I want to put a warning on this podcast that this is going to talk about a hard subject of fish fighting each other for sport. This is not something that we condone, and it will be a hard episode for a chorus to listen to. But we do want to bring attention to the subject since no one else talks about this at all or much that I can find due to this episode's grim nature, I will not have anybody sponsor this episode for obvious reasons. If you feel inclined to support this podcast, please check the links in the show notes. We accept donations on Patreon or discord. I want to thank you, the listeners, for being our number one sponsor, as I don't know if we're going to be getting sponsors after this episode due to the nature of the content. Consider yourself warned. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast. This is the podcast I've been least waiting for.

Really.

Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast, where if this is the one you're starting with, I swear to God, stop immediately. This is not it. All right? We do better content than this. Funnier content, right? This is not where you should start listening to us. We do better than this. Go listen to episode 18. Start around there and then poke around. Have fun. Come to this when you got at least 20 episodes under your belt. Do not come here as your first subject, if this is your first time. Thank you for giving us a try. Stop. Find another episode before we begin.

Yes.

I'm your host, Rob Jolson.

Hey, I'm Jim Colby.

And I'm Adam on the shark.

So today's topic that we're going to be deep diving into, I'm not even going to give preface because you've read the title, but what's the title, Rob?

What is it? I haven't seen it yet.

All right. It is.

I just got here.

Beta fighting.

Wow. You are a dumbass.

I'm a dumbass? So if you come to an aquarium podcast where you want an aquarium, and you came to listen to beta fighting, I'm going to point it out that this is on you.

Now.

Let's. Let's be real. This is on you. You came because of your curiosity. We're doing this not to condone beta fighting. I want to say this first and foremost. Beta fighting is a horrific practice that I am agreeing with that should be illegal in the United States. And I'm happy that it's illegal, but most people don't even know that it exists.

We're just bringing awareness to the program here.

And it's not that it needs awareness, but I think we need. We need education on what exactly you're seeing in some of these pet stores, what's going on in the trade, because changes have been made with awareness. And good or bad, you're going to now find out the research that I have done that Jimmy and Adam have brought to the table. I know me, I've worked on this for over two years. So I hope you learned something, because it's not enjoyment for me, but no one else is going to talk about it, so why not the shit show podcast?

How about we talk about dog fighting next week?

Yeah. No, no.

I'm a Michael Vick thing.

I enjoyed Michael Vick as a quarterback. But I think that that's already been overdone. And that's the point. People know about dogfighting. They know about cockfighting. They don't know about fish fighting. So let's bring this to light, let's talk about it and really tell people why it's not a great practice and they shouldn't be doing it or condoning it and supporting it, and why it's illegal, or why it is illegal in other countries. But before we get to that, we always do a bit of a news in our personal lives. So, Jimmy, you got any topics in your world?

I do have a topic in your world.

Excellent.

I know when you and Adam talk about me behind my back, you always talk about how 100%, probably word that goes to your mind right away about me is extreme sports. You know, extreme drinking, cliff diving, you know, surfing, you know, in Hawaii, you know, stuff like that. You think of me immediately. I found a new extreme sport that is sorta, sort of a little bit connected to our podcast, and it is so cool. And we are gonna start this. And I'm so excited. I heard this on the radio. I've done a little research. It's called worm charming.

Okay.

It's worm trying.

All right.

I. Robbie, this is a thing.

This is going to be a pun by the end of the conversation.

No, it's not going to be a pun. I put a lot of thought and effort in this.

Oh, this is not. This is. This is your idea.

No, this is something I heard on the radio and I thought, you know. Cause we love, as Aquarius, love to feed our. Our fish, live earthworms every once in a while as a treat, right? Oh, okay. And so is this gonna be worse.

Or better than butt loading?

This is gonna be right up there.

Right up there. All right. I.

So anyway, for the last few years, an english town called Falmouth has hosted an annual worm charming championship, which is sort of exactly what it sounds like. And for the competition itself, teams are each given a two meter square plot of grass. It's 2 meters, so you figure, like, six foot by six foot piece of grass. Okay. And you have a half hour, and without digging or using any mechanical tools, you're trying to get earthworms to surface, that you can capture and count. And last year's winners was somebody from the United States called the Tennessee Worm Tuggers. That was the name of their team. Tennessee Worm Tuggers.

How delightful.

And anyway, worm charming, worm grunting, and worm fiddling are all terms to describe fiddling. Yeah, I'm just. I'm trying to.

I think that's what my mom called playing with myself when I was younger.

Yeah, I think so.

So, worm charming, my wife calls it. Now.

Does that mean worm charming? Worm grunting and worm fiddling are all terms to describe the act of enticing earthworms to the surface of the soil. As a skill and profession, worm charming is now very rare within the art being passed through generations to ensure that it survives. In other words, it's basically a performance arts version of a bird pecking at the ground to rouse up the worms to come to the top. This year's winner was the Tennessee worm Tuggers. They charmed some 32 worms out of the dirt in under 30 minutes with the help of some harmonicas. They played sound and tapped on the ground to entice these worms to come up to the top. There is a person in Sophie Smith of Chestire who is currently the Guinness World Record holder of charming, a whopping 565 worms to the top of the soil when she was just ten years old. And what these people do is they'll play music, they'll tap on the ground, and the worms think it's raining out, like they've seen robins do this, where robins will go and eat, and they'll tap on the ground and sit there and wait for the worms to come the top. Cause they think it's gonna rain, and the worms come up top, and people, then they grab the worms. They have lots of different trophies you can get, like, for the biggest worm, you get a trophy. For the smallest worm, you get a trophy, but you have to keep all the worms intact, and all worms have to be let go at the end of the. The thing. So, anyway, I was thinking that we should start this in our area.

And I have never been more fascinated in a detailed penis joke in all my.

This is extreme. This is. This you find on the Internet, there's all kinds of freaking inner videos and stuff about it. And so, anyway, all we have to do is, I think you and me and Adam should come up with some different names.

Can I level with you?

Yeah.

Remember the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie in 2000 where he was collecting those worms, like, electric probes?

Yeah. They can't use them here.

Yeah, no, I'm thinking, like, that scene keep pops in my head as you're telling me the story of a bunch of people, like, trying to tap and fiddle out some worms.

Right. So we just need to come up with some really interesting and cool names. And so I was thinking, like, maybe, like, adam. Adam's team could be, like, adam's anacondas Adams.

Anaconda.

You know, I'm just. Because I've done some research and I've contacted and former girlfriends and things like that and wives and try to come up with some information. I even hacked into the Internet and went and found your medical records and stuff.

Well, thank goodness.

And so mine's gonna be Jim's wonder worms.

Jim's wonderworms.

Cause you kinda wonder where they've been.

All right.

And then we came up with one for you.

I feel like we could do this for charity.

No, we got one for you.

Do you?

Yeah. Robbie's inchworms. Robbie's inchworms.

Can we at least do Adam's army worms?

I don't want.

Yeah, you know, it'd be good, too.

It would be more of.

Because they infest everywhere, eat everything, you know, impregnate everything. Impregnate everything.

Now, first of all.

Oh, here we go.

They don't eat and infest everything. You white rats.

See, we got to get our squirrel enos, out, because we have to try to be serious in just a few minutes, when we actually start the real podcast.

I'm just trying to share some information. This data fighting doesn't seem so bad, right?

All right, gentlemen, I believe I have permission to tell this story. I'm gonna leave his name out of it. But there.

Leave my name.

You can look it up if you want. There's an aquarium club that I'm a part of. We got assigned new roles. Jimmy was the president last year. Now I'm the vice president this year of the aquarium club. And the treasurer is a gentleman that helped me do a bake sale for the club.

I know where this is going.

We did a bake sale. All the members of the club put out a bunch of baked goods. I sat out all day. Next to the street fair. We sold a bunch of baked goods, and we raised $333, some odd cents. So, round of applause. We raised some good money for the club. Our club generally uses it for helping club events. But more importantly, we donate aquarium setups to charitable organizations like nursing homes, schools, and other organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club. Anything that would involve either children, elderly, or somebody that would benefit from an aquarium.

And that's why we started this club, is exclusively to do good things in our neighborhood.

Good things in our neighborhood, not just to, you know, be a bunch of people that want to, you know, impress each other with our cool fish collection, because that is generally a waste of time in my mind. So we got this cool fish club that's been going well. We raised money, and we burned all day. Me and the vice president. Excuse me, not vice president. Me and the treasurer did this. So the treasurer has the money from the club, all the club's money in the backpack. He adds the money we earned today from the bake sale into said backpack and a money, one of those bank money bags with a clock. Then he's got a ledger in there, like a notebook with all the members every in and out of what we use money for what we've brought money in from. Of all the money going in and out of the. The backpack. It's got a few club notes, club buttons, you know, a couple different things right in the backpack. So he takes that with him, and I, and when we got done, the main bake goods we had left were individually wrapped things, individually wrapped cookies, you know, individually, individually wrapped muffins, stuff like that.

And you got done about 06:00 p.m. on a Sunday evening, right?

Yeah, it was about that time. And I'm like, well, what are we gonna do with the rest of the baked goods? And he's like, hey, I'm a veteran. I'm going to go to this veterans thing tomorrow morning. I can bring it and give it away to the veterans for this breakfast deal.

We're going to be going fantastic.

Great. Bring it to the veterans, buddy. Take the baked goods with you. So we put it in his car, and he takes the money bag, puts in his car, and drives off, and.

He put everything into a backpack, right.

The backpack was the money, right. So then I go a different direction because I have all the equipment from, like, the table, the awning, all the other stuff, and I go drop off the key with my buddy Derek that owns Dee's fish company. By the time I get there, I hear that he's someone drove by that he's in the ditch and in handcuffs. I'm like, what's going on? So I drive over to where it happened, found the tire tracks of where he went in the ditch, and all the other vehicles, which were police officers, that were in the ditch, but they're all gone and missing. I drove to his house, which wasn't far from the scene of the accident. He was missing. So I contact the sheriff's department, and I say, hey, I heard stories that my friend was in an accident and was in the found on. The. People saw him on the side of the road. I don't see him at his house. I'm trying to check for his welfare. Have you heard anything or seen anything? I'm trying to see if he's okay. And they said, he is with us and he's just fine.

So he's at the police station.

So this, this treasurer that's in there, our friend, our friend, our dear friend, finally told me the story after this was all sitting down. The next day, what happened was he was driving home after being with me all day long in the sun, selling baked goods, and he was hungry, and so he decided to eat some of the baked goods. Why wouldn't you? Right? So he's eating the baked goods. He's a little distracted, and he veres off the side of the road to the right hand side, realizes that he's veering off the side of the road, over corrects, going across the left hand lane and into the ditch. But he does this in front of.

The popo, the sheriff.

So he gets out of the vehicle. He's got the backpack on him. He's kind of dazed and disorderly. And he goes down to reach and try to find his phone. And they took that as here's a wild man that just drove off the road. He puts on a backpack, and he's reaching down for a gun. So they, of course, draw on him with multiple police officers, tell him to freeze, put him down to the ground, lock him up, and they start doing their investigation. And of course, they're not listening to him at all. He's yelling, he's stressed out. So they just take him away, and they're not even realizing what he's doing. They start looking through his car and see a pile, a pile of individually hand wrapped custom baked goods, individually wrapped cookies, and then find a backpack filled with cash, with a ledger of individuals that have paid small amounts of money to this money bag filled with cash. So poor got mistaken for a pot cookie dealer. Good on Mister treasurer.

So he spent a little time in the popo.

Yes. So we got the money bag back. The police knew it was the mistake, and once they finally took time, when they got back to the police office, realized it was for the club.

After they tested for some.

After they tested the cookies. Tested him. You know, that type of thing. But I figured that's too good not to share. So the moral of the story is, if you're a treasurer and you don't have the 501 c three finished being signed out, so you can actually open a bank account, make sure not to incorporate your allotment of cash for a club and your individually wrapped cookies in case you get pulled over, because it's not going to look good. So. Love you, buddy.

Best day ever.

Best day ever.

Well, not for him, no, and stuff. But now he's out.

So where the cookies at? Did you sell actual edible cookies?

No.

Were they all, like, clean?

All clean cookies?

There was no THC in any of the cookies. It was all family friendly. It was all by donation.

You would have sold more cookies.

And, you know. You know how we know that, Adam, is because the police tested the baked goods.

Yeah, we were just trying to raise money to purchase some. Some equipment and stuff. It didn't work out so. Well. It worked out. We.

I mean, we made the money. We've kept the money. The police didn't keep the money.

Yeah.

You know, he took a while to get the money. He protected it, but, you know, he. He had a rough day because of it, so. God bless.

I'm surprised they didn't keep it. Fuckers keep everything.

Oh, they. It was pretty clear once they got to the bottom of the bag. And here's the best part. When we got the backpack back, right? I was at the club meeting. I was at the club meeting, and I opens the backpack because I'm waiting for the key, because there's a second key we had to get. We had backups, of course. And I open up the backpack, and there's a. There's the police's unopened container of Narcan because they thought they would. Might have to treat the. Treat, this guy. So they left us with a container of Narcan in the backpack.

And so I'm reading the directions as we're going through our meeting, and my favorite part of the direction was saying that after you administer Narcan, don't leave, hang out, make sure the person's alive. And that was on the actual instructions?

Yeah. Yeah.

Half the people that are on Narcan that deserve that need. The Narcan, don't deserve it.

Is that right?

Oh, yeah. I mean, they'll just use again in a few hours. They'll get. They'll actually get violent with you because you cut into their high.

That's the point of Narcan, brother.

Yeah, well, I mean, but they get.

Mad at you for saving them when.

The pop star Demi Lovato overdose and almost died. They're having a Narcan party. That's what they. I mean, they're having an actual Narcan party. So whoever's the person that was in sober supposed to keep everybody, you know, alive. And that person got high too, so that didn't work out so well for everybody. But luckily, she lived. But, I mean, she kind of fell off the face of the earth for over a year.

All right, this is gonna be a rough enough episode. I don't need people messaging me because we taught someone about Narcan and Narcan.

Narcan.

The point of the story is don't. If you're gonna do something for a bake sale, don't individually wrap cookies. They want a dozen at a time. Beg them appropriately. All right? And don't individually wrap shit. No one's gonna. No one wants to buy a single cookie when they come to a bake sale. They want a baker's dozen. All right? That. That's the moral of your story anyways. Adam, do you have anything before we begin?

Yeah. So to all the people that are fish keepers and reptile keepers out there in today's episode of government stupidity. And I know Robbie wanted to me to be paid. Be good about this, so I'm gonna try and not swear as much.

Thank you.

The government, in their infinite wisdom, the Department of Energy has taken away and basically sent a list to zoomed on all the light bulbs they are no longer allowed to sell.

I saw.

Which is basically all of their light bulbs.

Yep.

Because they don't meet energy specific things. Energy specific standards for house lighting.

We need to reach out. Zoom it immediately.

I am pissed. What's next? Heaters? Fish tank filters?

Need to reach out to them immediately.

Energy standards. And I am be damned if I'm gonna let some asshat in Washington who thinks that global warming exists and we need to make sure we save the planet while they buy oceanfront property and sit on their yachts and private jets tell me I can't have any light bulbs for my goddamn animals.

All right, that's. That's your rant of the day?

How you feeling, I'm not done yet.

But okay, I left that out. I will go into this further, this.

Podcast, sponsored by Bayer, sponsored by Jesus Christ. Make sure to take your aspirin, baby aspirin, each day to stop your high blood pressure and heart attacks. We know, otherwise you wouldn't be here.

So. And did they have to recall those, Adam, then, or what are they doing?

As far as I know, no. All I know is that some of my buddies that are wholesalers, literally the same day that that was ordered, put in giant orders and said, send me everything you have. I am in the process of figuring.

What I'll need people to make stories. Like, imagine they did this for, like, food markets, like deli markets, right? They need to make up stories. Like, oh, yeah, I got, like, something from the governor. Governor saying, wink, wink. That say, we can't use a different packaging of deli ham. And then suddenly they, like, vendors be like, I'll take all the ham.

I don't know, but it pissed me off because it was literally every, like 5.08. The long terrarium bulbs, can't use them. Compact fluorescent bulbs. I have the list.

All right.

It's. It's every bulb that you would use.

So moral of the story is, if you're listening to this and you have a reptile, buy some bulbs.

Buy some bulbs.

Bulk up, go right now to zoomed.com and put in the comments that the aquarium guy sent you immediately. We're not sponsored, by the way. We want to be zoomed is like the tits. I'm a big guy. I get a tattoo. A zoom in. If I could really? Absolutely. I love zoom ed to death.

They love fish. They're good with. I mean, they have the. One of the largest turtle preservation, private turtle conservation things in the country there. Go out the world.

Right there in the comments says, right now you can get the tattoo. Excellent. I got permission. This bone said, so I will do it. You and I get joined.

I stayed at home express last night. I'm not a tattoo artist, but I'll take a look and I.

Excellent. We'll get a ballpoint pen. You can stab me.

I wish you were sponsored by Holiday Inn Express. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Get like a free room once in a while or something.

I'm not gonna lie. Last time I got a hotel, I'm like, what would Jimmy do? And I looked up Holiday Inn Express and they were twice the rate. I'm like, no, no.

I think I told the story where some friends of ours wanted to go out, take us camping. And we're like, we're not campers. And they said, why not? And they said, you know, bugs, smoke, boring. And. And my wife said, we're more La Quinta people.

La Quinta.

And anyway, he looked at us, goes, so you're Native american? And we said, no, we go to La Quinta Hotel.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, thank you for the updates. This is. This is a nice one. We're gonna dive into the horrible subject. And again, I want you to paint out that this subject is going to be about beta fighting. We don't condone beta fighting in any way. This is a terrible practice to take your pets and make them fight against each other, even though it would be their animal instinct. All right, we're going to be going into my research that it's taken me over two years to gather because of the sensitivity of the subject and frankly, the dumb methods I went to get it. What I can confirm on this is, if you want me to give you sources on this, I cannot. I spent time trying to find people that would give me a story, and they would give me the story that not come on the podcast on the record. They would give it to me and write me and let me answer any questions I would have off air. So that is exactly what I've done. I have multiple sources for this. These questions that I'm going to be giving out of the perspective of a. In the United States, that is part, in the past, maybe even currently part of the illicit beta, the illegal beta fighting circuits. And I have talked to a couple people where it's legal in Indonesia, where it's not only legal, but it's sponsored as a sport, much like UFC fighting. These people have brands, these people have lines of betas, and these people are on even some, I can't say television, but for. For lack of a better word, they're local media. We'll be going over a lot of different questions. I have reached out, and this podcast is recorded only live to the Patreon subscribers due to the sensitivity. So if you want to support the podcast and us bring stuff like this to you, which is dumb of us, no one's going to sponsor us after this podcast. I mean, honestly, you thought it was hard for us to get a sponsors before. It's going to be impossible after this. So if you are going to be the ones that's going to support us, if we're going to bring content like this to you. So go to Patreon, go to discord, both of which have subscriptions and the people that are listening to this live tonight. Thank you for being here. Thank you for throwing us a couple bucks and helping support the podcast so we can bring you information that no one else will. So, to begin this, Adam, Jimmy, I'll go over a little bit of the story of my hunt, then I would love you to supply questions. We'll try to do this in a kind of ask back or to interview, since we don't have the people here to interview. So to start the story, I wanted to do this researching because I had questions that came up to me. I found one of my community members that found a beta form, and they sent me a screenshot and they said, is this, is this real? And normally I would get questions like pictures of people rolling betas and paper towels and shipping them. And I'm like, yes, this. This was a thing of the past. They used to do this all the time, you know, people that find shocking things either in our aquarium history or practices that businesses do now that they never knew about. I'll get people that, you know, come to us because they trust us as a, at least honest source of information that even if we don't know, we're going to tell them we don't know. So they came to us and said, is this real? And they found videos of people fighting betas in the United States. And they said, I said, yes, this is a real practice that happens. What questions do you have? And they were just absolutely appalled. That interaction that I had with them said that they never knew. They've been in the aquarium hobby for 30 years. They thought that the siamese bait fighting fish name that they saw in an aquarium trade was something that happened, you know, maybe even hundreds of years ago, and the practice completely died out, or it was just a nickname. They were hoping that it never happened at all and not that it happens today. So I figured, uh, well, maybe this is a story that I can educate people on, because I'm not well versed in it. I know that it exists. I've been to quite a few fish stores where you can walk in and see an entire, uh, display of just the blackest, ugliest bait as possible. You'll see people, uh, um, come in and hold black point ballpoint pens up to a jar and buy six at a crack and then disappear with their tattooed faced, uh, a partijay and leave for the day. So that's about the extent that I ever knew. I knew that it exists. I've seen a couple videos. I knew high level about the practice, and that's it. So I wrote it down in my podcast idea lists. I have multiple of these lists that I go over trying to come up with topics for our evergreen podcast library for you guys to listen to that I believe would help educate, and number one, that I could find an expert to limelight onto. That's not just something that I'm talking out of my ass with. So began the research. I have brought a lot of different people onto this podcast. Jimmy and Adam have brought a lot of different topics onto this podcast, and a lot of people have brought stuff to our attention that we brought on the podcast. So we've been very blessed. This one has been by far the hardest topic to accomplish due to the illicit nature. So I'm very white. I am six foot one, six foot two. I'm a big dude, like over 300 pounds. I have a beard. I wear colored glasses. My. My complexion looks like porcelain doll mixed with mayonnaise. I am not your typical person that you would assume to show up to anything that you would assume is a beta fight, because most of these beta fights are done by either Hmong or some other southeast asian community. So my battle began uphill, and the.

Reason for that is, we're not dissing on any particular people, but this is how they've been brought up. This is just a thing that happens, that has happened in their life forever, and it's just part of their culture.

So I didn't know that at the time, but I did know that those were the. Definitely the people to do it, regardless of. Of it. If someone sees a guy like me show up asking questions about, hey, you guys got beta fighting. I'd like to know more information. I definitely look like the guy that's gonna snitch them out to the cops.

You literally look at Narc.

Hundred percent would snitch them out to the.

I look like that guy, you know? Right. So when you show up to these places, and just the outreach that I go to, I travel to other states, of course, but my outreach, of course, is Minneapolis, that area. That's my big metropolitan city that I can drive to. And that has more Hmong than any other major city in the United States.

Than any other state.

Yeah, any other. Well, I mean, yeah, state, but any other major city in the United States, any other location, has more Hmong populace per square mile than any other place in the United States. So, of course, there's going to be shops down there that have just black betas, just walls and walls of what you consider the grossest betas of all time. And you'd see people come in that come in in droves. They don't speak English. They come in with black ballpoint pens. And that's where I would start. I would start talking to some of the shop owners. The shop owners, they just got requests and that's why they brought them in. They didn't want to know anything about it. They didn't want to see anything about it. Someone wants to buy a fish, they told them that this is the fish that they wanted. They supplied it. It was that simple. Supply and demand. They had nothing to do with it. They said, hey, we want this fin. He orders that fin in and he's, he sells it. That's, that's how it works. If he keeps selling it, he makes a bigger display because he's got more and more demand. And that's suddenly how these local fish stores began supplying these fish. So how am I going to get into it? So I decided to reach out to, you know, the people that we know in our community, anybody that I reached out to, I said, hey, I want to work this story. I want to tell my audience more about beta fighting. And they just like, I have no idea, man. I know as much as you do. Or I would have people that would lock right up and just laugh in my face saying, you're just too damn white for this. Good luck. I would level with them. It's like, why can't I be the, you know, vice news, do this properly, get their permission, do it ethically, and, you know, try to get some contacts. I said I was even willing to get dirty. Like, I don't condone the process, but to bring this to light, I was willing to show up to whatever you consider this underground beta ring and put down money so they would know that I'm not a snitch. So I could get a story. I was willing to do what I needed to do. So I tried to work every lead. I would get close, I would get names of who did it, I would get names of where to go to potential people that might know someone. And I would follow this. And I did this for, I'm going to say, a year and a half. It was a lot of work to continually get to dead ends. You ever heard the definition of insanity? Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I was going insane for a year and a half. And again, I've just, every time I get to a failure, I'm like, I'm gonna put on a back burner and then something would just tinge up, like, hey, Rob's, I got, like, a tiny lead for you. And I would just go right back into it, work it through until it went to a dead lead. Nothing I could concrete follow along with. So I decided to change my tactics. I was sitting on the couch one day, and someone said, hey, I just ordered a bunch of drugs on Facebook. I'm like, what?

What?

Well, it was right around that time where Minnesota was talking about. They had a date of legalization. So, basically, if you have, like, a couple months before stuff was legal, they're just gonna pretend it's legal anyway. So now, as we're talking here, that marijuana is legal in Minnesota for consumption. So this was before it was legal. And one of my friends that was consuming, he's like, well, it's gonna be legal anyway. So I just ordered some stuff off of Facebook. I'm like, you can order drugs off of Facebook? Like, don't they have moderators just, like, shut down those Facebook groups? No. And he showed me his phone. I'm like, here's like, I don't order any of this. All I do is the weed. But you can order crack. You can order heroin. You can order meth. You can order. And he's showing me these things, and they have code names for this kind of, like, if you've ever seen fish groups, you're not allowed to sell fish on Facebook, and you're not allowed to raffle fish on Facebook. But if you put the word waffle w a f f e ld, then suddenly the waffle groups that you can find to waffle some fish are numerous.

I've seen some.

Right?

Rehome.

Rehome is another. Another way to get around the system that there's a rehoming fee, guys. And it just happens to be right around retail. Wink, wink. You know, stupid shit like that. So they're doing the same thing with drugs. They're giving drugs code names or taking pictures and, you know, making like, oh, I found my mom's soap. You know, I'll sell you eight pieces of soap for $80. Or, you know, stupid shit, right? And they're selling full on, hardcore illicit drugs on Facebook. I'm like, it can't be this easy. And immediately, I didn't give a shit about drugs because I don't do any drugs. I gave a shit because could it be that this whole time I'm working a year and a half that all my leads for illegal beta, the beta rings, could have been right under my nose?

This whole time, the dark web, you.

Didn'T even hide it. I gave it. I gave one quick search, I put Hmong beta fighting, and all these leads suddenly came up in front of me. Now, going down the story further, for those that don't know if you are prominent at all in the fish keeping hobby, doesn't matter if you are known or not. You just see that you're a fish keeping guy and part of the fish keeping circle and you have a bunch of aquarium pictures on your Facebook feeds. You'll have these people from other countries direct message. You trying to sell you betas, trying to sell you all kinds of different fish. And they'll talk about importing fish into the United States, but they'll still do it at relatively retail rates. So you get all these direct messages from people from Singapore, Indonesia, all these different people. And that's just part of being in the circle. Of course, I say that. I'm a part of a podcast. I have youtuber friends. I got friends in the actual fish business. So I'm a big target for people to continually spam me, saying, hey, would you like to buy my fish? And then they send me these lists. So that's a normal thing that I deal with. But what I didn't realize is when I joined these beta fighting groups that if I interact with any posts asking a question, suddenly I'll have all of these people saying, trying to sell me beta fighting stock. And they're doing anything they can to get me to do a $500 order to buy bulk fighting betas, to start creating, creating my own ring in my area in the United States. And they're going to try to supply me and teach me and set me up to be a beta fighting ring. So I have my leads. Let's work them. I'm a year and a half in this thing. This is way warmer than I've been going down, traditional methods, because every time I get close, they find out I'm white and kick me out of the search. So now I'm back on Facebook.

Could it be because of your last name?

Could be Olson. Absolutely. You know, could be because of my, you know, absolutely cartoonish Facebook profile pics. Who knows? But regardless, these people that are in these rings, they don't care because they're not in this country. So I message them, I say, hey, what's your prices? What's this? What's that? And they start messaging me this. I'm like, so I'm just pretending to be a customer. I said, hey, I've never fought betas before, but I'm looking to get into it. Wink, wink. I don't know where to start, you know? What do you have? So then they start sending me their product list. Well, we have these nice fighter picots. We have these long fins. We have, oh, we have these mean, ugly Superman betas. We have, I mean, just all the stuff. And I'm like, well, you know, then I'm like. I'm trying to think of, like, a sales guy pitch because I've never done this before. I start thinking of, well, what could I possibly do for proof? Like, someone wants to sell me a car on Facebook, ask for a video of it running. So I'm like, well, do you have videos of these things fighting? Like, oh, of course. And they just send me pre recorded videos of some of the battles that they do in their country. And like, whoa, whoa. This is not at all what I was expecting. So they showed me a beta before, a beta during the fight, and then the betas after the fight where they're either damaged, beaten, or basically dead. And I'm like, this is not at all like, this is way too serious. I can't believe that this is so common and this is allowed direct PM's. It's just this easy. Two clicks and I'm already into someone that wants to sell me and turn me into illicit, illegal, ring harming pets for other people. It's. It's. It's truly easy and awful. Don't. Don't condone this in any way. I was just shocked. Just utterly shocked. And like, well, thank you for the information. This is not at all what I wanted. And then it got into. How did you get in? Because, again, I'm interviewing the person. Well, how did you get into this? Just curious, you know, how does one get into this? It's like, well, I used to do it support and apparently she was in the Philippines. I used to do it support, and I'm decent with. With English, but they had some layoffs from some certain company, and now I'm trying to feed my kid. Oh, that's. That's horrible. So she shows me pictures for kid. They live in a hut, and she has an Internet connection. She gets at the library in, like, Milan or. Excuse me, not. What's the capital city of Philippines?

Manila.

Manila. There you go. In Manila, it just was heartbreaking. And she doesn't. She said she doesn't like doing it either, but it is part of their culture. It's completely legal where they're at, but she just gotta do what she's got to do to feed her kid. So I guess, you know, you get whatever gig's available, and, yeah, you do whatever you gotta do to feed, to put bread on the table, you know.

As you're speaking, I pulled up one of my import lists, and this one is from Bangkok.

Yeah, Bangkok.

And there is a. You know, you go through these things, and I'm just gonna. I'll read a little bit here, you know, beta, male, half moon, koi, half moon, nemo, half moon, patriots, plakat. And then you get down here and it says, you know, wild greens, wild blues. And then you get down here and it says, placat fighters.

There's a whole category. And when you look at these lists, Jimmy, and I know this, but I know this from actually doing the homework with these beta fighting importers. These are purposely the more muscular, the thicker fin. It doesn't necessarily matter if they're longer fin. They just need thicker finnae, harsher gill plates. They have more indented eyes. They're just a more robust, beefier beta. They're not done for looks at all. They are done for beefcaking.

And it is just amazing that I'm looking for it right now. But I did one time that was listed as fighter and in parentheses, retired. So, I mean, they're selling their retired fighters, and those things had four times the cost of a regular betta. And I just. I thought to myself, God, that's strange. Why would somebody pay that much money for that big, ugly Betta? But, you know, I never even thought about them, that they're gonna bring it over here and fight them.

You and I got that big Beta order a long time ago.

Yeah.

And they actually sent in a couple mistakes.

Yeah.

And they came in with chunks on them, but these were like, they're huge.

Your thumb.

Take a. Take your thumb out, right? Double up your thumb. And they were just like these swollen chode betas with chunks out of them. They were just monsters.

Looked like they'd been living in the blender.

Yeah, it was pretty rough to see. So continue going down the lead list. So, again, to this person that I'm messaging in the Philippines, I'm still a customer. So she's still desperate to make a sale. I said, hey, you know, if I'm gonna purchase one of these betas or a few of these betas, I'm not gonna purchase them unless I have a place to, you know, go play. Wink wink. That's the key word that you use. You want to go play. It's like, you treat it as a slot machine. And it just detaches the cruelty of doing this activity. And they all talk about like, oh, do you play? Hmm? If I'm gonna go play, I need someplace to go play. I said, I'm in Minnesota. I don't know no one that I can go play with. Can. Do you know of any contacts in Minnesota? And I named some states. Here's states I could fly to here, states within driving distance. And then they mentioned, oh, here's someone in Minnesota. Here's someone in this state. Here's someone in the neighboring state. Here's someone in California. Here's someone in this, and here's all these different people that you could reach out to that may or may not do it. But if they don't, they know who does. And if you give them the name of your supply, the supplier, and said that they sent you, you now have an in, and they'll direct you towards these beta rings. Okay? And the plot thickens. So this is the time where Jimmy and Adam, they. What was it? What was the thing that you said that I'm quite, quote, dumb as shit, and I don't need to involve getting my house lit on fire? Why am I. Why am I going this far? Was that the one, Adam?

Yeah, that was part of it.

That was the nice part of it.

That was the nice part of it. I'm.

You know, I think dumbass was the nicest thing.

I think that you guys didn't think I would get very far with this, but I was very headstrong, and I.

Just don't want your house on fire because it's near my house, and I like my house.

So I went down the road. I contacted us, someone. They said they wouldn't confirm or deny nothing. I said. I tried to get my foot in the door saying, so and so is this. Do you sell any betas? You know, I'm trying to get an in. Maybe. Maybe some dollar amounts would do. And they said, well, I could sell you a beta. Sure. I mean, I need a beta to play with. So can you sell me a beta? And they're like, yeah. And they're like, $25. You come pick it up. We'll meet. We'll meet at this location where there's no cameras in a parking lot. I'm like, oh, okay. It's like four and a half hours away from my house. I'm like, you know what?

How about at two in the morning in a dark alley?

How about we meet in a different public place?

We're gonna get your ass capped.

So I said, okay, let's meet at a fish gathering. So we met at a fish gathering. It looked completely legit.

Well, I'm glad you didn't do a funeral.

Yeah, it looked completely legit because everybody was trading bags of fish for money at a fish gathering, right. So I traded $25 for the ugliest beta I've ever seen in my life. And I shook his hand, and that was that. Moved on with my life. And I figured that would warm the lead, gave that beta a good home, and ended up giving it to an elderly lady. The beta is still alive. Very well taken care of in a nice heated ten gallon tank.

Oh, she one of those beta people?

Still ugly as hell.

Ugly as hell. Yep. Ugly as hell. I didn't have the.

Well, I do. I feel that that's better for it.

Yeah, I get it was just me choosing money to move along this, this whole system.

Rob's rescue.

Rob's rescue, right? I got one of this, one of them out of the system.

You know, I've got Bettas over at my house. I'll say, for $25 apiece, you want to save them from.

Ugliest beta I've ever gotten and. Funniest deal I've ever done in my life. Anyways, Robbie hasn't lived.

Were you, were you wearing a disguise? Nope, nope.

No, I was not. I was wearing a. I was wearing a purple hat, purple shades, I was wearing a Vikings jersey and I was just, you know, me, super white and giant and these four foot eleven. Like, you know, I'm estimating mung dude was coming up and giving me this bag and I, and was completely blown away that I was the person because apparently he didn't read my last name.

Olson.

I was the person looking for this fish.

Cash is cash.

And when he got there at this fish event, he's like, I'm in the parking lot. Come outside. I'm like, I can't. I'm in the event, dude, they're selling fish here. It's safe. He comes in and he's got like a trench coat on and he's looking at both sides and he sees all these people swapping fish left and right, betas and angelfish and all kinds of stuff. And then he just, here's your fish.

So when he's wearing this trench coat, did he open it up? And there's like twelve bags and you can just kind of pick which one, you know?

You know, he just had the one bed get to pick. I told him he gets to pick. He just. There's no picking. I just need one. He made it happen.

And you know what he did. I mean, it's. It's sad in a way, but he probably sold you the loser.

Don't. Don't care. It was the warm, the lead.

It wasn't even a good one.

It was the warm, the lead. So after he saw me, after he won the lottery. Yeah, after he saw me, after he sold the beta, he was definitely still sketched out, but at least it got me another name. And this other name trickled down the system. And now I got my interview. The person I talked to, again, I have to leave completely anonymous. And the other people that I talked to, I have to leave completely anonymous.

Let's just say it wasn't me or Adam.

I can give you information. The person I talked to is a skilled breeder, a skilled fish breeder. Had experience doing pet store work for many years. Is american born, but his family is from Laos in Thailand. He is the first generation born in the United States. All of his older family than him is all born in Laos, in Thailand. So to give you a bit of this, I'm going to go through some of the interview questions that I did and then we can return to questions unless you guys got some upfront to start with.

No?

Good.

Gentlemen, this is very interesting. It's.

Right.

I love going down these rabbit holes. I just hope I get out.

Right. We're gonna get out. We're gonna work this through. So he began to explain. I got contacted this person, and I got him to agree with the firm handshake that he will give me the story to keep his identity completely firm out of it. This is as on the record, I can give it if you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do to give you give any further proof of this. So I'm sorry, you're just going to have to either trust it or I, or enjoy this story for what it is.

Welcome to Fox News.

Welcome to Fox News. So again, his family, being from Laos and Thailand as kids, would catch wild betas for fun, even breed them or cross breed them to evolve their fighter genetics over and over. And they would have bloodlines called fighters. This was done throughout the generations of their family. And it was just a common thing that they did throughout their communities as pastimes, through poor rice farmers or anyone else that was involved with communities, regardless of being farmers or not. This was just everybody did it. You brought it to school. And this started at a very, very young age, just part of their culture. I did not expect the interview would lead immediately to children being involved with this, but apparently it started in elementary school, in grade school, grade school, you.

Would bring the same as cockfighting and dogfighting. So they all started young.

I didn't know that. Cockfighting and dogfighting start young again. I'm so out of touch with this. I'm glad I did this interview.

I used to burn ants with magnifying.

Glass because that's about as cruel as I got. I got grasshoppers with magnifying glass. Right.

Um, I'm not going into things.

Yeah, I was raised by rednecks. I got to shoot chipmunks, you know, that were pests and vermin's for horse. For horse farms, you know, trapped gopherse, you know, but I would never imagine that I would take two chipmunks, bring them to school, and then fight them in a cage. That would not have been in my thought process, right. That would not have clicked with me in redneck, Minnesota. But these guys, they would go out, they would find their betas wild caught, or they would have some sort of bloodlines from their family that they would bring, and they would literally fight them. They would have different jars, they would fight them at that school gatherings, and they would do this all the way through. And the adults would do it into even old ages. This was just part of the community, things that you would do now as an american born child, they grew up this from their uncles and older cousins and fathers. As growing up, this person had a local fish store and had old fancy long tails, short tails, and they're all fairly cheap. They would go buy some and just fight them for fun as kids, as genetics got better, fancy betas show up. And as these bloodlines of these fighters developed, common into the trade and got better and more selective from breeding the winners in Thailand nowadays, people take these fighters because they're more aggressive than the fancy and majority spar them to see fishes fight. Sad, but yet it's exciting to see Bettas give up the nice fighting show and provided pictures that I'm not going to share with you, unfortunately, because again, I'm not trying to condone this or mystify this activity. I'm trying to give you perspective of what's going on. So let's go through some of the questions before. Do we have any questions from the audience? Dalton or Adam or Jimmy? Do you guys got questions? Up until this point, I'm just surprised.

That it took you this long to find somebody. I mean, it's not hard to find the people, if you know who to ask.

Oh, but. But if. But it really is. It really is. I should had you do it.

You're more brown, buddy.

That.

Yeah, you're much more.

And then you tell everybody, huh?

You're much more brown. You just. You'd have been honestly infiltrated.

Honestly, I should have had you do this. You would have had way better success than me.

Well, yeah, but I wouldn't have done it because, honestly, there's things I don't get involved.

Right.

You know? And that's what sad shit is that we just tend to ignore it because we don't condone it. It's just like, people who want to save a. The whales or whatever, but they don't take care of their neighborhood. You know what I mean? Everybody wants us to do something astronomical and crazy. I talked to my ex wife the other day, and she was going on and on about monarch butterflies and how she's going to plant milkweed because 90% of the monarch butterflies are dying because of all the pesticides, you know? But yet we're not feeding our homeless that are in our community, you know? So you just got to pick and choose what you. What you want to, you know, make important to you and most people when it comes to something unpleasant, like. Like dog fighting, betta fighting, cockfighting, it's just. You choose to ignore it because it's something that's not happening in your neighborhood. And. And so we're just trying to bring awareness to people about these things are happening and not to condone it and, you know, stake up for the rights of these. These animals, because, you know, they're animals.

Now. I did get a question message to me on my phone saying, what makes you think that you were too white? Was the reason I was told to my face over and over again while every door was shut, saying, bro, I'd help you. I seem like a good guy, but I can't help you. I can't bring you into the ring. I can't show you. I can't tell you anybody. You're too white for this. And I'm like, what? I'm too white? Yeah. No. If I bring you, I'll get kicked out and ostracized.

Like, what if anybody's never seen Robbie? He is the whitest minnesotan of all Minnesotans around.

I'm like, that.

His. Huh?

I'm toilet bowl. White toilet bowl. Yeah.

He one time complained that his. His food was too spicy. When me and Jim were eating with him, it had a little bit extra pepper on it. And he wanted ranch to drown it out.

I did, yes. I went to, actually, for my company's Christmas party. We went to a caribbean dining experience, and I asked for milk, and I got laughed off the table. So, I mean, you know, what are you gonna do? But, no, I got told to my face, like, they were brutally honest. Like, dude, you're just too fight for this. Like, I can't let you in. I can't talk to you. I'll get kicked out for talking to you. Like, no, I just. I can't involve you. Like, it's just part of it. So I started with this gentleman that I'm talking with. Let's just call him Bill, right? Let's. Let's give him a name for the sake of conversation. So I was talking with Bill and telling Bill what the struggles that I've had, and I appreciate his time. And I said that I'm a six foot two mayonnaise kid. And he says, like, yeah, no, trust me, you're. You're far too white. He's just. He's confirming that there's no way I could. I could get this in a normal scenario. We. We go on. He says, so the biters, excuse me, fighting betas, there's many hyper names and tiers and grades. So how they do it is generally, they have the. The grades and your. This is for, like, generally wholesale. Wholesale list is where it starts. But you can get c grades for like $0.50, right, Jimmy? Like we've seen, like, wholesale and big batches. $0.50 for, like, the base grade fighters.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Then b grade fighters, like standard bacot, short tail fighters. You can get around five, five to $8. You can get grade A fighters. Your better blood run bloodline. Fighter picots are around $20 to $25 apiece. And then your, what we call, you know, vip priority, like good, scalable top end is $40 to $90 each per beta. Now, it can go up from there. We're not going to kid you, but that kind of gives you an idea of, like, your normal tiers of cost for these fighting betas.

Now, Mike, my question. I'm sure some other people, too. So they're fighting. They're not fighting for bragging rights. They're fighting for money. Correct.

Oh, well, we'll definitely warned Robbie not to do this. We'll definitely get to that. Definitely get to that. I said, basically, betas have no color that I've seen. Just blotches of gray through black. What colors of betas? Do you see in the fighting hobby they have in some rings? He said that there was classes of betas, so they had the muscle class, and they had. He had different names for them, but they had muscle class, and then they had, like, you know, the designer class and then some rings. Didn't care at all. You brought a beta. They don't care if it's pretty. They don't care if it's whatever they fought. So some of these are very much designer pecans. They just have fighter blood genetics in them, some fighter blood assets, and they'll still look like the pretty ones you buy at a pet store, but most of them still have, you know, toned down, grayed out, bland colors. Going through the questions here, my question involves, please, in.

In breeding these, like, how do you get. Because a male beta, a male fighter beta is probably just gonna want to fight. Like, it's. It doesn't even give a shit about the fuck part. It just wants to fight. How do you get a female? I'm assuming the females are way smaller.

Or it's just males that they use. They don't really have female classes.

How do you breed a good bloodline? Because what I'm trying to say is, if you have one that fights, and he just wants to kill everything. And from what I've understood, the fighting betas can take on small cichlids.

I would assume you just get some large females and just keep offering them until they take.

I asked if there's any attributes of using these fighting betas in a normal circumstance, like putting them in your aquarium, like anything else. And he said, and I've ordered these fight abating betas. And I just said, I gave one to a elderly lady that I bought for $25 from a dude. And Jimmy and I have got them on accident and sometimes on purpose for curiosity's sake, to order them in to see what they look like, and they just act like a normal beta. There's no, like, special fighting instinct. They just happen to have more makeup, that when they do fight, they fight better. And I asked him the same question. I said, well, are they more aggressive than others? He said that they're more aggressive to each other or anything that would prompt an aggression behavior. So if you put up a mirror, if you put up a black pen or a tip of a black pen, they will believe that it's a beta and they will flare. That is the sign of aggression to another beta. If they put them in a normal tank of a community tank, they don't have that bad of a problem. They're just going to be treated like any other beta that you would put into a community tank. They just have a hyper aggression to each other. And when they do fight, they simply do better and last longer than a normal beta. Asked him what entitles a match, how long do these match lasts? He says, well, honestly, it can get kind of boring, but fun too. It all depends on who brings what. Usually the general fight lasts about an hour. The details that I was given vaguely, because again, I have to be kind of vague in some of the details they gave me. They have two containers of the same size, generally about a half gallon to a gallon each. Almost all of the waters that they use are all tannin based tea brews that they brew for these betas. And they put them next to each other to begin the flaring and aggression process, at least see each other. And then immediately they put into a. Both betas are put into the same tank and they just let to do their thing. They can be watched. If there's a bunch of people there, sometimes they'll put a camera to put it up to a television, and they simply watch the betas. The betas go at it. They'll chase each other, they'll fight each other. And I immediately started asking questions, well, what are some of the rules? And they said, there isn't a ton of rules. The beta fighting is pretty straightforward. They will fight each other until either one gives up or one dies. And I asked him about a kind of a ratio and I asked a bunch of other people a ratio. So this is kind of a general answer. I got about 70% of beta fights end in one of the betas giving up. They don't necessarily fight to the death every time. So giving up is a beta. And they are very clear. If you ever watch these beta fights, two betas will go at it. They will hit each other and hit each other. And when one's done, it will just be done. And use any last bit of strength to swim away and far away and run and keep not stop running until it drops as far as possible. So it's not like, oh, look, it gave up and they misinterpreted it. Betas almost always show that they throw it in a towel and will dart away as fast as they can. So that's how they fight in a wild behavior. If two betas want to claim a territory and push each other out, they'll fight until one runs away, gets chased off, and then the winning male stays in his territory. The problem is, when you have them in a jar, that's one gallon. They don't have any place to run. And that's the entire point of a beta fight is they're putting them together to fight. And if they're irresponsible, they're not throwing in the towel and grabbing the betas out long enough that even if one of the betas gave up, they will still end up killing the other one. Usually as little hours. Some of them can last 3 hours. They can get sometimes very boring and they'll have to check a bit in on them. So they give up and just wait till one dies. Very, very cruel process.

When you said something to put a camera on them, I'm just wondering to myself, are they broadcasting this to other people? Are they watching it at home? Are you placing bets? What are you doing?

So the ones in the other countries, like Indonesia, absolutely. They put webcams on them, they put them online. And again, it's a, it's a legal thing. It's sponsored, it's marketed, it's like UFC fighting. But they're local community beta fighters. There's money that goes into it. There's grand champions. I spoke to one of the prior champions, grand champions in Indonesia and got some of the, some of this information from him as well. Again, I'm not going to give names because I'm not going to romanticize this so people can go look him up and start, you know, following this horrible trend.

That's just, it just simply boggles my mind. But, you know, you look now compared to, I was watching the rodeo the other day, the bull riding and how they breed these bulls, you know, to buck and to be aggressive and whatnot. And that's our culture. I mean, that's what they're doing in Texas. And, you know, every year, one or two rodeo people get extremely hurt or killed, you know, riding these bulls because they're crazy, first of all, getting on the backs of these things. But I mean, that's what people are all breed for certain things for being aggressive or for bucking or, you know, any other thing you're looking for. So I'm sure with the breeding, the Bettas, you know, like, like all your fish in your aquarium, you know, who's the aggressive? A hole in your, in your tank and stuff. And so I mean, you, you take that out and you want to build upon that and you breed your, your mean beta with your big mean female and stuff and see what you can make and stuff. And these guys are just, just making, it's their hobby and they're making money or losing money. One of the two.

So let's say that you're going to show up to one of these illegal, illicit rings. They're going to show up and they're not just going to do one fight at a time. They're going to do one fight, start it, show the first heat of the match, which is most exciting, kind of giving you the idea of how the match is going to go, at least give you odds, and then they're going to move on to the next fight and get that set up. And then they're going to rotate back around and keep checking in on different fights. It's like watching, I don't know, for NFL Sunday ticket, you're only getting in the CNFL red zone right when they're getting close to the NFL and they're going to switch between games to see which one's the most exciting. And they're going to keep setting up different games because other ones got boring. It's a, they got it down. They got it down. So you also asked, what does they get besides bragging rights? Well, this is absolutely a betting thing. So to bring your beta, you gotta enter in most the time for a fee. Just like I go to like a racing event, I have to pay my entrance fee for racing. Then there's also betting on the race, like horses, just like cars, just like sports betting. This is no different. So how do they treat odds? If you go to a sports book in Vegas, they're going to choose the Minnesota Vikings versus the New York, New York Giants. And they're going to bet, bet upon, you know, what the experts think the game is going to turn out as who has home field advantage, who has bigger players, who has known injuries. You know, they're going to give you an odds. Well, this is no different. They're going to see person that's a reputable beta breeder, they know the stock, they know their winning rates. They're going to look at the fish and go, is it big, is it small? What does it look like if the small fish comes in versus a big fish? Well, right there is probably enough to say, you know, a one to two betting odd versus a one to one betting odds.

Yeah. Every time we go locally in Fargo, North Dakota, they have horse races and they only do it two weekends a year. And they got a beautiful horse track there. And my wife and I always go bet. We probably take dollar 50 with this and we probably bet three to $5 a race. There's ten races and my whole theory is, I bet on the horse that.

Poops, that bone poops. There it goes. Good enough.

Because if it poops before it goes, it's like, oh, I can run faster after I pooped. She bets on the pretty ones. And, you know, what kind of equal. I mean, we usually come out of there with the same amount of money that we went in with, but, I mean, everybody's got their own idea what. What makes a great fighter.

And these people were mentioning, just like you, you had a bunch of different reasons why people bet on different things. A lot of superstition betting. Mm hmm. Especially because this is such an old, old hobby through a lot of family generations, there's a lot of different superstition beliefs that fatal looks a certain way because their family bets on them. So be it. You know, there's a lot of details like that.

I think they should give these bettas like a horse name, you know, like Viagra running or whatever, you know, because that would give you a better idea what these fish are all about.

Then there's also bets on how long the fights will last and all kinds of other details. So it's anything that they can bet on, they will bet on. Now, I was blown away by this. He just volunteered information and said, well, they generally, folks spend, on average for these normal rings around two weeks training their betas.

How does one train a beta?

So I'm like, immediately, I'm like, training their betas. What do you. I just ask them what they train them for. I'm like, training for aggression, stamina, endurance. Holding their breath longer is a huge factor. Holding their breath longer is a huge factor. Countless hours of training don't feed them because they're hungry. I'm just so confused. Immediately, I'm like, at this point, I'm like, please, can I get you in a microphone? I'll use a modulator. We'll put, like, we'll put the Darth Vader voice on you. We'll do anything to get you on a microphone, please. This is, like, this is incredible information. Like, I just, like, I know that this is the interview to get. And like, no, he's just like, absolutely not. But I'll give you whatever answers you want. I asked how, and that's the one. One of the things he won't tell me. There's a few things in this interview that no one will tell me. How they train their beta is completely what they consider top secret information that no one gives out. So just like, the secret sauce of how they train a horse, there's not a lot of information on that either. For horse racing, you can definitely assume. And you've seen people like, they'll, you know, they'll run horses on track, they'll do different things, but this, shoot them.

Up with steroids in the back, what.

Do they do to make their betas, you know, hold their breath longer? I can only imagine, is extremely extraordinarily inhumane.

Do these betas and get drug tested after the fight?

No, I asked that question too.

I'm just curious. Stupid stuff that comes to my mind. And when you're talking about such a.

Serious thing, it goes places, my friend. It goes places.

I'm not trying to make light of it, but it's just like this. My brain is just like, I don't get it.

Well, it's, it's just so unbelievable because it's not our world. We're not laughing at the situation because this is entertainment value. This is, this is horrible shit, but it's just so alien to us. We can't believe that this is, this is this detailed and this out there, that. Honestly, that, that's the, that's the perspective that hit me. And I definitely don't hit Jimmy. And Adam was so pissed that I was getting this information that I just shouldn't be getting it because I might have my tires slashed into one more parking lot.

I would, I wouldn't worry about your tire slash, worry about your house burning down.

That's.

That's what it was, house burning down. Throat slitvere.

It's not that Yakuza people, all right? This is. I'm safe. I got. I got permission. I got permission. I did not do this, like, you know, jank journalism, all right?

I feel so warm and fuzzy after all this. My God, I just want to go home and take a shower, curl up in the fetal position, cry.

I said, how different are these breeders that breed fight abators than they do normal betas? And he said, with the right weather and right amount of breeders, they would output 40k offspring a month.

40,000.

40,000 individuals, because these betas are more disposable than the normal beta. You know, when you have a fighter beta line and they make money and they need it, they can push out more betas. Unless there's a petco contract needing it or some big wholesaler, they can push out more betas because when someone wants a line they don't want, like, a beta, they're going to order 20 at a crack because they want enough on hand to either do their own breeding or have enough where they can go through them, like, oh, that's that. That beta is healing or that beta died. I need another one for the next, you know, play session, which is such a gross term.

I feel like we went to.

That's what pay to fail sound like.

Yeah, I just feel like I'm kidding.

That's what they say.

What's that, Adam?

No, that's. Let's not focus on that one. Continue, Jimmy.

I just feel like you dropped me off at Netherland ranch and I'm twelve years old. I just feel kind of creeped out.

Yeah. Question. Is there a time limit? Beta fights generally have no time limit. They fight until one dies or one runs away. Those are just the hard rules.

I mean, if a person. If you've ever been out there and I've bred Bettas many times, you can easily tell when the female has given up and she's cowering in the corner and that she doesn't want to breed and that. That's when you always take her out. And I'm sure it's the same thing with. With male Bettas when. When one is given up, he'll cover, sit in the corner, you know? And the thing is, if you don't take him out and he's just gonna get his butt chewed up some more.

So there it is. Bettas need to die. No. However, there are some matches where they. Where there's bonus points if they're going in a tournament of these things, or if they do die, you know, like a knockout in a boxing match.

I had one frickin mean Betta that would suck the eyes out of any fish that you get close to. And I mean, I flushed him. I was just like, I'm not gonna keep this damn thing around. And I'm just like, there's no way, Jimmy.

You put him in timeout, you don't flush them.

I did. I put him in time out in the toilet.

Mmm hmm. Jimmy.

He killed all my.

Jimmy, we're talking about people here that fight betas. And now you're telling us how you flush the beta for punishment?

Just one.

You are. You're as bad as these people.

I am not. You know, I mean, how do you suck out the eyes of a zebra, Daniel, that you can't catch with freaking twelve inch net? But he caught up and sucked his eyes out. It's like. You son of a gun.

All right, all right. Well, at least you're getting this out and you haven't done it since.

All right, I was drunk. How about that.

That's fair. All right, next one. Again, debaters need to die. Again, I answered that one. How do winds get measured? We were clear about that. Is there judge or refs? There's no judge or refs. It's all on the host. Generally, the person that's hosting the event is the overall person that ends fights and discussions. It's a game of complete, honest respect. And they have collectives where if there's attempted cheating or bad mouthing or anything that's out of line, you generally get kicked out. So everybody's on their best behavior when they're doing this, because you just can get kicked out of these rings for no apparent reason. So it's like, bro, you're not cool. You. You farted in the wrong, you know, opium den. You used my mom's linens to wipe your ass, bro, you're out. Had nothing to do with your beta fighting. Like, we're just kicking you.

When you say cheating, I'm thinking, what's a beta? Pull a shank out of its butt or something.

Okay, that's another question. Immediately I asked, and we got there. Right now, our audience is asking, what's cheating? Yeah, exactly. How could you cheat? And he said that the only real way that people commonly try to cheat is when you have two betas, and they both are just ugly ass betas. Just ugly black or brown betas.

Mm hmm.

And you put them in a jar, and the guy says, no, that was my beta all along.

Oh, the old switch. The old. No, no, no.

That wasn't my beta that lost. That was your beta that lost. Oh, that is how they get.

That's pretty tricky.

Right. So there's, again, that's why they have the host of the. The ring, the evening, declare these things. So they can either try to judge which beta is which, or sometimes they'll just make sure that different colored betas go against each other on purpose so they don't have the attempt at cheating.

Yeah. I was just thinking that, you know, this betta would come in there and he's keystring a shank or something, like in prison, and he pulls out of his butt and just powers it right into the other Betta.

Yeah. I never guess it would be like, you know, whose beta is?

Whose beta? Zada.

I figured that they're just, you know, someone would be like, yeah, mine's super ugly, and they would just own it. But no. All right, what's the size? What's the environments that I have? Do they have anything in the jars? Generally, one gallon jars, and they have nothing in them on purpose. Had one of the listeners on the discord ask if they put any objects in them. Like, for instance, someone even had the term, I know that they were coming from the right place. They weren't trying to be rude and disrespectful. They put, like, in super smash Bros. You can pick different arenas, so can you make different arenas for betas. Like, some of them have, like, a weed, some of them have a few rocks they can go hide. They have obstacles to use. Like a super smash brothers arena. No, they don't have super. They don't have super Smash Brothers arenas. They don't get to have obstacles. They have nothing in there with no hiding factors. And even if they can sometimes, no corners with an around cylindrical device. Some of them use square containers, but as long as there's nothing in them, clear water, only a few tannins in the water, no obstacles, just two betas in a small container to beat the shit out of each other.

I would imagine if you're, you know, they want the action and stuff. They don't want to have any hiding places for these betas to go hide. Fortunately, they are just out there getting their clock cleaned.

Right. It's fair to say that the end of a match constitutes one of the three things. Death. The beta runs away, or the owner himself throws in a towel. Or is that frowned upon? I asked, and he says, clear, run away, death. And he said, the owner never throws in a towel. If the fish loses, it's not a strong bloodline, and it won't produce future offspring. And most losses actually don't get recovery, and they throw them away as a cull. It is essentially a disrespect thing that that is a no good beta, and it needs to be culled. And only winners get to recover and get treated, rehabbed, and bred.

So not everybody gets a participation ribbon?

Nope, there's no participation ribbons. He says majority people will take their beta even if it ran away and literally dispose of it before they even left the event that evening.

We need to bring that back in schools. No participation.

Oh, good, because I thought you were meaning beta fighting.

Yeah, I was gonna say what this.

Is you going to go to. Thank you for clarifying.

Well, I mean, we could also get rid of kids that don't do, but.

I'm all for that.

All right, so is it fair to say. I had him clarify. It's fair to say that there's never really a case where anyone throws in a towel, is there? Any case, where he tries, and if so, is he kind of a bitch? And he says, nope, they'd rather take a loss than ever throw in a towel. And yes, if anybody ever tries, they're generally kicked out of the ring. If they ever attempt to throw in a towel, saying, ah, I changed my mind. I'm gonna pull my beta out. You are generally kicked out. And just like you are looked as a bad person to bring your beta to a fighting competition, win or lose, how do you treat a beat up beta after a fight? I said, treating an injured fish. Everyone has their own ways, but I can tell you the most generalistic ways that people do it is, of course, they use a tiny bit of mellifix, aquarium salt, and indian almond leaves are just a stunt staple of everything in beta fighting. They use them in everything because they're already preparing them for biting, scarring any tissue damage. The best form of treatment that they can use in their arsenal is tannins.

Yeah, because they won't fungus up and get. Get all goofy where they're tore up.

Good question. I got another question here in the chat. Keep these questions going. We are not ignoring chat, by the way. You got questions, you put them up here in the chat. People that are listening, bones asked if they fix it with a little clove oil. I asked if that when they did it, maybe. Maybe some of them were humane. They said, nope. They literally just chuck them in the trash. They actually have a trash can at some of these events, and they just flick them there like, oh, that bad? It was good flick, and they move on.

So. So I, uh. There is a book on, like, orchid competitions.

What's and orchid? Is that another name for better or.

No, no, the flowers.

The flowers.

Oh, okay.

Um. So this guy actually wrote a book. Sorry, Rob's. This guy wrote a book, and he was talking about how there was, like, this orchid competition, Minneapolis. And there was beautiful flowers that, you know, that would be anywhere. They would sell for several hundred dollars. Well, if they didn't win for that prize, they would, though. People would just throw them in right in the garbage. Like he said, he rescued thousands of dollars worth of orchids from the garbage that people just threw away because they didn't quote unquote win, and they didn't want to deal with it. So this. This. That makes perfect sense to me. That's what they do in dog and cockfighting. I mean, that's what they do. They just. They view it as garbage because they don't view the thing as a living thing. They just view it as a thing.

Thank you. Actually, that was a great, great addition, Adam. I do appreciate you putting that one out there. To continue on with the story, people asked and are asking the chat now, do anybody does steroid? The betas do steroids.

That's what I just asked.

You were asking that one as well.

Yeah.

So I asked him in a more detailed manner. I said, assuming, do people do anything like juicing where the bait is prepped for fighting? Is there any sports like, you know, sport, honorable mentions where they, you know, treat it like Lance Armstrong to prep for this lovely sport of theirs? And he said, lol, juicing, steroids, man, you can do whatever you want as long as you, and you can train them however you want. As long as the beta gets put into a one gallon jar of fresh water, it's game on. So anything that you can come up with, any steroid treatments, any juicing methods of food, anything. And I asked him if he can give me some examples. And he's like, that is another thing where I can't give you a lot, but I'll give you one that's very common. That isn't necessarily a trick of the trade, but it's done by almost a good majority of really high end beta fighters. He says normally people will fight their betas heavy in indian almond leaf tea, but specifically they will brew banana leaves. They brew banana leaves so the fish scales can be hardened and it bonds to their slime coat and adds an extra layer to their slime coat. Banana leaves leave that residue on the fish. So they brew and boil banana leaves into their water so they essentially can, you know, give them a bonus sticky slipper. Not sticky, a slippery extra slime coat and harden their scales for the getting ready to be bitten.

Kind of like a boxer puts on the grease on his forehead so the glove slides off your face easier, right?

I was so blown away by this particular statement. I'm like, does this actually work or is this just some sort of like wives treatment? And then he, I had, you know, like go into detail and then I asked this to other people as well, and I got some information of videos of like a before and after, they had some bettas they treated with nothing and they had betas. They treated with the banana leaf treatment. It was insane to see how much harder it was for the betas to bite them.

Now I wonder if stress coat would work.

Is this good for the fish? That was never asked. No one cared about that. And that's super, super sad. I mean, this whole thing Sadeena you're juicing, steroiding, you're boiling leaf juices. And not once is this asking anything of was this good for the fish. They. All they care about is, did it make it better for the ring?

And now I just found something online here talking about cheating. It says, sometimes cheating occurs at Plakat fights, especially when large bets are involved. It is common. It's common for an opponent's fish to be poisoned and switching small fish for a larger one of similar color. So kill the guy's betta and replace it with something that looks similar to it.

So.

And then the second thing it says, then people will choose bottles to display their bettas in that make the fish appear much smaller than their actual size.

So this was less common because I got this information from the places where it was legal, from those beta fighters. This happens quite often because they'll have places where they disappear champion lines, and they'll just. People will put little bits of poison in the tanks to kill them, like, kill their competition. In these underground rings in the United States, these betas generally don't leave your possession until they're ready to fight. So it just doesn't really happen in the underground scene. This happens in the legal scene, which is so much worse to me.

This whole time we're talking, I'm online trying to find out what is the fine? What is the penalty for this? And I can't really find anything, you know, like, is it a $300 fine? Is it a $500 fine?

So I also did a bunch of research.

Did you find anything on that?

And I was trying to mess. I was also messaging Adam this because he was very concerned about me dying, just trying to show up. Like, let's say that they were taking the activities and they would invite me as part of the participation, like, what was my legal ramifications? And no one virtually gets hit for this. So unknown. And they don't care about it. It's a jaywalking. Like, let's put it in the category of how the government treats it in the United states. Dogfighting. Big no no. You saw what Michael Vick got. He got some jail time. He got a lot of fines. Cockfighting, you'll get a little fines, nearly. It's local penalties. They'll break it up is about it. Visitors won't get anything. Beta fighting. They don't care at all. When they. The last beta fighting ring, I could find something in New York that I found years ago. All they hit him for was drugs that they found at the beta fighting ring. They didn't care about the fish stuff at all.

I like how you're putting me as the voice of fucking reason.

You were, for one.

Most illicit shit out of the group of us.

You were trying. You were doing you.

I was the one trying to be the voice of reason.

You were.

This is what and. Yeah, okay.

All right, I'm gonna take a. Take a minute. Dalton, questions since. Got any? Got any good ones? Because there's a lot that's been popped up since.

There were a couple that were posted. And one of the threads, one of them I thought was interesting was, has anyone ever been caught throwing a fight, placing bets against themselves, throwing the fight, anything like that?

Have you?

I have no data on that. Never asked.

You know, it happens in the real world. You know, what happens in this gotta happen. Gotta happen.

But the problem is, is the underground rings are such a. How do I put it? It's like going to your friend's car club night, right? It's just everybody's there to be cool. They're having a fun time. Everybody knows everybody. And it's not necessarily about illicitness. It's about them having a good time, smoking cigars and doing what their family did forever. It's not necessarily about this, you know, fast and the furious underground racing scene, that's this whole illegitimate shit. It's about, let's go to my uncle's basement. He's from, you know, Thailand. We got a bunch of betas and let's. Let's throw down like our grandfather used to. That's how this is. It's a family bonding thing between communities and friends. That's what it is. In most of these underground scenes in major cities. It's not like the yakuza shows up and they're going to show up turf dominance and whoever loses, you know, get loses. A pink.

I just saw something very interesting. I just want to bring this up.

Whose don't cut off pinkies for that.

Just saying mob, mob like and whatever. Mob, irish mob. You know, there's always some sort of limb that gets threatened.

You know the question here, how do we legal Betta fish fights take place? And what are the rules? And here's one of the rules. The owner can accept defeat, okay? You can say, I'm defeated or continue. But during that time, a fish fish diese, he'll be fined. So if you're fish, if you don't accept defeat and you keep your fish going and it dies in the ring, then you'll be fined. According to experts, these fights can last up to 3 hours long.

Those are the legal ones in Indonesia? Yep, for sure. Any others, Dalton, before I continue on.

None that I have right now, but.

I'll keep looking through all the questions.

Yeah, there's been some great questions tonight.

All right, I'll keep going. I asked which cultures partake in this because, again, I'm a dumb white guy. Again, I just told you about a pinky thing. I don't know if you could do that. That was just me. Like, knowing what are pretending to know what any mobs do, you know, I just had to make the joke of that. But I. Again, I'm trying to learn and culture myself in this interview just as much as you guys are curious about this. So I was asking which cultures partake in this? He says all southern asian regions. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, into Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines. Basically any southern or southeastern asian country, they all participate. And almost all of those countries, it's 100% legal, and they all have it. Where it's sponsored, it's all, you know, essentially commercialized. It's as though it would be like your local racing scene racing circuit.

How in the hell do you get sponsored by Lowell's or Home Depot on the damn fish?

That's exactly what happened. So the couple people that I've interviewed, and especially the one that used to be the grand champion, we're back to tattooing fish again. They literally were sponsored by their local businesses.

Wow, that's messed up.

Imagine, like, hardware Hank sponsoring, you know, Michael Vick.

Our bettas are tough as nails. Want some nails? Stop it.

Hardware Hank. I could just see it. Anyways, you explained before that it starts a simple game with children when they play on the other side of the scale. How much money actually gets spent on the highest end games? It all depends on how deep the pockets are. It can be as simple as kids playing with $20 or up to a few thousand dollars per fight on just the the game, not including the bets that go on the side of it. What steps do you take to train betas? And I already explained that this was a secret they would not comfortably sharing literally any way. Yeah, good luck on that one. I can't share any of it. Everybody has their own ways, and they spend more hours than you would spend doing a full time job with overtime.

That question on the Google said how they train them is inhumane. Zaltz said, inhumane.

And if this guy was willing to spill all the details he did so far, and the other gentlemen were spilling to spill all the details they've done so far. And no one would tell me this information. Know that that's probably the worst of all of it. That yes, they could fight to the death, but the training is probably somehow worse than doing that practice. That's fair to say. And when I asked them that, all I got was a stare and kind of a illicit. Yeah, yeah.

I just keep thinking about that scene from Rocky where he's, you know, in the meat locker beating up a side of beef and stuff. I'm just thinking you're taking your fish out and you're running it up and down the road.

And that was from the indonesian guy where it was legal when he gave me that stair, by the way.

Really?

Yes. That, that's, that's a pretty poor one. Alright, so now I think we can take it to the thread of beta fighting questions that we had prepped for our, from our Patreon subscribers earlier in the month. Let's go. Go up to the top. How does one get wrapped up in the scene? Oh, I explained earlier that generally it's from history and background. If you came, if your family comes from the southeast asian countries and you're generally first, you know, first generation american, most of your family's still deep into the, deep into the topic somehow, some.

Way, just part of their culture.

And other than that, even if you're white, there is white people that do get wrapped in the scene. Even though I'm way too white, generally it takes a long time. They have to be a friend of the family and there's many people validating and advocating for this person and why they need to be in the group. It takes very much a long time and they're still always on, on the edge of the underground ring.

I'm sure it's just like being part of the drug scene where until you've proven that you're one of them, you're not going to get in to the inner circle. And I don't know why you'd want to be in the inner circle, but I'm sure that's just the way it rolls.

What's the main demographic of people? And he specified that he wants to know professions, outfits, their looks. He wasn't going off of what race? To answer that, I asked this on multiple occasions. Everybody, the poor are into it because betas are cents apiece, since they are some of the countries and even accessible very cheaply in the United States all the way up to the absolute most wealthy. Because I don't know why, but wealthy people really like the idea of fighting to the death. It's all demographics, unfortunately.

I have a question.

Yes.

I'm not sure I want to. I'm not sure I want to ask.

It, but do you ask if beta.

Fighting is the only fighting sport that they're into? Do they draw an ethical line somewhere? Or if they're beta fighting, are they, you know, cockfighting, dog fighting?

I didn't. They said that the beta fighting was by far the most common. They said there is cockfighting, but it's not to the. Even near the extent that the central american or mexican cultures take it, it's very small and very select asian countries, and it's not near, like a family thing. And it has not gone near as long as anything else. When you're a child collecting betas and you do it between children, this is a culture based deal where it bonds families, whereas cockfighting has nothing to do with children. And it was generally done in, you know, gambling circuits. Again, the beta thing with families, they didn't even have to do it for money. They just did it as part of a pastime, catching wild betas out of the rice paddy.

These people need Netflix for something else to do.

That's what we need for every. For every southeast Asian. You could sponsor them. A Netflix subscription.

That's right.

Oh, my God.

Here's a little something better to do with your time that won't hurt any of our beloved.

What are you gonna do? Are you gonna go and go down to the south and America and Central America and be like, you need Netflix so that you don't have cockfighting? Are you gonna go to poor areas and be like, don't do dogfighting.

I'm sending Robbie. I don't really care.

That's the point. But the point is, it's that, you know, oh, what boredom can find, you know.

Oh, I remember I grew up in a small midwestern town of 70 people, and I remember, you know, trying to find shit to do.

Didn't you tell me that when you were young, you, like, lit shit on fire?

No, that was never, never maniac. But I was also.

Oh, no, no, that was drunk parties you were at. That's what it was. Okay.

But no, I mean, we used to go out in the middle of winter, you know, and if you've never experienced 20 below, I mean, here, everybody in this room knows what 20 below is. 20 below. You can't even hardly breathe, it's so damn cold out. And we would drive around and we would steal every freaking little toboggan. Those little red toboggans that had two handles on it and stuff. And we'd have a 75 foot rope, and we'd pull each other behind a pickup truck out on the highway. And that's just because of sheer frickin boredom is the stupid shit that we did, you know, growing up. And it's the same thing as if you're. If you're not, if you don't have a hobby and, you know, it's part of your culture. Unfortunately, we're never gonna stop it.

I know what I did when I was bored.

Yeah, what's the.

Wasn't it, was it worm fiddling?

Was that wormhood worm fiddling?

I had several women help me with the worm fiddling.

Yeah.

Excellent. Well, moving on, Adams anaconda. Let's. Let's knock out these questions, shall we? What's, uh, what's what care is taken outside of the fights for these fish. So since we can't go into training because they won't tell us anything, let's hope that it's better pampering. But for the stuff, I do know, they are taken care of and very well, uh, very well furnished, generally. One gallon to five gallon tanks. If you have the prestige stud male, it's going to be in a five gallon tank. It's going to be with daily fresh brood tenants. They're going to have, they're fed on a three times basis with only the best live foods and supplements. They're going to be the most pampered beta outside of their whatever mysterious tent, terrible training sessions that they have. But yes, they do take very good care of them because those are money. Fish that make the money, breed the money. They are treated like stud horses. And if you don't know what stud horses are like, a single horse can be worth millions. They have multiple trainers. So downscale this to betas. You can imagine that, you know, a championship beta could be worth, you know, a few thousand dollars for the lineage. They're going to be pampered as such.

I can already hear the beta, the crazy beta people going, they only put them in five gallons of water, whereas.

The ten to 20, I thought of that earlier, too, is kind of like, how can you fight them in just one gallon of water?

Oh, I. All these beta people, by the way, think that the beta freaks out there in the community that think that they need like 125 gallon of thing is just ridiculous. Like, there's no fish that they keep in anything besides a five gallon container. And that's the five gallon containers for the one pristine fish that they keep on the mantle, everything else is in a gallon container or less, period.

You know, another thing, I've told the.

Story before, but everything gets daily water changes, right? Yes.

I mean, like Rob just said, that if it's your primo stock, you're taking good care of it. Back to. I was in Dallas, Texas a few years ago. We were part of a large group and we were all being bused out to a place called Texas, Lille's Dude Ranch. And we're going to go out there and have a barbecue and watch a rodeo and stuff. And I was at that time working for a grocery store, so it was a grocer. And as we drive by this large penitentiary looking jail place with 1012 foot chain link fences with raised barbed wire, also had a paved track all the way around us saying, somebody asked a bus driver and he's on the pa, you know, and he goes, you know, is this a, this a jail over here? He goes, no, that, that's where they keep all the high end racing horses, the studs and. Well, why do I, you know, and he goes, I'll tell you, the reason they have this big fence over there is because of semen rustlers. And these people will, the people will jump. Okay, so if you're not familiar with.

Horses, boy, this escalated quickly.

But you can. What's familiar with semen rustlers? Just for the record, you're, are you familiar with that?

No one is. He said, no one is. Continue.

I wasn't. So anyway, if you ever watch dirty jobs with micro, he has an episode about where they're out there. You know, they bring in this artificial.

I can't even look at.

No, look at me. No, the back end of a horse and the horse and they smear it with, with pheromones from a female and the horse mounts it and does his thing and they'll take and freeze the semen.

Thank, this is explicit.

And they can get twelve or 15,000, $20,000 for a straw of semen. And out of one ejaculation of the horse, you can get, you know, hundreds of these straws. And so getting a horse semen could connect them up to a half a million dollars for one shot. Now I'm wondering, is that happening in the Betta world? I mean, is anyone milking these bettas?

I hope to God not, and I'm not going to eat a pixie stick ever again.

I want you guys to look up semen wrestling. I'm going to look it up right now.

All right, now that, that's in my brain forever rent free. More questions. More questions. Is there a good payout, or is there more clout for the best bred beta payouts? The same clout is huge if you are a known beta breeder that has many, many wins. Everybody wants your beta and betas, and suddenly your stock goes up, which is half the reason you're into this in legal countries, because then your brands, your names go out there and such. So much so that one of the beta fighters even offered, say, hey, Rob's, there's some extra betas here that weren't sponsored. I can put your guys's name on it, and we can fight some betas under the aquarium guys name. And I'm like, pass. I'm like, I'm honored. I know what you're trying to do, and that. That means a lot. But know that in my culture, this isn't kosher. So I'm going to respectfully pass. He's like, are you sure? We'd love to. You know, we like your podcast. Like, what you do like, nope. I appreciate you spreading the word. I don't. I'm not gonna be a part of this. Not gonna be a part of this.

Maybe they could put some money towards.

It wasn't much. Like, he offered, like, to pay, like, half the rate, and then, like, you know, it was gonna be like a $100. Well, again, it's in Indonesia, so the currency exchange, I did it like, it was gonna be like a $100. That's basically what it was gonna be. So for them was a bunch of money. For me, it was, you know, $100.

Yeah, no, you know, I'm just gonna say, don't Google horse semen for sale.

Can we move on?

I'm just trying to help you out here.

All right, next. Next thing is Rob's is gonna turn into sweet and sour pork. You should stop investigating immediately. So, no, I kept going. So I'm still here.

Until this aired, until this air.

How big in the area are you currently into fighting them? I did not. I was willing to. To get the story because I was doing it that long just to be able to vice news this shit to bring it to light, but I did not have to, and I'm glad I didn't have to, because it's. It's, you know, not a fun process. I don't want to put money into this and help. Help it further. Next question. Rob's gonna get sent to the shadow realm by a Hmong beta fighter who wears crocs. So you can see how cartoonish this got in our comment section.

I'll miss you.

Will you?

Because this. Because you're the one who brought it up. Me and Adam are like, no, I don't want to touch this.

I had. I tried.

We tried talking about it.

I tried. I tried to talk him out of it.

You did?

He didn't want to.

You know, I'm just glad we're not doing this on, like, serial killers and Rob's trying to, you know, talk to serial killers and figure out how to, you know, get away with it and stuff like that.

The smiley face killer.

Yeah, that'd be cool.

Describe the process of organizing a beta fight, from selecting the fish to arranging the event that I could not do that, because, again, most of these were, like, either established or somehow magically happened or they didn't want to talk about it.

Imagine you at home and you want to start a Bible study with your local people in church, and you just call your friends and say, hey, I'd like to get together, and we're going to study the Bible instead. We're going to fight fish.

Can you imagine a bait and switch for the Jehovah's Witnesses?

Oh, lord.

Like, putting out, like, a Jehovah's Witness gathering, and suddenly it's just a hmong beta fighting competition.

Like, the amount of people. The amount of people they're gonna kill you is just that one. There's another set of people.

So I knew. I knew. I knew of a guy personally that went down to the cities and he was supposed to show up to a training seminar for work, but went to the wrong building in one of the big buildings in Minneapolis and then ended up at what are, what, some of those, the mason, the Freemasons. Oh, he ended up to one of the Freemasons where they were. They basically handed out a test to see if you were smart enough to qualify for the Freemasons. So he shows up, fills out the whole test, and he scored better than everybody else. And he was, like, immediately indicted into, like, the leadership of the Freemasons. And he's like, this is not at all what I came down for, but heck, he scored. No. He's like, no, absolutely. I want nothing to do with you people and left. Just imagine, like, showing up like, oh, now I'm beta fighting. No, this is not at all what I signed up for.

No, I came for Bible study.

Other regulations or guidelines in place or for governing beta fights that you comply with them. I asked some, try to find some of the countries. Apparently there is no regulations in most southeast asian countries, there's a couple where they'll have, like, city rules and regulations, but they're generally gained towards how it's marketed. And parking and shit like that had nothing to do with the fish. So it got very. And you can only sit up for 8 hours a night, so many nights using Google translate before you just give up on that question.

So you're saying that if I come beta fighting, that you'll validate my parking?

That's basically how it goes. You can't validate parking for beta fights. And it got real, real weird.

That's organized, right?

How do you address concerns about the potential impact of beta fighting on a broader perception of fish keeping and animal welfare? So I think this is where I can wrap it in to asking these guys on how they felt about things. Right. There's. There's probably some other questions, and I'll make sure to wrap up the last couple ones. Dalton, please keep them close. Talking with these, uh, with these guys. I did ask them, like, clearly, I have to ask you the question on how you feel ethically about doing this. Clearly, most people feel like that this is taking the creatures that they love, forcing them in a jar to kill each other is inhumane. The things that say, is it really animal cruelty? I mean, look at what we do with UFC, fighting, boxing, and the stuff that we've done to humans throughout history and culture. That's entertainment, and that's.

That's totally fun.

That's, you know, that's entertainment. And I said, well, you know, the obvious answer is, those people have a choice. Those people chose to be dumb, you know, get cranial brain damage that was offered to them for a money package. These fish did not ask for this. They didn't go off of it. But I. Again, they keep out giving us of childhood fun. It was the. The same approach to them as you and I, Jimmy, when we took magnifying glasses and burned ants in the ground, you know, it was the same process. And honestly, once I burnt a few ants and the grasshoppers, there was something that clicked inside of me going, like, why am I killing these things?

Right?

Like, I know a mosquito bit me, and he's gonna get revenge, and, you know, boom, that's gonna go away. But there's a. There's a spot in my life that I stopped, and I don't sit there with a magnifying glass as a cruel kid and burn ants. Fish mean a lot to us as an audience. To us, we're the people that care most about these things in a tank and jar. These people grew up with a culture where that bonded their family together in the most serious way. As much as I want to educate people on these topics, every single time I interviewed someone that did this, it was always involving family. That was the thing that shocked me. And I did not go into this thinking that was the possibility. I thought that, you know, someone thought it was cool to gamble on something, and they thought that, you know, two creatures killing each other was fun. I still think that the japanese bug fighting is the coolest thing you could find on YouTube. Back in the day, watching a giant rhino beetle fight a scorpion brings in my inner childhood of watching, like, you know, anime on television. But in all seriousness, why don't you.

Just watch actual anime?

You just beat my point. In all seriousness, I'm just gonna go back to actual anime.

We're going right in the pornhub.

But no, this is.

That's what Rob watches with the girls in the tentacles. Ooh, non sex cartoons.

Back to the. Back to the emotional part of this unilaterally. This was not just a culture thing like the Native Americans bonded together by killing bison and going around family, feeding their family. This was, they grew up, their ancestors, their current family. Even the family they go back to see in their normal country, still go back in rice paddies. The children capture these things and they keep them on the side of their jar, just like my daughter just this last week, went out and go, caught butterflies, kept them in her cage, in her. In her room. We released them a day later. There's a whole innocence to this and family bonding that I can't begin to judge and understand. I can't begin to judge those people for doing what they did. As. Although I do believe it's 100% cruel to fight these creatures, and I still want to put it out there that I don't condone it. But I'm not going to judge these people for what they've done either. I did not expect that coming into this. I expected coming into this. I'm going to learn about an illicit cockerel, cockfighting ring. I'm going to find out some information on. You know, people essentially treat it like cigar smoking, where they. They shouldn't, but they do anyway because it's fun. I was. Felt like I was going to expose something, but instead I found way deeper meaning in having their grandpa show them their. Their source of family bonding, collecting, breeding, showing the entire process of the beta and then showing them on display in their communities, beta ring circles. And it's just so much more than I thought it would have going into this initially. And me being the white guy in the room, not allowed into it is because that's. It's more of a culture thing, and I'm not part of that culture. It's not because I'm the white man snitch and wasn't allowed in. It's because I did not share that mentality and bond going into this. And I just simply wasn't playing part of what that whole thought process was. And I can respect that.

Rob's totally a snitch.

That's right.

There's so many things in the world that I believe that are wrong but have done because of it's been done in the past. There was part of a culture, there was a need, there was a social bonding aspect that I, as a person in Minnesota, should have no opinions on that because of the planet overpopulating, because of the modern era, we have to change somehow. Japanese killing whales, there not being whales left alaskan Inuits killing seals. All different types of cultural heritage, aspects that I know nothing about. Given the opportunity and the over two years of research that I put into, just this tiny subject was gifted into, really gave me this tiny bite of this part of the culture that I don't want to judge what they do, but I'm certainly not going to tell people that they need to go start a beta ring. And I would like to see, like, you know, being the person outside of that culture that if, you know, collect the betas, breed the betas, show the betas, just don't do the fighting. That's not for me to say. They're. They're doing what they're doing. It's illegal in this country. I hope it stays illegal, but I'm not going to ever talk down to those people that have done this practice in the aspect of how they've done it. I'm going to talk down to the people that have commercialized, that have turned it into a business where they have to farm out fighting betas for people in competitions, or they've turned it into something that isn't the culture for their family, that have the 40,000 betas that they need to go murder in a milling facility to go out and kill these things. That's what I'm trying to expose and condone. I need to place that difference there, and I did not expect to learn that in this process.

Yeah, as you were speaking stuff, I was thinking, too, of some of the cultures that want rhino horn, because to them, it's like Viagra. And I mean, there people are killing the rhinos and the elephants and, you know, all these big mammals just for their ivory tusks or whatever, you know, that's part of their culture that they've done for years, too. And it's just. It's hard for me to wrap my head around, but it's because of the way I was brought up. I mean, I go out to my God dang yard and I spray for mosquitoes because I can't stand freaking mosquitoes, you know? Am I hurting the honeybees and other animals? Most likely, yeah. But you get such a mindset, you know, like, well, you know, these people that are breeding these Bettas, well, they're breeding them just for doing this. And if it wasn't for them breeding them, then these Bettas would never be born. And so they have this aspect that, well, they wouldn't be here unless I brought them in here. So I can bring them in. I can take them out.

So, Dalton, any other questions that we got from the chat?

No, I looked through both threads and, and the live chat here, and you covered everything. So warm and fuzzy, wasn't it?

So warm and fuzzy. So, guys, guys, if you got more questions, I still have access to some of these people. I can follow up on discord. I'm probably not going to bring this up at a podcast again. I think I got at least the point of how it works. Some of the processes, some of the horrors, and some of the unexpected culture and beauty that I did not see to come from it, even though I don't condone it. If you got more questions, email us. Go on our discord, aquariumguyspodcast.com. bottom of the website, you'll find the link to it. We gotta find a better subject than this.

Love your fish, man. Love your fish.

Oh, God, this was a rough one. So God bless your worm fiddling jokes, because we needed them this episode.

It's not a joke, it's fact.

Adam, last notes.

I hope that everybody looks at this now and sees that technically, all animals could be sentient in some shape or form, whether they're from the biggest elephant to a bug. And they should just treat everything with respect. That's what we're here for, as to just basically treat shit with respect.

Love each other and love your animals.

So the next time you see display of betas at your local fish store, you know, remind them that they should have them in a gallon container.

Ten gallons a piece with.

Ten gallons a piece with heaters.

I can't wait for all the hate mail from the beta people, though.

Beta people. Hey, they're right up there with the government.

And that note, there goes our last hope of ever being sponsored, so.

By the government.

Yeah, you know, send us. See us on Patreon.

My favorite thing that I saw the other day, I saw a license plate that somebody paid for. This is anti gov, I'm thinking. So you paid the government money to advertise it? You're anti gov.

That's idiotic.

I know. I drove. I drove it. And this guy had an anti government license plate. I'm thinking, I bet you get a lot of respect when you get pulled over for speeding.

Like, wait, how much does it cost.

For a personalized plate full of vanity plates? I don't know, like a couple hundred bucks, 5000 bucks? I don't know. But I mean, you, you know, makes total sense that you pay the man to diss the man, so.

Oh, last question. Oh, they asked how many people that I actually get in touch with that did this? We'll say illicitly and non illicitly. I got in touch with four different people that had, I don't want to use business names, but had brands that fought in Indonesia. And I got ahold of seven different people that did it illicitly in the United States, either now or has been in the recent past.

So what's out there?

And this was, this was answers not just from one person. This was the collective of all of those people, all of these answers, by the way. So this was. This was not just me getting one answer from one people. This was the average answers. So if you guys that gave me those answers are listening and you say you didn't say that, it's because the other person did say that. So note you were saying, adam, now.

That you know these beta people, can you and I get some contacts so that I can get some ship rod over from Indonesia. They got stuff that I need.

What kind of stuff? Need, Adam?

Hey, Adam. I know a guy. Until next time.

I know.

Okay, until next time, people, peace out.