Alright guys, welcome to the podcast. We always have to talk about our charity first thing, cause they matter most. Ohio Fish Rescue are your friends that help big fish find better homes.

That's it. It is.

That is exactly right. You have a large fish that needs a home, call these guys.

Don't put it in a lake, don't put it in a stream. And for God's sake, don't flush it down a toilet. These fish fish deserve better. And too many pet shops sell giant fish without talking to the person. No, your tiger catfish is not going to work in a ten gallon tank. And again, Ohio Fish Rescue is there. They'll either try to rehome it or keep it in their own facilities to give it a nice long, healthy life. Go to their website, ohiofishrescue.com and they have t shirts. They have ways where you can support them financially, giving them on their patreon PayPal or even gofundme. And there's numbers on the website as well. Give him a call.

216-773-0407.

Literally just pick up the phone and be like, excuse me, sir, I love you, and just hang up.

That's it.

He just needs to know that you.

Care and appreciate him. Give him a shout out.

All right, let's kick that podcast.

Let's do it.

Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Aquarium Guide podcast, coming live from you at Studio B in perm, Minnesota, and rob's basement. We are excited to be here today. We've got some special guest stars we haven't announced yet and they'll be with us just very shortly.

I'm Rob Z olson and the deliciously sounding man that was just introducing ourselves is Jim colby. So today we finally got back. Adam, welcome, buddy. Thank you.

Glad to be back.

As you can tell, his voice sounds so much better. He's working on now his room to be in a podcast studio because we're across the state from each other. He's got a good mic, but you have to forgive him. He's actually tenting himself with a blanket just to make sure that his audio quality is as good as it can be for you listeners.

So we're hoping that maybe Adam hasn't had beans and rice or something for dinner because he'll probably kill himself by the end of the podcast.

Don't guess yourself.

Don't do it.

I won't.

So today we have a very special guest. Steve rubiki from Angelsplus.com. Introduce yourself, sir.

Well, Steve ricky, I've been doing angel fish for most of my life and not a whole lot else I can say other than that because my life is pretty boring.

Other than doing fish secretly. I'm assuming that you like to go out dancing every now and again.

I danced at my daughter's weddings and before I was married. That was also a long time ago.

Well, at least I wasn't wrong.

Now, how many years have you been doing this, steve, you've been in this business a very long time.

Well, actually, as far as like an official business, I started that in the mid 80s. Before that it was more of an informal 100 tank hobby where I took fish to pet stores and went to fish auctions and that kind of thing. And I did that for quite a few years before I started actually shipping fish out, advertising in magazines and then eventually the Internet come along and then I switched from advertising and magazines exclusively to just advertising on the Internet or having a website. And that's where I started a long, long time ago, though. I mean, I literally started, you know, I had Angel Fish since, you know, probably 1963 or so and bred my first fish when I was a teenager and first angel fish. And so I've been doing it a long time. It's just that it gradually progressed to the point where I went from five tanks to ten tanks to 50 tanks to 100 tanks and to a peak of 475 tanks. And now I'm kind of regressing back down to the 350 area. Well, that's kind of the general history.

That'S what we brought you on is you with Angels Plus. At least I've done a lot of research, seemed to be the first website that I can find that offered fish selling online for the first time. They had listings and talking about it. But you seem to be and I've done a lot of homework up to this interview making sure of this, and I can't find anybody past you. But you look to be the first person that sold online. And that's really the topic of our podcast today, is the history of online on sales for fish. So, again, thank you for coming on. We're going to go through a couple of cleanup things before we get into the interview. Too far here. So we had a caller this last week. Thank you guys for calling.

Absolutely.

We've been begging people to give us a call and we got our first caller and it came up with a fantastic question.

So let's get right into it. I'm going to play the recording. It is about a minute and a half. Here we go.

Hi.

My name is John from Pennsylvania. I was listening to your episode five about koi farming. And I do this on a hobby scale. I have about twelve fish in a relatively small pond, about 2500 to 3000 gallons. I have a question about clarity in the water and wondering if I have too many fish in there. Like I said, about twelve fish in at most 3000 gallon pond. And I cannot get the water clear no matter what I do. I tried black trap door snails and I'm pretty sure my fish ate all those. I had about 30 and I have not seen any. And I have a pretty good filter system and keep up with that and I'm wondering if A, I have too many fish in there, which it doesn't seem like I do, and I have plenty of plant life in there as well. And the other question is, should I do a water change and start it from scratch? I'd like to have a clear pond so I can see the fish. And I understand that they have plenty of food with all the algae that's in there, but it's green and murky, doesn't smell. But I just want to be able to see my fish. If you could answer those questions for.

Me, that'd be great.

Thanks and enjoy the podcast.

Bye.

Perfect. I appreciate that. John from Pennsylvania, we got to follow up. I texted him back and forth trying to get a little more information because there's a lot to go over there. Clarity is not just one thing, it's a collective of things. So number one, his size of the pond seems adequate, 2500 gallons to 3000 gallons. The dimensions of the pond could be spread in a lot of different ways. So if it's too shallow, you're going to have a lot of algae problem reflecting off the bottom. But again, the average depth of his pond is 3ft, so that's a decent depth. His fish are anywhere from I'm assuming to a foot to 2ft. That should be twelve individual fish. That's about the limit you want to put in your pond. So they'll definitely have a large amount of waste. But the things I didn't get is the amount of flow his pump handles. Because your filter sure cleans out the particles in the water, but most of the time in a pond it's outside, there's a lot of direct sunlight. That's not the issue. The issue that really cleans up the pond's clarity is a uv filter, a uv sterilizer. And as long as you're cycling that pond, at least everybody likes to do at least once an hour. As a standard, you're sterilizing the algae in the water and will make it nice and crystal clear. There's also other things you can do, such as using raw barley to disintegrate in your pond. And you can get these in barley balls. They wrap them up quite nice and meant to throw right into your pond. The barley, as it decomposes, creates a natural algae side, almost like a small minimal hydrogen peroxide that prevents or slows down the algae from blooming and growing in your water and on the walls of the pond. So those would be the recommendations is number one, do you have a uv filter? And if you do, how fast is your pump pumping through the gallons per hour? And try different things like barley and snails. People say it cleans up. They're not going to change the water quality, they're actually just going to add more bioload because they're going to eat the algae on the side of the tank and then create more waste. So they're great to mode on the algae feed your koi, because they're going to gobble them up. But those are the big recommendations we recommend. And again, John, thank you for calling in. Again, we'll be texting back and forth, and anybody else that wants to give us a call certainly go to our website. It's the Aquariumguys podcast or excuse me, aquariumguyspodcast.com, and scroll down to the bottom of the website. We have our contact information there where you can either call in, text us with questions or email us directly. And just a reminder, listeners, our number is 218-214-9214. We love having these. We are super excited to see this end, very excited, and it clarifies things that we may have missed in the show. So you're calling in helps a lot of other people that have the same question.

I just got one thing to add, Rob. When you're out looking for a sterilizer to put in your pond, like Rob said, you want to make sure that you have the right gallon per flow per hour. But the other thing, too, when you're purchasing a sterilizer, is you want to take a look how much is the replacement bulbs. You can find sterilizers out there at a really cheap price, but if a replacement bulb is half the price or three fourths of the price of that sterilizer, you might want to reevaluate what you're actually getting. It's like buying a printer for your computer at home. If you're buying a printer for $39, but it's costing you $75 every time to put ink in it, it's not very cost effective. So that'd be my little two cent.

In there, and then mine would be if you do get a sterilizer, make sure that it's a twisting, like a turbo twist sterilizer. I found that those work better than just the regular straight shot uv sterilizers, at least for me.

At least.

Yeah, it's all about whenever I use them, it's all about how long that water can stay inside the uv sterilizer. So if it twists, it's just more time being against those uv rays sterilizing the water.

And it won't clear up overnight, but it clears up fairly quickly. Steve, do you got anything to add on to that?

Well, I think you guys are pretty much spot on, but the only thing I do have koi ponds myself, and I have tons of algae, and it doesn't bother me because I just don't care. You should have algae. But when it comes to algae, and this is true whether it's an aquarium or a pond or whatever, it's a combination of food and light. And two things help with algae. One is reduce the light. So in the case of an outdoor pond, you shade it with things like lily pads and maybe some canopies over near the pond so that you cut down on the number of hours where you have direct light into the pond. And then if you take care of that, then generally, the sterilizers have less work to do. There's less algae to begin with. And I think you can be pretty successful just following you guys'recommendations with the sterilizer and reducing the light that's basically feeding that algae.

Thanks again for calling in, John. Hope to hear from more of you listeners. Give us a call. We love having these questions. So again, a little more clean up. So we're going to talk a couple of different things about the future of the podcast. We're very pleasantly surprised we don't have them put a dollar of advertisement in. It's been very little word of mouth because we're busy people and apparently the internet has definitely picked up on our podcast going out there. There's only a handful of, I would say, decent aquarium podcasts. And there's been a lot that's closed down in the last year or two and we're getting a heavy amount of listeners. So to keep up with your popular demand, we need to talk about the future of our podcast.

The future.

So what we're looking into is, again, you want a merch store. You want the deliciousness of the aquarium guys on your T shirt or a hoodie. So we're going to get that rolling to you as soon as we can. Number one, we need to tell more people about this. So that really relies on two things. Number one, us putting on a little social media advertisement. But the bigger thing that's invaluable is tell your friend a bonner podcast. Send them a link. Find two friends this week that you know is in the hobby. Send this to them, tell them to subscribe. And then we're also going to try to look for conferences to meet you guys in person and talk shop right at the convention. So if you have a convention that you want to suggest, we will certainly look into traveling and get that to you in the future.

Yeah, and we're very excited about all this. If you come across with some great ideas, we have got four or five things lined up in the near future. But if you come up with some ideas that you want us to talk about or find out about, if we don't know what we're talking about, we'll find the people that do know. So if you have any suggestions, what you want to hear about it, give us a call.

Well, perfect. I think that does well for clean up. And let's just dive right into the topic. So we got a little highlight from you, Steve, on your background. But is angel fish clearly your favorite fish?

Well, that's a tough one because I started out basically being attracted to the hobby from guppies and Goldfish. Although I got to say early on I did see a pair of angel fish that of course, I was probably five years old when I saw them. They seemed like they were three times larger than any fish I've ever seen to this date, and there was a breeding pear, and my mother had a friend who liked fish, and we'd go over and visit her every now and then. And she had a house where she had goldfish and ponds outdoors, and she had aquariums inside. In the wintertime, she had 200 gallon tanks in her walls that were filled with these goldfish. She'd bring them in out of the ponds, put them in these tanks, and keep them there for the winter. And she had a little room all by itself that just had aquariums in it, and it was filled with guppies. And I love those guppies, the colors and the varieties and the goldfish, they just mesmerized me. But she had one tank with a pair of angel fish in it, was a breeding pair, probably just silvers, just regular kind. They might have been wild, but not really positive. It was probably around 1960 or so, and they were just incredible. And so that was stuck in my mind until I got old enough to get my own tank and take it from there. And they probably took over since then. But I've always had other fish other than angel fish in addition.

So, Steve, before we get into the topic of selling online, the history of selling online, I'm just trying to get our listeners a nice perspective view. So, angelsplus.com, as it stands now, you're extremely well known in the hobby for award winning angel fish that you either sell individually or by breeding pairs, and you're known for not necessarily being featured in a pet store. You sell direct and you have the best angels, and you have a very methodical, proven process on how you do that. Do you want to explain.

You mean as far as the process of how I breed them, or are you asking about how I sell them or what?

I think again, where you get your reputation from and then your breeding process. I think that's really what makes you unique.

I can't really speak too much of the reputation because I'm not on the receiving end of that.

I got you.

You got a pretty good reputation, my friend. Pretty good.

Yeah. If people say stuff, usually the only things I hear are the bad things.

Of course.

It's funny when you're doing something like this, you'll actually be surprised at how many people who also breed angel fish want to see you do poorly and say lots of really bad things about you. So I would have guessed my reputation was bad by what I hear from customers who call me to give me the latest scoop on what somebody's saying about me. But that's kind of to be expected on any competitive situation.

That's how you know you're doing well.

That's the way I look at it. I said, if they're coming after me, it must be because they're trying to get to where I am or something like that. I don't really know but that's just the way I think about it, and that way it doesn't bother me.

So as far as the process, at least how I've known you before I was introduced to your website is I knew of you going on fish forms and doing some homework on some of the best quality and unique variations of angel fish. And if you go on your website, I think most stuff that tracks me to you is you have these extremely brilliant coy angel fish. You have to be an expert on breeding these variations.

Well, I'm not so sure I would put myself as an expert or anything like that. All I know is that I have a lot of experience, and experience does teach you a lot, especially when you're in a hobby where when I was a kid, there wasn't a lot of people doing this kind of thing that could teach you anything. Books that you could buy were far and few between, and they had very basic information you kind of learned either from yourself or from your friends who were doing it with you. And I did, fortunately. It's funny, only in New York is, well, 40 years ago it was 20,000 people. Today it's more like ten, so it's dying. But at 20,000 people, it had something like eight or nine fish rooms with more than 50 tanks a piece in it. That's just unheard of. It was unheard of at that time. Anywhere in the country that that small of a population would have that many people interested in fish. In fact, another guy in town, Dave lasnick, he became a good friend of mine, and he was absolutely superb at breeding fish. And he did mostly guppies. But he got into angel fish when I started doing a lot of them. And he got into it, and he became expert, in my opinion, expert at doing them and doing them well. We could share information, we could share tips, we could do lots of things, and we did a lot of things together. In fact, we started Angels Plus together, and he decided to get out of it when I decided I wanted to go full time on it. But we've been great friends all these years. I've had some resources to help with my learning, but it's nothing like today. It's nothing like getting on the internet and talking to 400 breeders of angel fish and getting their opinions. There was none of that. I did have a bit of a head start by having some very active aquarium society in town with friends who were doing well breeding fish, but a lot of it was trial and error learning, experimenting. And so what I found out was that a lot of the stuff written in the books is just plain false. It's just completely not true. How it got there, I don't know if it was because the guy was amateur at it and was guessing, or if he was repeating something that he heard and didn't know if it was true or not. But I found out that there's so much that wasn't true, that I did so many different experiments so that I could try to figure out what worked and what didn't work, that I kind of eliminated a lot of. The things that didn't work at least didn't work well for me, to the point where I got a lot of stuff accumulated over the years. And when you do something for 50 years, you just naturally, eventually I mean, I learn every single year you get better. And I learned things this year, I'll learn things next year. You never stop learning if you're still interested in investigating different things. And so for me, it's just a time in the hobby that's kind of accumulated to the point where I learned enough to produce nice fish.

So you gave us a perspective before talking about your experience. When you get again, you started in the 80s, you started getting more tanks and breeding more again, you said you started with pet stores. What led up to you posting anything online?

Well, actually, it was kind of funny. I did the pet store thing for quite a while. In fact, at one time I was selling I'd say we were selling about 1500 angel fish a week. And we had a little circuit. We would get in my van on the weekends. And actually at the time, there was three of us doing it, and we all did our varieties in our different rooms. We combined them and went to the I call the shops up and they take the orders and we drive to the shops and we distribute all this fish. And it went really well because it was during a time frame when there was what they call the angel fish plague that was really bad. And shops could not keep fish alive, but they could keep ours alive. If they did what we told them, they could keep them alive. And so we sold a lot of fish at prices that were probably five times higher than what they could import them at. The imports came in tiny and they died, so they didn't want them. And ours were beautiful and they were bigger and they paid for them and they sold them quickly and they made money. And so because they made money, we made money. And we did that for, I don't know what it was, four or five years, three years, I can't even remember. But it came a certain time when I decided that I had so much extra junk in my room I wanted to get rid of. I'd seen all these ads and quarrying Fish magazine, fama magazine out of Tropical Fish magazine, I think it was tropical Fish hobbyists, it was and Fama Fama that were the big ones back then. And I put an ad in the back of I think it was fama to get rid of some of the junk in my fish room. It wasn't even fish, it was just stuff. And I sold the stuff so fast I couldn't believe it. And I was just like, wait a minute, I'm selling junk and they want it? What happens if I decide to sell other stuff, the fish food that I use, the nets that I use? And so I started selling dry goods and they went really well. And then I realized that nobody's selling fish. Well, there were a few, there were a few breeders who advertised in fama, in tfh that they would sell some fish. In fact, I had bought discus that way. I'd done a few things that way. So I thought, what the heck, I might as well give it a shot when I have some extra fish. I had to learn how to pack them, learn how to keep them alive. A lot of trial and error at the beginning because there wasn't anybody. You could sit there and ask, how do you do this? There was no internet. There was no way to get information like that. You couldn't call up some guy that had been doing it for 20 years and ask him because he wasn't going to tell you. Absolutely, it's not going to tell you. It was guarded secret practically. So I set up experiments. I put fish in boxes, I put thermometers in the boxes, I set them outside. I did this, I did that, I did all kinds of things until I figured out this is how you can keep, and started shipping them out. And then I'd call each customer after I ship them out and I would say how they arrived, and I'd take notes if they died, if they were sick, if they were cold, if they were perfect. So eventually I learned what worked and it just kind of grew from there. And it was almost by accident that it went from I'm selling fish wholesale for relatively low prices to selling fish retail online at relatively high prices. I think I was selling Coy Angel Fish in 1980, 719, 88 for $12 a piece back then. That was like $50 today, or something like that. And they were nickel sized. I mean, they were little and that was unheard of. But it was because I could open up a nationwide market for fish that nobody had seen. And when they see a new fish like that, they go, I want that. And I literally sold tens of thousands of them doing that type of thing, which morphed from magazine ads to a website.

I think the first time I ever saw your ad, Steve, is I was paging through the back of Tropical Fish hobbies magazine in the there was probably three people. And I want to say I think I saw you, and I think I might have saw Jack watley, and I might have saw a couple of trans shippers that were advertising in the backs. People like Zfish dolphin International, I think, was doing that at the time, stephanie but there's very, very few people you look back in there, they had the the little highlights where they say like, you know, livestock supplies and stuff and under livestock there are only four or five people.

Yeah, there was, there was a few breeders of but not with not with Angel Fish. But there were a few breeders. Like I said, I bought fish online. One in the early 80s, maybe 70s. There was there was a lady in California that was she was selling a can't remember the name of her company, but she was selling a little redheaded. I can't remember even the name of what she called it, but it was basically a gold blushing angel fish that had a little red dot on its head, or at least she called it Red. It was probably just orange, but they were blushing and they were white bodied with this nice bright orange spot on the top of their head. And Dave Laznick bought some from her and he'd remember her name in a heartbeat, but I don't remember her name. And anyway, we ended up getting some fish from her and we got Discus from Jack watley. I bought them from a few different places that were doing it online. And the person that was in California, I believe they were importing those fish from Southeast Asia somewhere. But there were no really domestic breeders of angel fish that were advertising in the magazines at that time. But it was starting to explode. In the 80s, there was an organization called the Fish Breeders guild that was started by Larry desiano. He was also a local guy and he was a big time fish breeder. Very intelligent guy with lots of information. And he decided he wanted to set up a trading operation across the country where people would just trade fish or offer fish for sale through this bulletin that he mailed out. So you got it in your mail once a month. And so that's how I was shipping out. My first angel fish was actually through that bulletin. But still I didn't consider that being in the business. I could just consider that as hobbyist trading or selling fish at nominal amounts of money. And shortly after that fish beaters killed thing kind of died, was when I put the ads in the magazines and went from there.

So when did you decide that you're going to get Angelsplus.com? Was it called something before Angelsplus.com?

No, it wasn't. The name of the company from the beginning was Angelsplus. And when I joined or when I got on the Internet, you could easily get your name.com because there weren't very many people on there. So it just made sense for me to get my name. What I should have gotten was Angelfish.com and then redirected everything that came in there to my site to. Angelsplus.com, because that would have been available when I did it, and I didn't think of doing it because I didn't know there were people out there buying.com names and selling them for $10,000.03 years later.

You got to go with what your brand was at the time.

Yeah, it just didn't occur to me the real reason for why you should name your website the way you do. But anyway, I ended up with angelsplus.com, and it was just repeating my name.

So you got the idea again from seeing just again, content online. Hey, I already do these magazines, bulletin boards. Why can't I just post something online and try that method? Is that where the real idea came from?

Well, that's how I got it. That's how I did the ads in the magazine. But online, it was actually different. I had a customer who was a computer expert, and every now back then, you talk to everybody on the phone, whereas today I don't talk to anybody on the phone.

Isn't that wonderful?

Well, I can't do business today on the phone. It's just too impossible. Back then, I didn't have as many sales I had time to spend on the phone, and I did. I spent a lot of time on the phone. And this guy was a computer expert. His name was Bill dawes, and he was like 70 some years old back then, and he knew how to design websites. And he goes, I'll build you a website. He says, I'll charge you, and I can't even remember what it was. $500, something like that. I think I gave him some fish in addition to that and whatever, and he designed angelsplus.com. That was the very first website. It was one of them really crude looking things, but back then, I thought it was great. But digital cameras had barely hit the market. They were crummy. Basically. You took your film camera, you took pictures of your fish, and then you scanned them in order to get your digital image on your website if you wanted it to look like anything other than garbage.

And that was after you probably went down to the drugstore and developed the film.

I bought slide film.

Expensive.

I'm telling you. I sometimes take 200 pictures to get one decent picture of a fish. And back then, I was far more careful. I mean, I didn't just click click. I waited until it was in the exact position that I had to hope I had my flash set right, and I had to hope there wasn't no reflection. And I probably got one usable picture out of every 30 or so. So I'd be spending a roll of film and developing to get maybe $15 to get one usable slide. I had a printed catalog back then, and as far as putting a slide in that catalog, it was maybe one out of 200 that were good enough to go in the catalog. So it was an expensive process of using film to digitalize it to get it into the website. But what it was was every time I had a new picture to put up, which when you're doing fish, is almost constantly, I had to call Bill dawson and say, Bill, how much to put this on my website? It was like $15 a picture to put that up. I said, this has got to stop. I said, Tell you what, I'm going to pay you to teach me how to do this, because I can't pay you to do my website every day that I need to change. And basically he gave me some pointers, and then I started getting some books and reading on how to do anyway, I learned how to do the programming back then to get a website up and how to at least change my own, so that when I got a new picture, I could put it up there. If I had a new paragraph, I could change it. I could do whatever I wanted with it. And so that got me so that I knew how to do websites. And since then, I have built every website that I've had, and I've had probably four or five changes since then as far as brand new websites, and I've done it myself. The one that I currently have is probably the easiest one because that's a little bit more of a canned solution. I buy it from a company that produces the shopping cart, and then I just have to put all my pictures and information and stuff on it. But it was something that was hard enough to do that not very many people did it, and not very many people who did do it did a very good job at it. So that also gave me a little bit of a competitive advantage.

It reminds me of my dad telling me how he used to go to school and walk uphill both ways in the snow over the power line. This is kind of steve.

Steve, he went to the same school.

Yeah, this is kind of steve's rendition of how he got going. I'm tired just thinking about it, man.

That's a lot of work. You know, he's an expert, though, because he didn't insinuate that he had to do anything with tubes. So he's on points.

Yeah. No tubes, no vacuum tubes.

No vacuum tubes.

No. But I did grow up watching my dad try to fix our TV by replacing tubes without anything to test them with. He would just buy them and put new ones in.

My dad just whacked the side of the TV. That didn't help.

Yeah, we did that last, but that didn't work.

Aluminum foil and the rabbit ears.

There you go.

So what I did before the interview, Steve, is I did some homework on, again, the history of your website. So I'm not just an aquarium guy. My normal profession is an It expert. So I dug up some history on your website. And again, I can see the purchase date of Angels Plus was 1996 in February. Now, I did a lot more homework trying to see if there's any way I can find some sort of snapshot or archive that something was captured in 1996, which blows my mind that there's actually snapshots out there or something in 1996. But the first thing I could scrape up from your website was in October of 1996, the first year that you started. So I'm assuming it took the guy some time to build your website. So this is probably no, no, he.

He built it really quick. It was up early 90s. Got you.

So he probably had it done by the next month, March. So this is, again, the closest thing I could find at the start of your website, and I was able to pull up quite a bit of information from your original web page in 1996.

Would that be like just the main page?

I got more than the main page. I was actually able to get a catalog of what you sold with some pictures that you took with, again, flash photography. And let me tell you, it is a fantastic read. Again, I sent you a picture of your old logo. I don't know if you have that saved anywhere.

You did send that, and I thought it came off on one of my catalogs, but I might have used the same logo on my catalog. I can't remember.

Certainly possible. But just for the giggles, I'd like to go over a couple of things on your website. And right up front, you had details of what quality you have pricing, but the variety is really what I want to go into. So you sold, even from the get go, a very large batch. And it surprises me that in 96, some of these strains were out. So you must have been on the bleeding edge of some of these.

Here's the surprising thing. Only a couple of strains have come out since then. One is albino, and the other is the gene for the blue that everybody's kind of hot on now. That's it.

So it's funny you say that, because you show that you're introducing these new blue strains on this page. So in October of July, you got.

To realize, though, that blue is a different blue than the blue that's out now. It's a different gene, and there are.

Some pictures of it, so they do get an impression of it. But the ones I want to point out, because you have, of course, the regular silver, marble, zebra, smoky gold, and you even do have on the bottom, it's like your pie stars is an albino strain that you have. But the ones that I point out that blew my mind is I only see in books the leopard strain. You have, like a blue, beautiful, silky leopard strain on here. And there's a picture of it, and it just blows my mind. It's red, beautiful blue hues, and just amazing pattern I have not seen, but only in books.

Yeah, what's amazing is that that actually was a beautiful fish that nobody wanted to buy. Amazing. They couldn't picture it. I guess it didn't sell well, and I couldn't possibly tell you why it wouldn't, but it really didn't. And today it would sell even better because you'd add the new blue gene that's out there to it and you would end up with an even better looking fish, in my opinion. I actually got rid of the smoky gene out of my hatchery. Haven't had it for 15 years. And that's what went into creating that fish. And it's because nobody would buy them.

I'm looking at the website here with the robs, and I see something that I don't see very often anymore. The German blue blushing. What happened to those? I mean, you used to be able to find them quite readily, and now.

They'Re tough to find it the names are changing a little bit because they kind of gotten confusing. When the new gene for blue came out, it was like, okay, Modi got a blue blue bushing. Well, German was just a name that was attached to it. And quite honestly, I don't know that any of these fish came from Germany. So why that name ever got on there, I don't really know, but that's how I bought them. I bought them as German Blue blushers. In my opinion, you can create that fish by putting blushing in any Silver Angel fish, and you'll get something similar to that. And then when you add the blue gene to it, it will end up being more iridescent than it would be otherwise. So it's a fish that's been around for a long time, and today it's still around. It's just that you don't see them quite as often because people want to add the new gene that expresses more blue to the same fish, which just makes it look a little lighter, gray, with a little more iridescence on it.

So another thing on here is not just the varieties, which, again, we can certainly go over. There's a lot more here on the list. You had quite the extensive list when you first started doing this, but also just the price point for the quality that you have. You started selling just the silvers for $5 each, and this was over 20 years ago. And these really beautiful choice ones for $10 each. Just to show that in 1996, this was literally probably one of the best you could find as far as what the prices as far as selection? As far as selection for the price.

Yeah, selection wise, back then, my thought process was have as many varieties as possible. That way a person is going to order from you that we get everything in one spot so they don't have to pay for shipping multiple times. And so I had many, many varieties. And it's just that after a while, I finally learned that too many tanks were taken up by fish that didn't sell. And 90% of sales came from 30% of the varieties. And so I got rid of a lot of varieties for that reason. It was just economics. You're just kind of forced into it because it was difficult to keep something available all the time if people weren't buying it. Because, you know, you couldn't just let it grow up to adult size and sell it. You had to have it out of there by a certain age. And if you didn't, you had to wholesale it.

And people don't realize when you've got got 400 plus tanks, each tank has to pay its own rent. And if the tank is just sitting there, not paying its rent, out the door you go, and let's get something in here that will pay the rent.

Yeah. I have a different way of breeding. When I was breeding wholesale, I had fewer pairs and very, very many tanks put to grow out when I went to retail and I was selling extremely good fish and I was trying to improve the strategy. Like, if you could see koi in 1985 and compare them to koi in 2015, you wouldn't even know they're the same fish. And what that is, that's Dave Laznick and myself taking 40 years of our life, selectively breeding them to the point where they got good. But the only way you can do that is if you have a majority of your tanks into grow out for pears. So if I have 100 tanks set aside for koi, and actually at one time, I probably had closer to 200 tanks set aside for koi. 175 of those tanks had adults in them. And the reason that was that's the only way that I could select extremely good fish that were extremely colorful, the best shapes, the best behaviors, that laid the most eggs. I mean, I got 2000 egg spawns out of koi, and the only way you could do that is if you set up 100 pairs and pick the best one and kept it. And that's what we did. And so it changed the dynamics of selling went from raising very few small fish for sale, but selling them at a much higher price from the prior dynamic of wholesale. You don't care what you got, you raise it up to a certain size, as many of them as you can, and you sell it, get them out of there. And I hated wholesale. I hated doing that. I loved selecting fish. I loved selecting for quality, for color, for shape, for behavior, for all that stuff. It was fun. That's what I liked. And that's why I like guppies and sword tails and goldfish and other fish like that where you select for qualities that people like versus just farming them out in numbers that bored me to death. And it didn't take me long to switch to where I realized I really love the retail. But the retail is totally different. If you've got a few pairs and tons of fry, you're not going to be very good at retailing them.

More details that I pulled up for your website. It's pretty incredible. I'll make sure to send you this so you have this for fun. Because looking back over 20 years ago to what you used to do, that's got to be a lot of nostalgia. But just to go in the process again, starting this out, it looks like payments were done. Phone. You can send a mail for convenience, fax, and you also did by email at this time in 1996, which very impressive. You show how you do cod money in the mail or even credit card. Back then again, there was no electronic swipe, but you had the numbers to do the transaction. So that at least seems pretty straightforward. But how did shipping work when you first started shipping fish?

Well, pretty much the same way it works today. The only thing is, nothing was automated. So you have to package the fish up into a warm container, put a heat pack in it, and get it out. Next day shipping to wherever you were going. And we did next day shipping back then, Ups. I mean, I've been ahead of Ups account since probably 1987 or something like that, or 85. And everything was written by hand. You printed your labels out on your own printer. You had a Ups book that was a log, and you hand wrote this log. It was incredible. I think back, and it was craziness. And if somebody actually came to your place and wanted to pay with a credit card, you had those little hand swipe machines where you had to take this thing and push it across the card that you pressed some carbon paper onto it. It was just all kinds of archaic ways of doing stuff. Everything took longer. Everything took longer. So I sometimes wonder how I could make a living doing it. It was so labor intensive.

Yeah, if you consider how much you're getting paid per hour, at that point, you probably want to shoot yourself paperwork.

So I'm 29 years old, and I just found out about those carbon swiping machines.

Oh, serious.

For the very first time, I went to a local lumber yard and I had my credit card, and I felt, I don't know, it was just something from the Stone Age. They pull out this violated metal thing. They throw it on the counter and just like, wham. Like, what is that? Give me your credit card. What do you mean, give me your credit card? Don't you have something to swipe? And they just, give me your credit card. He slaps it down on this contraption and then pulls it back. And I'm thinking, he's going to cut my credit card because it looks like this mini paper cutter. He throws this thing back, and it just, like, takes a bar and swipes across the top of the machine. And I was like, what? And sure enough, it was like a little carbon footprint that rubbed off of the etching of the credit card, because I've never understood why they had the numbers raised in my wallet.

Well, that's why.

So they could press it and get the numbers on this carbon paper. I felt like I was just watching a real piece of history.

I thought that stuff was illegal now. I didn't know I could still do that.

No, that was available.

Oh, I had to do some hard googling on this stuff, and he put.

It to the order.

Sure enough, I saw, like two weeks later, I saw the statement finally hit my bank.

I'm going to take Robbie out later, and I'm going to take him. I'm going to see if I can find a pay phone booth. And for those of you young people listening, that was a phone in a box alongside the road.

But that one I had. I grew up in a very small town, and I think they got rid of it, like, nine years ago.

We still actually have the phone booth, but the phone part is missing. But they have the phone book in it.

That's called a bus stop, Adam. That's all the bus stop. No.

I think that's bad. When I was in college, I had to walk from my apartment about half a mile to a phone booth to call home because I didn't have a phone in the apartment. And that was the only way you made a call back then. You went to a phone booth, and.

It was uphill both ways.

It was in Colorado. everything's a mountain.

So if you want to have fun, if you're anywhere from 30 years old and above, do this to your millennial or Gen xers or whatever you call them nowadays, go online. You can still find these. They make a few, remakes a few, and far between. But you can go on ebay, and you can find yourself a rotary telephone. Get a rotary telephone. And if you punish your kid or whatever else, make them make calls and say, doug, I need to call someone. Use the phone, and then sit it down and just watch them. They'll look at you. They'll look at that and just watch the fun. If you can make a telephone, I'll give you $20 to go to the movies. Do that to your kids for me, please. So if there's any stories of that, message us. But I've seen this time and time again just where's the buttons I just.

Saw something really interesting the other day where this grade school it was like first and second graders coming up with inventions. And one of the inventions were a telephone that you would mount on the wall because his mom could never find the cordless phone at home. And so he came up with this great idea. Let's put a cord on it and tie it to the wall so it's always in the same spot.

What's the saying? What goes around comes around?

Yeah. I just saw something really interesting. They're talking about things that don't exist on cars anymore. And one being a cigarette lighter, another being an ashtray, another being an antenna hand cranks on cars. So you have to actually roll the window up with your muscles, and you forget about this stuff. And it's just really kind of interesting. And it puts in perspective your age when you hear stuff like this.

Mind me.

So, Steve, out of the things we talked about, I think we got a real capture of how you started. Clearly your success grew again. Peak was 475 tanks. Did you have employees?

Well, I've had my family pretty much has worked with me for quite a bit. And then Dave Laznick, who I've spoke to about you about before, he helped out at times, and so I had help. It wasn't just me doing the tanks. I did have a couple of guys who part time changed water, stuff like that. But over the years, it's actually gone in reverse. Most of those people are gone. I do almost exclusively everything with the fish, just myself now. And the dry goods, I don't even touch them. I don't do anything with them. I have people who take care of that. So I spend my whole day in the fish room doing fish, packing orders for the fish, doing all that kind of stuff. Years ago, I used to do a little bit of everything. Now I just do the fish and that's it.

Run us through a typical day. Steve, I know you're a busy, busy guy, and we are so excited. And thank you again for joining us for this podcast. I know you're a busy, busy guy. What's your typical day look like? Are you doing this seven days a week? Are you trying to cut back on Saturday, sunday?

No, there's no such thing as doing fish without doing it. It's not seven days a week. It's 365 days a year.

He's got to milk the cows.

That's right.

It's a very similar analogy. Basically, if you're a dairy farmer, you don't hire anyone to do that because you can't afford to hire someone to milk your cows unless you're a giant farm. So if you're the average guy with 75 cows, you're living in the barn, barn at 05:00 A.m. And 05:00 P.m. Every single day, every day of your life. And I'm very much the same. Some people think that you can get away for a week, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know something? You can, but you can't do it and have nice fish.

Yeah, it's going to cost you a fortune.

Well, the reason you can't have nice fish is because you can't get people who can properly feed them without destroying. Angel fish have the most delicate fins of any fish that there is. If that water quality isn't absolutely pristine, they're going to curl, they're going to chop, they're going to bend, they're going to fungus, and then they're going to grow back crooked, and they're going to be ugly as crap. And what happens is I hire a person, I show them how to feed. I show them five times. I watch them feed. I correct them a thousand times, and then I let them go. And I come back and the fish are all shit because they can't do it.

And then the beatings start.

Well, I beat my head against the wall stupid enough to think that I could get somebody to come in and feed the fish properly. Fish act hungry. They wiggle in front of the glass, and people think, well, I got to give them food. Well, a lot of times they're just pecking the food and it's going to the bottom of the tank, right? They're not even eating it. And then it's just rotting. And then when it rots, it rots their fins. And so you're, you know, angel fish, you have to have someone who really knows what they're doing. If you're going to get long, tall, pointed fins that are twice as long as the fish is tall, you're going to get fins that are perfectly straight. No kinks, no bends, no deformities. To get that and to get good color on them, it requires very precise feeding. It's the most important thing, taking care of angel fish. There's nothing even comes close to feeding. Feeding is 98% of success with angel fish. Doing it properly and doing it reliably and doing it consistently every single day. And most people fail in that area. And I couldn't hire anyone who could do it. Never could. Couldn't get my own daughter who worked for me. It was a very smart kid. The only way I could get her to feed so that fish didn't have a problem was that if I had her feed grossly under feed of feeding or two each day, I said, you feed this much and don't feed any more to any tank with this many fish, and it would be way less than they could eat. And then if she did that, she was okay. But if I just let her go for two months, I'd come back in and she'd be feeding five times that amount. Because they just gradually up it. Because it's just a natural thing. They're hungry, I give them a little more. I have just found that it takes a knack, it takes a certain observation skill to be able to properly feed. And I myself ruin tanks of fish every now and then because you just can't always be perfect with these fish. It's just not possible.

And how often do you feed? Do you feed twice a day or how many times do you feed a day?

Well, that's the funny thing. You can be successful feeding. I don't care if you're feeding once a day, you can be successful, or if you're feeding ten times a day, you can be successful. What the key factors are with feeding is what's the temperature? Because they eat way more at 85 degrees than they do at 75. And I'm not meaning 10% more, 20% more, I'm meaning like 300% more. And I've actually have some tanks in the wintertime, I've got them at 68 degrees. And, you know, at that temperature, they might eat a flake a day. Hardly anything. They just don't eat much. The lower the temperature. And if you give them too much food too often, you will ruin them at any temperature. And so the key is to know what temperature you're feeding. The top rows at 80, the bottom rows at 73. You feed those two rows differently. Because my room is heated, I don't have any the number of tanks I have you don't have aquarium heaters in each tank?

No. You can't afford that many heaters. You can't afford to pay well, it.

Would just be just impossible. The electricity would be incredible. So you don't do it that way. You heat the room. And I happen to have a hatchery that's above ground on a concrete slab that is very cold in the wintertime. And so the bottom tanks are very cold and the top tanks are where I want them. Well, the bottom tanks, I usually put in fish that I don't care if they grow fast. Cold does not hurt them. If you feed them properly, they just grow slower. They age slower, which means they live longer. You keep a fish at 68 degrees, you probably keep it till it's 20 years old. I mean, it's just it'll just live a long, long, long life at that temperature, which is common with cold blooded animals. So you got to you have to know that this row of tanks gets fed this amount with this many fish in a tank. And so it takes experience to get this right. Even I get it wrong, because it's just too easy to mess up on a tank. And so hiring somebody to do that is almost impossible. Which is why I don't take vacations. I'm up on Christmas morning. The first thing I do is I run to the hatchery. I don't go to the Christmas tree, I'm in the hatchery.

What time do you start in the morning?

Well, it used to be about four or 430. Now I'm probably so the milking the.

Cow bit was pretty accurate.

Pretty accurate?

Yeah.

Well, no, I worked a lot longer day than a dairy farmer would. He get up at five and milk cows and he'd milk them again at five and he was done. I'm usually up until eleven working on orders. I mean, I. Was not only just doing fish, but I was running the business in addition to that. And, I mean, there's just as many hours to run the business as there is to take care of the fish.

I'm impressed that you started a family. When did you have time to have children?

Yeah, I don't even remember.

They gave them a quarter.

That certainly was not ideal. It was certainly not an ideal. I really wouldn't wish this on anybody. It's the kind of thing where you got to have some kind of weird short circuit in your brain to do what I'm doing because you got to like it to that degree, or you just wouldn't do this for 40 years. Basically, I've been taking care of fish for over 50 years. I've never, since I was eight years old, had less than six tanks. And even in college, I had more tanks than that because I went around campus and I talked to different administrators of the buildings to let me set up a tank in their building as a display tank, and they pay for everything, and I'll take care of it. And I went to Colorado State, which had 23,000 students at the time, and there was buildings everywhere, and I had tanks all over campus, so I got to play with fish for free, but I did that for fun in college. That's how shortcircuit my brain was. And so I've been doing this my whole life, and I don't think very many people would do that. And so you've got to pick a small number of tanks that you think you can take care of, do it as a hobby and not be too serious about, especially angel fish because they're just so delicate, so hard to raise, really good ones that you can't overload yourself with tons of tanks and expect you're going to make it. Because most people just aren't going to work that number of hours on it and be happy with it. And I was just unusual in that respect that it didn't bother me.

So moving forward in your angels plus history, there's a couple of milestones that I like your opinion on. So when you started, people had independent websites for different niches, and that's really when the Internet was building in the 94 to 98 range. Right then, in early two thousands is when you started seeing, you know, social medias pop up. And then we saw all the niche websites. And what I like to point out is nowadays you have the ebays.com where you can sell virtually anything. There's limitations where you can't do nicotine, you can't do not say for work content to a limit, and you can't do live products. But there are weather websites such as the ebay of Fish, aquabid and Aquabid. Again, I'm trying to find history on these guys. They came out somewhere in the mid 2000s. Did you see any sort of change in the market because of that, or did you yourself ever use some of those?

Well, you know what's funny is when Aqua bid first came out, I was one of the first guys on the owner's mailing list, and I think I was one of the very first people to join it. And I think I might have even sold one of his first auctions. I mean, I put fish up right away, and I only think I put up maybe ten auctions or something like that total. And what I found out was that it was attracting a different clientele. They were more beginning hobbyists, more people who were looking for a really low price. And I found out that if I sold the fish on Aquabad, it was way less than if I sold it on my website. And so I thought, I don't want to do that. That doesn't make any sense unless I can't sell on my website. And I could. So I didn't do Aquabid. I would buy fish occasionally on Aquabad, but never angel fish. I always bought things like guppies or sword tails or something like that that I wanted especially that were different. As far as angel fish, the last time I bought a fish from anyone in the United States that was an angel fish was 1989. Since then, every variety I got, I either ported it from overseas, or I took a wild fish to keep it going and make it strong. So I was crossing wild. Started in 1990. I crossed wild scolari into the domestic strains to strengthen them. That's how I got my stock from wearing down as I got the vigor back with wild blood. It would take a couple of generations of inbreeding back and forth to get the color to back to where I wanted it. But it worked very well, and it's still what I do today. I don't buy angel fish unless there's a gene that I need, and then typically back then, at least, and when I bought a new strain, I was buying a box of 50 of them from Taiwan or someplace where they were breeding them.

What was your quarantine process?

I just never buy them from anybody in the country here.

Yeah, I know you have a really crazy quarantine process, but when you bring those fish in, they don't even go into your normal room, do they?

No, my quarantine is extreme, but it's extreme because I have too much money tied up in the stock, so I can't put anything into my hatchery because I would risk losing tens of thousands of dollars worth of fish. And I can't do that. And so I have a separate quarantine room at my house that I put the fish in, and they never leave that room. They never leave that room. If they grow up there, I breed them there, and then I take the eggs from them, and I sterilize the eggs and take them to the hatchery. Wow, that's how I get the stuff into my hat tree so that it's clean. And I've been doing this for I don't know, 25 years. So it's just a technique that works for me. It's nothing anybody else is going to do because it takes sometimes two to three years for me to get a fish from that, to get a fish into my hatchery from my quarantine room by way of breeding. First thing I do when they come in is I treat them for everything under the sun so I can keep them alive and then they're stressed to heck. And then if they're small, I have to grow them up and then I have to breed them and then I have to take the eggs and remove them. And then I have to grow those eggs up to adults so they're breeding. So I actually have breeding stock hatchery. So it's a long process and like I said, I don't think anybody else is going to do that.

And how do you typically sterilize the eggs before you take them over to your hatchery?

Well, it's basically a rinsing process and then you put them into a solution of very strong potassium permanganate for a while. So you rinse them very thoroughly. Like I take them out, run them under a faucet, under pretty high pressure water for a minute so there's nothing stuck to them. And then I put them in a bucket with potassium permanganate for a certain length of time and then I take them and put them in a hatching container that's sterile, take that out of there and take that to the hatchery.

I'm surprised of the potassium that works. I mean that I've heard is pretty strong stuff.

It is. So it's a dose time, it's something where you can kill them real easy. So you have to experiment so you can figure and this is how I know that it works. What I do is even when I take them to the hatchery eggs, I grow them up, I put them into the hatchery, I let them get to a certain age and then I take the spawn and I sacrifice a few fish under a microscope. I dissect them to make sure there's nothing in them. And I have to do that in order to know if they have a disease, they have something. And I don't have to do that anymore because I know my procedure works. But I'm talking about back at the beginning when I wasn't sure if it was going to work. I had to find out if I was bringing parasites in there because I didn't want to wipe out my whole hatchery again or anything else I could identify and I've never been able to find anything. I believe that my procedure is a good one and it works very well. And fortunately I hardly ever bring fish in, so I don't have to do it very often. And I cross to my wildfish which I have had in the hatchery for forever. Some of my wild pears are 810 years old. Because I don't turn them over. I'm not trying to selectively breed them. I'm trying to give them to live as long as possible so that I can keep that closest to wild generation stock for as long as I possibly can. And so I've had fish over 30 years that are only the F three, basically ten years per generation, and they're still breeding. When I decide to quit on them, I don't know if they go they might even go to 15 years, I don't know. But they're still breeding it at ten years. But I only do that with the wild fish. The stuff that I'm selectively breeding, it's quick turnover. I want to pick the next generation that's better than they are as quickly as I can. That progresses the line faster that way. But the wild fish aren't there to progress the line. They're there to give vigor to the line. So that's kind of the overview of how that quarantine works and then how I keep my fish strong and procedures I use. But it's it's so involved that, you know, it's really only for some really large hatchery where some guy really has fought pathogens for years and has decided I don't want to do that. Which was me, because I'd been doing fish for at least 20 years before I finally figured out, okay, this is the procedure I'm going to use to try to clean this up. And it worked. So average aquarius? Not a chance.

No.

So the next question I want to go over, Steve, is in 2001, 911 shipping changed for everything coming in and out of the country. And that was really how online had to adjust. So I would love to know, how did it affect you? And even Jimmy has told me in the past the hassles he's had to go for international shipping. And we've had a couple of stories here on the show of we all hate Delta, but over time, from 96 to now, how is shipping changed for you?

Well, how do you bring that up? It just kind of jogged my memory. I almost forgot this. For years, I used to take my fish to the airport, the Buffalo airport, which was 70 miles away from me, and it was so far, I only did it once a week. And I had a van, and I would fill that van with fish border boxes. I mean, it was stuffed. And I would drive to that airport, and then I would go to Delta and American Airlines and Us. Air and every airline that was going to that particular airport. And I got up. In fact, I shipped on a Wednesday. I didn't even go to sleep that night. Every week, once a week, I was up. Tuesday night or up. I was up. Yeah, Tuesday night, all night long, packing the fish because I was taking sometimes I was taking 40, 50 boxes of fish I had to pack that night, and I was filling the van. So it took me the whole Tuesday that night. And then I would leave for the airport at four in the morning, because you had to get there for the first flight. So I had to be there 06:00 or something. I don't even remember what time it was. But what happened was after a while, I decided to start ups. I can't even remember if I started it because of 911 or if it was before 911. And I just said, they made it so restrictive to go to the airport, you had to become a known shipper. Oh, I know what it was. I wasn't shipping. I had switched to ups, and I was only going to the airport occasionally. And what it was was I went to the airport with a load of fish, and I couldn't ship them out because I wasn't a known shipper, even though they all knew me, they'd seen me a thousand times, but I still couldn't ship them out. Actually, I did get them out, but I had to have somebody come over and inspect the boxes and all this other crap. I finally just said, how do I become a known shipper? And they gave me the procedure, and I just said, and so what happens if I don't come up for like three months? Well, then you got to go through it again. And I said, this isn't going to happen. I'm done with the airports. The only other time I went to the airport was when I tried shipping international, and I did ship some international shipments. But us. Fish and wildlife were so difficult to deal with, they were basically doing everything in their power to stop me from doing this. And so I just decided it's just not worth it. So I haven't been to the airport now in probably three years, three or four years, and I don't plan to ever go again.

I was going to say it's probably the happiest three years of your life.

Well, it was certainly nice being able to go to sleep on Tuesday nights, and right now I couldn't have kept that up. And once ups became a viable option for shipping fish overnight, it was so much easier, although it was more expensive for the customer, because I could ship £100 of freight out for $60 or something, and £100 of ups now it would be about $400. It would be a huge amount of money. So it was cheaper to go by the airport, but so hard for me to do it because I didn't have a close by airport that I just had to go with the ups thing. And so ups really hasn't been affected by 911 to any great degree. And I don't know why. I don't know why their whole system hasn't been attacked. It seems to me that it would have been vulnerable. And it's just that for some reason, it's remained pretty stable on what they require over the years. In fact, they've even gotten easier, because everything is by computer now, and it's easy to weigh your box on electronic scale, print your label, slap it on the box, track it every step of the way. There was no tracking these things. Back 20 years ago, you had no idea where your box of fish was. You kept calling your customer and say, show up. You didn't know. Now you know where the box is. Shipping is pretty much the same, but the flow is easier, faster, and there's a lot more tracking ability that really is good on my end and the customers end.

So for those that don't know, the flight has changed from the beginning, because commercial flights are in the 1950s, after world war II. But commercial flight has evolved in a very short amount of time. 911 overnight changed everything because they never thought of using commercial flight for any terroristic acts. So there was no security. You look at old videos, smoking, people were roaming around the plane. You could bring anything you wanted and ship anything. The only thing they cared about was if it was going to florida, it was cocaine. It was very relaxed system. So 911 changed everything. And now they're looking in boxes. They're trying to see exactly what's in those boxes. They'll rip them apart in transhippers in the middle. So there's a lot of risk and there's a lot of flight delays because of the security checks and details. So the cargo has become worse than second class. It's bottom class.

Yeah. I want to say back in the day when it used to be northwest airlines, and they had a chart in their back room, and number one was passengers, that was their number one priority, was passengers. Second was luggage. And then they went on and on and on. And I think number three was hrs. And what hrs are is human remains. So, like, if your grandfather would pass away, let's say in arizona, and you need to fly him back to minnesota, they actually put grandpa in a box, and they put them in the cargo hold, and they move them. And that's the only thing that I can seriously say that the airlines can quickly move today, because nobody wants a dead body in their back room. And even in our little airport in the last 25 years or so that I've been going to the airport, I've probably helped load literally 200 bodies, because as I'm sitting there waiting for my fish coming in, all of a sudden one of the morticians will pull up, and they get priority. So I got to move my car, and they come out with a forklift with grandpa, and in a cardboard box that's kind of a a waxy box, like a banana box, bee at a grocery store, and they load them, load them up with a forklift and put them in. And Morticians usually by himself, and he usually needs some help pushing Grandpa in. But going down the list, there's like seven or eight different things. And then at the very bottom is perishables, meaning tropical fish and flowers, that sort of thing. A lot of the flowers that you get at the greenhouse, especially, like during valentine's Day, that all comes in on the bottom of an airplane, and that's their least concerned. They do not care about your cargo. And so I can see where Ups is a very viable source, because at least they take a little pride and can shuffle stuff around pretty quick.

Well, the bad part about the airports, now at least it was one of my last international shipments. They had to have a bomb squad dog come and sniff the boxes. And after that, the fishing wildlife guys came. They opened the boxes and inspected every single bag of fish. And I don't want my boxes open once they're sealed shut. It was like, what are you doing? These are tropical fish. It's 13 degrees in here. You're opening them up, and you're stressing the hell out of them. And he says, well, we got to look in there and make sure you're not smuggling anything and that it's illegal fish to ship out and all this stuff. And finally, I thought, this is crazy. If they really suspect that there's a bomb or something, of course, I think the fish guys just wanted to catch you shipping out a rainbow to somebody that's illegal or something like that so they could arrest you over something minor like that. But it was so disturbing to the fish that I just said, nah, this isn't going to happen anymore.

So over all the years that you've had angels, plus, what's the biggest things that we mentioned? A lot of points. What's the biggest things that you've seen change in the market? Again, you're in a very unique situation. You used to wholesale a little bit, and now, again, over the years, you've transitioned almost 100% to retail. And your goal is not numbers, it's quality. So in your niche, what do you think has changed from when you started to now? What's the biggest things?

Well, the number one thing that I see is that I used to sell to guys like Jim who were breeding. They were dedicated hobbyists who had a thrill for producing fish, for breeding numbers, selling them to their shops and doing that kind of stuff. I swear, at least eight out of ten had to be breeders who wanted really good breeding stock. And there was a lot of them. I mean, there was a lot of them. And today, almost none of my sales go to those types of people. Almost none backyard hobbyists who have one pair and just playing with it and want their kid to see a fish bond come up with the parents raising them. A few people might have multiple tanks, but they're not hardcore breeders. They're not interested in taking this thing and setting up twelve pairs of double darks and seeing if they can get the nicest double dark blacks in the world. They don't care about that. They just want the experience of having some tropical fish and they like angel fish. So it's gone from a bunch of dedicated breeders to a bunch of kind of inexperienced hobbyists buying fish for the most part, in my opinion, that's been the biggest change that I have seen. On the other hand, there's some positives today kids don't care about spending money. So if some kid that's 1820 years old and he's got a job and he says, I really like guppies and what are they, $100 a pair? Sure, I'll take ten of them's credit card. I mean, they don't care about money. So they just spend money foolishly on fish just to look at them for a little while until their interest wanes and they go into some other hop. And that benefits me. If some kid doesn't really care if he spends a lot of money to get really quality fish and he's not that interested in it. But the breeders were really way better because guys like Jim had called me and order fish 25 times. I've had customers order fish at least 25 times. And that's what you want. You want people you've dealt with, you both trust each other. You're not wondering if the transaction is going to go good or anything like that. And it's not that way anymore. Almost every customer I get is a new customer. It's not somebody who's been doing it forever because there just aren't a lot of people out there doing it forever.

Now, why do you think that's changed?

I think it's because guys like myself getting old and were kicking off. And the hobby isn't placed with young guys that are just as excited. I mean, kids are. When I was a kid, you didn't spend any time in the house to speak of. You were outside playing whatever game, football, running in the woods, you name it. You were in sports, you did all kinds of stuff. There was nothing on TV, there was no computers. I mean, we only had two channels on TV and none of them had anything worth watching. So I mean, you didn't spend time in front of the TV, you came in the house. And about the only thing we did was place maybe board games or something like that. So me, I got interested in animals in the wintertime or if I'm stuck in the house. I had my aquariums, I had every animal you can think of. I mean, I had hundreds of mice and cages and rats and snakes and turtles and you name it, I had them. And that's what I had fun with, playing with animals. And doing stuff. And nowadays kids are drawn by just too many things. I mean, they've got the amazing TV, the amazing internet, YouTube, and I don't even know what they all are because I don't participate in all those social media things. But they're on their phones 24/7.

Well, you got to milk the cows.

Exactly. I couldn't be on my phone and milk the cows, but these guys don't have the milk cows, they just have to be on their phone and maybe playing computer games. They're drawn by so many things that I just don't think most of them have more than a casual interest in an aquarium for a short while. And if you don't develop it early, I don't think you ever really develop it to a great degree. I think that guys like myself are that way because I started when I was a tiny kid, when I was really little, I was fascinated by something that could keep me fascinated because there wasn't a whole lot of other things to take my interest away and it just grew as I got older. If I was 20 the first time I saw an aquarium, I probably never would have had one, or if I did, it would have been a disaster for a year or two, like a lot of people. And it gets really funky and they put it away and sell it and never have another one. I think that's closer to today's story versus back when I was younger and I hate to see it go that way. And maybe like I was talking to you earlier, maybe that'll change, maybe with social media, Facebook groups, whatever, that get people online looking at beautiful fish and seeing them swimming in videos. Maybe that'll make them realize, hey, this is pretty neat, and they'll get interested and they'll start getting more people involved. But I know something like the ifga. That's the International Federation for guppy. Association for Breeders. They have a fish show for guppies and that was practically dying out. I mean, they were having lots of shows with 100 and 5200 entries, which is really poor, and their members are really getting old, kicking off. I've noticed now that in the last couple of years they've been getting entries in the five 6700 range, which shows a renewed interest. And I don't know if it's old guys setting their tanks back up or if there's a lot more younger guys getting in it, but I do know that's more interest than they've had in a long time and that suggests to me that something might be turning a corner. Maybe there is becoming more interest because you don't do ifga style guppies without having a pretty good dedication because you're not going to win a show unless you put a lot of time into your tanks. Cross our fingers.

What I'd like to do for the listeners out there is I'd like to give you a crash course in starting online. If you're going to start in the hobby and you consider yourself past the fish novice and you want to start breeding, let's give you some steps. And please, Steve, interject anywhere along the way. So, number one, you need a place for your product to go while you're learning. So talk to your local pet store and most people that start with a humpy, start with guppies. I mean, I'm pretty sure that all four of us on this podcast have started with guppies as our first tropical fish. So start with something that you know is easy to breed and you're familiar with. Get quality stock where you know you can find it. And make sure you've had that relationship with your local pet store to say, hey, what would you pay me if I brought you a product? And normally they'll say, well, I'll give you a quarter of each, or whatever it is. You're not worried about making money yet. You're worried about making sure that your breeding stock has a place to go. So you're raising ethically. So start home, set up a few tanks and learn your processes. It's all about research what cycles of the fish on how fast does it do, what does temperature and water changes do to your stock, and get good. As simple as that. Get good. And when you have developed that and you start to consistently produce not just a couple of batches, but consistently produce a fish, then can start considering reaching out, maybe a couple pet stores. Talk to your friends if they want some, and once you have consistent enough orders, only then risk something online because you're not going to waste your time, your advertising. You sure, it was harder in 1996 for you to do it, but it's still not free. So when you do it, there's easy to use tools nowadays, such as shopify.com, that essentially you don't have to be an It expert. You can go pay them a small monthly fee and start your own website and store online. And that allows you to begin to network out your site and start selling slowly. Once you have that established, you can work out from there. But those are essentially the key, is prove your practice and have a place to ethically go with your numbers. Because I've seen too many people like, I'm going to start something, I'm going to call this guy up, I'm going to hey, I'm going to reassure Steve rubiki, get myself ten pairs, and just expect that you have that practice down. Start with a pair practice. Make sure you have quite a few batches underneath your belt, and use easy access online tools. But even before that, there's the aqua bits. See how your product sells, know who your market is and practice safely. Don't just dive in and be a Jim colby and spend $8,000 in the first 30 days.

That's right, we haven't talked about how I lost my butt. The first year on guppies, I think it was about $8,000. Thanks for bringing that up, Rob.

I'm here for you.

God. Steve, do you remember back when Guppies had that terrible we called it the Singapore slew around here? What was that? gram positive. gram negative bacterial infections on the saddle.

Guppies have always had some troubles that I'm not sure anybody has ever really figured it out. I mean, they've gone from thinking that it might be a parasitic, it might be bacterial, it might be viral, it could be there's multiple possibilities and I don't think anybody actually really knows. It might even be a combination of a few things, but guppies are one of those things that it might be an easy fish, but it's a really easy fish and I want to kind of go back on that point. It's an easy fish to breed. It's a difficult fish to breed. Beautiful one. Absolutely. There's a big difference. All the tips you were just given about starting a business are great tips. But the number one thing, if you want to succeed, this is absolutely critical. You will not succeed unless you can raise a superior fish. Pet shops can buy junky fish all day long for twenty five cents a piece. They don't need any homegrown fish unless it offers them something they can't buy. And the only thing that you can offer them is quality. And quality has to be easily seen. It can't be one of those things where you have to sit at two fish up and look at it and say, is that one better? Yeah, that one's a little bit better. It's got to be one of them things that 25ft away you go, oh my God, look at that fish. That's the best fish I've ever seen in my life. And when they say that, you got them hook, line and sinker. And you don't have to sell it for $0.25, you can sell it for $2.50 or $5 or whatever. Because is once you have that superior fish, you will have your market, you will have your ability to charge a price. And I recommend you don't go in and say, what will you give me? Because most of them will say, I'll trade you this little bag of fish food for those 500 fish. Pet shops struggle to stay alive and they are the cheapest people I've ever seen in my life.

Sorry, Adam.

On average. Well, I have also found that if you demonstrate clearly how they can make money, they are all ears and they will. And that's what I used to do. My sales pitch when I went into pet shops was shop down the street. I'm selling them these fish at $2 a piece and they're selling them for twelve. They're making $10 per fish and they're buying 50 a week. I think that's $500. And the guy sits there and he goes, I don't make $500 a month off fish. What are you talking about? And I've got his ear, I say, well, that's because you can't charge $12 a piece, you know, for your fish. You're selling, you're buying them for 35. You're selling for a dollar 29 and they're not worth a dollar 20. They're worth about thirty six cents. And you know, so you can only make a dollar a piece and nobody wants them because they're ugly. When you rather make them $10 a piece and everybody wants them because they're gorgeous and they've never seen a fish like that. That's your goal. Once you get to that point, you make money. When you're at the point where your fish look like everybody else's, forget it. You're not making any money on those fish. I don't care what you're doing. You're not making any money on them. Pet shops, if they want them, it'll be because they want them for almost nothing. And so my suggestion is just make it a hobby. And then if you happen to become really good at it, think about making money at that point. If you're willing to dedicate the time that it takes to keep that quality up and then charge what they're worth, don't ask them what they're going to pay you because they still won't pay you anything. You got to say they cost this much and I've got a little batch here I could afford to let go to you. I normally send them to what's his name down the street, but I can let you have a sample of these and try them out. He's selling them for this much money and making this much money a week. And that sales technique usually will help. You have to convince the shop owner he's going to make money on your fish. Once you convince him of that, he will buy them. The only reason he doesn't buy them is if he's not convinced he's going to make the money because I know what they make on the imported fish. I know what they pay for them and I know what they sell them for. And they don't pay a lot and they don't make a lot. And a lot of them die because they don't come in in good shape and they're ugly to boot. I can go on and on about the problems that they have with those fish. And so you clearly demonstrate you can take those problems away and make them more money and they'll buy your fish. And so if you want to get into the business, that's what you do. You, you, you produce something they can't buy. Because I'm telling you right now, you produce something they can buy, they're not buying yours because they got a thousand options. And the people in Southeast Asia living in some third world country that's got a standard of living where they live off dollars, they can sell those fish for $0.10. They don't care. They're selling a million of them. They'll take ten cents. And you're not going to make any money selling them at $0.10 apiece at the prices you got to pay to, to raise a fish in the United States. So that's, that's how I did it and that's how I would suggest anybody do it.

So the last piece of the crash course would be shipping. And shipping is the most difficult thing. And that's where I've struggled with it before, is I had a website called Fish Hunters Plus for about two and a half years with Jimmy and we sold online. And we had a pride in ourselves finding fish no one else could. Again, it's the unique experience that you can provide because if they get from wholesalers, there may be things that they just can't find. They'll get their bread and butter stock, but you couldn't find the unique fish. So we could certainly find those unique fish and ship them out. But shipping is the big key to the business. So take your time. Look up. Postal Service is probably going to have the cheapest rates but has limitations on time ups. Again, we'll get them there, it'll be convenient and easy, but it also cost you a bit more. You can certainly fly them on an airline and maybe do bigger shipments and also have a lower price. But you're going to hate Delta through.

Your teeth and have to be a known shipper, which is not easy.

And then you have to deal with people that say that you can't ship it to a different state because of those laws. And you'll have to deal with law enforcement and all kinds of craziness. So the best thing you can do is find yourself small time local shipping industries. Close to us in the four or five state area, we have a place called speedy Delivery Service and it's an independent delivery service that if you have to go past their area again, they'll just offload it into ups, but they're good prices, they take care of their product and they're fast. So do your homework and also call up the corporate offices and see if you can do a contract. When we were working on ours, we were working with the Us postal Service and at that time they decided to go for the last mile with Amazon. So we got pushed to the side, but they still offered those services. Do your homework on shipping and then after you've locked that down, test it. Don't just trust it. Test your shipping methods. Make sure use the foam boxes, see how heat packs work. I've seen people stick with the paper plates placement in the box matters and ship a few fish. Trial fish to a known friend in another state just to make sure that works out for you. Don't be afraid to test it. And shipping is going to be the hardest part of the whole pie, but that at least gives you a crash course to get started. So steve, is there anything that you feel like we left out or you want to tell the audience before we call this a show?

I don't know. We've covered a lot. There's endless topics with fish. We haven't touched on a million of the different topics with angel fish or any other fish as far as breeding and the intricacies of developing a strain or any of that kind of stuff. You could spend days on these things, talking about all the different things. But as far as introducing people to doing an online business or somehow starting a business selling fish, I think we covered most of the important points. A lot of this stuff you figure out as you go. You don't go into any kind of business without having constant problems and constant obstacles. The people who do well are the people who aren't chased away by those obstacles and those problems. They sit down and they figure out how to overcome them. And really, that's how you succeed at business. You don't know everything when you start out. You know basics and you build on that with failures, basically. I failed a lot of times before I learned how to do certain things the right way.

I got a quick question, Steve. Excuse me. What's the main things that you're raising right now? I know you've had some sword tails in the past, you've had some discus in the past. I know angels. What is your main thing that you're pushing right now?

My main fish is always coy angel fish. And the reason it's always koi angel fish is because there is only one angel fish that's brightly colored and that is the koi angel fish. All these blue strains, they're not brightly colored. They don't even have color. The blue is not a pigment. The blue is a reflection off of a shiny substance called guanine in the cells. So if you have a certain spectrum of light hitting the side of that fish at the right angle, you'll see blue. But if you put that fish in a tank and there's no light hitting it directly or shining or fish at the wrong angle, it's as blue as it can be. It's just combinations of grays and blacks and browns. I mean, there is no color. So blue is not a colorful fish. It's a fish that flashes some iridescent color under the right circumstances. And the pictures you see on the Internet, 99% of them are juiced to look way better than the fish does. And I know this because I have them. I've had them for a decade. I've had them for twelve years. Whatever it's been, I've done thousands of them. They are not impressive in your tanks, in my opinion. They are not impressive. They are impressive in pictures. And that is something that I think is people find out very quickly when they do them that they're very pretty in pictures, but they're not so pretty in your tank coy angel fish. You can turn the lights off in your room and you can still see them. They're orange. They're orange pigment and it's bright, it's almost fluorescent at times. So people love them. And that's why I put, I don't know, half my tanks into that one strain and double dark blacks, I've always done them because they're difficult to do and if you do them well, no one else has them. And so it's a fish that people like, but they can't do it the same way. People are incapable of raising good albinyls. So if you can do them good, you've got to market almost to yourself. I'll do certain fish like that for that kind of reason. It's desirable for x reason. Other than that, I do fish that I like right now. I have sword tails, I have platties, I have guppies. They just keep my interest. They're fun to play with, they're fun to play around genetically, see what you can create with them and see what you can do with them. And I do sell them, but I don't make a lot of money on fish. I don't sell them for high prices prices. They sell for less money than the typical guppy breeder. ifga breeder is going to be selling them for or a really good sword breeder, there are swords out on the market where they're easily $150 a pair. And I have those, but I don't sell them yet. I'm still working on them and I'll never sell them at those prices. So you got to kind of pick your expertise area, concentrate on having the best fish that people can find of that variety and sell that fish. The rest of the stuff, I think you got to kind of look at it more as a hobby because if you try to do a little bit of everything, you're not going to do it well. You can't do everything well, you can only do a couple of things well and you have to choose what those are going to be.

So, again, thank you. Steve, go to angelsplus.com. Steve has a wonderful blog that he has a plenty of information. Again, we can only cover so much in this topic, but go to angelsplus.com. And again, the blog you seem to be posting pretty consistently and you got full pictures, descriptions, and of course, you sell angel fish.

Actually, the blog isn't my main learning resource. If you go on a footer of the website, it says Learning Center. If you go there, there's a series of articles on care of angel fish breeding, angel fish, genetics of angel fish that has most of the information on my website that will be useful to somebody getting into this. And actually, there's about 30 articles that still haven't gone up that I haven't transferred from my old website. This website is relatively new for me and I'm still getting stuff transferred over. And so within the next, hopefully, within the next month or so, I'll get the rest of those transferred over. But that's really where the blog has got some interesting information in it, but it's not really where you're going to learn a lot breeding or caring for fish or genetics or any of that. So that's more in the learning center of the website.

Well, Perfect Angelsplus.com certainly check out the stock you have there to purchase and if they got questions again, check out his resources in the bottom of the website. Just remind again the learning center. And I appreciate you having you on, buddy.

Oh, it's great. It was a pleasure to be here and I really appreciate you asking me.

So Adam, do you got anything for us? I know we didn't get a lot of chance to chat with you this time, but what do you do?

No, I was just listening because I was amazed at the F three from the wilds. And do you ever sell just straight wild stock? Because it's hard to get good wild angel fish that live a lot of the time.

The thing is, my wild stock is domestically bread. It's not collected in the wild. And so a lot of people would look at that and they say, well, that's not wild, it's not collected in the wild. They're 100% wild fish a couple of generations ago. And it depends. I have a couple of different wild lines, so some of them are older generations. I know some of them are new, but I do sell those on occasion. It just depends. I don't breed them except when I'm looking to make an outcross usually. So I set wild fish up with domestic fish frequently. I don't often set them up wild to wild just to sell wild, but occasionally I get to the point where my pairs are old and I want to get something going new before they kick off because I don't even know when they might. I've never actually had them die of old age, but they live a long time. But I don't want to risk them stop breeding and then having nothing. So every ten years or so, I generally breed them and start over. But I don't do it very often on purpose. Sometimes I'll have crosses that look wild. For instance, I'll take 50% wildfish, cross it back to wild. Now I've got a 75% wild fish and I actually have a tank, I think it's about 100 gallon tank with a group of 75% wild angel fish. But there's actually veils and supervales in there because I used a veil fish to make the crosses with. And there's 75% wild peruvian scalari that are supervales and they're amazing looking. You'll never see anything like them anywhere. And I think I might have. I have a video of them up on YouTube, but I don't know if I've got one on my website. But if you go to my YouTube channel, which is linked on the website and you scroll through the hundreds of videos that are on there, you will see 75% wild adult fish somewhere within the last couple of years in the videos that will show you some fish that are veiled and supervilled 75% wild. They're just amazing looking, at least I think they are. So I have those on occasion because since they're unique, because they have veil in them, I'll offer them, I'll actually breed them on purpose and offer them sale. But the wild to wild is not common. Maybe once every three or four years.

Okay, I just like the wild stuff myself.

You'll have to ride them.

Yeah, I will, but I just like the wild stuff and I never see good quality wild stuff, but most of.

It is going to be imported. And the imported stuff, when they come from the wild, they always have parasite. Unless the person that's holding them is trying to clean them up for you, you're going to bring in a fish. That might be a little difficult because first of all, they're more easily stressed by that domestic environment. And being that they have parasites, oftentimes they get sick once they're under that stress and you end up losing them or not having them do real well. But that's usually what you're going to run into because there's not a ton of people out there who get wild fish and breed them to each other and then have the little ones for sale. Occasionally you see them, but it's not very common.

Well, thanks again, Steve, and you got anything else for us?

Jim, I just wanted to say when you're talking about breeding your angels and you have some that have spawns up to 2000, I saw rob's eyeballs bought come out of his head. What is the largest spawn you've ever had, Steve, with angels?

Well, the largest ones I've ever had have been in the 2000 range and I think I've had maybe four of those over the decades. And the reason I know the count on them is I don't sit there and count each egg, it'd be impossible. But what I do is when I get an exceptionally large spawn and I'm curious, I take a photograph of the spawn, I put it up on the computer and I put a grid over it. And you make sure that you count the cells in one grid, that it's an average looking grid, and multiply it by the number of grids with cells and you come up with a pretty close estimate of the number of eggs. And the largest one I think I ever estimated was about 2200. I've had several right in the 1900 to 2000 rain. Common spawn size is six to 900. What happens I think is that occasionally if a female is holding eggs for whatever reason, because they can hold them, they don't have to lay them. If you stress them for some reason just before they're going to lay, they sometimes won't lay them. And if it goes another ten days before they lay them, they actually lay twice as many as they normally. It's funny, if you actually took an angel fish and you counted the number of eggs they lay in a month, you'll get pairs that will lay every six days, and they'll lay 400 eggs. So you got a fish that's laying 1600 eggs a month, and you'll get another pair that only lays every 14 days, but they lay twice as many or three times as many eggs and you get the same number. I think you can easily count on getting about 1500 to 2000 eggs a month out of a pair. And that just depends, of course, on there's a, there's more factors to it. There's feeding, there's temperature, there's the quality of the food that you're giving them. There's some genetics involved. If you breed fish with lots of big spawns, they tend to produce fish that will do the same thing. Which is why when I'm selecting pears and I've got 25 koi pairs set up across the bar, and they all look and act and do everything about the same, but one of them lays twice as many eggs as the other. It's the pair I keep for myself, I'm very careful to make sure I'm not keeping pairs that don't do well with all aspects of angel fish. But over time, I have found that there just isn't a huge difference out of the good pairs. Whether they spawn more frequently with fewer numbers, or high numbers less frequently, it ends up being safe. And what happens is they have a certain number of eggs inside them that they're probably born with, that are in a state that's very tiny, undeveloped, and once a certain hormone is expressed, the egg ripens and becomes larger, and a certain number of them, and they do it on a steady basis. And once those eggs are gone, they're gone. And so if you have a fish that spawns, let's say every nine days for the first 30 spawns, they might be done after that, they might never give you a note. Whereas if you got a fish that you keep in a cool tank and you keep it at 72 degrees and you get a spawn once every six or eight weeks out of them, they might just be spawning when? You're twelve years old because you don't hardly ever. You get three or four spawns a year and just keep spawning because they have a certain number of eggs to lay. Egg laying. And that's a technique you can use when you're breeding. People go out, try to keep pumping eggs, and I keep telling them, well, don't feed them so much and don't keep them so warm, and they won't spawn as often and as much, and they won't be as aggressive, and they may not spawn at all. So that's a technique to control the number of eggs you get because no breeder needs 20,000 eggs a month. You can't raise them. You can't do it. Unless you're a farm with ponds, you can't do it.

You can't milk the cows that often.

Yeah, you can't do it. You can't milk those cows. You have machines to do it.

I appreciate your time again, Steve Angelsplus.com. And before I let you guys go next week, again, we were hoping to have this week, but next week we're planning on having Julie from seagrass Farms give us some inside information. And again, go to the aquariumguyspodcast.com, tell your friends, and thanks again. Let's kick that outro.

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

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

Can I listen to it in my tree house?

In your tree house, in your fish room, even alone at work.

What about my man cave?

Especially your man cave. Yeah, only if adam's there no with feeder guppies.

No, they're Nlertis, you magic loving, quack sucking motherfuck.

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