Reptile Fight Club - Various Topics w/ Ron St. Pierre

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob discuss various Topics w/ Ron St. Pierre Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIG https://www.instagram.com/jgjulander/Follow 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

Right, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. I'm Justin Juleander. With me here's Rob Stone. And tonight our special guest returning. I think he's probably been on this podcast more than anybody else as a guest. And we're very happy to have him back. Ron St. Pierre. How's it going, Ron?

How's it going, guys? Yeah, there's been quite a few on here, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you just have so much insight. We just got to keep having you back. Yeah. Is that what it is? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm always available.

Plus, you have so many great stories and experiences. So, yeah, it just makes it a lot of fun to have you on. So, yeah, well, how are things? How have you been? Good, good. We're hitting the, we're in the final stretch of the great skinkapalooza that after six years of work, it's about to become a reality. So nice. Yeah, I started seeing some ads. You guys putting up some animals for sale and things. Yeah, that's some of the last year stuff. This year, though, this is the big year that she managed to breed a shit ton.

Something like 100, 100 females or something. And that's spread out amongst five species, five or six species of pure stuff. And then somewhere between nine. 11 mutations potentially. Wow. So, and some of those will be double visual combos because she made double heads for different things last year. Right.

And hopefully most of that stuff took we've had, she basically, you know, we're kind of doing two things here. She runs them on the outdoor together year round kind of thing. But then just to make sure she will bring them inside briefly and then manually breed them in the fucking living room. Oh, man. Just to increase the workload? No, just to make jokes.

She's like, dude, she's way more hardcore about this shit than I ever worked. Yeah. But she's got David Kirchner vibes of his lace monitors on the rug in his living room. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So for like two weeks there during breeding season, you couldn't even walk in my living room. There were tubs all over the floor.

And she's sitting over him on the floor looking at him. I got a lock. I got a lock. yeah well that's the nice thing about blue tongues is they they go right to work you know you throw me together kind of like knob tail geckos or something yeah for sure you go but yeah this is this is going to be our big year and um for that so it took six years to get here um and then obviously a lot of craziness but yeah on oh sorry on that topic where where you say you know they're housed together but then or is it?

it just like a bunch of females housed together and males? Or what are you, you're just housing them as groups, but then? Most of them are in pairs. Some of them are in trios. And they're kept together year round. Have you ever been here? No, Rob has. Rob has, yeah, I missed out on that

one. So almost everything, all the enclosures here are large to some degree. You know, the smaller stuff or the smaller enclosures, she keeps pairs in and those are still pretty big compared to what you would, could really, realistically get away with indoors because it's all outdoors.

And then the groups are in like those huge monitor enclosures that I had, the ground-based ones that I had built. So you have kind of a false floor, right, that they can go underneath and. Yeah. Yeah. Almost everything now. Dude, I've had to do so much hardening of these systems over the last couple years because of how fucking bad shit crazy the weather's been.

Oh, man. Yeah. Not great. So the stuff here now is, I mean, I've done things here that I've never done previously, and it's been working really good. But, you know, those things, they can, they can definitely, they have the ability to get away from pretty serious weather and be safely, you know, tucked away.

Right. So. So the cage design has to support that. as well. So have you made me any modifications to, or what's kind of helped for that? Well, no, I mean, the interior, you know, the stuff you put in the cage has changed. But the out, you know, a box is a fucking box, man. Right, right. You know, however, however you, whatever you prefer as far as aesthetically, I guess with that.

But it's what we do internally. Like I've, over the, like previously, I would just normally, prior to about six or eight years ago, I would just have like pipes on the ground that were just slightly buried for them to hide in, you know, various lizards. This is my initial Tegu system and then I've slightly modified it over the last,

you know, for whatever I was doing. And now that I heavily modified it when she decided she really wanted to go after the skink thing. But it, you know, it's basically the same system. But, you know, with Tegu's and, during the times that I was doing it, the weather was pretty mild. Like, but the last couple of years, especially the last few years, I've just dealt with just extremes on both ends, like super fucking hot and it fucking cold as shit. You know, relatively speaking, right?

I mean, okay. We're in Utah and Colorado. For central Florida, and keeping tropical reptiles outside. Right. You know, plus the hurricane problem. I mean, you know, even when they don't directly hit you, they'll dump tons of water on you, which has its own, you know, set of issues. Yeah. So we kind of have contingencies now for everything.

But four weeks ago, after having weeks and weeks of like 80 degrees every day, 82 degrees, it dropped down to below 25. for 13 hours, which I have never, ever experienced. That's bizarre. I've never seen below free. So normally in Florida, in, you know, central Florida and south, when it gets really cold, I have gone through some 20s before. But it usually only gets in the 20s right before dawn. And then it hits that temperature, and then the sun comes up and obviously the temperature goes back the other direction. but this was sub-32 for I think 13 or 16 hours and I was looking at that forecast and I was waiting and waiting and waiting and moving back and forth.

Finally, at the last minute, two days before I was like, no, we're going to pull everything because I just don't know that they can survive that. Right. So we went through and pulled every single out, everything that was outdoors. And let me tell you something. man. That took two solid days of about 12 hours a day for the two of us to get it all and get it inside. Oh, man. And but I've got a question, man. Everything was there that you expected and nothing else. No extra. No missing, no extra. No missing, no extra. I mean, I mean, you know, if it was just, if it was me running this place, I'd never know what was going on. But Heather rules us with an iron fist. So she knows what everything is, where it's at, what it, does. Right.

How many toes it has. Like she's super hard. Like I said, she's super hardcore. I'm very much into this. Yeah. So, yeah, so she knew exactly what to pull. Like, there was no guessing. She'd like, okay, there's three in here.

It's two of this and whatever. But, you know, it was. And this was very hardened system. I mean, in the beginning part of the year, I expected it to be really cold. the forecast were looking like we were going to have some extreme events. So we did stuff we never did before, which was we had a ton of hay delivered, and then we backed up deep layers of hay in every enclosure and removed all the shade areas so that the top of the hay got blasted with sun so that underneath, you know,

and then we don't use any electricity for anything, but we do use this six-mill clear plastic. and that's how we raise in lower temperatures. So, and I imagine, honestly, that everything would have been fine, that I probably could have left it all out. But after 40 years and never, yeah, and I was looking at that going, I just can't guarantee that we're going to come out the other side of this without some heavy losses. So we pull it because, you know, it's a, it's a six and one half dozen of the other

because you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you're, you don't here. Because if you pull the shit, you're going to have to keep it in some optimal temperatures for the day or two they're inside anyway. Right. You know, they're not going to be exposed to extremes, but, you know, they might spend, they were in here for three days in like the mid-70s, you know, but with no heat or anything or no lights because obviously, you know, they were not geared for that. So that's, that has some modest risk to it. Not as much as potentially, you know, freezing to death. So that's why we aired on the side of caution there. But it is

a risk to pull the stuff and disrupt it nonetheless. Not to mention it's a you know, it's just stressful for them. It's stressful for us. So yeah. But yeah, I just couldn't, I couldn't do it, man. I chickened out. It's the first time.

Normally, man, I will sleep the sleep of the dead, man. I trust in what I have done and it always comes through unscathed. Yeah. But this one, I just, I would not have been able to sleep. Right.

So, yeah. Worth the effort then, yeah. Yeah. And I guess for the listener, too, we're not asking about specific projects because Heather's right now on a podcast. I'm sure she's talking all about all the different mutations and things you're working with. So I'll let you listen to her talk about those kind of things. And we'll ask around about the cage designs and things.

But yeah, I mean, necessarily are jamming interest anyway. Beyond hearing, do you think the OxyPitalis are going to do anything, right? They have, yeah, they are. She's gravid again. So last year she went, she got gravid. She had five stillborn babies, which sucked. Yeah. And we talked to, I talked to a few people.

I talked to John Felicity about it. He's been successful breeding them. And he was under the impression that because he had the same issues previously. And then he started lowering the temperatures when they get closer to having babies. So he was like, yeah, I think they're getting too hot near the end. So I took that into consideration and I moved their entire enclosure into an area where they have way more choice this time. I had them in the hottest part of the yard because I assumed based on where they were from, you know, that they're going to want, you know, almost hell on earth like a lot of that Australian

shit, you know? And so this time they have, they have the choice. They can choose hell on earth if they want or they can, they can be tucked up underneath the shade. Yeah. So they come from such a, such a, I mean, we're, I've been in their range several times and unfortunately have never seen a live one. Um, our last, or my last trip to South Australia, a couple trips ago. We flipped a piece of tin and there was an Eastern and a Western and a shingleback. Unfortunately, the Western was dead. It was just like a carcass.

I don't know how it got there or why it was dead. But yeah, the Eastern and the shingle back, like all in the same little area. And the shingle back was incredibly gorgeous. Like it was this gold dust looking. It was crazy looking, just probably one of the nicest ones we saw on the trip. But we saw about 40 shinglebacks. They were everywhere. But, yeah, I don't know what my luck is, you know, with Centralians and Westerns.

I always find them just after they've been hit by a car or, you know, dead under a piece of tin for some reason. So, yeah. Well, I mean, that that fucking shingle back probably crawled under there, murdered the Westerns. Like, this is my spot now. But it was, it was like, it got really cold. Like we were we were shivering in the night, you know, and we were even further north and where we saw those. Those were down kind of towards the bottom of, you know, towards, what's this? Is it Adelaide down there?

Yeah. In South Australia. And, you know, the nights were cool. They were pretty chilly. So we're in a day time. It was. It was. I mean, it was still fairly chilly during the day.

It was a year. Yeah. Oh, yeah, for that time of year. Like springtime, yeah. But yeah, I'm sure it gets just blasted hot, you know. So we didn't see it. I mean, we saw a lot of lizards. It was a great lizard trip.

We saw like two snakes on that trip, which was kind of lame. But, you know, just and some of the days were pretty warm. But for the most part, it was maybe just a little too early in the year for high reptile activity. But great trip regardless. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's something we got to do at some point. point. Hopefully, now that this, I mean, we made a lot of sacrifices to get this, I mean, you know, to develop these projects from scratch is very expensive and takes a long time.

Yeah. So we've been, you know, working off of a, on a razor for the last four or five years. Yeah. But now we should actually start getting some rewards from that. So hopefully maybe in a year or two, we can actually take that trip and go for a weekend. Nice. Yeah. I'd like to see that. She's always wanted to do that.

So it's definitely a plan. Maybe we'll tether onto one of your excursions because I'm not going to go by myself. I don't want to go without people that already know the shit. Yeah. You know. That'd be a blast. That'd be really fun.

Yeah. I wish I could have made it the last time you guys invited us, but it just wasn't in the cards. Right. But. I need, I'm Mitching to get back over there again too. I think the next trip's up to the Kimberly.

need to go find some rough scale pythons and see yeah that'd be badass yeah yeah it's gonna be a bit more of a high adventure you know like expensive trip too because getting out there is just very difficult without a four-wheel drive or you know so yeah it'd be fun and uh jordan parr was just on uh mpr talking about you know his a few of his trips and he's a great storyteller so i'd I'd recommend everybody listen to that. It was fantastic. He tells some really good stories about some of the trips over there. Nice stuff.

I'll have to check that out tomorrow. Yeah. So with the, you know, the weather changes and things like that, how much do you think that? I mean, obviously in the wild, they're experiencing kind of these dramatic shifts from time to time. do you think like it's it's kind of smashing out a whole season's worth of reproduction or do you think they're they're they're pretty tolerant they're gonna i've never i've never had a year and now that i probably shouldn't say this because i'm gonna jinx myself right but i have never had a year where i had any kind of you know terrible season that was attributable to anything like any weather or anything like that I mean, you know, they can't, despite what the, you know, what Facebook might lead you to believe, they're not, these animals are not these, you know, delicate flowers that, you know, have to have these perfect temperatures. It's just fucking ridiculous.

Yeah. I mean, like you said, every place where you find this stuff, most of the places, it's really fucking harsh, man. It's not climate control. It's, you know, it has its seasons. even the equator has seasons to some degree. You know, I mean, there's no, there's no place on Earth where it's static and stuff like that. So I think as long as you're within the range, you know, somewhere within like a 20 degree north or south range of, you know, they do fine. And I've never had a time, any time I've ever had like low production, which has only happened to me two times that I can remember while we're talking.

That was all attributed to stupid shit I did. It was stuff that I either changed some, you know, formula or I was off, really focused on something else. And I wasn't putting 100% in, you know, to the animals and stuff at the time, you know, if I was distracted by something. But there was always places where I slacked off those two times for sure. Right. And I mean, I mean, I'm bad about slacking off at a time. let me but there ain't no there ain't no slacking off with heather man she's i'm telling you dude i look at her and i i get exhausted just watching her and like right just chill it's not this is not a

everything's got to be perfect all the time i i hear you though like yeah i just um i was thinking man why why can i not i got my egernia you know uh the gal depressa and and to breed, you know, once. And then like nothing after that for a couple years. And I'm like, what am I doing wrong, you know? And then I talked to a few, you know, I talked to Art, Avilis, however you pronounce his last name. And really good advice, you know, but he's like, yeah, it sounds like you're doing everything fine. Just check your temps.

And I, you know, the batteries in my temp gun had run out. And I hadn't replaced them. And I just assumed, oh, everything's, you know, autopilot running smoothly. I go to temp the cage and like the coldest spot in the cage was like 95. degrees. I'm like, I'm cooking them. You know, like the heat hot spots like 150. And I'm like, that's just too high. You know, I just got complacent, got lazy and just assumed everything was okay. And so, you know, switching out the wattage and changing up the, you know, that. And now we're back to the right temps. I have, you know, I have a video camera focused on them so I can watch them at work

and stuff. And I turned it on. And lo and behold, they're up there mating. And, you know, things are back to hopefully productive state. So, yeah, I think, you know, and in the wild, too, like if it's too hot, they're going to estimate, they're just going to be inactive and hide out, you know, you're not going to see them. So it fit with my mistake, you know, that all went to. Well, it's the downside to the stability of being inside. Right.

There's farless choice and option. That's what I was just going to say is that that there's the Achilles heel of indoor keeping. Right. It's 100% dependent on. on you. Yeah. You do have to be like control. Right.

If you're off. And see, my, I've always been, you know, I dislike control method to a degree. You know, I kind of like to set things up and then stand back.

And hopefully I did the, my method is basically, you know, set them up, give them all the options that you think they need. And then stand back and, and let it happen. and it don't interfere unless you absolutely have to.

Right. So that's always been my method. Heather had a, she was more of a control method when we met, but now she's adopted a lot of my stuff and then she's, but still maintains. So she's kind of doing a hybrid between the two. Right.

She has a lot of my, you know, they're in my systems there. And then I've modified them based on stuff that she wanted modified. You know, she was like, oh, I think it would be better if we do this.

And in a lot of cases it actually did make, it made things even better. It hardened them more than I would have done on my own, I think. So they actually have even more choices. But then, like I said, to make damn sure that this shit gets bread, she'll bust out a six-week period, like in the middle of breeding season, where I've got to see a lock before I put them, you know, because she wants to know.

Yeah. And I think that's why, you know, we've been, we've done really well. well with them. A lot of people were apparently 10 years those albinos bounced around. Nobody was able to produce them. Right. And then we got them going and, you know, and now we have all those other more. So we got hypermell stuff on the ground. So we'll have black one soon and combo. Some of those are comboed up with other shit. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. But what do you think the secret sauce was? What was the reason you guys succeeded where others failed? honestly I think people threw them in CB70s and thought they could feed him shitty cat food

cheap dry cat food and they thought that was enough yeah and that's you know no it doesn't cut it so we just you know we treat them like lizard you know really the thing I like about blue tongues is that they're sort of in between a lizard and a snake they have a lot of snake like things about them you know they don't have to eat that often you know they they don't really need you I don't think they need UV at all because they're basically crepuscular. I mean, they do bask, but I think they're only basking. They only bask early in the morning, and I think they're only really doing that just to get their temperature up. Right, right.

You don't see them out at all when it's really hot. So I personally feel like they don't. Plus, most of that really shiny stuff doesn't really seem to have like a major UV requirement. But it may have played a part, you know, people not being successful, too. I mean, maybe it's more important than we think. Heather does seem to think that it's more important than I think it is. And it's possible. She would be a better gauge of that than I would because, like I said, she's with them all the time.

And that's really her focus. But that understanding of like they need to bask or they need to heat up from that heat source above them, you know, rather than a rack system with a belly heat or something might be. Yeah. You know, because I've seen the same thing where, you know, I've had to keep some babies in rack systems, and it just doesn't, it's not as good as when I keep them in a cage, you know, with with basking lamp and that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, we, I just ended up trading out for, for 10 or 11 CB 70 vision racks. And that's for overspill, for babies.

Yeah. because I'm expecting skinkapalooza here in a couple months. And I was trying to figure out how the hell am I going to build out, you know, building outdoor enclosures on your own. Right. sucks, especially at the scale that might potentially be needed.

So I found this guy that was selling all these, they were pretty cheap. So I was like, all right, well, that's a good solution for temporary housing for, you know, babies.

Hang on one second. Will you guys cut it out? Sorry, Yorkies are, Yorkies are a pain of the ass But Yeah So it

It Where was I talking about before I was so rudely interrupted by Sprite Yeah So anyway Damn dude I totally lost my train of thought What were we talking about? Yeah

I mean you Yeah you were trained You had hopped into the You know Skinkapalooza baby rat The CV- Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we do, we do use some racks, and we have, we have that, that it's, I think it's like 2,000 square feet, that big, that big building that I have in the back. It's a, there's like four big bay doors and a couple of extra rooms.

So, you know, we do have that. And so in that right now is completely full of enclosures. You know, and most of it is indoor, outdoor. So, so that's the, that's a hybrid between the two. Yeah. And a system that I built for her last year to handle overspill. And it ended up being over flooded overspill. So because it's just like, oh, I got to keep this and I got to keep this and I got to keep this. And the next day I knew everything that I set up to be temporary became permanent. So we've had to modify that.

But that actually has been working pretty good. Have you ever tried raising up babies in a group? Oh, yeah. No, they're all raising groups. Okay. Yeah. You don't have any issues with tails and feet. No, not feet.

Very rarely with tails. But honestly, man, we found the secret sauce for them is to put them on a legitimately, you know, full enclosure level of hay. Okay. So like a couple inches of hay deep. They will burrow. They don't do that. You know how one of the problems that you find with skinks in captivity a lot is they will. they will kind of, yeah, the back thing, the back bend, that gets rid of the back bend.

Yeah. Because they don't do it anymore because they're doing that back bend because they're not comfortable with what you have set up really. That's really what it is. So it's kind of this nervous tick. Yeah. It's the same thing that you see in Bearded Dragons, like Beard of Dragons, most people, I don't know if it's still this way, but it used to be that most people, there's were all nipped up. Mars don't nip. And that's because a long time ago, I figured out, oh, they're.

friggin arboreal we force them on the ground you know with a basking rock and some dirt right and we put them in a group and we think that's but what's happening is is there they tend to start stacking up on each other and when they do that because they're trying to get high you know you know off the ground and then they start getting nervous because they're getting stressed out and then they start nipping at each other and then all of a sudden once one you know um draws first blood then all the rest of them are like, oh, and then you can have this situation where they chew each other's feet and tails off. Let me tell you something, man, you put a pile of small sticks. Like, I make a ball out of little oak branches, you know, really thin ones. There's probably like 100 to 200 individual

little sticks in each enclosure in a big ball. It completely goes away. And they spend all their time sitting in there. It's because each one can get their own little stick. And then they can stare at their little, you know, their little cage mates and nobody gives a fuck because nobody's sitting on each other, you know, nobody's sitting on their head. Right. And it all stops. Huh. Like 100% of it stopped. I wonder if I came to the wrong conclusion then, because I, when I bred bearded dragons back in the late 90s, I, I set them up like that. I had like a branch with a bunch of sticks and they could all kind of have their own little stick to bask on. But I figured it, you know, was like they would feed. And when they ate all,

the crickets, they were looking, still looking for that movement. So I just sprang down with water and then they'd go bask. And so I figured, oh, I'm shutting down there, you know, feed response. So then they go bask to warm up again. But maybe it was because they had that individual basking areas that they did. Well, yeah, I mean, that was the general thought. Everybody thought they were, you had to keep feeding them. And they, everybody thought, oh, you got to feed them five times a day. Yeah. Whatever it was. And if you did that, Yep, they didn't nip. And you know, why?

Because they were constantly trying to burn off the food. But the minute you didn't do that, they'll turn on each other. So you have to ask yourself, so I started to question whether or not that was it. Then I realized they're fucking, those things really are semi-araborial. I mean, they're more arboreal than probably even semi-arboreal. They're just not super high tree top. But they like to be three, five, six feet off the ground, eight feet off the ground if they can get away with it.

And so I think that, so I started thinking about it, and then I started playing with it. And once I did that, then it actually allowed me to maintain enormous numbers of bearded dragons and healthy, by the way, but only feeding them once a day like you would normally.

Like there's no way that a bearded dragon needs to eat four times a day. Right. I mean, where the hell is that? That's just, it's just stupid. Yeah. And so, yeah, it was a game. changer and they don't they don't you know they don't um they're not stressed out once they have that

ability so they they they hold their weight much better and everything about them is better and that's because they're caught that it's basically a nerve i'm convinced that it's just a nervous tick caused by extreme stress from an animal that you're denying you know what it wants you know what millions of years of evolution have told it that it wants right you're forcing it on the ground where all the shit that eats them can be and then they're they're there they're in terror, even if they're in a safe, you know, they don't know that there's not a carpet python around the next corner, you know. Yeah, we were driving in South Australia, Jordan and I, and we went, you know, and we had

walkie-talkies and the Australians were behind us, Sean Scott and Steve Crawford, and they're like, hey, did you guys want to see that bearded dragon? We're like, what bearded dragon? We're looking all over. We come back and it's 15 feet up a tree. We drove under it, you know, like it was. up just sprawled out on these thinner branches on the edge of the tree. And, you know, it seems like most of the ones I've seen have been in that situation where they're up, you know, either, you know, four to, four to 15 feet off the ground, you know, in a tree, dead trees usually or a shrub or, and they'll do that chameleon thing where they kind of go on the other side of the overhance to not be seen, you know.

But if you get too close and they figure they've been seen, then they'll drop and hit a burrow or something. you know, or run, yes. They kind of know their escape routes and where they can hide out. You know, they'll go under a rock or something. But yeah, so yeah, you're definitely on to something there. Well, and you highlight, right, the totally unnatural, you know, from going into a pet store 30, 40 years ago, where there's the stack of five hatchlings on top of one another. And it's like people might find that compelling, but that's obviously not happening in nature.

But it's so cute to see them all stacked up. they need their their uh hammock and yeah yeah and they're yeah and they're a little bed yeah yeah i don't know man um but yeah i actually since she's we're we have dramatically lowered the uh the number of bearded dragons that we produce now we're basically only producing less than a thousand and those are for you know those are like high end ones for the pet trade directly. So we were able to lower the numbers down to about 25 adults. And I had all those giant monitor enclosures behind the house.

Those four by eight by eights, they're eight feet tall. Yeah. But we started, I started changing them over so she could put some in there. And she's already set up three or four of them with dragons in them. And they're almost always, man, on the very highest shelf, on the top of the big branches. She's been taking pictures of it, you know. Yeah. And, like, and they're way up there.

And people, people would say things like, oh, my God, if they fall, they're going to break their neck. Yeah. All right. I once chased a green iguana. I was 50 feet up in a frigging tree on a canal bank. And that iguana, right when I was about to grab it, he launched out of the tree, like a friggin' bullet straight down, smashed into the friggin' ground. and then ran away and went under the water and I caught him an hour later and that thing was just fine. Yeah.

No broken bones. No, and it was legitimately, dude, it was 50 feet because this tree was really tall. I was way up in it and I was level with, it was alongside of a big bridge in Miami near the airport. I was level with the cars driving over the bridge and I was looking at them. people were looking at us and they were like, what the hell is that guy doing? It was the biggest iguan I'd ever seen, though. So I was determined to, at the time, to catch that thing. Right.

Yeah, and so many lizards use that as their escape route. And I've seen Bearded Dragons do it too. We had one sitting in a tree and I'm thinking, oh, that's a cool photo op, you know, and I get closer and closer. It just dives and gets the ground and, you know, scrambles into the brush or whatever where you can't get to it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it's not the same thing as if, like, my fat ass jumped out of a picture and break everything.

Right. Maybe only works with Hela Monsters. That's about it. Oh, yeah. Even if it has dexterity in the rock pile, some, as we've said, some. Yep. So what else you guys want to know? Yeah, well, you would hit on, right?

that most stuff is maintaining groups, but then you're doing extra pairing or kind of monitored pairing of those same groups in the house, so you can see what's going on. I just wanted to hit on that idea. I know Justin previously you've talked about, you know, kind of the often condition with the pythons that you maintain in pairs is that you might be seeing sort of signals within the female as she's building follicles and getting ready to lay eggs, but it's rare that you would observe copulation. Within the last week, I'd seen, I guess, four pairs of rhinos, kind of doing, two,

over two occasions, two each on two occasions. And it was just like, well, this occurred over probably a half hour, 45 minutes. And if I hadn't walked down in this window, I probably wouldn't see it all year.

I don't even know how many times they're doing it within a season, stuff like that. So I was just curious around whether that's something that you guys are seeing, meaning do you often see sort of copulation, breeding behavior generally, in the stuff that's maintaining groups?

Or is it more so you're, you just sort of see the positive signs, and then because you're bringing them in for the controlled, you know, visitation that you can have that sense of security with it. Most of the time, we do not see copulation out to out in their enclosures. Like, it's pretty rare.

Every once in a while, if I'm walking by, maybe I'll catch a glimpse of something. And I think she sees it more than I do, but again, she spends an extraordinary amount of time outside, whereas I don't really, I'm not really,

in any one place for long enough. Like she's usually out there for hours messing around with this stuff. And, you know, so she'll run into it a little more. But even in that case, it's pretty rare. Most of the time, you just, you know, we just find babies or, you know, you find eggs or whatever.

I mean, you know once they take. Then after it's taken, then we know, because based on behavior, like the skinks, the females bask longer during hotter parks of the day. So when we see that, we know, yep, that's gravit. And, you know, we need to keep an eye on that. So, and then, you know, other species that I worked on, you know, all the snakes and stuff, I can't even remember ever seeing, I mean, I remember seeing Boas copulate once in a while. At night I'd go in there and turn on the light in the room and I'd see, you know, they'd be locked up.

And, but yeah, it's pretty rare. I mean, just because you don't see them breed doesn't mean they're not, you know, not doing what they're supposed to. So, yeah, it's, and it also, I guess, depends, you know, if you're how often you're actually, you know, in your rooms. And most people that keep snakes, I think they're probably not in there a lot because snakes don't require all that extra, you know. You feed them once a week. You make sure they have water, you know, every couple days or whatever. but that's one of the reasons why I'm personally going back to doing snakes. I'm totally done with the lizard thing.

And I've been picking up boas and pythons. I'm building an old school python and boa collection like I had in the 90s. Cool. So, yeah, not a ton of anything. Because now we're the skinks of the skinks will now pay our bills. So I don't really have to do. anything commercial anymore. That's our commercial thing.

You'll probably be that way for perpetuity until, you know, right. Until we're, we're essentially done. So what what Python projects are you getting? The first thing I wanted was some bloods and short tails and stuff.

So I started picking up some of that stuff. Right. I'm working on getting a pied and then some locale stuff. I picked up some locale stuff from McNamara. The top of my list, things that I

fully intend to acquire in the next year, you know, a couple, maybe a pair or two of Diamond Pythons, San Zinia, Cuban Boas. I like the epiquities, but I used to have, you know, Haitians and Jamaicans and all those that was always a thing.

And so I'm going to try to get as many of those as I still, you know, as I can get. Again, you know, different ones. But I'm going to probably cap it off at somewhere between three and five pairs of each thing. And that's not really more focused. I'm more interested in like, you know, locales and pure stuff. Right. The only morph stuff that I want to do are the bloods.

Cool. I like the blood morphs and stuff. But yeah, I mean, it works well what we do, especially, you know, I was getting a little tired of dragging all these insectivorous lizards that I was working on to these shows. They really do suck to take the shows. I mean, you take, you start out on Friday, your Knowles look great. By Sunday, they look like shit, you know, and it's really hard to keep them up. And then you bring it back home Monday and you're like, oh, my God, you poor bastards and you get them back out. And then, and they're fine and they bounce back right away. But I was just, I was just kind of tired of that. I want stuff that, you know, is easier to move around,

easy, you know, and doesn't require a lot of work because when you have as many skinks as we have, and I think it's somewhere around 350 adults, there's always some shit that has to be done, you know, like the cages has a problem, you know, something. So I need to be free. My time really needs to be, you know, free to be able to deal with anything like that. And lizard projects are inherently, you know, time-consuming. Yeah. Especially they don't want any kind of scale. So that pretty much, I started to phase it out.

I did set up this, well, I'm in the process of setting up this outdoor toquee ranching sort of thing where, you know, it's a bunch of adult tokeys and a big walk-in enclosure filled with sheets of plywoods. you know, that they can hide between and just see if I can just manufacture babies in there without actually having to do anything just right. Oh, we're going to a show. It's going to grab some babies. Yeah. Right. So they seem to be a good candidate for that.

And I bred them in the past. I actually was going to do them. I had all these tanks and I was going to do them in the tanks. I was looking for an excuse to keep those tanks. But then it was like, this is, I did it for like a month and I was like, this sucks. I just want, I just want to put them outside and have this big walk in and, you know, so I ended up selling the tanks and I was like, I'm just going to build them.

This, this big walk-in thing. Because I, Toki's were one of the first reptiles I ever had. I've always, I like them. They're little, you know, cantankerous bulldogs. My dogs are nuts tonight. Will you guys? a Yorkie and a bulldog man i swear god right um i did a podcast last night and they didn't shut the fuck up the whole damn time but um star in warm blooded animals yeah i love those too but my god

they have to be the center of attention all the time right um but yeah so you know i've been kind of fucking around with that but yeah i that's another reason why I bought all these racks initially so I can raise baby boas and pythons pretty easily. Yeah. And I was like, I'm just going to go back to doing all the shit that I, because when I started this, I was a bow and python guy. I was not a lizard guy. Right. I mean, I always liked monitors and tagu's and stuff.

But primarily, I was boas and pythons. And I had, you know, I had a room full. And even when I was doing the tagu's, I had a two-car garage. It was completely full. that's when I was doing like blood boas and motleys and all that stuff. Yeah. And I got rid of it because, you know, there was a lot of competition. I always like to look for holes in the market.

I don't like having to, you know, when it was just me, I hated the selling aspect. So the whole commercial aspect of this just turns me off. And I'm not good at it and I know that. I hear you. So I always, I look for holes because that's easy to sell. You know, it's easy to find, it's easy move the stuff. You don't have to sell it. You just have to make it.

And at the time, everybody was doing all those different snakes. You know, this was before really the ball python boom. Right. And I'm looking at all these wide open markets that nobody's really mining with all these lizards. And, you know, and there were a lot of women starting to really come into the hobby. It was starting to change. And they were, a lot of them were very interested in lizards. They seemed to me.

So they were kind of lifting that the lizard interest market was, was booming. And I was like, oh, well, that's cool. I'll do this because, you know, the first pet reptile I ever had was this big lizard because it was a night and all because my mom was dead set on me never having a snake, which I violated the hell out of that a year later when I came home with a reticulated python. I bought for $44 from something's fishy. That's a fitting, fitting title there. That's actually a funny story, dude.

They told me that if I caught it. If I caught stuff, I could keep it. So I saved my lunch money for like a month. And then I was also mowing lawns. And then I got on my bike and I went to something's fishy. I had put a down payment on this retick. And I paid it off. And I came home and I took it out of the bag and I threw it in the front yard.

And then I pretended to catch it. I started yelling, there's a snake. There's a snake. And my mom came out and I'm like, oh, my God, look at this. I intended to catch this reticulated Python. And then they were on a catch 22. They told me if I caught it, I could keep it. I just caught it.

So, yeah, and I absolutely loved that thing. I mean, I would have reticks today if I, because I could give them a huge outdoor enclosure and friggin' badass. But first of all, they're banned of Florida, so I definitely won't have any more. but not to mention, you know, I wouldn't want to breed them at this point. There's, you know, I know they have super dwarfs and shit like that. But if I was going to keep a retick, I want the legit monster, you know. Yeah.

Big orange-eyed, you know. Right. Just the epics of selling those. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's like, it's like all the, yeah. That's why I kind of moved away from the big monitors. So I was just like, this is going to end up being a problem down the road because it just, it just.

you know, it just gives them some, I mean, it's, I don't know, I mix, I don't want to see any of that stuff banned. I don't think banning anything is the, is the issue. It doesn't, it doesn't solve anything because the people that you don't want to have them, they still get them. Right. Like, the people that are responsible, they're still going to get them. Right. I guarantee you that even though the reticks are banned in the state, there's all kinds of frigging assholes that should not have them that do sketchy shit that have them. Yeah.

Right. But all the people that would be responsible can't have them. So it's like it's it's it's just it's just fucking stupid. However, I, you know, I do think you need to be like careful if you're selling that stuff, how much you produce, who you sell it to and all that. Right. And that, but then, you know, at that point, you're one, you know, you're like, well, how much of that really is their responsibility and how could you possibly police that anyway? because people can just lie to you about whatever. Yeah.

Right? So it's, I don't know. So because there's all those things that kind of, I just avoid stuff like that now. Yeah. And, you know.

Yeah. Are you planning on keeping any of these Python or boas outside? So, yeah. The diamonds, the San Zanian, Diamond, San Zanian, Centralians. anything from Australia I will absolutely keep those outdoors

that I know how to do it won't be that cool yeah I mean and I did have Mexican indigos out for a while and they bread and then I sold them to Jason Hood and two weeks later they had babies and I was like damn it dude I had them in a 16 foot outdoor enclosure

that I had backfilled a portion of it with a four by four foot area with 36 inch of sand and I had buried a like a two by two foot piece of plywood about halfway underneath that and then I dug that out and built it and dug a chamber there and man those snakes

they were always in that and they would come out and they cruise it all day long in the blazing heat these these indigoes would be out there in the sun cruising up and down it was super friggin' cool man I really enjoyed that. Yeah. But yeah, I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have gotten rid of those at the time.

But we were making cuts on stuff because we were getting overloaded. That's the problem not having employees is that we are always having. We have to be very careful as to what we expand into. And, you know, we'll go through the summer going to shows and stuff and be like, oh, that's cool, I got to have that. Oh, that's cool. I want that. then you got like a pair of this and a pair of that shit all over the place and you're like oh man it's starting to it's so much easier in concept right right absolutely there weren't so many cool reptiles right it'd be a lot

easier and that was why after the emerald tree boa fiasco i i decided there was two things i was going to do one i'm not going to i'm not doing anything else commercially we have the commercial thing that's the skinks and anything that I do, I'm just going to do the shit that I personally really have never been able to you know, not pay attention to. Yeah. And that I haven't bought over the last few years,

mostly because I've always been, you know, tied up on some bullshit. I mean, dude, I had 2,000 square feet of giant fucking knolls. And I look back at that and go, what the hell was I thinking? When I look at what I actually made off of that, it really wasn't worth what what what that cost to i mean that was an expensive development on all that and then i i don't

think i even broke even on that when i finally sold it off yeah i'm pretty sure it was a loss if it was if i made money it was it it wasn't much right so and that was 10 11 years of but i was trying to i was trying to make something popular in the hobby that it's probably just never going to be you know it was they're good it's good for like hobbyists to have pairs of those you know to have right you know 20 babies here and there yeah but it was not it was not commercially viable commercially viable project yeah yeah yeah that's the I guess you know that those kind of things it's like leave it to the small hobbyist like you're saying yeah 100% yeah yeah yeah a pair here and there and yeah yeah and that's what I'm going to do with the I every time I

So all these Tinleys and shit I do, I end up always with McNamara at some point. So I'm usually sitting in front of his table scaring off potential customers. And he and I spent a lot of time talking there and on the phone shit about, you know, what to get, direction and stuff like that. He's a good dude. I like Mac, Dennis. And he goes there with a nice spread of stuff, you know, and he always does well. Right. You know, and he doesn't, he's not burdening himself with, you know, he doesn't.

do this stupid shit that I do. He's, he's smarter than I am. So I've been looking at it down. I was like, you know, I could be doing this. Why, why do I feel the need to have 50 of every fucking thing? Diversity is a nice thing to have at a table at a show. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It can save your ass if it's, if some, whatever it is you have is not selling at that point. So, right. Yeah. So I was like, you know what, it's time to, I'm getting the feeling that, old school, you know, the way we used to all look at this shit 30 years ago is kind of coming back.

I mean, I'm seeing it more at the shows. I definitely hearing it from all the different people that I talk to. Like, people are diversifying out again. And then there's the historically cool shit that everybody kind of likes, you know? I mean, if you're into beaus and pythons, pretty much everybody likes diamonds.

Everybody likes Sanzania. Everybody likes, you know, uh, uh, uh, carpets and, all that shit. So, but I also like the niche stuff.

Like, I like a pickerese boas. They're pain, most of them are pain in the ass because they're lizard years when they're small. But it's not like I have any shortage lizards. And then, and Cuban boas. At least amongst the subplavus and the internatus, right? You have those? Yeah, yeah. I'll send you pictures of that.

Well, actually, that was. was another topic. So a variety of things I want to hit on to you is, but yeah, one one question or a thing that popped in my mind right, I was telling you about the rhinos and saying, okay, well, you know, keeping them in pairs and not noticing copulation, I don't keep those together, but generally speaking, as soon as I toss either the Jamaicans or Puerto Ricans together, the males just go right to it and you see them locked up within the first 10 hours, 60 minutes to 10 hours. and that was the case this year. And to me, they've been consistently, both species have been consistently by annual breeders, right?

The females ago like clockwork every other year. And then last year, the female Jamaican missed her first, you know, every other year. And I came to think that basically she had just hold herself up in a cork round and that he couldn't sort of exert his will. Yes. And I was wondering if in your country. context that you that you know that you guys noticed that at all and maybe that's part of bringing them inside is even kind of breaking out that situation you know when you were talking about keeping the beardies in those big monitor cages that was kind of i was like oh i wonder if you see any of that

where instead of being in a small box certainly it's the leper gecko thing right well they don't have any problem with it because they're keeping on paper in small tubs and you toss in that mail and you know it is what it is right um that if that's an issue that you see um because then this year guess what I took out the court grounds and then no problem. He was on it. No worries. Yeah. I mean, I never actually thought about that. That's actually kind of an interesting thing because that actually may explain some of the issues that you see on occasion. I never really considered that at all, actually. So now this is going to bother me now for a while. I'm going to be thinking about that. No, I've never personally seen that, but again, never really paid attention to that. Things like the Beard of Dragons, we don't really care about that, mostly because, one, they have an enormous window.

You know, they have a six-month breeding site window. Two, they only got to be hit one time to produce several clutches. So, and those males are always, man. And not to mention a bearded dragon, it has to stick it's, it has to come out and get sunlight every day. So you're going to be out in the open. If the male wants you, he's going to get you. although but at boa you're right they can hold up in there for weeks sometimes some of those things won't even move it depends on the species but i mean

you know they don't have to go anywhere and if she doesn't want to any part of the the male that's in there she could just sit in there and be like fuck you come get me and then they got to be able to spread out too you know to be able to finish the job i would imagine if it's tightly coiled up he's not going to get be able to do it so um yeah those are things to consider. I had never thought about that. But, you know, maybe that's why keeping stuff outside has played to my advantage on all these different species over the years. Because, you know, it has to do everything.

It has to do the whole range of behaviors. So they have to come out. They have to, after a cold night, they have to go and get, you know, warmed up. And that's interesting, though, dude. I I I I fucking love those

but all those boas man that are found on those is when I was a kid growing up in Miami I don't know if they were smuggling them in like crazy but man they were those all those species were always into pet stores like just local you go to a local pet store

like a friggin giant Cuban boa and Haitian boas all the time and yeah um so the price of gaster the Turks and Kekos boas are probably the coolest you know, one of my taste.

But, yeah, basically, just this side of unavailable. I was going to ask you about that. You used to see them, but they were even rare back in the day. Yeah. But, yeah, I was wondering if those were. There's a couple, and that's about it. And don't seem to be doing all that much, the couple that are there. That sucks.

Well, I mean, a lot of people just don't even know what those things are, man. And all those island boas, it's surprising how many, you know, and I don't think anybody, I don't think most people have ever seen a really giant Cuban boa. Man, that's an impressive and a terrifying snake. Right. That's what you can do that gives much the same impression, man. Oh, no, I know. I used to, I always had Cuban boas up to 2001.

That was, that's one of my favorite snakes. They only have like four or five babies. The babies are fucking gigantic. they can eat, you know, adult mice almost right out of the gate. Like everything about them is, they're so much different than all the other ones. Like they are the retic of that island, of those islands. But yeah. And so those are pretty high on my list of to acquire.

And plus, you don't have to break the bank to get those things. They're all like fairly reasonably priced. Right. It's only nerdy hobbyists that know what they are. what was the coolest things at timley man um i mean i i i i did go by juggernauts table a few times because he had you know he has super black bloods up there you know black short tails and her somatrons and you know he had some pides and i kept looking at him i was like man if i could sell some albinos at this show i'm going to come back here and buy a pide but it didn't happen um

Um, but, uh, yeah, and I mean, trying to think, I mean, so we vened with, uh, two friends of ours, Dan, she, I don't know if you guys know Dan Sheehan. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Dan and Stacy. Yeah. So, so, so we vend with them. Oh, cool. Um, yeah, they're good friends of ours and they, they've been producing Shinnosaurus. Mm-hmm. So she, she, she, Stacy had some of those there. And, man, that, that's just, that is one of the coolest friggin lizards. And yeah, it's really nice to see, uh, I mean, those two, They produce a lot of cool shit. They have a lot of stuff between the two of them. I remember the first time I met them and they're just like going through their collection.

I'm like, whoa, these guys have some serious lizard power. I know. Yeah. They actually moved, I mean, not super close, but they're eight hours away from us now as opposed to, you know, they were way up north. And we may end up in a thing where we, when we do Tinley, we'll drive to their house and then we'll all just carpool to Tinley from there. Oh, nice. Yeah. But yeah, they're they're they're fucking great, great people doing really good stuff.

I mean, they're, you know, they're like, they're like us. Yeah. Whereas a lot of the industry, not the industry, but the hobby in general, you know, now it's very heavily tipped towards like, you know, like, you know, new, newby people, you know, new people or people that, you know, really only interested in the popular, you know, like they only know ball pythons or they only know cresting echoes. So it's cool to see, you know, a younger generation that's doing the shit that's into all the same shit that we're into. Right. It's refreshing to see. Yeah.

Yeah. You strike up a conversation. Then I'll send you're surprised like, oh, that's cool. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's all we do is sit back there and fucking talk shit all fucking weekend when we're at those things. It's great. It's really nice having Dan and Stacy there because there's always somebody to keep you to talk to, to not get bored. but but there's a lot i mean timley really has gotten a i i like it a lot more now when i first

started doing it 10 years ago i wouldn't even walk it it was a fucking snooze fest it was just you couldn't tell where one table stopped and another ended because it was all the same the same display with all the ball python on the whole frigging thing and then you'd get to some cool boas and i'd be like oh that's awesome and then you'd be back into ball pythons again and but now now it's changed a lot I mean there's still a lot of ball pythons there the show's probably

maybe 40% ball pythons at this point but you see there's a lot of cool frogs there's a lot of cool geckos actually if you consider cresting geckos in there ball pythons and crest of geckos probably take up about 60 to 70%

of that show but that still leaves you know it's a big show it's not like it was in the 90s like those shows are big So there's there's an immense amount of of things that are worth walking. And I just recently started walking that show the last couple of years because it was finally like, okay, I'm actually, you know, I'll find some, I'll see some cool shit or run into somebody that I've always wanted to meet, you know, that I see on social media that does cool stuff. So that's why I made it a point to go see Elijah from Juggernaut. And there was a few other.

I don't know, man. It's kind of a blur. We have, you know, everybody's there, so there's all these people that come, and I don't want to, and I, after I'm out of there, I'm usually like, just ass be tired. And then this particular trip was fucking brutal.

Because going up there, there was a severe storm system that was going across the United States. And if we drove straight through, which is 23 hours for us, we could avoid it. We would get at Chicago right as it hit, and that's exactly what happened,

right as we got into Chicago. And mind you, when we left Orlando, we left it Thursday morning or 4 a.m. And we were in shorts and a T-shirt. It was hot as balls outside. You know, it was probably 80-some degrees. And we're driving through there, you know, only stopping to get gas and to pee and stuff.

And fucking, we get out of the car, in Chicago at like 1.30 in the morning. And it was 70 miles an hour. The wind was 70 miles, 50 or 70 miles an hour. It was frigging stupid. And it was cold as shit. And I was like, what the hell is this? And then when we got it to the room, the whole frigging thing, it sounded like a hurricane out there. Like it was like the shit we go through down here. Right. And I was like, man, this is bad. But I'm like, that's cool, though, because we can chill on the way home. Yeah.

Nope. On the way home, it ended up being way worse. And I'm sure there's a lot of other people that attended that Timley that drove home that went through similar shit that we did. We ended up driving home on the edge of it the entire time. Matter of fact, Jason Hood was just ahead of us somewhere. And we were kind of talking back and forth. He drove all the way through like a maniac.

And he actually pulled over at one point at like 4 a.m. in the morning. and he said the the raindrops were like the giant raindrops were hitting and as they went him Billy Hunt and his other buddy who God it sucks I can't remember the dude's name he comes

here all the time anyway they went into the gas station to get some coffees and stuff and I don't know whether they there was a tornado right near them but it knocked out the power while they were in there and they had to wait and he was like there was shit blowing outside and

and for us we could see it the whole way home we could see it to the right of us like in the horizon you could see the lightning strikes and the wind was blowing

the car all over the road and our phones just kept going bha tornado warning tornado warn take shelter about about three and a half or four hours into that

because we left Tinley at five o'clock or four o'clock right when it ended it was about 11 o'clock at night we were in like some little

called horse cave Kentucky which I didn't even know fucking existed. It's like this tiny little town. And the phones were just going nuts and it was pitch black and the rain was sideways and it was and I was like yeah this is this is really getting uncool

quick. So we stopped at horse cave. We got we got to there was only one holiday and we got there. They were like we only had one room that's all they had. So we got the room and to make things absolutely worse Heather swiped the key.

She went in the room first. I was followed behind her. And all of a sudden, she turns around and comes running out with her head looking at the ground, shaking her head. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. She just kept saying, nope. And I realized that there were people in that room sleeping. And I was like, you could not fucking make this shit up. So we went downstairs.

And she was at the counter yelling at them about this. And while she was down there, the woman that was, in that room also had called down there was yelling at him. It turned out it was two doors down from there. They gave us the wrong key to the wrong room and put us in the wrong room. And then

as soon as that, it was unreal, man. That storm was friggin. I mean, we've done that run twice a year for 10 years. Right. This one was just stupid. And it's just the timing. I mean,

it's just like, man, you know, Why? One day off, this wouldn't be like this, you know? Right. And having to follow it, too, the whole time. That just makes it even more like, yeah. Let me tell you something, man. When I, when we finally got home, I was fucking, just a piece of shit from stress and anxiety.

Like all, all three of us were because we had taken a friend of ours Tyler with us to help drive. Because I can't drive in the dark anymore. I'm fucking night blind. So Heather didn't really want to, you know, I didn't want to saddle her with like late night driving through mountains and shit. So I was like, you know, this frog breeder, Tyler Conningham, friend of ours, I was like, well, he's like 26 years old. I'm like, look, bitch, you can go with us. We'll pay for your shit.

Just drive. So. Sounds like a good deal. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So it was cool.

It was fun trip, but it's a lot of memorable stuff and not memorable in a good way. Right. Yeah, that was Rob and I, when we were in Northern Territory, we went to cruise this great road, you know, that's got lots of herps. And we saw like a pygmy mulga and some other, you know, geckos and stuff. Yeah, it was pretty sweet. It was kind of funny because I was driving. So Rob jumps out and he's, and I see him looking at this snake and he's like trying to figure out what it is. And then also he starts doing the dance.

You know, I'm like, oh, it must be venomous. I had something in my mind that I was hoping. I was like, okay, this is going to be a small olive python. So I still haven't found an olive python. And I'm going, okay, it's going to be a small olive python. I'm standing over the top of it. And I'm like, okay, no, there's a disconnect between what I want that to be and what it is. And as soon as it as it fully processed, you know, in sort of the crouch position right over it.

And as soon as it, like, the rotation clicked into what it was, when it decided that it was because for the most part you can actually tell the different other than i guess that matters i haven't seen one of them either but uh you know the for the most part the difference between pythons and elapids in australia is that alapids just run from you so if you see a snake on the road and it stays on the road then it's a python and if it doesn't then it's an alapid um but this one was an exception to that rule so i'm staying and you know kind of all ready to pounce above it and then it was only once the little rotator clicked into place that then it decided oh let's have some fun.

Oh, God. So they're watching me. It's, you know, it's coming up, striking it. Striking up at me. And I'm just hopping back like a frog. Yeah, it was pretty good. Yeah. So we jump out and, yeah, corral it and take some pictures and stuff.

At least it wasn't in your hands when you made that to turn with you. Yeah, I was, you know, I had stopped, you know, and Justin was, you know, giving me shit, saying like, well, why'd you have your hands like that? And I was like, well, I needed to grab it if I needed to. Well, I mean, keelback students. look pretty similar to those pygmy mulgis. So you have to really kind of stare. That light pink purple, you know,

on the top of the head that you have had a banding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're cool snakes. But yeah. You see that's, but yeah, the keelbacks look very similar.

So it's like, I had a couple moments where I'm like, is that? Which one is that? You know, I better not mess with either of them, but, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. That's funny, man. Yeah, that's the thing about Australia, right? There's so much shit that can fucking kill you down there. Yeah. But then it started raining on us and we thought, oh, well, you know, we'll drive and try to, you know, maybe we'll drive through it.

And it just kept getting worse. Somehow, yeah, it was like expanding around us. Yeah. Yeah. Then we thought, maybe we'll turn around and go back the other way. And it just, the whole way out, you know, we got all the way back out to the town, you know, and we're like, oh, man. It just was just pounding us. You couldn't see, you know, more than a few feet in front of the.

Fortunately, there was essentially no one on the road. It ripped off, you know, all these extra limbs and, you know, leaves. The whole thing was just totally destroyed. Yeah, the street was trashed. Making road cruising hard. I saw they just got beat to shit by a couple of big hurl. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're getting pounded.

And didn't they just have like an internal hurricane over the, over Alice Springs area? Yeah. Oh, man. It wasn't a hurricane, though, right? It was a. Just rain. Yeah, they got pounded. Like, so we.

You know, we were there in March of 2025, and the place we stayed at, like, you know, we, the, the river was completely, you know, over the road. We couldn't even have gotten to where we were staying that trip. Yeah, that's some cool. Yeah, it was crazy. So I'm like, man, and it was about a year after we were there. So we're like, man, we picked the right year to go because we would have been snorkeling looking for stuff this year, you know. I'm not, I'm not certified in scuba. so it would have been a little rough.

Right. Yeah. Crazy, though. I mean, you know, all the rivers were full and it was like South Australia too. Like we see in different places like, I remember driving on that road and now it's like completely washed out. You know, just, you know, just the, yeah. Yeah. See all the dust in the sky at Shark Bay the other day?

Like the sky was red, you know, apocalyptic red sky. Oh, yeah. Where was this that? Shark Bay. in Western Australia. Yeah, where you can get one was up there. Yeah. Wow, man.

Crazy. Yeah, it was completely just red, like the whole sky. Yeah. I'm pretty sure there's like an old sailor saying about that. Right. Yep. I can't remember if it was in the morning or night, though, Rob. Right.

Yeah. But yeah. Which was it? Right. Like we were talking about before. You know, there's extremes. Like the, I remember driving through Ipswich with Troy Kulagowski and he's like, oh, yeah, just a, you know, a couple of years ago, this whole, you know, Woolworths was underwater. There were like sharks swimming through the store, you know, because it was just flooded.

The floods are. Well, and that's how the golf course got sharks in Brisbane, right? Right. They were there for, it was a bunch of male sharks that then wound up being there for whatever it was, 10, 15 years, something like that. But, you know, you get gators in the ponds at the golf course or it's a desert. or whatever. But yeah, from flooding,

they had gotten sharks. A half dozen sharks that were then in this for the next 10 years. Don't go get, don't go to retrieve your ball out of that pond.

Well, and then the crocs. Up in, you know, far north Queensland, right? Where, you know, and I see,

there's a handful on it, accounts on Instagram that do show good stuff from up there, but like the Solar Whisper dude who works on the Dane Tree Cruise, I think. And, you know, he had something that was like, yeah, you know, he's, I think it was drone footage showing something that was splited out.

And he was like, yeah, it's normally your street. But you see that giant crock that's sitting there? Yeah. Yeah, at least in Alice Springs, you're not going to get attacked by a crock. There are no crocs there? No, no, not in the center. Yeah. But like, we were up in Kakadu and going to a lot of these.

gorgeous and they'll trap out any crocs and have, you know, monitoring systems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, when they open and close it for the season, right? Yeah. But then as soon as it floods, you know, all bets are off and all the crocs move in. And, you know, it's, yeah, you can't go there. They just close it down. So I think Jordan went to that same area about a couple weeks after us and it was closed. You know, and it just was raining. Yeah.

So they got to go very few places up there because everything was closed. You know, when the rain start, then everything, a lot of things closed. So kind of crazy. When at that spot, right, wasn't, who was telling us? Some, yeah, someone was telling us that on one of those tours where they go, the tour operators or whatever, that somebody had got taken by a crock at that spot. Oh, really? Yeah, with the European swim team and all.

Yeah, it was like the opening or closing as I'm taught, you know, or, you know, the last last openings or the when they had first opened that they had missed one. And yeah, like took somebody on a tour. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I was, I was hearing about a tour and like just some, I think was it was it, uh, no, Gavin that was telling us about that where. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where they were like going to the swimming hole and the tour guides are like, yeah, it's fine. You know, there's, this is, it's too shallow to have proxia. We've trapped them out or whatever. And they're, you know, they're swimming around all of a sudden, the smallest person in the group just goes underwater. And they're like, oh, hell no. Messing around. And then Croc took her. They're just like, yeah, everybody get out of the water, you know. And then this tour company's, you know, facing legal issues.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, led people there during, you know, we're just not crockwise at all. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I was, when I was, you know, hunting a lot of iguanas when i was young when i was a kid growing up in miami i i had several close calls with very large alligators and i and they're relatively harmless you know they it's pretty rare that an alligator will attack you let me tell you something man they'll come right up on you though to investigate sometimes when you realize that you're in the water with the 12 foot frigging monster that's way bigger than you is very unnerving i can imagine there is there is no fucking way i would even set a toe in an Australian. I don't give a fuck if you said you trapped them because I've seen monster alligator slide out

from under holes in canal banks that you can't even, you didn't even know they were there. Like, and then all of a sudden it slides out from you realize, oh my God, Godzilla's coming out from under that, you know, and they're like six inches below your feet. I mean, I can't imagine. Crocs have to be similar in that regard. I imagine they have some of those banks dug out. you don't fucking know. They can hear you, though.

Right. And, uh, yeah. We saw it up at Kills Crossing, which is where the water comes over the road and the crox all lineup to catch the fish as they're coming as they get their daily rise in tide. Um, and you got people out there fishing standing on this thing. And we saw one night. I mean, I always get thrown off because the sun goes down so early when you're down there. It goes down at like six, six, six, three.

Um, so it, you know, it was probably 11 o'clock, but felt like one in the morning or whatever after we'd been in another spot we'd come over and there were folks that were standing on this in you know ankle deep water fishing and we see a crock just make a bee line towards this person and it's like oh my god this is about to go down like you know we're at a distance and have a vista so we can see it and it's just on a straight line and then it got within whatever it was just in 10 15 feet and it just made a hard right turn and chose you know chose peace that day yeah Chose piece. And what kind of crockle?

Was that a salt water? Salty. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I saw crocodile in Dundee, man. I know how that works.

Yeah. And the freshwater crocs aren't too bad. You know, like you don't want to get bit by one, but they're more shy. They'll run away from you kind of thing. But yeah, you don't mess with the salt water. Yeah, and that's how alligators are, too. They're relatively benign. Right.

But they will, they will, if they will, if they, if they interest you, if they're interested by you to see what you're doing. They'll slide right. Some of them will come real close. I don't know if that's the result of people that feed them because there's a lot of morons. Like I used to live on a canal

when I lived in Palm Beach in Loxahatchee. I lived my house sat on the corner of an intersection of canals and there were these fucking dumbass pit bull rednecks that lived across the thing. And they would

go out there and they would clean like, I think they were killing wild boars and then clean him and they would feed the friggin alligators that lived in the canal this. Right. Well, after four or five years there, those alligators got pretty big and they were always hanging out there. And then one night, my stupid ass Pekinese ran out the back door, my daughter's Pekinese, and jumped in the canal. Yikes.

Right where the alligators were. But there was a lot of weeds, you know, canal weeds in there. And he was sitting on top of the weeds. And then he was like, oh, what the fuck do I do? I didn't know this was water kind of thing. He's looking at me and I'm looking at him and it's like 11 o'clock at night. I'm like, well, I'm going to die getting this frigging dog. But I got him out and everything was fine.

But there were many, many times where there were kids, there were all that neighborhood, a lot of kids in it. And the kids would be out there fishing on the things and those alligators would slide right up on them. Yeah. And I was like, man, when these, and at the time they started out, they were about six feet. When I moved, they were probably about eight feet. But there were like three or four of them there.

And I'm like, man, when these get about 10 or 12, this is going to be, I mean, eight-foot alligator is pretty dangerous. But 10 or 12-footers, I have to wonder if they don't start, you know, thinking, eh, maybe I can take this monkey. You know? Yeah. Especially after they've been fed like that. They were 100% not afraid of people at all. Like they saw people as, you know, that gave them food. Right.

I just thought, I thought, man, this is, I under, at that point, I never really understood the, I knew that the state was really against feeding alligators. It wasn't something. But I never really understood exactly how that translated until I actually saw it. And then I was like, oh, yeah, I could see where this is like a real problem. Yeah. Yeah. So. You wonder, too, like the cotton mouths where they, you know, people say they got chased or whatever.

You wonder if they're just fishing and cleaning fish there and the, the cotton mouths are trying to get a. easy meal and they chase their scare the people they'll drop their fish and run away i mean when i when i was a kid i i had places i had these two canals in miami and a place called hialia that were absolutely loaded with huge cotton mouths but but but and i used to catch a lot of them so i used to get like seven bucks for them from one of the reptile dealers um so i would always catch them when i was out there i would go out there to hunt king snakes there's a lot of king snakes but you'd always end up getting like 10 or 15 cotton mouse house. And at the time they were everybody, you know, this was like in the 80s and people,

herpetic culture was buying that kind of stuff. Yeah. But I'm telling you, man, they don't move. Like you walk up on it, they don't run away. They just sit there and they open their mouth. Yeah. Like I never had one try to ever strike or, you know, it's mostly a bluff. Yeah. But, you know, they're pretty impressive. When you got like a, you know, a large three foot, four foot cotton mouth and, you know, they're about as big. a big around is the, you know, your arm and shit. That's an impressive, it's an impressive snake.

Yeah. Yeah. Jordan has a really nice, Jordan Parrot has a nice big yard, and I think he's got 10 acres behind his house, and we were, you know, just looking around. It was kind of late in the season, so there wasn't a lot of stuff out and about, but there was a snake, you know, on the bank, and he's like, it's either in eastern hognows or a cotton mouth. or a water snake, you know. And I think I hadn't seen all three, at least in that area.

So I went down there and I go to check it out and it starts, you know, going down the hole. So I grab it by the tail and pull it out. I'm like, yep, it's cotton mouth. Set it down on the bank, try to catch a quick picture. And then it slips back down the hole. I'm like, oh, that was cool. Yeah.

Yeah, it seems like wherever there, you know, wherever cotton mouths occur, they're pretty, pretty plentiful. Right. Like they seem to be fairly, uh, they seem to be fairly common. They're pretty easy to, usually they don't go anywhere. Water snakes haul ass though. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of like that Australian thing. If it takes off like a bad of a hell normally, that's just the water snake. If it, if it, if it coils up though and it cocks its head to the sky and opens its mouth, well, you know what that is. Yeah. You see all those videos too, people picking it up going, oh no, That's a cut mouth. I just got bit. You know, time to go to the hospital.

I know. That's, I mean, it's a good thing. They're not really that, you know, they're really not that venomous. I mean, I don't think I've ever heard of anybody dying from one of those. Terry Phillip told me that there was a record of somebody getting bit by a pretty good size one. And they died like really fast after the bite. Oh, really? Yeah.

So it's not, you know, impossible. But, yeah, they're not quite as potent as some of, some of the snakes, but you can. And foreign protein. That's anything that's right. It's that quick. It's like, okay, that's probably anaphylaxis, you know, in reaction. A devil dog.

It's the thing that doesn't shut up. I know that well. Cars are outside right now or you'd probably hear them too. Yeah, Chuck's dogs would always bark during the podcast. Ruby and good times. How's Chuck doing? Have you heard from him? Not a ton.

No, I mean, I, I mean, I think he's moved back to Indiana. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, California was just not a great place to live, I think, as far as, you know, just being expensive and all that good stuff. And he has family in Indy, so. Well, shit, if he's on Indiana, tell him to drag his ass to Tinley and come see him. Yeah.

I'm sure that's probably in the plans for some. point once he gets settled. And I'm not sure if he's actually moved for sure or not. You know, I, I've only talked to him a couple times since for the last couple of years. So I get back in contact with him. Yeah, I was thinking about him the other day. When Rob said he asked me to be on here, I was like, what's going on with Chuck? Yeah, he's a good dude. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So you guys just do Tinley. You don't do any of the other show? Or?

We do Daytona. Okay. That's right. Because we can just draw, that one we can just drive back and forth. It's an hour and an hour and 15 months away. Yeah. Those local shows, they're, especially if it's a big show like that. That's great.

Yeah. Daytona's hard to give up. And then every once in a while, there's two big, because we live in Orlando. So we have actually, it's basically Orlando. Orlando and Tampa are kind of, you know, like right here. You know, they're almost twin cities. cities to some degree. So Repticon tends to have, and Reptilian Nation both have like bigger shows here.

So if we have stuff, you know, we'll do those sometimes because again, the Orlando one is like 10 minutes away and Tampa's like an hour away. Yeah. So we'll do those sometimes, but we don't really make a super habit of it. It's more like, you know, do we have shit? Do we need money? Then we go. Right.

Otherwise, I mean, we were doing like 39 shows a year or something, and it was, it beat the fuck out of both of us. Right. And the pandemic put the kibosh on that. So after that happened, then we realized, oh, shit, we're much happier staying home, not being on the road all the time. Yeah. Does Heather do most of the business through like Morph Market or online? or most of it is it's more market in those shows that's our primary income yeah and we do some wholesaling you know we had do like some the reptile specialty stores that went like high-end quality

stuff they right they'll buy stuff from us but that's pretty much it i mean it's a it's a totally different setup than when i was on my own back then i would just 100% of what i put unless it was unless it's somebody that I knew that specifically wanted something, I just, every week I would load up everything I had and take it to strictly or Reptile Industries and sell everything to them and get a check. Because I just, I just wasn't, I wasn't going to deal with all the stuff that comes with the retail. But it's, it's certainly, I mean, we definitely, we definitely, very tail makes way more money than I

ever made when I was doing it that way. I mean, because she's actually, you know, she sells most of retail. We keep everybody happy. Right. And so we're actually getting paid what it's really worth, whereas I was just kind of dumping it for whatever, just enough to get a check to eat and keep the lights on and shit. Right. I was really, that was one of the things when her and I got together, she goes, you're an idiot. You know that, right?

And I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, those dragons that you just sold that guy for $25, you know that I sell those all day long for $250. And I was like, all right, well, I don't have that. I don't have that. Yeah. Not exactly fit for prime time. So sounds like a good match, though. Yeah, I mean, it's been good for both of us.

I have all this, you know, experience with all this different stuff. and she had 25 years worth of breeding bearded dragons and a few other things. So she had a lot of husbandry and stuff like that. But she ran regional mayor's jewelry for a long time. So she's got chops when it comes to business. Right. You know, she can do the corporate speak. Yeah, definitely makes the difference when they have.

Right. She can talk to customers that are normies and not offend them with an F-bomb here. Or a shirt. with a devil on it, you know? It's like, it's like, yeah. So, you know, cantankerous old metalheads shouldn't be selling to the public. That's basically what it comes down to. It makes it so much easier, though, just to move a big, you know, mass of animals.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's definitely pros and cons to each way. but yeah i mean i was yeah i just i realized a long time ago that i was just better suited for that right um and then i would do daytona to like sell to the public that wasn't somebody that i knew specifically so i'd save all my really good stuff for that and then i would sell it there but um but yeah basically became a thing where friends got all picked out all the good shit and then all the other stuff went to all the wholesalers and that was kind of how i was operating for for quite a long time.

And now we're mostly a retail facing outfit with a little bit of wholesale. Right. But, you know, they get to talk. She gives them their phone number and they'd call any time. And, you know, me, I will, you'll be, I mean, unless I, unless you're

somebody like Rob, if that, if that phone rings, I'll look at it and go, oh, fuck. And then, you know, if it's not somebody that I know personally, I just, I will not pick it up a lot of times. that's not really conducive to the retail. Right. You know, I just, I can't, I can't change.

That's just how it's always been. Yeah. Well, I know Rob has a bit of a heart out. Are you okay? Or do you need to, he's on his call. So he's listening to both here. Yeah, no, I mean, we're good at, whatever you guys want.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we can keep talking to you. I'm trying to think my brain's a little fried. I played water polo tonight and I got smacked around a bit. Yeah. Any cool new insights you've had into, you know, the reptile breeding or, you know, anything like that. Yeah, you know, I was thinking about that before I came up. on here and I had something and

I'm drawing a blank right now. But it I mean tonight I got one with Rob's with Rob's you know

Epickrity's bow and the fucking log I'm going to be thinking about that like holy shit that I have I fucked up in the past by doing stuff like that by giving them too many tight options no I mean that's that's actually that's actually a legitimate

thing to consider. Something I never considered before. I mean, it is closer to what they would be in nature too. Like if they're not receptive or ready and they can wedge themselves in where they can't bug them, you know, that might be a good thing to

prevent, you know, stuff that may not be as productive as or female hopefully knows what her body can manage. I don't know. I think there's kind of a given take there too because it could could yeah maybe she just isn't interested or doesn't feel like she can have a litter of babies in a box or something you know like she wants a bigger area or something who knows so yeah i mean the the biggest problem the biggest problem with captivity obviously is that even when you try to give them as many options as possible it's still nowhere near with the amount of options they'd have in the wild right right you you always have to kind of balance that between you you know

know, kind of what the animal needs to be successful and what you need to be successful. They're both kind of considerations there if you're trying to achieve a specific outcome. So, but I mean, you know, taking things into account like that, it's really good to know stuff like that because that might pop up down the road, you know, and you realize, oh, shit, I've been, I missed two years in a row. And it's because, you know, I've set up a scenario here where the job can't, get done. Right. Yeah. And if I mean, it'll be a little nicer if you're not depending on them for livelihood kind of thing. Yeah, where it's more of a fun project or just kind of an extra little thing. I'm curious too about, you know, keeping, I'm really curious to see how things will work out with your centrallians outside. If one, you know, they're going to, people, people have this idea that,

you know, they need the light to be nice red animals. And I've, I've, I've, always wondered about that or been been a little dubious about that, you know, that the UV is what makes them be so red. And I don't know, I'm kind of, so I'm curious to see if you're going to keep them outdoors, if they're going to, what, what, uh, lines or where, where, what source are you getting your central. I haven't, I haven't taken any steps for that. Oh, a friend of mine locally has a pair that he keeps outside. And I've seen them and they look just like everybody else's. Okay. Like, I used to hear that a lot about beer. of dragons, but I've seen lots of bearded dragons raised inside.

They're just as red as the shit we had outside. Right. I think it's kind of like a lot of things. You know, people see something. They make a judgment based on what they're seeing, but it's not necessarily true. You know, it's just like, it's a hunch. Yeah. Most of the shit that we do in this is just hunches.

Like we think, but I mean, even most of the things that I say, I, you know, that's just my experience. and there are hunches that I, conclusions that I've reached based on, but I could never say for sure 100% that what I say is, without a doubt, the actual thing. You know, I just, I look at a situation, I draw a conclusion, and then I go with that. I think a lot of people, though, draw conclusions without really thinking a whole lot about the thing. And then, and those are very, usually pretty evident. But it's funny how pervasive some of them become. Exactly.

Yeah. It's just like, that is the dumbest shit. And then I look at the current political climate and then I like, oh, I get it now. This is how this happens. Yeah. Right. It's just the proliferation of stupidity is just the film. And I think people think, oh, AI is going to fix this.

You know, like, no, it almost makes it worse because they, you know, like, I don't know, it's crazy. I refuse to, I will not fucking pay. for that shit. I don't want any part of it. This is the first time I'm opting out of technology. I normally will adopt whatever new thing is. But I want no part of this. Right. I know. So I've had a few conversations with my buddy Jordan and, you know, he's he's a techie guy. So he, you know, he's using these things to his advantage. And he said that, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a serious thing. And he said it's like having a genius, you know, as a best friend. But you have to know the subject matter to know if the information is accurate or not. It'll give you an answer that

it thinks is right. But, you know, if you don't know better, then you're not going to see that. So you really have to structure the questions the right way and especially with follow-up questions to get useful information out of it. So I mean, I think it's helpful. in some ways, but it's absolutely like dangerous or sketchy, you know, for gathering information in other ways, especially for people who aren't experts in that field. So I don't know. That's kind of the takeaway I've gotten from AI, but it can be a really powerful tool if you can use it in the right way. Yeah, 100%.

I realize that as a tool, you know, used properly, yeah, it's, hang on my low power liking. As a tool used properly, yeah, I can imagine it'd be pretty powerful. The thing that worries me is that I switched over to GPS, you know, like 10 or 15 years ago, whenever it was really, you know, and now I can't navigate for shit without it anymore. And I used to be able to go everywhere without, you could give me an address and I could get there without anything. And now I need the thing even yelling at me to turn. here because I've become so so fucking you know I feel like it made me weak right you know in a lot of areas so I'm looking at AI going yeah I don't really I don't think that I want to become dependent on

that right because that seems like that has a pretty big weakness attached to it all things have you know everything everything you gain you you have to accept the negative that comes with it and that's that's just where at this moment anyway I'm drawing the line I just I've looked at it. I've looked into it. Like I said, I, you know, I've always been a computer guy, you know, and I've always kept up with new technology and stuff. But it's just, first of all, I despise all of the people that have built these things. Like, those are people that I would not piss on if they were on fire for fear that I would put them out. And then when you couple that with, with, uh, with the, um, with again, I, I take it back to the GPS. I, I feel like that really screwed me up. Now, I could probably retrain myself to not be an idiot and be able to read maps again and get myself around without needing it. Yeah. But it's so frigging convenient. Yeah.

That's the price that I paid for that. Like I got this convenient thing. I also now completely tracked everywhere I go. Everything I say is recorded. And, you know, it's like, and now I'm an idiot. I can't navigate around anymore. I can barely navigate out of my driveway. Right.

I guess it's like any technology, you know, it comes with with risks, but at the same time, you know, it can be a powerful aid in some ways. I think I'm still trying to figure out where it can benefit. You know, I mean, everybody's using it kind of, well, a lot of people are using it just for stupid things. You know, make a cartoon of me or or absolutely false things. Like, I don't know. I see all these stupid videos online about like it's some wildlife guy with a. snake right in front of him, but the snake keeps moving the same way. And you're like, something looks off. You know, it's just not right. And, you know, people are like,

whoa, I've never seen behavior like that. Yeah, because it's not real. Right. AI, it's made up. So I think, you know, those kind of things are obviously just ridiculous and not helpful. You know, it's just a waste of time kind of thing. Entertainment more, more than anything. But yeah, I think, you know, and the way it's just skyrocketing in improvements. It's just getting more and more powerful, you know, and more and more capable as it goes, which is, you know, a little disconcerting and they can't keep up with the power and the energy needed to run this thing. You're like, man, I don't know.

This is going to be interesting to see how this goes. But it's definitely part of the future. It's here to kind of stay and, you know, I'm wondering how it's going to shape society. Because, you know, just in one area, Jordan was saying that, you know, there was employees and all of a sudden they're not needed anymore because their job can be done in the blink of an eye compared to like taking them weeks or months to do some projects. Now they can have this just run things and do the same job in seconds, you know. It's crazy. Right. And that's, and that, of that itself is very worrisome.

Right. Right. Yeah. What do you do with all these people that are skilled and trained and, you know? But I, but again, you have to be an expert. You have to know the subject to be able to use that. You know, you can't just, any idiot can't just say, hey, I'm going to replace this position. You know, they have to have the expertise to understand what it's spitting out.

But instead of having a team of five, people, you only need one person to do the same amount of work. So yeah, it's a little, little sketchy that way. I mean, that, you know, on the flip side, there's always a lot of doom and gloom that goes with new technology and it never, it never turns into what they, what people worried about. Right. At least not yet. And so I, I, but this one, and this one to me seems like it has a higher chance to be really bad than a lot of the things that we've, scene. I mean, outside of nuclear weapons, which, you know, we may not be out of the woods on that either. Right. So, I mean, we may be the offenders. Who knows? Like, we have in the past.

I know. I wouldn't put a pass. History repeats itself. Right. It's kind of sad. I'm hoping that ain't what's going to, but yeah. So, you know, all that's, I don't know, man, the future is always, always kind of you know scary and cool at the same time and I think we're definitely going through one of the one of the more extreme versions of that

I think in our at least in our lifetimes we've never outside of the Cold War you know and that but this seems like there's just so many different things right now that are potentially yeah scary could either be really good

you're in a whole new you know where everybody, you know, there's that whole utopia idea. And then there's the dystopia. I don't think either one of those things, it'll always be somewhere in the middle. Right. Right. It's just where the slider ends up. Does it end up more on the dystopia side or does it end up more on the utopia side?

How painful is the future going to be or how comfortable is it going to be? Yeah. Yeah. Any, like, if there was a project that, you know, that's not available to you now that, that you would drop everything to take on. Is there any kind of reptile project like that for you?

I mean, realistically, the one thing that I do want that I currently cannot afford our Sansania's. I would like to have a nice group of those. That's always been, you know, a big deal. But, you know,

I mean, I will eventually get those as soon as I, I figure skink money will allow me to be able to do that. Everything's better with skink money. But yeah, no, I mean, everything is within reach. None of it is like none of the things that I really am interested in or like out of reach stuff, you know. Right. Yeah, I mean, it would be, I mean, I'd like to have one Pelly Python's, but I'm never going to get those.

Well, you know, never say never. I mean, there's rough scales. I thought those would be, you know. Some made it into your pocket saying, I don't want to hear about it. Not in our pocket, but we've heard about him being in your state. So, you know, who knows if that's true. And where? In Florida.

Yeah. No shit. Yeah. That would not fucking surprise me. This is a Florida man territory. So you never know. Yeah. Well, and where they've been captive bread and reliably captive bread in Australia.

I mean, we got to. to go hold a bunch of adults in the haven't place. It was pretty awesome. They're pretty amazing snakes. Like, I mean, yeah, it's hard to describe how cool that is. They're just so long and thin and just different, you know, really unique snakes. I feel the same way. Like, I don't know anybody that has any or anything like that right now. But yeah, rumors and, you know, people who have said, oh, yeah, I saw some in the U.S. or something. So who knows. And, you know, Yeah, there's definitely heat on that. So you're not going to want to be the first one to put down a lot of money for those.

But hopefully they make their way into the trade legitimately and we'll be able to be able to keep those at some point. Because I feel the same way. I'd love to see Owen Pelley's make the rounds. Yeah, I mean, I never thought I would see lace monitors. That was like it was totally out of reach. You know, Ossipatallis, same thing. So I thought it was totally out of reach. And then they legal specimens came in.

And now we have them. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly possible. Their own Pellys aren't endangered either, are they? Not, well, it's hard because they're just, they're just so hard to find, you know? Yeah, but they're not listed as endangered on anything. They shouldn't be. I mean, they have such a wide range and they're just, yeah, they're just difficult to find, I think is the main thing.

Because they're way up in trees, right? They're nocturnal, so. Yeah, or deep in, you know, rock crevices and, you know, the cliffs. I mean, we were, we were out there and, you know, we had good intel on where one was seen. This was my first trip or second trip back in 2011. And so we were in, you know, cacadoo looking in the escarpment country. Like, they gave us the tree that the snake was in. So we knew, you know, it had been seen here within the last week.

And we went looking, you know, so we got there as early as we could in the morning. and we're looking around the area, looking in all the crevices, and we just realized there is, this is like so many choices for this thing to just disappear. Yeah. And you can never see it. And, you know, like all of a sudden, you started getting hot. And I, you know, I thought I was, I knew heat, you know, desert heat, but nothing like this. Like, I felt like I was going to melt, you know. And it was like 10 o'clock in the morning or something like a ridiculous heat.

And we had to stop and like, and then we discussed. covered that, you know, these deep rock crevices, like you fill this cold air coming out. You know, you could get down in there and refresh yourself a little bit. And, and then we're like, there's no way these things are going to be surface active with this heat. They're down in these crevices where there's probably water trapped and their food. And, you know, they probably don't need to come out very often. But it's kind of crazy. And it seems like they're cyclically active because when Gavin Bedford got the permission to collect some to breed him in captivity that that whole project. He had a buddy that was living up in the town of Owen Pelley in Arnhem Land, right, in the Aboriginal lands. And he was teaching English

up there, teaching at a school up there. And he would drive around at night looking for Owen Pelley Pythons, you know, like he would hurt. And it led to some confusion because the folks in town thought that he was visiting their women while the men were away and he had to explain what he was doing and show him like some of the snakes he was finding and things but he didn't see any

on Pellies and then one year he saw like three within the span of two weeks you know like all of a sudden they were out for some reason and cruising around and people in town considered out huh? Yeah. Yeah.

And not just him but also Gavin found, you know, had found some around the same time. And like when Rob and Eric and Owen and Keith found theirs, same kind of thing. Like another couple, two other U.S. guys were over there and they both found Owen Pellies. And then the spider researcher found one. I mean, they were just out, you know. And for whatever reason that year was the year they were out. And so I don't know. it's a detection thing or a luck thing, but, you know, they, they seem to be very scarce. But then when you find them, then you find them, you know, that kind of thing. So, I mean, that's, that does work that way. I mean, there, I can't tell you how many people that when I was collecting night and alls down in Miami, I mean, they come down in the middle of the day and they sit on the stump. This is huge green lizard sitting on a stump.

You would be shocked how many times I got out of the car, caught one in front of someone, and they were amazed that that thing was even there. Right. They had no idea that those things even lived in their house, in the tree in front of their house. And they were outside, you know, while I caught this thing. So they saw me do it. And they were like, I didn't even see that thing. Yeah.

But I bet you that once they knew what to look for, I bet you they saw them a lot after that. Right. Because every time I ever went looking for something, that was once I found one, then I understood it. Yeah. You know, up until that point, I just didn't, it's, it's just how it plays. Yeah, you have that search image and that really, really helps, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Same thing with Boyd's Forest Dragons, right? I kind of knew what I was looking for. I was checking the right size trees and everything and then finally see one, you know, like, okay, that worked. And then I was with my kids and I told them, you know, whoever finds one of these lizards gets, we'll get ice cream for everybody, you know. And so my daughter, my oldest daughter took it really seriously. So she's just scanning every tree. And we were up, you know, on this loop hike. And we were kind of waiting for these people to pass, right?

So we were just standing off the side of the trail. And she's lagging behind because she's scanning all the trees. And then she catches up with us. And then she's like, oh, I thought you'd be more excited. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, isn't that the lizard we're looking for? And it was, I couldn't see. see it because there was a tree in the way, but where she was standing, she could see it on the tree.

And she's like, yeah, that's it right there, right? I'm like, yes, good job. It was kind of funny. Yeah, Jason Hood was here a couple months up. I guess it was a few weeks ago now. I don't remember. We were sitting out in the back porch shooting the shit. And he was telling me about his Australia trip. And he was like, dude, we were catching monitors next to tree monitors next to sidewalks, like in front of houses. Right. The guy jumped out of the car from a mansion. There was a tree monitor right there on the sidewalk and I was like, that is not at all how I pictured Australia herping. I see just

outback and no people in trees and shit. He's like, oh no, it's just like living in Miami. He's like they're in the trees in front of the houses. He caught a big frill dragon in a park and then some elementary school girl yelled to him, put it down, you

fucking cunt. He was like an elementary school kid called. He yelled this at me. from the doorway of the school. And, you know, if you ever met him, he's like, you know, Jason's a big dude, man. He's, you know. We were on the trip together.

So, well, he started out, he started out in Darwin with, you know, he, on his own. He landed in Alice Springs, drove up to the Darwin area, and then came back down with our buddy Dale. And then we started the trip kind of with all of us. So were you with him at the elementary school? No, no. But, yeah, that was before. That's great. God, I think you had been there for that.

Well, we'd heard, Rob and I had hurt that same area and went over to the school grounds. Luckily, it was a Saturday. So we got to pick them up and, you know, take some pictures and stuff like that. But yeah, we found like, I think three or three or four on the school grounds. Like it just. Yeah, he said that was like the place to see Pearl Dragons. Right. It's like it's just school.

It's like pine trees. Yeah. Right. And he's like they're right there. Yeah. Yeah. And then along this park, just like very popular area. Lots of people run around.

We saw probably, you know, 15 of these spotted tree monitors. And then we saw some of the, the Mitchell eye, the Mitchell's water monitors in the party. They were a little more shy. Like they didn't let you get too close, but the scleras were everywhere. And you could get really, I got some really nice photos of the scleris. It was pretty sweet. Yes. It's so weird to think about.

Uh-huh. I mean, I get it. People come down here from up north and they can't believe that they're like iguanas just all over the place and alligators and the thing. They think that, and I guess it's the same thing. But for me, it's always like the idea that all the shit that we covet so much is in like frigging residential backyards. And people have fucking, you know, Owen Pelly Python's in their attic and, you know, whatever. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

It's like, it's like crazy, man. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know. I think I'm in that phase of like, okay, I've kept them in boxes. Now I just want to see them all in the wild. Yeah. It's so great to see some of these things that you keep and be able to, you know, find them in Australia, especially when you get really lucky and find, you know,

we found all four of the pythons in Central Australia and just crazy. But, yeah, that brettles we found was. as nice as any captive bretles in the U.S. And it was just, you know, run-of-the-mill brettles out in the wild. That's one of my favorite snakes. They are amazing. Yeah. I just like, they have that big head and they're heavy body carpet python.

They're just, they're amazing. And the red color is just, I love that. They don't need a morph. They're, even though there are cool morphs for them, they're just amazing on their own. And I've always loved them. I've set them up a couple times in the last five or six years. And they were always things that I cut because we were, you know, it was like, oh, we're overloaded. But now I can now I can actually do it and I don't have to worry about cutting.

Yeah. Especially if you just have a pair or two, you know, like it's, yeah. Yeah, because the last time I bought bretles, I bought 24 of them. Yeah. That's a lot of brittles. And then I was like, why do I have all these? well yeah you don't do anything small scale no that's that's done right yeah as i say that i have 300 we have 340 skinks in the backyard but no everything else that is the only big thing that

we'll be here that's i mean you know i'm i'm confident in that and i don't need to make another commercial thing so great i'm just going to have fun yeah i want to be able to do shows like this have a bunch of shit to talk about you know yeah cool stuff and have a nice, have different stuff on the table and all that. Well, we'll be excited to check in when you get some of these projects and be able to hear what you're doing with them. That'll be awesome. I do want some children's and stuff and I know you're like the guy for that. Hopefully. I mean, this season has started out terribly.

I actually just borrowed north of my Antaresia last week. So like a big order, you know, sold most of my available animals, but I still have some spotted and a couple pygmies that I'm still getting working on feeding. But yeah, I should hatch all five this coming season, I hope. You have all five species. Yeah. No shit. That's awesome, dude.

Yeah, I love that. Again, lizard feeders aren't really a problem for me. Yeah. And they, you know, most of them are pretty easy to switch over. It's just the pygmies are a challenge. And then I've got these pigmyers. me banded pythons which are in my opinion and undescribed species in the guy who they're the group that re did all the work on antarisia they said they're just children's pythons and i'm like

there's no way oh yeah i i heard you on one of the podcast you're like nope i don't care what the DNA says uh i just i don't know i just can't see i mean they they're physically a little different they're smaller they're yeah it's just so many things we're just lining up and you're like, no, I'm sorry. You're, you know. I actually talked with that guy and had a few conversations with him. I'm just like, I told him we need to bring him on here and kind of, you know, hash it out a little on the podcast. But we'll see if we can make that happen.

He was willing to come on and discuss it. And speaking of that, the reason that Heather's in the next room on a podcast is because we now have the ability to genetically sex blue tongues. Oh, cool. Who pulled that through? Phenome. Phenome, huh? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we had a bunch of different ones working with us or wanted to work with us, and they kept reaching out to me, and I'm really the wrong person to reach out to, and I would always forget, you know, get busy with other shit. And finally, one of them reached out to her directly, and then the next thing I know,

I find out that we've been sending sheds to this company, and she's like, oh, and they can genetically sex them now. It's like 50 bucks. Yeah, and that's actually a game changer for blue tongue. So that's always been the real problem is that, right. You know, when you're selling high-end blue tongues, nobody wants to have to buy six of them to maybe get a pair. Yeah.

You know, or four or whatever. So now we'll be able to get anything that's, you know, over, that's basically not a pet thing. We'll just have genetically sexed. And then we can sell them sexed exactly what people want. Right. So, wait a minute. Will you guys stop it?

Stop it. that's enough um idiots um the that's cool because i'd heard a lot of groups were kind of working on working towards that and i know uh ben moral i'd send ben a bunch of shed skins from known sexes so he could you know have at least something to start with but yeah i'm sure they'll all have uh they'll all have that same i would imagine so so that's that's actually a pretty big deal for this yeah that's huge that's been a problem for since we started it and we were worried about it. And then, as you know, an albino at $10,000, these guys are looking at and going, well, shit,

I got to buy three or four of them to hopefully get what I want, you know, or whatever. So are you just automatically sending out shed skins and getting them sexed? Are you waiting until you? We will this for the bit, anything that's for sale that we don't know the sex of. Yeah, we will. Of the higher end stuff, you know. Yeah. I'm not going to send it out for like a $500 pet thing or whatever.

For sure. But yeah, for like the higher-end morphs and species and stuff for 100%. And obviously, you know, the customer can do that too, right? If they decide they want to know exactly what sex there, then they can just send the shed and get it done. Because it's really not expensive for what it is. Yeah, especially if you're spending 10 grand on a lizard, you know, you, yeah, 50 bucks is not going to make any difference there.

Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That's good to hear. Yeah, I'm excited. I'll have to look into that because, yeah, I've got a few that I'd like to know one way or another. Yeah. And I think they're going to eventually have it for other skink species as well.

I don't know if she sent them anything from the Ossipatalus or any of the others. Because we have, we have pure Easterns. We have the Queensland Easterns. We have, you know. Marukis and all that stuff. So I don't know what she's been sending them. Like I said, my real interaction with all this is, hey, there's the cage lid on a number 39 needs repaired or stuff like that.

So I'm going to do that right now. Because I just don't want to interfere. Right. So complicated, you know, because she has to track all these hats and all this other stuff. Man, I am not going to get in your way. I mean, she will kill me in front of. you to send a message. It was like one of those things. Yeah. So yeah, so I'm not, I'm not touching it. But yeah, I do know that she, she, I mean, I was, dude, I didn't find out that we were doing this until the guy came and told us it Tinley. And then she's like, oh, yeah, we've been sending them sheds and now we can text. So I'm like, how the hell did I not even know this? She's like, oh, you don't know nothing. Just go play wow and be quiet. I was like, all right, we're good.

I'm sure you were really sad to hear that. Yeah, it was really, it was a bummer, man. Don't throw me in that briar patch. That's cool. Yeah, that's good information, and I'm happy to hear that. Yeah, it's cool. I'll have to ask Ben if he's any closer to or if this, you know, if they've published it or something, if he can start using that as well.

I don't know. A lot of those trade secrets, like it's kind of hard to figure out on the front end and takes a little bit of investment. So I'm sure they, they probably are keeping that quiet and, you know, running as many samples as they can. But yeah, I think, I think that, you know, this kind of thing where you can get those, you know, morph projects going that were kind of stalled, you know, if, if, you know, all the skinks out there, you know, 250 bucks, there's just really no drive to. you know, pay 50 bucks to sex them because, you know, like, yeah. But when you when you start getting that, that drives that motivation to figure it out and work it out and have that, you know, technology available. So, yeah, it's nice to see those revolutions and, you know, improvements in our capabilities through your efforts there. Yeah, I mean, it looks like a lot of the industry has been watching what we've been doing out here. and it looks like some of them have kind of position themselves to be to take advantage of it when it finally pops, which like I said is this year. I think that I think come October 10ly, we will show up this time with two tables that are completely full of all. I think people will be very surprised.

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. I might have to make a trip out there just to see what you got going. Or I'll just make a trip out to Florida. Yeah, I was going to say, man. Yeah. I need to get out there anytime man yeah well man it's it's always great having you on the podcast thanks thanks so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts and ideas and experiences yeah i appreciate you guys

have me man i always look forward to this one this is one of my favorite ones to go on because you guys are you the three of us just can shoot the shit probably for hours and hours and hours right all this crap Yeah. This is fun. This is just like hanging out. Yeah. And I'm always surprised. You always have new stories that I've never heard. You know, I've listened to all your interviews on other podcasts and stuff. And you always surprise me with new stories. It's great. It's just a matter if I remember it or not. Yeah. It's just kind of like the same way. And oftentimes, you know, I get, we go down rabbit holes that, you know, and a lot of times it's the same rabbit hole because a lot of people ask the same thing, whatever. But, but you guys always. kind of ass stuff that that the rest of them don't. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the whole reason we wanted to do a podcast was

just do something a little different than what's being done. So 100% man. Appreciate that. I appreciate that. MPR's still my favorite podcast that the whole thing, you know, all the ones under your, all the ones under that umbrella are all good. Yeah. No drama, no bullshit. It's just

fucking straight up. Right. Yeah, this, they're latest interview of Jordan was that was a great show. I mean, that guy's a wealth of knowledge. So, yeah, check that out. I will. I'll do that tomorrow. I was kind of bored anyway, looking for stuff. Right. I'll do that. That'll be my, that'll be my work thing tomorrow. Yeah. I'm kind of selective these days. Like, you know, there's a few shows I'll listen to. But, yeah, for the most part, it's like, yeah, I don't need to listen to that. You know, like that. Yeah.

It doesn't interest me. You know, even if it's not. something I keep or I'm really that interested in keeping. I still will listen to a podcast if there's somebody on there that, you know, is knowledgeable. Right. And that's, that's what I've been doing. If I know, if I see somebody on there that I know on whatever podcast, I'll listen to it. Right. The only ones that I've listened to most of them are the NPR ones, you know, yours and the other one. But the last couple months, I've been like, I, I tend to kind of put a little bit of distance between myself and the whole hurt thing for a few months at a time just so that I get

my head clear so I can think you know what I mean? Because you take in all this and it it can cloud your mind so sometimes you've got to clean the pallet a little bit so I'll step back and just stop listening all together and just focus on other things. But yeah, the last couple, ever since Tinley always throws me

back in. I go to Tinley usually hating the whole thing. I'm like I'm a miserable prick up until I get there and then once I get there and I see everybody, I'm like, hey! I remember how cool this all is. Right. And then I come back home and I'm like, all right, I'm fucking recharged again and, you know, ready to go.

Exactly. Well, having you on here recharges me. This is good stuff. Yeah. Thanks again for coming on. Well, it's mutual, man. I appreciate it. But yeah, my phone is about to die.

I hit the, I had the 10% battery thing about a half hour ago, I think. It's making random noises. I think it's about to go out. There we go. All right, man. Well, thanks again, and we'll catch you again soon. All right, man. It's good for you guys.

Yeah. Let me know. All right. Thanks everybody. Have a good night. Yeah, we'll catch you next time. All right. See you.

Good night.