Oh, yeah. It's electric gear in the aquarium room.

And if you're looking for something because.

You have a weak ass aquarium and.

You want to make it manly, then you want to go to Joe Shrimp.

Shack of Gear system jolla Wood.

He sells it buying a ton. I'm talking to you from this assistant.

Get out there and do it. Joe shrimp shack.com. Don't be a pussy. Don't promote code aquarium. Guys, check out brooker. Oh, yeah. Joe Shrimpshack.com. It hurts. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson. Jimmy, you're not supposed to fart in front of old ladies on the street. Oh, we're starting the podcast. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the guys. Are you okay?

Jim, you are such a dick wad.

You shouldn't do that to people. I'm just saying. anyways, today we're super excited to have Tom Lamb from Felix on yay.

Hey, what's up?

Felix is this wonderful smart device, and we are super excited to have Tom thank you for coming on, buddy.

Thanks for having me, man. It's been a hoot.

We just got done doing about an hour of troubleshooting playing with microphones. This is much better than it was, so thank you for all your patience and joining us tonight, buddy.

You're welcome, man. I feel like I'm a pretty technical guy, but when it comes to this microphone shit, it's pretty bad. I need to step up my game.

Hey, we'll get you a couple of links after the podcast. We'll get your game up. That's what we're here for.

Or contact you with a real professional podcast.

My name for that.

I would try someone else personally.

So, again, Felix is this wonderful smart device. Before, we've had a podcast talking about smart aquariums. Essentially, do it yourself, like a reef pie for those that weren't listing. It's one of our podcasts we had in the past. This is a fully functional system to hook up directly to your tank to turn it to the smart aquarium of your dreams. So hopefully this is now the upgraded version of the podcast, but we're going to dive into that in just a little bit. We still got some questions to go over, and Jimmy like my moped.

Yeah, Robbie got a new moped. And what's that old saying? What a moped have in common with ugly girls? They're fun to ride, but you don't want anybody to know about it. Is that what it is? Yeah, that's not what it is.

You don't want your friends to see you with one.

All right, so Robbie driving is 50 CC moped. All you can see is handlebars and wheels. I don't know where the rest of the bike goes, but apparently, hey, it's a fashion statement. Notch yay vespa.

So, again, let's get directly to the questions. Now, the last episode or one of the few episodes behind, because we kind of do these podcasts ahead of time, so I don't know when you're going to be listening to this, but we had an episode called Conspiracy Theories. It was episode 49. Jimmy had way too much fun talking about horrible things, and we have gotten some really good feedback. People loved the episode. Like, they were sending us memes about dolphin rape, all kinds of hilarious jokes.

That was disturbing. And I want to bring up that you were the one that came with the dolphin story, and the rest of us sat there with our mouth wide open just going, that was disgusting.

You were beside yourself and how tickled you were with the content I brought to the table. Jimmy, did you? I went home.

I told my wife about it and stuff. I said, you got to pull this up.

She pulled it up.

She goes, yeah, it's a thing. Only Robbie could find that.

So we have a message from one of our diehard fans that number one says we do a great job, so I want to put that out there. But also complaints.

Give them their money back, dude.

Here's our first feedback. So, got a problem with the conspiracy episode on your podcast. Margaret lavat never had sex with a dolphin, but rather manually relieved him using her hand.

I hate this so much.

Okay, yeah, we're getting that technical. So now, don't misunderstand me here. I believe it was completely wrong and rather disturbing, absolutely unethical. But you lied on your podcast, sir. The dolphin kept getting horny, which interrupted the research lavat was doing and decided to get the poor thing off. Everything should have stopped there, period. The dolphin molesting should have never occurred. But there's no indication that we have that lavat had penetrated of anything. So what is going on here? For those that don't know, 1960s, they had Margaret lavat, this is a fact, had a dolphin research lab that they're trying to teach dolphins to understand human communication, which is crazy, but it was the same time period where they came up with lsd.

And this is from our Us government.

And this is from our Conspiracy Theory podcast, ladies and gentlemen. So this was us having fun. And our belief, if I not remember correctly, on the conspiracy podcast, was that they were trying to make a love potion and use dolphins testing it because they're a mammal. People wouldn't know any better. flipper was popular. And that thing, that was our conspiracy theory in the matter. So I was saying that lavat diddle dolphins. I'm married for eight years, Jimmy. I mean, you've been married now for a few, right?

Yeah.

This is what, number two?

Four.

Four.

No, the first one felt like three.

It's number something. I'm just saying, if I'm being relieved, that's a good night in my book, and that's what I'll call it. So if I interpreted anything wrong and I was being incorrect on exactly what happened, it was just me not wanting to talk about it on the podcast. So thank you so much for this.

I'm pretty sure we lost our pbs sponsor.

Thank you for the feedback.

Nonetheless, thank you for doing the research for us because that was just disturbing all too much.

I'm pretty sure that the Us government enjoyed having to pay somebody to manually relieve a dolphin in order to get it to communicate with people.

Yeah, we need to sign that check. Didn't sign that check and the poor.

Dolphin then died of loneliness.

Yes. So if you haven't heard that podcast, don't otherwise get number 49. And we had a lot of fun. Back to more research things. Did you have any other quips before we go into more questions?

No, you go right ahead. I got to go wash my mouth out.

You got to wash your mouth out with soap. So question came in, how many shrimp does it take to start a nice running colony and can I run a notech set up? So I have shrimp. I have a lot of shrimp. Jimmy has a lot of shrimp. I think we can easily say that Jimmy has not sat there and done math going, how few can you have? Because Jimmy just orders a crap ton and then farms. So in my experience, if you want a healthy colony, because shrimp only live like a year and a quarter, give or take, get a healthy colony. Start with six shrimp. Don't get all one gender, of course, but six shrimp is about the minimum I start with. And right now I have probably 100 blue dreams from the six I started with. So that's a good point to start with. Now, there's not a lot of forgiveness. If you lose one or two, you might not have a colony, but if you can keep those six alive, you're good. I think that's about a bare minimum.

Fair.

Jimmy, how much tank are you running? Rob?

Two and a half gallons.

Yeah, I start out with 150 in a 20 gallon tank. That's my starting point.

See, that's why we can't ask Jimmy the minimum. He can do maximum questions but not a minimum. See? Tom, do you do shrimp?

No, we don't have any shrimp right now. But joe's going to hook us up though. Joe Shrimp is going to hook us up pretty soon here.

Darn right. And for those that haven't been on social media, joe just put out today that when you're picking up stuff from Bulk Reef Supply, you need to twerk out front of the business. So check out that picture. It's on his Facebook page. Make fun of him. He is in a COVID mask. twerking in front of Bulk Reef Supply.

Joe is twerking.

Joe. Joe from Joe Shrimpchack.com.

Wow.

I mean, he is a deviously, handsome gentleman and can get away with it.

He is, he's a good looking dude, but I don't know if I want to see him twerking.

Now, the other question on this was can you run a notech set up. Shrimp don't need heat. That's one shrimp needs some light. So maybe you could do natural light. You put it by a really well lit window area that isn't going to get too bad of a draft, so you don't want temperatures fluctuating. But again, no heater is really necessary. I think the only thing that you would have in this quote, unquote, no tech set up is have a touch of tech for your bubbler. You need a sponge filter of some kind, at least in my opinion. I wouldn't run one without. So if that's the only piece of tech and you called it a notch system, great. That's how I run all mine. I just have a light and a bubbler, that's it.

Oh, you definitely need a sponge filter of some sort. I run a whole matin filter on the back wall of mine and those shrimp continuously eat all day long off that and it works wonderful. So if you have not tried that, you get yourself a matin filter. Mine is probably ten inches by twelve inches. It's on the back of the 20 gallon long. I have my long facing towards me, short end wise, and I got about six or eight, let me see, I think I got six per shell, so I probably have about 36 of them.

And for those who are listening, if you don't know what a matin filter is, look it up. It started at 60s, if I remember correctly, doing some aquarium history research. It is the hamburg Matin filter. If you want to Google it, there is plenty of great tutorials on how to make them really cheap. You go online, you can go to Amazon, buy yourself a nice filter. Joe might have them on his website and they're really great to make. They last forever. And I use them in some even.

Yeah, they work well in sums too. When you've got that many shrimp that I do, I'd like to have a huge amount of space for them to crawl on. And what's interesting is you'll look and you'll see 100 adults, but if you sit there with a bright flashlight, you go, oh, I've got 300 babies also on that. And I think it's a 20 PPI that you have to use.

That varies depending on what you want want to do. You want to do a real fine, you can, you want to do a little course, or if you do real.

Course and you start losing babies inside of it and they can go to the other side of the back of the yeah.

So if you're really worried about getting babies out, just hang the sponge above and watch them drop for the next couple of hours.

People that are raising shrimp or raising shrimp to sell, right?

You don't want to sit there and wait for him to come out of a sponge.

That's right.

But I think also, joey, the king of diy had a good video on this I think he made. It is 2014, and the video still holds up, so go and check that out. Next question up for biz. I'm just going over here. If you guys want to submit your own questions, go to aquariumgyspodcast.com, and on the bottom of the website, you can find our telephone number. You can call and leave a voicemail, send us an email, or send a text message directly to that same phone number. People have been really abusing that lately. The Aquarium guys been listening for quite a while, wondering when the next story time will come out. Thanks, caleb.

Story time. We sort of strong. We've done two story times. First one pretty successful. Second one was pretty funny. Third one, we're thinking about getting some of our listeners involved with this.

Is that what you're thinking?

I think we should get a couple of listeners involved. We had a couple of guys with some pretty good stories. If you wanted to listen to one of the funniest podcasts we did, we had the guys from Hawaii Fish Rescue tell them stories. And I bought Wet myself the first time we had them on the podcast. Just absolutely adam, I got a little something for you right here.

Tom'S shaking his head.

Tom'S going, you guys are wasting my time.

So for those that are listening, what jimmy's meaning is, if you want to go ahead and submit us a story for us to read on air, we're going to select one story for story time, and we're going to pick it. And whoever picks it will get a prize. Prize to be determined. I mean, maybe we can give jimmy's motorcycle away. We could yeah, I'd like to go.

To that and get a new harley.

If not, we can do, like, an entire case of cholawood. We'll come up with something and make it fair. But send us in your submissions. We'd love to read your story and giggle about it on air. Only the best one will be selected, so send it in. That and if you also have some recommendations to who we should guess, I think Chris biggs is hilarious. He's got a wonderful YouTube channel. The mat aquarius. Check it out. We have to get him on, but.

Chris is very intense.

I think one more.

One more.

Yeah, we got to figure it out.

So I think we should do this in September when fall hits.

To be continued.

To be continued.

All right, that does it. This week, for questions, we have more, but we can only do so many. So, again, submit your questions in. And if you want to join the debauchery, you can listen to us live. We are again. Queenspodcast.com bottom. The website. We have a link called discord. That's where we have a bunch of people watching now and asking questions live on the spot. So come join us, and we love.

Having those live questions, because when we're talking to tom here, we see these things pop up, and then we sound much smarter because we have great questions.

From you guys that and we get great memes. I mean, they already photoshop tom into a couple of famous paintings as soon as he got on the podcast.

Why are they so mean?

They're a guest, tom. They just love you more than everyone else.

All good, man.

All right, so let's get into the topic at hand. So, tom, again, thanks for coming on. And to get started, we always got to learn more about you before the top of we're going to dive into so what got you into this great hobby of ours?

Well, I was never an aquarium guy. Honestly, I'll say that right up front. Both the co founders and I were not aquarium guys. We only got into aquariums about four or five years ago when we saw aquascape from Oliver knott. We just happened to kind of was browsing through YouTube and looking at planted plants and somehow ended up on Oliver knott's, one of his videos. The co founder and I, Lucas, we're both silicon valley brats. We spent four or five years out there building out tech companies, like solar companies and fashion tech companies and so forth. But I always loved aquariums. If you're Chinese, you're Asian. Your parents always had that little aquarium sitting in the corner. It was always in rough condition, but roughly rough condition. You never know if you're, you know, if it was show or, you know, possibly for dinner.

But I love it.

So, you know, I've always been around aquariums, but never really, you know, fell in love with it, I guess, until four or five years ago. But I think for somebody like myself, I was 30 something at that time. I always thought that aquariums were going to be tough, like, hard to keep, especially, you know, when you're looking at something as beautiful as a plan to tank. You know, you think, well, how the hell would I keep that? You know, what what sort of crazy devices do I need to actually maintain this thing, right? And so that's kind of where the whole start of felix actually began, was this idea of how do we get guys like ourselves to actually want to have an aquarium? And then we did, you know, the whole research thing. I've got a marketing background, so did some testing around it and realized, actually, you know, there's actually a lot of 30 something year old guys out there that are tech guys that have money. You're waving at me.

Oh, never mind. I don't have money, okay?

You're talking to the wrong group.

Well, see, the thing is that's the group we want to get into this hobby. So all the broke guys are already in this hobby. I was going to say, how do we get new people into this hobby? Because, you know, what, honestly it's, it's a beautiful hobby and I'm, I, you know, I've got this big 240 salt behind me but I'm a like, I'm a fresh water guy. Like I love, love like, you know, the, the artistry around like planted tanks and, and what the guys like George Farmer and Oliver not have done for, you know, the, the whole community. Right. So how do we, how do we get people to fall in love with that? Well us is just making it so damn simple for somebody. Don't taking away all that whole I've got to know this and know that and so forth. Right? And I think for hobbyists there's a group that you want to know all the information you kind of want to know like every, everything that's going to go into your tank and environment needs to be in the null and stuff. But there's this other group that just wants to have something beautiful and so we've really kind of built Felix with that person in mind as well. Now that's the story.

So what got you into your career path? Like yours is much different. Like you're only in the hobby for like five years so you must have had a certain set of expertise that you could even begin to put together a startup company like Felix.

Yeah, I've actually owned and had many startups, everything from real estate. I had the largest mortgage company in Canada for many years. I had one of the largest real estate companies in Canada but I have this tech background so I went to school for it, right. And I dropped out two years into my degree to get married and have kids and so I needed to make money quick. And at that time there was a tech burst at that time so there was really not as many tech jobs. So real estate was kind of my bread and butter. I think I mentioned before, I've got five kids to feed these kids, right? They eat a lot and so really I needed a way to make money. So I started out in the whole real estate game eventually before I had I'm from Canada, so take this, you know, with a grain of salt. But I had a reality show based on my real estate company and did that for a number of years but my heart always was in tech. So the real estate gig got tiresome after twelve years and so I said, hey, I want to go back into tech. I told my wife I'm going to sell everything and we're going to move to the Valley and I'm going to start a fashion tech company to solve one of the biggest problems that women have. Women always say have nothing to wear. I wanted to solve that.

Oh no.

I was wondering what.

It was because I was so tired of hearing it. Honestly.

Thank God you're here because Jimmy won't change his tire at all. He basically comes with no pants to the podcast.

I'm like Charlie Brown. I have the same every day.

Oh, no. So really, that's kind of the whole tech side. Like I said, I spent almost five years in silicon valley. We built out a couple of companies. One did very well, one failed miserably, and then I kind of came back to calgary, canada, to set my roots down and so forth. And that's really where I started looking at aquariums.

And of course he went back because of the enjoyable weather. We want to point that out because we're in northern minnesota, and I think the weather up here is probably just a little more sucky than it is here.

Equally, we have no, I think you guys have a little bit more sucky.

Do we really?

Yeah. Lake superior makes us shittier than most of Canada. Wow. Yeah.

Well, we suck.

We do. Well, tom, again, let's dive in to Felix. So you said the inspiration for felix was you saw mr. Oliver aquascape pate, and you're like, I need to make this nerd friendly.

Is that how it went?

Pretty much. I remember after I saw oliver's tank, the first thing I did was one of the first things I did was I booked myself a ticket out to nuremberg, the big show out there that happens interzoo, right, every two years. And so I went out there and I just wanted to meet the guy. I wanted to meet George farmer, I wanted to meet all these aquascapers and figure out how do we take this to the masses? And so that's kind of just my marketing background. I always compare planted tanks to cooking in the 80s. In the 80s, nobody gave a shit about cooking. There was like a couple of guys, I don't know if you guys had yan in the us. But there was only a couple of cooking guys. But then all of a sudden, food network comes along in the late two thousands and says, hey, cooking is freaking cool. And by the way, here's some celebrities that we're going to here's some chefs we're going to make into celebrities and make cooking fun and cool, right? And so all of a sudden you've got this massive billion dollar industry on cooking, right? And so I really think that's where aquascaping and aquariums could go with the proper technology and with the proper branding of it and so forth. Because I think it's been limited to the fact that a, there's been really no real technology in aquariums. And I say that in the nicest way possible.

Oh, no, we're not offended, trust me. People still use like, piston pumps from the 30s. We have been die hard for years on the same simple solutions. And it's not necessarily that because we're stuck in our ways, but because there hasn't been a whole lot of options to make things better. I mean, we've had canister filters. We've had the old cell hang on the back. So there's been some improvements, but as far as revolutionary stuff, to make things simpler, you can't get away from water changes, you can't get away from feeding the correct amounts. There are still things to do, but taking the day to day, what's my water level at? Maybe I should not I forgot to show off my light and I'm going to have extra algae. There's still things to automate, and clearly you've taken a real crack at that.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do.

So when you came from the outside looking in, I thought, that's so interesting. You just saw a guy that's beautiful. I want to figure out how to make that easier. So in your own research and development, what were the main things that you saw that I wonder if I can fix that, or yes, I can fix that?

Well, I think when you look at aquariums as a whole, you've got all these devices, and I remember this going to see George Farmer for the first time, and I looked under his cabinet, and all you saw was timers and plugins, right? Just lots and lots of sockets and timers. I said, well, first off, we live in like 2016 at that time, we should be able to get rid of these timers. Come on. And at that time, I think timers, these connected IoT timers were coming out. And so that's kind of where it started with, is like, look at all these devices. How do we make it all kind of talk to each other and work together? You mentioned something really interesting about the ability to like when you're looking at all these different devices, and you've got old devices and so forth. Well, that's the thing about controlling is you can have all these inputs, but if you don't do anything with it, if you can't make sense of it all, it really does, you know, get so you've got these cool readers out there or monitors out there that can tell you everything that's gone on in your aquarium for three weeks. The last three weeks. But if you don't know what to do with that data, it means nothing, right? And so a lot of that data just becomes fluff, essentially. But if you can actually harness that data and say, hey, let's actually create an action based on that data, then you have something substantial, right. And none of this stuff is new. All this technology has been used in healthcare, has been used in other tech for the last ten years. We're just trying to bring some of that technology to the aquarium industry.

So now that you identified some of those, and I just want to clarify, because we're going to have some questions from beginners about all the timers. When you talk to professional aquascapists, they're very plant based. They're not just scaping to make it look pretty. They're scaping to make a beautiful ecosystem that is extremely plant centric. So when they use these timers, especially before we had a lot of these programmable Led timers, we had to essentially put three or four lights on top if they wanted to really imitate the different times of the day to make sure that we had the complete experience in a lot of these aquascapes. So they went underneath and they'll have one light turn on for 4 hours, another light turned on for two. And it's essentially a handmade elite relay system that they have in a lot of these old scaping setups. And it was just a bunch of these old fashioned rotary timers that I picked on the jimmy for. But they're necessary. I can't give you too much crap for them because even on my systems, I have to do it for plants. If you mess up algae bloom so imagine you have a professional aquascapist go through a tank, know each plant's specific needs. He's putting objects to create shade. That's what they're using all these timers for mainly. There are of course other reasons, but that gives you the perception for a real professional tank.

These are tanks that they spend hundreds of hours on. This isn't just like your planted tank at your pet store. These are professionally landscape. They are flipping gorgeous. They'll make areas look like mountain ranges. And if you go online looking at some of the stuff, it'll just blow your mind. And these guys have got hundreds of hours of putting into these tanks.

It's not necessarily fun. Set up the setup can take a few hours. We've seen aquascapes done professionally and quickly, but these are like even well established long term units to try to grow into something. It's not just place and it looks beautiful, it grows even more beautiful. So there's always time in these things. But now, going back to the subject of Felix again, we've talked about some of these controllers in the past. There was an open source project called Reef Pie and that's made off of a little raspberry pi. It's a small, very inexpensive computer about the size of a credit card for those that don't know. And that was essentially the way that they could try to plug in and make sense of these. They could hook up a sensor to try to read PH. They can try to put on a relay to measure the water level. They could put on specialized timers to dim your lights and shut them off. They could put emergency alerts if power fails or if some particular device tries to fail. But again, it's very diy. And you have to have coke bottle glasses about as thick as mine to be able to not only do that, but then enjoy it after the fact. There's no support. Something breaks, you can't just order a new piece. A lot of times you have to either build the software or solder a new piece of hardware on your. Own and this was essentially how it began. So now we see a wonderful product like Felix. And when did Felix is in its beta, you were saying? Is that correct?

Yeah, we're still in beta. We're going to be in beta for a while. We started about, I want to say, 20 months ago with the actual formation of the company and the founders and so forth. But, I mean, like I said, it dates back for four years. But yeah, what we did was we just launched our official beta with our indiegogo backers. So we had about 300 users or backers that are now testing and giving us fantastic feedback. And I think that's kind of something that I've always been passionate about, was literally making it a product for the users. And so a lot of these backers actually kind of proved out the whole theory of when we were looking at the marketing side of this. A lot of these backers that we have are complete newbies. I would say probably about 40% of them are complete newbies. This is their first tank. Exactly what I said to you. They've wanted to own a tank, their adult life, but they just always thought it was going to be difficult. And so now we're testing with those guys and yeah, we're going to be constantly testing. We're a tech company. We plan on doing a soft retail launch sometime this fall, but I would say we're going to be in beta for the next year or two.

So right now, if one of the listeners is hearing this and they want to be a part of that, they can still go to your website, purchase it and participate in the open beta, is that correct?

That's correct, yeah.

Wonderful. So get on the ground floor and be a part of making something nice. So, again, let's go over some of the features of Felix and really what the device is overall.

Yeah. So everything you said about the reef pie is essentially the core, I guess, of what Felix does. Felix is just it on absolute steroids. And so being able, obviously, to control your different devices, timers, obviously, is the basic thing that Felix can do. It can turn things on and off for you at set times, right. Where it really sort of changes and morphs into something different is we've created, like, rural systems and so if you've been in tech for a while, you know the iftt if this, then that. You can create those rules within your Felix. So getting back to the aquascaping guys and the plant to tank guys, one of the things that they really wanted was they didn't want to just rely on timers. They wanted to know for certain if their plants needed a co2 injection. And how do you know that while PH changes, then you can add or take away co2. Right. And so with Felix, you're able to do things like that. You're able to control your system just even based on PH. Right. The other thing it does is acts as a redundant system. One of the favorite features, and I know this has been done in the past, but I think for the freshwater guys, the biggest thing that can kill your fish in your plants is a faulty heater, right. And so you can create a redundancy, a simple redundancy to turn the heater off if it hits a certain temperature. And it can remind you to send the messages to you and so forth as well. Right. But that's kind of the basic features. So on the water monitoring side, we monitor PH, ammonia. We do the par and stuff, lux and all that for the reef keep peers. But our system is really based on this open source system. And so we've built it in a way where really the goal is to have all these different manufacturers out there connect with Felix. And so we've obviously built like an open api that we want to be able to share with these different manufacturers. But we've made the system purposely so that it's completely upgradable and all that.

Jeff so I'm going to pick on you, right?

Sure.

I'm a nerd. And Jimmy Adam, I want you to stop me and clarify any point.

No, you're a nerd. You're damn nerd.

I'm a nerd.

No, there's no stopping.

My background is research and development for a lot of IoT devices. So this is right up my alley. It's Internet of Things, anything that connects to the Internet and does something for you, like your Nest, thermostat, your garage door opener. I've done a bunch of research, so trying to come up with the features that Felix does isn't necessarily something that I've been able to find in a full list on your website. I find points, but it's very geared. So I'm going to get real nerdy with you. Are you ready, Tom?

Yeah.

So before we go too much further, I'm going to explain a little bit more of this than that. So in programming language, right, if something happens, do a command. So if I tell right now, my Google speaker to call my phone and immediately puts a trigger to dial a number, calls my phone, it doesn't stop until I hit the button on the back. You can have another automatic because that's a manual trigger. It's me telling it to do something that's pre programmed. Right. Follow me so far then. Automatic triggers can be happening when something else happens. So I have a timer when the timer happens, play music just like your alarm clock, so something pre done or once at a time. So now that we understand a little bit more about that concept timers, so any function you have in here, you can set with. If this, then that command correct most any function that you have with Felix. So I'm going to pick on a few because you mentioned. Number one, there's timers, there's alerts, and there's some controllers and measurements. So let's pretend that we have a timer. At certain periods of time, the light goes to 20%. Whenever it goes to 20%, I can also try to lower the tank temperature by two degrees at the same time. So anytime the light turns off or goes low, I can lower the degree by two degrees. Trying to completely emulate the outside world. When it gets dark out, it gets a little cooler. During the day, it gets a little hotter. I can set that, as a rule, potentially in Felix, correct?

Correct.

Wonderful. So I'm going to pick on a lot of these. So timers is for anything plugged in. You can turn things on and off with timers. Okay. Then on the alerts, is it just for if this fails or is through a certain point, shut it on and off? Or is there something that can alert me to, say, a heater that's going to burn out, like it's noticing it's using a regular wattage, and you should probably change your filter before it burns.

Out, or is it just okay, so as it stands right now, it is literally just on and off. But the features, like we have, the sockets itself can sense the power, right? And so if we see spikes and stuff like that, we can alert. And that's kind of the next step of what Felix will grow into, is this whole AI system. We're very vague about it right now, but the whole iftt is the basis of the AI system that we're building out. And so actually, you brought up a great point there, Rob. Is every animal, every plant has an ideal setting in nature. There's an ideal setting for that species, right? And so what felix's aim is to do is to be able to catalog all that. So you might be doing something with your shrimp. Whatever species of shrimp that you're having in your aquarium, you might be doing something great. But down in Germany, somebody else might be doing something maybe a little bit better. And there's no disrespect to you, but maybe they're having a little bit more success. Or maybe you're having a little bit more success. So what Felix is capable of doing is it's aggregating all this data. It's pulling all this data from all these different users. Right now we only have 300 users, right? But what we've done is in the system, you can tell us exactly what animal you have, what tank you have with all these different devices you have, and we're sucking up all this information. End goal is to spit out something meaningful. Remember I said before, all this data means nothing if it's not actionable. So that's the goal is to be able to say, okay, these amount of shrimp, this truly is because of the crowd. This truly is the best lighting for it. This truly is the best amount of time that you should put lighting on your aquarium and so forth.

So, again, you've answered so many questions right there that you're trying to aggregate this. But until it's aggregated and you guys implement it, can a nerd get real crazy with it? For instance, can you use Ifttt? Is that enabled on the device?

So we don't use the Iftt cloud system.

Damn.

It's actually built internally into our system. The reason why we did that, we did on purpose, because you don't want that any interruption. If something were to actually happen to your Internet, you don't want that system down.

So it lives on Felix.

It lives in our firmware. So once you've created that rule, it's sitting there until you've changed it.

But is it like cloud sync with Ifttt?

No, it is just our own. We went into this whole legal thing with our lawyers, like, a year ago, and can we call it that? Well, if this, then that is not.

It is not a copyrighted thing.

No. So that's why we call it that.

Just so I get everybody back on board. I went real nerdy there for a minute. Ifttt is if this, then that. It is a company that allows you to integrate all your devices. So, for instance, here's what I did as a nerd, and I hope my wife is not listening to this podcast because I'm going to get some real shit for this. So I'm telling her, for those that are listening. I had a device, Amazon alexa, at the time, and I connected it to the service called Ifttt. It's free. There's a paid for models for your business and whatnot, but it's free. And I hooked up all my little smart devices to it. So I said Protocol 66 to alexa, and then it immediately shut off the TV and immediately killed the light in the garage because I keep forgetting it. And I had all of these devices, like a smart bulb, I had a smart plug, I had all those set, and then it would put on a fake cooking recipe up on my computer. And it also started a coffee pot, which, by the way, that burnt out. But the idea was it was supposed to shut down all my electronics, shut off my extra lights, that she would complain about me about, turn on music and make it look like I was cooking in the kitchen, just because I said Protocol 66, right? The Star Wars meme. You can do all kinds of settings. I knew one guy. This is a funny joke. Now, this is a real story, though. He had a smart lock. He built his own little smart lock, had his little alexa. I think he just yelled at an emergency protocol. It immediately closed all of his browser windows, cleared his browser history on his computer, and locked his door and crumblearing music to cover up whatever he was doing.

He was watching porn. I think.

Exactly. So there's a lot of cool functions you can use with ifttt it takes a lot of these separate devices and connects them all together so you can do crazy funny things. So if you take a platform like this before you continue, you can tell it to do a command or have it set with an alert and automatically preset your aquarium for certain conditions. I'm assuming in the future, you can tell Felix to prep for IX protocol. It turns the aquarium heater up to 80 degrees. It puts the lights down low to stop the stress of the tank. It immediately checks for water quality or consistency. However, the measurements are done there and then reminds you when to put the ic treatment in. Wouldn't that just be mind blowing? It prep yourself for ic and then it does it.

I kind of do that at home. I say prep yourself, honey. It's something else. Never mind. Hey, Tom, quick question for you. What fascinates the heck out of me on this whole thing is you've got all these different users that are giving you feedback, which is what I love. Are they coming up with anything really cool that you didn't think of? The one thing I was thinking of, and maybe you've already covered this, is we just did a podcast on heaters, and we hate heaters mostly, but sometimes the heater will start throwing out straight voltage, but it still will heat and run. But you'll put your finger in the tank and you'll get shocked.

I electrocute myself.

Yeah. Is there anything that you have that will see that straight current in the water and turn off the heater and notify you?

No, not right now. But here's the thing. We definitely don't have that right now, but we look at Felix kind of like as this iOS, right? It literally is this basis for all these other manufacturers to manufacture things like that. We don't want to go out and build all these accessories. We definitely don't want to go out and build all these water monitors and different probes and stuff like that. We just want to be a happy place for everybody to happily connect to us and be able to function, to be able to control all these different devices, right? And so I think one of the questions that we had, this is the question we always get, because people look at the water monitor and they say, hey, that looks like a seni water monitor, right? This guy right here, right? You guys can't see it at home, but in fact, it is a seni water monitor, and it actually says seni right on the packaging there, right? Besides Felix. But that's the thing is, for us, we don't necessarily want to go out and build all these different probes and so forth. We want to build the system so that other manufacturers can connect to us. And so that really is the ultimate goal on the controlling side. Did I answer your question?

Yeah, I just thought it was so interesting that you've got all these different people giving you feedback and you don't see that a lot, where people get feedback from their customers before they start manufacturing. And I just will.

Yeah, I think maybe all of you guys are welcome to join the Felix Lab and you can kind of see what's going on in there. We're extremely transparent. We told everybody, the first 300 units we got delivered. The first 300 units we got delivered, we had an antenna issue. And so we told the group, we said, hey, listen, we weren't in our production facility because of COVID We couldn't oversee anything. We just got videos and pictures. Right. And so we had an antenna problem and we shared it with the group. And a bunch of backers just chimed in and said nobody would tell us. A normal company would not say anything about this. They just let it pass. Right. But we've really tried to be transparent because we really do need the community in order to build this type of product. It takes a team.

So continually going down the feature list. Right. So we went over timers, we went over alerts, we went over that you can set up rules, and that the rule live on the device. Meaning that if the Internet goes out, it's not going to lose connection to the mothership to tell it what to do. What measurements does it have? I mean, I think that's one of the most powerful features of Felix that I'm researching. What can it do to read things in your tank?

Yeah, the semipowered monitor, it can read your PH, your ammonia, your temperature, your water level, and then it's got a bunch of light readings as well, like your Par, your Lux kelvin.

Wow.

Yeah. So a lot of the reef guys, you'll spend for a good power meter, 400, $500, or you'll rent it for $5100, but yeah, the monitor that we have actually is built in par.

Can you explain the need for a par meter? And what it exactly is?

The power meters for the hardware brief guys, is really to get enough light to your coral. Right? And so the right light and the right amount of light could really mean the success or failure of your coral. So being able to adjust for the different types and different species, it's extremely important for the coral guys. Right. Not so much on the fresh side.

I mean, there's still stuff to be told about some of that over time. We have Scott feldman. He is tenant aquatics, and he's just a big believer in the amount of tenants in your tank. But also, I think reading, especially when you're doing plants with a thick blackwater tank, knowing exactly how much light is piercing through in a freshwater tank is something that we don't even think about, but should. And that felix could in the future.

Definitely could. And actually that's actually, we were talking about things that the backers have brought up. I know that question has come up, not to us directly, but to other backers saying, hey, why don't you use it for this or use it for that? Right. Our next stage, really, we went through kind of honestly, the last three weeks have kind of been a lesson in startup and pandemic, because it's been extremely difficult to kind of navigate and try to get feedback and R and D done while you're trying to socially distance. Right. But our next stage here is really taking all this feedback and prioritizing it and rolling out what we can do reasonably. This year, at the beginning of March, we had to scrap our plan. Our whole year kind of went out the door. Everything that we wanted to do is kind of out the door. So here we are.

So now in the measurements, just to explain to people the idea that you have rules, alerts, timers and measurements. Now, if you have, say, PH, ammonia, temp, water level, there are things that you can't measure, such as co2. Do you have any way to measure co2?

We do, actually. And it's funny because when you start talking to aquascapers, they'll tell you a lot of different ways to do different things. And our friend and co founder, George Farmer, if you guys don't know, definitely Google him. He's got a big YouTube channel. Freshwater and planted paper.

He has a YouTube channel, literally one of the best in the business.

And such an amazing story, too, that backs it up. He came up with this kind of idea for Felix and it all revolves around measuring. Right.

I'm sorry, I literally forgive me. I clicked a button about George Farmer trying to see if he had some other information. And, yes, George is well known for having a co2 measurement trick, but no, continue. I clicked on the wrong thing.

Yeah, no worries, George. I'm going to plug his book. He's got a new book out here as well. But anyways, in the book, he talks about how to measure co2, and it's really taking the PH twice a day. So one time before co2 is injected, and then a number of hours later when the co2 is dropped. Right. And then you can check the PH again. From those two measurements of PH, you can come to a conclusion of what the co2 level would be in the tank. Right. I don't want to say V two, but that's on the horizon that you'll be able to see the co2 inside of your Felix app as well.

And that's not something that's been unknown, that's been a trick. And they've actually have measurements and graph charts of how to do these different releases of co2 gas in the tank. And the reason people really just don't do it, and they kind of just best guess it is because it is such a pain in the ass trying to sit there and get out your api test kits, putting them in vials, shaking them up. Maybe your stuff is outdated, maybe you didn't clean the vial correctly and you're getting inaccurate measurements. And it's just a lot of hassle to continue keeping up with it, where something like Felix does it automatically because it's not a set cut and dry thing and just keeps up to date every single day.

Yeah. And just to take it a step further, can I kind of talk about the kind of the last feature? There's two big features. Obviously, we have a camera that's available in the pro line. Can we take a minute to talk about that? Or did you have another question?

Oh, I have a bunch of questions, so take as much time as you want, man.

Okay, so this kind of falls in line with the Co too, right, and everything else that's going in your aquarium. I think when we first announced that we were going to do this 360 camera, I think it came off very gimmicky, and a lot of people, even to this day, look at it and say, well, why do you need a 360 camera, especially in the midst of COVID Our whole tagline in the beginning was when you're not at home, check into your aquarium while you're traveling. And so that's kind of out the window. But besides being really cool, being able to see a different perspective on your aquarium, the end goal with the camera and again, taking technology from different industries, applying it to the aquarium, everything is about visual recognition. Right? Now, you look at your camera on your phone, you look at Tesla and what they're doing with the autonomous vehicles, and even in the medical field, right. Everything is about cameras. And the reason why it's about cameras is because it's the heart of image recognition and AI. And so when you look at an aquarium, nature acts in a certain way. Animals act in a certain way when things are sick, when water is bad, when co2 is high, when co2 is low, PH high, animals, water visually, things act in a certain way. And and it's always there's no secret there's patterns. Right. And so the heart of it is the the end goal for for Felix, and we're very open about it, is we want to be able to recognize those patterns. So we think that there's going to become a day where the water monitors won't be as necessary because your fish will tell you what's happening to it or your plants. Well, your corals will, right. They're doing it in the medical field. Ten years ago, when you went to a doctor for a colonoscopy, what did he do? He stuck a finger in the ass and felt around to see if they felt any tumors. Right. Well, now they stick the camera advertising.

You have to go to the doctor for that.

I thought, that just jimmy's Tuesday. Yeah.

But now they put a camera in you and the camera actually can see these tumors long before the doctor could ever recognize it. So that's the key to all of this is like, how do we capture all this data? How do we capture images and make sense of it all so we can actually do something. So either A, alert you as the user and say, hey, I need to fix something, or B, I see that you have this device and I can fix it, so I'm going to fix it for you.

I love it.

I think it works as good as a nanny cam, too.

Yeah.

You're wondering what your kids are doing downstairs and turn your camera around and.

Watch them through the aquarium?

Yeah.

Wait, there's cameras to watch the children?

I've heard about it.

Okay.

Nanny cam.

All right, so to go through the last questions I have and measurements, we haven't gone through controllers, so you can measure the water level. Is there any hardware that it's more than just turning something else on and on? Does it come with some other hardware that can say, do something itself? Does it come with a light? Does it come with a water controller of some sort? Is there any extensions you mentioned before? You try to stay away from them, but what does it have for actual hardware controllers?

It doesn't have anything like in terms of the actual hardware that comes with it. It's really just the semi powered water monitor that measures we talked about the PH ammonia and the temperature and the water level.

So it's supposed to be completely hardware neutral and work with whatever you have and other things that people make in the future.

Actually, in fact, for the last year and a half, we've been actively engaged with a lot of the manufacturers, like the big ones out there, probably not the biggest one out there that you would normally think of controllers because they don't want to work with us for whatever reason. But most of the devices, the manufacturers of lighting and your different water monitors and stuff like that, we've been engaged with them for a while now. Perfect.

So never know what's coming up in the future. But as hardware stands now, let's talk about and we'll start with your Pro model. We'll talk about your other model soon, but your Pro has everything that you have to offer, so we'll go off of that for the questions. What does it exactly have for additional hardware? So I heard a rumor about a wifi extender. Am I wrong on this?

Okay, so in terms of the actual built, what's actually built in correct. You've got eight sockets. And so we're in Europe, we've developed for Europe, the UK and North America as it stands today. You have six USB plugins, right? There is a wifi extender that's actually built in. And so that's actually a key part of our tech and how we connect to other devices as well. One of the biggest problems in IoT is like looking at how to connect my light. Let's say I want to control certain aspects of the light, like different spectrums and stuff like that. How do I control it without actually going into the actual native app, right? And so what Felix can do is interrupt that signal, so it can be the WiFi conduit for that device and actually take over some control of it. You could also happily hook up your iphone to it if you need a better signal.

So what does it actually run on the inside? Is it a special secret lab piece of hardware that you have for the computer actually running in it?

I'll kill you just for nothing.

I don't want to say secret. I mean, even for the screws on Felix, we just put phillips we didn't put any secret whatever screw bit that you would need. We literally let the users we want the users to open it up. I'm not going to go into tons of details with it.

We got them.

You could open it up.

You can open it up and take a look and then it will electrocute you and laser beams will come out.

All right, so I'm going to go with some of the questions we got from some of our listeners here and others. Number one, does it have a battery backup if in case you have a brown out or a power outage and hold and run things for a few minutes?

So we've got a ups coming out. The goal was actually September and COVID happened, so it'll probably get pushed out probably to December, probably more than likely January. February wonderful.

For those that don't know, brown out, for tech, brown out is when you live in an area and the power gets so low it will actually kill your computer, but it doesn't quite kill everything in the house. It's common in some Puerto rico, I guess, would do it. It's where it has larger cities, but the infrastructure isn't perfect. It happens in a lot of smaller towns that weren't planning on delivering consistent electricity to you. For some reason, when you get a brownout or an actual power outage, a few minutes goes a long way, and that's what the power supply backup does for you, just like you would for a computer.

Just being special.

Again.

Rob'S being special. Brown out shouldn't mean that.

Jimmy oh, I thought you're talking about my underwear.

Right, that's brown street.

All right, so questions down the list. What devices can we access with this? Do you have linux support? So this comes down to more hardware. Could someone jailbreak it and put on their own operating system?

Not that he has documented or he doesn't think that's funny.

We've got actually a lot of our a lot. Of our backers are tech guys. Like I said, they're Silicon Valley guys. And I know that some of them are actively trying to hack it right now. I'll leave it at that. And we've actually, like they've said to us, want to try to do this. And we said do it because this is what we need. We need the speed ducts to make it get better.

So is it only for fish or plants as well? I think we explained that one quite well. That is for the entire tank. Can Felix support a public size reef aquarium? And if so, is there any limitations to massive aquariums? Say like 25,000 gallons?

I mean, in terms of at the end of the day, it's the power consumption, right? There's only so many watts available. Right. And so, yes, there would be a limitation. I mean, if you've got a 5000 watt heater, you wouldn't be able to run it through Felix. That's not to say that the control board, like we've talked to, for example, of the Vancouver Aquarium, which is a huge North American, very well known aquarium. And so they were looking at possibly using some of the tech, and we're open to that. But you had mentioned we get these crazy emails, people asking can we use Felix for grow tents? Can you use Felix for chicken coops? The reality is you can. Right. And so at the end of the day, it's really about what are the monitors that you need on your system and do they work on a protocol that we can accept? Right. I would say 80% of the monitors could do it.

Going into logistics on this, I'm going to pick on the situation. Let's pretend that you were our friend Sean creamer, right? Because Sean kramer does use a lot of different controllers on his he has a 2000 gallon roof tank. How many feet was that, Jimmy? 18ft long?

Yeah.

So it wouldn't be enough sensors for someone like Sean kramer because he wants multiple sensors in his tank. So if he wanted to do something, I'm sure that he could contact Felix directly and see if he can get a customized quote for building an independent system. Because Sean is a very unique case, or like a large aquarium like they were doing. But if you're trying to do something where you want multiple sensors and you're using over eight devices as your limit, it's not necessarily gallons in this situation.

So, a couple of things. There's a Felix slave unit that will come out pushing for it at the end of September right now. So you could have 1632 plugs if you wanted to, you could control all of it. So that's not an issue. In terms of monitor, we've announced this to our backers already and they've shared it on different posts as well. But we have an I two C connector coming out. It's a dongle, essentially, that will allow for a lot of these different sensors and monitor probes and stuff like that to be connected right into Felix, right. I think Rob, you'd be familiar with the itc center, itc protocol, right? Yes. So really at the end of the day, again, going back to the vision of Felix is yeah, of course we want you to be able to hook up any monitor. In fact, we have this partnership with seni, but we know that other hobbyists use different monitoring systems. Right. And so why can't they hook it up to Felix? They should be able to. And so that's the end goal is really anybody should be able to hook up their different devices to Felix.

So eventually it will be able to accommodate anything you want to plug in with a bunch of extra slave units. And these are going to be potentially wireless. Correct. So if I wanted to, let's talk about the very near future. I have what, 70ft across my basement and I have tanks spread across it, Jimmy. So I could have potentially a handful of slave units across all my tanks and run my entire weird basement filled with fish on one Felix device with the slave units. Correct?

Absolutely. And you know what's really interesting? There's a big company, I won't name the name yet, but they came to us about a year ago and they said, listen, we're getting out of wifi because it's such a beast. And honestly, you never know what the network is going to look like, the firewall is going to look like. And so you have to create all these different scenarios within your wifi protocols to bypass all this crap, essentially. Right? And so they came to us and they said, listen, we're getting out of wifi completely. We're just going to go bluetooth because we just hate, hate Wi Fi. And so and we said, great, get out of wifi. And the problem is that you're going to have is that your consumer is connected and so, you know, great that you have bluetooth, great that you can control in front of your system, but what if I'm away? And so what they asked us to do was to build an actual bridge for them via bluetooth through the Felix. And so now their system that is now completely bluetooth can run on our wifi. We've got a bunch of announcements like that coming down the pipeline very soon here. But it's like manufacturers like that when you're talking about like how what's the kind of the diversity of devices that can connect to Felix. Well, it's unlimited. It's just what we want to go after.

Right, so your Felix devices have bluetooth built in for their device or other devices. So that way then it acts as the hub that connects it then to the network.

No, it doesn't have bluetooth built in it right now. So we have a bluetooth dongle essentially to the USB. When you're talking about the different hardwares that we'll come up with that's what you'll see from Felix, you'll see dongles and different hardwares to come out that will connect you to the different devices you want to connect into Felix.

So next question is, does it have any search protection installed on the eight block?

So we've got a built in fuse that obviously just when there's too much search. So you do have to replace the fuse.

Oh, it's even replaceable. It's not something that they have to that's hard soldered like that to get a no, they can replace the fuse.

Yeah, it's literally a 40 cent, you know, Amazon fuse.

Excellent. How likely is Felix to kill me when the AI takes over? I'm just reading the question. Just reading the question.

What was that computer? What was that? AI computer on terminator. What was that called? T skynet. Sky net. There you go. You know, like, I think there's way more AI that you should be scared of than Felix.

Well, see, that's why they have a.

Few years, because skynet requires more than the 40 cent fuse.

Yeah, no, I think, you know, the thing with the AI is that love it or hate it, it's it's here to stay. And at the end of the day, I think for the aquarium industry, it can attract more hobbyists, more users. And I think that's the ultimate goal when you have something beautiful. I don't know, I just have this kind of crazy notion that you should share and other people should enjoy it. And so really, that's what the ai's intention is to maintain these systems with the best possible parameters for whatever you're keeping. Right.

Next question is, could this be adapted, or is there already software being programmed to control for reptiles? Is the intention, yeah.

So we will have 30 days. We will make an announcement that we will have a humidity and temperature sensor with a ground sensor that you can hook into Felix, or you can use the itc dongle and hook up your own units to it as well. But, yeah, for sure, the terrarium vivarium long underserviced, and it's actually quite simple for us to get into that.

That seems like a natural extension, considering the planted aquarium focus from the beginning.

We saw one earlier, too, where the people were asking about your chicken coop. Did you see that?

That's what he was saying. Yeah, I mean, you could use for.

Your chicken coop, too, right?

I mean, just for you. Jimmy, I don't have a chicken coop yet.

Not yet.

So we have a hard question for you because we can't just do the easy ones. Why does your monitoring system look identical to the seni one?

I think I mentioned before, it is powered by seni. We don't shy away from it. In fact, if you open up one of these boxes, you see the Felix logo on it, and then you see the nice little sennheise logo on the water slides yeah. So it's 100% it's powered by Senate. They were a natural fit for us because we were really focused on the whole plug and play aspect of it. And they definitely have the best plug and play water monitoring system out there.

So the other questions, I think, were already answered. We did a good job of going through a lot of can I use this for this? Can I use this for this? And I think we really hammered those home. Better yet, see, we got to watch Joe from Joe Shroomshack on social media. He got one of these as an early tester. And what has his feedback been?

Well, I mean, Joe is part of our beta group as well, and I think he is specifically wanting to use Felix as a co2 system for his plans. Right. So he's very adamant on the iftt rules being there. I think his overall experience has been good. There's definitely been some glitches in the system. And when you're launching a beta, of course, that's things that you recognize that are going to happen is that you're going to have glitches and so forth. So we've had those glitches and we've addressed them and we will keep on addressing them and overcoming them. So I think Joe is a good guy to really ask directly, actually, how his experience has been, but I think overall it's been good.

Yeah, I like that answer. Just go pick on Joe yourself and have him praise Tom, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

I have a quick tech question. I see you have the smart app and everything to be able to access it, but like my home router, I can log in via web browser to see settings and change things up. Is there a way to directly access it that way over the network?

Not yet. We'll open that up probably closer to Christmas. That's actually one of the most asked questions in our backer group, is when we will come up with a web interface. We'll get to that for sure.

Winning.

Winning the question nobody's asked yet. What does Felix stand for?

It's not the cat, is it?

It is the cat. Actually. I think for me, just on the marketing side, people always ask us, why would you have a friggin cat as a mascot or brand for fish? Because people talk about it. Right. And so anything that's interesting that makes things people talk, then I'm all for it. Besides my son, I think at that time, he was nine at that time, and he blurted off Felix. And I said, yeah, Felix, that makes sense, let's do it. And that kind of just went into that tangent.

I mean, it's either that or the Propolator 9000 and that just didn't seem appropriate.

And this was actually George Farmers. What he said about it, as well as Felix is typically in the UK known as, like, help a butler. Right. And so we thought, well, that's exactly what Felix is. It's kind of like your butler does everything for you.

Damn. jeeves was taken, wasn't it? Or lycos. There you go. That's their add on product. Don't give secrets away. So, Adam, do you have any questions?

Yeah, so I was intrigued about the reptile one, and I have a question.

Is there a way to hook it.

Up to, like, another country's weather? We're just going for reptiles here because that's kind of the idea that popped in my head. Say I wanted to have some madagascar species. Is there a way that I could have an app hook up to the felix so that it'll. Tell me what the temps and everything is in the jungle, humidity level in that area, and then it'll turn that into my tank.

So wait, before you answer, are you saying that let's pretend it's like madagascar?

Right.

There have to be like a typhoon. You want to emulate the low temperatures. That would be happening during a storm as well.

Then I'll send over my ex wife.

Okay, I want to hear this because you don't understand.

Some of these reptiles and fish breed during different things. And if I can emulate that where it happens, in their natural habitat, I.

Could breed them better be more successful.

If you don't have this, we should start funding to put together, like, country sensors. Like, you have one place in a random jungle where it's measuring humidity, temperature, light, and then you try to emulate it on people's Felixes and watch the house burned down.

You know what? Actually, it's not far fetched because there's data loggers in different parts of the world, all over the world, actually, that measure the data and they feed it into different organizations. Right. So all that data is up for the taking. It's open data. Right. So that's what I said I keep going back to with Felix. A lot of people look at us naturally. We are an aquarium company. We've built this controller for the aquarium company. But on the back side of it, we are 100% a data company. We're very interested in data. And so what you're talking about, even for, let's say, frogs? Frogs really need ideal conditions to breed. If you could replicate that, what would that look like? Right, it's doable. The data is there, so we just need some time.

And clearly bottle glasses like me to help you out. Tom? Go ahead, adam I just thought that.

Was a good idea because it'd be easier to breed certain frogs and reptiles and stuff. That just popped into my head. I get weird ideas.

Well, I'll take it to the next level. Adam what I was saying before this NASA research done about five or six years ago, and they did it on the iss rate, and it was in conjunction with mit. And what they were doing I'm going to geek out for a minute here.

What they did was keep going.

And I think, Rob, you kind of brushed on it a little bit. When aquascapers, what they'll do is they'll turn co2 or they'll turn light on at certain times, hoping to improve the system. Well, what mit and NASA found out, they published all of this like, four or five years ago. But what they realized is actually, if you introduce light at crazy times not normal, regular daylight time, but in the middle of the night, from 01:00 a.m to around 224 for an hour and 24 minutes, you could actually boost photosynthesis and you could actually force the plant, in essence, to grow faster. And so they did all this research and at the end of it, I can't remember the percentage, but it was significant enough to report it. So my point is that somebody somewhere in the world has found a great setting, for lack of a better word. They've created this perfect ecosystem inside their aquarium atrarium Vivarium, and they're breeding like crazy. everybody's happy inside. The plants are going crazy, the coral is going crazy, all of that stuff. Now, if we can actually see two or three and I'm saying this kind of just to be simplistic, but if we can see two or three of those settings replicated over and over again and having success over and over again. Well, the next time you put that species into your aquarium, like you put that coral or you put that plant, you can say with definitive backing, hey, this is the ideal setting, and we're going to take all your devices, and we're going to match it up as close as possible to give your animal the best chance possible to have its best habitat. So that's really the heart of where we're going with everything.

I think that's so incredibly important when it comes to these farmers who are breeding around here. We have a lot of turkey farms, there's a lot of chicken farms. They've done so much research, and if you can get that chicken to lay one extra egg a day and you've got 50,000 chickens, that is huge production, and that's how they watch their life. So careful, they've done a lot of research in the poultry industry, and so the same thing could be in effect, too, for your plants and your fish, if you are able to get them to maximum produce. If you're farming and trying to do a wholesale type of business, I think this would be just the best thing you could spend money on.

Yeah, it's so true. I'll tell you guys a story. I was in Spain. I used to go there quite a bit before COVID because our tech team is actually out in Spain. But I visited this farm and they breed seahorses, and I don't know if you guys are familiar with seahorses and the percentage that actually died in order to get one, but it's very high. And so one of the questions I asked them is like, why do you have such a high mortality rate with these seahorses? And the breeder could not tell me. He's like, well, it could be a number of different things. It could be this, this. And I said, well, it seems kind of arbitrary to just randomly have, like, 80% of your livestock die, right? And so there's got to be a reason. And so that was actually one of the driving factors around. This whole AI was looking at that and saying, well, wait a minute. There is a reason why this is happening. It's just that you just don't see it. You don't see it with your eyes. You don't see it with your different monitors. There's a reason, and we need to figure that out. And so we've actually been working with that farm for the last year, developing a bunch of stuff with them.

Have you had any success or got any questions answered?

No, and I'm very upfront about that, because AI is a long term game. It's not easy. It really takes a lot of data. I can tell you that we have a lot of data, and very soon we'll be able to recognize that data. We can make some sort of hypothesis right now on what's going on, but we don't have enough data to say definitively what's going on.

And so just by finding this data and looking at it, when your deaths are occurring, if you can fix that problem, they will significantly increase their production and profitability.

Yeah, the thing was when I got into this whole AI, one of our advisors is actually one of the head researcher guys at Apple, and he teaches at carnegie mellon. And anyways, I went out to visit him to try to absorb all this AI stuff, and he said, the common mistake that most people make about AI is they think that everything should work perfectly, and that's where the AI learns. In fact, it's the complete opposite when you're looking at Tesla and the autonomous stuff that they're building out, they obviously hope and pray that there's never going to be an accident. But it's the accidents that actually make the AI strong. Right. It's when things die or when somebody does something irrational, like sideswipes you because they're drunk. That's what AI can't capture. It can't make an assumption on that until it actually physically encounters it. Right. And so that's what you're kind of in the back of your mind. Yeah, I want all these seahorses to thrive, and I don't want any of them to lose their life. But where it actually becomes really effective is when something bad happens.

Nobody's putting pennies in their damn tank.

Yeah.

Someone's salty. So we were talking with one of our guests on the podcast, scott I remember his last name from Project paiba. Yes, Scott and piaba. I always get that wrong. piaba. piaba. Pyeba.

Pyeba.

See, that's how I get made fun of his organization is trying to find ecological ways that are safe for the environment, for species to be harvested out of places like the Amazon rainforest. And they've shown that the flood season kills way more fish than they harvest, so they find better ways to do it, to grab wild supply, to support the people in those areas and protect rainforests. It's a wonderful project. And Scott had a dream. He was mentioning on our podcast that he has a named harvester or farmer in South America that takes your fish. They mark with a location tag on the bag. The bag goes to some place like seagris Farms, get shipped out to either directly to the customer or a store. You get a card when you purchase this fish, showing where it's been, and you can go online and literally try to monitor and have an aquarium, be smart enough to replicate the exact area where it's come from as far as temperature, lighting, all of the goodies water parameters. And that's his future dream, that you can actually know where it came from, imitate the environment where it came from and give that the best ecological care and know that that's where your fish came from and you're doing the best for that fish. And I really believe after this conversation that we're closer than we ever had before.

The crazy thing about all of this is the data is there. The technology has always been there. It needs to come further. Right. But I agree with you, Rob. We're there. I think three years from now, we'll look back and we'll have a laugh and say, hey, how did we get here?

You got all the puzzle pieces, you just got to put them together.

I always find it very interesting, like when you talk to some of the older brands out there, and I'm going to get the heat for this, but some of these brands out there, dinosaur brands, they're in this little bubble of their own and they don't see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture for us, obviously, is to create these awesome habitats for these fish and different animals, right? But also it's to grow the hobby I want my kids to be able to. And my 13 year old is amazing. He didn't really get into this until last year, but now he's like all in everything. He watches all the YouTube guys, he's just so into these tanks now. Right, but how do we get more people interested in it? Right? And it's definitely not by trying to protect everything and so forth. So, anyways, I digress.

So the last couple of questions that we have, this is again the exclusive first interview anywhere that we can finally talk about Felix and talk to you directly. So, number one, we appreciate that opportunity, but can you give us some inside secrets of something that's in Project X? It's top secret. Give us a leak that no one's heard about yet. What's coming that you haven't talked about, sir?

We're so damn transparent. There is something that's coming out. There's a company that we've been engaged with for the better part of a year and they do monitoring and they do it really well. And their technology is technology is, I think, better than most technology out there in terms of measuring the different water parameters, especially on the salt side. And we're going to be making an announcement very quickly about our partnership with them. Yeah.

Any other hints?

And if you have to kill Rob, that's fine. He's expendable.

I am expendable.

Absolutely dead.

We can't say the company, can we say where they're from?

They are American North America.

That ruled it down right there. I was hoping it was going to be like this one small country that could possibly only be researched, but never mind Tanzania. Tanzania. Also, for those that are listening and heard about this wonderful product, you can go to your website where you have the product. Again, it is in beta. It's not necessarily the hardware that you were explaining, it's in beta, it's the uses for it and trying to aggregate data. So if you want to become a part of this beta and join the Felix team, go to felixsmart.com and you can order your own. Before I go for the last statement, just a quick anecdote on the Felix Light and the Felix Pro.

Yes, the Felix light is the controller. You've got eight sockets, six usbs, and it comes with the water monitor that measures PH, ammonia, temperature, light and conditions like par, per, kelvin and so forth. And then the Felix Pro is the full meal deal. You get the 360 camera thrown in there and you get to view your aquarium from a totally different perspective. By the way, the camera, if you've got some VR goggles in about, I want to say six days, seven days, you're going to be able to throw that camera into your 3d goggles or use your 3d goggles and view your aquarium in a completely different perspective.

Is that like the Samsung goggles that you put your phone into? Or is it like the oculus of the five?

In the simplest form, you could literally do a diy, cut out cardboard and put your phone there. It's like the Google. Yeah.

But you can use your vibe and all your other high end wonderful. That's awesome.

Take beer drinking to a whole new level.

So it's just the camera or is there anything else that comes with Pro?

It's the addition of the camera.

Excellent. Well, again, if you want to be a part of this project, go to the website, Felixmart.com, jump in. And if there's any other people that are listening, because this, again, was originally a backed indiegogo campaign, is there any other ways that people can support Felix? Maybe become a virtual backer? Even though the campaign is closed?

In terms of the actual backing itself. No, the campaign is closed, but like you said, you can definitely support us by pre ordering or ordering. We're completely sold out now until September. We'll get some more in, obviously, for orders, but I think if you jump on our page and kind of read about us and so forth, we're really open to connecting to different people and having discussions. Right. I think our openness and being transparent, if you've got ideas and stuff like that, share them. We're heavily, heavily on Facebook right now and Instagram, so definitely reach out to us there.

Wonderful. Well, is there anything you think we missed, Tom?

I don't think so. It was good. I went into this bit of a tangent because I put on my geek hat and start geeking out. But yeah, at the heart of it, it's really just to make things simple for existing hobbyists and future hobbyists.

Well, fantastic. Thanks again so much for coming on the show. Tom and Jimmy, Adam, you guys got questions?

No, all my questions were answered. I'm just totally fascinated by technology. Me being the old guy's podcast and anything to make it simple is just fantastic.

Adam good, too.

That was my idea, was creating typhoons in my tanks.

You know, I can bring over a case of beer and I can start a typhoon in your tank, if you know what I mean. Let me know.

Well, thanks again, guys. Again, we appreciate everything that you've done. Tom coming on the show. I know it was a lot of troubleshooting beginning, but keep us up to date. We'd be happy to share it with our fans. And again, if you guys want to support the podcast, go to Quarryguyspodcast.com, make sure to like and subscribe. But if you want to donate directly, we have the donation button on the bottom of the podcast. It helps get split on until next week.

Jimmy hey, be safe out there.

You can put your pants back on now.

Thanks.

I got that part. Let me replay that. Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent.

To be so sexy until I heard adam's voice. Go frank yourself.

Don't you know that's my boy? Don't you know?