Buying A $1.8 Million Dollar Koi Fish! | Confronting CoralFish12g

welcome back to the 58th ever episode of the iced coffee hour podcast my name is george and so far the podcast has made 69 435 dollars he says 69. that's incredible that is incorrect i think that was the best one we've ever seen on the podcast are you serious really i am not joking at all i felt it yeah yeah i'm serious and by the way thank you we are so close to 69 420. no are we really 69 435 yeah wow well done congratulations yeah thank you so much for coming on george always thanks for having me this has been really exciting because i kid you not i have watched your channel for honestly since you were probably 10 000 ish subscribers and right now your channel is approaching 900 000 subscribers we talk about aquarium fish reef keeping saltwater aquarium husbandry and you travel the world just showcasing some of the most exotic expensive fish and coral out there how did you start doing this because i found your channel in a college dorm room and you had like a little nano tank with a clown fish and an anemone in there right yeah so this hobby started for me in actually middle school i believe so i was 10 years old and i just really wanted a fish tank and my mom took me to a fish store and she's like you know these fish are all fresh water but i think you should do salt water and that was really interesting because most people don't even know the difference between freshwater saltwater aquariums you know they just go to their local petco or something and pick something up so we went to a saltwater fish store i got my first 12 gallon uh reef tank which is salt water which means you get to keep things like corals much more like exotic fish and different invertebrates and so then basically what happened was i got really addicted to like keeping uh the coral you know that was sort of what hooked me into the hobby because i just found it so fascinating the way coral grows if you can grow it you can cut it and then you can sell it to other hobbyists you can actually make a good amount of money doing it as you saw from as you've seen now being in the hobby yourself yeah how much quartz go for so that like really piqued my entrepreneur minded you know young george and that's kind of what got the ball rolling for me to just sort of like dive really deep into the world of aquariums it's weird that a parent would tell their child let's go salt water it's bizarre because it's like the most yeah my mom is i mean totally crazy for doing that you know it's very it's a very expensive hobby yeah most parents you know they just want to get their kid the quick and easy thing yeah the goldfish yeah the betta fish my mom was like we're gonna get you like the baller like best coolest thing you can possibly do and it's crazy because if she hadn't done that like i always wonder if she'd if i got into fresh water who knows maybe i would have just you know phased out of it after a few months or gotten bored why was that was she is she like a total fanatic for the saltwater aquarium maybe she has a lot of money how do i how do i get rid of it as fast as possible oh here's the saltwater crown let's bring that out no my dad definitely was i don't think he under quite understood the hobby or what was going on at the time um yeah but my mom's just like amazing for that reason like she always just has always encouraged us to do to just like go all out and go to be the best at whatever we try to do um and i didn't learn this until like many years later but my mom actually kept saltwater aquariums with her dad my grandpa growing up yeah that was it so what's interesting though is back when she was keeping them they could only have saltwater fish like the technology wasn't around to keep coral alive so it was actually kind of a new thing for her too to like walk back into a saltwater aquarium store and be like wait you can keep coral now and so yeah i mean that was that's really why so what was your first tank my first tank was um it was called the 12 gallon nano cube and that's where my name coral fish 12 g comes from 12. okay yeah and um it's interesting with aquariums you'd think that the smaller they are the easier they keep but it's actually the opposite so the smaller the reef aquarium the harder it is to take care of because the chemicals um you have less uh room for error right because you only have such a small water volume it's like if you were to take a drop of poison and like put it in there there's no room for free like it's going to kill everything versus if you were to take a drop of poison and like throw it in the ocean you won't even notice got it so the bigger the aquarium actually the easier so it was very challenging and i failed in so many different ways like i went through all the pests i went through pretty much every problem you can imagine as a young kid too and then after about two years of that i find in killing a decent amount of coral i figured out how to keep coral alive and how to get my tank just to look amazing and then that's when i took to youtube to teach other people how to not make the same mistakes i made what made you post youtube videos oh how old were you dude this was freshman years no this was middle school even like i think you're posting youtube videos in middle school i was yeah i'm really doing this along yes i i started my channel in 2010 i remember i didn't know that wow yeah but i think i i think i posted probably my first video in like 2011 or 2012. and at first it was just videos of my fish tank because i just wanted to see what people thought of them and that's sort of what youtube was back then it was just like a place where you like put stuff to see like what happened um then i saw there were like other people teaching about aquariums and i looked up to them and then that inspired me to like you know start giving my advice and my you know two cents on everything in the hobby yeah i remember when i was in middle school i had an aquarium and you would think that it's like this nerdy hobby but anytime someone come over it was like whoa look at the look at the fish and everyone was enamored by it everyone loved it yeah it was um it was sort of interesting for me because i also played basketball growing up actually into college even so i played college basketball as well and so my whole life this happened was more in high school where i realized i started thinking like hey maybe i should like give up this aquarium thing because i was like the you know starting point guard varsity basketball team supposed to be like this jock right then i had this like weird side hobby of keeping like super nerdy saltwater aquariums and like no one knew about it in high school so you didn't share it with people no i didn't were you embarrassed of it yeah i mean like you guys have to remember like youtube back then was not cool it was it just wasn't what it is today like true you know now everybody wants to be a youtuber like i think i remember seeing the number one sought after job by kids youtuber but back then it was it was not cool especially not aquariums at least i didn't think so and so i mean i told like a few of my closest friend knew about it but most people did not know did you have a following at that time i had maybe in high school so what happened was right around high school i think i had like a couple thousand subscribers um and i remember thinking like you know the what if people see this what's going to happen uh you know i think it's the same thing if you are people are going to start making fun of me and stuff and so i consider stopping it but then what actually kept me in it was i started receiving checks from youtube i was receiving like a couple hundred bucks a month that's pretty good for a high schooler that's really good for high schoolers yeah and youtube videos yeah yeah so i was like hey well if anyone makes fun of me for this i'm just going to tell them uh to go kick rocks because i'm making money from it yeah so i was gonna that was gonna be like my way of justifying it yeah and then i also started like companies started reaching out even back like that early and they were sending me free product and that was epic for me as a young kid because i again aquarium's very expensive and so like receiving free lights and free equipment was really cool so um yeah then what happened was i went off to college kind of a clean slate i committed to go play basketball at a very small school called lawrence university in appleton wisconsin which is about three hours north of where i grew up in chicago and uh i had i remember i had 10 000 subscribers my freshman year of college and my best friends were actually baseball players yeah and it wasn't until the end of the year that like the way my best friend uh found out was i had accidentally left one of my business cards like it just was like laying out in the hallway or something like embarrassing well i don't know i was i didn't know what was going to happen but basically he texted me a photo of the card and he's like what is this and i was like oh man everyone's about to know about this within a week everyone at the college knew that i was you know and how was it was it as bad as you thought no it was it wasn't actually a lot of people thought it was really cool um and even my best friends were like dude this is epic like why didn't you tell us about this like this is sick you got 10 000 subscribers like um so that felt good but um and you know encouraged me to keep doing it i also had i brought my fish tanks or my fish tank to college uh my freshman year i only had one by my senior year i had 15. 15 tanks in my dorm room yeah i had almost 15 13 or 14 fish tanks in my dorm room and i had like all the most exotic animals so it was like you would walk into my dorm room and it was a public square yeah it's like a zoo you had like sea horses clown fish mantis shrimp like planted tank um just like all sorts of exotic stuff that's cool i was the same way i didn't tell anyone about my youtube channel at all it's a scary feeling yeah on facebook i've never posted about the youtube channel oh i've never told my friends about my youtube channel they found out yeah yeah yeah over time they found out but i it made me more worried knowing that like my friends were watching and i would feel like i'd hold myself back because i knew like oh they're watching me what do i what if i say something bad yeah i mean everyone says supportive at least for me i mean if you weren't into aquariums you might just be like oh it's cool yeah just kind of brush it off so at that advantage yours is a little bit more personal right so yeah but when you were making these videos how many other people were making reef aquarium videos were you one of the first ones but first i want to thank our sponsor ladder i want to talk for a minute about things that have fundamentally changed the way we live these are disruptors things like smartphones streaming services wider than white paint that actually cools down buildings electric vehicles and even youtube another one i heard of recently is a company called ladder who basically took the life insurance industry flipped it upside down and check out the inefficiencies before latter if you wanted to get life insurance you'd have to drive across town sit through a sales pitch fill out a ton of paperwork and then wait six to eight weeks to find out if you've been approved you'd also receive a zillion phone calls from agents trying to bundle your life insurance with other things like car insurance now with ladder you can get fast affordable term life insurance without leaving home it's a hundred percent digital when you apply for three million dollars or less in coverage no doctors no needles no paperwork so if you're between the ages of 20 to 60 need coverage and want to team up with a company that's redeeming life insurance choose ladder i know that when i went through the process of getting quotes through ladder it was so fast and easy and i didn't need to dig out a bunch of old paperwork go to ladderlife.com iced coffee today to see if you're instantly approved that's l-a-d-d-e-r-life.com iced coffee ladderlife.com iced coffee thank you so much ladder for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast i you know i think a lot of people in my industry or at least in the youtube you know aquarium youtube would definitely i would consider myself one of those og aquarium youtubers um i wasn't the first to it by any means but i was in it very early on and and yeah i mean eventually so every year of college it my channel grew it actually doubled so freshman year 10 000 sophomore year 25 junior year 50 and then my senior year i got to 100 actually ended up surpassing 100 but um yeah and just basically what happened was like i never because i was playing college basketball that was my focus all throughout middle school high school was like how do i play college basketball so i was very very driven and focused on that first and then the aquariums and youtube was sort of like a side hobby and it was just like some side income i didn't really start taking it seriously until probably my junior senior year of college when you know a lot of companies started noticing and they started flying me out to aquarium conventions uh to do marketing and um and then it wasn't really until and i always wanted to do youtube full-time like i always thought like you you know being a youtuber would be like the coolest thing i i think i would have even back then as a young kid considered it my dream job it's just i never thought that it could be a full-time income like a full-time job i think there's a big misconception with a lot of small youtube creators where they just don't they don't realize that how close they are how achievable it is to make youtube a full-time job you know they think like i remember thinking oh those big youtubers like you know the ones with over a million or five million like somehow they can you know they're making a lot of money from it but i i didn't realize at the time that other creators with 50 or even only a hundred thousand subscribers even sometimes with like 10 25 000 subscribers can you know through affiliates or through brand deals or through just like dominating their niche earned a full-time living so it was until my senior year when um like another aquarium youtuber actually messaged me a uh and this was like yeah so like this is like literally rewired my brain yeah um no no i can't but it was it was an aquarium youtuber who uh was making like i think he sent me a because i i had my first viral video my senior year and then i started getting like a lot of attention a lot of other creators were like bigger creators were reaching out and you know i was starting to like meet them and talk to them and stuff he's like why aren't you doing this full time i'm like what do you mean like i can't i don't i can't make enough money to do this whole time i can't even go to my parents until i wouldn't even dare go to my parents say like i could do this because it just wouldn't be enough because at that time i was making like most of throughout most of college was making about a thousand dollars a month so i was like twelve thousand of the year like i can't do that yeah but then after my first final video it clicked like my senior year my first viral video which was don't uh don't buy fly fish off the dark web and that got five million views why why shouldn't you buy fish off the dark web i don't know you gotta watch graham but you have to explain it because now we have an entire audience that's gonna click out of this video go watch that and thank you for putting this title card right here into the video no we don't use time it's bad for the algorithm oh is it actually yeah it is because very few people ever click out of a title card think of it i mean if you're watching a video it's true have you have you ever when they say oh yeah middle of the video peak suspense click the title card go watch another video it works against you because that's a click against the out like any any option that people don't follow through counts against you the algorithm all right we're throwing the link in the description everyone go check it out in the description that you could watch later yeah yeah so the idea was the idea was um you know how how can i and this is also what was like a turning point point for my channel was how do i get more people interested in aquariums like how do i get me the mainstream interested in learning about aquariums fish or you know conservation with marine and different marine animals which that ended up that's you know a later part of what i do but um and i realize okay i really need these viral ideas where um so i thought okay what's the scariest fish you could possibly unbox like what's the scariest fish you guys could probably the angler well yeah you're a reef yeah yeah yeah jack what about you what's the scariest fish what would you not want to be in the water with a great white shark or a tiger shark or besides sharks stingray yes i wouldn't want it jellyfish maybe amazon think about the amazon prana oh yeah yeah you wouldn't want to be in the water with piranha there's this big misconception piranhas because of movies and even sharks too um and i've made a lot of videos about sharks and and uh with the same logic that you know the movies the media make sharks piranhas a lot of these animals out to be like villains very scary when really like piranhas are so timid and shy they're very very like but they're like coyotes where like one is timid and shy but then when you have a pack of them if they just go it's freezing blood in the water yeah i've seen those they're hungry yes but if you keep them in your aquariums like they're more scared of you than you are them i've seen some where they put like a fish in a piranha tank like a little like half-eaten fish and they just rip this thing apart it's it's knots yes but if you put like a whole human hand in the tank they're very like they're more likely to go hide because you're like a bigger animal than there unless they're in like a massive swarm in the amazon but regardless that the video was basically unboxing piranhas and teaching people how to take care of them in their aquariums all about them the misconceptions um and they are like i mean they're not not um they are dangerous animals like you wouldn't want to like you guys said be in the amazon river swimming with piranhas but i've also heard from a lot of people that they've walked like through like piranha-infested waters like no problem so i mean it goes both ways but um yeah after my first viral video and i saw how many views i got i saw how much i got paid for it how much you get paid for it i think i got like uh at least that first month i got like five six thousand dollars okay which for a college student yeah you're like five million views like ready to go to the casino man you're rich so um and i was like okay this is what people want to watch this is why people watch this and this is how much you make when you nail it right you hit it on the head you go viral and so and then since then i've just been able to sort of recreate that viral formula and i've been able to just have lots of viral videos since i graduated college which was two years ago and i've been able to turn it into a full-time you know living which i never thought i could do what's your formula for a viral video i'm curious from your perspective because you've had some videos just go nuts yeah i have and like for me it's all about um i think there is a golden rule to going viral you know there's a there's a lot of people who think i think if you ask the average person they'd say oh viral you know i just you threw a video of your dog up on facebook and it went viral like no i think there's a very like there's a there's a formula to viral i think there's a golden rule and the golden rule is that you need to make people feel an emotion you need to make people feel like happy scared anxious something something to the point where they take that piece of content and then they share it because as humans like it's built into our dna like when you feel something really intense a powerful emotion like what do you want to do you want others to feel that same way like when you watch something funny you want to share it so that you know your friend or your your husband or wife or whatever you know feels that as well so i think that's just like um i think that's what viral is is when you can really get someone's like emotions uh to change and you can kind of like impact the way that they're they're feeling you know because then they'll share it and then um and so i think it's a very powerful thing so for you what does that look like because i've but first i want to thank our sponsor surfshark nowadays more than ever we are spending so much time online for me i just love to watch youtube videos check the price of whatever coin the internet seems to be going on about and see what papa elon is sharing on his twitter and trust me the internet knows a lot about us and that is exactly why we should care about our online data that's where surfshark comes in surfshark is a vpn that encrypts your data when you're browsing online so that no one else can see your personal information and since they keep no logs not even surf shark can see what you've been up to online i also love using surfshark for streaming let's say i wanted to watch rick and morty on netflix well you see in the united states it's actually not available but if i use surfshark to change my location to the united kingdom i'm now able to watch rick and morty wherever i go this means you can also change your location to other countries on your favorite streaming sites and see a whole new list of shows to choose from get started today by clicking the link in the description and use the code iced coffee for 83 off and three extra months for free and if you don't love it for any reason there's a 30 day money back guarantee again just click the link in the description and use the code iced coffee to get three months for free thank you so much surfshark for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast my favorite video for me was a stingray one it was just the stingray breeder in singapore in singapore yeah that didn't make me i mean i was more curious explain the plot of the video you want to explain it or you want me to explain it from a viewer's perspective yeah why don't you explain you went to this it looks like this guy's house and we should throw by the way alex let's throw some like b-roll over top we went to this guy's house or you we went too i said if i was there i may as well have been you filmed first person oh no no you did you film first person it's so funny you say that because i very intentionally try to make my videos feel like the viewer is there like taking the tour with me yeah i use different like angles and different like lenses to give the viewer that feeling like they're walking around and looking at it yeah that's cool but um was there someone that i don't remember i had my uh my cameraman asher who's traveled with me to like okay quite a few countries so anyway so it looked like it was first person but you were walking through this dude who is so passionate about stingrays and what's cool about these stingrays is that they were like five thousand two to three thousand dollars on the low end for like a little stingray all the way up to like 20 25 30 000 for a stingray they had like stingrays with different spots on them and like white ones black ones and cool patterns and one looks like a question mark on it's really cool stuff but every square inch of this guy's spot was a stingray like you're walking on the floor over stingrays the whole wall is a stingray there's a stingray like above you it was knots and every single singer he must have had like a million two million dollars for the stingrays that he just breeds and it was one of these things it's like every moment he says something that's like what this is crazy a million to two million dollars worth of stingrays yeah is the value in an expensive stingray because like you can sell it and people can enjoy it or because you can breed it like a horse and you can like it's both it's both it's both yeah like um but it's more i mean the econom on the economic side it's definitely because you can breed it and once you have it you know you can yeah it's like a horse in that sense yeah but um yeah i mean it it's crazy that's just like there's so many different facets to aquariums there's so many different animals and um it's not entirely like i've sort of gotten used to it now like where there's a there's a stingray guy there's a flower horn guy which is a different type of fish there's clownfish guys like and they transform their entire homes to be these like insane breeding facilities um and that that's the cool thing about um you know when you kind of travel overseas is a lot of those people like that's their livelihood right and so they are just like doing it out of their homes and like converting i was once when i was in thailand uh a guy converted an entire residential apartment building into like a flower horn fish it's a type of fish uh like breeding like place and you literally five floors and every floor i just was like footage of that i do i have a whole video on it alex how much yeah yeah how much is this guy making because the stingray guy by the way you go up to this unassuming building like you would have no idea the gate opens up there's a brand new bmw i8 just sitting there and this dude pulls out shows you the stingrays like he's he's probably making especially for that area making bank and he ships all over the world yeah yeah how much does a flower horn got explain explain the flower horn you know it's it's it's different like animal to animal um with what's kind of funny and interesting the stingray guy so what he does as a full-time job is he actually uh like does car like uh i don't know how to describe it modifications on car like really high-end custom mods because in singapore i mean even own a car in singapore is like expensive yeah just the taxes for like a really cheap honda civic luxury tax yeah 50 percent it's not yeah triple the cost of the car so he does that full time and i asked him like well what do you make more money from like the cars or the stingrays is like the stingrays and the stingrays is just like a side thing why does he just stingray full time i don't know i was like why don't you just like open up like a whole or even facility i i'm not sure um but he i think maybe he just really likes the stability in the cars what's some of the craziest stuff that you've seen overseas in terms of the business aspect of of this like the stingrays that's incredible the flower horns i would imagine that's i haven't seen that video but would be even crazier than that like what else have you seen um i've seen like some markets some like wholesale markets where in asia like on certain days of the week they'll basically um like the there was one called the chatuchak market in thailand in bangkok where just like hundreds of vendors like farmers like individual breeders like the stinger guy clownfish they'll show up they'll basically like sit on the floor of like a parking lot and and just like have fish out on display for people to come pick up but then a lot of those people are like exporters that sometimes export them to the united states or other countries um sometimes they're just like fish stores but like um i've been in some markets that are like they go for acres like we're talking about like acres and acres are just like the most exotic fish some of which many of which are even illegal in the united states to keep uh which makes it so much more interesting for my american viewers is to see fish like arowanas which um are they why are those because i used to see those in fish stores graham i'm surprised you don't have marijuana that's a that's a fish that i could call fish it is a very cool fish i would have to have an arowana tank now macy wants a clown fish tank does she yeah yeah clownfish it's the entry point for a lot of people in the hobby or clownfish but um arowana so the arowana fish is also known as the dragon fish and in asia it's like a sign of wealth and fortune and like prestige oh we gotta get one it's dude there i don't you got to flash a photo of them they're just yeah they're still a little and um they're big they're shiny and um they're actually they became so like popular that people they basically like fished them out of ex to extinction i didn't know this and yeah so they're they're con i think the reason that they're illegal in the united states asian arowana uh is because they are on like the society's two or three list considered endangered so you're not you're not allowed to have them here in canada you can have them um but yeah so like seeing those fish and those fishing go for um hundreds of thousands of dollars you know i've seen arowana fish where they're like yeah this one's like 50k 80k 100k so like um i was just my most recent trip uh was japan and there they're crazy over koi so koi uh fish which most people here just go to like their botanical gardens and see swimming like it's a koi fish over in uh japan that fish is like again another just massive symbol of like uh good luck and so there was a koi fish in 2018 that sold for 1.8 million dollars it was the most expensive fish ever sold um why why was that fish so expensive it was like so they do these koi uh competitions uh and they do this for every fish um you know clown fish flower horn and we um all the different fish they have competitions for them to see you know because the breeders want to know like who whose fish are the best and that also will help dictate the price on a certain fish so um but like koi fish there's so many different breeders they enter these competitions and this fish i think it uh won grand champion like two or three years in a row and it was just like massive this gargantuan was like i think like i think it was like two three feet i mean at that size it looks like a little pig yeah it was like the size of like a small pig so the size the body shape the coloration the pattern the colors because um all those things have to do with like the perfect koi and um believe it or not the guy who bought it the fish ended up dying a year i think a year later no why it just i don't know it just i don't i don't think there's a lot of information on that i don't know why this is worth so much that's the fish so it's so beautiful yeah so it's just good to me man jack's like i want more i mean it looks good but but i like if i saw that i wouldn't think that's like the most expensive yeah i wouldn't think that's the best in show screenshot so the reason that one uh there's actually a few different types but the red and white varieties are worth are like considered the best uh and worth the most because red and white it's like the the colors on the japanese flag even yeah they're just like those are the colors that they they value um wait so so when you say it died you were talking about the fish fish died yeah all right first thing i thought we should but the owner the owner um you're like who gets the fish now wow i mean the fish is big yeah it's a massive face is big yeah i mean it's a good looking koi fish like i've seen koi fish before like at the local chinese restaurant or something like that that looks like a nice koi fish but i i don't know if i would say that's like a two million dollar wow to the average person you know they you wouldn't know um yeah you wouldn't but to so many people who are like dedicated their lives to these sub sections of the hobby yeah it's like everything to them no the fish died do you know why the fish is it do do they have a life koi could live a long time so yeah it was nine years old when it was sold yeah i mean i don't think there's a lot of information on why exactly it died i don't i don't know maybe the owner didn't want to reveal that or something i'm not sure at least to my knowledge i don't know but um i i will tell you like a lot of fish have pretty long lifespans i mean koi fish can live like 20 to 30 years on average um there's like there's legend rumors that there's a koi fish that is live to be like a few hundred years old that's not typical but even like um a lot of marine fish like a lot of the fish you have i know macy was asking yesterday or the other day um and they were really surprised by the life span of like a clown fish i mean clowns live 15 to 20 years i didn't know that yeah even in a in your aquarium i know a lot of different hobbyists who have been able to keep a clown fish for 15 20 years so yeah wow they have longer life spans than i think a lot of people think i think that's because most people get the goldfish that will get sick and die within like a few days or six months or something but when you buy a 1.8 million fish do you buy it with you must buy it with the intention of breeding it right because otherwise let's say you buy at 1.8 million you only got like let's say five to ten years with the fish probably let's say 10 years 180 thousand dollars a year to own the fish yeah i think it's just a flex like i think it's all it is i think the same way elon musk had like so much money yeah i think the same way elon musk will just blow you know crazy amount of money on something to fly i mean that's just what he did have you ever got bit by a fish um and you like bled no it's funny now you guys are gonna be like i told you so but my dad got bit by one of my piranhas [Music] that you say is safe it was an accident right it was probably didn't mean to and that's that's it just thought his hand was food right and you're actually right that's exactly what it was my dad just the way he feeds them was just like leaving his fingers in there like holding on to the food if you play with fire you're gonna get burned so and that was that was but uh i personally have never gotten like stung or bitten by anything crazy and i hope not to because yeah but most of the time it's on accident i mean that's that's something else like so when i was in asia one of the biggest projects that i did was um like a a couple videos on sharks and what's happening to sharks right now because each year over near 100 million sharks are killed 100 million 100 million is that for the finished finch spin suit for shark fins that many sure 100 million how is that possible and i thought the same thing i was like that must just be like grossly inflated yeah the when you think about china and their population it's like and then you take like a food that we have here in america and you like hamburgers right yeah and for them shark fin soup was just like for the longest it's on the decline now with more awareness and stuff but it's still like it's being sold dude i saw this oh sorry go for it well and yeah i was just gonna say like it's um it's a much bigger issue than a lot of people think how do you oh yeah i was just going to say i saw this video i remember like back in middle school where they like wrangled a bunch of dolphins oh what's that yeah that video was horrific it was so tragic yeah i feel bad i've seen some of those fishing videos where like they they take up the fish yeah there's like something that gets caught in there like nothing it's not necessarily a dolphin but it's something that and it's just flopping it's flopping on the deck and nobody's like put it back in the water it blows it's just it's so easy just just do that just do that and fish could live and they just they just don't care yeah i mean for them it's just considered i mean obviously it's their job those fishermen um and it's it's food for them and that was something i learned over in asia as well is like we you know i did a whole basic whole video on the shark fishermen who um are are collecting these sharks and is like well they're just literally doing it to provide for their family it's like that's all they have so isn't there is there aren't there other foods that you could eat besides shark or is it just like that's that's easy to catch they get money for it because in in china shark fin soup is like a delicacy it's a luxury so they get like a premium for catching a shark versus a fish so they're like encouraged to kill sharks it's the same thing for the meat market here you know for for meat production it's like you just like people like eating steaks that's why we keep making it yeah but at least with with steak i mean the the cows are um and that's a whole nother thing but they're they're farm raised right like they're they're born to be to be concerned oh true like the sharks in the ocean it's not it's not like that and something interesting too is like sharks a lot of different sharks sometimes they won't be ready to have babies like they won't be ready to breed for 10 15 until they're like 10 15 years old so if you kill too many sharks before they reach that age like you really like i mean they say that sharks won't be around in 50 years wow yeah just be due to the crazy overfishing of of them and there's a lot of there's a lot of marine life like that though there really is what are the other sides of uh the aquarium world like this that you could tell us that might not might paint a worse picture like like the sharks are importing illegal fish and coral yeah what can we at least bring awareness to so that now more people know that this is happening i mean i'd say first and foremost the some of those like bigger marine species like sharks and um and whales and all sorts of those those bigger marine life because you know they are the top of the food chain and so if you take the apex predator away which is the shark i mean the whole everything underneath just like starts just going um but for me like one of the things with the with the hobby is that i've been really excited to see is um aquariums is is an amazing hobby and yeah there are a lot of fish that are imported um from from different places in the world but um there's also like a massive effort right now it's not an effort it's happening of captive breeding fish for aquariums so like all throughout the united states and and as you saw with the stingray video people are breeding these animals and with the purpose of you know taking less from the ocean so that's amazing um and there's also um another i mean it's there's a lot of um you've seen sort of the rise of a lot of environmentalists like just coming down and coming in on everything and i feel like maybe the aquarium hobby has like felt that a little bit but there's just there are so many fish now being bred in captivity so it's a really positive thing and also coral too yep people are farming you know plants for their aquariums coral for the aquariums um and it's it's a lot better for the fish too because then those fish and those animals are raised under you know certain conditions that allow them to live healthier and happier and longer lives in aquariums yeah that's what i like like uh andrew sin city corals shout out link down below in the description but he's grown all this stuff in his huge like 600 gallon tank just breaks off a little piece puts it in my tank and one day i could break off a piece for somebody else jack when you set up your reef tank i'll break off a little piece i'll give that to you thank you i'll give you a good price too so let's go back to your business right now so you decided to give this a shot full time how was that transition for you um well it was exciting um you know it was something that i never thought was gonna be possible like i said my junior year of college even actually up until my senior year of college i remember sitting in my dorm room thinking this is never going to work like this would be my dream job but i'm never going to be able to go to my parents and tell them i want to do this full time and then after my viral video you know things changed i was able to immediately like start understanding the whole algorithm how that works you know just the whole business side of it and i picked up on it really fast i think you know as a combination of me also just maturing as a person like finishing college right and um and and you know i've been doing youtube a long time but i was also like living my life and growing up and like doing all the normal kid things so i wasn't like intensely focused on how do i like crack this algorithm i was just like by sheer like not chance but by coincidence maybe like i was hitting a lot of different like good things for the algorithm and like how to do it like a like my thumbnails and stuff like we're pretty good and like sometimes i have videos that would blow up um you know a couple of couple hundred thousand views but once i was able to like get a bunch of other youtubers to like show me how much they were making and like why they were making that and for me to realize okay you need a lot of views like you need volume right to get you know for for all these like the little the money to add up um that's when you know i i just like put it all together and i was like okay i can do this what did you oh wait what did you want to do originally um well my original plan yeah my original plan like from high school was i i mean i really wanted to play professional basketball not in the nba like overseas so my dad uh is from greece and so like you know a dream of mine was to like go play in greece for a couple years and be by like some of my family out there and just like learn the language more and just like just you know enjoy that but college basketball i mean it was it was great it was fun but you know by year four just all sports in general they're very political i gotten very burnt out of that and just um and i was i accepted the opportunity to youtube very happily you know i was like wow okay this is something very exciting and also is happening so fast that i didn't want to like miss it you know my channel went from like 60 000 to like 160 000 in a month or two and so i and i think momentum is one of the most important things so i wanted to capitalize on that momentum and you know basically about a month before i graduated i hired my first editor cameraman and just and went got straight to work basically how much were you making at the time that you graduated college um like what was my final like adsense like months yeah yeah of college i think i was probably somewhere like in the like six six thousand seven thousand so if you're making six to seven thousand dollars a month i'm sure telling your parents that you wanted to do that full time out of college it wasn't like a very difficult conversation no it wasn't it was definitely like you know they can see the number and say hey this is very like yeah and and they knew that that's what i wanted to do i have just the most supportive parents even from as you know like my mom going with the saltwater crime from the beginning like they just they they they knew that's what i wanted to do and um and they were just like very happy to see me like doing it and also being able to earn good money doing it i think my parents would have been okay with me like going out on a limb and trying to you know whatever i would want to do in my life if i made no money from in the beginning like i have the type of parents that would encourage me to still go for if that's what i was passionate about um so i'm really lucky for that um but also like one thing that i didn't mention was aqua shella and that start we we started aqua shallow aquarium festival my junior year of college and um you gotta explain what aqua shella is yeah okay so this is an interesting story so basically throughout college i was like getting paid to go to different aquarium conventions to do like their media to do advertising for them and i you know after about two or three of them it just sort of got like boring to me and i thought hey there's got to be like a better way than like this old traditional convention right so um my friend and i we saw there was there was actually an aquarium event that that year for whatever reason it was like i think it was mismanaged or something decided to leave chicago chicago being my hometown i thought there's a massive opportunity here right like they've been doing this event for five six years there's they've obviously built up this market i'm not don't know why they're leaving but hey like why don't we capitalize this so um now my business partner but um my good friend at the time his name's sean hale so he works as a manufacturer in the industry and because he had been attending all these events as a manufacturer you know buying sponsorships to the events buying booths to the event he had that side of the industry on lockdown he had lots of experience in that world and he's a lot older than i am actually so he's 36 so he just been in business for a long time and had a lot of also a good experience and just all you know corporate uh and other facets of business but we started this event my junior year we're like okay we we need a name so i was like we need some really cool name and coachella was happening around that time naturally i was like why don't we do like aquacella no no i get the name that's a good name did it before no so this is what happened yeah but you might not have gotten it because what happened was about a month or two i'm thinking of cello cello like a cello like a like a musical instead like a cello i don't know a month or two in we actually got a cease and desist from from coachella saying like we have a chella trademark are you serious yeah and we but we had like used that first two months of marketing like blown up because coachella was happening that time and everyone was like aquachella like this is great we got like 10 000 uh people on our facebook page like right away so it blew up like from the start and with the marketing that i put behind it um it just like it was pretty close to like a interesting success what did i do for the marketing yeah no what did you do afterwards it gave you a season did you try to fight it at all so we pivoted we're like no we're not going to like fight this guy call it something else like isn't there another way to spell chella well we so we pivoted an a with a little you know yeah we pivoted to we pivoted to aqua shella which actually ended up being i think better yeah yeah so sort of a blessing but then we've gotten the marketing from aqua so we changed it to aqua shell and basically for the next eight months i was studying abroad at the time so me and my business partner were on like different time zones like big time so i was staying up to like i was supposed to be studying abroad not playing basketball that was like supposed to be my break like just being with my friends out there like traveling in europe instead i sat in my flat in london and just got to work and i just started grinding every day on this event aqua shella and i everything i'd learned up until that point um you know i just started pouring into the marketing i was up probably most nights i'd say like the average at six a.m then i'd go to bed for like three hours my classmates would like wake me up at nine a.m to go to class i did that for like pretty much the entire two and a half month study abroad term and um it was it was difficult but i knew that i was building something that had like this massive potential um so then my junior year i finished i finished the study abroad went back home that summer i just kept working on it with my business partner for like the next three months all the way up until our first event which was in september um we did our first event we had like three i think it was like 3 500 people come almost 4 000 people attend the first one in chicago we it was like you guys seen fire festival like the documentary you've seen it did you see it no it's a it's a it's a show man you gotta watch you gotta watch it just gets crazier and crazier and crazier some of these things that they say for those who are unaware they they sold out this event claiming to be like the top event in the world people were paying like five to twenty five thousand dollars per ticket to go to the fire festival that was going to be on pablo escobar's old island but it turned out to be a giant scam they got there and they were like hurricane tense instead of like in instead of like you know luxury campsites is like oh and and then what went viral someone posted on twitter supposed to be like this hand chef curated meal from like the best chef in the world and it was this picture of a styrofoam plate with two pieces of bread on it yeah and like a piece of bologna and cheese no so they actually held it but you shouldn't be laughing it shouldn't be laughing at this but they get there and it's raining literally it's raining yeah and it's like all these like all these influencers like for you know that paid exorbitant amounts of money to go there being these like cabanas and it's just like a hurricane and it's like chaos nothing set up and like basically the whole thing was just like being called i felt called off so bad because the locals were really like this was big business for them because they don't get tourists yeah and so to have you know hundreds of really wealthy people flying and they're spending money they were paid like you know millions of dollars to set up for this thing and it turned out that they had worked really hard they didn't get paid i mean it was horrible who threw it uh what was his name uh it was just some it was some guy probably better not give him exposure but anyway this guy who's had a history of uh over-promising under-delivering taking money shutting down businesses getting investors all excited basically he basically took all the money spent it on himself and then just whatever was left over tried tried to make this as best as he could yeah he took like five million dollars and then like try to use like 50 000 to put on the event it didn't work yeah but um so that guy that whole thing that's exactly like i couldn't relate ever to anything more in my life that's how setting up aqua shella felt really yes to that degree like how much money you make um you bought the lamborghini and dude i would watch the gold rolex i wish i'm kidding it was yeah but it was it was chaotic yeah it was chaotic putting on events of this of that magnitude for thousands of people how many people were involved in just you and me and sean we were like really that first event it was just like us yeah it's you needed like 20 people on that and we just we do yeah a lot of things you forget like parking oh yeah security food like all the little things that you would never even consider like who's gonna check the tickets in the front it's how many people do you need yeah and so like we almost died like just from like exhaustion and and just like stress i think i think i must have aged like five years just in those few months but we put on the event we like barely and like the event went well like obviously there were the hiccups it's like the first one but we like just barely managed to like get out of it like and be okay and at the end of the day we didn't really walk home with much money like it was we didn't walk on with much money it was like we had a little bit of money left in the bank we had a lot of assets though to like the infrastructure for the facility like the whole set and everything and we had proven out this concept because it was like a very new thing all the all the indus the whole industry was like what is this going to be it's like is this some brave or is this an aquarium convention right they didn't quite understand it um and so we were able to like prove the concept like hey this new way of teaching people about aquariums getting people interested um you know and making it an event where like anyone could attend and they would just like love it they'd have a great time and just think it was like potentially like the most fascinating thing so that was like the whole idea behind it uh and aquacello basically is it's an aquarium convention but it's it incorporates elements of like a music or art festival and there's like this there's a massive art installations aquatic themed like with like uv uh paint so like under black light everything's glowing and it's just like it's it's a way to get a lot of people interested in the hobby a lot of the industry they weren't sure about it but all of the good deeds i'd done for companies in the years previous and also my business partner with you know same with him it all came back and in that moment we were like cash in on all that good karma a lot of people helped support that first one but we didn't make a lot of money on for the first one so then my business partner was like dude we just worked eight months on this event unpaid and we still we didn't really make much like what i don't know what you want to do and i was like we now that we have all of the assets we have the whole infrastructure the set and everything all we have to do is take this pick it up move it to a different city and run it there and we should be we should make money that this time and he's like you're crazy you're telling me like after eight months and he works his own full-time job as a manufacturer he's like you want to you want to do this again that was absolute hell and you're telling me to do it again for another six months so yeah let's do it in your hometown and so he's from dallas so we did our second one in dallas six months later and that was my senior year of college keep in mind i'm still playing college basketball while i'm working on my youtube channel aqua shella and um and school yeah so yeah i mean my senior year it was we actually lined up the dates perfectly so that the event was going to happen over spring break so i had off from school and um and we we did our second one in dallas and it went it just went crazy like we were on good morning texas we had like 7 000 people show up people were like moms people were just coming up to me like crying like begging to get in we had sold out the fire marshal shut us down because we're like over capacity wow it was just like it was insane it was it was it was crazy and um and we took a whole team that time we and we had grown a little bit more of a team we had some of the artists we had like some more staff we'd actually it's really interesting after our first one we had someone reach out they wanted to buy a franchise in new orleans they're like we want to do this in new orleans like will you sell us one uh my business partner was like kind of entertaining i was like no can you say how much they offered uh yeah i think they wanted like it was like 35k or 40k for it but it's just the franchise and then you would get to keep a portion of the profits too yeah i think there would have been like a royalty or something yeah but i was like hey no i don't trust anyone else to run this event the way we do so we actually took that guy and we turned him into our we brought him onto our team he's actually one of our show managers now and um so that's been great but yeah we expanded our team and um the dallas one um i mean the line was insane to try to get it i mean it was went on for so long and uh but we did make money and we made a good amount of money and how much every once how much we made like um i'd say that first aqua shallow we made like um like almost a hundred thousand split between you and your yeah almost a hundred thousand and and that's that's including the assets that you including the assets which and we had actually built up even more assets because we had like built onto this side even more um so yeah i mean i basically then i went back to college for my last two months of college and that was a really interesting two months for me because like it was i went back to college immediately after being like submerged in this like um i think you know how it feels when you can't go back you can't yeah you're surrounded by like children correct it's like what's going on this is weird yes you're like oh my god like the conversations that a lot of my friends were having i went out to the bar that weekend and like people you know susie's like talking about the hockey player that won't give her a look yeah and i'm like did you see what last week was what spencer said man and he's like dude i got better things right yeah exactly and i just it was really hard for me because i i really like i couldn't relate with anyone at college anymore like all these kids were doing these not internships but like internships or like gearing up for like and i was just like in two months you guys are graduating yeah like what are you guys doing like get it together man like you're talking about the hockey player that won't give you that won't look at you like you have much more important things to worry about like so you know that was that was kind of interesting um and you know it was also like i had um i was i was sort of depressed for like a week after that event because well i was depressed and i was happy but you know uh you spent so much time like months and months just focusing on this one day of the year how it's going to go and then it just happens and when it's over just like it's over did you miss it or no it was like just like you know i this is going to be weird that i'm comparing myself to this or what but you know that feeling that like postpartum when women like get have don't know that no no you don't i've heard of have you heard it yes i've heard of it have you heard of postpartum and like women have their baby yeah and they're just like they feel like emotion the flood of hormones and yes right they feel like empty though because like they were carrying something for nine months and then it's just not there anymore and like they feel like something's missing um i've actually heard it on a lot of different podcasts like business owners who sell their businesses for like 20 100 million dollars whatever it's like the saddest day of their lives because they're just like i got nothing to do tomorrow yeah like i just sold my company like so they got 100 million in their pocket but like they have no purpose so like i i sort of felt that a little bit and we actually now have coined it because a lot of it was it wasn't just me like a lot of our staff got it and we coined it the aqua shell of blues we had like grown-ass men with like yeah we're like supposed to be doing like uh with power tools like crying after the event because they're like i'm gonna miss you all like this was so crazy and so much fun and like so yeah it's just it's become a really big team effort and um and and yeah when when i got back to college and that check hit my bank account it was after basically a whole year of working on it um that along with my youtube channel finally clicking it was like everything had just like come together and i was like i just remember sitting in my dorm room and and i was like kind of emotional because it just was like i just figured it out yeah and this whole time i didn't know what i was going to do after school necessarily and i that was my dream so how many do you host now we actually this year have expanded our to our third one in orlando so in besides if you don't count the pandemic year in two years we've grown to three one chicago one in dallas and one in orlando so the one in orlando is coming up june 12th and 13th uh 2021 and it's gonna be crazy and then dallas you're telling me is on halloween yeah this year we've moved dallas to be on halloween and we're gonna call it aqua shellaween and so it's it's crazy we should go i think i want to dude it's going to be cool because i think we're going to be able to pull like incorporate elements of a haunted house into what is already very like has a bit of that that element to it so i think we'll be able to pull like a really ridiculous crowd you should get a clown fish as like the orange and the black and look something like that or it was what is it the achilles tang yeah achilles tang yeah well we i don't know if you've seen like some of the promotional like stuff we have but not for the halloween we bought these massive inflatables for like to put outside the event spaces so we bought this like 30 foot by 30 foot inflatable clownfish that just like sits outside the event it's filled with air and and yeah i mean there's a lot of different things like that where my business partner has been like are you sure you want to spend you know that kind of money on something like that i'm like yes like this is how you get people excited about an event right this is how you uh you you should tell people like and i think that also resonates with people i mean i think it's most the time when when you when you see people putting a lot of effort into something like you're way more willing to buy into it so yeah you know what uh george reminds me of uh the strad man of reef tanks dude i actually see that yeah i actually see that strad man you're the strad man of aquariums tell me about strat man you don't know the strat man wow very positive very genuine yeah uh yeah the stride man has one of the largest car channels okay out there i'm not the biggest car guy really okay so that's why i don't know but yeah but but of the car niche you have like doug demiro uh you have another one daily driven exotics and a few other ones but but strad man's like near the top and for the reef aquarium i feel like you got the you're the strat man of the reef aquarium watch the strat mate you're going to see the resemblance like very the way that you talk and carry yourself yeah yeah cool it's it's it's accomplished it's a i hope this man is a cool guy yeah he's extremely likable he is yeah uh so can you walk us through the numbers right now of your business of uh my youtube business or my everything yeah everything you're comfortable discussing they want the numbers yeah um well i mean youtube we'll start with youtube i mean it's nice because i've built this uh foundation my audience is is education based right like teaching people how to set up aquariums so uh because i've done like everything really um because i took all i always took the extra steps to like fact check everything i was saying and make sure like everything was the proper way to to educate people a lot of aquarium brands really respect my channel which isn't that's not always common with you know animal pet channels um so i mean as far as sponsorships go i've been able to like land some these like good good long term sponsorships um it's tough because like aquarium brands don't always they're not gonna like want to pay as much as like a big court like big corporate brand would uh because they just like they're not used to working with influencers right so sometimes you really gotta like i mean that's that's been uh also part of like what took me i think so long to start generating more money for my channel um was just for them to like realize that versus maybe some other bigger companies realize it quicker but i mean what do you want to know uh just like could you just give us a call yeah we could see your analytics or just like an estimation do you want to just see it yeah all right you tell me now it's crazy like aquariums like it doesn't have the cpm you guys have which i'm very jealous of because sometimes i feel like i am working very very hard for like let's see these consistent views oh man look at that are you going to like my my yearly yeah yeah well just for the last 28 it's almost it's it's like same views every day that's really good same subscribers every day the ah that's cpm yeah it's just not it's it's not nowhere near yours it's like 25 a quarter yeah uh you guys you trust me you do not know how good you have it because i think most of youtube is has my cpm i'd say like 75 percent of youtube is this what i have so you guys really are i don't know if you like you just get grow not grossly overpaid but like you just get paid so much more for the same amount of work that i do well this is uh this is interesting 30 of your audience is in the united states for us it's like 85 percent yeah now that so that went down my u.s base went down a little bit just because like when i went overseas for almost a year yeah doing different videos um philippines that's why your cpm is going to be a lot lower though yeah yeah i mean if the cpm before i went and i did all these trips was wasn't too far off though and i know aquarium other aquarium youtubers have a very similar cpm to me that don't make it like travel content yeah but it's a it's the audience demographics so they have like similar audience demographics no i'm saying like percent usa no i'm saying like they're probably like 80 usa and they have the same cpm like it is the topic trust me it is i've like triple checked with pretty much every aquarium youtuber and i mean my cpm is what they make as well it's not just the international thing so but in addition to that then you also have sponsorships supplementing that yeah so i have some sponsorships that i have on the yearly side and again like some of those some of those i'll sacrifice on the dollar amount just because there's like a lot of good synergy with like what how what they can do for me right like they can provide me with tanks or like you know lots of travel costs or just like do you want to give a shout out uh one of my biggest sponsors is fritz aquatics and that's the company that my business partner for aqua shella uh that's the company he works for okay so i gotta say you sent me the fritz uh turbo start yes start my tank amazing product insane insane you sent me an entire gallon that was shipped in like this temperature controlled box yeah to keep it cool and i dumped in this bacteria that like turbo starts the tank as a cycle like it's it's the bacteria that you'll normally wait weeks to generate that you could start almost within like a few days they claim that you can put fish in there the same day as turbo start they claim that because the um the bacteria they culture in their facility in dallas is like and they ship it refrigerated overnight it's like so dense and it's just like so concentrated i put this in the tank it's just clouded the tank for temporarily obviously it's all bacteria but it's their most popular product and um and it's it's like a very easy product for me to promote as well because like everyone when they're setting up tanks like needs turbo start you can even throw turbo start in your existing tank just like add the bacteria levels uh to like bring them up yeah so you can't you can never overdose it either so but like fritz aquatics is is my longest one um and the way i met sean who is the business partner for aqua shelly he um it's so funny so he was a sponsor for like a different aquarium convention i remember he was like attending it as with like as a sponsor with a booth vendor booth and the that show asked me to interview him since he was a platinum sponsor and i was on doing the marketing so like we still have this video which is crazy to watch now like four i think four years ago like us just sitting on some like fritz salt buckets like just talking i never you know we both didn't realize at the time that would turn into a friendship that would then also later turn into now the biggest aquarium event in north america which is aqua shella so i got to try the salt too do the salt and you see reef crystals yeah it's a big yeah it's okay it's a big upgrade from reef crystals briefcase just is uh you know a lot of the salts are very similar but the bigger difference with fritz salt is like it'll mix clear like really quickly and there's no residue in the container um it's like very uh it's like almost like a powder okay so yeah and i've used their salt my tanks for for years and they've been able to grow their company what's so interesting is now everyone wants to like now every manufacturer i think really wants to do marketing and advertising with me fritz aquatics got in like from the very start because i don't know what i mean sean saw something in me as like a young college kid when my channel was at like 10 000 subscribers and he was willing to invest and um and um you know so i'm very thankful and i'm very loyal to that brand for that reason we've grown together it's like uh it's sort of like david dobrik and see geek like my brand like with fritz is just they're synonymous cool so yeah it's one of my favorite it's called favorite sponsor so you have the youtube ad revenue yeah i got my youtube sponsorships mm-hmm aqua aqua it's taking place once a year three times a year three times a year three times a year yeah how how would you divide it if you had like a yeah what percentages would you allocate to different income sources i'd say like 50 of my revenue is youtube a third of my revenue is uh aqua shella and the rest is like merch sponsorships like in like miscellaneous cool you were telling me too that you're diversifying into real estate yeah so that's that's what i've been doing with all the money that i'm making from youtube aqua shella i've just really i've been putting it almost exclusively into real estate why real estate uh well my dad is um he's a real estate investor and he's also just a serial entrepreneur so he's been in so many different like businesses in his life um i should i should just say he's a investor because he doesn't only invest in real estate i guess he'll invest in kind of like you you reminded me a lot of him when you're talking about like oh i bought this car because like it was such a good deal that's exactly how my dad is like my dad has bought some just the most random things and got into some very interesting business ventures just because they were like very good entry deals right like he could he stole them essentially so um yeah i mean we were raised sort of with like uh to have with that entrepreneur spirit but also i think like with a little bit of like a mercenary mentality like our dad always pushed us like to make money like you know he's an immigrant from greece he came from nothing and i mean that was obviously very inspiring for all my brothers and i to to see you know for him to go if you see like the village that he's from in greece and the fact that he was like walking around at 10 years old there with like no shoes like i don't even think he has a story that he didn't try a banana until he was like 15 or something like it's then for him to come to the america and live the american dream you know he's he's uh put a lot of that into us and so you know we were born to you know raised with this idea like you know america is an amazing place with so much opportunity go go get it you know like take advantage of it it's also something i've been able to realize just traveling to as many countries as i've been to because like i think now i'm at 25 25 different countries and um yeah when you really when you go out there and you see different parts of the world you'll come back to realize just how how much opportunity there is here and there's a lot of people that say the american dream is dead i mean it's not what it was maybe for immigrants like 20 30 years ago right with like the doors wide open to certain industries but like still america so much more opportunity than the majority of other countries how were you able to manage real estate doing all that at the same time do you want rental properties flips um it's actually it's it's all commercial real estate so um i mean my younger brother is actually is he he's he's here where is he my younger brother your younger brother's here i do have a younger brother and his name is yani i heard a rumor that if you say yanni three times in a row he shows up let's try it ready yanni hey guys what's going on this is my younger brother this is my younger brother yanni he's he uh hey he's two years younger than me but uh he has a rope he's like right yeah what kind of rope is that it looks like versace it looks like versace it's not as expensive because of the amount of money i lost at a casino this weekend but yeah uh it turned out it's my last friend's 21st birthday so i came to vegas and it's good timing because we've got a real estate guru right here cool that's what we're getting into i want to hear about the real estate between you so what have you bought so the niche that we found is industrial properties and basically what we do is tour a lot of them and make really low offers so we make really good deals happen somewhere where we can find a single tenant for an industrial property so like auto repair shops car washes garages and they're really just low maintenance properties so it's perfect for him and it's perfect really for for anyone yeah anyone it's not like it's exclusive to anyone but um one of the reasons we like these like commercial that niche that yani just said is like he said they're very low maintenance so what we found is that uh if you buy like a commercial piece of real estate with an elevator you are like you are going to constantly be getting phone calls about the elevator not working or like the air conditioning units are like not working like there's as you know there's a lot of different problems and come up with real estate uh like and if you you can't you can't predict them and sometimes they are can even be very expensive fixes right so we realize that like garages are the type like it's an interesting property type because the people who are using garages are mechanics they're handymen so if their air conditioning unit goes out or anything isn't working they don't call you they'll just fix it themselves and so it's like one of the lowest i think it may be the lowest maintenance type of real estate to buy and that's why we were so attracted to it but yeah um like george was talking about earlier our dad has um he's like involved in almost every business you could pro possibly imagine and through 40 years of doing real estate he's just got so many headaches from so many different things so finding this um this niche where you really don't even see your tenant for a year or two after you sign a lease it just worked out perfect for him because he can put the money in and not really have to to manage the properties which is also some um we have a there's another um niche that we're looking forward to it's like foreclosure properties where i think a lot of people want to look for like flips but uh something we're thinking about doing which we can't because the covid right now and the uh the courts are closed we can't get eviction notices to get people out because we want to rent them out for section 8 housing yeah so how many properties do you have now i have three so i have three garages uh i have five garages how much how much you guys making from this uh each garage is about i think we net about so they're not leases and the um tenant usually pays 5 000 rent is what we look for and then what's your take home after that after uh well i guess you're not paying taxes or anything on that but do you do you have to pay insurance no so actually the you pay insurance well they pay the rent and the property taxes right is this triple net yeah so we basically i mean it's about net 5000 per property a month to yeah you have luggage yeah i mean we put about 25 down so what's the cash flow like on these oh it's very good you're looking at each year like sometimes like 20 to 30 percent potentially it's it's like okay so so on five you're walking away with about 2200 a month net to you in your pocket i would say it's close to like three let's say it's close like three grand a month per property yeah so three times nine thousand dollars a month from rent in these properties net 25 like so it's a great return because each property i think mine mine the average cost of mine is about between like 175 to like two like three hundred usually like 150 and 300 thousand dollars is like the average property cost and then you take home about 60 60 000 a year so that's really high roi what areas well so we're doing it in chicago but these properties exist everywhere which is really cool wait how is that wait so let's say 300 grand it's renting at 5 000 a month triple net so five what is it 60 so you're getting a 33 yeah roi you have to understand yeah so you have to understand how hard we work for these properties so there's a lot of people that will go out and they'll buy like um they'll buy like a lot well they'll be very aggressive right on like a really nice looking piece of real estate or something that looks really good there's always a ton of uh buyers even right now at the housing market like people are like not overpaying but giving like 10 20 over asking price right so it's the same idea with like most real estate however what we do is like we play the waiting game and so what we'll do is like we'll put in an offer which is like very very low sometimes solo that they'll bad mouth us so get on the phone and just say you know piss off right but then we'll just kind of hang around we'll stick around and like six months later we'll be like hey what do you think about our offer still and they will sometimes still tell us to piss off up until like amy can go for like sometimes like 12 months like up to like what's some some of the longest ones like the third year there are so many of these industrial single tenant properties i mean if you take your car and you drive around chicago every single corner is going to have one every corner yeah so every week we're setting up meetings to go see i mean he's not doing this so much but i'm setting up meetings to go see these properties and after a day i'll get a list of the equipment and then i'll submit an offer and whatever the asking price is i do fifty percent so if it's if they're asking 500 000 they just gotta double their price they gotta double their price then all of a sudden you'll offer them asking instead of 500 okay i want a mill all right so i mean it's a waiting game what ends up happening is like because yani's going out and making so many like not so many offers but just like making a decent amount of these offers on a basically um you know most real estate or people will say like how do you ever buy real estate then because no one will actually accept that offer but like once in a blue moon not even a blue moon like just every once in a while like 12 months like you find like a really motive that's the key that's the key is you have to find a very motivated uh seller right someone who is like in you know wants the cash right away um like i don't know maybe like their spouse who owned the the building like died and like they don't know what to do with it they don't even know how to manage it they just they don't even so they just want to get rid of it liquidate it so you have to find a very motivated seller um and you know but and sometimes that and that typically happens after 12 months of them not getting their asking price right so and then sometimes they'll i mean they'll accept it and so they'll and you jump at it but what happens if you put in enough of these offers like your offer it's like the deals that you're making are on offers that you started sometimes up to a year ago so you you know it kind of takes some time right but eventually once you are doing it long enough like you just start getting you know the time catches up right yeah the risk here is that if you get a tenant someone moves out finding a replacement tenant for yeah would be difficult yeah isn't always actually a problem because for a lot of these properties it's their owner users so you find the motivated sellers from the sellers when they're retiring from using the shop so they they're they're looking to get out of the business and additionally they leave all the equipment behind yeah so it's not so hard like we've gotten some prop some of these properties where there's no one we need to find a tenant with all the equipment's inside so for two of them i just picked up the phone and like we're aggressive we're like we take an aggressive stance on everything we do so i'll just call around every surrounding neighborhood every area and i'll talk and i'll ask to speak to the owner or manager and i'll say hey we have another turnkey operation business we're just investors looking for a tenant um all the equipment's inside we need a uh security deposit and first month's rent and you can get going right away good business yeah is it a good business keep doing that what do you what do you let's see jack you better see something nothing that's just that's enough it's 30 that's just jack that's what you should be doing do that what you're going to encourage me to do that listen 30 that's shocking 30 yeah that's time away from work graham that's shawn not if it's triple net that's true true um so i heard we were kind of chatting before filming this podcast because he wasn't wearing socks okay and it's kind of an issue because if our guest isn't wearing socks or if one of us isn't wearing socks including socks yeah but your socks last episode they had a they had a hole in them a big hole we got some comments and your feet were poking through yeah we got comments about your feet uh so i i like how brooks starts recording as soon as we're talking about my feet i let you borrow my socks so you could cover up your feet right and uh you know i said we get a lot of comments about the feet on this podcast so everyone usually wears socks and then you said that you you've sold i mean if you're getting you guys were speaking about people messaging you to buy your the pictures of your feet i didn't say no no no george was saying this is what happened so i sat down on this couch right and i didn't come here with socks on because i'm enjoying the heat in vegas i'm from chicago so um then as soon as i asked well are my feet gonna be in the shot and they said yeah and i said oh no no way am i doing this podcast with no socks on at least not for free right no at least not for free pay me and how much did you want you said jack you have to pay me if you want to see my feet yeah jack just said how much yeah you'd have to pay me a lot actually i feel like you could easily get janna to do that for look man i'll use it as my down payment john is an entrepreneur whatever it takes is the price opportunist wait so so people have actually asked they've asked for feed pictures from you for money haven't they asked you guys no i wanted to buy my shoes and i seriously i think i think i'm gonna be doing it but the only the only thing is that we got to get the offer higher because he offered a price where it's like it's the cost of the shoe i'm not gonna send him shoes worth the price wasn't like 400 bucks no it was less it was under that we're not gonna we're not gonna get the exact price because we don't want to lowball ourselves here right but it was a price it was like that's the cost of the shoe at a certain price on a pair of shoes i don't like uh maybe haven't worn a little bit i'm gonna i'll send them off there's a price for everything so yeah so what what was your experience by the way i'm trying to sell my bath water it's on grahamstefstore.com five thousand dollars no one has got it yet it's a gallon too it's not just a cup it's one gallon think of shipping on that i have an idea how much are you asking i could flip it five thousand dollars why don't we why don't we use that for an aquarium what great water in an aquarium yeah would it be safe for a human just to dip in an aquarium oh that's what you're wearing you don't want to wear like sunscreens and stuff like that oh it's inside why would you wear sunscreen if it's inside if you if you're outside with some chemicals yeah chemicals in the aquarium but i mean i just i don't know i thought it was just common it was funny because when we got you know i i thought it was common like everyone every influencer gets like asked for fifa so you you've gotten asked did you sell your feed pictures or um i did not i did not although it is very very tempting sometimes because it was the highest offer you guys i feel like it wouldn't uh highest offer was like two i don't know like a few hundred bucks wow dude come on it's like what is it that's the thing if you're just saying this isn't in it though what if it's just like that's what i'm saying is like yeah it's it's so to me at least it's innocent like hey how are people gonna know they're my feet and then b like whatever if people like are in defeat like i don't care you can be into whatever you want like 300 bucks for like some photos that really do take you a minute to take me like even less than a minute they take me 10 seconds and i mean he probably went up a little bit it's tempting but i i knew immediately what you were referring to when you're like oh no george like you better get some socks yeah i was like you bring me some socks i don't want defeat people defeat people i don't want i don't want them i want them to they better i don't know i'd rather than focus on the conversation sure you know i'm sure my feet are saying you're about to get a little yeah man that's a request that's a strong community listen yeah this for the fee people out there we should be getting a percentage of this because this right now is free promotion so if you sell if you sell any feed pictures from this we'll link it down below we want 20 percent yeah 10 of 10 10 gross that's too much driving traffic you could set up an instagram you know for georgia's feet [Music] we just want 10 whatever whatever business you decide to do dude i'm we're getting 30 percent gram i don't i mean we're getting 30 percent we don't want we're giving you the traffic we'll take 30 percent no no wait wait wait we're getting 30 on real estate we don't want oh yeah we get 90 honestly to take a picture of your feet uh jack will do it for free graham would you saw photos of your feet what is it for the right price or what what is that price oh jeez uh i mean honestly a thousand dollars it's like a thousand dollars yeah that's a lot of money a thousand dollars dude literally someone says jack i want to see my feet dude i see your feet all the time bro i see them all the time you must have someone else you don't have a picture they're all right i don't have a picture where you could look at it dude i could get one when you're not looking it would be so easy dude i would sell a picture of my foot for 20 bucks like literally it takes me 10 seconds why does it matter it's not for me a thousand dollars is the price where if it ever got out that i had sold pictures of my feet no one could ever look at that and be like i wouldn't have done i would people would pat me on that they would applaud everyone gmail.com a thousand dollars and it will send inquiries even if it's you know someone that's just associated with us andre if you want to get pictures of feet of andre let us know in your price to prove it's my feet is they could have me write something on my foot that only they would know so so it's like a time stamp like initial blank i have no your if i sell 10 pictures of my feet i'll reinvest that money back into creating some sort of nft one of them for your feet one of one of my left foot i want to save the right one in case i need it but one better one do you have a better foot what do you have a better foot no they're the same thing but it's like i'll keep one foot to myself what kind of toes you have you know how people people have like different types of toes like oh yeah the middle one will be out yeah yeah yeah you don't want to spoil the secret man no actually let's not spoil the secret yeah i was gonna say something that would reveal the type of foot i have but i just didn't want to spoil the secret did you actually create the email yeah grahamstuffandfeet gmail.com we created the email we we actually did create the email i'd be surprised but i just just making it clear money has to be paid up front don't worry i mean it's not like we're not gonna we're not gonna you know go back but but it'll have to be sent up front before i said anything so i think that's fair yeah or me or alex yeah jack is only 20 bucks so well we'll see we'll get jack that's enough to go get a nice meal and if i can pay for a meal in 15 seconds in the box [Music] all right all right so what that said you guys thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it we'll link to all of your information down below in the description where you can also get feed pictures make sure to also destroy the like button subscribe button and notification bell and also you can get a free stock worth all the way up to 70 dollars when you sign up for public using link in the description code gram 70 and you'll have a chance to win a completely free stock of tesla so you may as well do that it's pretty much like free money thank you guys so much for coming on thanks you guys so much for watching and until next time see now you're loose enough now you're going to kill it all right