Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob golson. All right, guys, welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast. I am your favorite host, Robbie olsen, and the subpar host is is Jim colby here? How are you doing, buddy?

I am wonderful. What a great weekend we had. We rocked it hard, didn't we?

We did. We went and saw Great White because not only were you kind of sewer a fish, but also burned out 80s pants. I'm just kidding. It was a good time. I went backstage with you. You hooked me up. We had a great time this week.

Yeah, we did. You've heard about what we talked about on the podcast. One of my other hobbies is we love the 80s rock and roll. So on Saturday, we took rob's rock and roll 80s virginity away. We took him, saw Great White and vixen at our local casino. We did meet and greets. We hung out, we got autographs. It was a pretty good time.

I didn't even get offered heroin, so I feel like I've got not quite the full experience, but close.

Yeah. And how was the opening band, dixon? rob's, goal. This is an all girl band.

I've never been more attracted to 50 plus two year old women more than betty White. betty White is still above them, but that was pretty hot.

Yeah. If betty White was banging on the drumsbacker, you would have wet yourself.

I would. I may not even be here right now. So we also have Adam nashar el nashar. I'm going to get that correct someday. How are you doing, buddy? Pretty good.

How about you guys?

Hey.

We are rocking.

Where were you, man? We were at the concert. We're having a good time.

I was meeting all my friends down in the cities this last weekend.

So you're down in Minneapolis?

Yes, I was in Minneapolis, St. Paul, visiting all my northern Minnesota friends I hadn't seen in like, five years.

You're forgiven this one.

Yeah. Next time.

So we have the specialists of guests today. We have. Finally the guys from the Ohio Fish Rescue. We didn't even do the intro because this whole podcast is going to be doing an interview. And again, our subject of the day is talking about rescuing fish. We talk about every intro of the podcast. We want to do an entire podcast about it. So who better than big, Rich and Josh? Introduce yourself, gentlemen.

Hey, how are you doing? It's big rich here.

And this is Josh. You guys are talking to Ohio Fish Rescue.

So Jim has so many questions. I had Adam and Jim do some homework on you guys just to see exactly where your tanks are at and everything else. And before the podcast, I had to start cutting off questions like, no, ask them during the podcast. Come on, guys. So, again, appreciate doing the time. We know you guys got a ton of work to do. So can't thank you enough. But before we get into the interview and questions, we got a little house cleaner to do.

What's that?

So, number one, we have emails again from listeners.

Did your mom email us again?

My mom did not. She'd be like, what are fish? No, I'm just kidding. My mom's actually getting back into fish hobby. She kept a little bit up in her day, but she's actually got some koi bits here on the counter for her and she's super excited to get back in. But our fan message us, Leonard is his first name. His last name will be held secret because that's what we do around here. And he said, good morning, guys. First and foremost, I want to say how much I enjoyed the podcast. You guys do a wonderful job. I was wondering if you could dedicate a podcast episode to just placos. First explain why no one should have a common plato unless they have 125 gallon or larger. Then start with the basics of care breeding. Talk about different varieties and why they cost so damn much. I love platos, and there are many to collect just like them all, like Koi or guppy, aquaris do. Thank you. Look forward to the next episode of your podcast, Leonard. And he also sent us pictures of his collection, and they look to be infant hybrid bristlenose platos. They have the nice black and white patterns. Okay, so inspiration of the pictures, we're starting to get in from some of our audience without ever asking for them. We love your pictures.

Thank you so much, Leonard.

So we made a fan fishboard on our website. So if you go to aquariumguyspodcast.com, at the bottom, you'll see the fan fishboard and it'll be ever changing as more and more pictures come in. Again, we just have a few listeners that send us pictures. We never made a call for them. So now that we're making a call, any pictures you send us that you give us permission to we'll put them on the board and share with everybody. This is a fun community and we love to see what you guys have.

Good or bad or even pictures of betty White, you can just send them in.

Those may not be posted on the board. That's just for my collection.

Yeah, for Rich and Josh. You guys. On the podcast, for the first time, robbie has a very weird hey, it's healthy. No, it's weird.

I'm a damn American.

He loves a betty White, and apparently betty White has some what did you say, Rob? Are they risque pictures? Are they nude pictures on the Internet?

They are in the, I think their 50s or 60s. But she actually did some poses before she was famous for a playboy, like.

A pin up type thing.

Yeah, we talked about this, I think on our first episode.

First episode, we actually got a lot of response from that after we go through the whole gamut of beautiful fish people that we can get a hold of. We're going to try to track down betty White before she dies.

Good luck.

Keep saying that, man. You keep saying that, but we've only.

Got well, she lives in her 90s.

She is and she is such a big pet.

She's 98.

Yeah, she's she loves the pets. She loves the Bob barker type pets. You know, spade, new to your pets, take care of your pets.

Bob barker was secretly a convict keeper. That's why he said that.

Really?

Right?

You're making stuff up now.

No, but Leonard just want to do a shout out again. Answering your question. Absolutely. We're going to do a playco podcast. We have so many podcasts that are planned and so many guest stars, but this is definitely on our list. If someone's listening or someone has a suggestion of who we should bring on as that pleco expert, we have a couple of ideas, but certainly give us a call, email us or contact info is on our website, Aquariumgeistpodcast.com, but that is certainly in the making.

And Leonard, one other thing, too, if you want to check out. amazon's magazine had a wonderful fancy pleco magazine. What was it, about eight pages? Nine pages. It was just a beautiful it was.

A dedicated pleco special.

Yeah. And they had some of the best pleco people in that magazine, and they showed some of the pictures, and you look at these pictures of all these plecos, and you kind of go, this guy has got thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into just the equipment. It was really cool.

So to go down our list again, we are also looking into some sponsors. We've been contacted by a couple of different people. So what we're doing is we're not just sponsoring anyone. Again, the podcast is still pretty, although we're getting a bunch of listens, and we're just blown away of how this is really blown.

Yeah. Thank you very much, everybody, for listening.

Thank you.

But what we're doing is if we're getting a sponsor, we're going to vet them, we're going to order some of their product. We're going to make sure that we've done our own tests and in house here to make sure that you're getting a quality product if we're going to put our name behind it. So look to see something in the future. And also for those who are listening, events and expos. We want to hear what's in your area, what expos you think that we should go join? There's definitely a couple of different expos close to us. I know there's a really big one yearly in Chicago and even doing more background homework to make sure we're doing our due diligence on the Ohio Fish Rescue. There is a monster expo, is that correct, gentlemen? In Florida?

Yes. Monster Fish bash in Florida.

So those are definitely on our list. But if there's something else that you guys think that we just can't live without. We need the aquarium guys. There certainly message that to us as well.

And Chicago was aqua shella.

Right. Well, there's actually more than that. There's a lot in Chicago.

Right? Well, the big one we were just at was aqua shella and we sat there and signed autographs for like 6 hours. It was crazy.

So when was that load? Was it just recently? In the last few weeks?

Yeah, that was three or four weeks ago. Three weeks ago. And it's put on by coral. Twelve G. The guy's name is George. And it's all like psychedelic. You walk in, there's just fluorescent everything, and all the corals are lit up. Fluorescent. They have fluorescent glow paints where they did the whole front of the place where you walk through and there's like smoke going off and fluorescent and black lights and fluorescent paints and it's just crazy. And then you have to wear these glasses to walk through the place that enhances the color of the corals under the fluorescent. And there are so many beautiful corals there. And of course Ohio Fish Rescue was there and we'd sign all the autographs and I was signing T shirts and hats. And even this one guy's belly wanted his belly signed and then he was going to get a tattoo of it. It was crazy.

So I got a question. So when you're at these merch tables, do you ever sell like full mullet wigs? You should do that, man.

I'd buy one.

So for those that don't know or haven't the Ohio Fish Rescue videos, rich has the best the best mullet I've ever seen in my life.

Makes Billy Ray cyrus look like a pussy.

Joe Dirt is jealous. The other thing is Jimmy what do.

You got there, Rob?

Will you quit staring at my tits already? I know I'm wearing this new aquarium guys T shirt, and I know you're jealous because you need to buy yours tonight.

Do I have to buy mine tonight?

You do.

I'm just going to buy mine tonight, too.

I'm just going to wait for your mom to buy me one like she bought you one. Oh, God.

Slam.

Get up.

See, I think the next day we're going to leave the podcast tonight. It is Wednesday. I think you have tomorrow is the last day of 15% off. Certainly go to aquariumguyspodcast.com. In the bottom, you'll see the merch store. We have a bunch of different choices. And again, I did make a terrible promise a couple of podcasts ago that if we get 20 different people purchasing from the store, not 20 total items, 20 different people purchasing that I take pictures in an aquarium guy's crop top. So still on. As much as I regret it, I will do this.

Rob'S is a large gentleman. Are you six two?

I am 6363. £350. That's a whole lot of man.

You're a little bit bigger than me.

I just need the mullet. That's what I need.

You know what? After we get off this, I'm going to call Billy Ray cyrus, make fun of that pussy because he doesn't have a decent haircut.

Oh, my God.

Back in the day, I got to meet Billy Ray cyrus. I used to work for a grocery store for years and years and years, and we had a thing. Our event here is called We fest, and it's the largest music country festival in the nation at the time. And Billy Ray performed. I delivered backstage. And there's Billy, Ray and trish. And this was in the mullet days. And he had two little kids with him. I imagine one of them was miley, and I probably should have ran her over, I guess. I don't know.

Something then you hit it like a wrecking ball.

No, I'm not hitting it like a wrecking ball. You do snug it.

Do snug it. That is a new one for any podcast.

That's a new one, but that's going.

Into the Christmas end of your clips.

But Billy Ray, he was rocking the mullet back then. I don't know if he's still doing it or not and stuff, but Rich has got some fabulous fabio type hair. Check it out on YouTube. These guys have got a bazillion. Is it a bazillion? Probably more different videos on there. And they often make fun of themselves as like we do. So it's a lot of fun. Check it out.

We're just happy that Jimmy does fish because he clearly can't do math.

Can't do math.

How much you put in there? Ten millimeter. milliliters? Just put a cap 10 ml. Just put the cap in.

Take a swig out of the bottle. Shut up.

Usually a cap. Just fixes everything.

Yeah.

All right. Again, aquariumgeistpodcast.com, bottom of the website, fish store. And, you know, let's get in the interview.

Let's get this going.

We've done enough.

We've done enough damage.

So, gentlemen, again, thank you for coming. But a couple of things I want to cover is, number one, we want to know more about you, more about the background of what you guys do day to day, and your organization. But also, we want to hear some crazy stories of fish rescue. So one thing at a time. So, number one, you guys, of course, live in Ohio, and you guys are known for rescuing fish in your own personal extended house with over 80,000 gallons of aquarium space, right? Where did this all start there?

When did you become legally insane?

That's what I wanted.

When did you okay, well, let's go back to I think it was 1981. No, it's earlier than that, because I was seven years old when my uncle gave me a ten gallon tank, and I knew as soon as I had it, as I was setting it up, I needed bigger, so I went to a 20. Then within, like a week, I went to a 55 and I was like, this is a tank, this is a big boy. And within a week I was like, this is too small, I need bigger. And that was the disease that hit me when I was a young kid and throughout life here I raised three boys and my youngest Josh is on the podcast with us. He has already finished college and now he works as an engineer for the city of Cleveland. And in that time of raising the three kids, we kept upgrading that whole time. And now what happened was with his older brother, I got into the cars, well, building cars and hot rods and all that. Josh was out there handing us tools and he just hated it because me and ritchie are working on the car and Josh is handing us tools and, you know, next thing you know we'd find him passed out on the garage floor with his dog Flash. And you know, the kid's like seven years old and he's just tired of handing us things and he goes to sleep. So now he grew up not liking cars. How do you not like cars? So now that richie is gone and on his way in life, me and Josh needed to get into something together. So I built that camaro that's in our videos all the time with richie. So now I needed something to get into with Josh. So we already at this point had 1000 gallon tank and a few other tanks. And I decided to get into the fish with him because he really got into fish. He was always excited when I got a new fish and he was now old enough to start looking for deals and finding fish and surprising me with the deal he found. So we started this fish rescue thing mostly because we had big tanks and word of mouth gets around. So all of our friends, all of our people are handing this fish left and right and we were getting overrun with fish. And so I decided to start this Ohio fish rescue thing and me and Josh build it up into what we can. And it's a father and son together thing. And a lot of these little rescue start up because they want free fish. And you got a guy with 125 gallon and a 90 gallon and a 55 gallon and he starts a rescue in New Hampshire or something. It's not a rescue, it's a guy wanting free fish. There's a lot of good hearted people out there that do start rescues and can only do what they can do with what little they have. But we were able to do more, so we did more. And it's all about the fish at this point. So when we get fish in and we're trying to show them off to people as don't buy these because look how big they get. Here's one at four foot, here's one at five foot. Here's this, they get up to three foot and you have them in a 55 gallon, what are you going to do? And so on. And it built from there. So now we are running Ohio Fish Rescue, and things have just spun wildly out of control just a little bit.

Just a little bit understatement of the century bra. So, Josh, from your perspective, you're not sick of it, are you? We just want to make sure that you're not leaving. Sure, you're handing him tools and pumps and filters, but we hope that you stay in the hobby.

Have you watched the videos?

Yeah. Tools and pumps and filters.

Oh, there you go. Thank you.

We're briefly trying to figure out who's a little crazier.

I'm usually the one that has to get in the tanks, who has to catch all the fish out of the tanks, clean the tanks. He usually gets in there, he'll put up all the fish food and feed them. He'll make sure everything is good on a daily basis. And I come home from work, jump in the tank, fix this, fix that. We'll have a little burst, a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, and we'll get some sort of project done. So say we got to move this tank tonight. I'll come in. That's where you see all the action on most of the videos and then all the more boring stuff that you guys don't really want to see. That's when we do it in our off time either. I'll spend time on myself doing it. He'll do it while I'm at work. And we just try and keep on going together and work as a team to try and get this whole organization ahead.

So besides the fish that you guys rescue, is there like a Josh and Rich section? Like, these are my fish, those are his fish.

Oh, yeah. We have these things called arabimus. They are our fish. And we have brutus is the biggest one. He's about 40 inches now. And before brutus, there was Big bubba. Now he was five foot, and everyone knew us for our big arabima. The problem was, this was ten years ago, and he stopped eating one day, then the next day he didn't eat. So we're starting to get worried. The third day he was dead. We didn't know at that time about septicemia. Here's the problem. You're looking down at the fish and you don't see the red streaks on their underbelly, and they needed a shot of antibiotics. Well, that was the biggest problem. We lost a lot of fish to this over the years and never knew what it was and never knew why they died. You know, if a fish just stops eating and three days later he's dead, you know that you chalk that up as an unknown death type syndrome. And later we find out more and more and more, and we learn as we go to where. Now, we need a vet on hand or somebody that can come by and prescribe antibiotics and let us know exactly how much to give certain pound fish to save him from this disease, which they can be saved, but they can only be saved by a shot of antibiotics, which you don't run into in a normal fish environment. I mean, how many times have you given your fish shots? Nobody ever has. This is something that comes up in the public aquarium, sea Worlds zoos and we could have saved some fish over the years if we'd have known about this. So right now, that is our biggest problem. We need to have either like an intern or a vet that's willing to work with us and help us out that way. We now know how to figure out what fish has septicemia. That's the one disease we haven't been able to bring fish back from. We figured out everything else, but septicemia is you get the red streaks on the belly and their butthole gets really extended and huge and you don't see it because you're looking down at the fish and you're only seeing the top of them, like coy.

It's not just septicemia either, it's a more specific kind of septicemia and it's antarctic septicemia and it mostly strikes in catfish and barbs.

The only thing yeah, that's one of our largest type of fish we get our catfish.

What does that cause by? Is there anything specific that brings that on?

Catfish? Just like humans, you can be feeling great forever and then all of a sudden you come down sick. Whether you went outside and your bare feet in the snow or you just were exhausted that day, somehow your body immune system got worn down and then you got sick. Well, all these diseases are actually in fish just like they're in humans, but your immune system fights it off. Well, when a sick gets transported, they are in stress and these diseases can come out, they can shine and take over. And that's where we get a lot of our problems from. The septicemia seems to be the hardest thing to come back from. We completely believe in fresh water changes daily. Sometimes we've even done 75% water changes with ro water and same exact temperature, declarnated ro water before and then they're living in beautiful prime water every day being changed. And that cures a lot of sicknesses. Believe it or not, salt cures a lot of diseases and then you have your different medications that help cure. But nothing cures septicemia other than a shot of antibiotics. So there's where we hit a brick road. You or I cannot go to the store and buy a shot of antibiotics. It's just not sold, it's not readily available. So there's where we need the most help is a veterinarian or a vet assistant, somebody that has access to this. And when I call and say, this fish has got this disease. I have a microscope. I can check it out. When this fish has this disease, I need this type of antibiotics. They're willing to subscribe or prescribe it to us and we can give it to the fish.

The only time I've ever dealt with injections, like three or four times I've had people come with specialty koi and one with an alligator guard. And again, you couldn't get to south over the counter. You had to go to a vet. And the look that I got from my veterinarian when I had to ask for antibiotics is like, for what again? And this dude is used to dealing with cows. He's just fish.

Really?

Like, how big a fish? I tell him, well, it's 30 inches. I have to have something. Well, he's pulling out textbooks, going, yeah, I think this is what the dose you're going to need? I'm like, all right, we'll give it a go. You know where to poke it in, right? Yeah, I got that. We're okay.

Last week we had Julie Filto from Cigarettes Farms on and I've been there probably 15 times. Rob has been there a couple of times with me. And they have a vet on staff with J Three.

Well, it's a three text.

It's a free text.

Yes. Senior vet with three other they either have interns or actual other text.

Right.

So they've got four people on staff there all the time to treat their.

Staff because that's what we need here.

And we can reach out to her and see if because they work with the Florida Fish Co op and the different people, and they should be able to send us in the right direction and maybe we get you guys a little bit of help and a little bit of relief there.

It's a rare deal when you have to deal with these type of diseases and there's no one else to reach to. Like, who else has eight foot arapima in their house? Yeah. No idea how to deal with this.

Just some crazy people in Ohio, I tell you that.

All right, so to walk through everything, you started out hobby. You and Josh have been doing this a full bore, and you started word of mouth, telling people that they understood you had large tanks, and then you started taking in what was the point where you realize the first time you had to like, oh, boy, we have to extend the house.

Okay, that was wow. Good question. That was basically when we started the 501 C Three. We got that through. And then at this point, it was all word of mouth. People just would bring us fish or call us and ask us if we could take their fish because everyone around, once somebody gets a big tank, it gets word of mouth out there. And we had a bunch of big tanks once we went 501 C Three and we started talking about it on Facebook, we had people coming out of the woodwork bringing us fish. And now at this point, I wasn't into it as much as we are now. So I didn't have an outlet for these fish. I just thought, well, I think at that point we had 18,000 gallons or something of just fish tanks.

Just 18,000, just a couple. We were laughing. Our buck just feeder gun.

And they kept coming in and kept coming in and the most thing was Pacoo. So I had all these fish and I'm getting overrun and I was getting worried. It wasn't until Greg woodstock came out here and he's the pond guy from Aquascape as his company, he came out here and he turned our pool into a natural ecosystem, aquascape ecosystem. And now we can have pressures and ends. You get right, it's our predator pond. And now we had an outlet, we had more area, but the problem was the fish kept on adding up. So we started getting frantic and we were calling every public aquarium around. Now, as you guys know, public aquariums don't take from the general public no more. You can't be Joe Smith and call them up and say, I have a fish. We take it. They'll just tell you no, because they were run over with diseases, bacteria, all kinds of different things. You have to be on the end public, right. They stopped taking from the public. And now with our Ohio Fish Rescue getting such a great reputation, we started talking to different public aquariums and now we started working with two or three. Next thing you know, it's like seven. Now we, we have like twelve aquariums we work with. And then there is a network of new aquariums opening up and they're all calling us for fish. We don't charge them nothing because if we can give them a three or 4000 gallon tank or even a pool, they can give them a 30,000 gallon South American display tank with a vet on staff and better food. So I only get rid of the fish to better places. Like if we get an Oscar in, we can keep the oscars here. But if you have a 200 gallon tank or 300 and you want the oscars, you can take the oscars. But if we have tiger shovel nose in the 3000 gallon tank and you come at me and you just got a new 125 and you want a 30 inch tiger shovel nose well, I'm sorry, I can't feasibly give you this 30 inch tiger shovel nose that came out of a 3000 gallon and he's going to go live his life in a 125. No. So we only get rid of our fish when they're in better conditions than we can give them. And it's worked. And now we're working with a bunch of different public aquariums. And now seagrest is the seacrest or sequest? John Seacrest. Okay. sequest is a company that opens up a. Bunch of public aquariums across the United States. We donated to them about two months ago. In their first place in New Hampshire, they opened up a new public aquarium. And then they just called me, like, two days ago and want more fish for a new public aquarium. They're opening up. This helps us out a lot. Now, we have a strict quarantine system we go through, and the public aquariums know this, so they're willing to take from us. And because it's a new public aquarium, they need fish. So I help you, you help me situation. I don't charge them nothing. I give them the fish for free because they're getting better care than they could at my place.

So we have to talk after the podcast. We're also up north, we have a different network. Again, Jimmy has been wholesaling for, you know, 30 plus years, and I've been helping him with that in the last few years. And to do that, we've actually been I've reached out to the dnr. We're on the Minnesota dnr list for anybody that wants to get rid of fish or help out in extreme situations. And we've done a lot of rescues ourselves, and we get in touch with a lot of local zoos as well. And there's a particular issue, and I'll talk about on air, I think it's an interesting issue. We have the Red River Zoo in fargo that is they like that zoo. It's a wonderful little zoo. They have red pandas. They have a lot of weird things you really don't see in even big zoos, and they're smaller, but they have had a buffalo head collection of this type of carp, and it's got such high ratings, and they have these crazy attractions, yet these big wild type carp get all kinds of love. Some of them passed away of old age. They've had them forever, and the guys that got them from in the past had them forever. So they were truly full lifespan on the fish, and they're still looking for more. So we'll have to chitchat out to the podcast to see if you know of anything.

Okay, great.

So now you have all of these connections to move fish at. So right now, just to give perspective, I want to know, number one, what's the most common fish you see, and two, how many total fish you see? On what basis?

Okay, here's the biggest problem fish we have. Now. I love Paco. They are very personable fish. They become like a house pet, a house dog. They're very smart. They're great fish. And I'm not saying they're not. Here's the problem. They sell for, like, $2.99 a piece at two inches, three inches, and they look like piranha. And anybody that can walk into a major supply store can buy three or four paku because they're cheap and a ten gallon tank and go home. Well, guess what? Two weeks from now, they're too big for that ten gallon tank. Three weeks from now, they're too big for that 20 gallon tank. And two months from now, they're too big for the 55 gallon tank you just bought for them. So they grow way too fast. They're very cheap as babies. And that's the biggest problem fish I have. And what I mean by that is I might get ten paku all between 18 and 26 inches or so, and then I'll get a red tail catfish, and then I'll get another ten paco, and then I'll get a tiger shovel nose. I'll get another five or six paco, and then I'll get a marble cat. So you see the pattern there arising there's just way too many paco. Now, it ain't that the pacou is a bad fish. It's the paku grow way too fast, and they're too cheap as a baby. Red tails are $20 for a three inch baby paku or 299. Tiger shovel nose are 1299, as a baby paku are 299. So you're seeing the problem there. And it's a great fish. It really is. I mean, if you want a fish that wants to live with you and your family for a long time, paku are great. Buy 1500 gallon tank and one paku and let it grow. And next thing you know, he's sitting there playing with your dog. I mean, it's a great fish, but they're too cheap and they grow too fast. And it's the biggest problem I have. Here's the next kicker about it. When I get new public aquariums opening up, they want all the red tails I can get, all the tiger shovenos, all the tereschuki cats or ripsaw cats. They want marble cats. They don't want no paco because they can get them everywhere. So I have the biggest problem getting rid of adult pacos, and I have no problem getting rid of adult any other fish. So I now give out a window clean. It says this store is backed by Ohio Fish rescue, and that's only for stores that agree not to sell paco. Now, that's a great idea, right? But here's the thing. You can still special order a paco from that store, and I won't frown on it, but that's a person that really wants a paco and has the set up for it, and that's fine. What it's doing is stopping the average mom from taking her ten year old kid in there, and they buy three or four paco for a ten gallon tank because they don't know that's what it's stopping. So we give these stickers out to any pet store that's willing to agree to this, and that will help the problem. I really don't have a problem getting rid of anybody's 36 inch red tail catfish. I keep two or three of the biggest fish here to show people how big they get. And then I keep all family named pets. Like if you've had a red tail cat for 19 years and his name is slasher. He can come here and stay at the rescue and you can come visit him. He'll stay here forever. I won't find him another home, but which I think that's a really nice thing to do.

That's insane.

Yeah. People can come and visit their pets.

Do you take small children?

This is Billy. Billy. Can he stay here? Do you take small children?

My kids are grown up. I'll drop them off.

The problem is the pacoo fish. So that is our main biggest problem. And it's not because the fish is a bad fish. The fish is one of the better fish to have because like flower horns, oscars, they all have personalities, but the paco seem very smart and they really get to know you and they're like having a dog or a cat. They're very personable. So I would suggest people, if you want to get a three to 500 gallon tank and you want to get a paco, that'll be your friend for life for the next 30 years. They're great fish, but I don't want them ready available in stores where kids can buy them. mommy looks like a piranha and they don't know that's the basis of all my problems is that scenario right there.

Oh, go ahead, Adam.

Sorry, I was going to say from a retail store point, they actually put them on the list as vegetarian piranha. And so everybody sees piranha. Because I used to have a retail store, everybody sees piranha.

Everybody wants a piranha.

But then parents go, well, what if they bite my kid?

Blah, blah, blah.

Which they don't. And so they go, well, this one's vegetarian. And so the people go, oh, I'll take that one.

And they're cheap.

And they are very cheap. I never sold any because they just got I knew they get so big and then I'd have to deal with it later as the only store in like a 200 miles radius.

Oh, yeah. People bring the fish back to the store they bought it from. Yes.

And then it's, where am I going to find a place to put a big paco? But literally they'll wait.

Have you never heard of Ohio fish? Right.

Now I'm just going to say that.

This is before I heard about you guys.

I know.

So rich. I got a quick question. How many times do you get up in the morning, go outside, and there's a five gallon bucket sitting on your front step with a pacoo?

Oh, my God. That happens. I can't believe you know that that actually happens. And it scares me and it actually upsets me. I want people to call me, set up a drop off time, I'll deal with it. I've never said no to any fish and I will not say no to any fish. But please get a hold of me some way. Text me on Facebook, talk to me on YouTube, I don't care, but please set up a drop off time because a lot of times I'm downtown Cleveland working on my properties, and I come home from work and there's six one gallon plastic ziploc baggies sitting in front of my garage with fish in them. Okay, so how long have they been sitting there? Or have they been there all day? Is it too hot? Is it too cold? I don't know any of this. I just come home and I'm surprised by there's fish in my driveway. Are they alive? Oh, my God. Let me get to these right away, please. People just set up a time to drop them off, and I'll make sure somebody is there. A lot of times people come to the house and we're in the back and don't realize that the rescue is an addition to my house. So we're in the back working in the rescue, and somebody knocks on the door and they leave it out front. Well, that don't help because we don't know they're there. Send us a text, help some way, do a little more. We come home one time and there was about 100 goldfish in my pond that I've never seen before. And they were all I swear to God, guys, they were all covered in, like, fin and tail rod. There was like, tumors off their side. And now I have to spend probably about $150 in medication to try and fix all these fish where I could have quarantined them and spent $20 in meds and healed the same amount of fish. Please don't do that. Just call me, get a hold of me, text me something, set up a drop off time, and I'll be there. Do you want to come get fish? Go ahead.

The reason that Jimmy was asking that is because we both had the same issue. So me, I had it because I have a pond outside, but back to my prior house I used to live at, and people just knew me as the fish guy. I sold online, and I already saw a report with the dnr. But no, what I have is people didn't go as brave as they dump them in my pond. Instead, I get home and there'd be like, four buckets lined around the outside of my pond in random spots, and they would just have random goldfish. Koi. Whatever was the flavor of the month that just showed up at my door, and it was always around that right before the first frost time when I'm just kind of closing down the pond for the year because that's when people don't want them at that point. In Minnesota, everything gets a hard free. So if you don't have a six foot deep pond, they just flush them. It's a real big problem in Minnesota. So some of our rescues that we've dealt with is you said about the paco. So we have problems with Paku. Not near, probably as bad as you because you get a big collective, but paku oscars, oscars and oscars goldfish up the wazoo. Because again, like we said in Minnesota, the freeze. So no one gets to continually keep them and no one wants to bring them inside. So we get, I'd say on an average season, last season, I probably got what, Jimmy? 1000, 1500 goldfish at least.

Yeah, that was a small year for.

Us, showing up on our doorstep. Just goldfish that was nothing else.

Wow.

That's our curve.

We get that same thing here, but it's because of in the summertime, we have churches, we have different cities that do this. This is retarded. But they take their pools and they stop putting chlorine in and they put fish in. And then they think it's an event where they can invite everybody up there to go fishing and they get to take the fish home that they catch.

I've only heard about this.

You heard about that. They either take the home and they either take care of them or they don't. And they end up here or the fish that they don't catch. Now I've got a priest or a minister or a civil servant of the city calling me saying, can you take these fish? And I'm like, you mean the fish that you just took out of a nice safe environment and put them into a non chlorinated pool where there's no filtration? And then you had people fishing all day, catching or not catching and releasing and put them through stress, and now you want me to take your sick fish. Sorry.

No worries.

I get a lot of that and it upsets me. But I never said no to any fish. So I spend the money and the time and the effort and we get the fish healthy and then we find homes for them. Our front pond is more like a take a penny, leave a penny. If you need goldfish, come on by, we'll give you some.

Excellent.

If you have extra goldfish, come on by, we'll take them and I'll put them in my pond. But please give me the chance to quarantine them first.

See, our event is we have these county fairs, minnesota, I'd say above any state, probably Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin. We're known for all of our weird festivals for no apparent reason.

We make stuff up just to get a party.

Just to give you an idea, we have a town next to us called and when they have this, 20 years of doing this, of a testicle festival, they chop off all the cabs balls, freeze them.

Festival it is.

They deep fry them, mince them up, and you have a big old platter of balls to eat. It's a big to do around here.

And then you drink some beer.

Minnesota is filled with weird obscure Minnesota testicle festival.

Yeah.

Hey, we will, honey, you can have all the balls you want to eat.

Gobble them right up.

Yeah.

You know what? We're going to set you up, we're going to send you a big plate of balls. You know what?

I'm going to get a big old.

Bucket of balls and I'm going to just leave them on their doorstep.

It just happened.

It was September. Guys, I think I got to go.

No, we got all night, man.

So in saying that, we have all these obscure festivals and what we do is county and city fairs everywhere. Every tiny dinky town across the state of Minnesota has their own summer fair. And what they do is they all hire these shitty, I don't know, what do you call them? Like carnival, carnival people. And all they do is a bunch of different coin, a ping pong toss to win a goldfish, all kinds of shit. Yeah, we have that and we have it in such supply that they'll go in the area and they'll wipe out every Walmart. They can stop by and buy all the goldfish and just keep them in barrels in the back of their home.

Now they can't. Walmart has stopped selling goldfish and everything else except for hard yay for Walmart because there was so many bad treated fish in there. But the problem isn't going to stop there. It's going to transfer to another store, right?

It just trickles down the trickle down effect. Like poop rolls down hills.

So what is the weirdest or rarest rescue you guys have ever done?

Well, there was this Chinese guy named John trong. He called me up and he says, look, I have to be relocated. I'm moving from Ohio to Michigan. And I have my prized platinum guards, alligator guards. They cost me 3500 for the male and 4500 for the female. Can you please hold on to them while I change addresses? And I'm like, sure, of course. I'd love to. I'd love them fish. And he bought them here and he said it would take about six months.

I feel like you still have them six months?

What's that?

I feel like you still have them.

About six months later, I got no call. Seven months, eight months, nine months, no call. And I'm like, these guys are getting way too big for the tank I have them in. And even my people online were saying something about why are they in that little of a tank? And it was a 550 gallon, but I had it split off. So they were in like 225 gallon and my stingrays were on the other side. The next thing you know, he calls me and he's like, I broke my tank moving. And I thought I was going to be able to, but I can't. So what I want you to do is go ahead and sell them. Don't take no less than 3000 and $3,500 for each one and sell them and keep the money for the rescue. And I'm like, as much as we need the money here, I'll tell you what, I'll do you one better I know you love your fish. I will keep them here forever and you can come visit them, and we'll just go from there. And they've now grown to our three foot platinum alligator guards. And they are the highest quality platinum guards I have seen. I've seen a bunch of predatory fins. I've seen a couple at my Chinese buddy's house. None of them have all spot on white body like these two. Every other one I see has got like a little black trim on the tail or their fins, or you can see some of the normal coloration on their side. None of them are pure platinum like these two. These are the two highest quality I've seen, and they have grown with us. And now they're 36 inches apiece and they're in the pool.

My Lord, that's a lot of fish.

What's neat is when you're in the pool and they come up to check you out, you think they're coming up and going to bite you. But the few brave people that have kept the camera on them, they've actually come up and touched their nose to the camera and then swam away. But other people have ran screaming out of the pool.

So no nipple piercing. When you go in your pool, take.

Your nipple piercings off. Yeah. And your other things.

The weirdest stuff that we've ever dealt with for rescues, I'm trying to think, is, well, I've dealt with white sturgeon, which is decently, not common, but they're native to Minnesota.

I would love to have one.

If I come across it, and I probably will, you'll be my first phone call. But white sturgeon, they actually farm them for two different purposes. One for pets, which is rarely done, and mostly they do it for dnr farming because they're trying to repopulate in certain areas. And I was able to get that pushed out to the dnr. It was nice and small. It came in a shipment that we got. It was a wrong order, and they weren't going to take it back. So what am I supposed to do with a six inch sturgeon? So I found a home for that. And we name him Charlie the Catfish. That we still have. I think it's Charlie. The catfish.

The Charlie, the catfish.

He's going to be wait, you have a catfish? Do you still have and you still don't remember his name?

No, because here's the deal. He's the bane of our existence.

Rob'S keeping him at my house.

Yes, it's rob's fish, my fish. That's something at jimmy's. And there's a purpose. So I got the ear to rescue. We got decently small, but it's an Albino channel catfish. And this fish, because he was nice and small size, I kept my koi pond until I could find a place. So I reached out to different places. dnr wouldn't take him because the catfish are potential disease issue. I've talked to cabellas. cabella's is a big outdoors, retail chain. And they have in their stores giant aquariums with native fish only.

Beautiful aquariums.

Beautiful aquariums.

Yeah, they do a good job.

They wouldn't take it because now they outsource all of their aquarium stuff, and they wouldn't refuse to talk to me. Zoos, I just got done talking with a bunch of different zoos, and the people that would take them did not have anything compatible because would eat everything in their tanks, right? This fish has now been come in and out of my koi. So I brought in my koi for the winter, brought it into my warehouse. And I have three giant vats. I start with 300 gallon. We went bigger, and I had on a trickle system. And this thing is absolutely the most impenetrable fish I've ever had. The city of perm decided that they're doing blow out lines of the perm water lines, and they posted the paper to let people know that, hey, your water is going to be brown on Tuesday. Well, I have this trickle system that automatically does water changes in my fish room, and it killed all of my two and a half foot koi. And the only thing that lived through all of it, because they didn't put it in the paper, they didn't tell me ahead of time that this was going to happen. And the only thing that lived is that damn catfish went over there and.

Went over there to find two and a half foot coy floating. And the catfish, we thought, oh, he's.

Gone to so we assume that he's dead, right? And we're cleaning all the fish, and we're all kind of angry and sad and teary eyed because these are our pets. They're hand fed, they're trained, they're koi or family fish. Expensive koi, also very expensive koi. So I'm going through, and we're just cleaning up the dead. And we didn't even pay attention that the catfish wasn't in there. So we just let the VAT sit, and we're shutting down the warehouse. We're pulling all fish out because we were emptying out. And I shut down my online business, and I go back in to take out the vats. And here, seven months later, he's alive in two inches of pure green soup. There wasn't even water. All there was was an old airline connected that I somehow forgot to unplug. And he was in there for seven years with no food, an albino channel catfish, and he was in good shape.

Al channel catfish can live hours on land. They breathe there. They're crazy.

It was incredible.

They can live through anything.

And when we pulled him out and we got oh, and he was fat. I mean, he was not skinny. I mean, I expected him to be right.

He's been eating good.

He's been eating something.

He's eating all the algae that was in there. But the whole warehouse for seven months was shut off, so there's no heat. So it was 40 degrees in that warehouse the entire time, so he wasn't able to process that. That's okay. All he had was an airline. There's no filter. And he had maybe two inches of water. So his top fin was sticking out of the water. Seven months.

He didn't get a bacterial infection from his top fin sticking out?

No, we were blown away. He must have splashed it.

That's crazy.

So, Charlie, the catfish has been in utter darkness. 40 degree weather and in two inches of soup.

No food?

No food, no nothing. And he's alive. So we pull him out. We're blown away. I take him into my house, and at the time, I didn't have anything set up and prep for him. Jimmy has a breeding room down in the bottom of his house with large tanks. It's mixed. He's got shrimp, all kinds of stuff. He does a lot of angel fish breeding, and we kept him there. And he gets all the dead fish because Jimmy still wholesale, so he gets a lot shipped in. He quarantines, and he gets everything that's dead. He has a very, very full diet almost all times.

Sometimes they have to look at me. Sometimes they have to look at the fish and go, nothing died today. Good luck, buddy.

And then he goes, hey, you know, when a fish deserves to live, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, no kidding.

He's he's something else.

Yeah.

And now he comes up and knocks on the glass and goes, hey, butthole, feed me. And so, like, rob's and I were just in Minneapolis at a Koi show not too long ago, and Rob somehow bought £25 of koi pellets. So now he gets Koi pellets because nobody died today.

It was the high protein youth pellet stuff. So it's a catfish, man.

Yeah.

And it keeps growing.

So it just keeps growing.

They eat anything.

They really do.

So if you happen to get an Albiny Channel catfish in a bucket in front of your house, it wasn't from us. Just saying we'll put it in the top.

I have a couple of them now. One in my albino tank, about two foot, and then one in my 750, about a foot and a half. So they're good fish. Actually, the Albino Channel cat at my house I don't know if you saw the video, but we set up the 2200 gallon tank in all, like, Greek Roman sculptures and these ruins and stuff. He got caught inside of the I don't know what it was the coliseum ruins, and in between, two columns. And we come home, and he's like, oh, my God. He's red as can be, like blood red, like bloody red. And I have to pick him up. I pick up the columns, and I have to cut through it with a pair of pipe cutters, and I'm clamping through it. Finally, I cut through it, and I bend it over far enough to where he can get out and he went straight to floating upside down on top of the water. I was like, oh, my God, I doubt this fish is going to make it. But I came out the next morning and that channel cat was back at the bottom. Hardly had no red on him. His fins were torn up, but the red around his body was gone. And he's still living today, doing great.

They're amazing fish bulletproof. So Jimmy, right, you had a ton of questions for him before we started the podcast.

I was telling rob's earlier, and before we went on the air here, our local outer tail power companies is who we have that supplies our electricity. And my wife and I have a five bedroom house, but it's just her and I. But we happen to have like 30, 40 aquariums downstairs. Got a few heaters plugged in. And I got a thing from autofill Power today saying you're using 90% more electricity than the majority of your neighbors. And I'm just wondering to myself, just before the podcast, my wife and I were watching you guys on YouTube, and she looks at me, she goes, ask them how much of their electricity bill is. And I go, he'll probably have to kill me.

It would be 98%. But you have me as a neighbor.

That's right.

Well, actually, it's actually not that much. It's about 450 a month.

Wow, that's impressive.

That is really good.

Yeah, right? We don't use no electric heaters in any of our tanks. I use a gas garage heater on the ceiling, and it's called a Mr. Garage Heater. And basically all of this is a furnace from your basement that hangs on the ceiling. And there's a flame, and it goes through the pipes, and the fan blows over the pipes. Well, with the flame in the room, it makes the room dry. Like, have you ever had in the wintertime, your furnace is on, and if you rub your feet against the carpet, you can shock each other. Yes. That's because of how dry it gets. Well, your fish room is moist. If you had that kind of heater in your fish room, well, it would work for you and dry it out. So it never gets that dry in the fish room, but it keeps it from being over moist. The heater runs, keeps it at 80 degrees all year long. summertime comes, it may get up to 90 in the day, and the heater ain't on, but it might get down to 70 at night, and the heater kicks on. So all winter long, it's on day and night. And it's just a gas. It's like maybe two foot by three foot gas furnace hanging on the ceiling.

Just natural.

It works great. It keeps all of our tanks at 80 degrees, 79 degrees if they're on the floor, 81 if they're up high, because the cement is still tied into the surrounding ground. So it's colder on the. Floor. Of course, that was the cheapest way we found. So our gas bill is about 450 in the wintertime, and total bills are about $1,600 a month. And it's been coming out of my pocket for the last, I don't know, ten years. And we started this whole thing on Facebook, and we tried asking for we put up a Go fund, me. We put up a paypal, we put up a patreon. And that gives people three different options, a way to help us out. If you want to, you can't come visit. You can't come over and help. You can send money and help, or you can send food. And this whole thing worked out great, but at the most, we were making maybe $300 a month from people donating. Well, now it's down to about maybe $80 a month. The thing is, I don't need to ask people to help me with my vision on what I want to do with my future. Once I got the 501, I wanted to ask companies who caused the problem, and we're talking do you want me to name names?

That's up to you.

Okay. petco pet Supplies, plus Pet Land, you know, all the major grocery stores that sell these fish and cause the problem. You know, they don't tell the people, well, ma'am, you can't buy them three park with that ten gallon tank. They just sell it and don't have a thought.

Otherwise, we have a lot of hate on the podcast, and generally we use the keywords. Schmelta.

We'Ve got so many people in.

The industry, the problem is they do the deed, they sell these fish, and they sell them really, really cheap. The paku are 299 for a three inch paco, and it looks like a red belly, like you said, a vegetarian red belly piranha so they're glorifying it. That's the biggest problem. So I don't know, it kills me, but I'm not down to them. But I think that if I'm going to ask for money, it should be from the people that caused the problem. So I don't ask joe schmo general person, please help us. Donate to us. I don't do that anymore. I only try and get from the stores, and that's not working out that well.

I was just going to ask. Good luck.

How many six figure checks did you get from these?

I can count six figure checks?

Yeah. $1 million?

Yeah. No, I've never gotten done like that.

Never got that the biggest thing that I see, that it's a bigger craze, and this blows my mind, and this is just for me, YouTube. scouring to see what kind of content there is, because we have to stay relevant, and it's my hobby above all else. So how else am I going to keep up on Ohio fish rescue but YouTube? And we see a bunch of these, how do we say millennial douchebags, deciding that they're going to get views by pretending to be an activist and they'll say, oh, these poor fish were just being abused, so I had to go buy them from petco.

Oh, I hate it.

Let's pause you right there for a minute. If you're thinking that you're going to be an activist because you see issues at petco or they're selling the wrong types of fish or they're mistreating betas and then you're going to spend your money buying the betas, it's the biggest scam of all time.

I've got betas for them, too.

You're helping them sell their fish and they're going to go and replace them with more.

If you think for a minute that doing anything like that or even videotaping and trying to use that as an educational moment will help, that's not going to do it. You would cover it, talk about how it's wrong, and for God's sake, don't spend your money in that establishment if you feel that that's what's happening there. It's the dollar that businesses go. If they're not selling, they're going to see why.

Besides everything.

Absolutely. Hey, I got a quick question for you, Rich.

Yes, sir.

We're watching the videos and stuff and seeing all these large fish and they all have large appetites. You're keeping them at 80 degrees. They want to eat all the time. What are you feeding? Do you just go to Red lobster and just start picking stuff out of the dumpster or what?

It was as easy as that.

And for Josh, what crazy antics do you need to get fish to bite?

As far as fish biting, that's a whole different story. You just stick your hand out and they'll jump up and get you. But say, for instance, the 4400 gallon tank. You've got good to watch when you're feeding them because you'll stick food out there and you'll have the arijuanas come up and they'll jump right out of the water and try and bite your hand or just try and get at the food. But if you start getting well, they're.

Doing nothing more than they're trained to do in the wild. They're jumper fish and they jump. Some of the bigger arrows are known to jump up at 15ft into the trees and eat the monkeys out of the trees.

I actually saw that at one of the did you? aquariums. Yeah.

Here's the thing. I tell Josh all the time because he grabs a handful of fish and he throws it up, that 4400 gallon, six foot tall. So he throws it up above his head, goes over to the hole in the top and he drops them. And I'm like josh, please be careful. And at that point, an arijuana jumps out of the water and nails his hand and he yells and I'm like, I told you.

I've got a question for Josh. Josh, you there?

Yes, sir.

Is your nickname nubs? Is it nubs because you're missing.

I.

Think the most gruesome fish attack that has been here has been from an alligator gar.

Oh, my goodness.

That's why I don't trust them nut. And I never will. I'll never tell someone that, oh, my alligator guard won't bite, because they definitely can, and they will. They have that killer instinct in them. And it doesn't matter if they're six inches or if they're 6ft long. They start coming near you, you should watch out.

Josh, can I tell the story?

Tell it.

Yeah, go right for it.

Oh, my God. We're lifting an eight foot tall biofilter, and we're going to put it into our pool because this came out of aquarium Adventure when they closed down, so we carried it home, and we don't want the bacteria to die, so we want to set it up as fast as possible. So here I am, I'm carrying my side. It's about £150. His side is about £150 because it's full of K One Media. The whole eight foot. It's two foot by two foot by eight foot, and it's heavy as can be. So I'm carrying my side. I get over the little pool. It's about three foot tall. It's 14 foot long by seven foot wide and three foot tall. I get over it and I get into the water and I start pushing the fish back, and I start walking backwards. Well, Josh gets over with 1ft and then his other foot, and now we're into the pool, and I'm wanting to walk back about another eight foot. Well, Josh stops walking, and I'm trying to pull him. I'm like, Josh, quit messing around. And I'm trying not to swear here, because what I said was swear words. Quit effing around is what I said. Josh is like, dad. And I'm like, what? Boy? Come on. Quit messing around. He's like, dad. And I'm like, what? A fish has got me. And he's like, doing this dance thing now. Got me. Fire, right? I'm like, what the f what do you mean a fish has got you? He was, dad, a fish is biting me. And he's still doing this dancing s thing, and he's moving around. And I look over and sure, shit, there's a four foot alligator guard done bit his foot. He's got his bottom jaw under his foot and his top jaw on the arch of his foot, and the thing is shaking left and right. I'm like, oh, my God. At this point, I then realized my son is a god. If that was me, I just screamed and let go of the damn filter. My son is like, dad, the fish has got me. And he's shaking. You know, the fish is shaking them. I mean, it's like, holy shit. This was crazy. My son is a beast.

You're a man.

I am so glad he didn't have you by the crotch, Josh. This whole time he said he's shaking you, and I'm just like, where's the fish got you? My God, that was a great story.

If you got me by the crotch. My name might not be Josh today. It might be jacqueline.

All right. Josh, do you have scars on your ankles right now, or nubs?

Yeah, I have pictures.

Okay.

There was probably 90 little blood spots. It looked like he got 90 shots all at once in a big circle, like, three inches long. Cuts over about two inches and comes back three inches on the top of his foot. Little dots of blood everywhere. And then the same thing underneath.

Number one, pictures of this number one, best tattoo ever. Number two, if you don't have that on a video, like, at least the picture of it, that tattoo, bro.

Josh, do you have kids at all?

No, I don't.

Not yet. someday when you have children, you can say, hey, kids, we're going to play a new game. It's called connect the dots. And you could just give them a pen, give them your foot, keep them busy. It'll work in church, all kinds of places.

So, yeah, you got to get that picture. You got to bring them into a tattoo parlor and, like, we recreate this shit. Please.

That was the best story we've ever had on this podcast.

That really was.

That's great.

Get out.

That was nothing. We had much better.

We'll keep rolling. So did you have to seek medical attention, or did your dad say, just put some duct tape on it?

I knew it.

I knew these guys.

Josh, you're my hero.

You know what? If there's an albino channel catfish and a roll of duct tape, it wasn't from us. In front of your door tomorrow, dude.

I swear to God. We use neosporin, some gauze, and some gray duct tape. I shit you not.

If it would have been my dad, it would have been Old Milwaukee and a dirty rag. Okay.

That'S it.

We got to get Josh.

You got it made here, buddy.

That's right. Your daddy loves you.

You guys got to do a new line of T shirts. Just put josh's foot on there and say, I'm the man.

I took one for the team.

I took one for the team. Ohio Fish Rescue.

I never just get my question. What do you guys feed these gosh darn fish? My God, you must buy hundreds of pounds of stuff a week. Where are you getting your stuff?

No, we just feed them kids that don't listen to me.

I got a 28 year old.

They don't listen to.

28?

No.

Mostly we feed tilapia shrimp, and we used to feed hot dogs. But there's a certain brand of hot dogs. Hot dog?

No, we need a sponsor, so I hope it's like bundog.

Oscar meyer has a way for fishy.

No, the normal hot dogs are way too greasy and makes your water too dirty. I met a guy in it was Washington, above California.

His name was Ted.

Ted?

Yes, Ted.

The hot dog man gallon tank that was outdoors at the time, and he had some huge fish, 19 huge catfish. Well, his tank broke open, and he was giving them away. It was on monsterfishkeepers.com. And I just sillily put on a post. I'll take them off, and people were like, they were jumping on it. And he was like, all for it. And I'm like, wait a minute. I was kidding. And next thing you know, I bought a box truck for $2,400. We built an 800 gallon, two x four wood tub with a liner in it. And then my son Josh, my son richie, and the guy that worked for me at the time, Ricky, drove straight through to Washington, and it was 72 hours drive there and back. Supposedly, it took like, 90 some, but they made it there. They collected all the fish. They got them all into this tub. And now my idea was, well, if we're having three drivers, we can drive straight through, because I'll put a piece of plywood on top of this big 800 gallon tub, and we can put a mattress on top of there, and then somebody can sleep while somebody's driving.

What the hell? Oh, shoot.

It was a great thought.

Osha approved.

Yes.

Now, check this out here. Here we go. My son richie's driving. ricky's in the passenger seat. Josh is in the back. Now, they're using prime. Have you ever smelled prime?

Smells like ass.

There's another sponsor we should go after.

Great product, and it works great. It takes the chloramines chlorines out of the water, but it does smell like ass. We're doing 800 gallons of it. Here's what we didn't take into consideration. My son is locked in the back of a truck with an 800 gallon tank full of prime and 19 four foot fish that are being air rated, and the air bubbles are busting and shooting the prime up into the air. So my son richie pulls over at a gas station to get gas, and he comes in the back, and he unlocks the door for joshi to get out. Well, joshi was sleeping back there or.

Passed out or dead.

He goes and he gets a whole truck full of fresh air. Well, he gets up off of this concoction, this bed, this box, and he gets 1ft out of the truck, and he passes the f out and falls down the rest of the truck bumper and steps and everything to the ground. Well, everybody there around there, they were like, oh, my god, this kid is drunk, and it's clearly he's underage, so they called the cops on him.

Oh, no.

Mind you, my son richie and Ricky are in the store, and they're getting postitos, they're getting chips.

Jimmy jimmy jimmy's.

Jerky.

By the time they come out of the store, they paid for their gas. They come out, and there's cops and, like, a crowd around the back of the truck, and they come walking up. They're like, what's going on? Well, the cops grab them and throw them to the ground. They handcuffed them. They throw their snacks everywhere.

What state was that?

What state was that, Josh? Washington.

Washington state.

You didn't even get out of Washington before you got a guy.

These poor kids are getting arrested for rescuing fish, and now they're on the ground, they're getting handcuffed, and everybody's around like they should die because they got this child. This kid drunk and shoot up. The cops made joshi take a breathalyzer and he passed. He wasn't drunk. He was passed out from prime. That is the best. Yes. That was a great.

We got to.

Contact the people to make prime.

Everybody got released and they drove away, and none of them have been back to Washington since.

So who got the second night in the back of the truck?

Josh, when you took over driving, who was sleeping in the back?

It was ricky.

Was it? You sure it wasn't ricky? Because you told me ricky almost tipped the truck over.

Yeah, he was driving. I was in the passenger seat. Ricky almost killed us. Ricky drove for a total of 25 minutes. I drove for about 98 hours, something like that.

Shout out.

Yeah, ricky was worthless. He started going down the hill, and now, mind you, 800 gallons in a tub in the back of your 16 foot box truck. 5600, but it makes a little difference. Well, he was going downhill, and the brakes started to get too hot, and he was hitting the brakes. Well, he went into the oncoming lane, and the last minute he swerved right to avoid the car that's going to hit him, and the truck came up on two wheels. Josh had to go from the passenger seat over to the driver's seat, correct the steering, get him back on four wheels, and threw ricky out of the truck. You're not driving no more.

And change your life.

Now, mind you, my brother, is in the back of the box truck.

Oh, you didn't bounce around everywhere smelling shit.

What the hell just happened?

And so the next stop was walmart to buy underwear for everybody because they had pooped their pants. My god. Why are you guys alive? I'm just curious.

Everybody just blamed it on prying it's.

For the betterment of the fish.

He said he's got three sons. He didn't start out saying that he had nine before he started all this.

Well, I didn't want to tell you about the other five.

That's right. My lord, this is fantastic. I've not had this much fun in so long. This is great.

And mind you, he just went to a great white concert this last weekend.

That's right.

I wanted to mention on that great white is awesome. And I don't care what you say about vixen. They might not be a betty white, but they're a great band. But great white is awesome.

We're losing your audio again, but yeah, we definitely had a had a great time. We went backstage. Jimmy is very connected in the 80s rock and roll world.

Yeah, we went backstage. The new there's two great whites. There's Jack russell's, Great White, who is the original leap singer. He's out there doing his own thing. We've met him several times. He has been nothing but is that.

The guy with Once bitten, twice shine?

Yeah, that was great white. We've met him several times. He's still haunted by the big fire. The big fire. And so the band that we saw was all the original guys without Jack. And they have a new lead singer now, mitch milloy, who's from dickinson, North Dakota. Mitch milloy also was in Van halen for about two to three weeks between David roth and sammy hank.

That's his claim to fame.

Yeah, that's his claim to fame. And Mitch milloy is a beautiful man. He's got long blonde hair down to his butt. And we met him last year in the mantras of Rock Cruise. And he remembered us. It was kind of funny. And we walked in and he goes, awesome. He looked at us, he goes, you guys are from Detroit Lakes and my wife has got purple hair.

Wait, did he remember you or was he scared?

Yeah, not scared. No. Every year we go on this thing called manchester's Rock Cruise. It's 80s rock Cruise with about 50 bands.

No, he was scared because Jimmy threatened to leave buckets of fish on his front.

That's right. I brought some chum to the Great Wake concert.

Some prime.

Some prime? Yeah. For all you huffers out there who are huffing paint right now, don't give them new ideas.

That will be the next thing.

Prime is no longer allowed to be.

Sold at pet store.

I'm just trying to help.

They actually changed up their formula now. So it's not the same smell that can do damage to you now. It's a little bit more pleasant. It still doesn't smell as good, but it's not the stuff that it's still a great product.

Yeah.

So it doesn't smell like ass.

I would suggest closing yourself and do an enclosed 16 foot filter or truck with an 800 gallon tank full of prune. I mean, who would have thought that was bad?

So it doesn't smell like ass now? It smells like ass light.

All right, we're going to put an apb out for those that are listening to our artists. If anybody can draw up a rendition of a handful of guys in a truck with 800 gallons of prime with a bed on top on two wheels, that will be the new banner. Yeah, that would be the new logo.

I'm going to be selling T shirts outside of every Ohio Fish Rescue.

We are so lucky to be alive.

Forget about the fish.

We're still here.

But you've also got to get the gator guard jumping out of the tub trying to guide my foot.

Yes, that has to be in there. If you can make a caricature of this, we'll find a way to compensate you, I swear to God.

It might be with a free gift card to wendy's or something for $5.

So to make sure we're going down our list, I did want to touch on fake rescues. So we see this time to time, like you said, people set up a small rescue. It's not that they have bad intentions. They want free fish. And the thing that I want to point out before and the podcast is do your homework on whoever you find is a fish rescue. Most pet stores, especially mom and pop shops, will happily take back in your fish because, again, they're there to try to support you and your hobby. And if you can no longer handle a fish or made an incorrect purchase elsewhere, they'll do their best, but again, they may not have the facilities to take it. So having a like the Ohio Fish Rescue is nice. And what I'm seeing is two different scams. Number one, people like to get free fish, and then they just hand them off to whoever they can outsource them to. But the bigger thing is I'm seeing.

Is people trying to they take them and resell them.

Not just that, because even a rescue has to move fish somehow. So if they find a new home.

Someone wants to donate resell, no fish at all. We make zero profit on any fish.

And that's what makes you admirable. But if someone wants to donate a couple of dollars, there's nothing wrong behind that for some areas. But taking fish in just to make a profit should not be the business. So number one, check to make sure they have a charity license like you guys do. So that's check number one. That's easy with homework. Number two is also see their motive or long term play. Because what I'm starting to see is pop ups, especially pop up places that do airbnb places. And this is happening more and more commonly, where people will say that, no, I'm a charity, and they'll get all these free koi or different free tanks and try to make a play out of it where they can make a small B and B or something else. And the entire idea is not to.

Rescue fish in that situation. The fish are still being taken care of. And I'd say, good for you. Try it. Run your scam, but you're still taking care of the fish. My biggest thing was people that, oh, he's getting a rescue and he's getting all these free fish. Well, they don't realize that I'm not getting free fish. I'm getting other people's problems, and I have to find these fish at home.

Right.

Your father has to keep people happy. So that's one problem. Two is the second problem is maybe they don't want just so much free fish other than they want their fish and they want to be a rescue, but they can't be a rescue. If your rescue says no to certain fish, then they're not a real rescue. Exactly. We never say no to any fish, including if you call me with 20 pacos now, I'll go, okay, thanks. But I will still take them. I'm taking on the responsibility of finding them a home. A lot of people just want their tanks full. Check into your fish rescue. Do they have a 90 gallon and a 55 gallon and that's it? Are they just trying to fill their tanks? Are they saying no to some fish? That kind of stuff? Are they taking the fish in and then putting it back up for sale on Facebook Marketplace? You have to do your due diligence on every rescue that you contact.

The thing I'm seeing is with the airbnb is that they'll have deck decor and ponds out front. Come that winter, they'll destroy all the fish that they got donated. There is no homes for them. And it's a tragedy that we've seen in a lot of places.

They don't live through the winter.

They don't live through the winter. They just want them donated there so they have free decoration. So do your homework. See what's happening to the policies.

Yeah, we ran into this a couple of times. It's just not naming names, but yeah.

That'S something I have not run into, but have not thought about. Because if anybody wants Koi, obviously they got a pond. The pond, they'll winter over. They're deep enough. Of course, duh not here, but guess not.

Yeah, they're up in Minnesota. The frost line is a lot deeper.

6Ft.

Oh, yeah.

It's only ten inches or so.

Yeah, we need 6ft for Koi to be completely safe with no risk.

Wow.

Yeah. It's not uncommon to get actual temperature, 32 below for about seven or eight days in January. It's always the first or second week in January.

Called me to come up to Chicago, Illinois. I went up there and it turned out to be the coldest day of the year. It was negative 52 with the windshield. It was retarded, and yet Paul cafaro was with me, and he ran outside in his bare feet into the snow and picked the ice cubes or icicles off of the roof. It was all for his YouTube videos. But I'm like I'm flabbergasted. Why would you do that?

Yeah, last year it was 47 below. I recorded in our backyard one night.

Actual temperature?

Actual temperature.

Oh, my God.

Windshield brought it to, like, 68 below.

That'Ll definitely bring that your actual will bring down the Earth temperature. Way down.

Absolutely.

We're never going to Minnesota.

I wanted to point that out so.

You guys could do your diligence, but I don't want to visit.

Yeah, well, you don't want a summer in the summer.

Our only thing is at least we can make fun of the Canadians. Where it gets really cold.

Exactly. Actually, to be fair, sometimes we get below the Canadians because they're the great lakes.

Yeah.

So we get it pretty bad here compared.

You get the wind chill, we get it all.

In our area here, we have got how many hundred lakes in our area in a 20 miles radius? 412.

Well, from our house to 30 miles drive, it's more lakes mile per square mile than anywhere else in the world. But Minnesota itself has around 18,000 lakes.

Right, but we have like, let me know when the paku population invades your lakes already happened, because that's when I know I have to give up.

We already dumped them there. We have one of the records they're trying to at one point, this was like, I'm going to say, eight years ago, they pulled a massive Paco out of the Mississippi, close to the Minneapolis. And the thing was like a damn billboard sign.

It looked like a garbage can.

It was amazing.

I saw one of those ads about this strange fish with human teeth. It was one of those strange ads like that, that this is like an alien fish or something they actually eat. Is that how it was?

Yeah, they actually eat nuts, don't they? Because nuts that fall out of the trees in the Amazon well, in their.

Natural habitat, that's what they eat is the nuts that come out of trees. Yeah. And that's why they have the grinding teeth.

Like humans delete anything. They're pretty crazy.

Actually. One of the delicacies of the tribes over there is to cut open the paku, open up their digestive track, and take the nuts that they ate and already crushed and went through their digestive tract. Now they're softened food. And that's one of the delicacies over there.

And this does not occur at Ohio Fish rescue. I just need to paint that out loud. We don't get bile caviar happening fish fries at osr.

Wait, we did have this little vietnamese guy showed up and he wanted one of my paco. And in my whole screening process, I'm asking him, what size tank you got? blah, blah, blah. What's your plans for him? Because this thing was like 26 inches and I had bigger I had a 32 inch pocket at the time. He was like twelve inches wide, huge pocket, and probably about 45, maybe £48. And he wanted this paco that I had put up in the paper. I forget what I put. If anybody needs a big fish for their big tanks, let me know. He contacted me, and within talking to him, within about 20 minutes, I found out that he came over or came up from South America. And this was one of his delicacies. He remembers as a kid eating paco, like we eat while I in perch here. He ate paco as a kid there. And he wanted more than just the one fish I was offering. So I'm. Like, well, damn, what size tank do you have? And he's telling me, oh, I got a 6000 gallon tank. I'm like, well, what are the dimensions that? He's like, oh, it's ten foot by three foot by three foot tall. I'm like, that's about 1000 gallon tank. He's like, no, that's 6000 gallons. I'm like, no, this tank right here is ten foot by four foot by three foot, and it's 1000. And finally, he admitted he wanted as many paco as he could get because he wanted to eat them.

Well, you see, Ohio Fish Rescue, you know, as much as you guys want to be, don't be the new Red lobster.

That's right.

Right. We are not the Red lobster. Damage?

No Red lobster.

You should you should ask him, you know, how big is your tank? You should have Sweden. How big is your frying pan?

There you go.

Because obviously it was too small.

That would have simplified things.

That's right. Well, what we'll do is we'll certainly have to have you on in the future sometime. We again, we appreciate the time. We got a lot of stories, a lot of information, and I don't think.

We scratched the surface nearly, not even a little bit. This is going to be a three part series over a course of time.

I'm good with that.

There you go.

We're going to do it.

So, Adam, before we leave, you want to give us our fish of the episode?

Okay.

The fish of the episode this week is Archer fish. And they're kind of a neat little fish. They actually shoot water out of the water and I guess in the water to hit bugs and invertebrates and stun them and eat them. You don't see them very often, and it's because they're a brackish water fish. Most pet stores don't really deal with brackish. I brought them in just because I thought they were cool. They will jump and keep in group. Keep them in groups. I always try to sell them in trios or groups of six, depending on your tank size. They get up to ten inches and 16 inches, and they're found mostly in estuaries. I've never tried them in pure salt water, but I've heard of people that have. But I don't think that that's advisable. I would advise using brackish water systems and then using like, a marine salt instead of regular aquarium salt to make your salinity.

Right.

I think the salinity I kept them at was like 1.35, and then you can put them with monolith and other brackish water fish not vulnerable to gobies. They will eat those. So that's the thing.

People hear brackish and they get real nervous. Don't be nervous. Brackish is simply real easy to treat. It's not near as expensive as a marine hobby. It's simply just adding extra water and doing a simple test. It's not near the maintenance people give it credit for. So don't be intimidated if you wanted to give it a try. It is a fun fish as long as you have the space for it. And, you know, I've seen people do creative enclosures for them on occasion, trying to make them, especially in zoos, imitate the bug behavior. But if I'm not correct, do you guys, Josh, have one at your facility?

Yes, we do. Can I add to that story, please? Okay. He was saying something about squirt water out, blah, blah, blah. We have one about ten inches long now, and he was in brackish water for the first six months of his life, and since then, he's been in fresh water for about ten years. He is now in our thousand gallon tank, and if I take off the lids and I hold a cricket about two foot out of the water, he will shoot water up and knock that cricket out of my fingers and into the water, and he'll eat it. He is crazy. Them archer fish are like dead on target fish. They are a remarkable fish. You can acclimate them to freshwater. I was always, under the circumstances, if it's a brackish, don't do it to freshwater. But we have a few fish here that people have had like, we have a scat that people have had to freshwater for over ten years. So we're not going to move it back to brackish. We're going to leave it living the way it was. It's in freshwater, and it's in 1000 gallon. And then we got this huge archer fish, and he's in fresh water, so we let him go. Archer fish's natural habitat is to shoot the bugs out of the trees. When they hit the water, they eat them. Well, we sometimes hold crickets up there, and they shoot them out of our fingers and they land the water, and I'll be damned if you don't eat them.

So a lot of these species that you would have for brackish environments, arterfish in particular, are more sensitive when they're young, and clearly that's what you guys are showing. It's very dependent on species. So let's take another species example. The freshwater flounder is exactly the opposite. When they're young, they love freshwater. When they're older, they need brackish water. So certainly do your homework on salinity needs, and always ask an experienced pet owner if you have the ability to see what they're doing.

Just a quick question, guys. Do you have a YouTube on that of the squirting?

No, we sure don't, because a YouTube video has to be at least ten minutes. You know, up to 20 minutes is the best, you know, we found is the best time. You need ten to 20 minutes, because under ten minutes, it it bodes bad for you because of the retention time. So you need ten minutes or more up to 20 minutes. And every once in a while, we'll catch them on doing the bracket thing. But it's a 32nd event, so it's hard. But we can include it into one of our videos eventually. I think that'd be fascinating, doing that, because that's pretty I like to have it seen.

Well, you got to have it, like, as a finale to the tattoo video that Josh is going to get after the show.

Josh is getting a tattoo?

Come on, man. Do it for us. We need this.

What tattoo is this?

Yeah, I'll get her guard tattoo.

Got you.

Well, thanks again.

The only way I see that happening is if you fly out here and you tattoo it.

That might be a challenge right there.

I've never done a tattoo, but I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express last night. It can't be that tough.

Oh, my God. Josh, what did you get yourself in for?

We'll even do a cute little butterfly in your butt or something. I don't want to be kind of fun.

I'll tell you what. I know the owner of 252 Tattoo. If you guys fly out here and you want to do a radio show of it, josh, would you be up for it? Get the bite marks tattooed onto your foot.

Why not?

Oh, my God.

He is the man. Oh, my God.

This is great. All right.

Wait. He knows Cat Van dee. I'm going to try my damnedest to get her out here to be on this show while we're videoing you getting the tattoo from 252.

She is in such demand. Cat is in so much demand. It's about a two year waiting list right now to get her to do anything.

Well, see, these guys are on here.

But he is a friend of hers.

There you go.

I've heard him say it multiple times, so we'll see. Otherwise, he's lying to me.

Well, thanks again, guys. I appreciate it. We definitely have a long podcast here to process, but we'll have you back on. There's a ton more stories to go.

We got a lot more questions.

We have more stories.

We'll be glad to have you guys back.

We appreciate it so much.

Guys again. Check out Ohio Fish Rescue. Ohiofishrescue.com. They have, again, three ways to donate. You can do paypal, go fund. Me and my brain is just patreon. patreon. Thank you. And above that, you can get a T shirt, and there are numbers on their website. Give them a call. Tell them you love them.

We do that every podcast.

And apparently you said you got some people calling you, so you're welcome.

You know what?

I love you.

The next time you call and tell these guys you love them, give them $10. Help them buy some paco food, because obviously paco is our problem over at Ohio Fish Rescue.

And know that if you're looking for a big paco, we got some people for you.

Oh, we got you covered.

Got you covered.

The next time we have you guys on, I want to hear about how you ship such large fishes, especially alligator. Guard and stuff, so we'll save that for next time. I really want to know how you get these things over to you.

Well, thanks again, guys.

We won't tell you about josh's personal injury when he messed with alligator Guard last time.

Oh, no.

I want to see photos.

All right, thanks again, guys. And let's kick that outro.

Thanks, guys, for listening to this podcast. Please visit us@aquariumguyspodcast.com and listen to us on spotify, iHeartRadio itunes, and anywhere you can listen to podcasts.

We're practically everywhere. We're on Google. I mean, just go to your favorite place, Pocket casts subscribe to make sure it gets push notifications directly to your phone. Otherwise Jim will be crying in asleep.

Can I listen to it in my treehouse?

In your tree house? In your fish room. Even alone at work.

What about it? In my man cave.

Of your man cave?

Yeah.

Only if adam's there no with feeder guppy.

No, they're endless.

You imagine loving Frank sucking mother frank.

Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.