Meanwhile, at the aa meeting, my name's James, and I'm a shrimpaholic.

Hi, James.

James. It's been two weeks since my last shrimp purchase. I'm not sure I can do it anymore. My second wife left it's. It's just a constant battle in my life. One day I get paid, the next day I'm flat broke, spending my entire check on four or five shrimp re, wind up dead in the mail.

And it's a house.

An empty house full of tanks by myself. No kids, no family. Just dead shrimp and an empty wallet. I don't know what to do anymore.

Wait here.

Give me the mic. Guys, what if I told you you can go to Joe shrimpshack.com and use promo code aquarium guys at checkout to save 15% off? That way you can afford your addiction. Let's get out of here and get some shrimp. Joe shrimp shack.com. Because quitting is for quitters.

Where?

I found it in the fish room.

Anyone nearby?

I saw green. What? I just finished dosing reflowers. I'm not the imposter.

I don't know. I suspect green. He was using all kinds of different bottles. No way someone has that many supplements.

I swear I was just easy bawling the tank. It's my favorite task. Easy bawling? What does that even mean? This guy is making stuff up. Guys, they're just reflowers aquarium supplements. I got them for 25% off at reflowers. Dot us with promo code aquarium guys at checkout.

I'm sorry, man, but there is no way you paid that little for all these. I just can't believe you.

Green definitely sucks. Yeah, vote green. What? Oh, man. He wasn't the imposter. I was sure it was him.

Yeah, me too. Well, after I'm done sabotaging you, I'm heading over to reef flowers us to get my own balling set. 25% off is too good to pass up, even for an imposter. Crew members and impostors alike can get 25% off all reef flowers, aquarium dosing supplements, premier marine salts, and fresh and saltwater substrates. Just head over to reflowers us and use the code aquariumguys checkout. Be an aquarium baller and dose with reflowers today. And after you've ordered from reflowers us, you can go to aquariumguyspodcast.com. On the bottom of the web page, you'll find our discord information and play a couple of games of among us with us. Welcome to the aquarium guys podcast with.

Your hosts, jim colby and Rob golson.

Welcome, guys, to the aquarium guest podcast. This is take two for those who are listening. Jimmy, you brought me cake. I love you. Thank you.

I did.

I brought my cake that was left over for my birthday, and I thought you would enjoy it since you have porridge for blood and your diabetic. I don't know what they're trying to kill you.

Thank you. Because it's a gesture of baked goods or pretend that it was the antifreeze you're giving to a dog. So either way, I'm losing a toe and I'm going to smile about it, but thank you.

You lose more than a toe, honestly.

I'm your host, Anna Freeze, because I got a biddering agent in it.

Does it?

It does now.

Yeah.

Well, thank goodness. But I'm your host, rob's olsen.

I am Jim colby.

And I'm Adam.

So this week, we are ecstatic to have the youtuber bentley pascal. Did I say that correctly? pascal. I want to say tabasco now. That's not even fair. dickweed certainly take a moment checking the podcast notes for his YouTube channel, but thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Man.

All of a sudden, he's proper and quiet.

I can't believe he's camera shy, even though it's an audio podcast.

This is nothing. How can I say this? I used to work in radio, right? And there is an inherent training. The second you know you're being recorded, that just goes click. And once you're programmed that way, it's really hard to deprogram it.

We'll get you.

You can't deprogram Rob, because last week was interesting.

Was it?

I felt poor Jenny. I felt like I took her like taking a lambda slaughter, for God's sake.

It really was. Now, for the listeners, they're hearing these things out of order because we record everything back in time, but they're listening to we're referring to the Turtle podcast.

Turtle podcast. Yes. Right. You drove that thing into the ditch so fast. I feel so bad.

Sorry. No one warned me that turtles breathe.

Out of their asses, and you only said it about, I don't know, 340 times about breathing out your butthole. And that's why I'm late tonight, because I couldn't get past HR. When I came in the building. I couldn't get past we needed HR.

Last week, big time, same level, all right. Of just complete shock. And I didn't know what to do. When you're fed that amount of information and just taken back, you don't know what to do. The whole betas or transgender thing. Didn't know that, either.

And dolphins.

Right? I knew that. But it's still hard to choke down.

That was bad.

That was bad.

Yeah. I feel like you two owe her, like, a T shirt each.

Oh, easy. And, actually, I owe her anything.

I listened to it, Adam. I listened to it.

All right. Jenny actually made the artwork on a lot of our aquarium guys swag. So if you guys want a T shirt from Jenny, we'll make sure to give her an extra high five for putting up with us on that podcast.

It was like watching a bad episode of Force gump. It really was lifelocks. chocolates. And then Rob go. But they breathe through their butthole.

I had to clarify. They have a lung tube, something to their butthole, and sure enough, that's how they hire as they breathe out their butt.

So what HR. Would like you to do is write a 500 page, 500 word apology to the company. And then they made one new rule.

About what?

I'm out of town. And that you can have a podcast. Can't talk if you say the two of you can't talk.

No talking.

I thought, what source can happen when I take one night off? What's source can happen? Because the last time I gave you guys free rein and you had the night off, what happened? You lost the freaking podcast.

You lost it and you never found it.

And I thought, oh, what source can happen? They'll lose it again?

No, didn't lose this one.

No, I wish you would have lost that one.

Did not lose.

God, I didn't think it was that bad.

What did I do wrong? He just jealous that he wasn't here.

So who's but loading the fish? Not gut loading, but butt loading fish. Who's injecting fish?

No fish.

You were all theorized, right? There is no fish harmed in the making of the last podcast.

All my ears are burning. And then Jimmy is off because it's his birthday. 75 years old.

Yeah, that's all Rob, too.

Now we have to go to math class. So between math between the airing of.

This I was going to say this for later, but between the airing of this podcast or that podcast and this one, we've actually gotten some listening response, and they heard that it was your birthday and they sent in a little bit of money oh, yeah, right. Just to get Jimmy a gift. It's in the one car, right? The puppy is no, your gift.

Oh, okay.

But we got you a walker with tennis balls as the slider. Did you? We did. Little rollers, the whole thing.

My balls already ran on the ground. I don't need that.

So happy birthday now that you're back.

Thank you.

And that is on behalf of discord. So you have to take that home with you. They insist on getting a picture with you in the walker.

Oh, I'm sure.

Right.

I was late today because my wife bought me a bicycle, and as I was getting into my car to drive the block and a half over here, she goes, Why don't you take your bicycle? I go, Because Uber doesn't go out after 09:00. Because that's how I have to get home if I ride a bicycle over here after Uber home.

Right. I did not know that dwi is on a bicycle. But how you now inform me.

Dwi on a horse.

North Dakota get one on a horse.

Now, what happened? Well, I'm not going to ask about your week because I'm assuming cake, bicycles, you're quite entertaining.

I got a TV for my birthday. For my bathroom.

What?

Yes.

Ice bentley is going. Yeah.

And you're talking about but breathing as being my problem.

No.

What size TV is adequate to shit with?

Well, my bathroom, which is off the bedroom. I can only fit a 24 inch. But we did put a 32 inch in jen's bathroom. But we were in at a nice hotel at one time, and there was actually a TV in the bathroom. And I thought, this is pretty cool. You can watch CNN or porn or whatever you're doing in the bathroom. It's very convenient.

I can already see this Thanksgiving like, you have boone waiting as friends and family, that they're just going to be in the bathroom the whole time.

Everybody will be in the bathroom.

Right.

We actually have a couple of 65 inch tvs, which should probably more adequate. But if we want to get everybody in to watch a 24 inch in my bathroom, that'd be fun.

Well, so clearly you're getting the cut of my podcast money as well.

How many clouds can you put in a car exactly?

Well, Adam robber of the car, he ain't going to fit anymore in there.

That's right.

How about your week, Adam? how's your week been?

It was okay.

It was okay. Did Jimmy call you and heck you about butt breathing turtles at all?

Jimmy was more embarrassed.

Was he?

Well, he was butt loading something.

I did not but load. I said gut loading because rob's wanted to shove needles full of shit of vitamins into Fit.

I did not. I don't know how you prepare.

If it wasn't for Jenny and for Scrap keeping the train on the track, this would have been just a train wreck. But the next time, like I said, you two are allowed to have a podcast, but you just can't talk.

Okay, deal.

All right. No more podcasts when jim's not around. Okay.

All right.

Before we get the times, did I bring up HR?

Not enough, clearly.

About four not enough.

Exactly.

Don't worry. I think, like four podcasts from now, we'll have to have an episode with HR so everybody can participate. So before we get to get it too far, we had a quick conversation before the podcast. Now, I've known Jimmy a while. I've known Adam little less. Right. But apparently there's this weed that Adam used to have, and we don't know what it is.

What we're going to do is we're.

Going to take a picture. We have no clue what it is. Adam has some story on it. He thinks that you can't get rid of it, and the only way you can get rid of it is burning it. So any descriptions for us, Adam?

Okay, yeah. So I was told that the only way to get rid of this is to take it, put it in a ziploc bag, throw it in the garbage, because if it dries out, it comes back. If you freeze it, it comes back. I have frozen it, and it does come back. And that the only other way to kill it is to burn it with fire.

Kind of like a hornworth, really?

Yeah. I was told that may or may not be illegal, so, of course, I had to have some, and I may or may not have some in my.

So you had to get a piece for Jimmy when you sent up the year, right? The whole meme about the endlers to me. So Jimmy got a piece of it, and you put no light on it in a dark room, and it's still growing.

It's still alive.

It's still somehow photosynthesis out of the pure darkness.

I named it sigmund sigmund, the Sea Monster.

It'll compete hair algae.

It's a full plant. We're going to get a picture. We need bentley's help to identify this.

A lot of plants can out compete hair algae as long as you're providing what those plants need. Pocostamin octopus will beat hair algae all day long. More than likely, from what you guys have briefly described, it's, either some species of milk oil that's what I was going with. It can be a myophylum, or more commonly, which is like, on the Us. noxious weed list, is parent feather, which is absolutely horrible as an invasive plant. Like, it destroys ecosystems like crazy. And that's part of where I would start leaning, is something like parrot feather, because it is not impossible to kill. It doesn't care about cold weather. It doesn't care about hot weather. It doesn't care how much you tear it apart because it grows so ungodly fast, like carp can tear at it, and it just doesn't care. It just has shreds that float down a stream system or river system, and then, oh, look, it propagates even further and gets even worse.

You're kind of half shaking your head. I pulled up a picture of parrot feather. Well, how did you get a picture? We'll put it on discord. I got to confirm this. We didn't know.

We're not really sure what it is. And all we know is that when the authorities do show up, adams going.

To jail and.

Automatically go to jail.

This is Minnesota. Wrong man goes jail.

Do not pass. Do not collect $200.

The brown man.

You guys made fun of me because when I brought it up, I literally brought up what was it, like, not even a half inch size?

Yeah, it was like a piece you forgot to put it in.

It's like it was stuck in there.

And something fell off of it.

And then you guys are like, where's the plant? I'm like, It's in the bag. I need more.

No, you don't.

You're not wrong.

That's all you need. A brown man goes to jail. Or as I like to call you behind your back, malibu Ken.

Malibu Ken. We can't give cool names.

I got a cool name for you.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

The vanilla gorilla.

Oh, boy. Is better than vanilla. Vanilla gorilla.

I'm not wearing purple today. Or been grape. ape. Okay, so let's get to some questions. Now we have questions by going to aquarium guyspodcast.com, bottom the website. You can email us. You can text message us. You can call us, leave us a voicemail. However, you can go to our Facebook page. Message us. This one happened to come off of Facebook. Hi there. My name is Rich. I'm just covering this because I'm making sure we got this on the podcast risk. I love podcasts. I love the podcast. Keep them coming. anyways, I wanted to ask what type of filtration I should use for my biggest aquarium. No, we did this one, adam, you.

Did that one last week.

We did this one last week.

I wasn't even here. I know.

That.

Why is it now checked off? All right, let's go to the actual questions. Thank you, Rob.

Me.

Thank you, Rob.

What you got? Hold on. What I want to know, I'm curious. What is the biggest aquarium? How big?

So his biggest aquarium is 375 gallons, and he was asking if he should do a sump or a fluval X six, and either is a great option. I prefer sump. Adam prefers the fluval because he's that guy.

So if you're really 75 gallons, you need, like, three fxes.

Correct.

It's a nice start.

We just assumed that you're going to get the adequate amount of filtration for that versus one big sump.

So if you're comparing apples to oranges.

Or the electric bill, I would do.

What Rob says and I would just fill it full of java moss. I don't know. I think you should fill it full of what did you say? You said you wanted to put a sump.

You were just so proud of that. Put a sump. You can put all different types of filtration. Moving bed is what would be great at that, because most beginners over stock and you want to kill that ammonia. I love moving beds. And you can get away with that.

Do it.

And then you can also use it for a quarantine tank.

Right, now the actual questions. So we have joanne saying, hi, guys. I want to thank you for sharing knowledge and experience in the podcast. I failed badly at my first attempt at having an aquarium, and some innocent fish were lost. I'm not one to give up, so I'll dedicate myself and figure out where I went wrong and how to do it right. I checked out a few things on the Internet, and then I found the aquarium guys, podcast.

There's your first mistake.

I binge listened to them at work, and it was wonderful, entertaining and informative. It made the work day fly by. Jimmy wow.

Send us your paycheck, joanne. Right. Send it to Jim.

Colby I am happy to report that I have now cycled a planted five gallon tank with golden mystery snail, black orchid, beta fish. It was a joy to watch the beta. We named him Beta Max, or Max for short. Explore his new home. And he is currently working on a bubble nest as we speak. Thank you so much, and I'll see you guys in the next podcast. Warnings that's how you end up becoming the editor for the podcast? What Happened to me last year? We got you, boy. So what was the story? Did you just Google us and poof and now you're just the best editor in the world? I already had audio skills. I had no fish skills. That was the problem. Well, I'm happy to trade the podcast. Happy to trade.

And it's still the same as it.

Was then, just with a lot more turtle butt references.

That's great.

I messaged back. Thank you so much for the kind words. We'll be sure to read this on the next episode we record. Okay, cool. I'm making my boyfriend watch the next one with me on Discord. So if you're here hi. Welcome to the discord. We're doing this live on Discord right now, guys, if you want to join the fun, you can come live according to guyspodcast.com and live on the website. Click the button. Join the debauchery.

Click the damn button.

Right? So she's making her boyfriend sitting with us this week and said, I figured you guys would get a kick out of the little tidbit. I work for a cannabis company in Oregon, and I make infused prerolled joints. So I was making joints while binge listening. lol. Many thanks. And more tanks.

That explains why she thought it was good.

There we go.

Contact high. Listen to you, Jim.

Just glad we're the ones that would be fine.

The great Vanilla gorilla.

Gorilla. That's a whole lot.

I know. I came up with that on my own.

Thank you. Sounds like a rejected Hannah barbera cartoon.

Vanilla gorilla and Malibu cannon.

All right.

Hi.

Rob'S listener from the UK here. I'm halfway through your brackish tank talk and was wondering how I can cycle a brackish tank using cycle sponge from a freshwater tank, or do I have to go through its own cycle with poop in a bottle that's made for aquariums? Saltwater aquariums. Thank you and keep up the great work. And from my experience in any brackish tank, I have not bought special poop in a bottle to cycle it. I just use freshwater cycle media for brackish tanks. I haven't seen the downside. I haven't seen any time disparities where it somehow takes longer in a salt water tank or a brackish tank has not been an issue for me. How about you, bentley?

What I would say is, if for some reason your freshwater media isn't doing the trick, like, you just keep testing, right, and you're not seeing some level, like, put tiny amounts of fish food in there to create ammonia and test it. If that's not working, then instead of taking just the media, if you have a sparrow sponge filter, remove it, put it in the brackish tank, squeeze it, get all the gunk out of the filter, and that will naturally cause enough for your bacteria to kind of form on its own. Like, it gives it a biofuel to get that bacteria forming inside the bracket system on its own and you'll be fine.

And there's nothing better than just rinsing out a poop filled sponge into your tank and going, Take that. Are you okay, Jimmy?

I just don't get you sometimes. We like saying poop a lot.

I missed a week.

Yeah, I'm thinking I probably should miss more.

Shame on you. Hopefully that answers your question. Mr from the UK HR called. They're tired of your crap. Tired of my crap? There is a text message we got. For some reason, it got yeeted. I don't know why. Thanks to Google voice that was recording it. I even messaged back, thank you so much for the kind words you meant a lot as well. Someone messaged us and it said on the bottom that found the podcast. Loved it. Got me and my kids are now doing a project together set up I think it was like a 55 gallon tank together and they're bonding time together and then she's put it out. ps. I don't let my kid watch the podcast.

Listen to the podcast. Yeah.

No, it doesn't listen to the podcast.

Rob would be considered child abuse in some form of state.

Our episodes have explicit where necessary, sir. And we use ducks until they ran out. Now it's bleeps.

I have a story.

What's your story?

So on the radio today, I was listening and apparently now these kids are going to school and they're zooming and there's been a lot of problems with what is going on behind them as they're zooming into class. Apparently one of the mothers of the students was practicing her pole dancing without her top on? No, behind the child. And she had nothing on top.

It had to be on the news.

Yeah, and it was on the news this morning and she had, like, a G string, and from what they said is that she was not really very fit either. So apparently we had somebody not really fit topless in a G string working on her pole dancing routine doing that.

I feel like that would be a perfect advertisement on a naughty website where it just says, doing your part, and then they make shoes in a mask. That would have been the perfect COVID ad. Doing your part. Is there that the milk oil you were talking about earlier there, Adam? Wait, wrong MILF everything.

There's also parents that had been smoking pot in the background. And also a woman vacuuming with a bottle of wine at 09:00 A.m.. 09:00 A.m.. 09:00 A.m. On the thing.

I had a lot of cool things.

That were happening in schools. I wish I was back in school, grandma.

The only one I felt bad about was that teacher that had that she witnessed a murder. It was in Florida.

Way to bring it down.

You didn't hear about this, Jim. No teacher heard this arguing in the background of the zoom call and she kind of put the screen down to let them deal with their stuff, and all of a sudden it got louder and louder, and the lady started screaming. So she's watching and she's trying to call the cops, and guy shoots the girl's mom right there. Done. And then ran.

Wow. Thanks for bringing it down.

On that note, I think I have one last back to school kids, one last question. No, I didn't. That was the same one that got yielded. So here's to you, Mr. Yeding. You're from Nashville. I wanted to mention you again as well. Texas back if you want us to do the question. And if anybody else has questions, we love voicemails are our favorite because we get to hear the whole concept of you talking to us. And it makes us feel better. When Jimmy heckles me for doing Turtle podcasts without him, it'll be okay. You'll be there for the next one, Jimmy.

I promise. No, I won't.

If you're lucky, you're allowed to do any podcast.

After last week, I probably have to first get Jenny in therapy. It was like watching the wizard of oz. Okay, let me put it this way.

Listening.

We have Scrap, who's the all seeing wizard. And then we got Jenny, who is the beautiful dorothy. And then we got you two freaking flying monkeys. That's what we got.

Just the monkeys.

Just two flying freaking monkeys. And just jibber jabber.

And Adam was the lion. Because you keep making no, you guys.

Didn'T even get into two main characters.

You were the freaking exotic references.

That's right.

Let's dive into the subject at hand. bentley, it was a pleasure speaking with you the last couple of weeks, trying to plan back and forth content. So I have a list when I started the podcast of people trying to reach out to and there's still people we're trying to get a hold of shout out to you. Gary lange. Please answer your email. We'll get you yet. darn it. But bentley, pleasure having you on the show. Thanks again. But we wanted to talk getting a little emotional with this podcast and talk about what aquariums mean to us. So before we get into too much, because this is also a part interview on you as well, getting to know you more, what got you into this wonderful hobby of ours. We asked this to everybody. We guest interview.

Sure. So I've been in this hobby effectively longer than I can remember, and that's just because of my family. There's a picture I've shared it somewhere, but I think probably my Instagram, where you can see, like, my uncle holding me as a baby and my parents in the background. And right in front of me is 125 gallon tank that we had as a kid. And I'm just staring at the fish as a baby. And I've done that ever since I was a kid. I've kept fish. My parents have kept fish. My great great grand mother used to breed angel fish back in the so fish have kind of been in our family for a long time, and for me, fish have always been something I could just sit and stare at and get very relaxed and calm. We'll tie in, I promise you, very soon. Go until about college, I had some level of fish tank up until I got into college. At the time, I had lived with my cousin, and we had, like, a little 56 gallon bowfront. And this is the 90s. Yeah. I don't remember. I'm old. The 90s era beaufronts had really bad seam issues.

They'll do.

They were worse back then. They've gotten a little bit smarter about their manufacturing process.

But back then, it was guaranteed to fail.

Yeah, it's basically guaranteed. It was not if it was a win. And especially the lower front seams were really bad. That's typically where they would blow. So at the time, we kept predatory cyclists. We had, like, a Red devil, a Jack dempsey, a few other things that were in this particular tank that was basically just like some kind of weird thunder down. And it was supposed because my cousin worked for peco at the time, and he was like, I'll buy the fish is what I want, but you know how to take care of them properly, so help me take care of them. I got kind of attached to a Jack dempsey, if only because they have so much character, right? Scene blows. We're both broke. He works at peco, I'm in college. We can't afford to get a tank that's big enough, fast enough to save the fish. So eventually we donated them to a local store that did larger cichlids, and that was the end of fish for a while. Come 2016, the particular job I had been working, my contract came to an end. I was unemployed, and there's a lot of stress surrounding that whole. Like, I work in contract tech. You don't always know how fast you're going to get your next really stable, long term contract. A lot of times you get short term contracts that pay really terrible. And I'm a homeowner, right? So there's this inherent paranoia of, am I going to be able to keep my house? I live in Seattle. It's got awfully expensive here, like, puttering around YouTube. Just trying to take my mind off of stuff. Between some interviews, I came across a video from the YouTube channel The Green Machine, and it's a specific video about an aquascape they did call Continuity, which is the shallow tank with these beautiful red rocks and a lot of greenery. Watch that. And instantly, like, every memory I had as a kid of sitting and watching tetras daniels and barbs just, like, all came flooding back by the next day. I've watched three and a half years of their content, and I found, like, four other aquarium, YouTubers and. I was just like, yeah, I have to have fish back in my life. I'm remembering what it was, being a kid just staring at fish and instantly feeling stress disappear, feeling very relaxed, very calm, very at ease. Within a week, I had ordered the fluval flex. That's just by me, which for your podcast, folks, you don't see that, but for those who are here in the video chat, you can see the little fluff flex behind me.

And I'm doing Monday to 07:00 P.m., guys. Central time.

Join live. And within like two days after I ordered the flex, I'd found a used 135 gallon and had that already at my house before the flex had even arrived in the mail because I ordered it online, so it just get delivered because I couldn't find them at my local stores. And now I've got 23 tanks. Yes, some large number. It fluctuates. At one point I was a little over 30, and then I paired down to get some turn a bunch of tens into 120 and things like that, right? Getting more gallonage because I do rainbow fish specifically. So I tried to go for bigger tanks because it allows me to have more room for rainbows. But the big thing, when I was getting back into fish, even when I had like a short term contract, for a while I worked for oculus. For those who are in the gaming side of things, I would get home after work and how can I put this lightly, the people who ran parts of their test there had no idea what they're doing. So it became extremely stressful on the testers and the test leads. So people like me who worked there, their understanding of how to do proper quality assurance testing was really poor. So it's a very stressful work environment. I come home and I had this old beat up recliner that sits in one of my two rooms that has most of my tanks. And within 20 minutes, whatever had happened in that day just didn't matter. I just sit and stare at my fish. And eventually I had a roommate at the time I'd fall asleep, I'd get so relaxed, I'd just pass out in my chair and my roommate come around like an hour later and be like, hey man, getting ready to cook dinner. Do you got anything in particular you need? Yeah, whatever. Just didn't care. Like, totally melts all the problems away.

As long as it's warm and edible. Make it happen.

Yeah, I mean, 90% of the time the answer ended up being like, tacos, right? Two kids can go wrong. But it's one of those things where for me, fish has been in my family for a long time now. What I keep now versus what I was interested in as a kid is way different just because the hobby has changed so much. Like, I grew up in the 80s, right? The stuff that you could reasonably keep in the 80s is way different than what you reasonably can keep now just because of technology changes or stuff that's come into the hobby that wasn't really in the hobby back then.

Shrimp.

Yeah, shrimp. That's a great thing. I'd never seen a neocaradina as a kid. I'm still terrible at them now as an adult.

You're saying scrap. I just got my first order of shrimp from Joe. Yes, Joe Shrimpchak.com aquarium guys at checkout. Get your 15% off. I swear, before you continue. So I'm glad that you're taking the normal methodology of when you have one tank, you need more, so you check that box. That's a fun role with us around here.

Well, sometimes you realize that you need less, but you need more gallons.

There we go.

Sometimes you're like, those 410 gallons aren't bad, but what if that rack that holds those 410 gallons disappears and becomes 120 gallons instead?

And where do those tanks disappear? In the other room and they get set up again.

They ended up on my front porch and are still there.

That's just a tank waiting to be reset up. It misses you.

We'll see as you get through your fish life. Right. The tank sizes you value the most really changed when I first kind of got back in the hobby. I love the 20 long and the ten gallon. And now I'm like, well, those tanks are nice, but 40 breeders are way better.

There's a lot more you can do with them.

I could do so much more in a 40 breeder. And it takes up kind of to save a lot of space, kind of.

What inspired you to do content creation on it? Like, you come home, you have a hard day, you're dealing with shit and.

The oculus can you say shit hand?

The oculus HR is not here. It's 07:00 p.m.. They're cut off at 430. So you come home, you relax, you eat some tacos, and then you're like, you know what, this feeling? I have to share this with other people. Is that what happened?

I don't think I've actively talked about this so far in the recorded portion. No, I have. I used to work in radio. Deep down, there was a part of me that loves some level of entertainment and or education. In the case of fish, it's more education. When I was a kid, I played a lot of sports, despite being a big guy. And I played a lot of competitive video games. I did competitive fighting games as a kid a lot. They would go to tournaments and arcades, all sorts of stuff. They have this really strong competitive streak in me, which nowadays is basically fulfilled by fantasy football. Yeah. For those that can't sell. Like I'm from Seattle. I love my seahawks. And don't say anything else.

All right? We're okay with that. In Minnesota.

We're insane people. In Seattle, we're all the twelve fan. Yeah, pretty much we're a very crazy fan base. Part of the way of finding competition in the aquarium hobby, there's kind of two routes you can take. You can either try to be that person who wants to breed the most whatever, or try to find your way to make the most money doing fish. There's people who have that kind of competitive bent and there's other people like me who basically decide that your only competition is yourself and you're at this continuous pace to get better and better at what you do, no matter what it is. It's like trying to achieve perfection, but perfection doesn't exist, so you're never getting off this climb. Right. In my case, it tends to be plants for my local club. So I'm a member of the Greater Seattle Aquarium Society. We have a really robust horticulture Awards program. Well, within three years, I went from being just starting the program to being the person who has achieved the most points in the history of the club since the 70s. Wow. Because I'm that psychotic when it comes to competing with myself.

We're the Minnesota Aquarium Society. I know.

There's a really good plant program, actually.

Yeah. We have a breeder program on top of it and we need more people to participate. We've talked with our current champion, Andrew Henderson. There are a lot of different breeds, a lot of dedication, but you just like to see more of those people use themselves as a self point system in those situations. I think that's a great description.

The way that I look at it is competing with under other people only will give you so much satisfaction because eventually you can do what I did and in a certain period of time, you can just overtake everyone else who's trying. If you're that aggressive, once you're at the top, who do you have to beat? Only yourself. So if you start at the very beginning going, I'm just going to keep doing this until I hit a level to where I don't know that I can learn much more. I basically just have to experiment and figure stuff out. That's kind of when an earworm came in, I had done a couple of small videos, documenting a few things, basically documenting for myself and showing some friends. And I talked to a bunch of people and the one thing I noticed when I would peruse YouTube is that certain things are not well represented on YouTube in a lot of things, honestly. But YouTube is kind of like the strongest thing for most visually oriented fish content. Right?

Right.

There's lots of great podcasts and it's a great price.

It's free.

Yeah. It does come in a reasonable entry point for those who want to watch.

You don't have to pay geo on your cable plan.

Depends on how serious you decide to get. So the thing I notice is there's not really good plant education out there. There's plenty of people who want to sell you plants and will tell you just enough about a plant to make you want to buy it, but they won't tell you how to propagate that plant and how to make money off that plant. At this point, I was between a couple of contracts when I started doing this and part of how I was supplementing my income to pay bills is I was selling a ton of aquarium plants. At one point I started doing a series called Plants for Profit. This is really where I started getting more into YouTube. It was basically preaching my philosophy that breeding for profit is for suckers because you can make more money and sell more plants than you ever can fish. And the difference is the cost is so significantly lower on plants and the requirements are so much lower on plants that the ceiling is significantly higher and the floor is significantly lower. So it's much easier to be profitable on plants than it is with fish. I think I did my second video right as I was going to a local basically swap meet. They didn't used to do before the Great Human malware, they used to do like two or three kind of aquarium swap meets a year in my area and you could get a table to sell stuff for $25. It's like, well, I can sell $25 worth of plants in the first five minutes I'm there. So I purposely really overgrow all my plants, spent like almost a day trimming everything. Go into this after I'd made my second video is a proof case that Plants for Profit works. Finish that first event and I'm walking home after buying stuff with 600 profit in my wallet.

Nice.

To note this plant swap was only open for 5 hours. So if you do your math right, as a salesperson, I'm making well over 100 an hour, because I probably bought about $100 worth of stuff while I was there, plus my table fee. Plus if you count my cost for having a meal because it happened during lunchtime and having appropriate things to drink while I'm there to stay hydrated and talk with people and all that kind of nonsense. And at this point I think I have like 200 subscribers. It's a very small amount and it's only because a guest that you've had, Alex from Secret History had come and done a tour of my house ahead of time and that put me from like 100 to 200 subscribers. It's like basically doubled my channel, which is really nice.

And then you knew that you're going to be doing plants at that moment sharing content on YouTube, right?

Very much. That was kind of the thing where it not only proved something that I knew was true, but I have a direct thing that shows. And I'd been at that point selling even minorly while doing all this stuff, trying to get myself into my next appropriate work gig. And stabilize things. I was selling one hundred dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars for the plants a weekend. Just selling them via craigslist, Facebook and offer up.

Well, it sounds like the next step in your plan is to write a book. We follow this trend with other experts and just book. The thing is talk to Amazon publishers.

I don't think I don't think books are I'm not a person who reads for enjoyment.

But then you can name everything like axelrod I did, and just make sure that there's last names on things.

Yeah, see, I don't care about that part though. The thing is, what I love the most about YouTube and what I've changed is I could have used YouTube in some way to be like other businesses that are out there and just as an advertising wing, right. If you watch enough YouTube, you instantly know you can think of 2345, however, many really like a handful in an instant that know their YouTube channel is mostly their marketing. Right? I could have gone that route. I don't like that route. It's no fun if you're the only person that's really good at something. So if you educate all of those around you, you get them better and better and better. You can create that subtle feeling of competition that can keep driving you to keep pushing yourself. So I use YouTube to educate because I'm tired of seeing people who will go to even places that I like to buy stuff from and will buy the same plant over and over and over again because they keep failing with it, because they're not given the right information to be successful. So if my goal is to make them successful, it's not necessarily because I'm trying to kill some business for somebody. It's more because I want to see people get into this hobby more to the way that I appreciate it.

You're inspiring the soulful passion of your hobby to other people, and that's how you get your reward from this. I mean, I'm part of it.

That's a big part. A big part is anytime you see it, like you had the comment you read at the start of the show, where I love the show. I work rolling joints for those that are in that gym. That's got to be a pretty decent job.

Shout out to joanne. Yeah, way to go.

Call me. I'll come to Colorado.

I think about it like this, right? If you're doing something you really love, you want to see more people into it. We're in an incredibly niche hobby. fishkeeping, especially in the United States, and Canada is really small. Especially if you look compared to Europe or anywhere in Southeast Asia.

Germany has got a thick man.

Yeah, I mean, Germany just has been kicking us in the teeth for an eternity. But the thing is, we can do better because we can look at all there's tons of scientific studies out there Plymouth University, a few others that prove like keeping an aquarium lowers the stress and anxiety in your life period. It lowers your heart rate, it lowers your blood pressure. It's incredibly good for people that have numerous mental health issues for helping stabilize them.

They're using it a lot now with Alzheimer's patients.

Well, I think we can actually begin now with the dive. We really got the idea of really what inspires you, at least the YouTube channel, the content, how you got into it. But as far as what it does for all of us, there's a pile of ways. The biggest one that we can all pick on, like you hammered home, is that just stress relief, zen like feel of getting lost in your tank. And I even have a roommate. That all he does. I don't want to underput him. His major is documentary films. He's a film expert and tries to do different types of films. And he gets lost in tanks. He comes downstairs when he needs to recuperate and go to my basement, my fish layer, and just sit down for 2030 minutes and just, wow, that was refreshing, and goes upstairs. He never really grasp on to how good that was for him until he lived with me. Now he's my roommate, loves it. And he keeps joking that he's going to set up his own tank in my basement as well. I mean, that's what gets you in. But the numerous benefits that we can even begin to list now, on the podcast that we've done research on, you said Alzheimer's was a big one.

Yes. My wife is a nurse and they are using it with Alzheimer's patients a lot more, and it's actually hit some of their what do you say? Books. It's part of their study. It's part of their language now, is how to help these people as best you can. And with all the patients, they've been putting a lot of tanks in these different places, as we know, in all the different clinics and whatnot. And it has been very beneficial for them.

People have been doing in nursing homes and whatnot, like those aviaries or those little bird cages. I don't really know how you would describe those. They look like two giant closets put together and it's enough space for birds to fly across.

Yeah. In our local hometown, they have it full of finches where my wife used to work at. They had one there. And I'd go upstairs and there'd be 20, 1520 people sitting around in her wheelchairs watching these birds. And these birds, they're letting them breed. They're having baby birds and whatnot, and they have them all named. And this is a source of entertainment and calming for the residents of the nursing home.

So you've done a pile of homework. We've talked about this now for three or four weeks, back and forth, going prepping for the program.

Sounds right.

Well, again, you were saying you work 60 hours, weeks, and I've been juggling with Jimmy, throwing stuff at me and disappearing for other podcasts. But what were some of the other topics you wanted to mention?

There's a lot of studies that have shown just generically, how it helps aquariums can help with stress and and anxiety. And the big thing is because there's documented and noticeable differences when people observe aquariums for any period of time. So it's usually, you know, five minutes plus where your blood pressure and your heart rate decrease. High blood pressure usually linked to stress or anxiety, say, with heart rate. If those are decreasing, that's really good. Beyond just like an example of Alzheimer's patients, what we're seeing now is a lot of therapeutic uses of aquariums and sometimes just water in general. Water has a very calming effect on human beings with kids with autism or people with some type of ptsd, some kind of serious emotional trauma. A great example, there's a program in Canada and I'm forgetting the name. I had something somewhere.

I think it's part of the military. You're talking about the therapeutic tanks?

Yes. There's two different ones. There's one that's just generic that's not purely tied to the military, where they're giving tanks to people with other mental health issues, primarily ptsd, and they're using that as an emotional support. So kind of like how you would have an emotional support animal, a proper one, not that, like the lady that brought the peacock on the damn plane. There are some horrible ones out there, but like, real, actual emotional support that's helpful. In Canada, there's a program that one of my actual subscribers is a part of where they'll bring former soldiers that were on deployment. They'll take them out fishing, and they'll take them out into remote areas, get them around water, get them somewhere. All you have to do is just relax and let go and enjoy nature and fish. And a lot of those guys, because a lot of the people that are the volunteers that help with this program, they're all aquarium keepers. I think the gentleman who was telling me about this program, there's something like 75% of the guys that volunteer for this program all actually keep aquariums on the side. And they they'll encourage the soldiers they're working with to look into having a home aquarium, because a lot of these guys are former military and have their own, like, you know, personal demons. And aquariums are part of what has helped them get past those things. You get programs like this where they're using a part of known science that's out there, where we're talking about that, getting rid of that anxiety, getting rid of that stress, and applying it to significantly harder trauma cases. Kids with autism, right? You have all this it's really easy to great example. My significant other, my lady, as I like to call her, her nephews and niece are all autistic. And very recently, for the first time, they got to come up to our home and they had been hearing for like, a year, which is what it feels like because of all the stupid COVID crap about all the fish tanks that I keep. And the eldest of the three kids really likes fish but has never had a fish tank at home. Kids with autism, a lot of them tend to get very easily. The sensory input just goes on overload. It's really easy with autism, and it's hard to understand if you don't either interact with kids with autism or have autism yourself, what that overload really means, but it can cause these real serious meltdowns. Well, one of the kids was kind of getting really ramped up because my dog, whom you've probably heard barking in the background, he's super excited when he meets kids. He loves kids. Well, we put the dog away. We take them into the room with all the fish tanks, calm, literally, like flicking a light switch, just zeroed in on one of the first tanks and stared at it for about ten minutes. This little girl, she's never done this before. She's never been around fish tanks. She's pretty young. She's only I think she's five, if I remember right. She's staring at it, and we're sitting there and we're showing kind of each of the fish, and even though we're like, oh, hey, Sarah, come look at just zeroed in on this one tank, I finally like, do you want to feed the fish? bam. Big smile. Happy. Excited, but very controlled excited. Not over rambunctious or anything like that, which can happen really easily with kids with autism. Well, after I'd had this experience, they spent their time at the house, and they eventually left. And my lady's sister is like, I might have to get a fish tank. And I was like, if you want a fish tank, you let me know. I'll pay for it. I'll get you everything you need. If it helps you have an aquarium at home for your kids, I'll do that happily. that'll be my gift to them. So I started doing research after this had happened and found there's tons of links where they're using new therapy or places like the Georgia Aquarium, for example, certified under a special certification that defines that their staff and the way that all the architecture and everything is designed is good for people with autism. It is designed to help people with autism remain calm, be relaxed, be able to enjoy themselves, which a lot of places aren't like that because you'll get loud noises or what have you, that can cause sensory overload. Whereas being around water, seeing fish swim, it's inherently soothing to people, even those who have a mental condition that spikes even what we would deem as the smallest things in the world, to an extreme. Soothing. It's like it literally sometimes it's it's like snapping your fingers how fast it can happen. It's incredible to see.

I just recently read that one of the National Aquariums, and I can't remember which one it was. I wish I would have paid more attention, where they're allowing people, autistic children especially, to come in at night, spend the night sleeping on the floor next to the big aquarium. And what a great thing it is for these kids to be able to, first of all, have a nice outing like that, and it's very calm. And of course, you've got adults watching to make sure everything goes well. But I mean, what would you rather have your child doing? Would you rather have them on ridland and paying out that outrageous amount of money that you have to and not knowing if it works or not? Or would you rather spend $100 on an aquarium and putting that child in front of there for a little bit and letting them unwind?

And again, ridland is not even for autism. That's the ADHD exactly. Different symptoms. So I got two stories that correlate directly I did not know this right. This was not privy knowledge to me. I did not get some sort of feed that notified me that this was a case study. So it didn't even recognize because I don't have a lot of friends and family that have issues with autism. The only times I've ever dealt with it is in certain circles and generally at public places, church, I have to help a family with something, or someone would request a quiet zone. Again, I, as a person that's never dealt with it, really can't recognize that whole sensory overload. robb is an extreme extrovert. His life is chaos. That's just very foreign to me. I had a mother reach out to me. I think her kid was about six years old and is just escalating a lot of these oversensory symptoms, panic attacks in the middle of night, screaming outfits, just outbursts all the time. And it just kept getting worse as he aged. And I was actually at a local thrift store in town and saw her at the thrift store. She was looking at fish, and I was like, I need to try to find something. We can't get a cat or dog, because he also has cerebral palsy, I'm assuming is what she was meeting, where she'll grab the dog and hurt him, not because he wants to, because it's involuntary. So they need something else as a relief. And doctor said, we'll try any type of pets, maybe a hamster or a fish. Who knows what will work? So she was there trying to get it. I got her aquarium. I said, here's, this, take these fish with you. Here's some recommendations. She contacted me back and how did they get things set up and addressed? And she's just in tears. She said, I've never seen my kid. Literally, like, we flipped the switch. If he's ever having a bad time, it's in his room. If he wakes up in the middle of the night, he just opens up, looks at the blue light to the aquarium, and it completely changed their life, bar none. Just completely fixed any not outbound issues, because, again, he still has the condition, but fixed all of the distress that comes with that sensory overload that comes with the fits and just essentially turned it all off whenever they have a problem and can lead him right to his room, to his fish. It's something that I've never really witnessed until that moment. And then seeing all these, like you said at the aquariums, this is actually happening across the nation. zoos are doing it not only they're seeing just the extra revenue come in for renting out some of their spaces to parties that may want to have like a birthday party, sleepover at the zoo or aquarium, but they're seeing these sessions really work for kids, for anybody.

Out there listening who is in an aquarium group. Like Minnesota has, like Seattle has. Hey, bring this up in your next meeting. All of us have got an extra tank. How about we donate our extra tanks to people that can use them for therapeutic? What a great deal would that be? If you're a mom with autistic children, if you are a serviceman with PSTD and you get yourself a tank for free and you're helped out by the aquarium society, I think that would be a great thing for everybody to get behind and push forward. Clearly it works.

I mean, it might not work for everybody, but if it has that drastic results on even our cases that we've seen firsthand, there must be more.

So let me give you one more example of something slightly different, but tied to a similar thing. In the greater Seattle aquarium society, we have a philanthropy program where we'll do whether it's sponsoring some of the charitable events like project piaba or something like that, we also have a tanks for teachers program where we purposely are trying to put fish tanks where everything's provided by the club into schools. Well, we recently got contacted by someone who's out on the peninsula of Washington, which is a little more rural, a little more remote, and there's a teacher out there which could prove, because he's been keeping track of this, he's a science teacher. And ever since he started keeping a fish tank and teaching kids in his biology classes by using a fish tank with typically guppies, but he's done it with some other fish, too, teaching them about, like, genetics and how raising things can occur and babies and all kinds of stuff. From an animal biological perspective, the overall grade point averages, not just in the science class, but overall of all students who interact with that tank in one class regularly throughout their years at this school, increased by over a full grade point. So if they were previously c students, they were at. A very minimum B student after interacting around a fish tank daily as a part of their school time.

Now, that's incredible because I was watching what was it two years ago? I think it was about two or three years ago, somebody actually donated a bunch of money to see if this would work. No, this was done a couple of times. It was in recently, but it was also on that movie. I think it was called freakonomics, where they have a hardcore belief that everything in life is done by incentive. So if you're a salesperson, you're incentivized by the bonus. If you want to move forward in life, it's incentivized by what you can do for yourself, your family, and your circle. So they thought that, hey, let's go to big public schools and let's hand everybody I think it was $50 or $100 every report card. And if you can keep your grades above I think it was B minus. I think it was the measurement just above passing, because I think A minus C is passing. If you could keep your grades to that level, they would literally hand you either $100 or $50 every report card. And they had report cards regularly, and they saw no improvement. Like, not really much improvement across the board. It's no improvement negligible on reports. But yet something like this, an entire grade, that's incredible to me.

This particular group has been doing this for over a decade, and he's tracked it the whole time. And it's not just science. It's not just math. It's English. It's every class that these kids participate in. You can see their grades the year before, and the grades starting the year is where they start being in the classroom around a fish tank, and there's a noticeable improvement. You would think if it was like, okay, just science class. You're just a good teacher. Math loosely associated with science. If you're good at science, you're probably decent in math. You're probably just a good teacher. You're improving the way they think. But when it improves English and a lot of your other programs, history, grades from a science class, there's something different happening here. And the teaching staff hasn't really changed. The curriculum has only changed as much as how the standard curriculum has changed across the nation. The only common factor fish tank.

I can speak this. We talked about this in the podcast before. When I was in elementary school, I went to a private church school, and it was, I'm going to guess, 15 in the classroom. They were all mixed grades, and I didn't think it was an issue, but again, I was probably the loudest student crossing most of the rockets as well. I still am. So we always did a theme every year that we would base upon all our lessons off of geography of a certain main continent. So Asia was that year's continent. I'm like, hey, you know what would be a great idea. I'm a fish nut. Can we please get goldfish and koi in the classroom? And the teacher is like, what? No, please. I'll help pay for it. Whatever is necessary. So I collected pennies, that type of thing. Ended up that the teacher paid for it all. And we got a kiddie pool with goldfish in the middle of the classroom. Comet, big comet goldfish. There's a lot of repercussions and stories with that one tangent. The floors were heated. Didn't know that they started breeding in front of us in class, and it was a continual splash fest. But even with all the distractions, fish splashing, breeding, the whole thing, the one thing she continually noticed is she actually kept a distraction card at her desk. And every time she actually saw someone make a distraction and kill productivity in the classroom, because we're all in the same classroom, she would make a note of it not just this is just what she did as her own practice being a good teacher. Then we put the fish in and for her record was a third of what anything else was. If any kid got distracted or was about to create a ruckus, oh, the fish made a splash. I'm going to look down there.

Oh, that's right.

Go back to my schoolwork. And it was just the biggest, good distraction the class could have had. It stopped other people from making a raucous, and it was its own peaceful zen. Almost like I still to this day listen to that chill YouTube track. I think they call it the vapor wave on YouTube. Just to have light sound in the background, maybe water running. That white noise, that pond really represented that for us. And it's still going today.

Still there.

It's been there for, I think, now 18 years.

I recently was just over there with our friend ty, who does tank maintenance. He does tank maintenance for the school. They have a saltwater aquarium and they still have that kiddie pool. It might be a different kitty pool by now, let's hope. But it's still in the same darn spot. Because Rob and I had this conversation before and they still have it. And I mentioned the story to her about it, and she goes, yeah, it's been here forever.

Yeah. They leave it run through the summer. I mean, it doesn't change temperature because, again, it's full heat, so it's the same temperature all year long. Who knows how many times they bred, but definitely matches those same results.

Yes. That's fantastic. I think one of the best ways to get people into the hobby is right for them to see stuff like that as a kid. But more importantly, when you can get the people to more actively embrace it, is when they can hear those kind of stories. Think about you have aquariums to cut down on distractions. They cut down on maybe things that would prevent you from being better at your grades, because maybe that's all it is, is that distraction difference is the difference between that grade point that occurs right. You've got that better focus because I kind of glanced at the fish for a few seconds. Instead of pestering Jimmy over here beside me, I think that fish tank helps. Well, rob's a little distracted.

A little, yeah.

So I was giving a man cake.

Yeah, that's why I gave him a cake. And I also have a shot collar around him.

I got diabetes. I grew up with a kid on ritalin, and I was never like they used to call it adhd Add. I had the Add continually distracted. And the way it can describe it for people like you, accurately describe a sensory overload. For us, trying to give us a small picture. The whole Add concept, if you really have it, you feel like a television and channel is always changing. You want to focus on something, even if it's something like you can really enjoy unless you want to put your hard effort into it. Your channel is changing and you have no control of the remote. So having something just lightly in the background, like my music, I listen to writing myself notes. There's always bandaids. But the best Band Aid is having that eye candy distraction that if I'm going to go somewhere, I'm not going to go far. I'm going to go right there. You had something else to me. You brought papers.

I brought papers because my wife is a nurse and she was pulling stuff up today, and we're talking about what we're going to talk about tonight. And I just wanted to read something. Here a couple of things that I didn't even realize. They've done studies where you are in the dentist office, and actually, the calming effect of the aquarium will reduce the amount of pain. And I'm not sure how they measure it, but they measure the amount of pain that people feel when they're going through the dentist and stuff, and that's why they have all these different tanks in the different places. But what I wanted to read real quick is it says calming effect for children and Alzheimer's patients. Though fish tanks provide visual stimulation that might boost your focus and creativity, they can also have a very calming effect. The particular benefit has been observed in children and hyperactivity disorders as well as Alzheimer's patients. In one study conducted at purdue University, the presence of fish of a fish tank at home improve mood alertness and actually the appetite of Alzheimer's patients, which is a big thing, which I didn't realize that a lot of people with Alzheimer's have increased appetites, and then they actually will go downhill a little bit faster.

You know what? That's what I'm going to blame my weight on. I'm fat because I have aquariums.

That's right.

I don't think the aquariums have anything to do with it.

Yeah, it might be the chocolate cake in your hand there.

I smell pizza.

Yeah. And it also reduces the amount of aggressive behavior in Alzheimer's patients. Children who struggle with behavior issues may find a tank calming. It may improve in concentration and sleep. And with extra sleep, people are better behaved. And there's been all kinds of studies there showing, too. So if you're getting better sleep, that's.

Why you're crabby me when you came to the podcast, because I was an.

HR today, because of you guys. That's why I was crabby. So anyway, there's a lot of people, a lot of studies out there that are doing this, and I just think it's amazing how we have not ever focused on this before now.

We've only talked about some examples of effects on humans. We even talked about all the tools for kids. So we talked about kids with autism, different conditions. Any healthy child has distractions, and clearly this is something that can be used. There's plenty of studies for that. But also, if you're a parent, this is a wonderful tool. Any pet that can be used as a tool, but nothing so rigorous. If you forget to feed the dog, he'll probably go a week without food. If you don't train the dog right, he's still going to be there and do his best. The aquarium, you can certainly get hearty fish, but you're trying to create your own slice of nature. It has its own rules. You try to master it, but you can't change those rules. And for that and a kid learning the responsibilities of keeping a tank, the reward of education and seeing their knowledge before them, really reward them with either breeding or fruitful plants or a great looking tank is the best lesson I can figure out for a kid. Besides, don't stick that in the electric socket. Really? You can look at me on that one. You didn't even see that coming.

No.

Perhaps the better lesson might be don't be a fool or at your tool.

There you go.

I'm just thinking, people are listening to this, and they're so calm and relaxed. They're going to drive off the road.

Come on.

Just joanne, she's rolling some joints right.

Now, and we'll definitely drive off the road. I hope she's listening. I hope she sends us an email, tells us we're a bunch of douchebags. I think it'd be fun.

I mean, there's also other ones that we haven't messaged, because this is, again, what aquariums mean to us. And I hope people listening that don't have a criminal are just getting into this. Hear this, because this really gives a small window, at least for an hour, and something podcast of what these mean to us. It's not just, oh, cool, we have a fish tank. It's just another hobby. We do. No, it's a part of our lives. We've accepted that. And these are hard reasons why in effects that are changing other people's lives.

These tanks are not put in dentist's office into your doctor's offices just because they're cool, but they do have benefits for the average person.

So just a couple of others that I had on the list is of course Camaraderie, the fish clubs, the networking, everything has the human element. I don't have a ton of friends in the area. I got Jimmy, I got Adam Adams, like 6 hours south.

That's pushing it.

But they're still a network, even in our Bunkto area, fargo area. But the amount of connections, the conferences that COVID prevented have been wonderful for a lot of different people. But even now, moving stuff online, talking about doing conventions online, they just had Pondimonium done online for businesses. So camaraderie second to none. And then of course, the slice of nature conservation. But what other details or topics we missed? bentley, do you think is worth noting?

The first thing I want to talk to you, we touched on ptsd and soldiers and I specifically now that I pulled up my resource, just because I want to give this organization a little love. Therapeutic Tanks.org. This is actually a specific program that works with soldiers with ptsd by providing them everything they need to start an aquarium in their home to help as a coping and soothing mechanism to deal with their ptsd after deployment.

And we'll also have that in the podcast show Notes. So you can right there, it's a.

Cool organization and I mean, they're involved, they've got some really good sponsors like Red Sea and Bulk Reef Supply are also part of kind of sponsoring them some, but it's a very cool program. Definitely check it out if you get a chance. One thing that we haven't touched on that I think matters, there's a lot of people, and I know some who are fans of various YouTube channels that I've talked to, whether it's in a live stream chat or they contact me on Facebook, whatever it might be. There are a lot of people who have some kind of health condition that prevents them from being able to do something like go out and take a hike, go out into nature. But keeping an aquarium is an opportunity to bring nature to them. To be able to interact with nature in some way, shape or form when you normally could not, can also be something very helpful to people. I look at every tank I put together as my opportunity to build a small little ecosystem. And I care very much about making sure that it is a functioning ecosystem, even if it's manufactured. I'm not trying to replicate. This is exactly what happens in this one river in this spot here. I just want something that is appealing to me. But at the same time, there are plants there to help keep the fish healthy, to help produce extra forms of beneficial bacteria. There's snails in there, there's different types of fish that all serve different jobs. I build this because I want that little slice of nature. I work so much that I'm not going out on a hike. I'm a big guy too, so it's not like I'm amps to go hiking up a mountain or something. I'll leave that to my kid brother.

But go down the mountain easier.

Well, force equals mass times acceleration. And when you go to mass, you accelerate too much. You're not stopping.

I'm getting buddy thinking about this, but.

You get this opportunity to bring nature to yourself. You might not be on that conservative like we have to protect nature mentality until you start bringing it home and you start enjoying it more and more. You start realizing how important some of these precious things in the world are and that if there is not some level of protection, they will be gone. I love rainbow fish and basically every rainbow fish out there is on some level of potential extinction because where they come from, especially the ones that are all in the papua New Guinea as opposed to the Australian ones, the Australian ones are slightly safer. They're country. This is a place where they're actively looking at ways to get more food fish, not ornamental fish, into their lakes. And those food fish kill all the rainbow fish or they're destroying a lot of the natural forested regions around to make palm farms because it's the most profitable thing they can do. But by doing that, they're destroying everything that makes some of these fish that we value in this hobby able to continue to live in the wild. So there are some of them that are extinct in the wild and the only reason that they are not completely extinct is because of hobbyists, because of people like us who keep aquariums and keep these fish. I have some in my fish room downstairs. The chalatherina sentani ANSIS the lake Centani rainbow. They're extinct in the wild. They're gone. The only reason they exist is because of hobbyists. And they've been trying through the hobbyists to reintroduce them into the wild. Now that they've steadily worked with the local tribes around Lake Sentani to help curtail back some of the things that had made those fish go extinct in the first place. And there's several other cases that are like this. The emerald rainbow, the glossy lepus wanameses is in the same case. They introduced tilapia into the lake there. It killed nearly every wanameses that lived the last time they did a major collection back in 2005, they found 80 pairs of fish not harvested. That's something they could find in the whole lake. And the lake is huge. And they've steadily had to re breed them in captivity and slowly reintroduce them in waves to get them back out of extinction status. And they're still critically endangered only because of the captive bred population.

We've talked about it over and over on this podcast about how some people are still totally against us keeping fish. But on the flip side, if it wasn't for the hobbies keeping some of these fish, they would be gone in the wild. We've talked about the different people in the pet industry that have introduced all these fish to the general public and how the general public now is seeing less and less fish out there because the walmarts of the world and the different mom and pop stores have gone out of business. And so if you're not seeing the stuff in front of you, you don't think about it. If you don't talk about it, you don't have the conversation. Then all of a sudden a fish goes extinct and nobody cares, nobody hears about it. So it's because of the hobbyists that we're going to get through this and restock the lakes eventually, someday down the road.

There's been some programs that Jim cummings told us about reintroduction in some areas, but it's few and far between. It's going to be our tanks. It's going to be that bentley's basement that's going to preserve these things and hopefully we can make more basements.

They just had an article in Arizona about reintroducing one of the skiffska species into Mexico, again, one of the Mexican libraries. And they said that they've been doing good and they're doing it with another one now. One of the biggest things you run into from a scientific perspective is teaching those captive bred fish how to survive native predators. When you're doing, say, like salmon or trout, which runs in massive numbers for stocking lakes and stuff, they don't teach them how to survive predators. So the survival rates are extremely low, like 1% or less of all of the fish they release. They release 2300,000 fish and two to 3000 of them survive to spawning season. Whereas we can't do those kind of numbers with ornamental fish. So it becomes this very interesting game where from the perspective of those people like me, who I wouldn't have cared about any of this before I got back into the hobby, and that's four years ago. Four years ago I was not armed with the knowledge I am now. And I wouldn't have cared about some random lake in Indonesia, right? I wouldn't have cared. I'd have been your proper dumb white American be like, it's not a lake near me. Who cares? But now it brought fish back into my life. It brought nature back into my home. And I look at these things and the first thing I can think of is, how the hell do we save this? Because I don't want just me to enjoy this. I want kids. I want my nieces, I want my nephews. They want their kids to be able to enjoy the same thing I enjoy. I want my lady's, like autistic nephews and niece to be able to enjoy these when they're adults. But if we don't, the few of us that are willing to start acting in some fashion, it doesn't have to be a lot. Sometimes it's just small enough to keep that hobby going, to show all those beneficial effects, to get more people interested and then teach them, like, well, here's this one fish that not only are you now protecting something that doesn't exist in nature or is critically threatened in nature, but it's also helping you enjoy yourself and feel better at the same time. You can do two things at once. The more that we can bring that into more people's lives, the better chance we have. For those of us who super care about conserving nature in some way, shape or form to make real impacts on actually doing that thing, it starts with one person. One person being passionate and vocal enough can inspire more. And it's like any grassroots thing, it can work and inspire more and more people. It just takes that first contact, that first level of people who can show you, bring you into that door and show you like, you really stressed. Do you get home from work and think, god, I hate doing what I do? If I could tell you you can spend $100, get a fish tank, and within 20 minutes of every day you come home from something you hate, forget all about it, feel relaxed, feel at home. If you want a beer or a scotch in your hand while you do it, feel free. Need to roll that extra joint? Go for it. But just chills you out. Now you can go about that time with your family, with your friends, and not have that stress on you, so that everything you do for fun becomes even more relaxing, even more enjoyable. Could you possibly say no?

Well, I don't think it's going to get better than that, ladies and gentlemen.

No. I look back and you talk about the grassroots movement takes one person. A lot of the zoos in America now are changing from just displaying animals to educating people about those animals. But as a person, just as a human being, if you've ever stood within 5ft of an elephant and seen how majestic they are, how huge they are, how cool they are, how do you not want to help save these animals in their natural habitat? I understand that people get uptight because there are animals behind bars, but the zoos are getting much better at keeping animals. They have better habitats. But if you do not educate people, the only time a child ever sees an elephant is on National Geographic. It's just another cartoon on TV that doesn't matter. And so I really think it's important, the zoos that we have in this country, the aquariums we have in this country, to help support those guys, because they are out there now trying to create positivity about keeping these animals alive out in the wild. And I think that's super important.

The project pia Buzz, the Conservation Acts, the reintroductories, and the most important thing. Above them all is the basements of the world, holding treasures passing on from one friend family member to the other, like my animals, keeping the hobby alive and making sure feeder guppies are there for everyone.

Feeder guppies. hoorah hoorah.

Well, bentley, you have been fantastic, sir. I appreciate you having to let us know your inside of the hobby and telling us what aquariums mean to you. It's not going to get better than this. So if you're listening to this and you're just getting a hobby, get in. We don't have to tell you this. Told you. Get in. Get your piece of heaven distress and above all else, joanne, I hope you're rolling blunts right now because that would be perfect.

Yeah, she's listening to this podcast and she's going, I can't even get high enough to get out of this podcast.

Well, bentley, you got any last remarks for us, buddy?

Well, I mean, only because it ties back to the start of this episode in that you have dojo locations behind you, right?

I do.

And I think it's important that we've discussed how turtles have gas exchange through their rectum. It should be noted that the Majestic Dojo loach also has an important gas exchange through the rectum, which is to say that they have two air bladders in their body and when they feed at the top, they very often bring too much air into their system and they have to pass that gas through the first air bladder to the second. You'll often see them come into a weird l shape. I know this because I have my Dojo loach, danger Noodle, who is a big fan of ramsay.

Danger Noodle.

That's going to be my nickname.

Broken noodles. Small Noodle might be more appropriate.

There you go. It is cool here in Minnesota.

It does get a little chilly, but it's important to note that that gaseous exchange occurs. And as an aquaris, few things are funnier than watching a big tentacle penis monster fart.

It is literally the reason why it's my wife's favorite fish. She calls it her penis fish.

So the name Danger Noodle was because it was the appropriate version of the cthulhu penis monster that my girlfriend first gave the Dojo lush when it came home. And now ever since the fish is so dumb, we will sit one of our favorite things to watch together is any kind of Gordon ramsay show. We put it on that fish, I joke you not shows up to the front of the tank, flops down and watches the TV.

And farts.

Without fail, you are going to see danger tolfart just guaranteed because it's what they do. And every time you catch it out of the corner of your eye, it is pretty much impossible not to either crack a smile or giggle at it because you don't see other fish fart. It just doesn't happen. That's not how they produce air through their systems. So it's important to know for everybody listening the importance of gaseous exchange in your weather loach. Remember fart your danger. Noodle.

All right, we're redoing our merch store and we already have one of our local artists that made a Danger Noodle artwork. We're going to send you guys a t shirt.

That's all there is to it.

Yes.

Well, again, guys, we're going to be on next week. Join us Monday 07:00 in discord. If you like what you hear, go to quoriumgistpodcast.com. You can go to the bottom of the page. Give us a few bucks. Keep the lights on. Buy a danger noodle t shirt. They are there. We're going to get new ones with logo. Oh, it's actual award. Danger Noodle now it's all over.

That's my new superhero. I'm going to go home with danger noodles.

On that note, we bid you do see you next week. Thanks, guys, for listening to 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 could be so sexy until I heard adam's voice. Go frank yourself.

Don't you know that's my boy don't you know.