a week and in your stores if you've

got you know let's say it was 250 stores and he's like oh we could sell probably at least 10 a week in each store and i start doing the math and i'm like shit he like, we're getting ready to buy out this other chain right now, and our goal is to have 500 stores by the next year, and I'm just going to ching, ching, ching. And so that kind of spawned this whole other tangent with Bob and I on taking the infrastructure that Bob had built to be a good retail breeder and scale it up on a commercial scale. And so we were doing that and became quite successful with the whites

and the bearded dragons, and we're doing everything that we promised Petco that we would do. And so while that was happening, I was developing this Crescent Gecko thing on the side. And then, of of course there finally came a time where i'm like damn these things these things have the potential to end up in petco you know not you know and so i started focusing a little bit more on holding holding back females and and building a colony and i said okay we've got to have i've got to have at least a thousand

breeder females in order to even turn the switch on with Petco. And they made commitments to me to take them and put them in the stores and stuff. And then as soon as that happened, I mean, it literally went, you know, I think by the year 2000, probably, I was producing 1,000 crested geckos a month or something um and and then all the passion just disappeared right it became like I mean for a long time I tried to get excited and look at every baby and stuff and then it got to the point of just like I felt like I was going to a chicken farm every day you know there every day. There was just nothing to drive me left. And I looked, and I'm like, man, look at this monster that I've created. I mean, it's great that I had made a gamble on Crested Geckos going this far

and becoming what they did. But at the same time, I just destroyed my love for all of the reptiles at a certain point. I just got my mind just blocked out because I created a monster that I didn't really like being a part of anymore. And it took me a long time. And then, so then while that was all going on, Bob and I split up Sandfire. I took the, I ended up with the geckos and left him with the frogs and the dragons. So then I'll, cause so in the middle of all, I just told you about the drip, the geckos went from being part of Sanfar to be my only income.

And, uh, uh, and I was not, I was just, it wasn't fun anymore. The one thing I started getting excited about was actually the nutritional side of things. And that started all the way back in sandfire to about trying to fix, trying to find ways to fix nutritional problems on, on scaling up and producing stuff on large scales, whether it was raising the tadpoles feeding the crested geckos,

dusting the bearded dragons. Those are basically my three main projects. And so when Sandfire split, I took the geckos and I took the food line, which at that time I had licensed to T-Rex, and T-Rex was selling rapache superfoods as like a sub-brand of T-Rex. So there I was with 10,000 rachidactyls

between about 5,000 or 6,000 females. So 6,000 or 7,000 crested geckos, a couple of thousand gargoyle geckos um six or seven hundred late yannis wow 500 chihuahua um i mean it was it was massive a massive deal um and i started focusing on the nutrition side of it and got to a point where I was like, man, I sell a crested gecko, I make 20 bucks. But every crested gecko I sell, they buy a $10 jar of food every three months. And so I started shifting my mindset towards growing the food business and the supplement business and finding a way out of the breeding business.

My biggest concern at that point was, because I was supplying Petco and PetSmart back then, my biggest concern was I could, in a couple of phone calls, split my collection up and just send it out to a whole bunch of people but then Petco and PetSmart would be left holding the bag and they wouldn't have anybody that could supply them what they needed so I ended up calling Petco and saying hey this is kind of the direction I'm going and uh you know you have other people that supply you other stuff.

And I think that the best thing here would be for us to find someone that wants to take over my colony intact so that they can just take all my stuff, all my animals, all my knowledge, and help them get going. And then you can get your supply from them and it'll be seamless. And the day after I did that, I got a call from Bill Brandt, the gourmet rodent, and he was providing all the bearded dragons and colubrids to Petco at the time. And so anyway, long story short, Bill and I worked out a deal, and I sold him

all of my whole Crested Gecko colony and my whole Riculatus colony. And then I dispersed the late Giannis and Chihuahua and

Saracenorum and am I missing anything? No, I don't think so. Trachyrhynchus. Trachyrhynchus. I only had a few Trachyrhynchus, so that wasn't... I just gave that stuff to Philippe. And I gave Philippe the cream of the

crop on the leachies and the chihuahus and stuff as well. But yeah, so that's the downside of even when something starts out as a passion for you. Sometimes instead of you driving the business, the business drives you. That sounds an awful lot like a con, so let's go over to Ron. Well, yeah, the fucker is on both sides already.

I don't know how to play this game. No, it's all good. It's like if there was this little gremlin on my shoulder and my brain, and I looked in the mirror, I'd fucking see Ron's face. That's exactly who it would be yeah the funny thing about that is uh everything he said is the same shit that i have always struggled with right i do this again it's finding this it's finding something that makes you want to get up in the morning and do it but also being able to pay your fucking bills and eat and not

all that. That's a hard combination. There are really not a lot, and God knows by now, over 200 species on some commercial level, trust me, the vast majority of the shit does not tick both of those boxes. It either ticks one or the other, but it's probably less than 50 species that tick both. And honestly, I'm probably being very generous with that. It's probably less than 25. I mean, bearded dragons came along in the mid-80s.

Crested geckos came along in the late 90s. At least when I look at the reptile world sorry to all you snake people but i don't i'm blind to snakes okay but in the in the lizard world there nothing has come since the crested gecko to rival it yet and so we might change that with we've been now we've been now 30 years without without something that has made the impact that crested geckos have made and before we've we've had we've had leopard geckos bearded dragons crested geckos and i mean obviously ball pythons have kind of yeah yeah so that's why i said that's why i said i'm blind i'm blind on the snake side you had you had king snakes yeah corn snakes king snakes ball uh ball pythons and

and uh um boa constrictor yeah yeah yeah yeah but but uh and then and then for lizards there are there are some i think i mean i'm gambling everything on the future that the blue tongues are going to have that ability. Now that we've got six or seven morphs in a production, she's just done amazing work. But the difference is, is that in the past, I would have attempted to scale this up to some giant fucking scale. And but now because of my relationship with Heather, you know, she's much better at retail facing, you know, you can't send an ogre out like me out there to sell shit retail to the public. I'm like this fucker. I need to stay behind the scenes on the scene. You know, I can show up on these hardcore podcasts cause this is my people, but you know, I'm just not fit for fucking prime time and so but she is and so we are now doing a more kind of an old school sandfire um but then again i recently started trying to resurrect some of bob's uh white tree frog morphs and that gets out of hand real quick i have already that's the thing is like the difference between

yeah a thousand eggs and a hundred yeah the scalability of blue tongues i i think is because i you know i did the math on them myself i'm like i can't scale them up you can never make a blue tongue like like a crescent gecko or a bearded dragon just because they don't have the numbers so is that good or bad it depends on what your goal is if my goal i mean if you if you follow take another animal for for for the retail pet trade that can be in every house then the blue trunk isn't a blue tongue isn't a non-starter but if it's to for the model that ron has then then that it great. And the nice thing about, well, we're talking about the good and the bad and stuff. Nice thing about a project like what Ron has here is that because it can't get

to a point where it takes over because of the fecundity, it can stay fun. Yeah. You'll never get like, shit i've got 10 000 blue tongues it's not fun anymore you're always and you've got so many different morphs going that you're always going to be excited about looking and seeing what the what's been born and and what and what different has come out of it so so like to be able to keep the passion you've got a good chance with with the blue tongues well see that but see that's what the ball pythons have and there's a ball python in almost every fucking house these days and they're extreme they have the same thing they're very low production rate people that are into them are really fucking hardcore into them for the most part there's all

kinds of ways you can go. And that's still an animal that's produced on a commercial scale, but it's a scale that's shared by a lot of people. Is there a lot easier to produce than blue tongues? No, I don't think so at all. At least not if you follow a few i think i think you know okay i i don't know very many people that have great success producing large amounts of blue tongues in in slow i don't think anybody has yet yeah so so space space for you know i always look at like well when i was doing my commercial stuff it was like how much you know what's the potential of this two square feet to produce?

And so when you start putting that into the factor, when you're using larger stuff or outdoor stuff, the scalability changes. And so in order to put a blue tongue in every house, you'd have to fence off the whole state of florida okay but see but see you're again that's but that's what my point is is that with the blue tongues it's similar to the ball pythons where it takes a large number of people producing smaller numbers to achieve that goal so you're spreading it around more than if let's just say you and i both know that there are companies that produce a quarter of a million fucking bearded dragons a year. And there are multiple companies like that.

Right. Right. But they control almost all. I mean, yeah, there you can make crumb crumbs. You know, I mean, we used to we produce about three to five thousand bearded dragons a year. And I know that sounds like a lot, but really, in the grand scheme of things that's fucking nothing like most of the big wholesalers that you know they buy a hundred at a time that's spread out over the course of five or six months so they get they disappear into the trade but they're but you're up against companies that make a hundred

thousand two hundred thousand a year and there are three or four of those companies. They basically control that entire thing. That's not really possible with ball pythons, even though there are large companies that produce, you know, 20,000 ball pythons a year. But there's plenty of room for all the little guys. So you like the decentralized factor of it. Yeah, for sure. It's basically kind of like fucking crypto, man. I was going to say kind of like the Bitcoin factor of it. Yeah, for sure.

It's basically kind of like fucking crypto, man. I was going to say kind of like the Bitcoin or Retsu. Yeah. I mean, that's what the ball of Python is. It's essentially, it's crypto. God, you shouldn't put those two words together because that's the whole thing. But yeah. What's the word that comes after crypto?

Spiridium. But yeah, you know, I mean, I, so, I mean, I'm gambling on that. I think that, I just don't think that there's no other lizard that you can, that you can use to make the kind of radical morphs that you can you can get out of a blue tongue like crested geckos can make some cool morphs but go look at them they're they're not they're not really radical the lily white's probably the most radical one they have but but the base color of a crested gecko is just a kind of a brown lizard whereas the blue tongue has oranges and reds and yellows and

black and all these different colors so they there's a lot more that can you know can be milked out of that whereas you know leopard geckos um and then plus there's a size factor and the fact that they're shiny they display the mutations really well and they're really bright you know the a lot of people have tried to you know set up bearded i mean the beard is blue tones yeah and like the animals that you have have been passed around i know failed with them yeah i think if anybody can make it work uh it's not you i i do think that's a really i mean important factor anytime you're starting a thing is you know like you said what's the goal and and is it feasible you know how much space or or how many animals am i going to get out of this and how much am i putting into it or yeah how many you know and i i i think that's a when

you're you know that goes into what kind of model you're setting up and where you're setting up like a uh you know not a wholesale business but more of a consumer-based business you can ask a lot more per animal and and uh you know then those people will benefit from spending a lot because they can turn around and breed them as well. They're not going to get to the point where they out-compete you because, you know, you're always going to be a step ahead of them or, you know, have those adult animals or whatever. You don't need to wholesale that kind of stuff. I mean, my most recent past after I walked away from everything and the crested geckos and everything, was a gurney. I started with a gurney where it's super rare and hard to find and similar to the blue tongues on the productivity level.

And I went from, oh, I'm going to get back into reptiles, the gurney is kind of do it for me. I'm just going to get a couple pair of this and a couple pair of that. He had a gurney. I knew I had a couple hundred gurneys. But I think that what Ron's trying to do with the blue tongues is probably a mirror of what I was doing with the agurnia. And the only reason I stopped with the agurnia was I developed like this histamine reaction in my room. And I wasn't even feeding insects.

I was feeding my foods and greens and i would feed the the depressa and the little ones uh crickets and mealworms because they they don't do well without it but but every time i would go in there i would i would like grab a nagurnia and pick it up and handle it and then i'd i'd walk out of the room and my arms would start itching, and I'd get a rash, and I would have an asthma attack. I'd have to use my inhaler. And, I mean, after 40 years of herping, I had asthma problems as a kid and everything, but I never really had anything reptile-related. And all of a sudden, it just started kicking my ass, and I couldn't even go in there and take care of stuff. And my daughter was like five

and i had her taking care of the reptiles and i get the rashes from handling stuff now but i think the only reason i don't get the the asthma reaction is because it's almost all outdoors and even our indoor buildings have giant babies i mean it's like i i have to go i have to go get my inhaler and take a couple of Benadryl. And it was just like, I was just like, man, like this sucks. And so now I'm back to just a couple of tortoises and a couple of geckos and a bird. Yeah, that's something you can't call from the get-go either. I mean, if you get heavy into a big project and all of a sudden you find yourself with an allergy, what do you do? Superworms would do that.

Like at Sandfire, we raised our own superworms and our own crickets, and we had like a thousand-square-foot building of just insects. And, yeah, that's another thing too like scalability um is is the number one point where people fail like i realized at sandfire that when we started scaling stuff up that the most important part of our whole facility was our insect room because without the food because we were feeding what you know we were doing the white tree frogs right we were producing um we had 50 to 100 000 froglets at a time so you're talking about you're feeding half a million little crickets a day yeah yeah when you run out of crickets guess how much a half a million crickets costs every day you know 50 grand whatever you

know it's like so that was the most sacred part of our business the big the most responsible person at our place was in charge of the insects. And then we had the cricket virus came. I can't remember what year that was, but wiped out the crickets and then start growing other crickets and relying more on mealworms and superworms and stuff. But, man, you realize that, man, like raising reptiles isn't really about raising reptiles it's about um at least insectivorous reptiles yeah and i'm sure like with with snakes it's like well what if you run out of mice or rats you know it's it's it's it's not something

to overlook and then you're like okay well if i'm gonna prepare for the apocalypse and I need a six-month supply of frozen rats and frozen mice, how big of a freezer do I need if I have a thousand snakes? How do you keep them from going bad? Yeah, and so then people skimp on that part and they just feel like, oh, my supplier, he'll have them every week when I call. What if he doesn't yeah you know then you've got a bunch of hungry snakes you can't feed and and uh um and then when animals go off go off feed and get sick sometimes they don't come back sometimes um pathogens that they have that are asymptomatic that they're carriers for as soon as the animals become

weak that stuff starts to take over and next thing i know you've got idd or one of these other things that shows up and just starts wiping stuff out you don't know why and it's well yeah maybe it's because the animals you know the the your care for the animals uh dropped off or you didn't notice that your colony was full of mites or something you know it's like there's all these other outside outside and that's insects again it's like uh mites i had i had mites uh in the racadaclus you know the late janice the original wild caught late janice had these little orange mites on them and uh 10-15 years later they were still in the in the captive populations here and they weren't hard to get rid of i finally figured out a really easy way to get rid of them but they were they're like

pissed you off and and and anything that can go from one cage to another can take a sickness from one cage to another or even you know one building to another you know or you know you handle something in one room you have a quarantine room i mean quarantine rooms or quarantine setups in our hobby for the most part are jokes oh well i'm isolating this this animal in my in my in a cage in my kitchen i'm like yeah well what what do you do when you go in there and you handle that kitchen or show me where all your food bowl where you clean all your food bowls. Or show me where you, you know, show me, because cross-contamination can be,

you take a food bowl out, you clean it, and you go put it, you know, from one place to another. Or a utensil, or just your hands, or your shoes if you're getting it on your your feet you walk around i mean i mean when like i i i mean justin you live in this environment and then i i owned a tissue culture lab doing plant tissue cultures and you realize really quick how dirty we are yeah yeah it's like how did this get here yeah aim on you. Oh yeah. And you look at like the lab, lab supply, the mouse, you know, breeders and things. And that is like a very clean facility. You know, you think a rodent supply place like that, the, yeah, they're, they're as clean as it gets, you know? Yeah.

But most people in the hobby just remember the concept of what, what, you know, what, what it takes to actually quarantine stuff, you know, when you're dealing with, when you're, you know, that's always the struggle of, uh, um, trying to be groundbreaking, uh, is you're always working with the shitty imported stuff yep um and then you get to a point where um you clean the stuff up and you get it going and you're like shit i need some more blood you know yep and then it's like okay i don't want to do this you know or even if it's captive bred from somebody else you don't know you know you don't know shit you know, you don't know shit about, I mean, you know, people, but you just don't know what could be in their, in their collection or, or what. And, and, and, and, uh, so it's like, it's such a risk. for me was about 50 was my goal was to get enough animals the very first time so i could do it all once and be fucking done all the doors and say i don't need your animals yeah not enough i've established a i've established a clean population it's a it's a closed door and then and then and then somebody's like hey i hatched an ovino i guess i should make an exception you know or whatever you know there you go it's so hard

i'm curious around like outdoors if you deal with i mean because obviously it's it's a little more easy to control indoors with you know different pathogens different pathogens or, or, you know, some bug that's been sprayed jumping into the enclosure and maybe be, you know, being toxic or something. Do you, how do you deal with that outdoor? That would be a good debate. I had never, ever had an issue like that outdoors and i think that part of that is that when you're outdoors you're protected by the sun yeah and the elements things those pathogens don't survive that long outside and you know in high heat environments actually indoors if you think about it we create these fucking perfect environments for a lot of these i mean that's what we do

right we we had moderate temperatures. It's dry. There's all these things that go into place that allows us pathogens to survive longer. Outside, though, I think it's fucking annihilated pretty quickly by the sun, by the elements and all that. So I think that's part of it. It saved my ass. But there's a paper coming out, apparently. I don't know how much I'm allowed to speak about this so i'm just going to bring this up briefly but i think i somebody told me a daytona that's out but they kind of showed that if you raise the body temperature which this

so this we've known though the whole fucking time right yeah we've always known that if your shit gets sick you raise the temperature and it generally gets better well this well yeah i mean we could your chytrid fungus couldn't survive at a certain temperature and so generally gets better. Well, this. Well, yeah, I mean, we could. Kittred fungus couldn't survive at a certain temperature. And so you try to cook it up, cook it out, you know? Yeah. So there's a paper coming out, I guess, that shows that in a certain snake species with a certain disease, that once they got the body temperature of the snake up to a certain level that that it became

disease free after a couple weeks well if you think about that snakes don't they're they're cold-blooded you know all ectotherms are they can't they're relying on the environment to allow them to have a fever to deal with the fucking uh with the so they would naturally, when they're sick in the wild, they would go spend more time basking or in a world. It could be a two-fold situation where it's not just them being able to get hot, but it could be...

That it's actually killing the pathogen. But it could be the magic of the UV, the magic of the sun. I really believe that the natural light has so much to contribute. But in this instance, though, with the snakes, they did it in just an incubator. So they weren't outside. They just got them up to like, I think it's 97 degrees. And so as soon as I like I said, people were talking about it openly at Daytona.

So I'm pretty sure that it's out. But it was kind of one of those things where somebody gave me a heads up about it. Yeah, we actually discussed that. I was on the Trap Talk Network podcast. Oh, so you know about this? So, yeah, we talked about that. And I thought it was really interesting. It makes sense. It was like, what, a week at 95 in an incubator or something?

Yeah, and I think it was Ninovirus in a python species. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I've always thought, and Ron and I have had conversations about this a little bit, but to me, the number one thing that we fight in herpetoculture that is probably causal to so many other things is hydration yeah well i mean yeah you see in the winter if you're living in a cold place like i do and you got forced air or whatever you know everything dries out and you're more susceptible to to pathogens whereas if you've got an intact you know barrier and you're well hydrated, that happens less often. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then, and then just, you know, liver function,

kidney function. I mean, like, I mean, bearded dragons, I mean, I could change the, I could build a bearded dragon terrarium and I could sell it as a beef jerky machine if I wanted to. Yep. Right. Really? It's really, it's really uh um you know you're just you're creating an environment that is unnatural and it's so hard to hydrate anything and just drinking isn't going to solve it you know yeah oh yeah i we routinely hear that you cannot breed bearded dragons outdoors in florida because the humidity is too high i'm like bitch i've been doing it since 1988 out here

heather's been now doing it with me. You know, she adopted my systems when we got together because she was doing them indoors. Because, again, that's the thing, right? Oh, you can't have them outside. And I was like, no, that's bullshit. And this is the system. And then once she got used to it, she was like, oh, my God, this is so awesome because I can actually go in these enclosures with them. But when it's fucking raining, like it's been raining here for four days they're out

drinking they and and they they and i'm sure they uh they take in water vapor and that helps to hydrate them just like chameleons and when it's not raining they're getting they're getting do do yep and when and when we go through dry spells you can they actually start to physically dehydrate so i have a drip system that runs across all her things that's hooked to a hose and we turn it on it drips water in a certain part and dude when you turn that on and it's been dry for a couple weeks a hundred percent of those fucking dragons are out there fucking drinking and doing that so and the air and i live sandwiched between two lakes in central florida my air humidity here is fucking 80 yeah the answer the answer to bearded

dragon cage is is to give them a water bowl and what they do the first thing they do is they shit in it yeah and then if they've got a you know a direct life cycle parasites, then it just fucking gets worse and worse and worse. Don't shit where you eat. It is awful hard to replicate nature in a box. That's kind of the challenge. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but the bigger you go,

maybe the more opportunities you have to have a better environment, you know, less easily spread pathogens or more airflow or whatever, however you want to see it. Or, you know, you can open up a sunroof or something, give them access to the UV and things like that. Well, animals that live outdoor live in a balanced environment. And the way I look at herpetoculture, it's like – and then the same thing with breeding. It's like not how do I breed these species? It's what am I doing that prevents them from breeding? Yeah. Because they're born to fuck.

That's the bottom line. Animals, they eat, they shit and they fuck. And that's, that's all, that's, that's the only thing that's important to them in the world. And so it's like out what they need what i need to give them to make them reproduce and then when i get there how much of it can i take away and how small can i make that box before it stops again and that's just uh you know that that's the mentality that I had for a lot of years. And now I look at, like, how can I set something up in a more naturalistic setup and make it productive but more natural? And then I think Ron is on to it with having success outdoors because he's doing those things instead of just saying okay here's the bare minimum that they need and then here's and then and then here's how many of them

i can fit in this room it's like if you've got enough outside you're not trying to produce stuff on a commercial scale then then you can have good success um giving the animals more and getting rewarded more by having them just being more mentally rewarded by being able to enjoy your animals more. Because there's no enjoyment sitting in front of your sweater box and watching your snakes sit under a hide rock, right? I mean, it's enjoyable to go outside or to go and like my old shrill dragon setups to sit in front of it and watch them do stuff yeah and that was always my problem with snakes the snakes don't really do stuff that much no matter what oh dude they do if you set up but

for example condros and condros and embald cheapos and they're in a nice environment are are beautiful i can sit down and stare at a condro even if he didn't move if he was in a nice environment are, are beautiful. I can sit down and stare at a condo, even if he didn't move, if he was in a nice, beautiful setup and, and, uh, and that would be rewarding for me. So if I was drawn to snakes, it would be, you know, those kinds of snakes, but, but cryptic stuff that lives in a hole in the ground is just, yeah, it's not my thing. Yeah. I mean, I mean, you pretty much,

I think it's a perception problem with the industry right now. I think we're still locked in that 90s, you know, it's all about bare minimums and giant racks. And then we have all these cage companies. They all essentially make the same fucking box. I mean, there's some that are starting to branch out and do different things, but there's not enough of them yet. And I think that's what it's really going to take. I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Yeah, well, and with snakes too, I would imagine that you probably like,

okay, how much do I really need to feed them? Do I need to feed them twice a week? Do I need to feed them once a week? Do I need to feed them every two weeks? At what point do they not produce as well for me or do they not grow as fast or, you know, you pump them up as juveniles and, and then like, you know, pumping stuff up just because something grows fast. Like I always used to get into these arguments with people with Cressida

geckos with the, you know, like I made my foods not as sweet as, as, as other options or people feeding baby food. Oh, they grow super fast on baby food and they eat it all day. And I'm like, yeah, but I mean – They're drug addicts. Because they're bigger doesn't mean they're healthier. I mean if they're not – if they don't have good bone density, if they don't have good mineral reserves, if they don't have all this stuff,

they're going to, as soon as they start being reproductive, they're going to crash because they don't have, they don't have the infrastructure to be reproductive and recover from it. It takes a lot to shell an egg, you know? And when we pump stuff up and, oh, I've got mine to breed in six months or I got mine. It's like, yeah, no, that's not, that's not, you know, I, I always, I always raise stuff together and let them breed, um, when they were ready,

but I didn't, but I didn't try to raise them fast. You know, I always just fed them a decent amount and let them go. And people are, oh, you know, it's not about their age. It's about their physiology. It's about, you know, what they're made out of. And if you raise them slower, you know, an animal gets to a certain size and it's can breed it can an animal that's made out of jello can breed but it's not going to succeed if if it wasn't raised on the proper proper nutrition nutrition so yeah and and the snakes the snake world i you know i don't know

enough about about um uh if you raise you know if you feed feed i know pigs have different nutrition than than than hoppers and and adult mice and and uh um uh you know at what at what point you turn the butter if you're feeding a lot of little butter balls it's different than feeding a nice lean mouse and then and then you know if you know you take take take a field mouse that you pull out of out of out of um out of a wheat field and and then take a lab mouse and and compare their their protein and fat and carbohydrates and just do a nutritional analysis and you've probably got two different animals you know no for sure yeah um and and the one that's living in the field is the one that the snakes have evolved to grow on. And if you're feeding a mouse that's grown in a lab that has twice or maybe three times the fatty acid composition that a field mouse does,

then you're doing something that you know, that's, that's not normal for the, for the, for the snake. So, yeah. And then people don't really supplement, you know, when they feed their snakes. I'd talked to some people in the past about doing stuff like that, but I don't know if anybody does that. And then I, I had some lengthy conversations with Rico, knock on wood. Rico Welder?

Yeah, about he was really interested in supplementing and having something that we could basically gut load a mouse, like an injection that you could put into a mouse that would supplement the mouse when it was being fed and stuff. We talked about it for a while, and then he got sick, and all that happened. That was kind of the last I heard of anybody asking about supplementing when it came to feeding snakes and stuff. But that's your realm, Justin. Go ahead. Yes. You know, in some ways that that whole prey item in a lot, especially for, you know, nocturnal python or whatever, kind of meets most of their needs.

Now, I know, you know, we can kind of kill them with kindness and feed too much. I remember Matt Somerville had like this species of brown snake, you know, in Australia. And I think he fed it maybe two mice a year. And one of them, one of them died and it was just full of fat bodies. It's like, how do you get that much? I mean, it's so efficient. I mean, obviously if, if supplementation was really needed for snake keepers that it would have

re-intended and people would have fixed the problem. So if there's not a problem that, you know, you don't fix it if it if it works you know now there's a lot of snake you know maybe diurnal snakes would be different or things like that there's a lot of different uh factors and considerations but i think at least for the commonly bred species i don't know that that's much of an issue as it's as much as over you know over supplementation or things like that what about hydration with snakes yeah i mean usually if they have a water bowl they're they're usually pretty good yeah i mean depending on the species obviously there's you know the blood pythons need to be in basically you know kind of a wet environment whereas you know you do that with

a woma or a or a you know python, you're going to run into trouble. And what about tropical stuff like emeralds? I built a whole rain system. Yeah. That's a Ron's realm there. Yeah. Just like you, I ripped the bandaid off last year and bought 56 of them fucking things one time and set them up. And it's been a mixed bag.

You know, all, all the issues that everyone else has encountered it did real good for eight months then i started having issues then i rectified them then i then i started again and i've been back and forth but i gotta tell you man i do not believe that the so think about this? For 50 years or more, northern emeralds have been coming in, in large numbers. And yet there is no entity, not a single one, that regularly produces captive-bred emeralds. As a matter of fact, there are random one-offs here and there, usually a half-ass clutch of a few slugs and some babies. A lot of times it's just an imported female that was gravid that had the babies. There's all those things, but why after 50 years is no one, why is there not one person that's routinely producing captive bred Northern

emeralds? And there's not. And people, they think it's a disease, there's not and i and and people you know they think it's a disease it's this that and the other thing i'm gonna be that guy all right of course and uh so so i started fucking with it and i've run into the same problems. But where I'm currently at is I think that animals from – so I went on a Trap Talk podcast and I talked about the regurgitation issues I was having. And then over the next week or two, I got flooded with messages from notable, serious breeders that had the same problems. And every single one of them, it was a grouping of snakes from very specific region. It basically was, you know, it was some guys with the giant rat snakes from Suriname and Guyana,

some red-tailed boas from there, emeralds, all snakes that probably feed on the spiny rat. Okay. And the spiny rat is a fruit-eating rat now we know the emeralds absolutely feed primarily on that rodent and it eats just fruit and seeds so now you're feeding you're feeding fruit to your emeralds no i i would totally do that what i think is that I think the rodent food that we feed the rodents,

when you feed them to the snake causes gut inflammation. And over time you're damaging the gut, damaging the gut, damaging the gut. And eventually that reaches a point where they probably have so much damage. They can no longer hold down their meals and they start puking up. Now I found that if you take them off food for two to three months and then offer them a meal, they'll hold it down. But if you try to chase that down with another meal a couple weeks later, long after it's digested, they'll fucking puke. You have to wait a long time in between feedings. Now, I've heard floated the idea that, well, maybe they only eat once every three or four months.

Maybe that's all they can catch their prey. And that's possible. But the fact that I see these motherfuckers, they're all, all of those are outside in big enclosures with, with real trees and all that shit. Within a week after they've digested their meal, they're hunting. They hunt in a very specific way. They go to the, they hang straight down at the bottom of the enclosure,

waiting for the rat to walk underneath and get it. If they're doing that out there, then they're absolutely fucking doing that in the wild. And there's no way that they're going three months in between meals where a rodent, and supposedly the rodents are incredibly abundant there the spiny rat is not it's like like it's very common so i find it hard to believe that that's the thing i think it's the fucking rodent food it was an idea that heather had floated initially because there's a lot of antibiotics and shit in that in that crap

well that kind of goes back to what i was just saying about a sweet-of-field mouse and a lab mouse. So it may very well be because there's problems with all those snakes, right? There are some people that successfully produce red-tailed boas, but, again, it's pretty rare, right? There's not, like, a lot of people producing them. And I've got people that are telling me they've had this issue with captive bred red tails that had no nothing to do with the wild at all. Right. So what the fuck is going on there? Why is it only this certain group of snakes from this very specific region of South America? So I think my person, I could be totally wrong, but what I think is that something in our commercial rodents damages their gut, whether it's the gut biome, the gut flora they have, maybe we're killing it off. Maybe there's something in the rodents that kills it.

I don't know. I don't know exactly what it is. All I know is if you try to do them on any kind of normal schedule, the wild caught ones after after, you know, if you if you just wait a few months, then they can eat a fucking giant meal and they hold it down. But but man, if you try to chase that down with even something as small as a mouse and I did try this 100 percent% of them puked it back up. So they held down a full-grown large rat and completely digested it within four days and defecated everything they're supposed to do. I don't have any of these constipation problems or anything because mine are outside in high humidity and high heat, and they have an overhead rain system. Doesn't matter if it's a rat or a mouse? No, it does not fucking matter.

What about chicks? Have you ever fed chicks? I have not. What about guinea pigs? Well, I mean, I tried quail, but the fuckers didn't eat them. I had Jason Hood bring me a whole bunch of quail. You're not feeding anything live, right? You're feeding everything frozen.

No, I'm doing live and frozen. Whatever I can get. But I had Jason Hood bring me a bunch of live quail. I put them in there. They gave zero fucks. I had a bunch of snakes living with quail, and I ended up giving the quail to my mom. I mean the rats and the mice. Are you doing live and frozen? Yeah, live and frozen, whatever. Whatever I can get.

And the result is always the same. As long as I feed them sparingly i can feed them whatever the fuck i want and they hold it down but if i try to to do it on any kind of schedule even as close as three three weeks apart four weeks apart some a percentage of a pew not all of them all the time but but most of them will and then you know there there's thing where there are, I know for a fact that there are some people that have these that have small numbers of them that have never regurgitated. So are those outliers? Are those? They were wild caught or they were?

Yeah, wild caught. So, but my question is, are those like random outliers, right? Like not everybody has ibs or not everybody you know you know what i'm saying like i know guys that can't eat a fucking slice of pizza or it'll put them in the hospital you know is that the kind of thing that's going on or i just i'm at a loss with it honestly i've gotten to the point where i'm just like i have them all set up in these underneath all the trees out there and they're doing well, you know, as far as that. But the fact that they fucking puke like this, when I try to put them on any kind of a, you know, a schedule at all, this beating me to the fucking dirt.

The interesting thing, though, and this is where it comes back to for the initial eight months after i brought them in right so from the day they came in and i got them all within the span of a week because just like you said i knew going into this it was risky so i wanted to rip the fucking band-aid off right there and i wanted to have enough that i would not have to ever do this again so i did it one fucking time and that was it that eight months 100 of them were eating every two weeks and holding down every meal and i did not have a single regurgitation and eight months and it's obviously whatever happened is your fault then i know it absolutely is so eight months in it started and then i I've had people now that have attempted this on some kind of scale with emeralds tell me that they had similar issues up to about two years. Like they got through a year or two where everything was great.

And then they said, if you can get past two years without it, but I have not found anybody that's gotten past two years. It seems like it would be a pretty simple i mean obviously you'd have to sacrifice the animals but have a pathologist look at the you know intestinal tract and see if there's so there actually have been there have been that done and they found lesions in the gut yeah so they also found the diet is, yeah. But they also found traces of chlamydia, bird chlamydia and crypto and a couple other things. But usually pathogens like that are opportunistic. So if there's damage to the intestinal system, then that gives them a foothold. Whereas normally they would just, you know, be be they would just be there and minor populations

are benign yeah yeah yeah so that's that's what i that's exactly what i think is happening i think when they find those things they're just seeing the result of the stressor on the snake over the period of time where you know maybe they got a little more of a foothold but in every instance they've never they there there's no none of the papers that have been done that I've read said that it was the regurgitation syndrome was caused by the, one of those pathogens. It said, we found them there, but we cannot definitively say that it was the cause, but they got linings, had lesions. Well, if there's some shit in the fucking food i mean that does explain why it has because look if you had lesions like as in like what i would think of as an ulcer or something that's that's what i took from it what i read but you know i'm not this is above my pay grade

yeah pathology is a different language altogether yeah yeah um but but i but i mean it's not that there's no financial incentive here if you could produce captive-born northern emeralds you could sell them all fucking day long for 1500 bucks easy thousand bucks minimum like you would sell if you had if you showed up at a show with a whole with tables full of them you would fucking sell them especially if you could figure out what's causing the damage that yeah sounds like an allen uh problem right he can start uh breeding spiny rats or something feeding them right so i i have a solution sausages i have a solution for it and that is to i tried uh raising normal the the commercial rats on a fruit and seed diet doesn't work they're just not they just can't do it right they just get skinny and they they fucking go to hell but

african soft furs though live very well on a diet of bird seed and fruit yeah so i'm probably after i get all this skink shit because she's got all these babies and I'm in the middle of building up her, her systems for that. But after that's done, then I'm going to put together some kind of a, a small thing that I can breed my own soft furs and then just try feeding them just that and see if that changes the equation. Yeah.

What, what about like a gutted, I mean, if it doesn't have the intestinal tract, it's just the muscle and the skin and the fur and stuff, you know, does it have this effect? So I tried that. I did, I let them, I emptied them out and they didn't regurgitate them. But when I tried it three weeks later, four weeks later, then they puked. so but if you think about it if the rat has been raised on this diet its whole life and the diet

is the problem then every inch of that rat is completely formulated with that stuff right because yeah that's that's where i'm getting hung up because like i mean they're they're converting it to protein so protein i i'm trying to think wouldn't wouldn't wouldn't they antibiotics still be you know and the chemicals would not not be part of their makeup just like we have fucking microplastics and all potentially yeah that's that's what I'm trying to you

know work out you know how that's getting incorporated or if it's just you know that's you know that's why I said if you remove the intestinal tract does it change it but however there also is could be the fact that I didn't wait long enough from the previous damage so every time you feed them you're still causing damage yeah because you're activating

all their you know snakes go through that eating for a snake is incredibly stressful their body physiology changes while they do it you know their heart goes up. There's all this shit that happens to them, apparently. Organs change sizes and all sorts of things. Yeah. So it's not like a lizard that eats all the fucking time. Snakes are made to eat sparingly.

I don't know. I thought it was... I just don't know. I'm at a loss, but at this point I kind of hit the fuck it thing, and it's just, whatever happens happens. They're out there. I stay

on top of them. I'm only feeding them every couple months until I get my own rodent colony going, and then we'll see. To say I'm aggravated by this is an understatement are there any are there any native uh feral like mice or rats that you could just trap where do you live i live behind orlando international airport and i

my neighbor so it's funny my one next door neighbor is a is a one of the yeah i guess then you got the risk of getting something that somebody pours into though yeah yeah my neighbor on one side of the country yeah my we're on five acre tracks here but the neighbor on the other side of me is basically lives on kind of a totally manicured golf course this guy sprays round up around the perimeter like every couple weeks. I'm sure that he's got... I'd be afraid of pulling in any rodents that might...

That place is so manicured and it's so pristine that I imagine they have all kinds of pesticides. What about blue toes? What about them? No, I'm not feeding them.

You would find me crucified in the front yard. We'd be holding the nails and the hammer. I imagine they're probably adapted to more of a mammalian diet anyway, the boas. Yeah, I mean, the em, the boas. Yeah. I mean, the emerald tree boas specifically we know from field studies that eat rats. It was never a bird eater. The way it hunts, it's very clear. It hunts at night.

Where the fuck are they going to find birds at night on the ground? Or lizards. Yeah. They're going down to the forest floor and sitting above the leaf litter and waiting for someone to buy it. And chondros do the same thing. Yeah. So the field studies on chondros, I found some papers on their, some of the prey items that they have and they don't, I mean, you're, you're probably have a better chance of finding a chondro in iron range anyway, than you are finding their prey species. I think they're just very low-density prey. And so the chondros are going down every day trying to hunt, but they're very rarely successful, it seems, from the published literature.

And that may be the thing with emeralds, too. Maybe it is occasionally at least two or three times a year. Maybe that's it. Just because they're going down to hunt doesn't mean that something comes along that night. They might sit there for two weeks. emeralds too maybe maybe it is at least two or three times a year maybe that's it just because they're going down to hunt doesn't mean that something comes along that night they might sit there for two weeks well that but that's what i'm saying right i would think though after two or three weeks go by they would find something but maybe not maybe they're only getting two or three meals a year maybe that is the maybe that's the whole key to all of that and maybe you're working

that out how many meals it actually takes to to successful, kind of that Alan Rapace math. How many rodents do I have to feed this thing to get a decent-sized litter or whatever? Shit, man, I would be fucking ecstatic if I only had to feed one rat a year and get 12 fucking babies worth $1,000 a piece or whatever the hell they would go for. That's good math. In the condo paper, did they make any hypothesis on how often they were actually eating? Um, I mean, not, not, uh, not like a number of, you know, rodents per year or whatever. Um, but I mean, just the fact that they weren't very successful or didn't eat very frequently, but also that they don't reproduce every year. So, you know, trying to do a commercial, you got to find that balance between how much is too much and things like that and how much is too little. And yeah, I have some condros and I've noticed that they're way, way more. They're way faster faster way more aggressive about

feeding like they gotta catch it when they can because it's not coming along every often maybe maybe emeralds are just dopier they're not as good as hunters emeralds don't move they just sit straight down that's it and if it doesn't pass directly under them but chondros will actively hunt shit yeah so because i put live rats in with the condors, I have a few that will only eat, uh, live and Holy fuck, dude.

These are big enclosures, right? These are not little boxes. They're four by four by two. The condors are usually up on the top level and it's full of fucking branches and trees, man. When that rodent hits the floor of that cage, doesn't matter, day or night,

those fucking chondros, they're like, it's like a fucking spring. They just spring out of their coil, race down to the bottom, grab the fucking rat. The emeralds don't fucking do that at all. So maybe the food is more abundant

for the emeralds, but they're just not as skilled hunters. So maybe they're not eating that food. Unless it comes up and sniffs their nose, they don't get it. I mean, are you seeing them being emaciated? Like, are they losing a lot of weight? I mean, with eating over every month or so? So when they were eating once a month, then no, they were actually gaining weight.

Now, the last round that I took off a couple months after they had regurgitized, some of them are starting to – you can start seeing that they're losing a little bit of their body fat. So they're due for a feeding in about two and a half, three more weeks. It'll have been two months since the last time. But prior to this, I was giving them a lot of small meals because i thought that was a problem then i tested out with some large rats and noticed oh fuck they hold these down just fine as long so that makes a huge difference like the ones that i fed the large rats to have very good body weight yeah so i remember seeing a picture that i think jeff

lem put up of an emerald in the wild that had an absolutely massive, like, food bolus. Like, it had eaten the biggest thing it could find. And this was a good-sized emerald. So, yeah, maybe they're just eating larger meals less frequently. Almost never, yeah. I mean, maybe that's what it is. Yeah. So.

Yeah, that's definitely a challenge of, you know, establishing a, you know, Everyone told me not to fucking do this. Everybody was like, you're fucking crazy. And then I thought, well, I was like, I won't have to throw in anybody's money. Like none of my investor money, none of my own money, technically, because what I did was I took the anole thing that I was just like he said i reached a point with that an old thing where i had 2500 square feet of these fucking anoles and i'm like this shit is not fun now this is i'm not enjoying this it's not fun trying to keep track i was trying to produce like six different morphs

of the giant anoles and tracking all those hats and everything so i was like fuck this this is miserable so i sold the whole thing to one guy, and then I took all that money and we put it into those emeralds. So it was just kind of like I rolled one project and turned it into something that I actually wanted to do because I've always wanted to work on emeralds. But for all the reasons that I just listed, I've always avoided it because you hear nothing but horror stories, and there are very few success stories yeah and when they are they're generally not consistent like people get lucky here and there or they get random one-offs there's a variety of things but in 40 years there's not a single motherfucker that is produced

and the re and one of the things that i thought was interesting was he was talking about rico walder who was probably the most successful of all these people that's ever lived currently yeah um the fact that rico was talking to him about that about you know gut loading the rat so he may have been looking at this as well. So... Justin, was that the trip? Were you on that trip? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That 2010 trip. That's when that conversation started. Yeah. I would have liked to... It's too bad he's not.

Yeah, that's a big loss for sure. What year did we lose him? 2014? Yeah, it was only big loss for sure. What year did we lose him? 2014? Yeah, it was only a few years after that trip. Super nice guy. To me, sitting here watching you guys talk about these emeralds, I'm trying to stay awake. But Rico made the snake stuff interesting to me, obviously because like my, my passion for the nutrition stuff, I was like,

wow, that'd be like neat to, to, you know, I, I didn't, it was the first time that anyone had said to me that they thought that, that snakes needed something more nutritionally.

And, and, well, he had everybody tricked that he was a snake guy. He was a turtle guy he was a turtle guy right yeah you remember him at the the nose turtle he was checking out yeah that's pretty cool yeah well i i we could probably go on all night i'm sure you guys could talk uh till the break of dawn but i i'm fortunately i got a run so maybe we uh do a round two of this but uh

thanks so much for coming on. This has been a pleasure for me, for sure. I, I, I mean, you guys have been, I've looked up to you, both of you for a very long time and yeah, it's been just awesome having you guys on. So thank you. And hopefully you can come back soon and we can, you know, branch out on this discussion a little more. Yeah. And in all seriousness, Ron is my oldest memory and my oldest friend, I'd say, in reptiles is Ron.

And we lost touch a few times for quite a few years, and we always kind of found our way back to each other and uh and uh and uh we went and on a lot of like just um we had a lot of good talks about different stuff and and not just reptiles and stuff but uh yeah for sure it's uh i'm glad glad to see him doing so well now and wish him a lot of luck with the new projects, for sure. Yeah, I definitely want to see some success there, too. I'm excited for all these cool projects he got going. I appreciate that, guys. But this fucker is out front or is rock now willing to do podcasts.

So any other podcasters listening to that available finally after i did decide i did decide that i need to start to talk a little more you know i think losing losing bob recently kind of shook me up quite a bit and i'm just like you know there's a lot of stories to be told. That'd be a good candidate for Herp History. I know Eric and Rob do a Herp History. That's a good one. That would be really cool to have down in a recorded format. Yeah, I almost had Philippe joining us tonight as a surprise.

I said, hey, Philippe, you should slip in on it. He's like, oh, I can't. That would have been good. Yeah. He came over Sunday. Philippe and I had – he came over and we had a couple beers. I cooked him some bratwurst on the barbecue and we caught up. See, I wish I lived out there because – Yeah, you know, I can't – I mean a lot of my success in the hobby is from

hard work but a lot of it is just from being in the right place with the right people you know and it's like uh having having philippe and bob yeah um literally as neighbors um i mean how the fuck could you not just become something better than you were just through osmosis? Just being around those guys is an honor and a privilege. Yeah, it's interesting. And Philippe, he's done so much more than most people know. I mean, our hobby would not be anything that it is now without what he did in the past that nobody even really, nobody under 40 even probably knows much about.

Yeah, he's really responsible for all of us. Yeah, right. He's the godfather of everything. Yeah, and to call him one of my best friends is yeah that's cool i constantly just like how lucky how lucky am i you know yeah and then i get fuckers like this guy that come into my life it's everything i can do to tolerate them but there's a, but there's a few good nuggets here and there. If he hadn't have picked me out some good frilled dragons, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Awesome stuff. Thanks, guys. I don't know that you need to throw out your information. I think pretty much everybody knows who you are and where to find you. I mean, nobody knows who this is. If you're looking for Ron, just start looking under rocks. No where to find you. I mean, nobody knows who this is. If you're looking for Ron, just start looking under rocks.

No, that's you. You're out for a little rock now. That is definitely you. You can find me on a shit ton of podcasts. I have never turned these down for 10 years. Well, I'm looking forward to Herpeton 3. Maybe we can get Ron out to the West Coast again. If you guys do

that, I'd love to be there. Both of you guys do that, that would be really cool. Both of you guys have got some things to say and some things to share, and I'd like to do it in more of a relaxed environment. My picture of Herpeton is like it's not going to be – you don't pay anything to go. You just show up, and there's no i mean maybe we'll kind of schedule talks or we'll bring in people that we know have stuff to share but but it'll be informal and and um and uh there's no there's no hotels that are close or anything so you got to come prepared with a tent or you can stay inside the shop and

we'll be roughing it a little bit but that that's half the fun and we'll get and the herping should be unreal you know we do it the right time so i think justin has to go and you won't shut the fuck up yeah we'll just say okay there's going to be a separate fire pit over here yeah and that's and then justin's going to stand on that rock and he'll just be talking all night so just get over there when you get enough come back over here we could do like we could set it up like speed dating you know yeah yeah yeah just i mean i think somewhere and then every 10 minutes you move. Yeah.

Everybody gets kind of into their own little, you know, world and within, you know, their sub world. And then it really helps to mix and, you know, get ideas from different groups,

like tourist groups or lizard groups, even snake groups have something to offer. That was Philippe and I is like, right. One of our most important things about herpeton was like, yeah, to get the lizard guy and the chameleon the snake guy and the tortoise guy the turtle guy and yeah and whatever get get those people all interacting because like you said it's like i'm a i'm a crescent gecko guy and all i do is is talk Crested Gecko people and I can give a fuck about what happens with the ball python world. But also the formal like giving talks and slideshows, it's a little less productive that way because, you know, you need to get into the nuts and bolts and discuss, you know, how their view can influence yours and help you and build, you know, how, how their view can, can influence yours and help you and, and build,

you know, things. So, you know, I think your idea of doing it kind of informally or maybe loosely, you know, formal, it'd be a good way to do it. It'd be different. I don't think that, you know, we're not going to have the turnout that we would if we put it in a hotel and did the formal thing. But, um But honestly, I don't care. I want to be surrounded by people that I call friends or that I want to be able to call friends and get to know people on a face-to-face level and learn about something.

I mean, I'm an old fuck. Ron's an old fuck here. I don't know. You're getting there. He's going to be 50, man. 50. Yep. This March. I still have a lot to learn and there's a lot of people that are 25 year olds that can teach me a lot about something that I haven't studied, you know? So age is, age is not, uh, it's irrelevant when it comes to being an expert at something is if you focus on something for, for five years and I don't look at it at all and I'm 60 and you're 25,

it doesn't matter. I'm going to learn from you, you know, they're the expert. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I love learning. I mean, every day I wake, every day I go to sleep, every day I make a point to, you know, what did I learn today? I mean, it's like it could be any facet of my life, but the day you stop learning is the day you start dying. Yep, exactly. That's right.

Good words to end by. But, yeah, hopefully we can do another round too and uh yeah you guys yeah thanks a lot i will see we might get heckled and uh protested and make sure you make sure you put an adult or a parental advisory before you play nc-17 nc-17 or R. All right, guys. Well, thanks a lot, and thanks for listening, and we'll catch you again next week for another episode of Reptile Fight Club.

Thanks, Justin, for putting this together. All right, guys. Have a good night. Bye. See you, folks.