Confronting My Ex Boss

what's up you guys i just want to take a moment and give you a background on today's guest when i was 12 years old i started working part-time at a company that sold salt water fish and coral and it was this job that really shaped the entire way looked at life work and business my old boss chris who you're about to see here was the one who gave me a chance and set me up on the trajectory that would eventually turn into real estate and now today on youtube but i left that company when i was 17 years old and since then we have not seen or spoken with each other in over 14 years until now here's that conversation and i'm excited to introduce the person who's made all of this possible in the first place so enjoy welcome to the 57th ever iced coffee hour my name is chris turnier and so far this podcast has made eight thousand seven hundred and eighteen dollars or seventy four cents wow that was good i'm shocked that was perfect i met a loss of words that was the best one i think we've had so far ever i don't believe it it's true you're lying you're lying jack never lies it's it's true i can see it in his face he lies good more importantly it's yeah it's an honor to have you here an honor to have you here it really is i i am being honest when i say this this is the episode that i have been looking forward to for years like before even the iced coffee hour before youtube being able to do something like this i've been looking forward to this now you obviously know based on the title but you're my first boss ever back when i was i think 12 or 13 years old no that's like i don't think so i don't think it was quite i think you're i think so i don't know i think you're seventh grade if you're lying i think jack is lying jack is lying yeah they're always a bunch um yeah i mean i get i'm because when i left for fiji it was 2007. and so where were you in 2007. barely using i was barely leaving the company in 2007. right so but at that point you were you regret you graduated high school i think right and then you flunked out you flunked out of college because i was like no yeah and then and because of reefer madness yeah because of my because of my company yeah so and then so i mean we weren't robbing cribs at that point but so yeah i i don't know i mean i i'm trying to remember i couldn't at that point i'm not sure if you were working for me for four years or five years i'm not sure yeah i think i was 12 or 13 when i started working with you and for those that are aware you say reefer madness yes and people are going to assume it's reefer something else i'm thinking the reefer is it not no it is not it is not smoke it's a reefer because we are technically reefers yes so reefers basically mean that you're keeping a reef tank it's an aquarium with corals and tropical fish and um yeah it's a it's a crazy addictive hobby yeah that i've been doing for a long long time so um and still just as addicted to this day right it's something so when i was 12 years old when i was i yeah i think it was either 11 i was 11 years old i was 11 years old and i got bit by the saltwater aquarium bug and my mom was not was not about the salt water tanks she thought it needed too much maintenance but my dad was on board with it and so we ended up getting a saltwater tank set up and at that time i would spend all of my time all my free time basically after school on like reefcentral.com which was basically it's a forum of other aquarium enthusiasts who would come together and talk about their love for like keeping fish and coral and we would share our like thoughts of and about husbandry and like how to grow this stuff and i would be getting home from school and basically from like 4 p.m to 9. i was on reefcentral.com just like posting and there were live people on the other end that were getting back to you no they're robots yes kidding no you're mostly wrong the good life who do you think you're talking about yeah they're crazy crazy sort of question on it if you go online on the forum who's on the other side it's a who would foreign be crazy a dick oh so it's a human humans it's a form it's imaginary thousands of users yes like imagine reddit yeah okay but imagine before reddit and communities like that there were bulletin boards and forums which would basically be a website that you go to with like different i know i've been on forums before okay so that's what it was so there's humans on the other end yes what forums do you go on where there's not a human on the other end i'm just saying it just you know all right get it clear so there are other people on the other end were you one of these other people you use the forms yes i was actually at one point i i did a lot of because there was a lot of questions about specific corals and how to care for them and what this is and what that is and where to put it in your aquarium and so and so forth so i would go on there try to id stuff try to tell people what their care was it was a lot of work but yes i used to do that a lot yeah so i was really into this and i would say maybe when i was like 13 years old there was this guy his name was dave and this sounds super sketchy like looking back at this like if i had a kid i'd be super sketched out if the kid comes and say hey i want to go over to this guy's house and see his aquarium how old is he i don't know in his 40s and he wants to invite me over to his house to look at his pictures and he's pretty sketch he's a great guy but he's really nice guys super nice guy so this guy dave and cerzero dave and i had talked online for a did he say he was 40 online or did you know that when you met him that's a robot it sounds ridiculous so i was talking to this guy dave online and he was on reef central and he was posting what's called a frag swap and basically what this is i know it's i know it sounds ridiculous what this was is when when other aquarium hobbies would get together they would frag a piece of their core like they'd basically chip off a piece of the coral and they'd trade it with other people and you could grow it dave wanted to do a frag swap which is basically [Laughter] he was the only one there at the frag swap yeah so he was doing this big backyard frag swap we're basically all the guys online we're going to get it sounds it sounds it's just laughing over there it's just a way to say i mean there's no other way to explain it right anyway it was called the backyard's frag swap and i'm sorry i'm sorry can you move my mic or something i'm sorry keep going a backyard frag swap and people would get together and sell their fish and coral and little pieces of it and i was like 13 years old and i begged my mom i wanted to go to the frag swap so my mom said yes we can go to the frag swamp and we got there early by the way so she could meet dave and so she met dave dave was a really nice guy like over the top nice like the type that he just he just wanted to help a kid out and he saw like how into fish and coral i was so everything that day was was so much fun i was able to meet a lot of it as soon as we were able to meet a lot of the people online that i was talking to like on the forums and i think it was a local forum right it was los angeles southern california southern california yeah so it was called the southern california reefers yeah yes there's how the reefers come in so i was able to meet all these people that i talked to online and i don't think any of them knew how old i was because i just had my screen name online i don't think i really was your screen name i'm not gonna say it's insane because then people are going to be able to look it up say it i don't even remember ultimate reefer so embarrassed pineapple house oh that's right yeah i remember yep really i really like spongebob i really like spider and so i figured pineapple i don't know okay so now you can look me up on on reef central but anyway so that was my screen and people didn't know how how old i was but anyway so i show up there and everyone has like a little name tag in my pineapple house graham and i'd show up and uh and basically meet everybody and i was so excited to be able to buy like pieces of fish and coral and you had uh a friend and employee andy who was basically sent to this frank swap to represent the business of reefer madness reefer madness was one of the biggest spawn one you were a big sponsor on reefer madness um madness was a big sponsor of reef central so you'd always see the banner at the top for reefer madness and andy was sent there to be a representative of free for madness so i met andy selling a few pieces of fish and i think it at that point i don't think you sell pieces of fish or sorry in this importantly say it again if you do pieces of fish they're you know it's more like sushi that would be really expensive sushi again like a blue tang like a little nemo i can say that i don't know but little pieces of that usually on the rice yeah you can't frag a fish okay thanks for clarifying okay yeah i don't know it's been a while since you've had a tank so you might have forgotten so so andy was selling pieces of coral there and i think dave made the introduction to andy and i was like enamored that like someone from reefer madness was there and i think andy said that i could come by the warehouse and just check it out and i told my mom like we could go after school we could go to the warehouse i could take a look at this which warehouse do you i mean you'd probably get that so it was at this at the pacific aqua farms walt smith smith it was by uh lax and my mom said yes so we connected with andy drove down to reefer madness and you were there and i remember the first time i was there being like blown away like this was a kid in a candy store moment because i had my my aquarium set up and going to like the local fish store is one thing but being able to go into a wholesaler of like i don't know 10 20 30 000 square feet of fish and coral all in like huge light it's just long raceways you're right yep watercolors hundreds of fish thousands of corals and to see this i was just like blown away that like this exists and everything you could ever want was like was there and so i was introduced to chris and i think i was just so blown away at like looking at everything and i knew all the names of everything i studied every name of every coral out there and i could be like oh that was a montipora capricorn so this is a acropora nobilis and like just all these names and i think you offered me a position where like if i wanted to come in after school i could help out what was going through your mind at that point like i'm some kid walking into your business just picking out names and efficient coral well the the funny thing is about about people and and well and the reefing hobby is that a lot of folks they they're into the they're into like the mechanics of it they're into like the plumbing they're into the lighting whatever but in this in your situation you knew a lot at that age i mean i think you you know you pretty much astounded me to be able to name a lot of those corals so when i see i don't see it often even now after doing this so many years there's very few people that actually can pick up and identify those particular corals because not only do you have to remember a scientific name but you also have to remember the common name that was used in the in the aquarium and the reefing hobby yeah and there's hundreds of thousands of names each company i mean especially nowadays each company has their own name some some they use from from company to company but a lot of them are unique to the company and so you knew i mean back in those days it was a little bit different than today because yeah today you're fragging a lot but back then especially for a reefer madness reefer madness actually used uh sorry imported corals from fiji from tonga from the islands of fiji from the islands of tonga from bali from indonesia so on and so forth and you're getting colonies you're acclimating these colonies you're photographing those colonies you're selling those colonies so you somehow i don't know why at that age you would be so into it you knew that and i'm like game on and yeah you know and i think i think at that point we just said yeah why don't we you know see if he can do it part time start helping out with you know whatever and uh i think it and five years later and you flunk out of school yeah i don't know if that was the best decision but you know it's it's good so back then was it because you wanted the help or was it because you just like the enthusiasm for me it's always about enthusiasm okay if you have if i'm gonna hire somebody i have to have that enthusiasm it's it's hard to you can't force you you can't force that the the desire to to learn that particular stuff like for me an example you know from you know some of the finance stuff you that you you know you do a lot of that stuff is you know i try to remember but yeah naming a coral you know figuring out that speci the species of fish boom it's like pam's right in there yeah so that's that's kind of the thing that you know that's the that's if i see it i i you know i'd like to be able to what kind of cheesy term but nurture it and that's because it it helps us in the long run for sure right did my age concern you about being like i i i was probably 12 or 13. i'm sure i sure did at the time i can't really remember i mean that's a long time ago right but um you know that's what 2003 yeah 2003 so that's a long time ago and that was before we even moved to our you know the second location um so yeah no i'm i'm i'm sure that was the main thing it's just the enthusiasm that that makes up for you know 90 of it for sure i was so excited too it was every tuesday and thursday i get picked up from school and either my mom or my dad would drive me over to the where dad had the ford explorer yep i remember the red i think it was red he had a green one i had a green one and then the red was later that was yeah right all right so i didn't remember something yeah yeah the green ford explorer would drop me off and then i forget my mom would go and like read a book sometimes which i hated i hated that she would like be around all i just wanted to go and leave and then let me do my thing but sometimes she'd stick around and like read a book which i just i didn't like that but uh but my dad would just drop me off and uh then come and pick me up sometimes like nine or ten o'clock at night and i was i didn't even want to leave and there were several times too where i would be there until probably 11 p.m or midnight you would leave usually around 9. 13 years old yes i was working i loved it so we would have these shipments come in from i believe it was fiji and maybe thompson or two yep that was amazing thursdays those are the main suppliers right in particular yep they would come in at like 4 p.m i would help unpackage some of these the the the coral uh and then photograph it and sometimes like on on thursday i was photographing tuesday's coral and then on the tuesday it was photographing thursdays because we had to give it enough time to adjust and make sure it was okay um and yeah and i just was obsessed with photographing as many different corals as i could because we would get boxes and boxes it would probably be sometimes 100 you know 150 corals in a shipment right so and you're unboxing them you've got these big boxes i mean we call them coffin boxes because they're they're huge yeah they're they're massive and each box would probably hold you know between um eight to 16 corals i'd say for an example and then we'd be unpacking those and then you have to put them in a certain location in those tanks with a good amount of flow going by them you let them what's called polyp out and polyps are the little they have little like discs coming out all the sides of the branches of the corals and those have to open up before you can photograph them so you got to give them that amount of time to be able to open and that was yeah that was your that was your job yeah would you stay until the work is done or would you finish up the work and kind of just hang around and look at the coral and stuff uh both i i would hate to ever leave a job when finished um but if i finished early i wouldn't tell my parents to pick me up because i would be there i loved just being able to look because i could keep the lights on and and i don't i don't know if that was responsible back then like because i i was the only one in the warehouse like 13 maybe 14 years old and i had the code to the front and i think i had a key or something like that but i would be the one at like 10 or 11 p.m remember you tell me do the code and then i'd have to lock the door when i left and i loved it i loved having the whole place to myself uh we had the radio going and i could control the lights which i thought was the coolest like i could keep the lights on above the coral and yeah i would just i would ideally just keep going until i was finished but sometimes there's too much and by like 11 pm my mom or dad would say no this is enough we got to stop but i would just keep going but yeah and i think we're responsible to get those those uploads done for me so that was kind of a pretty important job who was doing the job before graham me you were yeah most part yeah yeah um yeah i mean that was my responsibility i mean the main thing was is always reaching your deadlines for those but to making sure that those products because the cool thing is and it's unusual i think even today is having what you what you see is what you get products work so i you were one of the first to do that by the way yes and that actually that was before reefer madness that was a company that i that i um i was one of the managers for a long time prior to that called flying fish express and that was oh gosh that was 90. that started 97. and we we were the first one at that point to do the what you see is what you get corals the whole industry the whole hobby progressed with the development of these halide bulbs now they use leds but back then like what you have on your reef tank now um back then they were halide bulbs and the the whole industry kind of started to make a move to more of a blue light because before they were using like yellow 65k look like sunlight every all the corals look brown and green and they didn't look very good but we started making this move toward um this blue lighting and it just made the corals pop it brought out this phosphorescence so that was the whole goal is to produce these what you see is what you get corals and that was what you're you know that's your job taking those corals photographing them making sure that the color was true using photoshop um and an slr camera at that point actually i think we were using your camera was that sony yep that thing was sony cyber shots it was a killer amazing camera back in the day yeah it was it was a sony cyber shot because we used something it was like it wasn't quite as good but then you brought your you brought your sony in there this huge huge barrel and had a carol's uh sorry um carl zeiss lens and that thing and even today i mean those carl's ice lens are yeah yeah they're really good lenses um so yeah so back in the day that was uh that that was a yeah i'd still consider that a decent camera to this day which i think so too it was able to get really good macro shots which back then by the way uh i think this was like a seven megapixel camera what are they at now how many megapixels do they have now these cameras right here no like 22 but how much do they cost over two grand all right so i found it okay so this is it sony cybershot f707 five it's five uh megapixels and this is the camera yeah i think oh wow that was sweet yeah it was back then 99 bucks you got it yeah 100 bucks yeah back then if you want to be a burgeoning reefer and take some photos there you go get up get one of those you'd actually be you could still get some decent yeah shots this was like the the camera of camera right now an iphone would probably do like 10 times better but this was the camera to get back in 2003. my ipod touch like fourth generation was like five or seven megapixels that's funny yeah but back to reefer madness the other thing too that was unique was that you were one of the first to really go online with with fish and coral and sell uh individual pieces in the what you see is what you get category what what sparked that besides the flying fish express what made you want to go off on your own from that well i was also one of the i was the very first and i get cursed at because of it but to actually name attempt to name corals down to a scientific level and actually give them specific names because before i came around this it was green acropora for example green staghorn or blue stag horn or you know whatever purple you know whatever and so i took it to the next to make it a little bit more personable because reefers as we call them are very um they're very they're addicted they love it so the more personable you can make the coral the more you can assimilate with something in real life i think it also does well to tweak their interest into um you know following you know kind of like a breed of dogs or breed of cats um it it does well to try to get their excitement growing even more um so i think that was part of it um but just the technology has come along you know came at that point as even was coming further and then the like i mentioned about the blue lights the 20k bulbs or the 15k bulbs so on and so forth they that also brought out a lot of corals the colors that you didn't see previously right when did you come up with the first name like really naming the corals that was actually flying fish express with those clamps okay we started we sure but we went even further we started you know doing names that were get even more off the wall um you know i don't know if i can say this but i mean one that always sticks out to me like super girl's nipple um i mean just we had some crazy you know that wasn't natural that was the name of one of the corals because it was it was blue and green i did of course um it was blue and green and had all these like projections it was all the projections and when you would cut one and when you'd frag one off it would be you know pointed so on and so forth so and then somebody would glue that to their rock to their live rock to their structure and their reef tank um and yeah so you know i had all sorts of those well i did some uh madness.us yep i did some stocking watch the the uh speech you you get you gave uh oh which one yeah which one i don't know it was one of them but but this is the screenshot uh and we'll we'll put this up on the screen for everyone to share but you know what i want you to oh yeah yeah there it is but i've got much better images okay i just did a screenshot okay oh yeah so see some of those are nuts i gotta find one so before we go into some of the names your reasoning behind this these names was that it just gave a more personal touch yes the quarrel yeah it just made him funny yeah it made it funny it made it it made it i mean it made it to the point where just like click bait um it i think a lot of people would reefers would look forward to coming to that page because they would see they would see these crazy these off-the-wall names that whether they purchased the coral or not um it made it it made it that much more interesting we came up with some really wild nibs it was it was the more it didn't make sense the better time to sell your kids because because we have this outrageous something something and something yeah we we had some like your wife is going to leave you after you buy this like crazy corn just like we had nothing the whole community just like are they the people are it made no sense but a lot of people would purposely come to the website and the website had it it had a consistent schedule of uh refreshing so you knew i think at like a certain time on like a thursday morning at 9 00 a.m the website would refresh and everyone would come to the website and they would either see the cool colonies that came in or they would read the names for fun because the names were all so just they made no sense at all but they were funny it was it was different there was nothing really out there yeah there's nothing i mean still i mean to this day i don't know how much yeah how much does it take to start the business let's talk about some of the financials well let's see the the website back then i think was probably it was right around between 50 and 20k to build because of how much it was a lot we had this um this guy named skip who actually did um the a lot of the web development yeah he basically did the web development i never really liked it i never liked skip skip the skip was always very short with me what qualms did you have with skip what did he do to you he would he just was never friendly he was tim at least to me he was never like a like an overly he wasn't a warm guy i like skip skip was cool to me i mean okay i mean maybe because i was the owner but yeah but whatever but yeah you know maybe you're just you know you were kind of snotty to him maybe maybe maybe i had the attitude but maybe it was at the end of the day and he didn't want to deal you know potentially yeah so yeah um but yeah he built this and he built this guy this monty or our mascot and he he did this i mean three-dimensional artwork for it which was pretty cool back in the even the day he took this these colonies of zoanthids which are these singular polyps that have all these crazy colors and he stretched it out of a three-dimensional stretch it around a three-dimensional frame and he built that and he built the structure of the website and um um and then we had to pay rent to pacific hawk farms so because we were renting we actually rented uh raceway space so this from these raceways these long raceways that we we talked about earlier um and we paid rent for that and for an office where we did our our photography work um and then our advertising and what's that do you remember how much the rent would be i don't i don't remember okay i don't remember the thousands it was probably around there okay it was probably around there um because i do remember that when we did move to our own location cup you know um several years a couple years later that it was um i remember the rent was quite a bit higher i mean and it was it was more of a struggle for sure because you know the electricity and for you know because we were running these massive thousand watt bulbs over our systems um the electricity went much up much higher so the rent and the electricity and you know and so on and so forth so the initial cost were was the website um and the website really didn't change a whole lot over those time over those years i think um but i think we were using dreamweaver for the structure of the website but it wasn't a database driven site either um so because back in those days so it was it was really just um people emailing us the number of the particular coral and then we would and then my lovely wife would actually go in and with their customer amazing customer service would mark those particular so and then you know the people would pay for it really wait wait wait so was there not a checkout no not back to those days what wait so wait how did this work it was like basically first come first serve a lot of it via email so you would have to email yes i think it was like christine reefermadness.us with the sku that you wanted yes in the beginning in the very beginning wow the very beginning and then i think we progressed toward a you know toward a shopping cart as it worked that was one of the main pushes but you'll see the idea at the very beginning yeah it was it was uh it was not a shopping cart it was not database driven where did you get the money to start it up because 15 20 grand for a website back then that's plus the overhead so it's like 20 volt yeah and you know that we we kind of worked together and made that happen so yeah wow so it was uh it was a chunk of change but they were doing um you know importing from from fiji and then um sorry exporting from fiji and running pacific and and and supplying pacific aqua farms yeah some of those it just kind of progressed and and worked and i might be off on that 15 20 grand but i'm pretty sure it was pretty close because how much artwork and how much time i mean that guy skipped he skipped worked on it for uh for for quite a few months before it was really for before it was ready what was that like running your own business like that because it taking it from the small little raceway to then having your own shop having i think it was two employees plus myself it was andy and mirna and he was there no yeah and i was there and then yep grant um i don't know it was all natural i don't it was a natural trend you know um and then christine of course yeah um it was just it was it was just a natural um move to you know to to running that just to growth in general i don't i don't know if it was all conscious or not i think it was just something that had to be done i do remember you know uh working 36 hours straight one time and almost i almost actually fell off the top of of a catwalk where we were the raceways i was so tired it was like the 35th hour or something trying to get the trying to we had a deadline to try and get this this warehouse going because we were i think shut down for a couple weeks because we couldn't we didn't have any corals we were moved out of pacific farm off pacific aqua farms and we were trying to get this this warehouse up and running and i just remember working 36 hours on top of this catwalk trying to set up these lights and everything started getting you know wonky and and i like had to catch myself on on one of the on one of the bars otherwise i would have like gone head first like 15 feet down under the into onto the top of the raceway that probably would have been very pretty but luckily you know we we made it through and we got those systems running and we got salt water from we had a big saltwater bin we got we actually brought water up straight from scripps ucsd they had a they had a basically um there was a company that was uh getting water from kind of a deep deep off of san diego county and it was trucking it up to us and and and that's what we use for our for our systems and yeah it was just a it was just a it was a cool it was a cool time it was it was hard yeah i remember how how much you were working like all the time late at night you were constantly even weekends saturday sundays you were working on stop yep yeah and i still do the same time yeah it's not much change so i was i'm a little confused so you were what the manager of reefer madness no i was no i was owner i was okay i was part i was part owner so yeah i basically ran it yeah you're part owner of reefer madness yes got it what was the day-to-day business like because i knew i remember being like i i think i was 15 when you moved in it was 2005 and seeing some of these orders come in for a thousand dollars or like fifteen hundred dollars and in my mind to me that was all profit like i didn't get the concept of like you have overhead you have expenses like everyone working there is getting paid it's electricity so i would think wow like i thought back then like you might you yeah i'd see these were like six thousand dollars and i'd be like six thousand dollars yeah like 25 orders a day right yeah we had good business but yeah no because you have mortality so because this is these are living corals and unfortunately sometimes those corals don't you know don't make it um they don't survive the shipping they have some issue that comes in later um they yeah so it didn't always do well you have overhead i mean the the place to the the sorry the cost of of heating the place or cooling the place the cost of fedex the cost of advertising the cost i mean it's just one thing after another um it was not whole yeah not incredibly uh profitable for selling colonies on the other hand selling fragments and once you get a fragment you start something that can become once you get a self-sustain you become a gardener yeah um then it becomes a bit more profitable let's talk a little bit more about graham graham's relationship with you as his boss okay okay that really excites me you know let's talk about it so obviously the relationship between a boss and it's him and his employees is very unique because like you know you have one person giving orders one person receiving orders was there ever any flack between graham and you was there ever anything that you told graham to do that didn't sit very well with you graham i'm trying to think if if he ever gave me any kind of flock i don't remember he was he was pretty damn good he because see the problem we're trying to we're trying maybe graham remembers some but i mean i i'm pretty i was pretty easy guy to work for for the most part i just wanted my deadline if if you reach your deadline and you you know you did a good job i think you got a little whiny sometimes when i asked you to re-edit photos sometimes you got kind of whiny about it i mean he was making like at the end i think he was making like a buck of coral so if we're doing like 150 or 200 or 300 corals a week that's for for a you know 15 16 year old he's making good that was bad back then that was bank i mean you think about it you can do i don't know how many corals you were processing an hour i tried photoshop oh yeah 100 corals was my minimum if i was going in per hour no no no no no no per hour no per hour i think it was anywhere from 15 to 30 depending on what it was and how quickly it could turn them out like sometimes the bigger colonies took longer because it was difficult to photoshop and get it accurate but like sometimes the smaller things just knock him out knock him out knock him out knock him out um so yeah he would definitely get whiny sometimes when i would ask to go back and re-edit some of those because i mean it was a lot of work but you know i had you know i had an expectation of what stuff had to look like even to this day um i do the same thing um very similar to it and i you know i will say okay i got to get you know this has to look like this and that's because in my brain i know what the coral looks like yes and it has to look that way otherwise it it's because the problem is if you produce a coral that um that isn't quite right uh the issue is is that if the color's off or it's too bright or too saturated as as as this industry believes um that a lot of these corals just don't look the way they they do in real life um you have to be able to tone back you have to increase you have to pull it back you got to crop it right you got to have the right it has to be clear it has to be concise it has to be you know it has to look right so you're saying some sellers would turn up the saturation of the photos to make it seem like the coral was more colorful than it actually is because in coral you want it to be very colorful and vibrant right but not overly so because if you do it overly so then you've got it's basically a false representation yeah of a particular you know the particular coral so you got to make sure and you see these astronomical prices sometimes for a coral that one a customer receives it it doesn't look quite right like that so back in the day and colonies actually back when we were doing it um like that was it was actually even more difficult um because obviously the technology wasn't quite the same but the um but it was it was very easy to get carried away yep um for some of these corals because they're coming from straight from the islands only a couple days here and you know in a captive environment coming from the ocean they get you know they're basically collected by you've got in fiji for example it was it was this ex massive expanse of 3 000 square miles that you could collect from and these divers were going out to specific dive spots every day collecting these specific corals and it basically equated to a super i mean they did a study they do studies on it every couple years and you it's like a forestry forest so you can have up to three percent of a forest and it's sustainable so they found with the studies that they were doing that that the collection in fiji um was point zero zero zero one percent or something um is crazy sustainable uh so you're going out there with a hammer and a chisel and you're finding a specific coral and you're you're you're clipping it off right there at the be right there at the base of the coral where it's growing into the reef you you knock that out you pop it off the rock and then you um you place it up on the boat you know i'm sorry you get a big collection of it you place those corals up on the boat then those are transferred to the main warehouse they they're acclimated for a couple days or so then they are bagged up shipped out all the way to the united states or wherever they were going it's a lot of traveling a lot of travel yep so the shipping cost back then was in these big boxes like we talked about earlier um that that was that was you know part of it and then you you have to take those corals the way that they looked in the ocean is one thing but then once they're tr once they travel and they ship they lose some of that luster and they're one of the reasons why we had such large lights the twenty thousand thousand watt bulbs on our systems was to try and bring that color out and with those thousand watt bulbs you could do it reasonably quickly but the same thing you had to make sure that you didn't over saturate those to make it look like it you're misrepresenting the coral and then you know make sure and then it sells like that and the customer gets it and you complain because customer service in this particular was very very important so i remember a few things i don't ever remember getting any flack from you or andy um not that i can remember maybe there was something i did wrong or i messed up something i think maybe the worst i've ever done is probably i've shipped the wrong coral that probably happened at some point that's the only thing i could think of like like an honest because sometimes they look very similar and sometimes i will have picked a piece oh and you know what we would do to make sure uh because everyone was held responsible for what they did we would put our i think it was we used to put our initials or our like you know a or g on each order so we could always look back and be like this order came in it was damaged or this wasn't correct who backed this order it'd be like oh there's a g granted and i think maybe once or twice i had shipped the wrong coral by mistake they look kind of similar sometimes if they close up it's almost impossible to tell what's what so i'm sure i probably did that at some point but i would say i learned quite a few things um from watching how you worked uh the first one was customer service and the customer service i remember it was so important for you to make sure the customer's always right and i remember even we had a few like trouble customers weren't always the easiest but you would always give them the benefit of the doubt even if you knew like they were wrong they were complaining they just want to be difficult you would always make it right even if it cost you money um and i remember quite a few times too if there was like a good customer or uh uh or someone who's brand new throw them in something for free and i think the cost of that to you was very little thrown an extra piece of coral that maybe had broken off but then started growing again throw that in the order always give more than what they pay for every single time always make sure the order is better than what they would expect that way when they get it they're going to go online be like wow i ordered this from reefer madness and i got an extra piece of coral that they threw in for free like stuff like that i think the overhead was very little but they would order again because of that um yeah because the customer servicing was was really i think the biggest thing for me and that's the thing i've carried on this entire time is always giving uh the customer more than what they would expect even on youtube um just making free videos they'll always get more than what i received back so that was really important for me graham told me that so i noticed one thing that's that's really interesting with graham is that he has like a no no questions asked refund policy yeah on his teachable on like his courses real estate yeah link down below yeah um so like he has like a youtube creator academy which teaches like strategies to grow youtube channel and stuff like that and people will ask for a refund maybe with some really like weird justification right and graham will always offer them a refund within the first wizard like three weeks four weeks yeah no questions asked sure let me refund you immediately and he said he learned that principle that was you yeah even before we had even talked about this it was it was from you doing that that i was like makes sense and we get people by the way we used to do 30 days but we would notice the people on the 30th day on like the 23rd hour hour you know 23rd hour and 30 minutes in where it's like a 30 minute window okay i got it it wasn't what i expected you said that we could get a refund so i want my refund and you go and look at the progress they've watched the whole thing and on that like it's not a coin they just want it back yeah and then unfortunately for us is that like once that 30th day passes the payment processor doesn't allow you to issue a refund yeah they cancel you out and you don't have to do it out of your own paypal exactly and oh yeah and they they charge you fees on top of that yeah so then i have to pay out of pocket and eat the cost of the fees and for them they're like well technically you said within 30 days and i'm five minutes away from the 30 days we do it anyway and my reasoning was that if you get one unhappy person they'll go online and say he didn't give me a refund it wasn't what i expected and if that causes 10 fewer people out there to want to give it a shot because of one bad review it's not worth it so i got that from you because you didn't want a single bad review you especially on reef central such a tight community that if one person says i got something from reefer madness it came in not as not as advertised they wouldn't give me a refund they weren't willing to work with me they're terrible everyone else will be like wow i should stay away but that was that was from you yeah i always my thought was always that if the publicity is good but and bad publicity you know can take you so only so far yeah the good publicity is that if you have something if you develop this if you nurture it and people will actually come back and protect you yeah your the community will actually come back online you know facebook instagram what if you start getting some bad publicity you will get somebody that will say hey they actually made it right for me yeah and that is everything yeah that is ever absolutely everything so i always uh and and i never had much business you know um education per se i'm i'm a fisheries biologist by by schooling i mean i got my fisheries degree so this is all self-taught and it's all just common sense to me in that sense is that i always thought that i needed to make sure that the customer as i said as you've heard through ages customers always right and they are right and now to an extent if you can fight it and fight a good fight then yes but for that for the most part you're like yep all right let's let's let's let's move on we got to we got to keep moving we can't dwell on the past because you've seen sometimes where they just battle they just battle they go at it you see the you know you see the the customer and then you see the response and you see the customer again and it just gets nasty and is that what you want because what do you what do people remember do they remember the good or they remember the bad yeah and almost always most repair most people remember the bad yeah especially if it goes on and on that's very true but that's one of the reasons too why if if you look up any reviews for for uh the program there's not a single bad review and very few people could ever say that about anything they sell online you got to have a bad review uh and it looks like artificially too good because there's not a single person who says that i got this didn't like it i asked for a refund he didn't give it back to me and if anyone is honestly upset they're given a refund and they they get to keep it for free so i don't i don't think there's a single bad review out there in uh two and a half years not one person has ever said that they've been disappointed what other really important business principles did you learn from chris yeah honesty so i remember i hated doing this you made me do this if so sometimes these corals would come in and they would get brown like they'd come in like blue or purple and just if they'd been sitting for like five to seven days they would kind of turn brownish they didn't look the same as they were online and you would have me call up to the customers and tell them that the coral they ordered doesn't look like it does online anymore i hate it because i felt bad i'm like they're gonna get angry at me if i tell them that their order that was about to be shipped out today doesn't look like that and if they want something else instead and i i got so nervous getting on the phone and uh like this is before like you could just text somebody i prefer just like to send a text but their phone number would be on the order and it would be up to me in like one of these big handheld phones press talk dial on the number hi this is john hey this is graham with reefer madness how's it go hey yeah and talking to the like i was so scared that's funny too because i bet like you'd be like hi this is graham for reefer madness like who's running this operation yeah hello yeah i don't know but uh but everyone was really and they really appreciated the phone call like no one was upset ever some people would be like oh man that sucks uh what else you have and and sometimes it would be you know back and forth with you know taking a picture of something else and sending it or giving a store credit if they wanted to get something else but everyone was happy that that you were really honest even if it wasn't that big of a deal and there's a few times where i've said like i don't even notice a difference like it's like 95 percent the same thing and chris was saying you still got to call him because if he gets in they're not 100 happy with it it's gonna look bad on us and so sometimes you're overly cautious like hey coral doesn't look to say if you want a discount on this we could we could do that we could give you a store credit you could still ship it you don't have to get it we could throw in some stuff for free to make up for it but there's always something where they got more than expected even if even if they didn't get the perfect order yep so true to me it just gave me the confidence of just like being able to work around like adults and be in that environment that i felt like really set me apart because once i started working i hated school like i was never a fan of school to begin with but once i saw that like oh wow i could i could do something i really enjoyed doing and in the beginning it was i was working for free and getting paid in fish and coral and i'd like save up for like a sunburst anthias and be like okay if i've worked this this week i could get a sunburst anthias at the very end of it um but once i started doing that and then like making money then i was like what's the point of school and i remember i'd be sitting in class this was this is because of you i would sit in class and think this is the biggest waste of time in this hour if i photoshopped 20 pieces i would get paid 20 and the opera and like before i knew about opportunity cost it was like i could be making 20 i'm 20 poorer now because i'm sitting in a class not doing something with my time i'm wasting my time and it was after that that school was just i hated it did not see the point didn't want to do anything other than just work so you're saying chris is the reason you you flunked out of high school 100 yeah uh because once i got my driver's license that's when it all went downhill uh because before i was relying on my mom or dad to drive me so they could kind of control how much i worked and my mom like mondays i couldn't go on like certain days it was it was uh tuesday thursday and sometimes fridays um so they could control like how often i was going there but once i got my driver's license i would go not not every day after school i would say probably three days a week after school i would just drive down to torrance and just work and i i don't know if you knew this but my senior i think it was my senior year so i was i was 17 so this would have been kind of the tail end of it i made up a condition and i i found a fake doctor's letterhead on google printed it out and i and i and i i typed this out on a letterhead and i just did a fake signature that said this is so stupid i had a condition of like rare condition of sleep apnea that prevented me shut up you never you didn't tell me this yeah that prevented me from getting a full night of sleep and i did well i did that so that i could skip the first few classes because i didn't because it's like working so late i don't know if i was working late i just didn't want to show up or i didn't want to go yeah okay um but yeah so i said i had a sleep apnea they believed it i don't know they believe that so i skipped all my morning classes a very good example here for the younger generation most our demographics are probably or mostly they so they say 18 to 35 so they're probably out there they're already there or getting close to that point getting close they're gonna write i don't know if that would work right i don't know if that would work now no uh so i would basically skip all my morning classes so that that was good and then i made it a weird goal i made it a goal of mine to miss one day of school every single week and so i wouldn't be about yeah and i would wear a goal yeah that was the goal one day and they did it how would you miss so i would call up pretending to be my mom and i did a good imitation of my mom did have you heard this i don't know if you ever did it see if i could do it without laughing hi this is stefan i'm so sorry my son graham isn't feeling well this morning his condition of sleep apnea it's not he's not feeling well so i'm laughing right now but yeah i could imitate it and i'm doing a bad job because that's good that's really good and i forget what what her name her name was like tracy at the at the front desk and she'd be like oh we're so sorry you know no problem we'll see him tomorrow and i would just and i don't think my parents knew this but i would just often work for madness what did they think when they saw your report cards and stuff like that my parents what did you think of graham skipping all this school chris wasn't there during it was andy and he was there and he was a bro and he was just like i think even once he called in for me how old is he how old was he at the time late 30s probably at that time yeah mid-thirties like this it's somewhere in there i think he's pretty pretty close up maybe a little bit older than i am yeah you're about the same i don't know yeah i can't remember andy called in once or twice for me or i think i gave his number as like the doctor if they needed to verify and i didn't know this i don't think he did but i would work during the day because i was afraid if he if you knew this i was working at home yes right i was working at my at my house i was doing the customer service answering all the phone calls doing all and doing some of the updates i would name the corals you would edit them yeah i would name them i would get them up on the site on the website so i think a lot of the days that um you know that i was i wasn't up at that you know at the uh at the warehouse um yeah you must have been uh i was there you were you were there when you yeah but it shouldn't shouldn't have been no i was there andy was yeah i have to ask about that at some point yeah ask andy about that but i think you only came in was it twice a week i think it was tuesdays and fridays i came in when the when the shipments since tuesday thursday yeah so i could see the corals right when they right when they're bagged and so i could so i can know that whether a coral you know how it would look yeah needed to look for the website but yeah my great suffered because i had zero motivation to do any work at all like to me school was just a waste of time but wouldn't your parents encourage you to get good grades i think they they gave they gave up and i think uh well if andy's going to that point like um yeah i don't know i mean my dad was disappointed but he was my dad's very easy going and my mom was was upset but i was you just didn't care i just didn't care i really didn't care and i was upfront with my teachers with a few of them that i was just like hey look i just don't get it because they would ask me like is something good they would think something's going on at home because i'm missing missing all of these days of constantly like sick um i was honest with them like i just i don't get it i i just don't have any interest in learning you went up to the teacher and they're like why are you like not showing up to school you just yeah i just don't get it why do i have to show this yeah trying to negotiate with the teachers there was yeah uh well i went to this this school that was a little bit more alternative no no smash was elementary school so i was on a scholarship at new rhodes high school how did you get a scholarship i've applied yeah well not a scholarship that maybe what is it financial financial aid oh like a grant or something like a financial aid it was financial aid they they had a percentage of students in there that couldn't whose parents could not afford the tuition that uh were admitted and they only admitted a few a year and i just happened to be one of them chris what did you think about graham flunking out of high school did you have any opinion on that you knew my grades were bad yeah i knew they were bad um it's a little fuzzy at that point i think we were getting ready to move to fiji so i think part of that was a little bit a little bit fuzzy um for my recollection but you know i don't know you at that point you know who knows you know we we didn't know where you were going to go for that point but because i was whining you know reefer madness was kind of making a different transition um so yeah it's it's hard to say i don't i don't really recollect too much but i'm sure i was disappointed somewhat because it's you know not really a great role model in that sense i mean now you are of course in some ways but um you know it's yeah it was uh i'm sure i'm sure i probably wasn't happy because i was kind of led to that but you know indirectly or directly right um you know it but but you know when you have your passion and that was your passion you found your passion that young then how can you how can you frown upon it in that sense i mean yes obviously the the standard is to go get your you know get your high school diploma and get you know move on to college you know university whatever but um if you found your passion that early yeah you know then you're what about with your kids you have two yes boy and a girl yep do you want them to go to class are they going to college right now or already in college yeah um they started going to the cool i mean nowadays you can do um you can do dual enrollment in florida you can do dual enrollment which is pretty cool as of a as a junior you can actually take college classes that that um you know that you don't have to replicate in high school which is pretty cool so you can take you know your basics um your sciences and your maths and even economics and so on and so forth in call in the community colleges local and it's pretty cool it's a pretty cool system um and yeah so they're my son's in um he's going um he's marine biology in ucf right now university of central florida and my daughter she is um this is a pretty cool high school harmony high school they have a veterinarian um you can basically get a certificate of veterinarian as a high schooler so you have to do a certain amount of volunteer hours i think it's like 500 volunteer hours so yeah they're running the gamut but i mean this last year has been strange because they've had to do mostly classes at home but they're you know they're rocking it they're killing it they're doing great i just want to know a little bit like like like you worked for him for what four or five years yep how did why did you stop working for him did you fire graham did he do something wrong no i left him i said later i'm going to fiji and you left and you moved the business to fiji no actually i work i started work uh my my business partner for reefer madness walt smith i started working i basically started working for him um and his wife um running the mariculture farm uh in fiji so i that's what i basically ran i i left reefer madness um why i never understood this because i think when i was like 16 or 17 i just i never understood like why behind the scenes or like why we laughing or like yeah for some people yes i i got that question a lot like why would you leave you're are you running this company you're owning this my understanding was that why would you lose my rumor or like i guess what my understanding was that you got an offer to sell your portion and that uh it was it was just such high stress such big hours and it and it made sense to take a step back that was my interpretation i don't think anyone told me this i think that just went through my mind not i mean not really i think it i'd always had a dream we'd always my wife and i really had always have a dream to to try to do a little bit more um try to make a little bit bigger impact and i always thought that running say like a coral farm um on the ocean was i mean it was it was i mean how many people have that opportunity right to be able to run a farm a coral farm on the other side of the world and living in a completely different you know uh culture i mean because as fiji is uh it's it's a it's completely different it's not something that you can you can't take the same things that you can from here you have to go to like four or five different grocery stores to get this the groceries that you would you know here you go to albertsons or whatever and you pick up or you know pick whatever you need up there you have to go to you know a meat market you have to go to a a grocery store one grocery store to get your milk and another grocery store to get your butter and um and then and then the and then the farmer's market to get your vegetables wow um yeah 2007 i think is the last time we've seen each other so yeah a long time yeah long time yeah so have you followed like did you did you find out about a youtube channel or we kept in touch briefly about 10 years ago yeah a little bit yeah facebook and um you had mentioned something about artwork because i was doing some artwork too when i came back from fiji i started doing some art and um you were saying oh yeah you should post it on reddit and so on and so forth and i couldn't figure it out okay um but yeah um yeah but i i always you know i followed you your you know i see your facebook posts about your hollywood you know all the the actual properties that you post on on facebook back in the day and i'm just like damn this you know he's got it going on you know yeah may have flunked but he's you know he's that classic you know that yeah school wasn't right for me but i found my niche um so yeah um but yeah i always always followed you and then your exponential growth now on on um you know on youtube it's you know it's it's it's incredible to see so yeah um but yeah i mean i've always you know watched from afar and you know thought it was you know thought it was um yeah it was it's you know hats off to you bro to be able to take whatever you know those you know what i uh what i taught you indirectly or directly in that sense and and um nurtured your you know your uh your passion for um you know for your goal to have a lotus that was always what you always remember your goal to have a lotus that orange lotus that uh you know that you would you know dave's uh not they bought one but dave palmer and pacific hawk farms um and you'd see it every day and you're just like man it's got to be mine yeah and uh so yeah and and to see that to be able to take that um and uh and and to you know to see what you've what you've what you've driven from there is it's it's it's amazing um yeah for me it was just the lotus that's all i wanted yep when i first saw that lotus and like that was my only goal it was just i want enough money to buy a lotus that was it that's that that was jack with the tesla jack wanted the tesla really badly yeah but not yet not yet not yet i tell jack my advice to jack is that as soon as he gets the test slots it's immediately it's going to be something else but it's really nice to have that carrot to have that little character for you was that the same for you like once you got the lotus you were just like yeah what's next yes really yeah what was next uh yeah but for a while the lotus was it uh when i got the lotus i'm like i'm set that's it don't need anything else as long as i have the car i'm chilling um but yeah that lasted about six months then i was like okay next is i gotta get a house all right yeah well speaking of here i got a speaking of artwork i got something for you i don't know if you wanna this is a this is what i do on my my spare time when i'm not working it worldwide corals i've got i've got something this is uh this is my other uh this kind of like a housewarming gift i think here so this is what i kind of do on the on my side [Music] i took this barn down in tennessee it was one of my stops and uh and i basically carve tropical fish on my free time and um this is called a candy basket and uh it's basically carved i draw it out i carve it and then i paint it and it takes me hours and hours and hours i probably have a hundred and plus hours in that piece right there this i see how detailed it is if you if you put like uv light on it you'll see a whole different animal we've got a different fish wow it's got pretty cool scales we'll go we'll get some b-roll of this wow even though this is out with yeah look at that well i mean i've got a i've got a uh a jigsaw i so so i draw it out by hand i draw all the you know fish and then and then make and then that is yeah oh cool no this would actually look really good against the black to find some spot part of me wants to put it by the tank but i feel like it just it wouldn't it wouldn't stand out enough up above yeah okay well we're gonna find something if you can like hang like a uv light on it like a butt like blasted you know you can see it in front of this one or whatever but okay if you can just like a spotlight on it and it's so cool so it's you know it's kind of a it's kind of a cool little do you sell these i do i do i sell them i don't you know i don't i don't make a lot of them because i i work so much but i so they're kind of a limited i don't i will never probably make another one of these ever okay of the candy bar wow so it's kind of it's a limited edition you'll you'll never see one well you know we'll put the link in the description you might sell out pretty quickly how many are for sale right now there's a few there's a few but it's always something i work you know working for so there's a link in the description guys so i have a feeling you'll you'll sell out of these so the link in the description you could get one they're pretty thank you man so yeah i love the level of details when you see this thing it's nuts yeah from the gill plates to the yeah that's the thing yeah like everything is just like looks like it's a hundred percent correct piece of you know barn wood wow of all things it's white oak so um thank you yeah so yeah so that's somewhere something you can uh you know because i see you have some you have some really cool artwork around your place so yeah this i think will go um will go well with it and mix it well with it thank you so much yeah very cool you're gonna see a lot of subscribers now be like i got one i got one i know i'm gonna get instagram pictures look at what i got graham and yeah like i said i mean i i feel like i owe like so much of just what i've learned along the way to reefer madness and like having that first job and just getting the experience of working at a young age and like being able to like be surrounded by adults and see how people work and like the business behind it even if i didn't fully understand like what i was doing or what was involved was so important for me so really like sincerely thank you for that yeah absolutely absolutely and and the corals part of it you know like i said i work currently work for worldwide corals and it's an it's an amazing place to work and i mean it's it's spectacular all the different corals we have a 1500 gallon reef tank we have a 1200 gallon lagoon with mangrove growing out of the back of it you can look it up on on instagram and on uh facebook on youtube yeah um and it's it's an amazing um it's an amazing place and you know we do i run the web department there so all the corals that you see on the website it's very similar to reefer madness and that's yeah that's cool um the customer service is almost exactly i've built it to exact almost be exactly the same and the care and the making sure that we you know produce products that are true to life and and growing these corals out and names and you know everything that we do i've realized this on my own but i feel like graham works best if you just leave him alone and it seems like you were like you're pretty like hands-off employer and i'm not a i am not a micromanager i never have been i don't like yeah i don't like being a micromanager i think that people always second guess themselves when you're you know micromanaging so they they second-guess their own abilities and i just i can't stand it so i'll give you a goal yeah and i'll say you know have at it um and then i'll give you some little tweaks on the way and then um you know then i think that develops and and their their the the product that they produce gets better and better and better that's how graham likes to work but see that's how i like to work but i feel like i i do get micromanagey do i jack i feel like i i do uh a little bit yeah you micromanage you know having you know you've got you know how many three point one and nine million point two three point two now wow so 3.2 million subscribers you probably need to more so um but yeah in the beginning in the beginning you're very micro managing but now you've kind of realized that i i feel like i you've drilled in these principles into my head so i don't really i'm pretty yeah in the beginning it was deadlines for jack we we had an agreement that the podcast would be done 24 hours prior and then i was sitting there 24 hours being like it's gonna be soon it's gonna be and then like 20 hours i would never know what's going on i would never have it it's never gotten done before and i would be sitting there at midnight 1am it's not up it's not up we're posting tomorrow what's going on with this what's going on don't worry it'll be up in the morning first thing in the morning where is it where is it no i never missed posting posting i always had it up it was always processed it was everything one time one time with ryan pineda but that wasn't i had it done on time there was just a processing yeah yeah it was a there's something out like something like that yeah something weird so technological exactly but i had it done on time but i never missed an upload graham just said he wants it uploaded an hour before but i would i'm not gonna lie i was so busy throughout the week and it's like to add on the podcast because i needed that extra day because that's on a sunday so at least i could work on it all day saturday and work on it and stay up late saturday night you know but like throughout the week i had so much stuff i had to do it was hard to have this done as well through you know on by friday while i have all these other things i'm trying to do what's your advice for jack this is great give jack some advice and jack ask chris for advice okay chris you could you could you could go into business coaching after this business coaching you could seriously if you i guarantee if you set up an email address i'm like i'm half joking but i'm being serious here if you set up a business email address and i guarantee people would reach out to you for one-on-one coaching for business advice because i feel like you if you have so much that you taught me that i would only imagine like what you've learned along the way it's possible so if you decide to do this you have a week to decide if you see an email in the description you did it if not i'm not going to push it i'm not going to micromanage that but if you want to do it if you want to do it maybe i reach out to you and you can help me with actually the setup part of it the technological part of it maybe i could all it is email email paypal email paypal and then and then help people yeah so people would reach out to you you'll have a rate and then people will paypal you in advance and you sometimes you just go back and forth over your email make sure make sure it's something that you could actually work with they'll send you paypal you set up the time to chat with them well what are you running into what are your what are your issues what are you running into that he has to micromanage you for is it still that the hitting the deadlines or is it different completely because this is my issues with my job just in general with with running this on you i guess like my only real issues with my job is that i wish that i could do it more like remotely like i because i i try to visit my family like at least once every two weeks but i've been here for it's like i think like my my fourth week in a row that i've been here and i like to spend like a weekend with my parents but and also i know that like a few years down the road it's going to be really difficult for for graham and i to be able to do that kind of stuff like especially even when i buy a new house when i buy a house in las vegas i'm going to want to live there and i'm going to want to stay there throughout the day but graham is going to want me to come here but most of the work that i do i can do it remotely grandma think i think just like likes my physical presence in the room if we're like going back and forth on thumbnails and titles although it may be the exact same thing if it's over the air you know my defense to that is that jack jack is free to go whenever he wants to if you want to see your family uh i'm i'm never holding jack hostage so anytime sometimes like weekends like this are planned out like a week or two in advance i'm like okay this week we got this thing planned next week we also have people flying in um but for the most part it's completely open so just so you know um no he doesn't hold me hostage i never hold jack hostage yeah but uh but now i feel like i've noticed a difference between in-person collaborations that you just can't do over a zoom call and there's there's some sort of magic that'll happen if we're working over a title or a thumbnail that and then we we post you know three three really many times a week and that's that in-person collaboration going back and forth and that like tension in the room of neither of us could think of a title uh you don't get the same thing and the same effect in this over zoom well i think i think for for for you you have to have you do have to have some down do you have any downtime yeah i i've definitely like since we hired alex like i'm actually working very like i'm working reasonable hours you know obviously like i usually start like later than graham but i usually go later than graham like i'll be able to go out play spike ball with my friends at five come back at like eight do you know maybe like an hour or two until i go to bed so i have like reasonable hours i can take off time i can come back i'm working i'm happy with the amount of working right now yeah i mean that's that's one of the things is that to become a i mean i know you know for from from all these years of doing doing this with the web you know managing web departments and coming up with all these you know these names and i do know that you've got to have a little bit of down time you got to have your brain to be able to clear itself to be able to come up with those catchphrases you know to come up with those names for you know so that they're exciting that they can click you know for a click on so i do know that you know managing your time wisely and allowing yourself to you know to clear that to clear your brain is is important but um you know for the deadlines to be able to work for i mean if you guys have a specific goal that you need that you you know that you're trying to get to um you should probably need to you probably need to buckle down and just you know and deal with it for a little bit longer until you get to the point where you can make that decision between the two of you guys rather than you know i also think one other thing i think graham needs to instill a little bit more trust in me because you mean like i did with him back in the day yeah like he'll he'll if i if i want to make a decision do you have i mean are those does he have the fortitude to be able to you know to to be able to do that i feel like like we're in therapy right now like we're a mediator here uh yes so like like obviously things that benefit graham benefit me and i totally see that and i recognize it and and for certain things like like i was picking out a new router for the house right like for for the wi-fi because we drastically needed it and i spent a lot of time alex spent a lot of time he researched it it was such a pain in the butt calling the wi-fi company trying to figure out what's wrong with it i sunk so many hours trying to figure out the new router and then finally out you know alex too we settled on a router that we liked and like these satellites that we liked with the router and i go to best buy and then graham and i had like some back and forth on like the cost of the router and i thought it was i don't remember it i thought we did it no you're speaking about it with costs exactly come on but the thing is it's like it's for the business and not only is it for the business but like you're going to have me a full-time employee and alex a full-time employee and graham and macy and everyone's going to be hogging up all the bandwidth on the and it's just very important that we have fast wi-fi and graham was like i hope you don't spend more than this amount and i'm like dude if only you realize how important it is to have wi-fi that doesn't cut out we would literally be sitting right here trying to get to comments or like be posting a video and the wi-fi would like not work we would have to move to another room it was so dumb we moved to another room because the wi-fi wasn't working here but when we were other when we were in the other room this is still graham you're speaking of yes so you know we all know oh just wait we know we were in the other room the video wasn't performing and graham said it's because we're in this room so we came back here and the wi-fi wasn't even working i'm superstitious i have to be sitting right superstitious or super super yeah stupid stitches stupid i have to be sitting right there when i post a video otherwise it doesn't perform well we've tested other locations the wi-fi wasn't even working here but they don't but okay here's the ques you upgraded it yeah i upgraded the wi-fi now you yeah okay yeah but there was flak from graham and it's stuff like that where it's like obviously what i want is going to be what is best for what is you know for graham and what is best for graham is what is best for me so so here's the thing i he has to heed my my requests and advice uh i i got the fastest internet that you could buy with with this thing and it was just this location here so i think my rebuttal there was let's call up the wi-fi company and see if they'll fix it you don't know how many hours i spent online with cox it was because i was like my thing it was like okay we're paying for the good one we should get that service it's worth it so you're saying the trust factors and the trust after all these years of working together and there's no trust factor yeah it sounds like 95 the quality if i was working elsewhere that's okay so here here's a point right we talked about earlier about um you know some of the things that you learned at reefer madness as well um sometimes if you have something say you know shipping out around coral or customers not happy with something so on and so forth it there it's seeing kind of play with sometimes improving upon something to improve something else is hard to see when you're already in it and you're focused on this particular thing should work but yet there's an alternative to be able to surpass that and go beyond that because we all know that cable companies are not always the easiest to deal with yeah so um finding a separate route i mean maybe i don't know i'm just saying that that maybe in the future you have other technology uh technological advances that you need to make in the uh in around the house like uh we do so we do so maybe maybe you need to do the same sort of thing you can say okay well this is the drawback and here is the benefit you know we could save even if it's one hour a week to get an imac that's worth it and the quality will go away i said we could get an imac and we're gonna go once you test it out though the happy a happy employee is a good employee yeah i figured i did i mean i work with both but you know i dig them they never fail you yeah they never fail they never lock up they never i mean it's it's it's unbelievable how efficient they are so that we could get one and i just i just how many do you do you need more than one yes i just wanted to point out that we we they don't fail you they don't we have i'm so i don't know i know you're editing different stuff that i didn't i i'm still using the same yeah i get it how many was it how many youtube subscribers three two two okay and it's like four between all yeah i saw some of the number you make per hour oh yeah yeah so you me in one hour would basically save a lot of money yeah okay yeah yeah but and then you pay for i don't like to make big changes i like that you know everything's the same we'll do it slowly we don't need to go all crazy with two imacs well get one i give it to alex have alex deal with it a little bit i'm splitting the cost so whatever whatever graham and i buy for alex that means i'm in fifty percent i'm totally cool with that you know oh yes so there you go but i need one two you're paying for one yeah he's paying for one wants to wait for me to wait what do you want generation two or something no he just wants how long i don't know he just and there's there's no it's like my advice if you really think it's gonna make that much of a difference do it and you know what i just want to say i talked to anes after because we we recorded a podcast with someone right before you came here and he has like he has a youtube channel with these crazy like cameras and equipment and all this stuff 100 grand in equipment for filming and i talked to him afterwards he pulled me aside and he says you know what man like i didn't want to say this on the podcast but you were right you you guys got to upgrade your equipment like it makes sense he said he says i admire you know graham wanting to sell you to you know use the towels as light diffusers and stuff like that like i admire that but at a certain point it only makes sense to to scale up because think about where you'll be three years from now are you still gonna use the towel as a light diffuser are you still going to use the canon 80d yes okay what about 10 years from now maybe if it would work but i think it just makes sense to to scale up and to build remember how excited he was about that the the sony yeah right yeah the sony my camera all of my equipment it was like three thousand dollars and i i spent three thousand dollars and graham is rocking with like a a six hundred dollar camera works it works it does that's what it's like why fix what isn't broken it's been working this entire experience i think for the viewers to have a like it just is i mean the only the only thing that i always see is that and i i sometimes do this too and graham's behalf is that if it does work you can see all your upgrades but the problem is a lot of times the upgrades are is that unless you have somebody that isn't comfortable to make that upgrade you always fall back to what works so making that upgrade sometimes doesn't fulfill your need nor does it nor does the cost basically make it make it an advantage for you if you can't if you can't make it work so that's always the thing you have to look at is that are you going to use that upgrade are you going to be able to use those particular things that are going to make that you know make that upgrade i wouldn't but you know what because you're here jack we'll get two macbooks we'll get we'll do it we'll do it just because chris is here and just because we're talking about it i will make the leap of faith we're gonna get to you could order them right after this but make sure to keep the costs yeah we're going to get the decked out ones down okay maybe wait for a sale is there a memorial wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait let's have an apple you just said yeah make the purchase after this you know after the podcast but now you're saying wait for this change no i'm thinking now that's no problem you're thinking sale that's true alex has an apple card you get five percent five percent off okay see i'm excited now you need to pay me there you go i'm very excited even though i'm dropping probably like two grand i'm very excited very excited and alex is getting in the background over in the corner yeah you can see his computer too if you could go anywhere in the world where would you go because you've done a lot of traveling right oh can i answer this question too uh no where would you go jack uh thailand why thailand because it's cheap and the culture is beautiful it's it's a beach town but it's also very green you know um it's beautiful the culture's cool jack actually had a trip scheduled to thailand and then the illness hit yeah and then it was the first time out of the country yeah yeah where would i go i mean it's always been a dream that like i think i mentioned to you earlier to dive with those the white humpbacks in the northern islands of tonga that that would be that would be something else or with the mayonnaise there's a few locations where you can die with mana rays i've done it once a dovan with amana mana ray once in the middle of nowhere actually christina and i just this captain we were with he's like we thought it was a plastic bag in the ocean it was and he's like no that's a mana red jump in now and we just got through on our mass and just in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the ocean like you can't like you can see islands you know but they're you know probably a mile away and we just jumped in and sure enough here's this manta ray just feeding he's just doing these loops and we're you know chugging them after you're chugging you know flying swimming as fast as we could behind them watching this manta ray just do these loops and just eating the plankton and that was incredible so to see something like that or to even you know to dive with the with white humpbacks that is that would be pretty the south the humpbacks of the south pacific they're they're basically their whole most of their body like three quarters of their bodies just white and it's just incredible why haven't you done that yet work just working so much you know me i mean i just i just work i just do a lot of work if i'm not working worldwide worldwide i'm working on my art and you know or usually it's like one day of art and you know doing artwork and then the second day is a family day so you know where we spend one of those days um being a family and doing stuff as a family so um yeah for the most part yeah is it possible to get time off like how long would you need um to make that trip yeah you probably need a good um 10 days probably 10 10 days or something how long is that to travel it's it's a haul no tongue is not quite as far um fiji's 11 11 hour 10 and 11 hour flight tongas depends i think you can go through hawaii you can go hawaii and then down to tonga i believe there might be some straight shots out of la um but yeah coming from like going from florida over yeah it's it's it'd probably be a good 12 12 to 13 hour flights yeah cool well i would like to do that for you and christine whoa so you literally let me know when we'll make it happen okay dang all right you're gonna come on are you gonna come with me maybe we'll see if you come with me yeah if you i don't know if i can get the time off you you're going to if i can make it you can make it then i can show you then i can show you what why why i move to the islands of fiji then you can then you can see why you know well then if i go then jack and alex have to go to go to yeah i mean we could make it assumed yeah you can yeah we could make it a you know that would be pretty pretty crazy that would make sense incredible float footage wouldn't it we just got to get christine away from you know um slowly get her away from being camera shy right yes okay realistically do you know when you would be able to get 10. i don't even know if i don't even it'd probably have to be probably if we could do it but probably next year i would have to go okay let's let's aim for that then yeah because i think you know with the corona and all this stuff still shut down but um yeah it should open up i don't know it should open but but then all right yeah yeah we'll yeah we'll make it do it yeah but that would be a lot of fun that would be my gift to thank you for everything that you've done for me and i think that would be a fun experience that would be that would be fun yeah yeah well perfect for sure there we go going to tonga and now you're going to tango look up is pretty cool this is a great episode this is a testimonial for uh for you as a business coach you should be doing the same thing too because you got jack a macbook or what is it an imac computer and a trip and alex is obviously gonna come along so we could vlog it uh you should do the business consulting i would do 175 an hour okay that's what you should be doing all right that's what you actually do nice yeah 175 an hour yeah do that for 45 minutes would i actually do it yeah sure okay i'll do it if the email is in the description you did it if not then no worries i don't want to press it but sure but yeah you i think that's great that's great jack will testify it worked for him it worked for me yeah it's got it cost me money so uh so there you go jack all right is there anything else i don't think so just really appreciative that you came on the podcast very nice to meet you yeah absolutely it's been like uh yeah absolutely it's been a long time um but it's yeah this is this is a lot of fun i mean this just happened just hit me up a week you know a week ago and and uh christina like yeah let's let's make it let's make it happen yeah it's just it's an adventure i love adventure yeah i love adventures like i said totally last minute things like how is this weekend sure let's do it do it yep i mean it was cool it was fantastic of you to be able to work as a you know work us into your you know crazy busy schedule so we did it yeah you did it cool been a lot but yeah thank you so much for coming on yeah thank you thank you for everything my pleasure it was a lot of fun it's cool this is this is a this is a really good experience it's it's it's it's fun it's loose it's not you know and i think that's that that bodes well to bringing out the the personalities of of the true personalities of people that you have you have on your show which is awesome it's not it's not uh you know it's it's not in a situation where you feel like you have to you know be outside of yourself exactly which is very cool and i appreciate that thank you guys you're welcome thanks so much and thanks so much for the fish so with that said you guys thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it uh we're gonna link to your information down below in the description but before you leave make sure to subscribe hit the notification bell hit the uh subscribe button and also you can get your free stock worth all the way up to 70 down below in the description when you sign up for public you know how much seventy dollars seventy used to be fifty it's going up no it's seventy dollars for a limited time and you could potentially get a completely free stock of tesla so if you want that down below in the description use code gram that's it it's pretty much like free money so enjoy thank you guys so much for watching and until next time okay make sure to hold the mic this way all right yeah there you go all right