Can Herpetoculture Catch up to the Aquarium Hobby? | VivTech

i think we keep all reptiles wrong all of them everyone no matter how well you're doing bioactive still wrong and the reason i think that is let's say you set up a 20 gallon long for a kid that wants a a leopard gecko right let's say whatever 40 breeder nice huge cage for a leopard gecko and you're gonna literally make this thing look like the side of the hillside in iraq it's hard for me to get someone who doesn't have reptiles to understand why you should you should be able to keep a cobra like that doesn't make sense that's to them it's like me saying you should be able to keep a fireball in a live hand grenade like yeah it sounds stupid you sound you don't sound sane or logical to them what what are next what's the next steps because you know like you said there's a few brands that all have a similar spike or similar uh spectrum yeah and if that is going to cause vitamin hyper hypervitaminosis what are the next steps i mean realistically [Music] welcome to episode number 113 of the animals at home podcast my name is dylan parent and thank you so much for tuning in today joining me on the podcast today is ryan mcvay of viv tech products i think most people are probably familiar with viv tech at this point this was a brand started earlier this year by ryan and his wife erica in the episode we discussed what motivated ryan and eric could actually go forth and start a reptile brand which is quite a feat we discussed that corporatism that we see in reptile products one of the questions that i'm always stuck with is why do we see these big corporations producing such poor quality reptile equipment for example red light bulbs we know red light bulbs are no good they don't really serve a purpose and they may even be detrimental if they're interrupting photo periods and whatnot so my question is why do we see large manufacturers or large companies building bad products or how are they getting away with generating bad products and selling them to customers because we know people are buying them so ryan has a really good insight in that formerly being at zilla so we talk about that how are bad products getting to the market and how can we kind of move the reptile industry or herbert culture in general away from supporting bad products and of course we discuss the vivtec products that are currently available on the market particularly the uv led bulbs now if you are a regular listener of the podcast you know that i had two main concerns with uv led technology the first was the amount of bulbs that are currently on the market from china sort of no-name brands that actually contain levels of uvc dangerous levels of uvc well any level of uvc is dangerous so a lot of these bulbs on the market right now that you'll find on amazon or alibaba are being promoted as reptile bulbs but they're actually don't have really any usable uvb and have a lot of uvc which will be dangerous so we discussed that and ryan even shows us an example on his spectrometer of a bulb that does have dangerous levels of uvc now my second concern with the uv led technology is the lack of the uva spectrum now these bulbs do have some uva but it turns out that the there's an important section of uva that is just not possible to produce right now with led diodes we're working towards it but we're just not available yet and that section of uva is needed to stop d3 synthesis so we know that uvb produces vitamin d3 but it turns out uva is what allows us to actually pump the brakes on that system now that is an incredibly simplified version if you're looking for something that has way more detail go to the reptile lighting facebook group dr francis baines recently wrote an article that really breaks down the biology of how that happens how the photo isomers in our skin actually interact with the different wavelengths of light and how that actually restricts the uv or the le no the sorry the vitamin d3 production it's actually really fascinating and the science is there to support that so that is a actual valid concern with these bulbs ryan is currently doing some testing and they're doing blood work as well and he talks about how they're going to solve that problem and of course we're they're trying to produce light bulbs that are more like the light that we get from the sun so it's really a fascinating conversation and we kind of go back and forth there and finally we wrap up the conversation discussing the future of vivtec what are some products that ryan sees in the future than producing there's just some incredible ideas he has we talk about it all the time how the aquarium hobby really has us beat when it comes to technology especially when it comes to computer systems and automation and it sounds like ryan is headed in that direction which is super exciting so i hope you enjoyed this episode i know many of you have been wanting me to have ryan on i promise you it was has been in the works for quite a while and we were able to make it work today which was great if you are looking for more information on this episode make sure you head to animals at home network dot com there you will find the show notes for every episode that has been produced if you are interested in joining us on patreon head to patreon.com animals at home and as always thank you so much to customreptilehabitats.com for sponsoring this episode of the podcast let's jump into this chat with ryan enjoy awesome cool well ryan welcome back to the podcast thank you very much for being here hey thanks for having me man i appreciate it i'm very excited to chat with you we've been chatting we've been contact since the summer talking about doing another episode i know you sort of you've been launching this new brand you and your wife erica and you're busy all over the place i'm happy that we're able to finally sit down and have this chat why don't we just start with viv tech to begin with tell me about vivtech in general what motivated you to get going on this new brand well so change changes in my life and and and stuff it happening in zillow when i was there and things kind of got me thinking a little differently and i started to realize that uh i had a lot different aspirations than what i was going to be able to do with zillow and we me and erica were thinking about it and we realized like there's something really interesting in the reptile community in the reptile community and products within the reptile hobby is if you look at fish like you have your goldfish tank or even or your bed a bowl let's put those equal you have some easy step into the hobby and it's all set up and it's all easy and whatever and then if you want to go bigger you go a bigger tank and maybe you get some cichlids they're a little harder you know or you get some other kind of fish that's a little more a little more technical and then after that like maybe you want to do saltwater well now there's a whole another world of level up where you can go from like i have a biocube super basic very easy really nice entry-level salt water you can go all the way from that up to i could spend a hundred grand on a 500 gallon tank made out of diamond glass with tesla lighting and you can go crazy with it but in the reptile hobby you don't we don't have that the same exact bulbs that are in your basic bearded dragon kit are what are on your lace monitor like it's the same thing you have an animal that's a very basic care animal maybe like a ball python or something and the stuff that's used to take care of that is the same thing that we're using to keep bowlin's pythons like it's the same sticks and bulbs and dirt and products and things like that so there really is no other levels but there are levels of keepers there are intermediate keepers there are entry level keepers there are people like me who macgyver things together and make things work or build it themselves and i think the hobby is becoming incredibly good at that but there's a big gap in really technical really effective higher end products that allow keepers to do more or you know have better efficiency better controls things that like you know timmy and mom and their bearded dragon or their first leopard gecko or their family pet just really aren't going to need but people like like you look at the enclosures that i keep and the ones in the background that i'm watching in your house stuff like that the stuff that we do keeping humidity is really on point especially for some of these species could be major game changers to our ability to actually produce them and i think a lot of species that we keep and don't have luck with is because we're we're trying to use the wrong products we're trying to use stuff that exists but it's just not gonna ever do what we need it to do and uh being at around a lot of the major companies and brands i realized that zilla zoo med exoterra those guys aren't going to ever do that not in a reasonable way that's accessible for us um they're gonna try zoo med comes out with some really unique stuff once in a while because of the way their company works and how they go out into the market it usually by the time it gets to the shelf for someone to buy is incredibly expensive for what it is and becomes kind of out of reach for people um so between all of that it was just we realized there's a big niche for better products there's a big niche for really some some intermediate to expert level knowledge in some products and that could bring some people keeping to another level uh as well as some places that we realize that major industries just not gonna take us because the majority of their stuff is sold through pet stores which just a lot of them don't have the ability to do that to sell to that level of a keeper and most level times that level of keeper isn't going into a pet store yeah it's really interesting drawing the parallels between the reptile hobby and the aquarium hobby because just like you're saying in the chain pet stores you're going to find very basic aquarium items there's nothing going to be very complex in there but if you actually look at some of these fish keepers the technology that some businesses companies have is just mind-blowing you think they're doing these different wave controls and lighting that's dimming and all these different things and you think you know computers it's amazing what they have like just go look into the fish world your mind will be blown and you wonder what is the stoppage on the reptile side like why don't we have that and is that is it mostly because it's driven by these big corporations you think it really is it really is because i think it's driven by a lot of big companies that do it um and i think a lot of the more technical things have been a little bit too i'm not sure why nobody's really jumped in after him and i know people jump into something here or there i think a lot of it is i think a lot of it with the reptile hobby as we've all become so good at macgyvering we just kind of figure it out ourselves there's some people who come up with some really unique things and they try to do something with it but we also look at things like the a lot of guys are hobbyists that start a business doing something and they go to reptile shows and it's kind of always stay as a hobby they don't and i see this in a lot of hobbyists and it's not a dash they're a bash to them or a anything negative to them at all but because when they're in the hobby and you treat it like a hobby you there is a there's a wall you're gonna hit where you're never gonna be able to get further than that until you turn it into a business and look at it differently and it doesn't mean you have to be like corporate and awful it's more like you know it's a hobby you throw you throw your buddy a snake here and there and you don't care you don't you know the trade stuff and whatever and i see a lot of that with guys and then when you do that you you can't grow correctly you're not looking at your your analytics you're not looking at making sure that your products are selling and really what you need to make sure your products are doing well and and you're focused more on like your your brand and your little company in your booth and people get stuck there they get stuck just kind of being in the hobby um and i think that's what what ends up happening is they they don't look at it in that range and it never gets there um so that's something that actually that's something that on on the outside of this when we started vivtec we actually started five companies um one of them is called exergy consulting so anybody who's stuck with their business like that where they're like man i have this cool idea and i'm stuck in the hobby you can let me know and exergy consulting is a way for us to help those companies find that way to take that unique product and get it out to more people how to how do i like how i can help anybody get those cool things out there i don't want to be the only company doing something cool i want to have 30 competitors that are all going after the big guys and all trying to you know come up with something unique and different and build the hobby and make it better like that's what's gonna make this hobby grow and make it cool and really advance it the major companies aren't gonna do that much like they're just not they're gonna go for the stuff that has the margins that they need to keep going at box stores because that's where their money is and that's fine we need that we need them to do that because we need them to get those entry-level people and we still use the stuff they use like we still use the terrariums and the screen cages and the domes and the supplements and foods and things like that we still need them but there are plenty of places where we could we could really improve and and um do more especially when we come to custom things and bioactive and all that stuff the hot the the pet stores and the the industry is going to be to not is going to be substantially behind the intermediate and expert hobbyist and where that is um and they're constantly going to be chasing after it but they're never going to be able to produce i don't think much that's really going to help those people um they're going to be able to make some tweaks but they're just i think they're very stuck in the way that everything is well i guess there's really no motivation for them to be tinkering with things you know designing new products is expensive finding price points is expensive and then trying to sell complicated products to people who are just getting into reptiles is almost futile and it seems like in general i think our economy over across the board across all business hopefully we start seeing a diminishing of these big larger powerful corporations and more not quite mom and pop shops maybe a little bit bigger than that but more specialized companies that aren't as huge because it's you know i i my wife works for a giant corporation it's like all the employees like hate it you know you know they all hate the the boss they all hate everything and it just seems like it's not a great way to operate and and they become out of touch with the customer exactly and that was one thing i noticed a lot when when i worked in that in that industry is it's just most of the people now not every company is like this but most of the people that work at a lot of these companies people don't look at it like like they see zoom at exoterozilla and they see like with zilla me at the booth talking about reptiles i'm a keeper zilla uh zoo med you know a lot of those guys the sales guys those are all hobby nerds and it was started by a hobby nerd a lot of those guys are nerds um exoterra like the guys over in germany are all big nerds they're sales guys in the us a lot of them are reptile keepers but but when you get to the corporate offices most of the time none of those people even have pets like they're not pet people they're they're corporate they're they're business people they don't look at the the products and how the animals go together and how the tank goes together and what components they need in order to survive they look at the margins that each one gets and they kill things based on how much money it makes not whether it's needed for a kit um or whether it's good for an animal now granted there are people at these obviously they're making sure the the stuff is safe um it should be making sure the stuff is safe um but yeah i just i don't see them ever getting out they're not they're yeah they're not gonna be able to grow like they're not gonna be able to get out and and and and do that i don't think because they also kind of take away that entrepreneurial passion in a way like it becomes a machine that just runs and it's not exciting and there's there's there's less push to it and there's less humanity to it i think too um and then and that's kind of one thing too with vivtec that we wanted to do too is i wanted to bring that back to it and i think with what i was doing was when i was at zillow there's ways to promote you know better husbandry and to um you know create better products and to put better information out there and continue to to to have happy employees and promote conservation and sponsor amazing things with animals and do all of this positivity these positive things and cost money but you get that back like some of the biggest companies that i see exploding out of nowhere are like bombas and toms that is a company that makes socks and one that makes shoes and you pay 20 for a pair of socks because they give away a pair of socks so you essentially buy two and people are okay with that because they want to do something better they want to give back but giving back is kind of hard sometimes you don't know how to do it or how to get involved but if i can buy a thing that's high quality that i like and then you're going to do like you're going to give back on top of it so i get that positive that positive feeling by buying a thing that i need like that's easy and that made those companies grow really really really fast so there's there's so much going on that i think that these big corporations just get so focused into how things were and how things are and fighting for the shelf like they have for years and they're very very slow to react and and that is one of the reasons that it makes it very difficult for us as keepers is they're slow to react that's a big reason the u.s is 10 years behind europe well and for people that maybe not realize how big a company like zilla is not zilla itself but the the you know parent corporations people we just see zillow we think okay that's just one of the reptile brands but maybe you could run through for example just the corporate structure of how big that ladder is so just as so so this is what's interesting too every single reptile brand that you know is run totally differently zoo med is a private company owned by gary bagnell like that is a private company owned by him it's totally there's no stock it's those guys they're alone they do their own thing um pagan is a giant corporation that's privately owned so they own like you know fluval and aquatic brands they own dog treats and tons of different brands in the pet industry um and then central owens uh central garden and pet is the com the corporation that owns uh zilla uh brand and in the branch that i was in up in franklin it's zilla coralife aquian kent and kt so kt small animal and then all the aquatics brands um and then they also own nylabone four paws pads and stuff like that um a whole bunch of other brands uh i don't think i could name them all if i tried um pennington seed they own a bunch of seed and stuff that's at home depot too uh but yeah central garden and pet is like a 2.5 billion dollar corporation they're gigantic yeah and traded on the new york stock exchange like a massive company yeah they're a very very very big company so um they they they like to buy buy up smaller companies and and hold on to those smaller companies and let them just keep doing what they're doing and like assist them to grow and do more um and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and a lot of times i see it really has a lot to do with how i think how much they get involved in those companies sometimes because it was interesting to watch like random dog bed company or something like that or not dog bed company but just some company they picked up you know um watch how they tweak how they got them involved like integrated into the into the company as a whole and you know there's some things that tweak and then just watch how these companies either flourish or don't and sometimes they do great and sometimes they don't like uh kent marine is a uh uh jack kent created kent marines a bunch of chemical products for like saltwater and very very well researched incredibly knowledgeable guy like this was this is the stuff you used for high-end aquariums and uh central bought it but he was selling he was selling direct to a lot of people and because central did more distribution didn't really do that they took that away which caused that company to change drastically because of the way it was individually getting to all these individual independents and then depending on which wholesalers bought those products from central or not would depend on whether those independents could get them anymore so it caused kent to slow to go it has its sales to go way down and eventually dwindle to basically nothing until they like dissolved the brand and moved it into other things so like that stuff happens and they make adjustments but um yeah it's it's but a lot of times they end up taking on these companies that do really great so it's yeah no it is definitely interesting when you look at the whole corporate basket you don't people may not realize how big that chain goes and and that was one of the things that i wanted to talk to you about especially because you were at zilla and you've kind of already answered how you know basically bad products stay in those lines because there's no motivation to innovate and people are buying them anyway but when you were there at zilla how did that make you feel for example like how much you know like selling red light bulbs or blue light bulbs for example which i'm sure you were like i hate these things but they're being sold under your brand and how much control did you have there first thing i told my my boss when i walked in was i'm killing cage carpet it's garbage i hate it and he said and he said that's what you think until you look at the numbers and then where then tell me what you think um and that was a reality they sell so much cage carpet it i couldn't kill it not that i didn't want to i just couldn't um and then the other thing too was i kind of got into a spot when i'm like okay i'm gonna kill something i know why cage carpet exists i hate it i know why it exists though and it does have it has some value when used properly so how can i tweak it to make it where it would be something better but still have that same ease and i went down that path for a while but didn't find anything really crazy innovative that would make a big difference so we just kind of left it how it was um but no there was a ton of stuff that i wanted to kill but i couldn't just because the sales were so high and the reality too is to an extent of like like red bulbs um red bulbs are a weird one for me because they're not bad they're just not any they're not the best like for a long time we all believe that reptiles couldn't see red light well they can but the red light bulb in my bedroom like if i had a tank in the room it's not gonna disrupt my sleep it's just not the best i'd rather have it not be light like that so that's kind of where you end up with them so they're not the best but they exist and it got to a point where unfortunately to be to be honest too you kind of get to a point when you're there where you're fighting against like my knowledge and husbandry and and biology and all the background i have on these animals versus the sales that these products are making at these major stores and how much they're moving and like as a company you have to make money like as much as people want to say like oh it's all greed well realistically yeah there's margin in everything i sell i make money on everything i sell because if i don't then i don't have a business like well and you have to please shareholders too if you're a big corporation like that yeah you just get to say hey no sales this year yeah exactly so like you have to do stuff and and i found people that were there that were big animal people that had told me like you kind of get to a point where you may not launch exactly what you want it may not be the best thing you think you can make but it's not going to hurt the animals and it's not bad and that's kind of where they ended up where where they ended up in order to do that and i just that was kind of where i was like yeah like i get that but i'm just not cool with it like i don't i'm not comfortable with that like i i think that we should constantly be innovating to do better every single thing i launched while i was at zilla was some sort there was something improved on it from whatever else existed like it was different or at least had something better about it that solved some problem i refused to put out just another thing that was the same as everybody else so that was something that i did with every single one and most of the time i could do that without it costing us any more money or any more money to the person it wasn't going to be a more expensive thing it was just rethinking how it was designed and tweaking it like the rock layers from zilla are a good example the human hide i put the entrance on the side and it ramped it up into it so because if you take a human height and you put a hole at the top it's a chimney for the humidity that doesn't make any sense why would you let all the humidity on the top so i am an engineer in my engineering backgrounds in hvac and humidity and airflow and temperature and thermodynamics so like this makes sense to me so i created a little tiny convection and made it where they could go in where it gives them enough airflow that it doesn't stagnate but it holds the humidity so like that's an awesome humid hide but it's still to anybody looks just like a resin rock they don't know why it works the way it does i do but it's a better product for them because of that and that was that was everything i was trying to do was that kind of stuff and a lot of times it just i didn't have the opportunity to do it exactly what i wanted well so now you must feel like you have a i mean obviously not being part of a huge corporation there's less funds to work with but the freedom of coming up with ideas must feel like kind of a weight off your shoulders in a way yeah it took me uh it took me a couple months to be honest to like get out of that corporate mindset and like just get out of the tension honestly uh about two weeks before i left for pomona i drove out to la from chicago um before i did that like two weeks before that erica caught me pacing in the living room i was just walking back for i was frustrated because i'm like i know i have an email to send or a call to make or a deadline or something and i'm not thinking about it i'm like i've sat down four times to write out my to-do list and i can't think of what this nothing i'm writing down is this stressful thing and i can't think of it and i was just pacing around the living room so she's like you come lay in the bed lay down on my lap i'm gonna rub your head and just relax for a minute and i'm like okay fine so i did and like after i kind of like relaxed for a second i i realized i didn't actually have anything to do i just didn't know what to do with not having anything to do so i just had that tension anxiety and like it took me it took me a while for that to go away before i finally like was calmer and excuse me more relaxed and but that as soon as that happened like then that passion came back tenfold it came back as soon as i started doing this but that anxiety was still there that that like overlooming deadline and there's something there that monkey on my back was still there um that trip out to la actually did it that that man i i drove to denver and if you drive from chicago to denver colorado it's a plate it is flat there's nothing it's awful it's the most boring horrible drive ever but once i got to denver i stayed at my aunt and uncle's house um which is cool i got to see some family so that was like nice the next day i left and you drive denver's right at the base of the mountains and you go right into the rockies and for the entire next day i drove through the rocky mountains all the way out into utah um and like the scenery is unreal unreal anybody anywhere in the world like that you should just just fly to denver rent a car drive to vegas fly home like it's worth it it's it's incredible i spent the entire time just driving like this and uh and it was just so big and like breathtaking like it just i got out the other side and was just really really relaxed and kind of inspired and happy and like had just had an amazing day an amazing drive and it just melted all that off my back um and the next two weeks of driving to la and going to texas for the show and looping around the country and hurting all night and sleeping in my van camper i built like like it was incredible and it and it and it really just kind of got me back home just fired up but one thing you did say that did does suck is i don't have that corporate bank account to go do all the things yeah there's no black amex card exactly and that was one thing that that's one thing that actually i got asked when we started vivtec so i want to clarify this no one except for me and erica has anything to do with vic tech i got asked how i got zilla to sponsor me into building a new brand which i thought was really funny that anyone thought that corporations give people money to start competing brands but yeah but but no this was uh this was me and erica clearing out our 401ks and our savings and putting it all together like we even had offers for people to invest big names even in the industry that wanted to get involved in what i was doing and we told them no um just because i have a very specific view for what i want and i know a lot of it's not going to be a lot of the people that i've been working with in the industry for the past decade are not going to be as appreciative of it because i think that there needs to be some major changes and i think we all need to take a look in the mirror for once and really start accepting what we're doing and how we're doing it and how we can do better and uh and i'm gonna be pretty vocal about it so i don't think i'm gonna be everybody's best friend for a while but and that's why we wanted to do it ourselves now i think a lot of people are gonna be behind it and i think it's gonna be something that the hobby needs and i think i've seen so much of just people getting more excited about husbandry and natural natural history and really understanding their animals not just having as many as they can and that's been it's just kind of been this perfect storm of time to bring that out but that's why we didn't why we didn't do any other investors or anybody else i didn't want anybody telling me or erica that we couldn't be that that we couldn't step in when we needed to that i didn't want to have fear of anybody else controlling our message yeah it probably makes more sense to establish your voice how the message you're going to give and then maybe if investors come on years later and that that experience you're talking about of having the infinite to-do last to-do list where you can't find the thing that oh my god that is such a relatable thing for me it still happens to me sometimes sometimes i'll just blow like half a day thinking about the thing that i must have to do and then it's just not there and you go yeah okay that's anxiety it sucks it's so bad it's just it's the worst feeling because it's it's that it's like for losing your kid in the mall like and then realizing two hours later that you didn't bring your kids yeah yeah exactly it's just an anxiety a panic attack the whole time it's you're just like tense and freaking out and then it's for nothing yeah yeah luckily i haven't had one of those i haven't i haven't been pacing in the house since uh august so i'm doing pretty good but but yeah no it's it's still it's still a lot like there's still a lot of pressure there's still a lot of stuff but it's it's definitely different like i make my own schedule i get to hang out with my kids every day which i did through covet anyway but it wasn't the same because i was sitting in a computer miserable like yeah now i can play with them and hang out when they get home i just leave my desk and go do hang out with them help them with their homework cook dinner when they go to bed i can go back out and work again like it's just been so much nicer you know i it's yeah it's been nicer it's still a ton of work i still have more to do than i can ever do in a 24-hour day um but yeah what's that saying it's like entrepreneurs are the only people that choose to work 80 hours a week to get away from a 40 hour a week work week yeah exactly exactly so let's let's talk oh yeah go ahead i'll say but that 80 hours is like it's just spread out in a way where it feels like it's 10. it feels like i enjoy it yeah i love it yeah let's go back to that sort of tom's model or yeah tom's model because you had mentioned that and i know that you actually have incorporated that or folded that into vivtech so maybe you could talk about how you guys are incorporating the sort of a more holistic i'm not sure what the word is philanthropic yeah vision well the the one thing that killed me when i started it at zilla was that they weren't they weren't donating to us arc they and they weren't doing a lot of outreach like that but that was just at the time they didn't really have that inroad or that knowledge so so we started doing that right away um and it was just interesting to me when i work with us arkan phil how many how many people in this industry make incredible amounts of money off the industry but don't help to support it at all like they just leach off of it and i hate that i hate that like if you're i don't understand the mentality of this is your life this is your this is your livelihood this is what you do and you're not putting aside some of that money to protect it that just that mentality doesn't make sense to me so right away off the top um uh out of the net profit and this is the net profit so this is definitely this is what would come back this is what would come back to me and erica and go into the company um this is just yeah so out of that ten percent of that is getting cut between five percent's getting donated uh to us arc in usr florida um to help continue to fight for our rights to keep these animals because if we stop being able to keep these animals there's no reason for me to make light bulbs or anything else i get really kind of simple like that's it's easy you know and when it comes to us florida for anybody in the u.s or anywhere who is like uh it's florida it doesn't matter it's not me the reason usr florida matters so so freaking much two of the biggest reptile uh uh distributors for the major pet stores and all of the pet stores in the country two of the biggest ones are in florida so if florida loses their ability to keep a ton of stuff so does most of the whole rest of the country lose their supply or the fact that like some it's more than 90 of tagues come out of florida now they can't be bred in florida guess what's going to get really scarce really fast yeah exactly you know iguanas same thing we all talk about green iguanas and whatever but like how far until they throw all iguana species and the iguana delicatism is on there now you can't have that now you can't breed that there's two people outside of florida i know that have those yeah 20 people in florida with them so like there's massive massive problems if we lose florida florida is an enormous enormous bed of where our animals are produced and brought in florida and california and new york are three of the biggest states we need to fight for because florida all three of them are major import spots that's why that's why the animal rights groups go after them that's why that ban for shipping in uh new york was going to happen is because of laguardia because if you can't ship anything out of laguardia no animals come in from europe anymore right like that's a really and we were all just looking at it like oh it's just shipping in state it doesn't matter it's not that that's not why they're doing it like and we have to pay attention so that's why we want to make sure us florida's involved and people need to care about us florida too i know it's a lot to fight for i know it's a lot to put money at i know it feels like we're gonna fight forever but guess what people who are fighting us make money fighting us so they're not going to stop so we are going to fight for them so yeah just accept it put it in your pocket like that's why we built that into viv tech i know i'm going to fight this for the rest of my life so instead of like arguing about it or being upset or trying to think about how i'm going to donate something here or there we just built it into our pricing of every single thing we sell every single product that is made by vivtec and ever gets sold for the entirety of this company 10 of the profit will be donated and the other five percent goes to conservation initiatives and i think as far as the conservation goes i think there are just different selections that the purchaser can choose or how does that work yeah so i thought that would be kind of cool like like if you have if you're a frog person and you buy the the first call bulb and then you get there it's a pop-up with the checkout that asks you where you want your percentage to be donated to if you're a frog person you can go to project sinju in madagascar that does uh mantela research and and conservation if you're iguana person there's the international iguana foundation turtle survival alliance ttpg um there's a there's a ton of different organizations on there croc fest is on there so i'm excited to go down at croc fest and with this winter and hand them a check from viv tech just from you guys buying bulbs and you know what clicking donate to crack fest so crocodile conservation is going to get some help just because people bought the bulbs yeah yeah that's awesome and i think and it's the same model i use with this podcast as well i donate to conservation as well and i i want to see more people doing it because you can make a tiny percentage and you don't as the the person running the business you don't notice it really and the money just gets funneled that way and i think it's a really important message for us to be giving to other reptile keepers and one i think frustration that some people have with us arc now i'm somewhat disconnected from it because being in canada yeah and i just want to know what your opinion is on this is they fight for our rights which is great but they also don't really talk about welfare and how to make sure we're caring for animals properly so sometimes people say well they're just fighting for the sake of fighting but also maybe we should also analyze like what you know how we're keeping some of these animals right and so what do you think of that yeah usark is one dude that's it yeah that's the answer it's one guy if everybody wants us art to be more and i totally agree i totally agree that we should have a standards i talked to a bunch of people we've talked and i've talked with ashley desant and other people about in in canada and the us about trying to create a standards organization or something like that because i have time but but but like it needs to happen but us art can't do it they don't it's one guy and they don't have the funding or the time the other thing too is i don't think people realize how u.s art works so usark is a board of industry people which now i've also heard that like i've heard people argue like us art doesn't have any herpetologists on their board so we don't care about them and they don't care about conservation and i need to clarify this there is an enormous amount of things in the reptile hobby that need to be addressed conservation is one of them conservation of the concert wildlife conservation conservation of the animals in the industry in the hobby um conservation of of of our abilities and our rights things others can't there's a lot more to conservation than just wildlife conservation um and then on top of it there's you have so you have the conservation site then you have the laws side then you have the welfare side then you have there's nobody that does all of it for any group of anything like this lobby like the hsus are who we fight with does cut well they kind of do all of it right like they lobby and they also put out a lot of things on you know animal welfare and you know legislation things like that so if we wanted to be that we could totally do that u.s arts budget on a really good year is half a million dollars hsus's budget on a really good year is 250 million dollars so as soon as we get us 500 times bigger we will have the most amazing care guides and standards and everything but if everybody continues to argue about whether u.s ark is doing anything or not and if they're doing good enough and whether we should support them they're never going to be any bigger and they're never going to be any better and there's no one else that's going to come out other than the people that are on the board like that people like us that are going to do this there's not like there's the people who can really do something generally don't have enough time to build a whole another organization we need to really support people who would do it um but we need to understand that it costs money a lot of money and we need to constantly be funding us arc as much as we can until that can be a possibility where that grows another organization will at some point come up to be that or u.s ark will be able to grow to be that but right now you're asking you're asking a lemonade a kid at a lemonade stand to be mcdonald's you can't and it's not it's a really important point to make and i've never really thought about it before and i wonder why that message isn't more prominent when that that uh you know when people raise that point about us arc i guess people know about it but i never really realized it was a single person and how small it actually is yeah it's it really is i mean it granted it's a single it's it's phil goss the president who's basically does everything um he has some people that will help with like social media stuff um and then he's got lobbyists that they pay attorneys and things like that so it's not the only person involved isn't him but the only usr person is him you know so like that's that's really that it really is a thing it really is one dude saving our all of the entire country's ass like i'll just make it real clear it's one guy and every time you see him if you don't shake his hand and thank him for everything he's done like you are missing out on probably one of the key people who is the reason that the show your ad exists period it's that guy and all of us is a community that support him and that organization so it's just gonna be it's gonna be important to keep supporting it and people can everybody wants to find a reason why it's not perfect so that they don't well i'm not going to donate because they don't have a herpetologist on their board well what would that do like that has nothing to do with lobbying in the industry in washington and on top of it yes they do have they have they don't have people on the board but they have a lot of people who are um uh they use as uh consultants like there's a lot of consultants um a lot of herpetologists a lot of biologists a lot of people from the industry i mean it's not just because the board is not does not have one of everybody it doesn't make sense for the board to have one of everybody the board that they have is very sensible and driven to stopping legislation understanding the industry as it is and that's and realistically as well as much as people don't want to hear it like us arc here this is something i said recently yesterday recently changed their logo to a more clean logo which caused a huge stir because everybody think it looks like it looks like the u.s bank logo and it's very similar just like a lot of other us anythings in the us and everybody's like oh why would we want it to not look like creative in us and you know have the snake and be our own and make it look like u.s bank and i'm like yeah when we're writing a letter to a legislator or a government official why would we want them to think of money we should make them think of philanthropy and giving out things and and and love and happiness because any politician anywhere cares more about you keeping your lizard than getting money yeah yeah exactly yeah it's an image we want to portray the right image when we're and it's sitting at the table it's clean it's readable it's it they can understand it right away the old logo was a little more graffiti style i'll be honest i hated it too i looked at it when i showed up at tinley and i looked at phil and said dude what did you do because i was like the old logo was cool but we talked for a while and he's like you know how many actually representatives ask what that says because they can barely read it because it's stylized or like what what oozark is oozark like yeah but like so this really breaks it up makes it u.s arc makes it clean and they're still going to keep the old logo around but like but that's what what we gotta we got to think about and either way like what my point with that was we're talking to people who care about different things than we do who are trying to stop us from keeping the things we like we can't you can't talk to them like they're animal people and you don't need animal people to talk to them because animal people won't get through to them you have to talk to them in a very very different mentality and not just animal welfare there's a lot to it it's not all money either but you have to understand politicians and politics to to understand how to work with them and if you think that bringing in a biologist to say or herpetologists to say that like hey those animals are endangered or whatever they don't care look at what they put on the the esa the major species act is getting they're what are they looking at putting on it as i laughed because they're looking at there's something that actually we're going to have to look at in the in the us because yeah usr just put it out they're looking at putting some reptiles on the endangered species act again one of them is a native u.s species and the other one doesn't come from the united states at all so putting it on the endangered species act does nothing except stop the breeding and working with that animal but right again yeah so anyway i don't know it's just us r does they are david fighting goliath with a toothpick and winning a lot like a lot which is impressive and that's what we need to be looking at is the fact that we're paying an organization to fight for our rights and they sued the government and won even though the government had on its side over half a billion dollars in companies pushing back on us we won like well it's a really good it's a it's yeah it is insane and it's an amazing perspective to add to it and and many of the listeners know i just moved out of a city that is essentially on the verge of you know banning like every reptile like they they sort of came up with a positive list and it's just a it's a laughable list if you're an animal or reptile person you look at it and you go hey i haven't heard of half these species b all of these would have to be wild caught it's like very strange but like you said it doesn't take me going in there to talk about animals just to sway them you have to sort of counteract the animal rights groups that approach them with that rule because you can tell that it was just an animal rights plan like plugged into the government the government just put this out and and now they have to deal with the aftermath but yeah we need people fighting and yeah like you said it's a it is a david versus goliath situation for sure and it's and you got to realize too like those people who are making those laws like like you said an animal rights person showed up handed them this and said hey you should look at this it's going to stop somebody from putting a tiger in their bathroom which everybody that's even animal even if you're an exotic animal keeper with a tiger like that's still insane and we all want to stop that that's improper care we don't want those people to have those things we want to stop people who shouldn't have animals like that from getting them everyone does but there's a line on where you want to put that and the other thing and and when animal rights groups bring something to them like hey this is going to stop this happened in madison there was a dude with a baboon in a bathroom in his basement if that was its enclosure was the bathroom and he had kids any logical person wants to stop that so they don't have to know anything about animals to go yeah no somebody with a kid shouldn't have a baboon in their bathroom okay insane right so that's what they lead in with and and any reasonable person would completely agree with that but what they don't understand is they're not they're not animal people they don't understand what the rest of that means and the same thing like if i i don't know nascar if somebody came to me and said did you know that nascar is directly related to baby deaths in the united states and they handed me something that said that and proved and like a study that proved it like i don't know crap who am i i don't who am i to say that's not true like that's pretty convincing evidence and i don't know anything about it so yeah i guess we should stop nascar because they're killing babies totally dramatic nascar doesn't kill babies yeah yeah as far as i'm just saying like something like that right you're gonna obviously go oh my god and but you don't know about it and we have to understand that those people don't know animals like we do they don't understand it so they're being taken advantage of by an organization that knows that and we need to go and go no no no here's what an animal is like here is how they interact with kids they have these in classrooms here's studies that show how um kids interacting with exotic pets are more likely to go into stem stem position careers in their life and just all these things like that that we can show that oh okay it's not the baboon in the bathroom no take all these things off make a permit list for these things because these things people there are people out there who should keep but not everybody should have them and then if you want to ban stuff like you want to ban tigers in the city limits like that's not unreasonable like i don't think people should be able to like i can't argue that there's some stuff i can't argue like i think anybody should be able to do whatever they want as long as they can do it safely and within reason but if you're in a very populated area things do go wrong and that's kind of a big risk to let a tiger or a big animal or even like a retake get out you know there are risks and we have to be understanding of that and like there's some stuff like that that's hard to argue it's hard to it's hard for me to get someone who doesn't have reptiles to understand why you should you should be able to keep a cobra like that doesn't make sense that's to them it's like me saying you should be able to keep a fireball in a live hand grenade like yeah it sounds stupid you sound you don't sound sane or logical to them so we have to be able to speak to them in a way that they understand it and it and talking about the animals a lot of times isn't the way to do that you have to do kind of different types of metaphors different types of ways to help them understand it relate it to things in their life as well as show them so many of the other positive sides that the animal rights groups aren't showing them and show them that other side and it's it's it's not easy and it's not like i said a herpetologist or somebody like that's not just going to show up and do it like it takes it takes the right people knowing what to say and you can go in and say the wrong things and make it worse yeah well and that's a big point that i always try to make too is the animal rights people don't even have a grasp on what they would get rid of if they got rid of the hobbies so it's like okay you disapp you destroy the hobby what else went with it what's the collateral damage we don't know so and we weren't even going to talk about this but now i'm kind of interested so we're going to go a little tangent here but as far as regulations go where do you sit on you know what do you feel in interpreter culture should be maybe regulated maybe we don't say okay you can't own a re-tick but you have to follow these rules or whatever do you have have you thought that out yeah i'm working on wisconsin is where i lived my whole life until i moved to illinois years a couple years ago but and wisconsin is one of the last states that doesn't have an exotic law um so me and us arc and mostly me phil gave me a few things and it's mostly me i am working on trying to write a law for wisconsin um because realistically we're gonna get wisconsin's gonna get a lot at some point it's either gonna be written by us or it's gonna be written by the humane society united states or peta like in between me hsus and peta i'm hoping that the reptile community is more comfortable with me writing it so that's kind of what i want to do and it and i'm trying to make it where you can basically have whatever you want so anything's any crack any the only things that i want to regulate is any crocodilians larger than one meter snout vent have to have a permit that's it you just have to have a permit so you know you you know you can prove that you can you have the housing in the enclosure you have future room for them like you have to be able to prove that you can handle what you have um and then for uh american alligators i want i want to make them illegal to sell in person at all in wisconsin just because i don't i've never i've never seen one and i've seen one in the state ever that had a good enclosure ever and they're just too cheap and easy to get a hold of um i feel like if you want to get a crocodilian you should have to think about it first and a hundred bucks is not enough to think about a couple thousand might be yeah so when your next best options are thousands of dollars or they're insanely mean might make you think about it a little more um and then all hots are gonna be i want to do permitted with uh hours along with having opportu having options for people to get those hours so yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah it's funny the way the province next to me i think they i think now they have changed the rules a little bit but at one point the rule was just you cannot own any venomous or constricting reptiles and it's just like oh so you can't own a canyon sanboa but you could have an american alligator yeah so it just makes no sense so it would make a lot more sense for us to be the ones that are saying this is fair this is coming from someone who actually has a knowledge and a knowledge base in this topic and also we want to be safe too so providing permits and whatnot is a good idea well i think i think we've kind of wrapped up on that topic and i don't want to go too far down that tangent because i still want to talk about viv tech and the products that you guys have before right recording this is the problem i have with being on every podcast i've never hit an hour so good luck man yeah yeah yeah we're definitely not going to hit an hour we're going over for sure yeah so tell me maybe you could just give people just a quick list of the products you guys have right now and maybe later in the podcast we'll talk about some of the future ideas that you have because i'm sure you have lots there that you might want to talk about but as far as what's for sale right now what do you guys have yeah so for right now we we launched with a couple simple a couple things um and i did i didn't launch a ton of things at once uh for a couple reasons one this is happening out of our house and i have to manage the inventory in my house and two is because the other thing is i'm trying to do things that are a little bit more of a shock to the industry that are more technical that are going to really bring some cool things to our ability to keep animals and i want to make if i feel like if i blasted everybody with a lot of stuff at once it would be a little overwhelming so i want to kind of trickle one out one cool launch and then let it sit and then be on podcast talk about it really get the website all updated get all the information and videos and really keep working on that and then launch the next product and then get that going and get that buzz going and we're going to kind of we're probably going to you're probably going to see us do that we're going to launch like every year we'll launch a couple things spaced out even if they're already at the same time though we'll probably space them out um just to kind of unless they go together or there's some reason to launch them um but the first thing we did was the led uv bulbs which was crazy and awesome at the same time and it has been a ride for sure um you know we we ended up being the first not like the first actual company uh to launch led uv bulbs and as far as i'm aware in the world um like there's you can buy them online from random manufacturers in china and things like that it's very dangerous to do and i'm actually sure at some point why it's very dangerous to do so you could get them but nobody actually no actual company had taken them on and test them and worked them through and and that's what we did so i saw that the ability to do it was there i found i i worked with a bunch of different companies and worked down until we found one that i was really happy with and we're making some tweaks as we go like the i'm already working on the next generation which if the sample ball coming does what i think it'll do it's going to be even cooler it's just going to be the last bulb you'll ever need for anything ever like that'll be it it'll be i'm good i'm i'm hoping i will be pretty pretty close to actual the actual similar graph not not weights but similar uh graph to actual sunlight that's incredible yeah so i'm hoping to i mean the parts of it we need um but yeah so the uv bulbs so that was the first one and that's these guys tiny little bulbs so and then after that we we also launched with that a uv meter that that one has been a challenge our our it came out we did really well with it i was really excited how many people we actually sold out of them when i brought them when we launched and i was excited about that because i didn't think i'm like nobody buys meters like everybody talks about wanting a solar meter but nobody's going to put up 150 bucks for our version we sold i mean we sold about an hour and a half oh and then it's been a scramble to get them back well once we did we got them back we got them um we upgraded some stuff with them we tweaked a couple things and then their manufacturing process changed a little bit and for the last four months i've been trying to get we're trying to get them dialed back in because they i'm not getting the accuracy that i need so i'm working with that manufacturer to try and get it dialed back in and if i don't have an answer in the next like couple weeks to a month um we'll be looking at other manufacturers so that happens sometimes but unfor you know we had tested that and worked with it for a long time and it was really good and unfortunately they changed their process i can't really fix that so they're working on fixing it but if we can't come to a good solution then we'll probably find another company um but so far um we're hoping to get those back in stock and then the other thing we did with snake bags just because it's a pet peeve of mine like i swear to god if i ever get another snake in a dirty sock or a bag that says cobra on it that it's scratched off but i don't know like every name on that bag is a venomous snake and i ordered a gecko like yeah yeah that's how my boa came it's like gaboon viper on it i'm like okay great i hope that's actually what's i hope my bow was actually in here yeah or you know or just the fact that it's usually crap stained and dirty and you just keep reusing bags and like i thought about that is as we want to keep looking at and making ourselves look better we want to improve the image we have as a hobby i'm like this is a it's a it's a fabric sack like we can do better than the cheapest fabric with the cheapest string made in the cheapest shop in in pakistan like yeah yeah better than that you know so i i made the i need bags there they're i didn't grab one because i didn't think about the bags um but we uh we put a loop in the side so if you if you need to you can actually pick it up and hang it you can use a hook to hold it if it's an angry snake you can hold with tongs and a hook you can actually hold the bag open um for somebody uh and then the the strings are a nylon it's almost like a not quite paracord but they're a nylon type rope um and when you pull them really tight they actually kind of meld to each other a little bit so it's they're incredibly hard to untie but it also makes it really really secure um so just small things like that and then just a better thicker fabric that would look better and then it's got um our logo screen printed on it and our website so like we can do those custom for people if they wanted them as well and the nice thing is for that is more like i want somebody to open excuse me to open up a box and it should be a presentation this is their new pet like we get too used to just oh you boxed up you ship it out you box up you ship it out this is how we do it i should if i'm a quick and dirty style yeah if i ship my buddy an animal i just ship them an animal but when i ship you a bulb i package i bubble wrap that bulb i tape it up really nice it comes with your your um any products we sent you right i said i i signed the uh the slip like the the receipt i sign it and say thank you you know we throw some stickers and stuff in there and then there's a little paper card that comes and says thank you for improving your husbandry you know with vivtec products something like along those lines and it's a card that if you actually throw it out in your garden it's got native plant seeds in it so it'll grow like lavender and stuff in your garden um but like we there's when you open the box that's the first thing you see and then you get that there's a presentation to it now might not be much but it's it's for me it's just that's how i want to get it that's those little things that make that a little cooler even when you buy stuff online from anybody especially like etsy or people like that you get that little card or something it's just that little extra touch that like it makes it a little more special i guess it makes it a little bit more it connects you with them a little more and i think when we're talking about pets we really need to remember that like like garrett hartl with uh reach out reptiles does an unreal job with marketing and packaging his animals yes he does you open this thing up and it's totally set up with your snake and a t-shirt or a mug and stuff like it all looks nice and everything is crisp and clean any it's not cheap for him to do that but he's also not selling cheap animals so he can put that cost into it and like that's when you start doing that like that's one thing too that people need to realize like especially for donating us arc or doing anything like this money and bottom line the dollar amount is always something people fight about like i need to make it cheaper i can't do that it's too expensive whatever but look at how just how much well garrett does not only with all of his marketing and stuff but like he puts money in and he gets that money back tenfold because he's doing the right stuff with it you know like if you're just blowing money to blow money yeah but when you're put investing like if you were to take five percent of your of what you sell a snake for and throw it to us arc that's something that like i i tell people all the time like you're gonna negotiate if i come up to your table and that's next 200 bucks and i say i'll give you 190 you're not gonna say no you're gonna say yeah so how about just don't take 190 just say no sorry it's 200 and donate the 10 bucks yeah yeah exactly they'll just take 190 and donate the 10 bucks because it's 10 out of 190 yeah you know it's so true like the reptile hobby in general can do better with that presentation and yeah garrett does an amazing job when it looks like you know you i've ordered like hair like beard products and stuff from these companies and you get the stickers and you get everything's in these nice little bags and it's you know there's a little confetti and whatnot i'm like oh that's nice like it feels good and i think that's that personal touch that we talked about at the beginning that the big corporations just aren't able to to pull off right well and that's where when shipping animals i think we've kind of gotten a little just pack it up ship it out pack it up ship it out you know like i open a box and it's and i'm i'm i'm honestly i'm a hundred 100 at fault of this too like i've continued to look for better ways to do it and i'm working on that because i want to do better i want my stuff to look better like i want to i want you to open it up and have rainbow stuffing cotton in there it looks all cool and your bag's all nested in there with some stickers and stuff and it's a whole thing like it makes i want to make that fun it should be exciting like everybody does unboxing videos then you cut open the box and there's old newspaper and a bag covered in feces yeah it's like yay cool this smells bad and my thing is in there yeah yeah exactly well i as far as the because if i was thinking about myself okay if i was to start a reptile brand i feel like lighting would be one of the last places i would go just because of how complicated it is so what motivated you to start there because it's the most complicated part it's actually it's because honestly it's yeah it is it's because it's the most complicated part that i think has been done the the most incorrectly i think lighting is the biggest struggle we have in in the industry um and i think the second biggest struggle is nutrition so those two are the biggest things we're looking at like i keep getting asked like are you going to do cages not for a long time not anytime soon okay everybody everybody and their brother has a cnc in their garage every there's plenty of glass boxes out there i have some ideas for something different and until i can make something that's completely different and i'm not going to make another box just like other people do that i want to make i want to i want to make everything inside that box work better so you know we started with the lighting and one of the cool things with the with the led lights is we have the best distribution of uv-a of any bulb period and that's that was one of the coolest parts of these is your animals actually see the light and react immediately i had a monitor freeze the second i flipped the switch he froze stared at the light and then without turning his head he had his head cocked sideways pointing his eyeball right at the light went right at it because he could see it and then he analyzed his basking spot like he'd never seen it before he was in this he's been in his cage for two years but i just basically gave him those colorblind glasses and lightened up an entire spectrum he hasn't been able to see as well and while i have uva and uvb in those tanks if you look at the uva spectrum of most bulbs it's a tiny spike ours is a really big spike and a long curve it's a lot wider so it covers a lot more of that spectrum and it's really really cool the the hormonal changes and stuff it's having on animals and that's like that's uva is actually where i wanted to focus because everybody talks about uvb but you can supplement uvb with d3 if you had to that's how the hobby existed before uv bulbs you can't supplement the effects of uva you can't so and and they have such a massive effect on the animal's mentality which that is it's it's kind of like the re i feel like the reason we don't focus on it is the same reason we don't look at medicine in general if you have a mental disorder or you have i've i struggle with depression i have my whole life and lie to a lot of people that do like but that's something that you it's a silent struggle like you can't people who are handicapped who have disorders like that or anxiety disorders it's they don't get given that same i don't know respect as somebody who has a physical disability they don't get given that same credibility i guess like oh you're just you don't you're not really sick you can walk into the store you don't need to park in in a handicapped spot that kind of mentality if you take that mentality and you take it and look at how we look at the world like that and especially in the medical side now when you look at our animals the medical part of our animals we do the same thing we go uvb is a need without it they'll die because without it we can watch them struggle watch them get sick and then watch it they die it happens in front of us there's a visual thing that'll happen it's gonna happen in a sequence of events that we can track it's a known thing uva affects serotonin developments in their brains and it affects the way they see their world how they see each other uh hormones are affected by uvas breeding habits circadian rhythm all that stuff we can't measure that we can't see that but we can if you know what you're looking for once you realize what you're looking for but most of the time in standard care you're not going to see it your animal eats it's active it moves around but ever anybody with amazon treble has ever noticed your amazon doesn't really use the arboreal part of its enclosure that much it mostly just hides in a spot and never moves throw uva on it and your your arboreal snake will never touch the ground again there's a huge reason that they have to pull amazon tree balls out of trees in the rainforest but in captivity you can just pick them off on the ground of the tank yeah yeah well and it's you're so right there is the we are much better at recognizing physical illness than mental illness and it's actually really easy to induce mental illness in captivity and people do it to themselves all the time by not exposing themselves to proper light i mean that's one of the reasons especially us up north through the winters it's you know there's no sun anymore you're not producing it any vitamin d half the time and there's no sun so if you and that's it and even the d3 that's still the that's still the that's still the the uvb part but like you ever noticed exactly the seasonal depression we know that because we're up north so when you can buy seasonal the playing those lights are uva lights that's what they are so it's it because it affects us too it's the same reason if you walk outside on a sunny day and you just like feel better like you just feel like you're ready to take on the world like it's just more aware then you go on a cloudy day like it's raining and cloudy here this is the most excited i can be and i've got a lot of lights around me outside it's just like oh it's cold and crappy again dang but like that's the immediate direct effect of uva on your brain yeah yeah immediately you get to feel good hormones and pumping through the body so can you describe a little bit as far as the conceptual conceptualizing the product all the way to development like what is that process like you don't have to go into crazy detail but how do you do that realistically so when i started this i was still under a consulting contract with zilla um when part of my contract was that any ip or like patents that i came up with period were owned by them because i was contracted with them so i didn't really i didn't go out to patent anything um but i did know that i don't you don't need to patent anything to come up with something cool because the reality is a lot of times the stuff that we need to improve our our husbandry and our hobby already exists it's just used in a different part of an industry that we don't see so it's really a lot of what i've started to started doing now i have a lot of ideas and things that are going to be patented and really unique in the future and build from the design up but a lot of this stuff is finding unique components and and manufacturers and just working through dozens of different manufacturers and finding the and testing components and then slowly tweaking them until i get something that is going to get close to where i want to go and then working with that company to continue to move it there um changing out components changing out colors changing out um shapes distributions you know voltages things like that to really take that thing that was used for something totally different and make it work for us and that's kind of what what that process is now it's really just a lot of back and forth and testing and tweaking and back and forth until we get what we want and then continuous uh quality testing as we go so every like every bulb that shows up it's tested by the manufacturer and it gets a a certification slip that we take out when we get it because we recertify it the day we get it so every single bulb that we have is tested by our manufacturer then tested by us and then sent out and then oh yeah as far as so what pushed you into led side was was it because were you trying to solve just an energy consumption issue or where were you why why did you push yourself there i've been watching leds for a long time and i think that was the next natural step we also kind of thought would be coming you know is led is the next step for for lighting it is for fish and everything else plants everything's going led that's the next step for reptile but because it doesn't have heat it didn't really make sense but we knew i've known uva and uvb were out there uvb has been so expensive it just wasn't feasible really um so as soon as i realized we were gonna kind of all right i was gonna probably step away from zilla in a more consulting role and then um we were gonna start viv tech uh we we wanted to go we because i really i knew that was a big thing and i knew it was a technology that was out there it was just where i wanted to go first it was something that i knew because i knew how the technology worked with led i knew the possibilities that exist with it it's just whether anybody got it there yet um and it was really just okay i'm gonna break it down and start looking so i got on alibaba on amazon and a bunch of other websites i ordered bulbs from all over the world that were led a uv a bunch of different manufacturers and stuff and started testing them um i was gonna say it so like and that that actually kind of ended up becoming a really long road of a lot of discoveries and i kind of knew this was possible because led in the aquarium world is so different it's so different on how it reads you can't even use the same lux meters most of the time because they don't read led light waves like they do uh fluorescent so like you have to have different meters you they you have to look at things differently and it's not the same light temperatures aren't the same thing anymore because you're creating light differently so everything about it kind of changes and it makes it a little more complicated to understand and i knew that was going to happen with this too that there were going to be some struggles on and getting people to understand led and one of those struggles kind of happened um with a one of the recent podcasts you did talking about leds and in uvb and finding that yes if you buy any bulb offline you don't know who made it and one of the bulbs that i have is this one that i got from a manufacturer and it says in big letters do not use and i'll show you guys why when we set up the spectrometer but um it looks it's just leds it looks fine the light that comes out of that is bright the blue the leds work um if i test it i tested it with the the six point the uh solar meter 6.5 so i've got that guy both i got both of these both of them are calibrated and brand new um and uh on this on the on the uv index it look didn't look bad i read like from 12 inches i had like a like a six like that's pretty pretty decent for like a desert kind of bad you know tropical the desert kind of area i'm like that's pretty good so i uh didn't have a spectrometer yet threw it on an animal just to do long-term testing um and it was off on the side of the cage so just kind of see if he came over to that corner to react with it or anything like that um and then about a month later i got my spectrometer luckily again that wasn't his main uv uh and then i put it under this bulb and uh yeah it barely has any uvb at all actually most of it's in the uvc range and shortwave uvb so had i kept that on my animal long enough is and if it was his only source of uv in a smaller enclosure i'd burned his eyeballs out yeah and that is well and that's the thing with the like you said there's so many led products that boast uvb production but so many of them it's like a it's like a minefield really yeah and the reality is it really is for the funny thing is it really is for fluorescent too we've just gotten more used to it because it's been around for 30 years things can get screwed up with fluorescent too like it happened in 2008 a bunch of bulbs got messed up and animal's eyes got screwed up and like yeah especially with the coil bulbs and whatnot it's like yeah the uv or the solar meter is quite an investment but it's really a good tool for everyone because it can happen regardless right but one of the things about led and where this kind of starts and this actually this is something that i talked about with dr baines and it's really frustrating for me um because we all use the uv index to test our bulbs i'm going to show you why that's not gonna work for led and why it doesn't actually work for any bulbs to an extent it does it's the best thing we can do but there's a very very big gap in it that you need to know about because this bulb that'll screw up your animal is going to look totally fine on the uv index meter it's not going to look bad at all it's going to look fine so there's if you had that meter and you bought this bulb there's no reason you wouldn't use it yeah i know how bad it is is because we have a photo spectrometer well why don't we jump into some of that stuff then why don't we look at some of the science here and and set that up for people so we can take a look at at all turn that screen back on there now everybody gets to see two of me there you are so excellent right here is the the fixture you can barely see it but there's the fixture i'm gonna hang it from and then we've got all of our meters and stuff down here let me get the solar meter set up now the solar meter that we have has it is calibrated but it is not it does not have a um it's not the entire system i have isn't fully calibrated that's getting sent out next week so what this is going to do and i'll what i'll do is i'll actually share my screen on this screen so we can see it but what it's going to do is it's going to show us the light wave and it's going to show us the strengths but they're not actually at a unit the unit of the unit that you're looking at is just units not so i can tell like this light wave is about twice as intense as this one but we're not going to get micro watts per square per centimeter squared out of it i will once i get this whole entire rig sent in gotcha gotcha yeah so we can just it's a mark in the sand without having actual units attached to it so we're gonna actually we're still gonna see everything it's still gonna be a reliable look at the at the lighting and what it means it's just not gonna be a measurable look sure why not it's qualified it's not quantifiable but it's qualitative so yeah yeah makes sense all right yeah sorry there's a lot to put together and by the way in case anybody's wondering these stupid things are incredibly expensive even just just sending the expensive like thing that i got in to get calibrated is like another fifteen hundred dollars oh my gosh yeah the actual spectrometer would not have been cheap no it wasn't and i found out that i think we might be one of the only companies that makes reptile products and has our own spectrometer which is insane to me and i'm the company that i just started and i live in my it lives in my garage and like companies that have billions millions of dollars don't have one i don't get it but here i'm gonna let me see how this works i'm gonna shrink my screen here so i can get into my system okay we are officially set up with the spectrometer we're ready to rock so anybody who's listening on the audio version i recommend going back to youtube at some point so you can see what ryan's going to show us he has a sharing a screen here and we'll try to verbally describe it as well so if you're driving in the car you won't feel totally in the dark but will uh but i it'll probably be easier to conceptualize if you do visualize it on the screen at some point so anyway ryan you can take it away what are we looking at here all right so what we're looking at right now what you're looking at is this is an ocean optics usb 2000 plus spectrometer this is the same thing that uh serena uh uses uh in her testing and uh doctor or cerrito wonderlic uses and dr baines use they use the same setup so this is the same exact unit they use now what we're going to start out with is looking at a typical this is a fluorescent coil this is a surprise it's a zilla coil um but this is what i had in the house so um looking at this coil it was interesting this one was actually designed with dr baines as far as i'm aware uh back in the day um but if you look at the spectrometer right here this reading what we're looking at right here is the uvb so uvb uh reusable and reptiles runs from like 295 nanometers to uh 345 and what i want you to think about and this is kind of hard for some people to understand what we're looking at because we're looking at what light waves of something that we can't see and that doesn't really understand so the way i would look at this is we're looking at all of the radio stations that you can tune into with your little dial and then what these wavelengths these these pieces right here are telling us is how strong that signal is so that's what we're looking at we're looking at the right wavelengths which are the right radio stations and which ones we want to have strong signal now what so for reptiles the uvb like i said lands from 295 to 345. so that's all through here so you see with a fluorescent you get here i'll put it really close so don't look i was i was telling dylan don't look at the intensity of this um but you can look at uh uh the wavelengths because this will show what wavelengths this puts off there's a couple things the shape of the graph doesn't change regardless of look it's just the intensity everything gets taller but the shape doesn't change so but if i get it really close it'll kind of help me show it a little easier and then i'll pause it so here all right so what we've got right here is a lot everything from like 450 up and up into the 750 like that's all your visible spectrum that's what we actually see that's what a lot of your plants are going to use and things like that there's spikes in some of these areas just based on the phosphors that are mixed inside the bulb that's how they pick where these spikes are and where these where these are is completely based on the chemical mixture of the phosphors that are inside this bulb this glass bolt if you've changed the chemical composition you change the way the wavelength looks and how that happens and this will explain a little bit about why all these bulbs are different all bulbs currently and the way that they produce uv is a an excited electron hits some other molecule and they have a reaction that causes them to send out wavelengths of light that we can't see we can see those reactions that hit those molecules that create wavelengths of light we can't see so what you see out of a fluorescent bulb is tiny little electrons shooting around in there and hitting uh molecules of phosphorus and when they hit them those phosphorus burn up and in that chemical uh uh in that chemical reaction or that reaction uh it produces these light waves um so over time that's why your uv bulb degrades over time is because those chemical reactions burn up that material and over time there's less of it and less of it and less even less of it so that's what happens um so that's what these phosphors do so right here you've got your uvb and there's a big spike in the lower in the lower section right here about 305 310 and then it carries out all the way through down into 350. um the this section of uv uh is used to um stop the overproduction of d3 and there's some studies out there that show um they're not totally sure exactly what portion of that is necessary to do that so there's some studies going on with it and as well as with our bulbs to see um because we're a little weaker on that portion of it but that's the only portion of the of the spectrum we're a little weaker on we're looking at the long term of what that'll do um so then right here you've got your uva and uva is kind of like through right here so you've got a couple big spikes but not you're missing a lot of it and a lot of it there's nothing and you're looking at really short very defined spikes the other thing to notice with this and this is with all every single fluorescent bulb all of them all mercury vapors and all metal halides is this right here it's not a lot but all of them have uvc and shortwave uvb at least some others it's basically a tiny little spike at what like 255 nanometers or something like that and zilla is actually out of all the bulbs i've tested zilla's actually got one of the it's got a really really good very very low uv c spike just to get that tiny dot you saw how close i had to beat the bulb so yeah their uvc output's very very low it's actually one of the reasons i used their bulb before i made better ones um so that's your typical coil so that's basically any fluorescent you're going to be looking at is like that now this is the suresun vivtec jungle cover so this is what would be like our tropical bulb i refuse to call it tropical or desert because those nomenclatures in the hobby are garbage because the highest uv kneading animal on the planet lives in the caribbean not in the desert so cyclical points like clear iguanas need more uv than any other living animal and they live on the white sand beaches in the caribbean which is not too deserty and a little more tropical yes i think you're right about that there's a little more humidity in the air right and there's got to be more we got to start thinking about things differently than like the two habitats is the dunes of the sahara and the rainforest floor because there's other stuff in between that well and even when we take that too far too you make all these you know arid setups completely arid and void of moisture and then the animals just desiccate there and you go well it's supposed to be a desert animal well in the wild it's burrowing deep into a moist hide it's doing all these things and it does rain sometimes and yeah yeah that's why that's why none of these are called desert or tropical and i don't think the word desert or tropical is on the boxes even because what we wanted people to do is stop thinking about whether it's a desert animal or a tropical animal because realistically the bulb that i made for frogs for like dark frogs works great for dark frogs at 12 inches the bulb for like cyclora works really good for dart frogs too at three feet so it depends on the size of your enclosure and what you want to use it for you know so it really just it depends more on what zone you need to get your animal in and how close it's going to be to it that's how you pick the ball not desert or tropical anyway side side rant um here so this i love this look how clean that is that's cool so that is a vivtec suresun mid-day blaze so what you'll see here is you'll see a a much it's a it's not as like weight as long and plateaued it's a lot more spiked um in the uv so it's right in the right about 310 so we run our uv from about 295 to 320 is really what it covers but it peaks at about 310. um right now we're working to add more into this section again that's kind of where you the overproduction of d3 is stopped however again we're trying to see i haven't seen any negatives with it and we have animals that have been on tests for over a year and they haven't had any problems um but we are testing it in a lot of long-term tests to see we really want to find out what are those portions in that spectrum and what can we use it for what do they need um and how can we improve it so we are actually i have samples coming with potentially some new leds that aren't really out there um that they might be that we're working on with a manufacturer to fill that section in so we'll see how it goes yeah actually let's linger there for a second because i think that was you know sort of the two main concerns with led uvb at the first is the uvc which we can see there's none here yep yeah it's a it's a flat line at the bottom which is great and then the second thing is this this concept that the longer wavelengths of uva or of uvb and uva are what you know pump the brakes for the d3 synthesis and it it's it seems like yeah there's it's more theoretical at this point but yeah there are some signs to show that that's probably the case so i guess my question would be well first are you doing are planning on doing any blood testing or anything with animals right now just to see where their 25 hydroxy vitamin d is you are yeah can you talk a little bit about that yeah well so what we what we tried to work on is i know like again knowing that this is an issue and and i talked to dr baines about it because i knew it was like in serena we when i sent them the bulbs and they did the test we were talking a lot about them and i greatly appreciate both of them and their input they've been phenomenal and and and it's been really cool because we want to change things so that's one thing that's been really nice with both of them too is and i think why they're more i don't know open to talking to us is i want to know how i can make it better i don't want to hear their i don't want to hear their their opinion and then post it out how they love it i wanna hear i can make it better i'm never gonna be satisfied until they go there's nothing better you can do ryan like until i get to that point where i've turned put the sun inside this little box like i'm not gonna be happy um and i appreciate their their their output so through talking to dr banz she kind of said we just kind of talked about how a really good study on the uv in reptiles hasn't really ever been done not in the way we need it to because we're always looking at just specific pieces and they always usually focus on like the shortwave or the long wave shortwave uvb right because that's they need that they have to have that or they die and again that's that mentality of we see it we know it and they need it so there's other pieces they're starting to learn more about so yeah we're we're looking at there's a university um and i'm uh friends with the head of the zoology and biology department and he has a lot of grad students that need things to do so we're working on some cool grad student projects to i think we could figure out who that might be just by thinking yeah yeah yeah we probably could talk yeah once we get this stuff going it'd be cool to talk about later too um yeah yeah cool but we're definitely trying to we'll be putting up some some stuff like that we're uh we're working with some other universities and friends to do a lot of testing and honestly we're even looking at uh stuff that has nothing to do with our bulbs like um i'm working with one i want them to do i'm trying to find a way for them to do it because generally their students aren't like a student project is has a timeline and this would be a little bit longer um but i want them to do like bearded dragon joint health uh on loose substrate versus tile like things we don't think about like yeah they don't ingest it but now do they have arthritis and horrible joints because they've been on a hard surface their whole life yeah you know like probably but yeah exactly that's that's a more likely thing than impaction like exactly every bearded dragon on tile gets arthritis one in ten thousand on sand gets impaction like what do you want to do yeah exactly yeah well like that kind of stuff i want to answer some of those kind of questions but with the lighting too yeah it's really we want to look at more long-term studies and the nice thing too is unfortunately it sucks erica couldn't be on here with me she was busy but erica uh erica mcveigh my wife was the ceo of viv tech actually has been a certified veterinary technician for almost 15 years and has exclusively worked with exotics including working for brookfield zoo so like there's very few people in this country that know more about reptile medicine than her including veterinarians yeah um so yeah so she's pretty stoked about all this and she digs into all the medical side of it and um yeah we're working on that kind of stuff but like but yeah so we're looking at hoping to figure that out and then i'm already working right now like i said with our manufacturer on making some chips that would fill that in um and we might actually be going to a bigger bulb housing so i can do more chips and fill more wavelengths um so we're listening what's the problem right now like why is there a gap there is it because we don't have an led bulb technology right now that can produce a wavelength there or honestly it's because the the diodes that are available the diodes that are available there just isn't there's no need for that wavelength for anybody else for anything really and that's that's one thing to remember too with reptile which this is kind of what makes it hard we talked about earlier with the hobby and and things one thing that does make it hard for reptile to innovate is it does make it difficult because if i want to get those leds and no one else in the world needs them i have to pay a company to make them just for me and they're not going to be 10 cents a piece they're going to be 50 a piece so like it's very cost prohibitive to do a lot of stuff like that and that's where it gets difficult so that's why this you know both any bulbs that are out there none of the leds i think have that yet um because that diode doesn't really exist now i found one my manufacturers looking through their through their you know contacts manufacturers for leds and found one that we're pretty sure is gonna do what i need to do um and if not we may be able to get them to tweak it and then i'm basically just gonna take out a loan and buy what i need to buy a lifetime supply of that diode and then try and get the cost down as much as i can um so let me ask you a little bit of a tougher question then so let's let's say theoretically worst case scenario without the longer the waves of uva or i guess the shorter waves of uva there is a hypervitaminosis d3 issue what what are next what's the next steps because you know like you said there's a few brands that all have a similar spike or similar uh spectrum yeah and if that is going to cause vitamin hyper hypervitaminosis what are the next steps i mean realistically it's it it it it's it's a it's a little nervous man i i i think we all are like i've done enough testing with it on my own animals we've done we haven't seen anything happen and and i'm comfortable that's the only reason i was comfortable enough knowing this to let it out um to release them is i know that that it's not having any effects on the animals we're testing um and watching uh their their their blood levels all look great everything looks great so um and with like i said with eric honestly i wish eric was here she could definitely touch a lot more on that um because i just tell her she just she tests she tracks it and tells me things are good and i high five when i walk through them like but uh but no i mean realistically i think what the biggest concerns right now is is it's not that it'll actually cause it is that it would cause hypervitaminosis but the other part of it it's it's more that if you measure it at if you keep it equivalent to fluorescent so if you keep the with the length equivalent to fluorescent basically because it's missing that the the the solution to it might be if it became a problem would be you just we need to add distance to the uv so instead of being at say you want to hit a uv index for your bearded dragon of 5.0 on your spotlight and you're getting 5.0 out of our bulb but we're we find out that over time you know years from now that maybe this has some tendency to have an issue then instead of you know being at 12 inches now you're at 14 and you're not at 5.5 you're at 4.8 but that is going to end up giving you the same amount so it might end up being a shift to kind of a shift to the ferguson zones as well as honestly i'm already trying to make sure we can fix it just because whether they need it or not isn't my question it's whether they get access to it in the wild or not and that's more my concern because i think when you look at supplements are a good example if we only look at what the animals need to survive then we miss out on a lot of uv is the same thing we only we continue to only look at what they need to survive then we're going to miss out on the things that create enrichment and better lives for them and better health for them and better everything because we're only looking at the bare minimum and that's one thing i think in the hobby especially in the states that it's it's changing significantly but for a long time it just it was about how many animals you could have and not how they were kept the best and it was just it was very keep it alive like a care sheet i tell everybody like oh do you have a care sheet for those i'm like a care sheet is a one week how not to kill your animal in a week that's it at the end of your week if you haven't done more research you're in trouble because in one page all i can do is tell you how not to kill it that's it exactly i can't help you understand that anything more than just it won't die in a week with this piece of paper if you do these things yeah nothing about natural history nothing about how to make it thrive exactly exactly and so so we've got to get more to like i love it when people come up and they're like oh my animal doesn't need uvb and i'm like oh hold on it might not need it to be alive but is that your standard is your standard of care not dead or thriving and breeding and living and growing and healthy because if your standard of care is not dead then i can tell you a bunch of ways you can save money like you literally can put it in a duct tape shoe box if you want yeah exactly and that is one of the standards we sit on all the time in the hobby is not dead like for example i had some pothos that i just gave up on i moved and i just let them basically not die under no light or anything and then i it was like two weeks or three weeks i'm like you know what i feel bad for this plant and i put it in water and it started spreading sprouting roots again but you know some that example of the plant wilting and the roots drying up and you know that technically wasn't dead it still came back to life when i gave it water three weeks later but it certainly was not thriving and i think a lot of reptiles are in that shriveled heart is still beating but that's about it exactly and it sucks because they're so good at hiding how hurting how much they're hurting or how sick they are you don't know until it's too late you're not you're just you're not gonna get what you think you're in trouble by the time you know your animal's sick it's already probably dead it just hasn't died yet yeah you know so well anyway so here so this is so this kind of all comes back to you when we're looking at this uv so this is when when john was on your podcast and talked about the negatives of uv and led and he was right on on what he talked about with that study on the bulb but what that bulb was was kind of what i started doing i had to go out to all these manufacturers order their bulbs get samples start looking at what they were how they were constructed materials i took them apart looked through the components you know i really needed to understand the quality of the bulbs what they did their outputs etc so i got one bulb and i thought this thing like i said looked awesome it has a ton of leds in it it gives off a ton of light it's super bright and then i tested it with my uv index meter and it looked great and i was like huh cool that sounds awesome right so i started testing it and this is before i had my spectrometer now i'm going to raise this thing up because i need to get it up higher so that i can show you the uv index so let's see here so if i take this we're at about we're about 10 inches here all right so if i do at 10 inches i can show this to you guys but you might not even be able to see it i don't even know if you can see it but no we'll take it for it i promise it's at 7.5 so it's at point five right there now for some uvi 7.5 about 10 inches below the bulb yeah so i mean that'd be good for like for us on a spotlight if you're looking at the ferguson zones on a spot that's a good that's a good range for like getting into a desert species right underneath it like that'd be perfect for your bearded dragon to sit there all right now now if we look at the the 6.2 the uv uvb meter i get 17 microwatts for most people it's putting out uv and it looks good on the uv index meter big problem with that for me and because i know is that if it's a desert bulb and it's like it's you're going like seven and a half in uv index that's a pretty strong output it should have a lot stronger uvb than that it should be up near 50 to 100 and it's not but i know that and i have both and this is why both is important because now i'm going to show you the spectroscoping of this thing so now we're going to take this and lower it so you can get it nice and strong if you do this yeah i'm like this thing's like i'm like in the bulb yeah there so now if you look at this uvb reptiles use is here there's nothing this is so basically we're seeing uh we're seeing a spike below 300. so it looks like maybe 275 or something a peak at that is the shortwave uvb that causes photocarotinitis and burns out reptiles eyeballs so and then this is the uva which again the rest of it's not bad the uva is not great not bad it's all one spike it's in a good spot no big deal it's this though but the problem the problem that i'm trying to really focus on is really if i if i only use the uv index meter i usually use the 6.5 which everybody uses this i would have put that bulb on my animal and not thought twice about it because it looked great that meter says i should use this bulb this spectrometer that you have to use to actually see the light tells me that that ball will absolutely kill my animal yeah and with that yeah i think because i don't think we i think we were talking about this before uh maybe off air but for people that don't understand the uvi index is a measure for talking about sunburn in humans so that's why the uvi is so high when you measure it it's like okay that's great but that's why it's so high because you're into the you know short length uvb it's going to cause burn right well that's the thing with like the uv index and the ferguson zones that i appreciate it i appreciate that we have ways to measure but just like everything else in our hobby we're macgyvering something to make it work for us it's not made for us it is made to work the it's the best thing we can use so the uv index like you said it was canadian but props to you guys canada uh created by a canadian meteorologist to uh to yeah to tell you how based on the fairness of your skin are you gonna get a sunburn um but the reason that that that works for us is because it's focused on shortwave uvb which is what causes sunburns for us so uvb is what it's not uvc it's uvb what causes sunburst it's that short wave and that's the most detrimental uvc is a sterilizer we never see that here but that's what's in like your uv sterilizers right yeah so yeah that shortwave yeah it's it's just it's no good no good it's bad news so this ball so this is why the graph should be sold with the bulb too right like not everybody has the 2000 usb ocean thing at home obviously well and that's that's where one of the things that i wanted to kind of like i said point out is like the uv index is a great tool but as you can see with this you cannot effectively check your uv without both the uv index is going to give you a good idea of the the the health of the uv you're getting the the purity or you know making sure that the uv you're getting doesn't have shortwave uvb or uvc if that you if this little uv uh shortwave uvb spike was a little higher you would have immediately known it's no good you know because it would have a little bit higher would have caused that to quadruple so you'd have been reading 20 or 30 at 10 inches which should have been way off so that would have been a good like you know red flag however because it looks good on this you wouldn't use it but then when you put the uvb under it just knowing that like for me i would i know that i know that desert bulb if i'm up in that with that range of the uv index my uvb should be 50 or higher not 15 and then that's where i can go okay something's a little off with that it's not right um but realistically without without the the graph you can't know and that's where it gets scary with all bulbs is you have to buy these from a manufacturer like us or z zilla zoom out arcadia whoever because we actually did these tests and we're showing you on the side of the box and promoting this is the wavelength and like i'm liable i can't lie to you and put a cool wavelength on the side of the box and then put it up yeah i get called out immediately you know so we have to put that out there but when you buy on amazon or you buy online and it's just a bulb from somewhere you have no clue whether that graph is real or not you have no way to test it um and if it's some random place out of china what are what are you going to do so like they don't care that's not happening no they rip off things all the time yeah so that's that's where led uv isn't bad and it's not going to kill your animal and it's not awful it's like saying that all uv all led uv is are bad uv is bad it's kind of like saying like well my chevy little tiny car can't pull a semi-trailer so nothing can pull a semi-trailer well no you just need a different vehicle that's manufactured and made to do that so that's what you're looking at is you're like everything's not the same just because it has wheels in an engine all lights aren't the same just because they have chips and lights you need to know what they're doing and you you have to really go with a company that's done that research yeah yeah no it makes a lot of sense so i guess next steps as far as you're concerned to try to fill out that that spectrum a little bit further and then so where do you see your bulb sitting in in a lighting like a lighting setup for right now so if someone has if obviously it's not a one all-in-one because you're gonna be missing some halogen and some infrared so you had mentioned at the beginning that you were thinking that you might have a bulb that could do it all were you also including infrared in that or so i i uh i want to i want to i'm hoping i can um realistically uh what i think is gonna end up happening is um i'm working on trying to get heat if we do we're not gonna be able to do heat and led in the same bulb it's just not gonna happen unfortunately because leds once they get over 110 degrees start to degrade significantly their lifespan degrades really fast um so i can't i just can't i can't make a bulb that'll not be over 100 degrees but heat enclosure however i can make a fixture that would put the bulbs separate and far enough away with some potential heat you know heating material or insulation um to be able to do that so there is some things i'm i'm looking at um right now to be honest i'm kind of just trying to find i'm more focused right now on finding different ways to utilize these leds um doing a for now the honestly the best types of heat already exist like the halogen type par 38 lights really do give some of the best infrared spectrums for any bulb and everything else i found isn't any isn't a lot better there's not anything that i'm finding that's better and i don't want to just launch something to launch it i want to find something that we can improve in some way so i found a few different types of of lighting that don't really exist in the hobby at all um they don't even really exist in our homes or our lives they're in like manufacturing um but it would allow me to create very very low profile lighting because they're it's a they're types of tubes that produce heat um so i can do them really really small and really short and really like do some unique stuff with them so i'm hoping uh to look at some of that um i'm looking at heat projectors and things like that just different opportunities for for heating but a lot of it like i said a lot of it exists and i don't want to launch something that already exists unless i can improve it in some way um so really we're keeping an eye on the on the bulbs um and the next step is uh uh full light length strip lights um however i i hate tube lights i hate them i think they're the worst thing that happened to the hobby except they were the best thing that happened at the time and they're great but that was 30 years ago like to what i don't like about tube lights is is you what you're doing is the idea behind it is we provide them with lower outputs of uv over a longer period of time in order for them to get the uvb that they need so in the wild obviously that's why we don't have sunlight type bulbs because they need to be able to escape that or they die very quickly so we did twos and a tube is that was the first bulb that existed fluorescent bulbs already existed gary worked to make them for uv it was amazing and we had 1993-94 we got uv bulbs when you put that bulb over an enclosure you're covering that entire enclosure with consistent uv and not just consistent like consistently there it's the same measurement across the entire tank so it's a flat there's no gradient the gradient is vertical and if you have a somebody that buys a 55 gallon tank and puts their bearded dragon in it and typical bearded dragon setup where it's a water bowl and a food bowl and it's tile and there's a half log on the other side and nothing else that animal has no escape from uv it has no gradient it can barely get away from it and it's basically torturing that animal with living in alaska in the summer forever like you're destroying its circadian rhythm and so many other things it becomes they end up hiding a lot and they just have problems because of that realistically in the wild there's consistent uv over everything the difference is there's trees and fog and clouds and tons of different pieces that you're not thinking about that we can't recreate or that we can but like with a very basic setup most people don't when we do planted tanks or we do even a big build out i've got branches everywhere plants everywhere there's filtration there's different gradients of uv throughout the entire enclosure um but that's why i really like spotlights is spotlights create that for you without the need for them to know why the average the average entry level keeper doesn't understand that so instead i say do a spotlight that animal especially let's say bearded dragons that animal evolved for millions of years involves an eyeball on the top of its brain that looks through a hole in the top of its skull and self-consciously regulates its uv for it and then you're going to say in your 10 minutes of knowledge that you know more than it does about uv and what it needs like instead give them gradients and let them use their body and their what they do they they know how to exist we they exist in the wild by themselves without our health the problem is we put them in a box and then we try and mimic their habitat and we screw it up so bad that we have pro they have problems they're not doing anything wrong we screwed it up so instead i kind of tell everybody look at where they live and then give them a gradient of everything you can measure heat gradient uv gradient humidity gradient depths of dirt gradients like everything everything should have a gradient so that they can find every niche that they need at any point when they need it and by using a spotlight you really create that you create a gradient that's top to bottom and side to side and a lot of times that's what they're gonna do they're gonna pop out on a rock right in the sun get blasted with the hot the heaviest sunlight they can get and then they're going to jump away and hide and with this it allows them to go to the side of the cage get up get their uv and then get away from it if they want to which is important and a lot especially with studies recently showing that they regulate uv independent of heat then if you only give them heat and uv or you just cover everything like you're not allowing them to truly regulate what they need yeah yeah it's a really good point and i'm actually starting to see a lot a lot of people create more of these basking zones you know what the heat ball was conventional too but now i'm starting to see people with like very high intensity visual visible light with leds as well and then shining that down onto the same spot where they're halogen shining and then of course there's ev tube on top but that's creating this really intense zone and the visible light is really what's sending the animal there a lot of the times because that's what they're sensing so it is that is a really interesting concept and i could see that kind of taking off but then you said you were we were also looking at doing strips we're gonna do long scripts but i i hate strips but everybody wants them because that's what they're used to and if i'm gonna fight between you buying better uv or not buying better uv just because of the style it's in because i don't like the style i'm not okay with that i still want to provide everybody the best they can but i refuse to just put out something that's the same as a tube because there's a there's a failure in that thought and i want to fix it so what we're going to what our strips are going to do they're actually going to have a gradient built into them and it'll have right on the top basking side non-basking side so it'll go from say 90 microwatts down to 10 slowly across the whole tank that way it'll give your tank an entire you have full coverage your animal has a gradient you have a high zone where you can set your heat bulb next to and it'll cover everything you need but it'll allow the animal to get away from it and the people who are buying that light don't even need to know why the gradient exists all they need to know is your heat bulb goes by this side yeah simple and now those animals are going to have a and that's kind of a way i look at a lot of the products we're doing i've stopped i've stopped being frustrated that people don't do enough research because we don't they don't have a trigger to do research like if i buy doc this is something i've talked to people a lot in the last couple months if i go buy dog food at the store i my wife tells me my dog's allergic to chicken and lamb so i can't or fish i can't use fish and chicken so i know the proteins i can use i go to the store i look at the proteins there's three bags that have what i need this one's expensive this one's cheap this one's in the middle i made my amazon review real quick make sure that you know they didn't kill a whole bunch of dogs recently but there's no recalls and then i just pick whatever bag look looks good and sounds good and is priced right and i leave i don't become a dog nutritionist in the weeks leading up to buying dog food yes i just i i i expect that that company has dog nutritionists and they're on the store so they have public view they can't be putting out garbage you just kind of that's the american buying experience for anything now take that experience and they have the same experience when they go into walmart or anything else and the same experience when they go into a pet store to get their first pet you go down an aisle and there's all of the stuff that you need and it's all made by the same companies who are reptile companies and then you buy a kit that says complete bearded dragon kit and then you get a piece of paper handed to you that says care guide what about that says you need to know more and you're not quite ready yet nothing all of that says exactly you got this good luck yeah you know and that's what we're doing now look at saltwater like we were talking about aquariums earlier if i came and i said dylan you wanna do a saltwater tank if you've never done one you're gonna be like no they're expensive there's a lot of work they're hard to do i need to research it first like marine aquariums really locked that in they're not hard i do two water changes a year on my tank and it looks better than when i took care of it what wow yeah like that's a whole other podcast once you get an aquarium set up and you understand the basics you just leave it alone and you let it do its thing and once in a while yeah i feed my fish when i remember like and he's awesome yeah and he loves it and he's doing great and he's healthy but like that that that stigma to it is a trigger that is a trigger that immediately makes anyone go ooh that's a little bit i want to let i don't want to dump into it i'll waste money i won't do well i need to learn we didn't do that with reptile we just kept pushing as an industry it's easy anybody can do it it's easy anybody can do it basic kit basic easy easy easy easy and then we made it so easy that you don't know how to do it right and now we've gone too far one way and we're causing we caused an enormous amount of problems for ourselves with animal like animal neglected just not doing well with animal husbandry and and just a lot of that stuff failed because of that and and that's why i stopped being frustrated that people don't do their research first because why would they i wouldn't if i didn't know better i wouldn't well and it's such a good point because we get frustrated from our side but yet you like the point you made is me when i go buy other things that aren't reptile related i don't do research i just go buy the thing it's like that car part is on sale i need it it's gonna go in my car i assume it's fine and and i've always i made that point before on the podcast like it would be very difficult to convince a non-reptile person that a lot of the items in the pet store are not great for your reptile right that just doesn't compute it's like why would that be it doesn't make any sense exactly and and there's like it's yeah we've created this like veil that just makes everything seem easy but we kind of covered up that it's not and the reality is i don't think that's wrong i don't think that saying reptiles are easy is wrong but it shouldn't be that they're easy and anybody can do it it should be that they're less maintenance than a dog and they're more rewarding in the fact of your knowledge base and learning people who have amazing saltwater tanks like when you go talk to them you learn just because of what they had to learn to do it and it's incredible their knowledge and how that works the same thing can happen to same thing happens to reptile people we just don't put it in that same context and and then they go into a when they hit that point they're in this in the marine aquarium world you're you're putting with all these other people that are at that same level that are really digging in that are starting to go deeper and deeper into possibly even breeding these fish in in tanks which is a monumental accomplishment over breeding crested geckos like you know like that's a huge deal and people just keep taking it further and then in the hobby you get your tank and you get excited and you learn about shows and you go to a show and you talk to a guy and you bob ball python and he tells he sells you a rack with one tub there are one tub racks that exist yeah like so that you can put it underneath your bed and forget you have a reptile yeah exactly and and then all the stuff that's there all that we all push people to be breeders and just do this as many as you can and i have hundreds of snakes at home and that's what makes me cool and then they go and they try to do that but they don't understand it because they don't have the 20 years of knowledge of my understanding of why a rack can work a rack can work if you have the knowledge that i have of all of the reasons it doesn't work you know and an entry level person doesn't have that knowledge so when they go up to all of those products they don't have that knowledge and we're expecting them to use it like they do so that's why viv tech's products are all designed with i don't want you to have that knowledge and i'm not expecting you to have that knowledge i have it because i've been doing this my whole life so why don't i put that knowledge into the products so you don't need it and make it work for you and that's how it needs to be not what can we get and hope that they learn how to use it what can we give them that will work and then as they learn they'll learn why it works so well yeah it's almost like we'll we're lucky if they to choose to do the research but if they don't the animal's still going to be okay exactly and that's how we need to look at it and my five-year goal and i tell everybody this because i want to be held accountable and also because i want my my my uh competitors to be a little scared because it's going to happen because i don't fail is uh i wanna i want at some point dylan you're gonna buy the vivtec habitat it's just gonna be a box and it's just you're gonna buy a box at a store in here or take it home and you're gonna at the store you're gonna click a thing on the box and it's gonna say what pet are you putting in here you're gonna click a species that's gonna give you a list of other things you need to pick up or take it all home put the box where you want it plug it in click an app it's gonna sync it all and then it's gonna tell you what you need to do to set it up then you're gonna put in your animal and hit go and it's gonna control everything your heat your humidity your lighting your controls the app's going to have you know it's going to send you messages did you feed your animal did you clean your water bowl today you know and then have a quiz in it where like the more points you make the cooler swag you get from vivtec and stuff that would entice people to learn and entice people to interact with their animals or you know if you get so many points you win a free video camera that can go in your tanks you can watch your pet when you're in school like we can do tons of stuff like that and entice people to want to learn because the more they learn the more products they're going to buy anyway so why not continue to help them do that it's not it's something that most companies look at is invaluable because you can't a lot of those things shows education blogs you can't quantify the return on it and it's imp so it's really hard to push them but i know the return on it and i don't need it to be quantified to know that it exists so i i think that's where we need to be putting our time and effort is is there yeah well it's like um chad's from snakes and adders one of the things that he has is he doesn't sell you on the first day you walk into the store and that seems very counter-intuitive but he knows that he's building a client and he's building a customer that's going to constantly come back for more information and more things so it makes a lot of sense and and what that that product that you just described did sort of exist at one point in canada i forget what it was called did you ever see that it was a kickstarter it was kind of like this little cube thing that was supposed to be all synced and it really went under i don't think it really it was uh biopod yes that launched all over the place that so yeah this will be very very very different from that too um because there's another basic i think we keep all reptiles wrong all of them everyone no matter how well you're doing bioactive still wrong and the reason i think that is let's say you set up a 20 gallon long for a kid that wants a a leopard gecko right let's say whatever forty breeder nice huge cage for a leopard gecko and you're gonna literally make this thing look like the side of the hillside in iraq right locks and bushes and all this stuff and then over here you've got a food and a water bowl or whatever and then over here you've got some kind of hide that you've made in even you've built into this enclosure corner right and then that leopard echo spends 95 percent of its time in that hole and that hole represents five percent of its enclosure that's that's like designing your house to all be bathroom and the bathroom is your kitchen living room and bedroom yeah it makes no sense why would you design your habitat to be where you spend five percent of your time is the majority of it but that's what we do because that's how we look at their habitat we look at their habitat through our eyes which is a macro habitat we look at a picture of the rock wall on the side of iraq and we recreate that the problem is that's not where they live that is but it's not they spend most of their time in holes and under rocks and in crevices in entire like channels that they can walk through that we can't even see on the surface and that's where they live and then they only use that part that we see for maybe 20 minutes in the morning and at dusk or if they need to bask if they ate they'll like stick a tail or a foot out from under a rock to get some uv like they're not using that but that's how we design their habitat and i want to create something that does both that allows us to have that beautiful escape that we see that we like but also allows them to utilize the majority of their habitat and for us to be able to control the majority of that habitat and the requirements inside there cause that's another thing like you look at their humid hide you can control whether it's wet or not wet that's it like that's about it yeah i mean unless you're really like wrapping the thing in heat cable with its own thermostat and stuff you really can't do much to any kind of human height other than just make sure it's wet you know so like i wanna i wanna see i wanna see us look at it different i wanna i wanna jump on the in the eyes of a gecko and his world and where he walks and how he uses his space around him and create a habitat like that and i think the hobby when it started we had to look at what we had we had fish tanks so we used fish tanks we had other tanks we use those but now with the knowledge we have and the research and the technology i know five guys with cnc machines in their garage making their own gauges yeah exactly we're way past glass tanks the first glass tanks feel the first glass tanks ever made were made from the window of a pizza place really yeah in milwaukee there you go that's one way to do it so like like that's where they started and then that's what we went with we just even look at like the exoterra type cages or you know any even the pvc it's all still a box with a door the door is just on the front or this way or on top it's all the same box with the same door yeah nobody's changed anything but like if we erased our knowledge of the hobby and it didn't exist and i just went hey dylan i found this weird little toad in my yard he looks cool i think it'd be cool to keep him inside and learn about him i don't know what he's uh we had to think about how he lived and how he set up would we would we take a glass box and throw a heat light with some tile on it no no no way we would look at like we would watch them we would look at what they do like when you were a kid and you caught a toad yeah you ripped up grass and leaves and you dug up dirt from there and you got a chunk of wood you found and you made him a little habitat burst up based on the stuff around him yeah you know you were at least closer now we're like he comes from africa and this resin piece that looks like a rock comes from china and this tile looks good but you know i mean like we're not we don't do that anymore i really want to get back to that like if i was a gecko and i'm climbing out of my hole and i see the world around me what does it look like from this high off the ground not from the sky or from a camera yeah we do get stuck with these like just conventions and you know even like the hot hide cold hide those you know things like that where it's like this just we need to move beyond that it's time to you know we could do so much more and i think you're right it's a lot of it is actually just erasing what we know and then using the technology that we have like we couldn't we could we could using heat maps and different types of technology i could i could make the dirt in the cage change temperature throughout the day ramp up the dirt the lighting the humidity you could do all of that we have all the technology to do that now nobody's just using it because it's expensive and it's hard to do and that's where it's not it's not expensive and it's not hard to do it's just it seems that way and that's where that's what those are the things that we focus on that's where i want to go like that's what some of the next stuff coming out is why don't we why don't we we'll kind of wrap up with i don't know how many if you want to talk about this at all but as far as you know future products and and things like you know not in five years something that's a little bit closer do you have any products in mind that you're getting ready to launch or are those still under wraps oh yeah there's a big one coming um it's the next big one uh and it's gonna come out in a lot of stages but we're uh and i've told some people we're working on a lot of smart tech and things like that so all wi-fi controls that stuff exists like sensor push exists and has some sensors um you can buy all that stuff for home security i mean everybody has a camera that they bought or something like that the problem the thing that kind of sucks is you have to get this ring camera with this different thing but then that company doesn't have a temperature humidity sensor so you have to get that from this other company and you have a page on your phone of the different apps you need this brings all of that under one um and then so the first launch of it is going to be just a lot of cool wi-fi sensors on off switches things you can set timers for um it's all standard stuff but it's going to bring it all under one umbrella while we continue to add unique things to it dimming switches and things like that um the next step is going to be getting that app to uh basically what'll happen is you'll you'll open it up and you'll put you'll you'll say add new enclosure instead of add new products and then you'll add an enclosure you'll say what's in it you know what type of animals in it the size of the enclosure things like that and then it will tell you um like you'll be able to buy a kit that would be like here's your sensor here's your plugs here's your outlets here's all the stuff you need and then inside that habitat you say okay heat is coming from plug one and the sensor for heat is sensor one and they'll sync up and they'll regulate each other and then you'll do humidity and then eventually that whole thing will run itself and then underneath it it'll be able to show you a graph of where that animal comes from and the daily temperature humidity ranges for their native habitat so you can follow it a little better if you want you can tweak yourself to follow it um and then the third generation is going to be i'm going to add a button underneath it and it's going to say so you can sink your habitat to the native habitat of where they're from in real time that is super cool yes and i'm working on i'm working on barometric pressure too so that we can even i can my background's in hvac for buildings i can change the pressure in a building i can change the pressure in a little box like so we i could make it where like just with my background i can make it where i can basically creating a habitat for people is what i went to school and spent most of my life doing and now i'm doing it for little boxes which is way easier um but i'm bringing a lot of that same technology and stuff and how i did that to this so being able to i mean we could if we do bear i told ari flagle who was abolition's pythons i said look when i get this done and i set you up your bolins are going to live in a cage that's exactly exactly the habitat they came from based on everything i can control and if they still don't breed that's your fault exactly you can't blame them anymore something like but really that really what that would do for species like that is that takes away okay it's not it's not a seasonal thing it's not a it's not a humidity or a temperature thing if we really can recreate down to rainfall and cross over habitat then it's something else okay well that crosses that off that's a huge piece to cross off now let's set now the next obvious thing for me and i've told them this already is food now look at their food like do the prey items i actually asked aria i said does the dude prey items they have a season and they get grabbed or they get pregnant and when they get pregnant they have hormonal changes and they still get eaten while they're pregnant breeding and their hormones are different would those hormonal changes cause us a different hormonal change or a spike in would the snakes sense that and could that cause a hormonal change in them like hey my food's about ready to have babies which would be food for my babies good time to have to start working on making babies like you could start to look into things like that or is it you know is it some kind of component in the dirt or some micronutrient that spikes that or see you know it's just you can start looking outside of temperature lighting humidity things like that yeah that's something that's really i love that idea and what would you do to get the input for the the climate data how would you go about collecting that nice thing is google pretty much has it for everything already yeah yeah a lot of it's just pulling them from sources like that that already have it like whether it's yeah and you just be able to basically be able to punch it like you would for google or anywhere else punch in this place and see their weather or weather.com all of those type of sources that are places that have that data for all over the world just link into their databases yeah that's amazing well i am definitely looking forward to seeing that develop and now i would love to be a customer for that product once it comes out and and as you said we blew past the one hour mark in this podcast we're coming up to almost three so i think we'll start to wrap it up and as those new products come back come out we definitely have you back on and and i i would love to see the the blood test as those become more available and i also love to see as as you discover new led diodes that come in that fill that gap and i think there's a lot of good things to come and a lot of interesting innovation that that you have is there anything that we didn't say that you wanted to to finish up on not really i mean we really did a lot i really i really do want to say like i i thank you to you for having me on here but also like everyone in the community leaving zilla and like stepping out on our own was scary and the amount of support we've gotten and how many people are fired up and seeing what we're seeing and like just the amount of people that want to see they want better but they just don't know where to what how to do it and that are behind us has just been incredible and and hearing people repeat like man i've been talking i've been talking last time we talked years ago we talked about uv i've been talking about uv to people since for a decade and having that stuff finally sink in the uva the importance looking at these animals differently starting to understand that it's not just a thing you stick in a box like it's been so rewarding and so fulfilling instead of just i think in the hobby people get burnt out and beat down by the same crap every day and uh yeah i got to that point like i got to that point a little bit i still but i never was not me and excited you know but it's still there's a little bit of a and now i mean i'm i have more energy and excitement than i know what to do with and and i love it and i'm excited to see where this goes and i'm excited to see everybody running with us and you know keep give us time for little and we're gonna definitely i'm gonna screw something up i have to fix it but um everything we do we're doing for the animals and we're doing to better the hobby and it's that's what it's about it's all about donating and giving back and and creating a better life for the animals if i make a million dollars that's awesome if i break even i still am fine yeah so well i think i can speak for most people say we're very excited and it does feel like it's like a hobbyist starting a brand that's kind of what it feels like i'm sure that's why you're getting a lot of the support people probably feel like it's one of us doing that and and yeah so that's fantastic i'm very excited to see how it develops over time and can you let everybody know where they can find vivtec and yourself online truly absolutely so you can find us at vivtechproducts.com you can find us on instagram and on facebook vivtech products and right now they're only available in the us that's changing um hopefully by 2022 my goal is that january 1 we have canada opened up so you guys it's not as big of a market but i don't care because i love my canadian people i gotta get back up to toronto soon i gotta bug some people but um no i i you guys will be getting that and then we're gonna be we're working on uk distribution and eu as well right now as well as australia so um hopefully by the end of the year next year every country in the world will have access to these our products so um thanks for and and also like god thanks for the patience oh my god we're out of stocks we've run through and we're burning through product faster than i can get it and i'm trying to sell kids but nobody wants to buy them and yeah like trying to get that funds but yeah just kidding i'm not really selling my children you wouldn't sell your your workers i don't have to pay them so why would i sell them yes um no but it's uh yeah it's it's it's awesome and and there's coolers there's even cooler stuff coming i wish like i wish i could tell you about everything i'm finding because i'm getting excited for some of the samples i have i boughts i got something i can connect to my phone to see the infrared uh infrared layout of my cage oh my gosh so i can physically look at my heat gradient and everything in my cage that's amazing well we'll definitely have you back on when some of those things are more developed and you can talk about them more because i would love to hear about it it's very cool did you mention the website yeah they've tell you products yeah yeah okay and you have instagram as well right yeah we have instagram we have a facebook um and then as well uh um coming up here in the future as well too uh very shortly actually we will have when wholesale launches for all the pet stores we're also gonna have uh breeder discounts available so um because i know as a breeder it sucks when you're like i have to buy 27 of these bulbs like that's rough um it's not i can't do a ton i can't do wholesale to everybody just because then like there's no reason to have a real price if i just wholesale everybody um and i have to make money so i can do more cool stuff uh but uh no uh every uh breeder will be able to sign up for an account and get 10 off of bulk purchase bulbs and then if you're us arc member you get 15 off so excellent everybody that's a us arc member gets a bigger discount awesome well i love the model i love the conservation focused as well and i think it is what the hobby needs thank you very much ryan this was a blast chatting with you absolutely absolutely and i can't wait to come back on we'll just keep taking up four three four five hours of every day we have exactly no this is awesome thank you very much oh absolutely man take care all right that is the end of that episode ryan thank you so much for spending all the time with me today and also taking the time to set up your computer and show us the spectrometer that was fantastic and i'm definitely very interested to see how these products develop over time i know you have new products coming in that you're planning on testing so i'll be looking forward to seeing how that all that testing works out and we'll be keeping an eye for new product launches in the future listeners thank you so much for listening as always i am deeply grateful for everyone that listens to the podcast so thank you so much for doing that if you did enjoy it really the best thing you can do to show your gratitude is just share it on social media share it on facebook or instagram that really does help a lot if you're looking for more information on this episode make makes you head to animals at home network dot com as always if you'd like to join us on patreon head to patreon.com animals at home there we have access to early episodes as well as you have closer access to me you can send me messages and whatnot and we do hang out on zoom usually but once a month or once every five weeks or so and finally thank you so much to custom reptilehabitats.com for sponsoring this episode of the podcast if you're looking for anything reptile related make sure you head to the link in either the youtube description or the show notes that is an affiliate link so if you do make a small perfect purchase a small commission will come back to me of course that is at no extra cost to you and that is the end of today's episode thank you so much for listening and i will catch you guys next sunday

Channel: Animals at Home Podcast

Views: 38,393

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Id: b0ikLyAElEM

Length: 133min 13sec (7993 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021