Space Coast Podcast Network
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Space Coast Podcast Network
Local Celebrity Podcast - Alligator Robb - From Wildlife Encounters to Heart Surgery: One Man's Tale
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to come face-to-face with a wild alligator? Or been curious about the world of critters that slither and scuttle across the Space Coast? Get ready for a wild ride, as we venture into the fascinating world of alligator catching with our guest, Frank Robb aka Alligator Robb. Rob transports us to Chicago, where he tangled with the notorious alligator, Chance the Snapper. Frank also shares his heartwarming rescue stories and emphasizes the importance of public education about these misunderstood creatures.
What if falling in love with an alligator could save your life? Frank Robb shares his remarkable journey from professional alligator catcher to heart surgery survivor. Uncover how his connection with these formidable creatures led to his life-saving medical treatment. Then, we shift gears to explore Florida's diverse snake population, dispelling myths and misunderstandings about the common red rat snake, the arboreal yellow rat snake, and the swift black racer. A special mention goes out to the glass lizard, a 'snake' with unique lizard-like qualities!
Finally, join us in a crucial conversation on environmental issues and the imperative role of unity in tackling these global problems. Frank's recent heart surgery gives him a unique perspective on life, and he shares his thoughts on the potential of shaving his iconic beard off ! We also peek into the world of podcasting and discuss the significant role of wildlife conservation and environmental education. So, tune in and prepare to have your views on alligators, snakes, and the environment transformed!
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Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So let me just get into your story. There was an alligator named Chance the Snapper in Chicago and it was evading even their local guy who was named alligator Bob, and your alligator Rob.
Speaker 2:Ma'am, yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he couldn't catch him, so then they contacted you. How did they know to contact you?
Speaker 2:They had reached out to the state of Florida, the mayor's office up there in Chicago, animal Care and Control. They had reached out to a bunch of different local zoos, the St Augustine Alligator Farm farm, and everybody said, well, you want the guy who's the longest tenured guy, who's been doing that work forever. Here's the guy.
Speaker 1:Here's the guy.
Speaker 2:Which is very humbling, very, very humbling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you've been catching gators all your life.
Speaker 2:This is year 28 doing it professionally. Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1:But you grew up in a family that had that background. Like your uncle, he was like a legend.
Speaker 2:I hear yes, ma'am, yeah.
Speaker 1:Bill.
Speaker 2:Rob Gator, bill. Yep, he did the work for about 20 years himself, for then Game and Fish, and then, when it turned to Fish and Wildlife, yeah, did the nuisance alligator work for a very long time as well? Yep.
Speaker 1:Nuisance, alligator work, that's what it's called.
Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then. So you got called up to Chicago, and then your whole world changed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was already very well known and blessed to be very well known for my work and it's just, it's different. I didn't know what to expect going up there. I got a call randomly one morning saying, hey, we need some help in Chicago with this gator. Again, I've been following the story. Oh you had, and it never expected you to phone call about it. I think we had joked about you. Know it'd be interesting if they called you. What would you do then?
Speaker 2:Like, I guess I go to Chicago and catch an alligator, I guess Went up there, remember arriving on the scene to this place and there's a mariachi band playing, there's a couple dozen news crews, there's people, there's food trucks, there's people selling t-shirts and buttons, and I mean thousands of people wrapped around this lagoon on the southwest side of Chicago.
Speaker 1:Because they were like 10 days in to try to catch him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they were. There's this misconception people have that. Well, they were all freaking out and scared. No, they were legitimately excited to see something different in the city of Chicago. It was entertainment, you know. They were really into it. Everybody was there waiting to see it like a glimpse of him, you know, and I just nobody knew who I was at that point. So I just kind of just walked around asking questions and looking to see what was going on and you'd hear people like look, there he is.
Speaker 1:But you knew right away to like clear them out. You knew that if you had ever a chance to catch him, this is not the way to do it. All the pomp and circumstance.
Speaker 2:Well, there had been so much activity there and he had been chased around by other people that were looking for him that the best thing you can do in a situation with an animal is just get out of dodge, just back off, let things chill out. They flipped the lights off in the park and I went to work and I was able to get it worked out.
Speaker 1:And the reason he was there was probably like a pet that had gone awry. Maybe I read something about. Maybe it was like a drug dealer's pet.
Speaker 2:There's yeah, it's one of the two. Believe it or not, they're coming up there in drug raids. The law enforcement comes up with one drug raids quite a bit. It was one of the two things, but it was 100% a captive animal. You can see the way his nose was bent was from being in captivity and something too small for the area. He was too big for the area he was in and it kind of bent his nose back. So yeah, so rough life of animals.
Speaker 1:So you cleared the whole place out and you gave him some time to calm down and emerge. But it was your. You speak the language.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the many studies we've done a long time through through Ears. My Non-Profit is vocalization studies, so we will take everything. There's 28 different species of crocodilians. We'll take hatchlings, juveniles and adults and record the sounds they make, because when you travel to other countries to work with those animals, it helps to be able to say hey, buddy, here I am, come on, let's get some blood from you, come here, let's take a sample. And they'll belly up at the bar pretty much.
Speaker 1:They will. So how do you say hi to an alligator?
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:Something along those lines, and there's also mating calls that are more like real deep, real deep bellows.
Speaker 1:Bellows yeah.
Speaker 2:It's actually a B flat, believe it or not.
Speaker 1:We've learned it's a B flat. And then I also read that they had different dialects.
Speaker 2:They do, depending on what part of the country they're in. We'll do work in North Carolina catching gators up there and you can tell they hear the Florida man show up and start speaking alligator to him. They all kind of go what in the world is going on. This is either the most entertaining thing we've ever heard in our entire lives or this guy's insane. We don't know which one.
Speaker 1:That is hilarious.
Speaker 2:We're going to do a combination of them both.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, that's fascinating. So you were able to call him out.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, called him out. I catch probably 99% of the animals that we do work with via fishing rod, so he just like foul hook and a fish. You just snag him, bring him in. We put a catch pole on him, tied him up and took him straight over to Chicago Animal Care and Control from there.
Speaker 1:Wow, and he was like a what five foot.
Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am, five foot three Wow. Yeah, he's a big old boy these days. I'll actually be up there Friday to see him in.
Speaker 1:St Augustine. He's in St Augustine now, living the life.
Speaker 2:Yep, living the rock star life, the rock star alligator life. Nobody even knew that was a thing until then. I don't think.
Speaker 1:But you too. So after this happened, you went on this like whirlwind of celebrity. Tell us you met the mayor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they kind of sort of gave me the key to the city. Yeah, it was a blessing. It was neat to meet her and chat with her. It's been one thing after the other since that whole story. You know it's hard to even put it into words. What a sincere blessing it's been.
Speaker 1:You met all the big people in Chicago. You went to Wrigley Field, you threw out the first pitch and now your friends with all of them.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, good peoples you met.
Speaker 1:Jerry Springer.
Speaker 2:Which I had no idea who that was. But yeah, that's a whole different story too.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's so great. Who else? What else have you sort of come into?
Speaker 2:Don't events up there with everybody you can think of the Murray family. Don't events up there with Dolores Jordan, michael Jordan's mom.
Speaker 1:The Murray family being Bill Murray's family. Yes ma'am, and what are they into?
Speaker 2:They're huge supporters of first responders. They have a nonprofit they run where they support basically first responders and military around the world, and that's them and a lady named Betsy Shepard that take care of all that. And they bring in law enforcement officers and military from around the country, around the world, that have had instances whether that be a school shooting, a building collapse, whatever might be going on to kind of give them a couple days to take their mind off all that stuff. It's a golf tournament they do every year.
Speaker 1:That's really nice. It's called Canal Shores. So you're involved and you're connected now and you even wrote a book, Our American Alligator.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's kind of my life's work all in one place. I'm going to put all of our research up into that point that we've done in one area. So when people have alligator related questions they can just go there and they can find it all Anatomy, physiology, myths, you name it. It's all in there with pictures from around Brevard County that have alligators in weird spots that we've worked with forever.
Speaker 1:That's so cool and because alligators have been around like since the dinosaurs, am I right?
Speaker 2:Well, you know what happened to the dinosaurs, don't you?
Speaker 1:They got eaten by alligators? They sure did.
Speaker 2:You went with that very well. You rolled right into that. That was like killed my joke line.
Speaker 3:But yeah, that was perfect.
Speaker 2:Sorry. No, that was good, that was. You're the first one to ever like. Just put it right out there.
Speaker 4:I like it.
Speaker 2:Okay, knew my punchline before I ever got there. That was good stuff.
Speaker 1:Sorry about that, but you've also like done children's books, like you're really taking the celebrity to great places. You also have your own podcast and you invite everybody on that has something to say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot like what you guys are doing. We're just trying to be a blessing to people, not only in the wildlife world, but people that are local here, that are that need that five minutes to talk about what they're doing and discuss it, and everybody has such a unique journey and a story, and if you can find a way to highlight that and what's going on, then I feel like you're doing the right thing.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, you have to have those conversations. So you also made a foundation the environmental education, awareness, research, support and services.
Speaker 2:Yes, ears, yes, oh, we jokingly say ears.
Speaker 1:It's double E a R, double S.
Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about that.
Speaker 2:So that was something I put together right before everything in Chicago happened and it was again just right place, right time Again. As a person of faith, I believe that's the good Lord kind of putting things together the way they're supposed to be. And we were put together to provide educational programs, which we've been doing forever. I think we did 100 educational programs last year from everybody, from elementary schools, every library in the county. We hit. We covered DoD you name the groups, we go there. We do safety programs for them. Blue Origin you name them, we go there, talk to them about the animals that are there. What to be worried about, what not to be worried about? We travel internationally to do and work. We just got back from Belize. What three weeks ago?
Speaker 1:I saw that you helped make a pen for the alligators that they catch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they needed a pen for their crocodiles, so we made a new setup for them, and then we went out and caught some crocs around Belize City down there.
Speaker 1:Alligators, crocodiles? I know that the difference is in their snout, but you always you keep referencing them as all crocodiles.
Speaker 2:They're crocodilians, yeah, they're all that fits alligator, crocodile, kamen. And then there's always one oddball group with scientists always have what you're called garyls.
Speaker 1:Garyls, what are those?
Speaker 2:Those are the fish eating crocodiles in India. They have the real long nose. The ball in the end.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, but you don't stop at crocodilians. I have seen you, you were holding snakes and possums.
Speaker 2:We do a lot of amazing work Through ears, beyond the educational outreach, we do Biodiversity research here across Brevard County and the Air Force Base. Now, where we go out of these properties, we set a raise, we'll put out carpets, we'll put out Coverboards, whatever we can do to kind of document the Animals and species that are there, that are traveling back and forth with the habitat types, mm-hmm. That helps them update their land management plans, helps them get more grant funding for what they're doing, and it's just it's. It's vitally important to know what's there so you can know how to take care of what's there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hear that Florida has like the most Alligators anywhere. Is that right or like Louisiana?
Speaker 2:has four times as many as we do. Four times.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then we're, we're we have a solid million. Yeah, we have a solid million and and right around the place where you grew up in Titusville.
Speaker 2:Right there's a poor st John.
Speaker 1:Yeah, poor st John. There's a lake there that has a lot. So how are you educating people and like, what do you? What's the goal? Is it to to keep them like in line, or to you're catching them a lot?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so with crocodilians in general, one of the things we try to preach is Not be complacent, you know under your surroundings, don't be complacent.
Speaker 2:This is a story we kind of preach globally, right? So I'm also part of a group called the crocodile specialist group and I sit on a human crocodile conflict board for them. So we try to preach being aware of your surroundings, which I mean everybody should be doing all the time anyhow. Right, but be aware your surroundings, understand there's better things to worry about, and I jokingly say there's. You know, worry about taxes or terrorism. You know, worry about something like that, because an alligator is nothing. It's gonna sneak up and kill you. It's not the way it works. The instances where locally here, people are getting bitten or hurt anywhere around the state, it's People that are taking things for granted, if you're, if you're feeding an animal and you expect something bad not to happen to you.
Speaker 2:You kind of being silly right. I mean especially a wild animal, and beyond that, if you're feeding that animal, you're setting the next person up for failure. It might not be you. You're setting the next person up for failure. And if you're going out and let's say, a wildlife area, a wild area in the middle of the night and going for a swim, and you get bit by an alligator, imagine that well, maybe make better choices.
Speaker 1:That happened in Disney World, or is it land or world? Here it's land.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Tell me how that was different, because I started looking into that and they knew they had a problem. You know they were. They took like four alligators out Right before that happened and four more after it happened. I guess there might have been signs there. The people in that case didn't press charges or anything. What happened there?
Speaker 2:So there's sometimes where you understand when something like that happens, it's a terrible day for the person, it's a terrible day for the animal. They both made mistakes that they're not going to probably ever get over. If the if the person lives through it, the animals not going to live through it, you know it's gonna. It's gonna be bad on both ends. And once you understand that and you kind of, each one of them has it their own dynamic to it. Each conflict like that has its own dynamic. That was people that they weren't from here, they didn't know. It's hard to educate somebody or blame somebody from something that they have no knowledge of. That was just a terrible situation that happened. That really I don't think anybody could have controlled differently.
Speaker 1:No, you don't think so.
Speaker 2:I mean taking all the alligators. Have an area is not the answer.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's a. There's a fine line there. You will meet communities, you know, because we'll go to communities like we were in the great outdoors after the guy lost his leg. They're in the great outdoors and had that conversation for a thousand of their homeowners there and in the area. It's something you have to Approach very delicately and let people know. Look, there's there's no right answer here as far as Every alligators should be kept, kept safe all the time, and every alligators should be taken out. It's somewhere in between. More on the animals all staying there. It just needs to be more awareness and Education given on what is what is a concern. Is what is not a concern?
Speaker 2:Right and that's where you you approach the, the fine line of everybody having their own idea of it, but there's still a right and a wrong.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's it's again. It's different with them. We just have to do it wisely and they're a keystone species.
Speaker 2:They're there for a reason they're they're a very important animal to have in the local ecosystem. You have to have them there. Without them being there, everything starts to fall apart. So I mean they're providing food for other animals, they're providing homes for other animals. They keep everything in a balance. Okay, they're apex.
Speaker 1:Predators tend to do that which an alligator is okay, but it sometimes it just gets out of hand, and that's when you get called in that's well, that's yeah.
Speaker 2:I haven't done that work in a while, but that's usually when that happens. Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1:Wow. And so now you're just educating people and how to be more aware and Yep, which is a non-stop.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's what we're, it's what you guys are doing right now. It's what we should all be finding ways to do with.
Speaker 1:Whatever we're doing, education should be a main mindset in Whatever's going on with anybody the one thing that I learned that now you Clear it up for me because you know they say if you, if you run into an alligator, you have to run zigzag. But now it's like I hear that that's not not accurate information.
Speaker 2:You should just bolt well, first thing, an alligator is never gonna chase you. So you don't have to worry about that in the first place. Interactions like that are gonna happen within five to eight feet of the water. If an animal is coming up to you, that's an animal that's probably been fed or you know it's. You're gonna be able to see and understand things like that. If you're out of the water Enough to go Okay, something's wrong. It's probably time to back up.
Speaker 2:Yeah just make yourself big. Back away, things will be good. Okay, and there's always this misconception too about mating season or nesting season, which I like to say it's actually called Mm-hmm. There's only about 10% of females that'll Legitimately protect a nest. It's very rare. Most females if you come across their nest, they're gonna see you. They're gonna be like any other alligator. They're gonna bail out, never want to see you again.
Speaker 2:They're not gonna hang around to talk about it. You will meet again. Probably one in ten that will turn around and hiss at you or jog toward you. All you gotta do is just back up and you're good to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I heard the hiss is what you should watch out for, not necessarily that bellow or the you know, the stuff. So you see in cartoons it's when they start.
Speaker 2:Hissing, is when they're Upset they're all individuals, just like we are. There's some that are Not so smart, just like people. There's some that are super, like super Einstein's geniuses, and there's some that are very temperamental and there's some that are just the most laid-back critter in the entire world. There's they mean, every side of the spectrum. They all hit it.
Speaker 1:Wow, and you brought one here today.
Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am, yeah, it's hard to be alligator Robin. I have an alligator with you.
Speaker 1:It's a hard mix. Sure, yeah, let's take a look at him.
Speaker 2:So this is Greg. Greg, okay, he's very sensitive about his name. This is Greg, with three G's.
Speaker 1:Three G's at the top or three G's at the end.
Speaker 2:Yes, okay.
Speaker 1:And Is Greg a genius or is he? Oh my god, he's a little guy.
Speaker 2:Yep, this is Greg. He's one of our educational animals, so this is what he does for a living. You know, one of the many things we try to talk about the people, about these guys, is you know that they grow very, very slow.
Speaker 1:They grow very, very slow. Yeah, sure you can hold him. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4:So he doesn't pee on you.
Speaker 2:there you go, oh you want to put put fingers here. So he's an alligator yes, ma'am American alligator, just don't squeeze him too hard.
Speaker 1:I don't want to. Oh my gosh, he looks like he's smiling.
Speaker 2:That's what beautiful thing about crocodilians they're all. They're all always smiling.
Speaker 1:So he's, what about two feet?
Speaker 2:He's not quite two feet not quite. Yeah, he's a foot, maybe a foot and a half and how old is he? He's two Yep in the wild. That'd be a be a three-year-old probably. There he's, this is him doing his work for a living, you know so he gets it.
Speaker 1:He gets it pretty easy, he's just hanging out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is what. This is what he does. You know, we get to talk about him and his osteoderms and his eyes and the sensory organs they have around their mouth and how they work and how they're built, and it just yeah, I see like a slit between his eye or right after his eye.
Speaker 1:What is that? Is that those are his ears?
Speaker 2:Yep, so they're actually flaps. That's what this whole area right here is behind his eye. They're actually baffles. They'll actually work like butterfly wings. They can move like butterfly wings.
Speaker 2:And then you know when you see him blink there you can see his nicotating membrane Come and, come forward and go back. They got five fingers in their front hands with three claws and four fingers in the back Hands with three claws, and right here where your middle finger at, is actually half of his body. That's their midpoint, right here where your middle fingers at. So they're exactly half.
Speaker 3:Half tail half body.
Speaker 2:If you look at, those little dots around his face. Yeah, those are sensory organs. We call them ISOs. Each one of those little dots can fill one drop in a thousand gallons. So imagine if he's out in a pond somewhere and there's a fish in distress or there's a turtle that's hurt or somebody's feeding the animals. They can fill that be underwater, come right to it, pick it up, grab stuff and move on from it, never have to even surface. Interesting thing alligators and Cayman have those around their mouth. Crocodiles have those little dots on every scale across their entire body, so it just magnifies their ability to fill everything a million times over.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:So it takes a, takes a tool that's really really special and makes it extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Now you have his jaw taped.
Speaker 2:Yep, I figured you'd like your fingernails to stay on your fingers that he would just nip at you, if not?
Speaker 1:Well, probably not probably not like a puppy.
Speaker 2:No, probably not. It's one of those things where you know Fingers are cheap, you know tape is cheap, fingers or not. One of those kind of things.
Speaker 1:Right, could he do some damage at this size?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you take your fingernail off, oh. Yeah when they're little, when they're first hatched, you can have them hanging off of every finger and have no problems at all. But as soon as that, you know, maybe a few months go by. That changes pretty fast and that's dead opposite with crocodiles. Crocodiles when they come straight out the egg they will. They're just not a good thing, you know really teeth are already super long and ready to go.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:And they have a tooth, of course, exposed in the bottom. So they can you just put in your hands over his mouth? They can they can cut you. Alligators have an overbite, so it's just have a.
Speaker 1:That's nice that way, he's really cute.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's a team player.
Speaker 3:You go.
Speaker 2:Oh, greg, he's a good boy. He was once Greg. Close your ears for a second. He was once called string bean and he grew out of string bean and wanted to be Greg.
Speaker 1:So I was told and do they like being handled?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean he gets. He's used to it because he's been been dealing with that since he was a young in okay. And this is what again, this is what he does for a living.
Speaker 1:But what do you do when you see one in the wild?
Speaker 2:because he looks pretty cute, can enjoy enjoy looking at him from a distance and move on and move on.
Speaker 2:Yep, you got to understand that it's only one in a hundred. That makes it a four feet out of a nest. So your typical nest is between 24 and 48 eggs and it's so it's about one and three nests. That actually makes it to being a four foot animal. You have figured their food for everything, their food for other alliators, their food for otters, birds of prey, you name the thing. It's all eating them. That's why reptiles in general lay a lot of eggs and have a lot of young, because they know most of them are gonna yeah.
Speaker 2:They feed the local environment. Oh, wow one of that, again, one of the blessings behind the animal that's. That's how, that's how it works. Lots of free protein.
Speaker 1:So when you capture them, do you always put them in it like a safe place, like the zoo that you put?
Speaker 2:So we, when we're doing our research with them, we're catching them, we're taking blood here in the back of his head.
Speaker 3:Okay, we're taking urine.
Speaker 2:So we'll catheterize them and then we'll take a piece of tissue here, one of their first up Right soft their tail, and then we put a pit tag right behind their ear and we kick them on the button. Send them on their way. Oh really yep, whole process takes about 15 minutes which we can catching him taking the samples and send them on and what are you looking for in the samples? We look at heavy metals, toxins forever, chemicals and what are you finding it's?
Speaker 2:it's some interesting stuff. Yeah, we just finished up a study in the st John's and we're moving on to the rest of the rest of our now interesting, Very cool.
Speaker 1:And do you ever have to kill them?
Speaker 2:There's different situations around the around the world where, if you know if an animal's killed somebody, that's the end of his story. Yeah it's killed somebody or hurt somebody, that's into their story, which is very sad. Again, it's a very sad thing for anybody involved on both sides, including the animal, I mean it's he makes that kind of mistake. It's costing him his life.
Speaker 1:How often do we hear about that, like per year?
Speaker 2:this year's it's again, it's. Florida grows over. I think the last I heard we're getting a thousand people a day showing up to Florida. They're moving here. Yeah as Florida continues to grow, wildlife interactions are gonna continue to happen, these conflicts are gonna be more and more common and Education, like we do and have with these neighborhoods, these communities, are gonna become more and more important because it's yeah, everything's being encroached upon. Yeah you can say we're taking their homes away. People have to have somewhere to live right they have to have somewhere to live.
Speaker 2:Then turn. You're gonna have things, you're gonna have conflict, it's. These are tough conversations to have, but they need to be happy, they need to be happening and we need to be having them right, when?
Speaker 1:when is this guy gonna retire? Due to his, he's gonna grow, yeah yeah, that is him retired. This is him retired this is.
Speaker 2:this is hard as easy as have to work the rest of his life here you go.
Speaker 1:It was very nice meeting you.
Speaker 2:All right, buddy. Thanks for being a team player.
Speaker 1:He's like I'm just chilling.
Speaker 2:Yep Again, this is, this is his jam.
Speaker 1:They ever get super active.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he'll sometimes have a temper tantrum, but it's it's a look like. Lot of throwing himself around in different directions and running around the circles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what do you think that means? Is he hungry?
Speaker 2:It's him saying I've had enough, stop touching me now.
Speaker 1:And put me away. Okay, yeah, all right. Well, thank you, greg. You also brought a few more critters.
Speaker 2:I did Brought a couple of our more common critters here on the Space Ghost that I flank her maybe, maybe important to talk about okay, let's talk about it. Oh, so nobody likes to talk about snakes, but I like to talk about snakes.
Speaker 1:All right, yeah me and snakes, but I'll be brave Because I need to get educated, right. That's the whole point, this is true.
Speaker 2:So this guy here is called a red rat snake or a corn snake, depending who you're talking to you. It's probably one of the most common snakes we have in the state of Florida, right there with Probably with the black racer. You see they have what we call chevrons there in their back. Just jump on in, you'll be all right. Wow black and white there on the bottom they're known for having their checkers in the bottom and if you can see what on their face just like the water snakes we have.
Speaker 2:if he's pulling away, yeah just like the water snakes we have here, they have what looks like stitches on their face. That's that tells you right off the bat it's not a venomous snake the stitches on his face vertical lines.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yep, our water snakes have the same thing. He's pretty cool, isn't?
Speaker 1:he.
Speaker 2:Again, the more relaxed you are with animals, the more relaxed they are. I'm gonna just don't let him get wrapped up in the mic, because then we'll be here for a minute. No, he'll go.
Speaker 1:He'll knows where he'll go hide his belly is like super Silky or shiny it's actually a biological property of their skin.
Speaker 2:It's really neat. Yeah really neat. She's a Freshly shed too, so oh is that?
Speaker 1:yeah, she's very.
Speaker 2:Again, you can see she's working what we call a Jacobson's gland. There she's sticking her tongue out. Yeah tasting the environment. So right now she knows what your favorite color is. You're probably your home address, your tag number, all the important things. She's got it all worked out.
Speaker 1:She's settling down. I think I am too, wow, okay, so this one might be mistaken for a lot of people see it and go well, man, that's a, that's a copperhead.
Speaker 2:like guys, we don't have copperheads.
Speaker 1:We don't have, so this is just fine to see out in the wild, yeah it's probably one of the more common snakes people will see on their front yard.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you'll see them climbing up the side of the stucco. I mean they're they're an arboreal snake. They spend a lot of time in trees and climbing.
Speaker 1:Oh cool, yep.
Speaker 2:And if you have a chicken coop, you'll probably you'll probably find one. They call them a calm, a chicken snake, for a reason.
Speaker 1:They like the chicken.
Speaker 2:Yeah, rat snakes, yellows and reds, can be called chicken snakes or corn snakes.
Speaker 1:Okay, can I ask you a dumb question?
Speaker 2:I don't think there are dumb questions around, well.
Speaker 1:They talked about like a glass snake. Yeah, the glass lizard, yeah, yeah is it true that if you just smash them on the ground, he'll break like a piece of glass?
Speaker 2:I hope nobody's smashing one on the ground, but they will. They will lose their tail. They are a lizard. Their skeleton has a, their skeleton has. It has legs. Oh, so it's one of the interesting things people use to talk about Evolution and adaptation and a lot of other things.
Speaker 1:Really cool. All right, so nothing to fear here. If I'm touching it, it's fine, but but you don't want to do that in the wild right, just leave alone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's. There's no chance of getting bit by a wild snake if you don't go putting your hands on the wild snake. You know things still, things still happen again. But if you're mining your peas and queues, it's.
Speaker 1:You can limit those opportunities for bad things to have teeth.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, everything can bite. Oh yeah, okay, yep, no muzzle there.
Speaker 1:No, muzzle Okay.
Speaker 2:We're cool.
Speaker 1:We're fine, all right.
Speaker 2:This one's a team player.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's cool, he, she, who's that? She, she nice to meet you lady, really cool.
Speaker 2:These other two are not team players. Okay so we'll just look and not touch these two. Okay, this warning you ahead of time. So this is a yellow rat snake, the cousin of the one we just looked at this is a strictly arboreal snake, spins Most all his life in trees. Oh, only time you'd see him have a tree is if he's coming down to climb to another tree. Interesting. Eat birds, there, again another one. It's very common in chicken coops because they love, they love chicken eggs. Let's see where he's at.
Speaker 1:I actually didn't realize how how snakes would be up in trees. I always thought to look for them on the ground. Okay, so she's. She's not as Um yep.
Speaker 2:So this is this is a four-line yellow rat snake. Okay, what's interesting about this guy? Like with a lot of our snakes here in Brevard County, they look very, very different when they're young versus when they're adults. Okay, this is actually our second largest indigenous species to the state of Florida. They get over eight feet long. You can almost make out the chevrons that are still there, as this one's growing, but they look a lot like the red rat snake but, with this background almost gray when they're young and they lose all those, all those chevrons and get the stripes.
Speaker 2:Our black racers know them are the same thing. They look like a red rat snake when they're young and as they get older they lose all that and become jet black.
Speaker 1:I feel like I've seen black racers like in my garage and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, pretty common very the most common snake in the state of Florida.
Speaker 1:Okay that I doubt but these ones a little more. Why don't I want to handle this one?
Speaker 2:This was a wild snake as of a handful of days ago.
Speaker 1:Oh really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's here just to hang out with you guys, and then he's back on his way after this.
Speaker 1:Oh, where did you catch him?
Speaker 2:Do in research? Yeah doing research. Yeah, he's one of our research snakes, so we will enjoy looking at him, use him for an educational program opportunity like this and then send him. Send him out in his way. They're very you see the big eyes. They're known for being a very visible snake.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I.
Speaker 2:Always tell people I carry a snake whistle so I catch all my snakes. Nobody ever gets my jokes. Snakes don't have ears. You know they have.
Speaker 1:they don't have external ears, so right, yeah, do you ever wear snake skin or leather, anything like that? No you shy away from that.
Speaker 2:No, not I like snakes. I don't really want to wear them.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I mean nothing on with somebody that does, it's just not my thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I figured you either were, you weren't.
Speaker 2:but yep, not really my thing. Yeah, all right, we'll put this guy away.
Speaker 1:All right, bye, bye. And so you're just taking them, you say, for research purposes. Give me an example of what. What are you trying to find out?
Speaker 2:Are you just we're just documenting what's on the properties the population it is just seeing what's there. You know, I mean just getting a species list to go and have a what's there on the properties. Okay what's traveling back and forth and what's going on, yeah and this is through your foundation, or are you helping other? We do this through ears. Yeah, it's one of the many things we do, yeah that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this guy King on it yeah he actually eats other snakes for a living, so it's always very interesting to bring him out after you've had other snakes around you because, he's automatically on. There's a Scooby snack somewhere nearby.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, and and is this part of your?
Speaker 2:This is, this is one of our snakes. We use for educational programs.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But he's a he's a sneak attacker. Oh, he will sneak attack your fingers.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll stay back. Oh, oh, that's a great color on him though.
Speaker 2:This is your Florida King snake, so we do have these here in Brevard. Okay, the ones we have are typically almost flip-flopped. Where this guy's white and black, ours will be black and white in the whole opposite side.
Speaker 1:Can we hold him up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh. Oh and again, you see those same stripes on his face.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's got a bigger tongue, he's just a bigger boy.
Speaker 2:Yep Again, king snake, because that's what they do is eat other snakes. They are the king. He will take every opportunity he has to grab something. They don't constrict it. Those grab it and start swallowing it.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:Hence the smaller head and big body, so he can just do whatever he wants.
Speaker 1:How often do they eat?
Speaker 2:Depends on what he's eating. This one we've got where he eats mice. If they're eating snakes, that takes them a while to digest that.
Speaker 1:Interesting Yep. And then you'll see the lump in his body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he'll double or maybe sometimes triple their body weight just by doing that, until they processed it.
Speaker 1:I've always wondered how they eliminate. There's no visual cue for that.
Speaker 2:No, reptiles, just like birds, have something called a cloaca, so that holds their sexual organs and holds their digestive tract within it. So they're holding concealed weapons, basically.
Speaker 1:Where is it though? Is it in their underbelly At?
Speaker 2:their base of their underbelly Yep, like where you had your hand out in the alligator.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You had your hand over that, so he didn't give you a bad wildlife experience. Oh, okay, because if you hold it there, If you hold your finger there, it keeps him from peeing on you. Yeah, just in case you wanted to.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that.
Speaker 2:There was like an old joke Robin Williams had said for a long time that was his favorite word, because you could call somebody that and they had no idea you were insulting them. A colloquia, a cloaca.
Speaker 1:A cloaca.
Speaker 3:All right, I'll add that to my list of insults.
Speaker 1:Frank, you had a really bad surgery lately. When was that?
Speaker 2:2020. 2021.
Speaker 1:Yeah, an open heart surgery in 2021.
Speaker 2:I had found out. You know I've been. I'd been up catching gators with the guys in North Carolina and just I felt myself slowing down. I didn't know what was going on. You know, I went to my cardiologist and said, hey, you know, I don't, don't feel right, like what's happening after some tests. He's like well, it's time, frank. I said, yeah, what? What is it time for? Well, that valve. You're going to have to either have that valve replaced or repaired. You better start looking for somebody that can do it, because you're you're different. You're a tall, thin guy.
Speaker 2:I had a chest surgery as a kid it was called Pectis Escavotum, where they they cut me this way actually flipped my sternum, broke all my ribs, reformed my whole chest and I wore a metal bar for a year in there.
Speaker 1:I read about that Is that was that just a?
Speaker 2:It was a repair that, yeah, my chest was thin. They kind of built my chest out a little bit.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that was a good time as a kid. Remember my, my, my dad and my brother trying to stick magnets to me. It was pretty funny. They made made the best out of it. You know what I mean Like Roman and Michelle. Yeah, it was a titanium bar, so that was never going to work, but it was, it was still. It was still pretty fun as a kid.
Speaker 4:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:But yeah, oh Lord, yeah. So I, you know I started searching for a doctor who to do the surgery, was really struggling to find somebody to do it. You know, I did. I did tell you that Mount Sinai had reached out to me and said that, hey, we'll actually bring you up here and do this for you. But it was. I was like man, I don't know anybody in New York, yeah.
Speaker 1:Have to fly somewhere.
Speaker 2:Who knows how long I'm going to be in ICU. Right, I'd rather do that down here somewhere, if I can find somewhere closer to home. And, you know, not finding anybody, even finding them. Wgn up in Chicago, hook me up with them and with a doctor who ended up doing my heart surgery. Wow, the medical team that had actually been down here and done research with us and, you know, went there, met the guy.
Speaker 2:He's like, yeah, I feel pretty good about it and I'm like, well, that's the first person to tell me you felt pretty good about it. And he's like, well, it'll be about an eight hour surgery because we don't want to do a valve replacement, we want to do a valve repair With the work you do we really don't want you on blood thinners.
Speaker 2:It's not a not a good mix having you on blood thinners, because it's going to take us one animal, Nick and you somewhere, and you're going to bleed out in the field. So let's put, let's let's go the extra time and do the repair and so like okay.
Speaker 1:Because the replacement my father-in-law had like a pig valve put in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they'll do that, or a mechanical one, usually, oh Yep, so they can do those surgeries in the course of, maybe, you know, 45 minutes, hour and a half, okay, but he spent the extra time this guy is Shans to go through and really dig into it. And you know, I didn't. That's one of the blessings behind the whole Gator in Chicago thing. Yeah, I didn't have any health insurance. I've never really been able to afford health insurance. It gets health insurance is insanely insanely expensive.
Speaker 2:I do this work because I love it. You know, going up there in Chicago meeting those people. They were able to. They were able to help me find the doctor to do my heart surgery and they fundraise the money and paid my health bills off on top of that.
Speaker 1:So that's just. That's a blessing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just the blessings. It's, you know, again, being a person of faith, it's the good Lord putting you where you need to be at the right time, and it's just repeatedly happening in my life, over and over and over again, and there's no doubting that it's God putting you where you need to be.
Speaker 1:And you're good to go now. You're healthy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was two years. A couple months ago Filled the best I ever felt. I was in Belize catching crocodiles, three months out of open heart surgery and spent two weeks in ICU afterwards. My lungs didn't wake up so they had to inabate me again and took had to relearn how to walk and all that good stuff. So it's been a journey which, again, we all have. There's a lot of people that have.
Speaker 2:some have even crazier health journeys than that, and it's it's what you make out of it. You can decide you want to spend the rest of your life on the couch or you want to get up and get something done.
Speaker 1:You got to get up and go.
Speaker 2:If you want to get feeling better, you get up and you get after it. Yeah, yep. So yeah, I was in Belize, I think, three months out, catching crocs with them down there, and yes, so heart surgery is not going to stop you. No, no, lord willing. No, it's been very good. I probably feel better now than I've ever felt. I have gears that I never even knew were there. Nice, it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:And what do you hold for the future then?
Speaker 2:I'm going to keep building this nonprofit and keep going to it. We have yearly events we're doing now, which we're probably going to be starting making by-yearly events our Ears of the Environment EcoFest events.
Speaker 1:Right, that's in January. Yeah, we're doing that in January 19th.
Speaker 2:Yep, january 19th in Cocoa Village. We've got some amazing sponsors behind us Pat, fisher-nesan, space Coast Executive Airport, brevard Zoo, st Augustine, alligator Farm.
Speaker 1:Will he be there? Will Chance. No no no, I'm not going to put Chance through that he's been through enough.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he deserves it. He deserves a chill. Yeah, without a doubt.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of amazing nonprofits behind us. Hello again, books there in Cocoa Village. They've always been a huge supporter of us and what we're doing. So that day of event we're having presentations inside from 9 to 4 in the Civic Center there in Cocoa Village and then at 4 o'clock we move outside and we have live music the rest of the evening out there in the amphitheater.
Speaker 2:So it's going to be a great time Should be a great time, but again, without these amazing people that are supporting me and my research and all these incredible groups around Brevard County that are doing so many life altering things with our ecosystems and our environments. I mean, if you guys haven't talked to the guys at the zoo, keith Winston and Zach and all those people about the things that the zoo is involved with and doing. I mean everything from the aquarium on the difference they're making here locally. This it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you guys are cleaning stuff up, educating.
Speaker 2:Trying. Yeah, all you got to do is just keep trying.
Speaker 1:And I love how you run your podcast out of Titusville High School. I was telling you that Hoover, back in my day, had a TV production studio, but it was small and it was limited space. Tell me what you're doing there, and are the kids pumped?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great. We do our Ears podcast at Titusville High School. It allows the students to run the graphics and the audio and the cameras and everything we're doing. Let's them be involved. It's a class after class. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3:It's a class after school.
Speaker 2:We've had a lot of amazing guests on there. Like I was telling you earlier, we've had everybody from George went from cheers on to different people here locally that are making a big difference we had. I think the one that's going up today is Lorelei Thompson Lady who owns Dixie Crossroads of Titusville and she's a big, huge influence to a lot of people in the wildlife world because all the incredible work she does. Just every week we're trying to bring something new, show people, people here locally and kind of mix in some stars from around everywhere that are doing neat stuff.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, that's great.
Speaker 2:Again, way above my favorite, just trying to be a blessing to others.
Speaker 1:Well, it also gives the students a chance to see how things work and maybe make their own content someday.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of the kids that are helping us, that want to go on to be able to do their own podcasts and they want to see how it's run.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's giving them ideas and things to run off of, and a lot of them are going to school after this and are able to put that on their resume. Like hey, look I helped do this for two or three years, which we're on year three of ours. So it's great, it's great.
Speaker 1:That's good. Tell me about what you also deal with possums.
Speaker 2:Are you just catching them to just we come up in the daily research, we come across possums quite a bit. They've become one of my favorite animals. Really oh my gosh, I love possums.
Speaker 1:Tell me more. We used to have a little family in our backyard up in New Jersey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we, you know. They're such an incredible critter that's so misunderstood. Their blood chemistry doesn't allow them to get rabies because their blood temperature is so low. They don't carry any blood-borne pathogens. Very rarely there is a type of parasite that they'll carry in their urine, but that's a whole different story. Their blood naturally kills any tick or anything that bites them. They're known for eating ticks. That's not their main food supply. It's kind of been a misconception for a long time. But they will eat ticks. Any tick that bites them dies. It's just it's almost like they're walking around, they're cleaning up trash. They're killing these animals that can hurt us. They don't carry any diseases other than, you know again, the one parasite they carry in their urine. They're a very important critter to have around locally that everybody takes for granted.
Speaker 1:Because you might be able to study how they eliminate the ticks, so that there's been a lot of different things going on with that. Yeah, a lot of people are studying those things Well that brings me to, because I saw that you said that alligators or crocodiles correct me that they're the perfect single species for human health and that their blood chemistry is like nothing else, like you're saying that they can help us figure out HIV cancer.
Speaker 2:I think they will be the eventual cure for a lot of things at LS, a lot of the research we do. So to break it back down a little bit blood chemistry on crocodilians we know their blood kills every known virus and bacteria. On contact you can take a drop of their blood, put it on the HIV virus. It kills it right then and there. The delicate thing is they're a cold-blooded animal. They have a nucleated red blood cell where we don't. There's some differences there. Their blood clotting factor. They can lose a limb, it can clot up like jelly, right then and there their blood. And so we don't quite understand how that works on that side. And of course you can't put that into a person or it's going to cause blood clots and a lot of terrible things that happen. So we're trying to figure out exactly the dynamics behind that. But again, their blood kills every known virus and bacteria. What we're looking at beyond that with them is their endocrine system. Their reproductive hormones are direct match for ours. They're like 99.9% the same.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:So what we're doing is we're using them as a sentinel species for human health. They're an apex predator, so they eat everything in the environment. They're eating the birds, the turtles, the fish, each other, whatever's there.
Speaker 1:Oh really, they eat each other.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, very common thing. It allows them to be basically a floating file of information to go take information from. So you go there, you pick up your file out of the cabinet, you find out what you need to know and you move on to the next file Just what they're there to do. And we have an issue here locally with a lot of different types of chemicals that people know the words now and know what's going on and we're just trying to dig further into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, let's go back to that, because you take the blood sample from the back of the neck and you find these have a lot of blood.
Speaker 4:I mean when I grew up here, we would see a rocket launch, maybe once a year.
Speaker 1:And now it's like once a week maybe, yeah, so all these things are it's not.
Speaker 4:You can't point the finger in one place.
Speaker 3:This is all stuff that's due to I mean there's so many different levels of contamination around our local area. You can start with septic tanks and you can go on to large industrial areas. I mean you can blame it on everybody from people in their yards putting fertilizers out to you name it.
Speaker 4:It's one of those things where we need everybody to kind of get on board and come together and make a difference as one before anybody starts giving anybody else a hard time.
Speaker 1:Well, how do we do that? How do we just it's education again, it's education, understanding what the sources of contamination are and eliminating them.
Speaker 3:It has to be one at a time, eliminating them, eliminating one at a time, but then get everybody in the whole community to buy into what you're trying to do.
Speaker 4:Okay, and that's how you make a difference.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, what are you doing?
Speaker 1:in your life to sort of minimize that.
Speaker 2:Are you not?
Speaker 1:doing like pesticides, are you not? I've never used pesticides, ever.
Speaker 3:Never ever, never, ever in my yard have I ever done anything like that. I don't use fertilizers or pesticides.
Speaker 4:I try to handle things like that naturally with other animals.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I try to let them work it all out on their own. Yeah, I remember when.
Speaker 4:I was a kid, that's one of the things we used to always go do. We'd wait for rainy nights and go out with brown paper bags and collect toads, that was.
Speaker 3:we'd come fill up the whole yard with toads.
Speaker 1:That was again. You want to keep away animals. You find a way to balance it out With another animal, or even a plant, no doubt.
Speaker 2:No doubt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got to think more like that. Yeah, now you're kind of hard to press them and go out and find a toad somewhere, just don't exist anymore. They're around, they're just hard to find what happened to them. Their issue is like with a lot of other animals I mean, when I was a kid poor St John was full of a lot of things that aren't there anymore.
Speaker 4:It's a lot of it's pesticides being sprayed.
Speaker 1:It wipes things out, so we have to stop that yeah, stop the pesticides Stop all the things. Yeah, I know I feel like we need to just wipe everything clean and start over.
Speaker 2:We're probably that's kind of where we're at right now with the world in general, and we've kind of screwed a lot of stuff up. It's time to everybody kind of go wash their hands and back up for a minute and go, let's start changing things. Know what's going to be the first thing to change? Yeah, let's change it. Make a choice and go with that and do one thing at a time. Well, are the?
Speaker 3:right people listening to you Like you can educate till you're blue in the face, but if the people in charge are not doing anything about it then I think there's a portion of our country that listens to things.
Speaker 4:People again. Our world is so divided right now In so many different ways. Environmental stuff is just one more thing I think divides people.
Speaker 3:It's kind of sad to say that but until we get everybody to kind of buy into what's going on and the purposes we have behind doing it it's gonna be hard for us to get any real change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it just seems like such a black and white issue, right? Don't spray chemicals on your mind.
Speaker 2:I think everybody pretty much says that about any issue that's going on in our country right now, because they'll be on one side the other. It's 50-50, one way or the other, no matter what it is. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's unfortunate it is it is.
Speaker 2:You can't go tell people their ideas are messed up.
Speaker 1:Well, because they won't listen.
Speaker 2:That would just be wrong in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, everybody's entitled to their own ideas, but yeah.
Speaker 4:We've come to a crisis in this world.
Speaker 2:And we need more people like you to educate us and get us on the right track. I hope I can make a difference. I think you are.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I want to just do one more than before you leave.
Speaker 4:I know that I love your suit. I love your tie.
Speaker 1:I kind of dressed down today because I thought we're going to get rugged here, but you look amazing.
Speaker 2:I still wear the flip-flops. It bounces it all out.
Speaker 1:It really does you have to wear the flip-flops in Florida. Yeah, I can't do shoes and a suit.
Speaker 3:It doesn't work together.
Speaker 4:Flip-flops and a suit. You can still flip-flops. It gets up and done.
Speaker 1:When you were in Chicago. I read all the articles. You actually had a man and a lady friend up there.
Speaker 4:How's that going?
Speaker 2:I mean, that was just a Didn't work out. The distance-thinking that worked out. Yeah, that's tough. Are you seeing anybody here?
Speaker 4:No no.
Speaker 2:Just me and the greasy beard.
Speaker 1:I heard that you maybe wanted to chop the beard off. I've been thinking about it and going back and forth about it.
Speaker 2:It's about time to restart the journey I challenge any hair salon that wants to call us and make it happen what?
Speaker 4:do you think?
Speaker 1:about that. Would you do?
Speaker 3:it If we set it up for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd consider it for sure. That would be great. I would consider it for sure.
Speaker 3:All right, let's hold you to that.
Speaker 1:I do have a sponsor that sponsors me at Pintitis Pill. It's Sweet, caroline Her place up there.
Speaker 3:She takes care of my hair and keeps it pretty good. It's funny. When I was up there last week, I was like Caroline, I think it's time.
Speaker 4:She's like Frank, it looks good. Why would you cut it off? I'm like maybe it's time she's like don't just stop talking about it.
Speaker 1:She's encouraging you because I'll go back and forth.
Speaker 2:I know because, it's your look right.
Speaker 4:And you wear it well.
Speaker 1:It's hard to cut it off right before an event, because I'll go to my own event and nobody will know who I am.
Speaker 4:Yeah, who's the tall linky fellow?
Speaker 3:in the corner.
Speaker 4:That's not.
Speaker 3:Frank.
Speaker 4:It can't be, frank. Because, I look like I'm about 12 without this thing.
Speaker 1:Really, there's a filter that you can see.
Speaker 2:Believe it or not, Chicago has done some stories on my beard being shaved off.
Speaker 4:It's out there.
Speaker 1:Everybody's just on pins and needles about it. I don't know about that. They've done stories when I shaved it before. Oh, you have shaved it before, so there's photo evidence. This is, I think, eight months.
Speaker 2:I really shaved quite a bit.
Speaker 4:If you had a beard growing contest, I'm pretty sure I'd win it.
Speaker 2:I'd say it doesn't take long.
Speaker 3:No, no, by all means. I had to shave clean before surgery and then I shaved about eight months ago.
Speaker 1:Here's your surgery picture, but we can't see because you have a mask on your face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was right after they pulled the tube out of my chest the breathing tube, the pressure mask, good times.
Speaker 1:You're a. You're a chipper.
Speaker 2:It's hard to look at those pictures.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:Remember them calling me after surgery several times from the hospital and being like so, Frank, how do you feel I'm blessed? I feel super blessed to be here. When you feel depressed, I'm like depressed. Why would I be depressed? I didn't realize it, but apparently when people get their chest cracked, it's a very common thing for depression to really take over on people. I'm like I never felt that way. I felt super excited to still be alive and to still be enjoying my friends and family and the work I do.
Speaker 1:I can imagine.
Speaker 2:It was so nice there. I told the doctors I'm like, look, I'm not going to be comfortable unless you guys let me pray with everybody before surgery starts. And you know like 20 people in the room I said, sure, they stopped everything, brought everybody to bed. I pray with everybody. And you know that just that was put me super, super at ease. And you know I had had some other friends I had made in Chicago that had had the same surgery years beforehand and they had.
Speaker 2:They gave me some ideas and some thoughts on things and I was like writing a letter out to all my family and friends. Like each one of them got their own letter.
Speaker 3:Like if I didn't make it.
Speaker 2:You know, everybody knew where I was at, where I was standing with, stood with things. I knew, I knew I was happy, knew everything was good. And you know, you, just you see what the good Lord has in mind for you next.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you took that second shot of life and doing great things, and I'm so happy that we connected and that we got to meet you and have you here in the studio. If there's anything that we can do, please let us know, because you're obviously an amazing guy and, yeah, let us know how we can help.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Honored guys. Honored is all mine and yeah, if you guys are not busy January 19th, I hope you'll come maybe set up a table and tell people about the stuff you guys are doing here.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:And we'll for sure get you on the year's podcast as well. Oh, I'd love to 1000%. We'll get you guys both in there. Thank you, frank, so much. Thanks for coming.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing all of your critters. It was fun for me and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:To be a sponsor or nominated guest. Hit us up on the socials Until next time. Bye.
