Cannabis History and Cultivation with Mel Frank

0:02BubblemanWell, good morning everybody. Welcome to Hash Church episode 56. I hope you guys are all awake and well as we gather here on another Sunday. 56 Sundays in a row. I was actually going through them recently. You know, most of them were above three hours. I had a couple in the under three hour range and there was even one that time I was on my way to Jamaica and I got caught in the storm.

0:27BubblemanWhere we did 17 minutes. That's the shortest hash church. So let's not do that again. Let's keep these hash churches going long and keep them educational. I'm going to quickly send out the links for the day so we can get some friends in here. Control paste. Send the email versions out and that'll bring in. A couple of good folks. And anyway, how is everyone doing? Should we start the church off with a dab here?

0:57BubblemanIt's nice and bright and early here. I woke up a little late today. I usually like to wake up at least an hour and a half before church. Welcome, Etienne. How are you doing, brother?

1:07Etienne FontanGood morning, brother man. How are you doing?

1:10BubblemanYou know, I'm doing pretty good here on this beautiful Sunday morning in British Columbia. I had a nice conversation with my friend in Jamaica this morning and he was telling me a little bit about sort of the committee that's been produced. They've created a committee to, I guess, release these permits. So that was interesting to see that they're still moving things forward because I haven't heard much for a while.

1:36BubblemanI really... Thank you so much for joining us.

2:01BubblemanDefinitely come. It's going to be amazing.

2:05Etienne FontanIf I hadn't have made plans a year ago for December, I probably definitely would have come. It sounds like it's coming together, and that's really good, and that sounds like it's reassuring because that was my concern. I really hadn't heard much about it, but most of that stuff comes together on the ground there.

2:21BubblemanYeah, I noticed Billboard released the other day, Billboard.com, pretty big. You know, the top 100 and whatnot. They've released the musical lineup, and it's pretty sick. I mean, I saw Torres Riley on there. I saw Iwayne on there. Kabaka Pyramid made it on, so that's really cool to be able to see him and Abishe and that whole crew while we're there. I didn't see Richie Spice on there, which was a little bit disappointing.

2:49BubblemanHe's got some pretty great cannabis songs, but... Who's to know if he's not added at a later date? We'll hope for that.

2:57Etienne FontanI always enjoy a good Richie concert, that's for sure. So, not much happening here in California. The laws, of course, were signed into effect, so those really won't kick in until 16. So nothing really too much to report here, except the media is doing its own little... Victory Dance, depending on who and where you are, saying how, you know, oh, finally the Wild West is going to be tamed, and it's amusing, needless to say.

3:26Etienne FontanBut things are moving forward. People are looking and searching locally for permits, because if you're permitted locally, you can get state permits. So people are negotiating and talking with their counties to see, hey, because such as the city of Berkeley, they actually issue permits for things like that. So... People are out hunting right now, needless to say, and we wish everybody luck. You know, a lot of skin in this game for a lot of people.

3:54Etienne FontanSo, you know, get your shit together, get out there and, you know, get smart, get your investors and come on and play.

4:03BubblemanYeah, well, that sounds like pretty good advice from someone that's been playing for a good solid 20 plus years over there.

4:11Etienne FontanYeah, again, it was fun to celebrate our 16th. But, you know, other people have been in the game and it's growing, hearing great things. You know, things are improving in Colorado. We've got things coming on board in Oregon. People are very excited about that. I had a friend just travel down from Oregon saying that there's advertising on billboards throughout Oregon. Thank you for joining us.

4:50Etienne FontanYou know, it's one thing it happened in the news. It's another thing when they say billboard locally that says, well, it's available here. Come and get it. So I've known multiple people who have been able to purchase their first legal cannabis in Oregon without any problems. And way to go, Oregon. We're very happy to see it. Very interesting to see what happens with Alaska. I haven't heard really much about Alaska cannabis except for that one reporter who got herself busted or harassed because of the crime.

5:18Etienne FontanHave you guys heard much of anything? I can hear you, Todd.

5:23BubblemanWe can hear you. Todd comes in with the girl, combing her hair in the background.

5:33Etienne FontanTypical. Now we can't hear you. Yeah, now you're silent. Of course, now we talk girls.

5:39BubblemanIt's so funny to see Todd have any technical difficulties at all, because you know he's the one guy that takes care of that shit before he comes in.

5:47Etienne FontanOh my goodness. Usually.

5:50BubblemanMic's on.

5:51SpeakerHold on.

5:52BubblemanNo, you're unmuted. Oh no, now you're up. Now you're up.

5:55SpeakerNow I was muted. You were. Went from having sound to not having sound. But you know what today is? Do you see what it says under my name? Look.

6:02BubblemanI saw it. I saw it. It says Mel Frank.

6:05SpeakerRight. And I'm not trying to impersonate Mel Frank, technically. Are you sure?

6:09BubblemanMaybe you should put a hat on. A little kind of hat.

6:12SpeakerI'll get that little French artist look going on.

6:15BubblemanGo.

6:16SpeakerThere you go. ATN knows it. ATN knows it.

6:18BubblemanWell, good morning, dude. This is quite six minutes in, and Todd McCormick's in the room already.

6:23SpeakerDude, what am I doing up early? That's fucked up. And you fucked up all my Sunday mornings, dude. I used to sleep till noon like everybody should. No.

6:33Etienne FontanSeriously, why can't I sleep late on Saturdays now? What the fuck, man?

6:38BubblemanThere's something for us to look forward to on Saturday. Can you believe there's 378 people? Sorry, 382 people.

6:45Etienne FontanSo they're all over there.

6:48BubblemanYeah, they're all over there.

6:49SpeakerDude, check this out.

6:51BubblemanReady for a wake and bake.

6:54SpeakerHey, Mark. Hey, look at that. So I'm going to go down to my computer and Mel Frank has his own computer. Good morning, AJ. Good morning, Mel.

7:06BubblemanWonderful. Well, welcome, Mel. You are most certainly welcome here at Hashtag.

7:12Etienne FontanWe've been hanging out all weekend. We've been sampling for the Northern California Light Dep Cup. So we were sampling cannabis, and we're very fortunate to have Mr. Mel Frank here himself and to sample along with him, which, needless to say, it's always an honor and a pleasure to hang out with him every time I get a chance. I'm always happy, and I'm definitely looking forward to hanging out with you today again.

7:35Etienne FontanSo thank you very much. It's always a blessing.

7:37BubblemanThank you, AJ. Absolutely. I've been enjoying the Instagram account, actually. It's been just wonderful to see all these photos from the 80s popping up in my feed, and I'm always so excited to see, like, wow, look at this in upstate New York in 1984. This was happening. It's very cool. Yeah.

8:02SpeakerI think the biggest grow was in 1982. 1982, eh? 1982, yeah. That was, I would say, the most successful one.

8:12Etienne FontanSo Mel, some people know who you are, some people may not. Mel Frank is one of the original authors of How to Grow Cannabis, and you published your first grow book when?

8:22Speaker1974. 1974. Five years after I was born. A little book. Actually, Ed Rosenthal, I did that with Ed Rosenthal. I had an article published in a section of Rolling Stone, the New York section of Rolling Stone, in a two-part series on how to grow marijuana in your New York City apartment. And through that article, The publisher put Ed Rosenthal in touch with me. Ed was also trying to get an article published in the same publication.

9:01SpeakerPractically, as soon as I met Ed, he said we should write a book together. Actually, I didn't want to write a book for that. He was very persistent and bugged me for about a year. Finally, I relented. We took the two-part article and flushed it out, added a little more to it, and off he went. He was gone for about a year, and he found Level Press in San Francisco, which published it in a little book, maybe 96 pages, I think it was.

9:29Etienne FontanYeah, that's a small book, right?

9:32SpeakerYeah, it was a little, you know, what would that size be, about four by seven or something? Exactly. Anyway, we made a grand total of 35 cents. A copy on that splitting at 17 and a half cents each.

9:45Etienne FontanBig money.

9:49SpeakerBig money. But there wasn't much out there, so that way. But I was in school at the time that it was published. I was going to City College in New York and studying biology, botany and microbiology mainly. And I was determined to write a book that really had You know, condense the knowledge that we had, which wasn't that much, really. I mean, when I started researching it, all I could really find was stuff on growing hemp from World War II and from actually at the beginning of the century.

10:26SpeakerThere's Todd. Yes, there he is.

10:28BubblemanHe's okay. So what was the vibe back then when you're writing about this subject? I mean, obviously, you were probably... You know, not complete. I mean, I just think of this. Most people that are involved in the cannabis industry, I mean, it's kind of an unsaid thing, or it was at least back in the day, but we were all really involved in the cannabis industry. So if we were showing plants or if we were showing pictures of bud, it generally meant that we were probably growing plants and potentially, you know, we were flipping buds and stuff.

11:03BubblemanThat's how we had accidents. So I wonder what the vibe was back in the early 70s or the mid-70s when you were writing this for either yourself or the people who you were visiting their grows. Was it a low enough sort of exposure that people weren't worried about it or was there still this kind of like, whoa, this guy writes grow books. Are we going to have him come to our grow?

11:27SpeakerCan I paraphrase that? Hey, Jim, what year did the Perinaria step into the cannabis growing industry? What did what? I'm sorry, I didn't get that. What year did the paranoia become really prevalent in the industry? It was really in the late 70s, early 80s. I would say the early 80s, really. And it just grew. Because you have to understand that in the 70s, the country was going in the opposite direction of the drug on war.

11:55SpeakerThere wasn't a drug on war then. And they were starting to relax the penalties for it. And, I mean, there was no talk of medical then at all, unless you were, you know, Todd McCurry or something. But, yeah, and we thought that by 1980 it would be legalized. You know, Carter had talked about, you know, relaxing the penalties, and it just really, it turned around. I mean, you've got the Rockefeller came in with these predetermined, very harsh sentences on drugs.

12:26SpeakerThe Schaefer Commission came out and basically said they should decriminalize it, certain if not legalize it. It had nothing but rosy things to say about it, pretty much. Nixon just said, the hell with that. They created the DEA, and the DEA was left to make up the schedule, Schedule 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and put marijuana in the harshest one. That developed into the drug war. You know, Reagan boosted it up.

12:53SpeakerI think more though, when did you feel like, you know, when did it change for you going around and meeting growers and, you know, did they ever feel like you were a threat or when, you know, when you first started growing, was it 19, you started writing in 1971, correct? Right. Yeah. So I started growing, I started growing at 60, almost as soon as I started smoking.

13:16SpeakerI started smoking A couple of months after I got out of the service, I was looking forward to it. And, you know, got a bag of seeds, just started growing at 68 on the line.

13:28Etienne FontanHow did you get turned on?

13:30SpeakerPardon?

13:31Etienne FontanWho turned you on for the first time, Al?

13:34SpeakerI was living with two women. One of them was my girlfriend, and the other one's a great friend. I lost her last year. She died last year. She was a principal in Woodstock. She helped put on Woodstock. Anyway, her brother, I kept saying, where are we going to get some of this marijuana stuff? And her brother brought some down from Oswego, where he was going to college.

13:55SpeakerHe brought down five joints. He showed me, he taught me how to roll a joint, which to this day says it's a claim to fame. And we sat down, the three of us, the two women and myself, on a bed, and we smoked all five joints, boom, right in a row. And we're uncontrollably laughing for at least an hour. I mean, we couldn't really even talk to each other.

14:16SpeakerWe were so stoned. It was great. We immediately started searching for marijuana sources.

14:23Etienne FontanDo you know what kind of weed that was?

14:26SpeakerI'm sure it was just like Mex. Yeah. It was probably just Mexican. I don't think I had Columbian for another couple of years.

14:42SpeakerWhat started it? What did you start with when you say you didn't get Columbian for a little while later? You know, you started in 68 and then you started writing about it. What were the strains that you first started getting your hands on? When did you start seeing Afghan? Things like that. I'd love to know the history of the genetics that fell into your hands. I didn't really see Afghan until I came to the West Coast, right?

15:06SpeakerAnd actually, one of the first ones I did get was what became Afghani 1. And that was already here, and it was a hybrid, and it was being grown here in Northern California, in Sonoma, Napa counties. I knew people that were using it. And actually, at that time, also, by the time I came out here in, what was it, 76, permanently, I came out in 75 also, but 76, the book came out, I think, at the end of 77 or 78.

15:39SpeakerAnd people just started gravitating to us. And just because we already had the small book out, I got introduced to people in like Calaveras County, El Dorado County, you know, east of San Francisco. And they just started taking me around. And we could talk pot. And they, you know, you start talking and they soon realized, you know, I knew a lot about pot. And so that just opened it up.

16:10SpeakerAnd then when the book came out, people just started finding us. I don't know how the hell they found us, but they would show up at the door. They would somehow find a friend that knew us, and boom, they just started coming trails of them. And they would come, and they would bring real Afghani. I mean, it was pure stuff. The problem was it wasn't nothing, none of it compared to Afghani want in terms of potency.

16:35SpeakerAnd Almost certainly it's because they were a mix of CBD and THC. And of course we, unbeknownst to us, all we could do was smoke test it. So you smoke test it, it doesn't get you that high, you never grow it again. So that's what happened to a lot of the CBD strains also. We just unknowingly just eliminated them.

16:58BubblemanSkunk Man Sam talks about that a little bit, but he pretty much says it was knowingly. It was just like, man, that stuff was the anti-THC.

17:06SpeakerYeah, well, yeah, they'd be really resinous, they'd look gorgeous, but they wouldn't get you that high. But to answer your first question, Todd, on when I was growing that, intuitively I knew that genetics had a lot to do with whether it was going to be stony or not. So I would simply ask people to, if they had any seeds they saved from their best part, and to save me the seeds from their best part, and I grew that.

17:32SpeakerSo that was Mexican and then Colombian and then eventually it was Thai also.

17:38BubblemanSo here's a question for you, Mel. In regards to back in the beginning again, back in the first herb smoking days, how did it come to be that you were able to learn about this plant? Is it the fact that you were going to university and you had a foot in the door? You were doing the botany thing and you had a foot in the door in the cannabis industry.

17:59BubblemanDid you have some type of a mentor? Who knew how to actually bud plants or did it start the same for you as everyone where you were growing vegetative plants, barely able to get them flowering, et cetera?

18:11SpeakerDr. That's kind of funny because the very first crop I grew must have been growing for six months and still no flowers, except for the males. The males did flower eventually.

18:26SpeakerYou know, I was just thinking, I think it was the fall by then, things were getting colder, and I just thought to myself, these fucking plants, you know, what is going on here? And I actually turned down the lights, made the lights short at daylight, and boom, they just flowered almost immediately, you see. It was just really quite accidental, and I later found out that that was called the photoperiod, it was a photoperiodic response, and that sort of thing.

18:50SpeakerBut in terms of learning and In the 70s, the University of Mississippi was learning about the cannabinoids, cannabinoid profiles, testing stuff from all over the world, and really trying to get a handle on the chemistry of the plant. For me, I got out of college, I finished college at 75, and wanted to be serious about writing a good book on history, chemistry, the whole thing. I just went to libraries, as many as I could, to botanical libraries, New York City Library, Bronx Botanical Gardens, all that.

19:30SpeakerAnd also whenever I traveled, I would try to go to libraries. And at that time, you know, it wasn't computer time, I'd come with rolls of nickels in my pocket, and that was for the Xerox machines, what was called Xerox machines then. And I'd go through, and I'd go through the catalogs, and I'd just use keywords, THC, CBD, hemp, marijuana, and so forth, and just go and look up every single paper I could find, and I copied most of them and I think I ended up with well over 300.

20:04SpeakerMost of them weren't very useful to something like the book or to cultivation. There really wasn't much there about cultivation at all. But I did learn a lot about the chemistry and that's why the Grow's Guide Deluxe Basically, it had a good brief history. It had an explanation of the cannabinoids, at least as much as we knew at that time. And the botany, I knew the botany, you know, simply because I had been growing it and I had a better understanding of the botany, I think, than just about anybody at the time.

20:41SpeakerAnd so, you know, that was it. You know, I had a little bit of experience growing outdoors in New York. But really, when I came west, really saw some good growing. There were guys in Calaveras and El Dorado. They were growing huge plants. They were growing four or five pound plants, no problem. And they were right out in the open because at that time, you also didn't have helicopters flying over and looking for all this stuff.

21:08SpeakerSo it was all very open. They weren't even hiding the plants then. They were in very rural areas. And there was also a rush at that time of, There was a lot of quote hippies going out and buying their 40 acres. That was the big thing. I want to buy my 40 acres and grow pot. And so a lot of them were out there. There was a lot of back to the land at that time.

21:27SpeakerPeople wanted to grow their own vegetables, all that stuff. Can I ask? Whereabouts did these countries of origin, like Colombia, Mexican, when did those become skunk and haze? When did they begin their strain names?

21:47SpeakerActually, I think that Rob and Dave really were the first ones I heard about talking about specific strains with a name, skunk and haze and that sort of thing. Otherwise, they were just the country of origin. They were like Nepali or Pakistani or Afghani, that sort of thing. I really don't know. I never named my plants. I just knew them by the country of origin and the number that I had assigned to them.

22:18SpeakerBut I did, a lot from visitors, managed to accumulate a lot of land races. I had 200 land races, which I still have the records of. I think it's funny, Jim, listening to you talk about this, for a lot of us, this is the beginning of modern cultivation. I mean, your book, for people that don't realize it, I was only 13, I traded at I got a $20 bag of weed from my friend's older brother for your book in 1984, and I immediately went home, cleaned up my closet, and I found the fluorescent lights in the basement, and you had a diagram where it just had wood and, like, cinder blocks, maybe, and fleas holding up a fluorescent light, and the plants were in a different height, and you had the lights sideways and everything going up at an angle.

23:08SpeakerI copied it to a tee and I found the watering can in my grandma's shed. I found the soil, the pots. I found the ropes and the pulleys. They were our old laundry lines. Honestly, even the timer was in the front window. The only thing I needed to go buy was the fertilizer. You really ushered in a new career for me. You even had a part about cloning where you put it in a napkin.

23:33SpeakerI did every exercise.

23:39BubblemanIt sounds familiar to me as well, Todd. Not as early as 1984, but around 1991 or 2, I think that his revised edition had just come out. It was because I remember it saying revised edition. It had to be 92, maybe even 93. And that was when I started myself. And we also did the paper towel and the seeds. I mean, that book was, there was no internet.

24:06Etienne FontanRight. It was very important to the sense. That was the book. That's the book we all started on. I mean, when I was on a hemp tour, I was telling Mel last night, I sold that book in 47 states because everybody wanted a copy because it was, either they had had a copy, they had heard about it, or they knew that was the one, but they would come specifically for that book, and they, especially when the revised edition came out, everybody went apeshit for that, you know, because it was much more comprehensive, it was available, and everybody was, again, back then, was afraid you'd end up on a list, so...

24:38Etienne FontanHaving that book accessible for people, but I cracked my seeds the same way, reading in your book, you know, putting them in, you know.

24:48SpeakerThank you enough. Look at all your disciples. I know. It's really incredible what's happened to the industry. And to think I thought it would be legalized by 1980, really. And then to see what happened, you know, with Operation Green Merchant and everything that happened in the late 80s and into the 90s. But even at that time, now that I think of it back in the, let's say, 80, 81 is when I think they started to actually look in earnest.

25:17SpeakerI think camp started somewhere around there. That was that campaign against marijuana propagation or something like that. And the helicopters started flying, right? That was really... Pretty incredible. That's when the growers, when I would go to the Sierra Nevada, now they were starting to actually move their plants from outdoor where they see a helicopter. They started to move them under the manzanita trees and that sort of thing.

25:41SpeakerAnd they grew just fine with filtered sunlight. Really, just fine. And they would spread them out, you know, But at first, they were just all grouped together, you know, right out there in the open. Yeah, that changed really quickly.

25:54Etienne FontanThat's when they started to hide. 182 is when they started to actually shield them from the sky.

26:01BubblemanYou can actually look at the Beaverland Dam, the old Beaverland Dam site. Pictures that they did for their brand of herb, and it was the beaver in the field, and Skunk Man Sam has like all of them, but it's like either in 81 or 82, it had the little beaver, and it's like damn close on the sign, and there's helicopters flying over, and the trees are, the little cannabis plants are hiding in the trees.

26:27BubblemanYeah. Pretty neat way to see the history.

26:32SpeakerYeah. I used to... I worked a little bit with this woman in Sonoma. I convinced her to grow about 40 female Durban poison when I was developing Durban poison. She grew that along with her other stuff. She had some Mexican and Afghani. All of a sudden, everybody around here was getting raided. The helicopters were just killing everybody that she knew. Understandably, she got in a panic and she went out and she just took everything down and hid it in the woods.

27:07SpeakerAnd that Christmas, she finally brought it out and we got up there over the Christmas break or whatever it is and helped her manicure all this stuff. And the only thing that was worth anything was the German poison. The German poison actually was just about finished and everything else was still, I mean, barely started budding. So that was a revelation for her. And she said, hey, this saved my year, just this variety, this new variety.

27:34SpeakerSo that was very satisfying to me because I had really worked for in the late 70s, early 80s to try to get really good stuff that matured early. And that also helped, you know, I had these people back east that kept growing crap, you know. I had a bunch of people that said, you know, crappy Mexican or just a bunch of leaf. And I said, you know, come on, get it together.

27:59SpeakerAnd this was after maybe about five years, they finally got me to go out there and help them.

28:06Etienne FontanDr. Was it with access to genetics?

28:09SpeakerDr. Yeah, I brought them. I had to make several trips. First I went out there to see what the situation was. And the situation to me was like, I couldn't ask for anything better. It was very close to the house that we would be in. It was rural. There was not much traffic at all. It was a very drivable dirt road. The sheriff went by every day on his way to work and waved to him.

28:37SpeakerBut, you know, you'd walk 100 feet in the back through some dense kind of swampy stuff and woods, and boom, all of a sudden you're out there, which was once probably a swamp or a lake or whatever that had, you know, filled in, and now it was like almost bottomless silt, wonderful, rich, dark soil. You could dig it with your hand. And I just looked around at what was left of the bushes and the natural vegetation.

29:03SpeakerIt was all like, you know, just really lush and growing. I said, this is going to be great. So I came out and I brought him some seeds. In fact, I brought him a shitload of seeds. I brought him really what I thought was my prize stuff. And that was an Afghani times Nigerian back crust to Afghani, and Afghani times Congolese back crust to Afghani, because I wanted to make sure that they finished.

29:28SpeakerAnd then I brought Durban, Durban Afghani Pure, hybrids of those two. I just brought really all that I thought would really mature well out there. And I showed him how to start the plants. I wanted him to start them indoors, which he did. He almost killed himself. I told him about setting up in his basement. I wanted him to use fluorescent snow if he went with halides.

29:54SpeakerAnd so when I talked to him on the phone, and I said, well, make sure you're insulated there, and don't go touching anything, you know, if you're watering or anything like that. Sure enough, you fucking ended up in the hospital, right? Touched a reflector on a wet floor, and boom. But anyway, the plant survived, and I went out there, I think in April, I flew out and kind of oversaw the planting, and gave special attention to them.

30:22SpeakerAnd what we did is we had, I think it was six plants. We had separate areas. It was one big area. It wasn't like you had to walk a distance to anything. We simply separated them by the natural vegetation, so it wasn't just one big, uh-oh, there's a whole bunch of marijuana there. I think that helped to camouflage it. It also made it easy for me. This little section's at the anti-Nigerians, Congolese, so forth and so on.

30:50SpeakerThen whatever area was left, they kind of just broadcast their shitty seeds. That stuff just grew. A thicket. And we went from there. And then I drove out there, and I think it was end of May, and spent the whole summer there. I rented a park in New York, but spent most of my time at the Grove overseeing them. But I came back to Oakland for a couple of weeks.

31:16SpeakerI don't remember what it was for. And they managed to kill the Afghani, most of the Afghani plants that I had there. Because they panicked about some insects, they said. And I said, don't worry, wait until I get back and we'll deal with it. Nope, they didn't. They ran out. I don't know what the hell they sprayed it with, but whatever they sprayed, they sprayed way too much because they killed plants.

31:40SpeakerAnd then I realized, I've got to stay here all the time. These guys are really terrible. But I managed to get one guy to understand pre-flowering, and we got everything out really quickly. I didn't miss a meal. Never had a seed in the whole crop, except for what I bred. And I bred a lot of stuff. I created a shitload of seeds from that. And that was pretty much it.

32:02SpeakerWe harvested over 500 pounds. Nobody got busted. Everybody had a great time. So that was all good.

32:12SpeakerAnd they should have continued. They should have continued doing that. But nope. The owner got really greedy. He wanted to grow a bigger thing. And ended up buying 140 acres at elevation, maybe another 50, 70 miles away, and tried to grow a really big crop, and that's when they got busted. That was the biggest crop that I ever saw. That one would have yielded about a ton if they managed to have pulled it off.

32:43Etienne FontanHow much was it a pound back then?

32:49SpeakerFrom what I understand, they sold the good stuff for $2,000 a pound, and the shitty stuff they sold for, I think, was $1,700. But I have a story that appeared in High Times. It is a funny story. I remember when I was talking to Chris Simunek from High Times, who interviewed me, and that is that in...

33:13SpeakerWhen I was getting ready to drive back, I finished with my apartment in New York, and I stopped at High Times before I went back, talked to them. And while I'm talking to somebody, a guy comes in and he says, hey, Mel, Mel, you've got to come back here. You've got to come back here. You've got to see this. So I go back, and they're smoking, and they're all getting really stoned.

33:30SpeakerAnd I look at the bag. I take one whiff, and I know it's Afghani Congolese, right? I know it is. And... And so they're talking. One guy turns to me and says, you know, he says, you just can't. He says, this is the best stuff from the Big Island. I said, really? He says, yeah, it's the best stuff from the Big Island. He says, you know, you just can't get stuff like this unless you live in the mountains or Hawaii or something like that.

33:56SpeakerI never told him it was like fucking 60 miles away, right? I could have called him up and said, hey, these guys want a couple hundred pounds. It was But actually, I didn't want anything really to do with how they were dispersing the stuff, how they were selling it. So as soon as they started to, it was all dried and they started to bag it up, I left.

34:19SpeakerThat was the last I saw of those guys. But yeah, that was pretty funny. I never told them and just let them go on with their fantasies about, you know, you can't get good stuff unless you're in the mountains or in Hawaii or something. Unbelievable. Right, so anyway, he put that, I tell him, don't tell him this, because I didn't want to tell him about the whole grow, but I guess he loved that story because he did put it in the interview.

34:46SpeakerThat's awesome.

34:49SpeakerSo, you know, I met Rob and Dave also about 78 or so, after the book came out, and we exchanged seeds. I gave Matthew any one German poison. And I don't really know what else. And he gave me, over time, he gave me some South Indian. He gave me a Nepali haze. I grew haze one time. I don't think he gave me scuff number one. I don't remember ever growing it then.

35:19SpeakerAlthough he did give me some of his personal seeds. In the mid-80s, when he came back to L.A. for a brief time, gave me a nice little canister of them. And I didn't grow them. I still have seeds from them. Turned out nice.

35:36BubblemanThat's amazing, man.

35:37SpeakerThat's a history right there. Yeah. So anyway, it was a lot of nickels and a lot of Xerox machines to get all those papers. But both Ed and I went through all of them, really did go through all of them, and we And it helped on the chemistry. Obviously, we didn't know the chemistry, but there was enough there, and there's enough in the original deluxe that's fairly accurate.

36:04SpeakerI mean, we thought THCV, at the time, we thought THCV might come on faster than THC. And it took a hit, and boom, we felt it. We said, oh, that's THCV, but apparently that's not true now. So there's things that, of course, we know a lot more about it now. We know about the trippings. I had no clue about the trippings in terms of any effect that they might have at the time, only in terms of the fragrance, just smelling something and saying, wow, this has got a great fragrance.

36:38BubblemanWhen we think about it, It makes sense that the terpenes would have as profound of an effect as we're finding that they have now because it seems as though, and maybe you could confirm or deny, that it's always had an enormous amount to do with the growing and the breeding and the collecting and the sharing of the strains. I mean, I'm sure that your friend that thought, or the guy you met that thought the herb was grown on the island and that you had to be on the island to grow this herb, that would have been most likely based on its fragrance.

37:09SpeakerYeah, I think, no, I think what really happened is that whoever sold it to them said, oh, this is from the big island, because you wouldn't want to tell them, hey, it's right here, you know, because people didn't think anything of homegrown at that time, you know. I had a great amount of people saying, oh, it's green, you know, what is this, hey, what is this, this is really grass, you know, it's a kind of mow, stuff like that, and then they would smoke it, and they'd say, holy shit.

37:31BubblemanYeah, there was a time when BC was sending so much herb down to the states that the quality just dropped and dropped and dropped and dropped and the people who were sending good quality stopped saying that it was from BC and they would literally just say that it was from A whole host of variety of other places. When it was coming from BC, it was just, you know, it ended up in New York or California or wherever.

37:55BubblemanAnd they generally just, you know, oh, it's local. It's just, it's not from far away at all. And it's funny how the lies could continue 20 to 30 years.

38:04SpeakerIn the 80s, when I was a kid and people would ask me what kind of weed it was, I'd say it was Alaskan Snow Bud. We've grown in the aromatic caves of Alaska with pure artesian water. We've grown in igloos, man, igloos. I'll tell you one thing about Alaska. I remember growing there, but in the 90s when I was in Amsterdam. I went out to dinner with Rob Clark and several other people.

38:33SpeakerIn this particular Indian restaurant, they let you smoke marijuana, so we were all smoking. This big young guy comes over, and he hands us a roll joint, and he says, Alaskan Thunderfuck. I'll tell you, it went around the table one time, and all of a sudden, whoa, because it came right through whatever else you were smoking. That was impressive. That was definitely impressive.

38:55BubblemanIt's funny how also every place seems to have, I mean not every place, but a lot of places seem to have this magical herb with a story that no one really knows. Here we had the UBC chemo.

39:11BubblemanWe had this strain that was apparently created by the people at the University of British Columbia. I remember being quite young and being in Manitoba where I grew up and a friend of mine from Transcona showing me this bud and I'd never seen bud like it. It looked all red and it was still quite moist like he hadn't really dried it properly. But it was just this, I was like, where did you get that?

39:34BubblemanWhat is that? It's like, oh, this is the UBC Chemo. They didn't call it the Chemo Kush back then. It was literally just called the UBC Chemo, which is really a terrible name for a strain. And then you have your Alaskan Thunder Fox, and you have the crazy story of OG Kush. Here in BC, we also had the BC Hash Plant, which also sometimes went by the name the Champagne Hash Plant.

39:57BubblemanAnd it was like a protected strain that you could actually find yourself in trouble if the wrong people found out that you had, like if you went on Overgrow and were telling everyone, look at this strain I got, you could literally get a call or an email or a visit from people saying, You have to stop doing that.

40:15Etienne FontanHere in the States, it was G13. When I was on tour and stuff, it was hearing the government-grown G13, V for government, 13 for the letter, M for marijuana. You want to get your hands on the G13, and it's the most amazing pot you've ever heard or seen. And then when I actually saw LV's pot, which was actually government-grown pot, shattered every fucking illusion I ever fucking heard all across.

40:40Etienne FontanBut it was a common misbelief all across America that the government-grown G13 in America was the best fucking pot in the world. Mel, you had to have heard this.

40:52BubblemanWhen I was visiting Shanti Baba, Scott, in Belenzona... They were just one neighborhood over from Lugano where Breeders Steve was doing all his growing. I guess Mr. Nice, Howard, and Shanti Baba had this amazing facility in Bellinzona. Acres under glass and stuff. It was just kind of the most, I think it might be the most ridiculous grow I've ever visited. Gypsy Nirvana and a bushy older grower at the time.

41:20BubblemanBut he had some G13 growing outside of his greenhouse, just between the greenhouses. And I think I might even have him on camera saying it because it was so funny with his Australian accent. He said, yeah, that one I call the G, that one's the G13. I call it the G whiz. He just had no interest in this plant whatsoever to the point where it was just growing between his greenhouses and I don't know, I just thought it was pretty funny to think that at one point, like you said, that strain in certain circles, people might, you know, just, they want that so bad and then, you know, in the more realer circles of people that are actually studying botany and have dedicated their life to cannabis and breeding, you see that it quickly takes on a place of, well, I'll throw a few between the greenhouses, we'll see what happens.

42:10BubblemanAnd in that greenhouse, literally, I think the one greenhouse was about an acre, like 55,000 square feet, and it was all six and seven foot tall Callio plants that were in there like seventh to eighth week of flower. It was just like walking into an orange grove. I should take this time, actually, to welcome Tony and to welcome Horatio into the room. Bring Tony back into the broadcast.

42:37BubblemanThere we go. Welcome, guys. Thanks for... Showing up on a Sunday morning with us.

42:43TonyYeah, it's good to be part of Hatch Church again. And great to see Mel Frank as well. I know we've run into each other a couple times in the past. And as I told you, I think one of the times I met you a couple years ago, we had some deep conversations about... Degradation of THC to CBN. And I'll share with the rest of the world. That was the first book I picked up in the 90s, mid-90s, was your book.

43:17TonyAnd it was quite inspiring. I picked up everyone else's book, but you had a lot of details. You seemed to go, you know, the extra steps, especially in the second edition. But, you know, I think that in that time period, people didn't realize, like, the Internet was very sketchy. I just disfriended, like, defriended people that would come over, they'd get on my internet, they'd go on, like, they'd go on a website or they'd try to go on High Times, like, you're out of here, like, I have to move now.

43:48TonyYou know, break the whole grow down, move to another.

43:53SpeakerYeah. They know where I am, they know what I'm doing, yeah.

43:56TonyYeah, so you mean huge, huge inspiration to myself and many, many out there, especially early on, I think even with... You and Sam and a few others actually had seeds, which was unheard of, like to actually have seeds, you know, to be able to access seeds or somebody was giving seeds away. So it was, besides the music scene, everyone talks about Grateful Dead and different things like that, but I really give a lot of credit to guys like yourself that pioneered the seed movement, that also wrote about it, was able to get it published and get it out to many, many, many, many hands.

44:34TonyAnd ultimately was the inspiration for everything I'm doing today. You know, I refer to your book as like the source. And then obviously Robert Clark and Dave Watson. And between the three of you guys, I think that's like, that's everything that I source, you know?

44:54SpeakerYeah, actually Rob and Rob and Dave were the two most serious people I came across in terms of they were really seeking knowledge and trying to learn stuff. So yeah, they were great to hook up with. At that time in the late 70s and into the early 80s, When people would visit me, I mean, inevitably, they would, you know, they'd want seeds. And basically, I gave away thousands and thousands of seeds during this time.

45:24SpeakerUsually, I only gave, you know, 10 seeds to somebody, 10 of this, 10 of that, that sort of thing. But actually, there were some that I would actually give like a half a can to pull the seeds, which is, I don't know, 400 or 500 seeds. And this is when I first was doing this, producing a lot of seeds. They come back the next year and ask me for more seeds.

45:44SpeakerI say, what? Give me a break here, right? I gave you 400 seeds. Right. I think you can produce your own seeds.

45:55SpeakerIt's really a bummer in terms of the attitude of some people about the whole thing. I mean, to think that there's a whole industry now, you know, and that seeds can sell like for 20 bucks a piece is just mind-boggling to me. I can remember growing little Afghanis under a light in the attic and producing a couple thousand seeds. They were little seeds, but a couple thousand seeds on one little Afghani plant, you know, thoroughly pollinated.

46:20SpeakerI was thinking, my God, what a money maker these guys are. Sensi Seeds and all that started. But yeah, at that time, it was just like trading. Here, have something. Even if they didn't bring anything and they wanted something, I'd give them something.

46:33BubblemanAs it should be. I mean, it's nice to hear that the seed business started out in the roots of sharing is caring. Because I'll tell you, you sure get into some serious arguments with people nowadays about... The validity of sharing strains with certain people. There's all these different reasons why people will come up, but it always seems to boil down to a fear and scarcity and an insecurity that those people will do better than they can do with those same seeds.

47:02SpeakerThat never occurred to me, really. I'll tell you, it was totally intentional on my part to give away these seeds and get them out there. At that time, there was also the paranoia that, you know, what's going to be legalized and the corporations are going to take over and pretty soon we'll be locked out of all this good stuff. And, you know, there was talk about Alcapulco Gold and names like that being, they're already trademarked by the big companies.

47:31SpeakerSo, with that paranoia, I mean, my thinking was, I'm just going to get these seeds out there all over the place, and once the genie is out of the bottle, tough, you know, there's nothing they can do about it. And it's, even now, when people talk In paranoia that, you know, the corporations will take over, which of course, at some point, I'm sure there will be several big corporations that do take over a big part of the market.

47:53SpeakerBut still, the seeds are out there and people will always be able to grow, you know, really high quality pot on their own. And that's the way it should be.

48:02Etienne FontanMel, I have a question. You're one of the forefathers of cannabis photography. How did you start and how did you develop your early photographs? Because it had to be challenging. Unless you did it yourself, right?

48:17SpeakerNo, I didn't do it myself. I mean, color photography is a whole thing to do. I did have a friend that did a lot of the black and white stuff that I have. But the color, no, what I would do is, you know, if I was at a grow, like when I was in New York, not the year that was successful, the next year, I would be taking photographs, but I wouldn't get them developed until after I left the grow and the grow was gone.

48:47SpeakerBut while I was in Oakland, yeah, I was just getting them developed by, like, Kodak. Well, actually, I learned that I should have Kodak film developed by Kodak because some of the rinky-dink operations ruined some of my roles. But, yeah, and that carried through to, let's see, when was that? I'd say in the 90s when they were working, Todd, who was that who put out the pesticide book?

49:20SpeakerThe Bush doctor. Right. I did, I wanted to do a demonstration of the nutrient deficiencies, what they look like. So I grew some hydroponics and had it, did it for the major nutrients. And waited, I had six rolls of film, and waited until I had cleaned that out of my house, and I was nice and clean from growing, and then brought them to Kodak to have them developed.

49:48SpeakerAnd unfortunately, they left out one of the dyes when they processed it, and so I have 200 and some photographs of nutrient deficiencies that are all orange. But that was what I tried to do, is wait until I had cleaned up my act before I got the stuff developed. But early on, Early on, I'll just bring it down, because like I said at the time, we thought it was going to be legalized.

50:13SpeakerThings were going pretty easily. And things happened. When Ed and I had the place in Oakland, we had the greenhouse in back. It looked like a shed, but we were using it as a greenhouse. But we had plants and pots outside. We had plants in the attic on the halide. I had plants in the window that I would be starting. They were just everywhere. The pot was everywhere.

50:39SpeakerAnd never really worried about it. In fact, when we had a fire that approached our greenhouse, the firemen came, they cleaned out my greenhouse of everything. I wasn't home at the time.

50:54SpeakerAnd I never got busted. You know, I expected to get busted. I came in as the fire trucks were leaving, and the neighbors were all up there saying, wow, you were growing a lot of pot back there. They just couldn't bring back full, back full out. And I thought, shit, I'm going to be busted, and just took my seed collection, moved the seed collection, and went over to a friend's house, slept the night, and said, I'll go back tomorrow and fix the music.

51:16SpeakerAnd the music never came. And I was talking about it last night and realized, well, of course it didn't come, because the firemen took the pot and divided it among themselves. And of course, they're not going to go to the cops, because they kept all the pot. I wish they had encouraged me at the time that I felt secure about it. I wouldn't have moved my seed collection.

51:37SpeakerVery cool.

51:39BubblemanI wanted to welcome the C99 just popped in, Mr. Soul, welcome Rick.

51:55BubblemanI got you on mute there, sorry. I'll have to give a quick little update both to Mel and Rick. I'll have to mute Mel when he's not talking, and Rick, you will have to unmute yourself when you are talking. So, welcome. I hope it works for you. Just got to unmute yourself.

52:16RickHear me now. There you go.

52:18BubblemanHey, dude.

52:19RickWhat's happening, guys?

52:20BubblemanI thought it would be cool to invite you in while Mel was talking. He's been telling some amazing old school stories. Of course, we've been trying to get Mr. Soul into Hash Church for a couple of weeks. You guys know this guy from Overgrow Days. Not going back quite as far as Mel's going back, but definitely another part of the history, the infamous Cinderella 99 and the Brothers Grimm.

52:42BubblemanSo I thought it would be nice to have both of you in here simultaneously kind of Talking about old stories and the great lineage of genetics and that story that Mel just told was unbelievable. I can't believe you didn't get busted with that fire, Mel. It's unbelievable.

53:03RickYeah, I wish you tipped me off earlier. I would have been tuned in, but I'm just getting the notice now. So I missed whatever everybody was talking about earlier.

53:13BubblemanYeah, that's okay. It's just we've been having, you know, talking about cannabis, doing, listening to really Mel talk about some Landry strains and the production of seeds and, you know, talking about cannabis photography back when, I mean, geez, you've been doing this for over 40 years, I think. Is that correct, Mel? I'll unmute you.

53:36SpeakerIf you move the mouse a little bit.

53:38BubblemanNo, I unmuted him, Todd.

53:41SpeakerWe can hear you. Hey guys, everybody. You don't get to unmute us. I was actually just explaining to him how we use this like a CB. Please go on. Yeah, so sorry. I'm going to mute myself.

53:54BubblemanThat's okay. I was asking him a question actually. I was saying that Mel has been doing this for over 40 years. I mean it must be 45 or something. I know I'm 42 and I was born in 73. He was talking about 71. So that's taking it back a lot longer than the majority of us. When did you start up, Rick? Was it the 80s or the 90s for you?

54:18RickMid-80s, like 86.

54:21BubblemanAnd so what was your first grow book that you checked out?

54:24RickWell, what I did was I got connected with SSSC, Super Sativa Seed Club, way back when I was in college. In the mid-80s and started to grow, you know, like many people probably discovered this in college and that's what happened with me. I just started devouring all the books that were available and then, you know, reading in high times, I saw an ad from SSSC to buy seeds and I, you know, I recognized right away that, you know, don't waste your time growing schwag that you find in your bag, you know, have some known seeds to start with.

54:57RickAnd that developed into a relationship with the company pretty quickly. We started communicating, sending letters back and forth to Holland and I asked some good questions, I guess, because they recognized that, oh, this guy seems to know what he's talking about and they asked me if I wanted to work for them. So that turned into about three or four years worth of working with SSFC on being their U.S. distributor and having access to all of genetics and being able to have a free hand in any kind of breeding projects that I wanted to take on.

55:31RickAnd that lasted up until, you know, like the early 90s, and then I shot over to Belgium on an opportunity to take a job over there. I'm a nuclear engineer, and they had a two-year project that I had. It was really interesting, and so I left and did that. Got away from it for a little while, and then came back to Boston in 97, and picked right back up from there, and you know the story of how Cinderella 99 was developed out of some seats that I had come back from Holland with.

56:02RickAnd so that, I think you know the rest of the story, but yeah, that's kind of how I came into it, and bring you up to where most people know the story.

56:12BubblemanI had no idea that you worked for the Super Sativa Seed Club. Once again, you know, interesting. It's sort of, I know I've talked to Skunk Man Sam in the past and I'm pretty sure that he shared seeds with those guys back in the day as well. So it's neat to see, it's just neat to go back into the roots of all this and it seems that the people who have the most...

56:34BubblemanThe most legitimacy seemed to have all followed these similar routes. Mel was literally talking about a very similar way that he got into things, also going about things in a way that, you know, going to books and Xerox machines and trying to find as many bits and information as possible, and that's... I mean, those are the roots of getting things done. Is it possible to ask that guy behind you, whoever's slamming and banging and booming, to stop doing that?

57:02RickIt's his place. You pinged me when I happened in... That's okay.

57:07BubblemanYou know what? We can do it another time, too, because we just can't have the background noise.

57:11RickYeah, I hear you, bro. No problem. You were supposed to get a hold of me yesterday.

57:17BubblemanYes, well, that's all good. It's every Sunday, so if you can come back another time, we'd love to have you, Soil.

57:24RickThanks, dude. All right. Take care, guys.

57:27BubblemanYeah, we're starting to have standards here on Hash Church now. We just can't allow people to come in with bad sound and crackling this and crackling that. I would have loved to have heard more of his stories, but bad sound is just too much. Guidelines on Hash Church. Something simple. How are you doing, Horatio? Heard you had a nice interview with the Cannabis Economy people the other day.

57:52BubblemanI listened to it. It sounded pretty good.

57:53SpeakerIt was pretty good. Unfortunately, I'm trying to get my question and mail off, so I want to redirect the subject. You mentioned like Durban Poison being one of my favorites, you've now re-experienced that given back to you and a lot of your strains. What would you define as a successful commercial producer to be when it's grown right? Everyone's got these terms and these made up, but rarely do you find the breeders getting an opinion of that's my strain, that's my clone produced the way I'd produce it.

58:28SpeakerAre breeders the best growers because they would have the best knowledge of the potential of the plant?

58:42SpeakerAm I unmuted now? Yes, go ahead. Okay. I'm not sure about that. I think that people who are real breeders probably do if they're testing each phenotype and noting the phenotype's characteristics and then choosing between what they're testing. So, you know, it's all about the profile. It is the cannabinoid profile, terpene profile, and the actual growth of the plant, and then choosing the best thing. I don't recall that.

59:10SpeakerThat's fine.

59:13SpeakerBack in the old days, of course, we didn't have the testing. You just had to smoke test it, which was actually quite accurate. What I did was, the way I went about breeding was I would breed a few, like a branch, a lower branch. On each plant, each female that I grew, excuse me. And then over the winter, we would smoke test the sensimia part of the plant.

59:45SpeakerAnd I would give nimbid joints to friends and just ask them to give me an evaluation on it. One of the things I realized was that the duration of the high was a very good indication of the potency. And so I asked them to be consistent about how, you know, their smoking habit. In other words, try to smoke at the same time each day, try to smoke the same number of pokes that you've started with, and then give me an analysis of it.

1:00:10SpeakerAnd I think that worked very well in terms of breeding because in really a few generations you could really see the difference in terms of, especially in terms of the consistency of the crop. Durban Poison, when I first got it, was all over the place in terms of really mediocre, just something that was pretty decent. Actually, by the time I had finished, well, I never really finished with it, but by the time it became finished with me, it was consistently pretty damn good.

1:00:41SpeakerThe time of maturation was very good. We were harvesting stuff like that in August in New York and in Oakland. I don't know where we're going with this. Anyway, for somebody who is just doing their breeding on their own, that's a very simple way of doing it that you don't even need a lab if you didn't want to go that route. I don't know what else to say about it.

1:01:17SpeakerFor instance, you said Oakland versus New York, grown outdoors. What was the difference in that crop? If I'm always trying to seek that perfection, sometimes the perfection is in how it's grown, and sometimes the perfection is within the genetics. Jamie, you have to unmute yourself. I can do that as well.

1:02:05SpeakerOh, he got it. That would have been a difficult comparison for me at the time because they were very different grows. In terms of, I was personally growing in a greenhouse in Oakland, and back east it was outdoors, full sun. The Oakland greenhouse was small, maybe got five hours of direct sunlight a day. And then the other grows were, a grow I did in Sonoma, The plants did not come out as tall as they did in New York.

1:02:40SpeakerI don't know exactly why that was, but just thinking back, I realized that they were taller in New York. Maybe it was because the soil was just so rich there and they had absolutely full sun. And then some of the other breeding that was done with Durban was simply by friends, and I didn't actually see their grows. They just brought me back. The Fertilized Buds, Numbered Plants, that sort of thing, and then I would evaluate it from there.

1:03:09SpeakerI never grew it indoors. In fact, I never saw Durban poison after I think it was 1982, 82 or 83, until about three weeks ago, somebody gave me a couple of clones, two different phenotypes of Durban. They're a little bit different. I can see a little bit difference in the serrations on the teeth, on the leaflets. One of them looks kind of similar to one of the phenotypes I had of Durban poison.

1:03:41SpeakerI'm very curious to see how it turns out. The other thing that Durban poison had, a quality that I've never seen since, was that some of the stigmas would be purple. And a lot of them would be kind of a lavender. And that's, I believe, is when you have a white stigma plant crossed with a purple stigma plant, you get this sort of lavender or light purple color.

1:04:03SpeakerThat seems to be what it is with the red stigmas also. I mean, you cross the white with the red, and you end up with banks. So at the time, I wasn't breeding for those sort of things, those cosmetic things. It was simply... Potency, earliness, health of the plant. And if it passed those things, that's what I went with. The cosmetic things were really secondary to me at the time.

1:04:27SpeakerOf course, I wish I had those primal stigmas now, because they were really beautiful. So, we'll see. I don't know. If you guys have grown any recent Durban poison and can tell me what they look like, got to be of interest.

1:04:42BubblemanThe last one I saw Breeders Steve had in his greenhouse in Lugano, and it was this big, like, it had to be eight feet tall, but it was all slumped over, like almost bent in half, so it was more like around six feet tall, and the butt on it was probably like Maybe like that big in the greenhouse. It was longer than my arm and much fatter, but very sparse.

1:05:05BubblemanLike it was just a super sparse bud. And I think Steve had gotten the seeds from Skunk Man Sam.

1:05:14Etienne FontanThe first strain I grew was Durban Poison, and I was just an idiot. I grew it in a closet, and it grew through the closet. Yeah, I was an idiot early. Going for that sidelight, eh? Pretty much, man. It wanted to go right to the roof.

1:05:30SpeakerI kept rising. I kept making the light go higher as the plant got higher. I thought that's what it was supposed to do. By the time I was finished, they were at the ceiling of my closet. But fortunately, I got to the chapter on cloning.

1:05:45BubblemanWell, I'll tell you, you know, it really goes back to the roots of the importance of the work, once again, that you did. You know, you maybe didn't realize it at the time as you were going from library to library, Xeroxing all of these different documents to put them into. I mean, did you really have any idea that it would have this sort of effect? I mean, it probably seemed to take a lot longer than you guys thought from what you were saying earlier, the way you thought it was going to just, you know, blow up, get legalized, be taken over by corporations early.

1:06:14BubblemanIt sure took a lot longer, didn't it?

1:06:17SpeakerI'll unmute you. Really been a long, strange trip, as they say. Yeah, that was weird. The thing about the book, though, that really had it explode was that it got a very good review in the New York Times. And as you know, the New York Times gets 50,000 books a year, so it's very, very selective on what's there. But I think that when they found this book, they were just, like, shocked.

1:06:44SpeakerIn fact, part of the review, he basically said, here's a plant that's illegal, and here we have this entire book with 200-something references in it, glossy photographs through the microscope, and like, my God, what is this, right? But gave a very good review in terms of saying the book was very accessible and serious, but accessible to the average reader. And so once a book is reviewed by the New York Times, gets a good review, Everybody starts to carry it.

1:07:16SpeakerSo that's what happened is the books really started to sell like crazy. And it was in all the bookstores. So that's how it really exploded versus other books that were also out at the time about marijuana. And there was a really nice book, Sensimia, which had nice color photographs in it. It was kind of a prose, a poetic kind of book in terms of talking about it.

1:07:39SpeakerAnd it basically talked about The maturation of the plant, that sort of thing. Very nice.

1:07:49BubblemanWell, you're definitely one of the OG photographers of cannabis, so, you know, also inspired me. I didn't get into cannabis photography until years later, but I always appreciated it through your lens, through the lens of Andre Grossman, through the electron microscopy of Joep Dumas from Holland back in the late 80s, early 90s. That work was incredible. And it just all sort of got me really inspired. I found that I started learning the most when I started photographing cannabis.

1:08:22SpeakerYes. When you really start to photograph and you start to get into that really close detail and if you're paying attention, you start to learn some things. You know, I used some of your photographs in Rob Clark's hashish books. I mean, you have some beautiful stuff out there, really, really nice stuff. But yeah, and I find that, you know, I like to take my little hand microscope with me all the time looking at stuff.

1:08:53SpeakerIt's surprising what you find there, especially in terms of the life they could live on a cannabis plant.

1:08:59BubblemanIt's unbelievable. I've seen some super, super strange, wild, zany things at that level, like everything. I mean, insects become more horrific and terrifying at these levels where you're just like, oh my God, like when there's a reference to how big it is compared to like a trichome. And the way it looks, it's just, it can be shocking to say the least. Same with male flowers on female plants, these big crazy bananas just coming out of this beautiful flowering female plant.

1:09:33BubblemanIt's like no! It's quite lovely.

1:09:38SpeakerThere's people don't look closely enough at their plants and they end up with a few bananas and suddenly they have seeds and yeah, you got to pay attention to your plants. I used to love to just sit in the garden, breathe all that nice oxygen coming off those plants, you know.

1:09:52BubblemanYeah, I can say the same thing. In the early 90s when I started growing cannabis, I was quite young just out of being a teenager and was just very much into literally I would go whenever I was reading, I would go spend time Under the plant, with the plants, in the canopy, and it just, that's, there's a real passion that there's a certain person that this plant speaks to in such a way that, you know, it inspires them to start photographing and growing and collecting seeds and going to libraries and Xeroxing papers and, like, it's quite an incredible flame that this plant can light within us, so I definitely...

1:10:34BubblemanI've recognized that for over 20 years, and I recognize it when I meet like-minded people, and it is sort of nice to meet you for the first time here, Mel. I know we've talked in email and whatnot, but out of all the people in this community, for as long as we've both been involved in it, our paths have actually never crossed.

1:10:51SpeakerRight. I know.

1:10:54BubblemanThat's incredible to me.

1:10:56SpeakerReally? This is the first time you guys are sitting here looking at each other and having a conversation, kind of?

1:11:01BubblemanYes. Yeah, absolutely.

1:11:04SpeakerI had no idea.

1:11:05BubblemanYeah. Yeah, there's a few people in the industry. I've said it before, and I usually say it when people are like, oh, Bubble Man, I want to meet you. I need to come. I'll come to BC, and we'll just hang out. And I'm just like, oh, wait, just a second. That's strange. You know like that makes me uncomfortable and so I've never myself really wanted to force meeting any of the people that I've sort of been inspired by in this industry.

1:11:30BubblemanThere's a few of them and I've just, I could have easily forced a meeting but I thought that's not how I really like to meet people. I'd rather have it come sort of more organic and you know more manifested in a natural form. I think it's a great venue here today on Hash Church for Mel and I to be having our first face-to-face conversation. Yeah, definitely enjoying it, yes.

1:11:54BubblemanAbsolutely. And we should welcome D420K to the room. How are you doing, buddy? Excellent, brother.

1:11:59SpeakerHow are you? You feeling okay? Yes. Man, I got cracked up by the chiropractor three days in a row. And this guy, I never heard any bones crack the way he cracked me up and I feel way better. Like I can sleep at night and it's good. I'm not bumping myself to sleep basically.

1:12:19BubblemanI came to the realization of just how close of a really good friend you are when like your pain was weighing on me harshly.

1:12:29SpeakerWhen?

1:12:30BubblemanThank you for watching.

1:12:50SpeakerIt's the thing of, you know, even my buddy, he's on his BMX when we were younger. He could do all the tricks, all that stuff. He's 45 fucking years old, 46 years old. He tries to do a big bunny hop. It's this big bunny hop. He's like four feet off the ground. Comes down, and the bike collapses on him. It comes right on his face. I'm going to show you.

1:13:13SpeakerI'm going to show the panel a picture of this. I'll do it. I'll do it. I don't know. You've got to see it, man. And this guy, three weeks later, he landed right on his face.

1:13:25BubblemanJesus.

1:13:27SpeakerHe took the whole bunny hop on his face. And what we've realized is we're not kids. We're a lot heavier, not as agile anymore.

1:13:36BubblemanAnd you know what? The bad news is he's not getting five million hits on his YouTube channel because he probably didn't get a video of it.

1:13:45SpeakerThat's a fact. He didn't, and he could have, I bet. Holy fuck, man. He might be even watching right now going, fuck, I knew I should have recorded that.

1:13:55BubblemanWell, we're sorry to hear that your buddy's hurt. I'm glad to hear that you're feeling better, and we're just having some awesome conversation here with Mel Frank, talking about some old school stories and giving us some inspiration to... To push through on this wonderful Sunday afternoon.

1:14:13Etienne FontanDean, we need your inspiration. Say it.

1:14:17BubblemanBall rip!

1:14:19SpeakerOh yeah, I'll do that. Let's do it. I'd like to tell you a little story about a fire as well that I drove into at one of my grow shows before because I was listening to a fire story earlier that didn't get busted.

1:14:36Etienne FontanNice haircut by the way, Dean.

1:14:40SpeakerI'm growing it out, man. I'll get a cut next week. I'm growing it out right now. I'll be too lazy. But the growth show I drove into in my minivan out in the middle of nowhere off the Fraser River near McBride and I rolled into this property and as soon as I rolled into the driveway I was committed no matter what And as I rolled in, there was cops, there was fire trucks, there was fire people, everything.

1:15:06SpeakerAnd what had happened is the guys at the show were burning some leaves in one of the buckets all back. Oh my God. Control. And it got the field and then it started doing a forest fire. Huge forest fire all around the fucking shop. We didn't have any of our gear outside of the building or anything like that, but the guys that were in the grow show were locked inside the grow show, barricaded in there, watching on the cameras what the fuck was going on around them.

1:15:32SpeakerThe grow show didn't get busted. The fire crews, everything were around there, and then we had to fight the rest of the spot fires for the last three days afterwards. You know the guy who was burning the leaves.

1:16:11BubblemanNo one was more happy than him.

1:16:13SpeakerOh, fuck yeah. He was fucking very happy.

1:16:18BubblemanIs this before bubble bags? Like people were burning their fucking leaves and setting the fucking forest on fire behind their grows because they didn't know how to process their material?

1:16:28TonyIs this what people were doing?

1:16:29Etienne FontanPut it in their, uh, fireplaces and shit, you know, however you could get rid of it, bury it, whatever, you know.

1:16:35BubblemanDude, I like the old classic was the flushing it down the toilet till your entire toilet plugged up and blew the water main on your fucking street. I heard that one a few times. That's a classic.

1:16:46Etienne FontanThat's brutal.

1:16:49BubblemanYou must have some good ones, Mal. Some just most absurd, ridiculous.

1:16:55Etienne FontanThe absurd...

1:16:59Etienne FontanUnmute yourself.

1:17:01SpeakerWell, I don't know about stories, but in terms of leaves, actually I used to save a lot of the leaf trim and I'd give it away to people because it was strong as what they were buying. They were buying Columbian at 4% or 5% THC. The trim was at least that from the stuff that I was growing. I wanted to revisit one thing I remembered About the climate at the time and being able to grow all this stuff all over the place and not being that paranoid about it was I ended up going to jury and actually became jury foreman on a case in Oakland.

1:17:43SpeakerIt was a case where a few old black guys were running a little neighborhood craps game and it was simply a friendly neighborhood craps game. And this trial got it. I mean, this case went to trial. And in the case, the defense lawyer never asked the defendants anything except how old you are, how long, you know, where do you work, how long you work at the job, are you married, do you have kids.

1:18:14SpeakerThat was pretty much it. And all these guys were just like regular old dudes. Worked at the same job for 20 years, had two kids, married to the woman for like 30 years, all this stuff. So when the jury is sequestered, we go in and we're all looking at each other and saying, why didn't this guy ask more? Well, that defense lawyer was smart. They had them dead to rights.

1:18:36SpeakerI mean, really, they had them as proof of what they did and all that. So what I did is I said, well, let's see where we stand. And I said, let's do, you know, everybody just gets a piece of paper, vote guilty, not guilty, and let's just see where we stand, and then we'll begin the conversation. Well, it came out, what was it, 7-5 to convict, okay?

1:19:00SpeakerSo, he put it open, and first person just goes through the thing while they got all this evidence on them and everything else. Go to the next guy, who's a guy about 25 years old. He says, I don't give a shit what they got. I don't care if they got them on TV. He says, this is a victimless crime. It's just a bunch of old guys having a little crap game.

1:19:17SpeakerWhat the hell are we doing here, right? He says, there's no way in hell I'm going to, you know, convict these guys of a victimless crime. And then I went to the next guy, and pretty soon we realized there was about five people there that none of us cared what the evidence they had, that we thought it was stupid that we were there, that there was no way we were going to send these just regular old guys into jail.

1:19:39SpeakerAnd we voted, you know, we convinced the rest of the jurors this is bullshit, and we were out of there in like an hour and a half or something. And after that I thought, you know what, if I get busted, I'm going for a jury trial in Alameda County. Because they'll see that I'm serious, that I've written about this, that I study this and so forth. I'm not selling pot.

1:20:02SpeakerI think I'll get away with it. So that actually kind of like relieved a lot of the paranoia that I might have had at the time. So that's, you know, so it was fortunate to be in Alameda County, really, in Oakland. But even at that time, and it's funny to see that Oakland became like the center here in this country, you know, of the marijuana movement.

1:20:24BubblemanFor sure. A jury of your peers. Probably a better idea than a single judge.

1:20:31Etienne FontanYeah. You just planted the seed, Mel. We just grew it.

1:20:39BubblemanAnd then a few of us processed it.

1:20:43TonyWell, you gave me some, and I was going to note earlier that one thing that I noticed that makes you also very unique is that you also still focus on CBD genetics. You gave me a couple two-to-ones, one-to-ones, different Harlequin sour tsunami crosses or things that, you know, some people aren't still doing that. Ringo and that group was always pushing for CBD, and I think that you're still Looking at the broader spectrum of this plant in both views, you know, so I appreciate that too.

1:21:21SpeakerYes, I did. Last year I grew, I crossed a jack that I particularly like and a diesel. And the diesel would test about 10% CBD and the jack was testing at 20% outdoors. So I crossed the line. I expected to get like a 10 and 10 or 0, 10, 10, 0, something like that. I didn't. I got a little over 11, like 11.4, I think, of CBD and like five and a quarter of THC.

1:21:54SpeakerSo the genetics aren't that simple. But what I do is I have loads of F2s. Thank you for joining us.

1:22:30TonyYeah, the terpenol is prevalent in the Jack Frost, the J1. So what do you think about the effect of now that you've got this experience and you're able to see these anomalies as you're breeding with CBD ratios versus THC, what about like, you know, Ringo's Gift is something that isolated the mercine. What about isolating flavors like that that come out of the Jack and pairing that in?

1:23:01TonyDo you think that has an effect on the CBD?

1:23:06SpeakerSure, the terpene profile definitely does. This will take a lot to sort out, but I think it will be sorted out because we have so many people working on these things and we're aware of it now, whereas before we weren't. Sure, and now you've got labs sprouting up all over the country and people will be able to tell just from their smoking saying, wow, they Take the proper connections between what it's doing for them.

1:23:31SpeakerYou know, about the jack, though, I've grown other jacks, and none of the jacks have the nose that this jack has. But it's good to hear that you've experienced the same thing. Because the other jacks I had really didn't have much nose at all. They were very potent, but not much nose. Now to follow up on Tony's question. When it comes to working with that CBD and the terpenes that modulate it, since it doesn't have a psychoactive effect where you can go, ah, I know that smell or that taste made it higher or lower, up-regulating or down-regulating, how would you, like how have you seen people judge the effects of CBD on themselves?

1:24:10SpeakerBecause it's not something you can, I don't know, I guess subjectively experience like a high.

1:24:20SpeakerWell, I think they do experience it because one thing the CBD does, it usually relieves some anxiety. It usually relieves paranoia. If people get too high, they get paranoid. So people just smoke a little and get paranoid. And CBD should alleviate that in some people right off the bat. But also, I mean, we know it competes with THC. It attenuates the effect of THC. And then, you know, you have the medical aspects of it.

1:24:53SpeakerSo people, those are subjective evaluations. You know, people have pain and they get relief from CBD, that's an honest subjective evaluation. Yeah, no, I see it, but I'm like, it's so different than the way people describe a THC high because it's not like describing something that's coming at them. They just go, yeah, I feel so much better than the normal stuff you give me. And I'm like, oh, I wonder as the CBD ratio goes up and the THC goes down, will they still be able to give me a subjective readout?

1:25:27SpeakerBecause right now it's like, how does the CBD affect the THC? But if we got close, like if you bred something that was Well, you know, hemp generally has a

1:26:00SpeakerUp to about 3% CBD. That's pretty high for hemp. Usually it's 1 to 2 range. So people, when they were smoking hemp and people used to smoke that ditch weed all the time in the Midwest, you know, they smoked it to the point where they got a headache because they were looking to get high and there wasn't enough THC in there to counteract the CBD. But, you know, I've had people smoke the CBD and just tell me that they just feel good.

1:26:25SpeakerThey say, I just feel good. I feel relaxed. I feel nice.

1:26:34SpeakerI don't really smoke joints anymore. I haven't been able to smoke joints for a while because I have some lung problems. But I'd certainly like to try to do it myself. I did break my little non-smoking joints on Friday because we had to do all that testing. So that was really fun for me.

1:26:56BubblemanHave you ever tried vaporizing lavender, Mel?

1:27:00SpeakerNo.

1:27:01BubblemanNo. It is the most antiseptic lung healing thing I have ever discovered in my life. And in fact, a friend who was suffering from like a bronchitis for, it was a chronic bronchitis. He had it for 10 years. I started turning him on to this French lavender and he was vaporizing it through his volcano and it literally just dissipated his bronchitis that he had for For 10 years, anyone that doesn't even have a lung issue can vaporize a little bit of lavender.

1:27:32BubblemanIt just feels... The oil? The plant matter. I just take French lavenders generally in the lavender scene, known as some of the most aromatic and terpene rich. For whatever reason, the French, they've got the good soil and they grow the proper profile. It's one of the more popular in the aromatherapy world. But yeah, just I wouldn't personally vaporize the pure oil. It might be a little too much.

1:27:57BubblemanBut the vaporization of lavender is incredibly healing on the lungs. And lavender was actually discovered by a French chemist who kind of started the whole aromatherapy thing. When he burned his hand very badly and dipped it into a giant extraction bowl of Lavandula oil that he had, and he found that he didn't get a blister, and the burn was basically very non-affected due to the lavender and how healing it is on skin.

1:28:25BubblemanSo it was through that that I kind of thought when I had my vapor bar in the early 2000s You know, as we were experimenting with vaporizing different plants.

1:28:34Etienne FontanIs it a fresh or are you drying it first?

1:28:36BubblemanIt was dried lavender. We purchased all dried herbs from a store that was a couple of doors down. And I ended up growing my own and drying my own and vaporizing it. And it just every time felt so good. The only thing is that, of course, any vaporizer you vaporize lavender through will We'll take on the very strong smell and taste of lavender, so you won't really be able to enjoy the flavor profile of cannabis that you enjoy if you only have one vaporizer and that's what you use to inhale your vapor.

1:29:10BubblemanYou need to figure out getting a secondary unit, but I would honestly say check that out. It just feels so good.

1:29:19Etienne FontanI'll break out. Sorry. On my friend, when back when we were doing Cantor back in 93, 94, we were at an event where we literally camped out overnight. And my friends love coffee. I don't drink coffee. But he had one of those campfire espresso machines, the old metal ones. They're very heavy. And he put it on. And as he was leaning over it, it exploded. And half his face was covered in coffee grounds, scalding hot coffee grounds.

1:29:48Etienne FontanImmediately wash off his face. Happened to be right next to us was an oil vendor, and she says, come here immediately. And she took pure lavender oil and smeared it completely over his complete burned face. And I swear, if I hadn't seen it myself, there's two spots on his face now where he has scars, and those are the only two tiny spots where oil did not hit his face.

1:30:13TonyNo, no, no, no.

1:30:14Etienne FontanYeah, it opened my eyes immediately to the healing power of lavender firsthand because there's no way from the burn that I saw on his face that his face shouldn't have been just scarred and he has nothing but two tiny scars to this day.

1:30:27BubblemanWell, it feels very antiseptic when you inhale it in a sense like almost like a eucalyptus but not as sharp and as like, you know, someone with a lung ailment taking a big vapor rip of eucalyptus, that's not a good idea. But the lavender is different. It's really soothing and like just the way it is on burns basically. I mean your lungs are just, you know, delicate, delicate.

1:30:51BubblemanThey need some help too. I just thought like all the things we breathe into our lungs and very little do we ever work on, you know, breathing in. And for me, I discovered all of this kind of accidentally when I started The Melting Point back in 2003, my gallery in Vancouver. I kind of wanted to just first, I didn't want a standard head shop. I thought that cannabis...

1:31:11BubblemanThank you for watching.

1:31:25BubblemanNew I could get around the smoking aspect because we weren't creating the supposed cancer-causing agents that are produced in the smoking of anything versus the vaporizing. So I had Aromed from Germany, I had the Volatizer wand unit from David Wheeler, I had the Volcano from Storrs and Bickel, and about six other varieties along this inhalation station of vaporization. And because so few people had licenses back then, and it wasn't our job to search for licenses, we allowed people to come in and vaporize their cannabis, but of course we had a whole variety of herbs that we had to learn about to show people that weren't there to vaporize cannabis.

1:32:07BubblemanAnd I swear, we sold many a volcano back in that time to people who were buying them literally to inhale like teas and different herbs. It was quite a neat thing. What do we got going on? Conversation?

1:32:27SpeakerHey Mel, like, you know, when these, you know, the countries switched, it must have been around the 80s that you started seeing, you know, skunks and hazes and, you know, what were some of your favorite strains to work with? And, you know, even leading up to now, you know, obviously you're still an active participant in the hobby and, you know, what are your favorite varieties?

1:32:53SpeakerWell, the Jack that I spoke of is a particular favorite. This cross I did with GDP and Blueberry Hayes, I really like that. But there was a period in the mid-'80s where I wasn't growing at all because I moved down with my soon-to-be wife to Laguna Beach, and I was in an apartment where I couldn't grow. And so there were several years there where I didn't grow at all.

1:33:25SpeakerI wasn't really that involved. But what I was doing was writing the Insider's Guide. So eventually we moved, I think in the late 80s, we moved to downtown LA to a loft and I could grow again. I grew some of Sam's skunk seeds. And that was just for our own use. So I really didn't get involved with all these different varieties and everything else. And that kind of came through the other night when we were testing.

1:33:51SpeakerAnd you guys would say, oh, this really has a diesel flavor and that sort of thing. I don't know the diesel flavor. To me, it was kind of perfume, that sort of thing. So all you guys have much more knowledge about the specific products. I'm a big fan of the trying a plant or two myself. With as many friends that I've shared genetics with,

1:34:34BubblemanIt's just nice to get, hey, a couple of these and a couple of those and just throw them in the garden and flower them out and see what they offer.

1:34:44Etienne FontanNow, if you were left with only one genetic to grow, what genetic would that be?

1:34:50SpeakerOoh, that's a tough one because it'd be between the Durban poison, really had some incredible fragrances, and haze plants. I really like haze. I really like that German poison. You know, I've grown a number of these OGs, and the OGs I think are great for a commercial market. I don't particularly like them in terms of smoking, but, you know, the way they form the buds and they're really easy to trim, you know, they're potent, all that.

1:35:26SpeakerI can see their attraction, but personally, I would rather, you know, spend nine months growing Nine, ten months growing a haze plant. Or just a few months with a Durban poison. But just in terms of smoking and enjoying them, yeah, that's a more of a sativa person for sure. Can I ask you about flushing? What do you think about, well you're not an indoor grower, you're an outdoor grower, you know, and is that something that has ever come into an outdoor grower in your, can I just ask you about flushing?

1:36:02SpeakerOkay, when I did grow indoors, I never flushed the plants. I simply stopped fertilizing, especially with nitrogen, as we started to get towards the end of flowering. At least a month before, I wouldn't be giving them any more nitrogen. And in fact, I like to grow them to the point where you would start to lose the family leaves from yellowing from lack of nitrogen. And to me, the buzz just seemed tighter.

1:36:28SpeakerI liked them better that way. But the concept and the actual doing of it as a regular procedure of flushing your plants all the time, no, I had never done that, never really heard of it until much more recently.

1:36:43Etienne FontanDr. Mel, I have a question. Going the opposite way, what's your favorite way to prep your soil for your outdoor grow?

1:36:52SpeakerDr. Outdoor grow, I like to use chicken manure, and I'll put in whatever. Now I'll even use cocoa in there.

1:36:59Etienne FontanWhat is whatever? What's in your whatever?

1:37:03SpeakerDr. Okay, guano, put guano in there.

1:37:12SpeakerThe cocoa in there, the chicken manure in there. Let's see what else I've used in there. I'll even buy bags of Fox Farm or one of these other ones. I usually choose them by which one is the heaviest. And mix this stuff all together. Make sure it's nice and airy. Generally, because I'm using bought soil now rather than digging my own or buying through a topsoil, I don't really use the perlite or vermiculite anymore.

1:37:42Etienne FontanDr. Do you use any anti-clumping agents like Jersey Greensand or anything like that?

1:37:46SpeakerDr. No, no. I'm a simple guy. I know what can work, and that's what I do. I go to hydro shops. I have a relationship with hydro shops and talk to them about what they're using. The fact that we have all these different, I hate to call them strains, all these different phenotypes of these basic strains, but the products are just amazing. People ask me about products all the time, and I'm not a product person.

1:38:16SpeakerI really am not. Like I said in the interview that

1:38:23SpeakerI just think it's insane some of these prices for fertilizers that I see where I see $150 for a gallon of this or that, and then they're not telling me what the hell's in it. They only tell me the NPK. For $150, they better have some great hormones in there or something, because I'll go and I'll buy one of the Miracle Grows or something like that, and I'll do just fine with it if I'm using NPK.

1:38:49SpeakerWe have organic fertilizers. For organic, I'll use fish emulsion is one of my favorites. I do use some CalMag. The plants take up a lot of calcium when they just start, which surprised me when I learned that. Doing some deep-water stuff and monitoring what nutrients the plants took up, I was surprised to find that. Dr. Any blood meal or earthworm castings? Dr. Worm castings, absolutely. Worm castings are wonderful stuff.

1:39:21SpeakerWhen the plants are first starting to grow, if you take a clone and stick it in deep water, that first month or so, they take up a lot of nitrogen, which is understandable, a lot of potassium, and a lot of calcium. They're almost all about the same amount that they take up. Phosphorus is quite way down there. That was a surprise to me. So that's why the CalMag.

1:39:47SpeakerI always make sure I've got CalMag in there. In fact, I always use an organic line also.

1:39:56BubblemanNice. Good, solid information to be sharing with people. I know people are always excited to hear About, you know, what things people are growing with, particularly people that have a good long amount of history with the plant. I sort of had a question in regards to, you know, every time we have some people that have been involved in this for a long time, some of the OGs in and they get asked what their strain is, you know, haze just seems to come up over and over and over again.

1:40:26BubblemanAnd I wonder if we are... Has the onset of prohibition and the shorter flowering, higher yielding vegetative yield of cannabis, have we unexplicably, have we bred out a terpene or a cannabinoid or a profile of the two that we just can't get in these shorter flowering Thanks for watching.

1:41:13BubblemanFor me, it was like 18, 16 to 18 weeks, and oh man, it was like the most incredible profile. The aroma seemed to hang in the air so much longer than any other strain. What's with that?

1:41:29SpeakerI don't know how to answer that, really.

1:41:34SpeakerI grew haze back in maybe 1980 or so, 1979, 1980.

1:41:41SpeakerAnd I grew it a few years ago on a fluke in that somebody gave me a bud that I took to photograph, actually. It looked, wow, it really looks like haze to me. And it had a seed in it, and I didn't see the seed until I really got in there for macro photography and saw the seed and planted it. And it was as true a haze as I've ever seen in terms of it just grew wild.

1:42:04SpeakerIt got about 16 feet high. It had branches that were about 10 feet, so the thing took up like 20 feet of space. And the problem was is that the branches were so long, they started to all break. Before they even had weight on them, before they even flowered, they were already starting to break. And at first, I'm like propping them up and trying to get them.

1:42:28SpeakerBut as you guys probably know, as long as you have that outer layer of tissue connecting They'll just mature just fine anyway. At a certain point, I'm just overwhelmed with all these broken branches. All I'm doing is putting stuff underneath them, milk crates, anything to get them off of the ground. Sure enough, the damn thing grew and must have given us, I don't know, four or five pounds of weed, of haze weed.

1:42:56SpeakerThat was pretty incredible. The thing that I still kick myself about is I never fucking cloned the damn thing. I've lost it, right?

1:43:06BubblemanWell, there's no doubt that the trichome structure is different from a processing perspective, at least one from a mechanical sifting or even the wet washing using specific size screens. The pure hazes and even, you know, plants that I found to be somewhat similar. Like the Mullum Bimby Madness from Australia, it just produced these incredibly much smaller trichomes. And it was really the first time that I was getting resin that I preferred in lower bags.

1:43:44BubblemanI usually prefer 90 microns, 73 micron, 123 micron. With the hazes, I was finding that the 25 micron was some of the most enjoyable.

1:43:57SpeakerThat's really interesting. I never noted that. So I haven't been that much of a screener. In fact, I'm starting to do some just now because I want the pure resin for edibles because I definitely enjoy edibles. Can I ask you, Jim, this is this book, Hashish, second edition. You were also the owner of Red Eye Press. Right. And you're the publisher of Rob Clark's book, Hashish. Right.

1:44:26SpeakerBoth editions? Yeah, this Bubble Man's photo right down here, you've got on the left of the screen, that's Bubble Man's. You know, I wanted to ask you, you know, we were at Frenchy Cannoli's hash party last night talking about the, you know, water hash and the origin of the separation process, and, you know, we were talking about the You know, Sadhu Sam's method in book one, and then now I was just looking up book two and how it, you expanded.

1:44:56SpeakerYou know, could you tell us a little bit about, you know, you kind of had a ringside seat to this. So could you tell us a little about Waterhash, you know, how it started, you know, and who, you know, who did what? What did you see from your perspective? Well, the start for me, I mean, I knew that, you know, you could get a layer of resin glands in water.

1:45:16SpeakerThat I knew. And I knew you could, you know, just coffee filter it and make yourself a little hash. I was never a big hash guy, really. And so I never really went that way and really investigated it much. But I got a call from Kenny from Tricone Technologies wanting me to come up and see him produce some more of the hash. And I think I came up there in maybe, I don't know, 99, 2000, something like that.

1:45:44SpeakerAnd Kenny had taken, as far as I know, had taken the principles from Rob's book and Saddle with Sam and all that and scaled them up so that, you know, he had an aquarium cooler for the water. He didn't use ice. And he had a series of bubble bags, that sort of thing. And, you know, bucket system. Set it up so that, you know, he had a drill with, you know, an attachment that would agitate the water really well, and we went through the whole procedure, and I photographed the whole procedure, and we wrote this article for High Times about making, you know, water hashish.

1:46:24SpeakerAnd I think that really spurred things, because at the end of it, you know, he had a chunk of, you know, Hachish that was, you know, you could use two hands to hold it up. And basically that's really kind of what's in the book. It's really a recounting of that that I put in there. Rob didn't really put that much into that. That's really my stuff. What year did the revision come out?

1:46:58Speaker98? No, the first book came out in 98. This book came out in 2010, I think. Oh, the second edition came out that much later? Yes. I told Rob, you had to have a water hash in there, right? I said, you absolutely have to have a water hash in there. Because you know that Rob is not big on concentrates and that sort of thing. He wants it all natural, but he would accept the water hash in the book.

1:47:26SpeakerSo we put that in. We did some other updating. We did some more color photography in there. I rearranged a couple of things to make it easier for people to understand. Like one of the things right at the beginning of the book, it shows a resin gland. And I just captioned it with talking about what is hashish. Hashish is the resin gland head. So right away people know what it is.

1:47:50SpeakerIt demystifies the whole thing. And Rob added, there it is. So it was the caption read. The caption reads, Figure 3, a fully developed capillate-stocked resin gland, a mature gland head filled with cannabinoids and essential oils. And its primary repository of THC, the main psychoactive component of cannabis. Gland heads are the main constituent of high-quality hashish. There you go. Actually, guess what? Photograph times 80 by guess who?

1:48:20BubblemanI recognize it. I can tell you. It's the Afghani bull rider, and it's actually a very clean photograph and a beautiful color photograph of that trichome. That was, yeah, very nice. Oh, man.

1:48:34SpeakerThere you go, right?

1:48:35BubblemanGood luck. That was basically, if that was 98, 99, that was the same years that Mila released the isolator bags in 98, and I released the bubble bags in 99. But Reinhart beat us both to it, and he released his machine in 97. Before all of the articles, the only thing that was really posted publicly about Waterhash Before Reinhart got his patent in 1997 for the methodology and the apparatus of his ice cold extractor was Sadhu Sam's water extraction secret in high times in 1988, which they got maybe sold 10 of those instructionals to 10 different people so that people definitely knew the concept and it was out there.

1:49:26BubblemanThe first actual sort of publicly available machine to do it yourself Would have been in 1997, Reinhard Delp, the ice cold extractor, he came to the Cannabis Cup that year. That was the first and only year he showed up at the Cannabis Cup. And he sort of sealed a deal and made a deal with Mila to promote his machine. It was a couple of people sitting on a couch looking at that machine.

1:49:53BubblemanIt was actually my manufacturer, Mark Rose, who used to be the manufacturer for the isolator bags. He was sitting on the couch with another gentleman by the name of Eldon who used to live in Kathmandu with Mark. And Mark was still living in Kathmandu. This would have been about 97 at the Cannabis Cup. And Eldon looked at the machine and said, you know, two nylon bags with screen bottoms and a five-gallon bucket and you've got the same thing.

1:50:22BubblemanAnd so Mark Rose, in that moment, came up with the name Isolator. Uh, went to Nepal and designed them and manufactured them. And then Mila, she was the one who brought it really to, she brought it to me. I had not heard of Reinhardt. I had not heard of the Sadhu Sam water extraction process. I hadn't heard of anything else. The first thing I ever saw Thank you for watching.

1:51:02BubblemanThank you so much for joining us.

1:51:30BubblemanRight from the unknown American who told Neville, from Neville telling Skunk Man Sam, from Skunk Man Sam putting it in the high times. I have no idea whether Reinhardt ever saw that and if that was his inspiration or if he was inspired. Some other, you know, pathway via maybe the unknown American that told Neville or through, I have no idea. I'd like to find out that and find out how he really came to figure out, you know, this whole process because...

1:52:00BubblemanI find it extremely interesting as someone who's been a very big part of the sort of promoting of Waterhash over the last almost 20 years. It could be its own show one day, that's for sure. And we'll have Kay in there too, because Kay told me that he was making Waterhash around 1994. So it's very possible that, and Reinhardt lived in that similar, he was also, he's in California, so it's interesting that these two guys would be doing this in California in the 90s.

1:52:36BubblemanObviously the information existed before, so it wasn't like they just invented it, but they knew about it, and I would love to get Kay, Reinhardt, Mark Rose, Mila, if she would like to, and Skunkman Sam and Rob Clark as well, I think that would make a great... You know, a little history, a water hash history. It's still something that people don't really know and it's a very, I would say, you know, water hash and butane are very much the two game changers in the way they allowed people to access extremely high, I don't want to say high quality because quality is decided by the grower and the genetics, but extremely high purity concentrates.

1:53:21BubblemanAll of a sudden people in 1999, that's really when people, I mean people can say they were doing BHO before that, no problem, they can say they were doing Waterhash before that, but the bottom line is if you use your computer and you follow the history of what's available online, it all started around 98, 99. That's when it really all blew up and people started, you know, sharing this information and more importantly, executing this information, you know, very well on their own, so.

1:53:49BubblemanI applaud everyone out there as hash makers. You're doing a good job. You're an important part of the equation.

1:54:00SpeakerSaw some good hash last night at French Ganollies. Yeah, very nice.

1:54:07BubblemanWell, there's some incredible quality out there, and there's people taking it very serious now. One of the things that...

1:54:16BubblemanAs we learn this, it's like we haven't really had, I guess it's why Rob and Skunkman Sam have been able to really, you know, I've looked up to them for a lot of times, but a lot of people don't know the amount of work that they actually did and the shit that they got done. It was just sort of, you know, kind of beyond inspirational how they went about doing it.

1:54:37BubblemanAnd that's because they chose to do it in the most sort of professional platform with, you know, access to labs and guys like Dave Pate and like people that were doing real science. And it's like as we get that behind us, the science is going to back up, you know, basically you told your story of getting turned on by the girl who was one of the founders of putting on Woodstock and how you laughed for about an hour straight.

1:55:02BubblemanI mean that incredible experience is really the foundation of how we now can get to a place today and know that if we give this little girl this particular cannabinoid profile, she can stop having seizures for 200 days. And that really came from that innocent fun. That's where that information was learned from.

1:55:23SpeakerYeah. It was quite a time, really. The late 60s into the 70s were really an interesting, fun time. I really think I lived in the best of times.

1:55:36BubblemanAnd you're still here! And I'm still here!

1:55:41BubblemanWe get to share some of those best of times. No, I feel that as well. It's definitely, it's very unique in any sort of human history. It's very simple to go back to the beginning of things and see how everything begins with humble beginnings. It's very simple and you can get to a point in anything where you follow people up 20 or 30 years later and you look and you're like, wow, like, You know, like, for instance, like, take something like rock and roll, you know, the Beatles and the Stones.

1:56:10BubblemanThese guys were like, they just knew each other. They were just like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, all the, like, greats were just like, oh, yeah, he's my neighbor. Frank Zappa lives behind me. Like, I'm renting my garage to, you know, so-and-so, Led Zeppelin. They just came from the UK. You heard of these guys? It's pretty incredible how it's very similar in the cannabis industry that this small core group holds together and you become that… I was in Amsterdam in the mid-90s and met Mila.

1:56:45SpeakerActually, Ed was there at the same time. The three of us got together and she wanted to know our opinion on something she was developing, which was the pollinator. And so we looked at it and we watched it, you know, spin some leaves and saw what she got out of it. And the only thing that I suggest is that she had a tray that she could pull out, you know, with the stuff on it.

1:57:09SpeakerSo she wouldn't have to go under the drum and sweep it up. And then it gave her really... So she was very aggressive on this and saying, listen, you've got to go get this patented before you start putting this out and everything else. So she followed our advice and she went to the Dutch authorities who practically laughed her out of the office and said, do you know how long people have been separating stuff through screens and so forth and so on?

1:57:36SpeakerWe can't patent this. It's hundreds of years old, these processes. And that was it. So that's how much we knew about it. And who was the guy that was doing that?

1:57:45BubblemanPardon? Who was that that went to the Dutch office? Mila.

1:57:50SpeakerAnd what year would that have been? That was in the... I think it was in the mid-90s. I can't remember. It was one of the times I was a judge at the cops there, and I think that was in 94, 98, I think. I'm not positive about that.

1:58:05BubblemanWas it a dry sifting process you were talking about, the tumbler or the actual… Yeah, the pollinator was a tumbler.

1:58:11SpeakerWe had them at Positronics in 94, 95, you know, right there in the room where customers could come in and process their dry material. The pollinator was… Really how we made ash. And then we also sold the steel I-beam presses with the steel flat bases with the little like bottle jacks that you could actually press your resin powder in. And we sold the cellophane plastic that you would use to put it in because it didn't melt.

1:58:38SpeakerThat was our whole processing. The pollinator was really the, and it was wrongly named because it's not pollen.

1:58:45BubblemanBut is that what Mel was talking about just now, that Mila went to try and get a patent on, the pollinator, is that what you were?

1:58:52SpeakerYes.

1:58:53BubblemanOkay, excellent.

1:58:54SpeakerAnd the pollen, as you know, came because that's what the Europeans called the hash, you know, it's made from the pollen.

1:59:00BubblemanI remember showing up in Amsterdam in 95, and it was definitely, you know, all the rage and what everyone was talking about.

1:59:07SpeakerSo it must have been 94 that I was there. You know, Chris Simeonek, which I'm sure, not Chris Simeonek, who's the one who did the great books of Hashish, Todd? Lawrence. Lawrence Cherniak. Lawrence Cherniak, right. When he was trying to get that published by Andor Press in the 70s, he wanted to do a whole series of books with them. They put him in touch with me because they weren't sure about him and sure of what he knew.

1:59:41SpeakerHe actually thought that the hash was pollen. I mean, he kept saying, it's not pollen, it's resin glands. He said, no, no, no, it's pollen, it's pollen. And I mean, he put out these books where basically he really didn't know what the hell he was talking about at all. Anyway, I mean, it was just really a shock to me because he had all these pictures. He did the travel log kind of thing with the hashish, but he didn't even know what the hell it was.

2:00:08BubblemanYou know what? Definitely he had the most incredible photos for the time of the hash and whatnot. It just probably should have been someone a little more knowledgeable in regards to what was actually happening. Right. But as a travel log and photographs, I was definitely very inspired by those old Lawrence Cherniak books.

2:00:32SpeakerI have to take a little break here.

2:00:35BubblemanYes, I think it's always good to have a break. I just had a nice little dab myself. What's dabbing over by you, Tony?

2:00:43TonyI'm getting ready to hit the lab here in Denver, try to get this crew on some terp rosin. So I've got some terps made, and people are eager to get their hands on it. So if you're still on later, I might pop in from there. I certainly will in the future.

2:01:06BubblemanAnd is this the lab where the Bubble Man brand will also be produced?

2:01:13TonyYes. Yes, it is. Excellent. I'm trying to get all the stations worked out. I've got one for Prana. I've got one for Pressing Hash, one for Curing section for that, Packaging section, just getting all that stuff worked out. Pretty exciting work. We had a compressor press that had to be calibrated because they couldn't get really the yields out of it. So I came here and readjusted it and it was like just smashing grapes, squirting.

2:01:49TonySo it would be a good demo to show maybe if you guys are still on when I finally get there. It shouldn't be that long.

2:01:56BubblemanAll right, well, I've got a little terp rosin right here. The guys were tripping out. I was showing them the other day. They're like, why is it so stable? It hasn't buttered out. I'm like, I don't know, man. I think it's the way I add the terps.

2:02:07TonyYeah.

2:02:08BubblemanBecause it's totally like, I leave it out all the time and it's just... Yep. I melt those terps right in there so they're never really on the outside. I melt them inside a pool of the rosin, heat it up, and then stir it in. And it's actually, if I hold it up in the light... You can actually see the terpenes like smearing inside the rosin. It's pretty sick, dude.

2:02:33TonyYeah, that's my favorite texture. That's what I was doing, and then I started messing with the butters. But, you know, it's like that variety, that way, that very stable way is also, I think, the strongest way because rosin is mostly THCA, and then when you're activating with a little bit of heat, I find that you'll see like 30 or 40% activated. I've even done that where I've warmed it up in a bowl inside a double boiler with water, whipping it, putting the turps in.

2:03:06TonyThat's kind of like how I'm making different textures and things. But yeah, that stable one is the way to go. Doesn't have as much nose as a butter right off the bat, but it's definitely more stable. Lasts a long time. That's what I have right here that I made. I made this with nine strains. About ten strains out of my refrigerator that I was really stoked to see are still there.

2:03:33TonyOh, nice. Same consistency. Yeah, so I just pulled them all out and then pressed them all out. We were talking earlier. But it's a really kind of the same thing. Curbs. Same thing you got. Not a bad welcome home gift.

2:03:53BubblemanHow about this color?

2:03:55TonyYeah, dude. That's ridiculous. That's on that film I sent you too, isn't it?

2:04:04BubblemanThat's a little rah-rah. Yeah. Yeah, I can tell. This is the time you should all be showing what you have, everyone. Jesus, look at that.

2:04:14TonyIs that just Ray Rosen or is that Terps with Rosen?

2:04:18BubblemanThis is straight rosin waiting for the turps. When I add the turps, it always gets a little darker.

2:04:27TonyYeah, it definitely does.

2:04:30BubblemanIt always gets a little darker with the turps.

2:04:36BubblemanWhat is that?

2:04:38TonyWhat's that? Is that dry sift?

2:04:40BubblemanThis is bubble hash.

2:04:43TonyLike a 73 pressed out?

2:04:45BubblemanYeah.

2:04:47TonyJust like a 73 Presto.

2:04:49BubblemanIt's so much fun to play around. These West Coast Concentrate guys, I've got to give them another shout out. They keep bringing the fire here too. They've got great looking hash. Real melty, real nice. A whole bunch of different varieties. They brought me another three or four grams yesterday. They're Hindu Kush in there. Jack and Blue Full Spectrum and their GCG, which is Green Crack God, little green cat crack God on the 73.

2:05:18BubblemanSo I always got to give the West Coast Concentrate guys a shout out, which is funny because I was talking to them the other day and I was like, man, you guys are doing great. Your company's blowing out. And they were like, oh, we're just a part of this company. It's a big team. You know, most of the company actually makes BHO. And I was like, what?

2:05:32BubblemanThey're like, yeah, they're like big BHO guys. I'm like, that's the West Coast Concentrate brand. And I'm like, man, for me, the West Coast Concentrate brand is like, Thank you so much for joining us.

2:06:04TonyYou've got incredible guests and hopefully everybody out there is appreciative of who you bring on there. And if you don't know who Mel Frank is, you probably should figure it out very quickly because if you pick up his work and anything he's had his hands on, It will change the way you cultivate or see how you make medicine.

2:06:42BubblemanDefinitely lots of cool panelists here today giving props to Mal for inspiring us back in the early, early days when, you know, it was, he made it easier for us not to have to do what he did, which was, you know, get to the Xerox machine and go to the library and, you know, gather as much of this information that is pertinent to cannabis, all the while, you know, Learning about cannabis, because if you started in the late 60s, that means that you were definitely around for the time that people weren't even flowering plants, where plants were just basically like leaf, like the long flowering equatorial exotic sativas just weren't finishing in like Minnesota or whatnot, where people were like planting them outdoors.

2:07:30BubblemanWouldn't that be the case, Mal, that some of these plants were not finishing back in the original days?

2:07:35SpeakerOh, absolutely. The stuff they were growing in New York wasn't traditionally outdoors. But you mentioned the leaf. I can remember in 1968 buying a lid of California pot, and it was a lid, which was 20 grams rather than an ounce. It was 28. And it was just leaf. It was just crumbled up leaf, and it was actually better than the mix that was out there. But it used to come in.

2:08:02SpeakerOne of the ways it came in was on gray rabbit. And Gray Rabbit was an old school bus painted with all the Psycho Devil markings on it. And they would take out half the seats and put in bunk beds. And basically it was like $20, $25 to go from San Francisco or LA to New York in a few points between. And that was a great fun time going back and forth across that.

2:08:26SpeakerBut after they had done this for a year or so and the state troopers and authorities got used to them coming through, you know, a busload of hippies, All of the gear would be stowed on top with a tarp over it. Once people started realizing they're not searching all of our luggage now, they started to bring pot to New York through there. It was leaf that I smoked, and I said, well, I'll get high on this leaf.

2:08:58SpeakerSo that was another impetus to growing, because as I was growing it and taking those lower leaves, I was getting high on them. I mean, when I think about it, it was probably like 3% or 4% THC at the most, but still it was comparable to what was out there.

2:09:13Etienne FontanHey, I want to give a shout out to Run Run Bubble Gum. We were given some of his stuff last night when we were over at Frenchie Cannoli's. He makes very nice rosin, which I've been betting on this morning. And then he also gave us some great bubble hash. There was some great bubble hash there. This stuff bubbles wonderfully. And then a shout out to this guy, High Noon, who made some very nice bubble as well.

2:09:42Etienne FontanSo it was all water last night. It was some very wonderful stuff there. You would have been very proud there, Bubble Man, because you saw your bags there as well.

2:09:52BubblemanVery good, very good. Nice to see the gathering of the hashish minds. It's always nice to see. I wish I could have been there. There's no doubt about it. I am always down for a nice hash gathering.

2:10:03SpeakerMark, I wanted to ask you, how did you get into the photomicrography?

2:10:10BubblemanYou know, it seemed like it came about, it was around 2007. And I believe, I was friends with Jason King at the time, and I think it's right around the time when he started playing with macro photography. And I had asked him, I said, dude, I would love for you to, you know, share with me how I can learn about this macro photography. And he was like, oh yeah, no problem.

2:10:32BubblemanI can, you know, as soon as you show me how to manufacture bags, bubble bags in Nepal and sell them on the internet, I'll show you how to do, you know, my photography. And I was kind of like, Are you serious? He said it to me in person too, like face to face, like, oh yeah, why don't I just show you how to displace me so I'm not useful anymore.

2:10:54BubblemanAnd I was just like, man, what are you talking about? I just want to learn how to do macro photography. So it was actually through a member of International Canagraphic, Gypsy's website. And he went by the name Monkey. And Monkey was the polar opposite of Jason King in the sense that he was going to not only share with me the equipment that I needed to purchase, he was going to start me off with proper f-stops and shutter speeds, he was going to tell me what flash I required, what head I would require, what tripod I would require.

2:11:29BubblemanHe would help me throughout my macro photography career And I kind of told Jason in the end, I said, do you really want to be the guy that when I tell this story, and I'm not going to be trying to bash you, I'm just going to tell this story accurately that you basically didn't want me to learn about this photography. And this other guy, who had nothing to lose or gain, just shared everything with me.

2:11:50BubblemanAnd I was so happy that Monkey did that because Since then, I have shared with anyone that asks me about macro photography, I will give them the equipment. I will tell them where to start. I will give them hints and clues and tips and it's not a secretive thing for me. It's very transparent and open and A perfect example of this is Dynasty Genetics. This is a guy who asked me a few questions back in the day.

2:12:15BubblemanI helped him a little bit. I told him what lens to buy, what flash to get, maybe started him off with a few f-stops, much the same that Monkey did for me, and man, if that guy hasn't really taken it to the next level, he does the same kind of photography I do, very crisp, very clean, but He does a form of stacking that to me is the first time I've ever been really impressed with the stacking of macro photographs because I find the halo effect of stacking macro photographs to me creates an image that doesn't look real.

2:12:49BubblemanIt doesn't look the way it looks when I see it. Well this guy Dynasty Genetics has basically, he's blown everyone away and that was just, you know, it's passing on the monkeys information and I'm sure Dynasty will pass that information. His name is Christopher Rex on Facebook if you guys want to shout him out or check him out and he's Dynasty Genetics on Instagram. He literally Up there with beer goggles and a few other, Todd McCormick.

2:13:16BubblemanThere's some great macro photographers out there. I'm just inspired that people are wanting to share the information and not hoard it. So thanks to Monkey 2008, that's really where I got my start.

2:13:29SpeakerThat's great. It's the way it should be. I mean I showed Lawrence Cherniak how to shoot through a microscope. And then found that the photographs in the book, the photo micrographs in the book were the ones that I took when I showed them how to do it. Oh my goodness, that's hilarious. Yeah, right. And I said to him when the book came out, I said, you could have at least given me credit.

2:13:53SpeakerHe said, you know, who pushes the shutter and who doesn't? What difference does it make? And everything was, what difference does it make to him? You know, it's one of the...

2:14:01Etienne FontanI'm glad you know it's Charniak.

2:14:02BubblemanIt's only happened to me one time, Mel, and it was a friend of mine who wasn't even a photographer, and I was taking a bunch of pictures, and I let this guy literally push the button one time, and it ended up being the photo. When I sent a bunch of these photos into this magazine, they ended up choosing that photo, and it actually ended up getting published, and we had a good laugh about it.

2:14:25BubblemanMy buddy wasn't a photographer at all, but I ended up kicking him down a little something something just because, you know, it was like, It was like, dude, it was your finger. I might have set it all up, but you took that picture, and I can't, you know, I never want to take credit for someone else's photography. That is for certain.

2:14:45SpeakerNot to be rude or anything, but it's not some, you know, if you have an apprentice and you're there setting up the lighting and setting up the f-stop and setting up your exposure and setting it all up and, you know, you get it all set and you say click the button, that's not exactly them being a photographer, you know, not to be rude. I'm having people helping me out too and, you know, that's, you know, yeah, but it is cool of you to kick down the guy for pushing the button.

2:15:13SpeakerHa ha! On your camera, at your shoot, on your subject, after you set it up. Yeah, that's really cool. Todd, do you think it was a remote shutter or the actual shutter on the camera?

2:15:27BubblemanI don't use remote shutters.

2:15:31SpeakerI would have handed a guy a remote shutter. I'm like, push the remote, don't touch the camera. Then you get a credit.

2:15:37BubblemanWell, you know what? Photography is a funny thing. In this day and age, I think that if you have the opportunity to shine your light on someone, for God's sake, do it. I mean, what the... You can't just shine your light on someone for half a second. You've got to keep it all for yourself. This is what Hash Church is all about. We're sharing the light. We're sharing the information.

2:15:58BubblemanIt's a wonderful thing. If we were just gathering and there was no one here listening to us, it would not have the same effect as it will have. With the fact that we have 600 live viewers and, you know, 10,000 to 12,000 people are going to see this in the next seven days, that makes it cool. And I always say that it couldn't be done without all of you guys.

2:16:18BubblemanTodd, you are definitely like the premier Ash Church, bringing in the bomb guests, doing great interviews, like keeping it positive. I appreciate everything you do for Ash Church, buddy, honestly.

2:16:34SpeakerWell, thank you. I appreciate it. You know, this is just a great way to disseminate information. Having guys like Mel Frank on, I mean, for those of us and a lot of people watching, obviously, you know, if it wasn't for the books, like your book, I don't know what would have happened with my life. You know, I would have been a mechanic or something. I have no idea, man.

2:16:53SpeakerIt would have been so different. You know, I had no idea. I was literally, you know, Majoring in marijuana through high school, and it would be what I focused on, but it was really your book and your work, and now having people like you in our life, I mean, for a long time when I was a child, you know, Mel Frank was, you know, I never expected to meet you or befriend you or smoke with you or, you know, hang out and go to Santa Cruz with you and go to parties with you, and now to have this, it's all surreal, and It's really nice to be able to share this with people because you inspired me with, you know, black and white text out of a book, you know, back 30 years ago and it still inspires me today.

2:17:38SpeakerSo, you know, for the people watching now and watching later.

2:17:44SpeakerActually, all this is the most surprising thing to me, too. I mean, to see the effect that the books did have on people, it's really incredible. I mean, watching this industry just become this industry, and it's still evolving, of course. I mean, once we legalize here in California, I don't know what the end result of that's going to be. Because I think that California is the center of marijuana in the world, really.

2:18:12SpeakerI mean, obviously there are great things going on in lots of countries, but I think there's just more of the really good stuff here. Agreed.

2:18:21BubblemanI don't doubt for a minute when I heard the story that it was an unknown American that told Neville that resin sunk in water due to its density. I immediately pictured some dude in California. I was like, that was definitely some Californian guy.

2:18:42BubblemanIt would not surprise me whatsoever.

2:18:44SpeakerCan you please show us? I wonder if Neville would do the show on Sunday. Maybe we should try to get him on.

2:18:49BubblemanI would love to get Neville on. That would be wonderful. I put the word out to a few people. Probably Steve Hayes would be a good person to ask. I'm pretty sure he's still in touch with Neville. Or Howard Marks or Shanti Baba, those guys must be in touch with them. So a couple of people asked if I just do a quick show on this new rosin screens that I got going on.

2:19:12BubblemanThese are the little pouches that they come in. So all sorts of different companies are making these little screen for squeezing out the rosin so your flowers don't end up in your rosin or your hash doesn't end up all over the place mixed in with your oil. And I was noticing a lot of companies were just using any old screen, any old thread, and once again I kind of got to the worry that like, you know, like 200 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit, 250, it's too high for certain screens, so I made sure that we got some heat stamp screens and just basically released these little pouches that have like, you know, in each one there's 10 of these sewn screens that are like little sandwich bags to get your bud or your hash into.

2:19:58BubblemanAnd yeah, that's about it. They're on the website. They're small, medium, and large. And we're doing customs. The large are four inches by five inches. The mediums, I think, are three inches by four inches. And they're all sewn up. I have heard people complain about this already. This outer edge of material here, I guess, can potentially wick the rosin. So what people are doing is they're just Turning the bag inside out so you don't get that, you get a more flush end and I guess you get, I haven't noticed it yet, I guess maybe I'm more efficient in my pressing or whatnot or I'm not pressing too much but people are really swearing that little bit of material on the outside of the bag just between the seam holds the oil and is not wicking out that last little bit of oil and material.

2:20:49BubblemanWhat do you think of this rosin thing, Mel? This one must have blown your mind, hey? This pressing and squeezing the bud or the hash and just extracting the oil?

2:20:59SpeakerYeah, it definitely did. It really impressed me. I mean, the first hit I took impressed me because I thought it was a full effect of what it is like when you smoke a good joint. It had all the kind of like depth of the hive that you got with a joint. Yeah, I really like the rosin.

2:21:18BubblemanYeah, like I'm not really one to go and go endlessly promoting. I really only showed these because someone asked, but yeah, it's Rosin. We've talked about it a lot. I've invited Soil Grown in almost every day for the last like eight weeks. Hopefully he gets it one of these days and we can have a little more, just a little another discussion about where it's going with these extracts.

2:21:40BubblemanIt seems that in the last several years, There's been leaps and bounds of information that's been shared. I had a piece of information shared with me recently that was quite shocking in regards to a mystery oil, and this one may or may not surprise you, Horatio. Were you familiar that dry ice can have mystery oil in it?

2:22:04SpeakerYeah, it's the same CO2. I mean, basically, it's liquid CO2 and you express it out of the same can. That's kind of why it gets questionable when you start injecting it into water for bubble hash. Because you're, I mean, it should essentially, the oil should float to the top and the water should protect you because the resin's heading down and the oil would float up. But, yeah, it can potentially have it.

2:22:33SpeakerIt, again, it would If you're releasing it to extract CO2 under high pressure, that's a whole different thing than a chunk of dry ice literally oozing with oil. It's just a ratio thing, but it's definitely present.

2:22:48BubblemanYeah, I just saw someone had taken some dry ice, put it in two metal bowls, let it all evaporate, and then they took a paper towel and wiped the bowl, and it was just like, whoa! I was very surprised that there was that machine oil once again present. I've always had a... My spider... It never made sense to me. Regular ice can be made in a freezer with regular old water and it just always got my...

2:23:18BubblemanI always seem to get a 99% gland head ratio and if I was getting 99% gland heads, I often wondered what sense did it make to try and mess with the process. What do you think you're going to improve by adding something that in the end, of course, could be... Thank you for watching.

2:23:52SpeakerAnd because I've been to the dry ice place and you see the guy making the giant brick and it's like, well, should I go start taxing him about the nozzle? Is it his nozzle that wrecked it? Because you go, it looks pretty white, it looks pretty clean and it's evaporating. But yeah, if you left it in a canister, it could potentiate out. Thanks for watching.

2:24:36SpeakerJust jumbling it in a bucket, dry. So how it gets used definitely makes a difference. And then when you take it to the level of CO2 extractions, it's tons of liquid CO2 being used.

2:24:48BubblemanBrett Maverick just stated dry ice is made from the lowest grade CO2. So they're not using their distillate, I guess, their CO2 distillate to... Well, why?

2:25:00Etienne FontanI mean, they're just using it as a, you know, a cheap inert gas just to, you know, freeze it so you can see why they'd go with the lowest common denominator.

2:25:07SpeakerRemember when they sold it just for smoke, not for smoking? True. What's that, ATN?

2:25:16Etienne FontanI was just giving a shout-out to my friend Keith Keller. He was just saying hi. I was just saying hi.

2:25:20BubblemanDude, I thought you were, like, splitting there. I thought you were pulling a Tony on us.

2:25:23Etienne FontanNo, no, no, no. It's all good. I got to go with them later, but we're going off to Santa Cruz later to do some judging or some speaking or whatever.

2:25:31BubblemanOh, that's rough. That's rough. How about you guys buy tickets to Jamaica and come to the Jamaica Cannabis Cup?

2:25:42BubblemanIt's going to be fun. They just announced the artists on Billboard. I don't know if you guys saw that Billboard made an announcement about the Jamaican Cannabis Cup. It's going to be much smaller than most cannabis cups. They're saying around 7,000 people, so it's not going to be the 40,000 or 50,000 that you see in the U.S. at all these events. I don't know what Amsterdam is.

2:26:06Speaker7,000 people are going to go to Jamaica?

2:26:09Etienne FontanYeah. I mean, they get 1,500 people for the Dutch Cup, or used to back in the day.

2:26:16BubblemanAt least, I heard more. I've heard upwards of 3,000.

2:26:21SpeakerTodd, how many people do you think are in Jamaica for weed at any given time internationally?

2:26:28BubblemanThat's what I'm saying. That's the whole purpose that people go to that country is like definitely a good chunk of it is that they have a good ganja culture. You know, of course there's great music and there's good food and it's warm and there's many other things that are worthwhile to go for, but The ganja culture, they have an ability, in my opinion, to shine. And if they could bring back these, you know, beautiful old school Landry strains and focus more on growing those instead of these, you know, like very poorly bred, cross-bred, inbred strains that are weakened immune systems and die from molds and bugs consume them and they just...

2:27:06BubblemanThey force flower, they auto flower immediately because so many of them are from very far away from the equator. It would just be nice to see them take advantage of their niche and grow like land-raised sativas, maybe even from around the world, but definitely specializing in that Jamaican sort of lamb's bread flavor, which to me, once again, is just another exotic haze. Do you have any history with the lamb's bread, Mel?

2:27:33BubblemanNo.

2:27:37SpeakerNo, I don't, but Jamaica was one of my favorite places to go to, and I wasn't going, I was going there just simply from vacation. A couple of stories about Jamaica. One is that we're in Port Antonio, which is on the northern side, and at that time there was really nothing there but some estates, and I think it had like about seven white sand beaches, really gorgeous place.

2:28:07SpeakerAnd I was there with a few other people, and we were the only white people there. Had a great time. It was actually the best vacation I ever had. But one time, I'm walking with a friend of mine, and we come across a number of Rasta guys, right? Near there, and they've got a big blunt, and they're passing it around, and we start talking about pot a little bit.

2:28:32SpeakerAnd... They asked us if we had any pot. When we said we were from California, they said, oh, hell, you have to bring any pot with you. So I brought out a joint that was already rolled, and of course it looked like a toothpick next to what they had. And they kind of chuckled about that. Well, I went around them one time, and they all started turning to me and saying, you got more of that?

2:28:51SpeakerYou got more of that with you? So they were duly impressed with that. But through those guys, we told them, my friend wanted to bring back some Jamaican. And he said, listen, you see what we have? He said, but we want some Jamaican pot. We want to bring back some. But it's got to be really, really good. So, I mean, we're going to be here for, I think it was 10 days.

2:29:13SpeakerHe said, we want you to find the best pot you can, and we'll buy a pound. And never heard from him again, except the night before we were to leave, there was a knock on the door, and the place we were in had a butler, a cook, all this stuff. Butler answers the door, and there's two rastic guys, and one of them is really enormous. He's like at least 6'4", big, huge guy.

2:29:36SpeakerAnd they come in, and Butler couldn't believe that we knew these guys, and invited them in, and we went in to the room, and the guy breaks out a kilo. And my friend smokes it, takes a few pokes, and says, this is good shit, Jim. I'm taking back a pound. And he looks at the guy and says, but I said a pound. He said, I can only take back a pound.

2:30:01SpeakerI have to hide this stuff. And we all looked at each other and said, well, there's no scale or anything like that. All of a sudden, the big guy pulls out his machete and just swings it, smashes down on this and cuts the thing right in half. I mean, when he took it out, we go, what? We thought we were going to get killed. Cuts it right in half and then just picked it up with his hands like this.

2:30:21SpeakerHere, which one do you want? My friend said, okay, I'll take that one.

2:30:25TonyNice.

2:30:26SpeakerHe actually brought him home in his wife's bra, and I still to this day don't know how they got that done. But, yeah, so that was a great vacation. We had a blast with those guys, right? Any vacation where you get to buy a kilo before you leave for at home. A good Jamaican, yeah.

2:30:47BubblemanOh, my God. Yeah, you know, my first trips there was Bubble Man, which was in 2001. I went there. And was immediately looking for herb and people were like trying, you know, showing me these little bags and I was like, no, no, like I need, I need pounds of it. I want to make hash with it. And I started going around the island showing people how to make water hash.

2:31:08BubblemanAnd man, I'll tell you, those were some of my, like it felt like that was, I'll look back one day on that and be like, those were the good old days. Like even while it was happening, it was so incredible stirring the bubble bags and the ice mixture with just a stick. Right. On a beach or in a jungle. I made some beautiful hash in some incredible places with some really awesome people and I'll never forget it.

2:31:35BubblemanJamaica.

2:31:39SpeakerI really like the Jamaicans. Always did.

2:31:42BubblemanThat's why I wish that more and more people were making plans to come out for the Cannabis Cup. I think it's going to be redonkulous.

2:31:52SpeakerI just wonder if the Jamaicans themselves can afford to go to one of these cups.

2:32:13BubblemanWe spend the tourist dollar, make it so that the people that are local are able to come. You can't be charging like 300 US dollars for a ticket. Right, exactly. That becomes very, very, very inflated. I think that would be 30,000 Jamaican dollars or something.

2:32:30TonySo very, very expensive.

2:32:32BubblemanI'm looking forward to it nonetheless. I've got my tickets purchased. I've got my places rented. I'm going to be there for almost... Almost most of the month of November, maybe close to three weeks. So I'm looking forward to going down, finding the best herb that I can, making some good hash, and showing them the rosin. I'll probably bring a bunch of these little rosin screens and bags.

2:32:55BubblemanI always feel that it's beneficial to bring tools to Jamaica. And if I can bring some bubble hash bags and some little screens or whatnot and then pass them on to the different people that I'm working with or the different friends that I make and meet, It just seems like the best thing ever to give someone, you know, like... Bring rolling papers. Bring rolling papers, man. Jamaica has lots of rolling papers.

2:33:20BubblemanYou would not believe it. Like at concerts in the middle of nowhere, there's a fucking dude vending like Rizlas and Ziggy's and like all these different like Lion of Judah papers and stuff. It's quite something.

2:33:32SpeakerIs it hair straighteners you got to bring? Because people are going to go nuts. Like, what do I do with this rosin bag? And it's like, you need a hair straightener, bro.

2:33:39BubblemanWell, believe it or not, there's no shortage of hair straighteners in Jamaica. I'm like, I'm telling you, dude.

2:33:48SpeakerYou could start a real men versus women. It didn't hit there, and the dudes should not have hair straighteners in Jamaica, so it's going to get beefy.

2:33:56BubblemanLook at Tony buying hair straighteners at the fucking mall. There's more bald dudes. I'm sure ATN's bought a hair straightener or two.

2:34:04Etienne FontanI've got three of them, and I don't own a hair on me that could use one, you know?

2:34:10SpeakerI remember the episode. Tony was like, my girlfriend's done with me taking her super high-end one, so I bought my own. I'm like, you were taking your girlfriend, but you told me.

2:34:21BubblemanThat's hilarious. We're going to maybe bring a D-nail press down there as well, so we'll see how well that goes. It's hot down there, and anything that you're using with heat, you definitely want to make sure that you don't overheat. Oh, Mr. Scaldone, I thought he was at the dentist for a second when he was standing up. It looked like he had a little white bib over top of his...

2:34:44BubblemanWelcome, Mark. How are you doing this fine, fine Sunday afternoon? Maybe you can hear me, maybe you can't.

2:34:51Etienne FontanI don't know.

2:34:52BubblemanEither way, welcome.

2:34:56BubblemanWelcome, welcome, and more welcome.

2:35:00Etienne FontanSo, Mel, what are you working on currently? Are you publishing anything in the future?

2:35:07SpeakerNo, I'm pretty much out of publishing. I may publish just some e-work in very short form, you know, like chapter-like kind of things, but basically... I really don't want to be a publisher anymore. I'm kind of like done with that. I'm working with a couple of other companies basically as an advisor to them. And that's taking a lot of my time. I would like to do one more book though, but I would have it published by somebody else.

2:35:40BubblemanHere's a question for you, Mel. For someone that would be interested in getting a book published in the cannabis world, if they were to be looking for a publisher, where would you point someone towards that might be a good place to get their cannabis book published?

2:35:57SpeakerI think it's very different now because everybody is talking marijuana. I think all sorts of straight publishers would welcome a book. That's where I would go, and also because the distribution has completely changed. Whereas before, you did a marijuana book, you wanted groups like Homestead and Glass Gas, Quick Trading Company, but a lot of these smaller ones, because they had the outlets, and the outlets do bookstores that would carry those books.

2:36:34SpeakerI think that's changed now. Most of those small distributors are gone. It's all been consolidated into a few really large publishers. Also, the distribution has completely changed. Amazon has really killed a lot of the smaller retail distributors. So it's a different world now, but I think you could go, I would try straight publishing where you like the books that they're presenting, whether they have anything to do with marijuana or not.

2:37:04SpeakerOther than that, I really haven't kept current with it the last several years, but even Green Candy Pack Press I don't think is doing much more. I know that Quick Trading is, Quick Trading is still publishing books. But yeah, I'm kind of done with the publishing world.

2:37:24SpeakerI guess this question goes to both you and Todd. What do you feel about this video education? Like, you talked about when you lost your pictures to all the deficiencies you wanted to document. And I think about, well, everyone loved those pictures, but it's funny how a moving plant waving in a breeze looks way different than this laid out scanned photo of a cut plant. Like, would you go back into...

2:37:51SpeakerThank you for watching.

2:38:12SpeakerThey're not academic educators. They're not able to go, you see this, this is the this, this is where you'll first see the signs way before you have to look for nitrogen deficiency. The plant will XYZ. You guys hold all that academic three year course stuff in your head, but... A lot of the authors say, I don't want to publish anymore, it seems old and out of touch, but they never say, what I want to do is do a more live version based on where I'm living and going and seeing, you know, at my age and in my experience.

2:38:43SpeakerYou know a lot of people who would love to show you their garden. Yeah, well, having a live video for certain teaching things would be great, sure. I think that, you know, for like pre-Flowers Inn, like you say, for For nutrient deficiencies and things like that, it'd be great. But in terms of still photography, it's completely different now because of digital. You don't have to worry about film and getting it exposed or developed, I should say.

2:39:17SpeakerAnd the other thing is that now with the digital, you see the photograph immediately. You see, oh, shit, I forgot about that background or it's not exposed right or whatever. We didn't have that luxury. You know, when I was taking it with film, I would usually take a couple, two, three pictures of whatever it was and just hope for the best. And sometimes I would, if it was an especially good bud or whatever, I would do it at different film stops just to make sure I got the right exposure.

2:39:47SpeakerBut that's a whole other can of worms that's gone now. With the digital, it's just amazing what you can do. And also the cameras. I mean, the cameras are so improved. You can shoot at much slower thing. Wide open apertures. You can set your... You're digital so that you can use much, much less light, less exposure to get the same thing. It's really made filming just so much easier, really.

2:40:27SpeakerI mean, look at what you can do with just your phone. It's just incredible what you can do with your phone, what your phone does for you automatically. Yeah, it's a whole other world. But the, you know, in terms of the video, I can see it being a very saleable thing to have different sort of what you would call chapters just done in video. Like bring somebody in and show them a group of plants that all have different deficiencies and show them that it appears here first on the bottom of the plant or the middle or the top of the plant and what are the first indications, which is of course what you want to know, you want to know it before, you know, your plant is devastated, that sort of thing.

2:41:06SpeakerSo yeah, I I'm sure people will do it. Well, I think a remote. I mean, when you say that, Horatio, because remote kind of started off running around documenting gardens, exposing people's gardens, you know, and it really was a, you know, YouTube changed the way that we could see into each other's life. I mean, I don't know if BHO would have proliferated as it did if it wasn't for people on there showing each other how to do it.

2:41:33SpeakerI mean, you know, I think books are going to, In a sense, still play a pivotal role because it's a lot easier to reference something, especially when videos aren't yet really indexed. So until all the Remo videos are indexed and you can just type in a few keywords and it'll go to that segment of that video and you can watch him talk about spider mites, talk about mold, or talk about nitrogen, or talk about whatever, it's going to be harder to find that stuff in video like you could find it in a book, if that makes sense.

2:42:04SpeakerBut as we go forward, I think that YouTube is teaching one another quite a bit. When I grew up, TV was stupid. You had ABC, NBC, CBS, and lucky if you had PBS and some UHF stations. And now we can tune in to what we're interested in listening to. And I would rather tune in and listen to, in effect, something like this. You know, which is, you know, some educated people having a conversation about a topic I'm interested in.

2:42:34SpeakerThen I have to sit through 22 minutes of, you know, slight BS surrounded by commercials, which is what we used to get force fed. So now I think YouTube is coming along as, you know, smart tube because you can skip around the bullshit and get to the stuff that's, you know, interesting to you. And now I think we are all each other's teacher. I mean, you know, I don't know Brett, but there's a guy that we just mentioned that's in here and he's, I, You know, he was one of them.

2:42:59SpeakerHe's just up there going, hey, everybody, look what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing. You know, do it your way. This is what I'm doing. And, you know, fuck you if you don't like it, but it worked for me. And I have a great deal of respect for that because it's just matter of fact. And, you know, and that is what we're sharing. I mean, the whole reason I'm here sharing this stuff, the reason I got in the pod is because I saw so many people that were inexperienced and I felt like they could benefit from my experience.

2:43:26SpeakerAnd my experience was coming out of learning out of his book. And that's what I was trying to share. So now to sit here and have Mel Frank sitting here talking about things, it kind of blows my mind. I can't imagine where we're going to go from here, if that makes sense. I mean, I hope people like Brett and others write books and don't go completely new school, but kind of do go backwards a little bit and document their findings more than with just YouTube.

2:43:59SpeakerI hope they do make books. I hope they do what Mel Frank and others have done, which was Really document and share their experiences so the rest of us could benefit from those experiences and build upon them. I mean, my garden doesn't look anything like the diagram in his book with the pulleys and the fluorescent lights, but if it wasn't for that diagram, I don't know what I would be doing.

2:44:28SpeakerWell, I guess that's kind of why I'm asking. I know the generation that on YouTube has educated us and we owe them a lot. And then I'm like, I know, but we're not the professors getting used to video. We're not, I guess that's why I keep using the word academic. It's getting the academics to do the 20 minute video, the one hour video. Because I'm like, I'll sit all fucking day and watch video footage that Rob Clark is just voicing over his book.

2:44:57SpeakerAs I watch video of what's being illustrated and basically how do we get Longer, more lecture-like information into the new era of palability. I watched every Brett Maverick video going up, but at the same time I've also watched all these videos. I'm like, that's not what I'd learned in college deep. That's like I totally understand you read a book like I read a book, and you're interpreting information, but that's not the guy who wrote the book and who wants to rewrite the book and is still frustrated over the pictures and how they turned out.

2:45:30SpeakerSo I guess every time we get one of these more academics, I'm going to draw them into, like, you know, macros do videos now. We can do, you know, THC to CBN on a plant using a light to degrade it with time lapse. There's a lot of crazy shit that visually needs professionals and academics to work together. Just like your Culture High video was put together, it's not, that wasn't done by YouTube people and it wasn't a YouTube effort.

2:45:57SpeakerBut it makes such, it's so much more I feel you. I always joked as a kid that the best people to get advice from probably weren't available to get the advice from. They probably wrote books, so I read their books. Ironically, I sought out the people that wrote the books that really moved me, Jack Carrow, Mel Frank, Rob Clark. And now they're my friends, you know, rest his soul, Jack.

2:46:33SpeakerBut, you know, and I tell other people to do it too. Seek out your own teachers, you know, try to figure out who you think is delivering the truth that you're looking for and, you know, engage them. I mean, I met Jack Kerr by calling the number on the back of his Emperor Wears No Clothes back in January of 94 and it changed my life. I mean, I met, you know, Mel Frank by happenstance and moved into his neighborhood of L.A. Hey, neighbor, I guess I saw what happened.

2:47:00SpeakerYou know, and all I can say is we all need to share. Yeah, yeah, you're, where were you?

2:47:07Etienne FontanI sure did, didn't I? I got to second that, you know, follow your heart, but as, you know, follow the truth tellers. Mine was Dr. Todd Nicoria. He was my, you know, my first one who I had experience with after Jack Herrera and then came to my university. So, you know, find where you can get in, wherever you can, and just, you know, I volunteered. People are like, how did you get to be where you are?

2:47:29Etienne FontanI was like, well, I volunteered for two years not getting paid with Cannabis Action Network going around the country talking marijuana. So I don't think you're going to enjoy being a volunteer for two years. So find people who are local. You now have local heroes. There's a lot of people out there you can Reach out to, talk to, you know, get information about, because everybody's wondering, how do I get in marijuana now?

2:47:50Etienne FontanIt's like, well, move to your legal state and start asking questions. Reach out, find out. If you want to get involved, you know, people are wondering what to go into in college. Mel, somebody's saying to you, I want to get into the cannabis industry. What would you say, if they were going to college, what would they go into?

2:48:10SpeakerWell, certainly botany. In chemistry, I would definitely take those. Microbiology would help. Any of those things, but a basic biology background really is where you want to go because that allows you to go into, let's say, the pests, which will be a big thing, microbiology into molds and fungi. All these things are going to be aspects of the industry that will be very important. As far as Horatio and the question about getting academics in, in doing worthwhile videos and that sort of thing.

2:48:43SpeakerYou have to pair those two together. You have to have somebody who's a good videographer and the academic that you want. And I think those pairings will come up really rather commonly here very soon simply because of the legitimacy that's happening with the whole industry. You know, you have all this money coming into it, these investors. You know, it's not embarrassing for somebody to work at it if you're a college professor, that sort of thing.

2:49:10SpeakerSo just with the legitimacy of the industry, you're going to find plenty of people that will be interested, especially, I mean, once they smoke the urban and the magic of the urban, it takes a hold of them. They'll definitely gravitate to it.

2:49:26MarkTrue. Can you guys hear me? Do I have good signal? You do.

2:49:29SpeakerWelcome, Mark.

2:49:31MarkHey. Hi, everybody. Sorry I'm late. I've been busy working on the farm. It's really cool. Yeah, I'd like to say something about the literature. Mel, I've used your knowledge to basically become who I am today, so thank you very much. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and as a scientist, people ask me all the time, do You know, Mark, do you have a crystal ball? Like, what's your crystal ball?

2:50:00MarkAnd it's funny because the literature captures everything from that moment to the past. And again, I think we stand on the shoulders of giants in many ways because I do have a crystal ball. It's called the literature. I look into it every day, and I can imagine all kinds of different things by just looking at what people have done before me. And it inspires me, just like music, to...

2:50:27MarkThank you so much for joining us today.

2:50:55MarkOf different chemistries and all kinds of different things and formulations to make these molecules better, last longer, act more specific, maybe take out the psychoactive effect while still delivering the medicine to very sick patients who need it. Mother Nature has inspired the synthesis of other medicines that, again, weren't exactly what was taken from the plant, but it inspired synthetic chemists Thank you all so much for joining us today.

2:51:25MarkThank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2:51:51MarkThank you for joining us today.

2:52:09MarkYou know, Mother Nature is an incredible chemist and the chemistry she's able to do. And, you know, Mel, I get this question all the time. People ask me to reach out on Facebook. I'm a PhD chemist. They say, Mark, you know, what is a good degree to get in or what's a good academic training to get in chemistry or in the cannabis industry? And I would say anything where you're managing, any kind of business degree where you have to manage numbers and you have to understand the bottom line, business sense is a very, very good academic pursuit at this point in time because, again, big business is getting into cannabis.

2:52:49MarkThere's no stopping it. And understanding... How companies start, how they're funding companies and all that kind of thing is very, very useful. But again, I think that an academic career in botany or chemistry, we need more talented scientists and especially more women scientists in this field. So please, have at it, folks. Have at it.

2:53:17MarkAnd send me your chemistry questions.

2:53:21BubblemanThere's 560 people in chat and they're asking a few questions here and there, not necessarily to anyone in particular, but, oh, I know, Ice Wax had asked a question to Mel about something you had posted on your IG in regards to the six types of trichomes. And he said, we know about the three basic types, but can he mention, did you talk about six types of trichomes on your IG?

2:53:46SpeakerNo, I think I put up a photograph and somebody posted

2:53:53SpeakerSomebody made a comment on it, and then I responded to the comment. I do respond to some of the comments. The problem is it all takes a lot of time. Yes, I did explain that there are six trichomes on the plant. Three of them are glandular, and three of them are not. They recognize that the systolic hairs are one of the non-glangular ones. I just wanted to make that distinction.

2:54:19SpeakerThe whole thing with the trichomes bothers me a little bit in that that's taken over the nomenclature when we talk about cannabis because it would have been more accurate to talk about resin glands. Especially if you're talking about the ash, you should be the capitate. Stocked resin glands are your primary thing. That sort of thing just would have made it more accurate. But yeah, that's all. The three non-glangular ones, the most prominent one, the one you see all over the planet, the systolic hairs, those little shiny, pointy hairs that you see, and the other two are kind of like wart-like little things that you really wouldn't see unless you get a really good microscope and look for them.

2:55:01BubblemanLike the bulbous?

2:55:03SpeakerYeah. No, the bulbous is a resin gland also. The bulbous has a little bit of resin.

2:55:08BubblemanYou're talking about smaller than the bulbous?

2:55:12SpeakerSmaller than the bulbous?

2:55:13BubblemanIs that what you're talking about? Yeah.

2:55:15SpeakerYes, they are smaller than the bulbous. The bulbous is interesting. The bulbous are on the leaves right off the bat. I mean, right away.

2:55:22BubblemanLike an apricot coming out of a cotyledon. Boom, there it is.

2:55:27SpeakerRight. Pretty incredible. So it's a very important thing to the plant to have these resin glands. Somehow it learned during its evolution, I really need this stuff because it's concentrated on it. And of course now, since we're working on it too, we've made it even more concentrated.

2:55:42BubblemanThere are also some types of glandular structures that I photographed on the epicotyl, those first two leaves that come out of the cotyledon. And what I noticed was that they were almost like a glandular, like just a little stub with no head on it. And what I noticed, what their purpose was, was to separate the epicotyl from the cotyledon as it's opening, because it's like wet tissue paper.

2:56:10BubblemanThis thing is so delicate.

2:56:12SpeakerRight.

2:56:13BubblemanOnly once you get in and you photograph it, these little nubs actually grow out and push, push the epicotyl away from itself, and it's quite an incredible thing. The first time I photographed it, I was actually very excited to have seen it.

2:56:30SpeakerWhat's that? That's very interesting. I've never noticed that.

2:56:35BubblemanYeah, I have it actually on one of my Flickr accounts. I'll post that account in Hash Church Group so people can check it out, all these particular photos that I'm talking about. It started with a 20-year-old seed that I had brought back from Jamaica and I planted last May. It was actually 19 and a half years old last May. It's now 20 years old, 20-something years old.

2:56:55BubblemanBut I cracked eight of these seeds and, of course, seven of them never made it, but one made it and it turned into a female and it was this Jamaican plant. Plant that I had for damn near 20 years from when I got married in 95 in Jamaica. And I basically, I wanted to document this, the entire thing. I thought I've had this thing for 20 years.

2:57:15BubblemanWouldn't it be cool if I took a picture of the first crack in the shell, the first root protruding out, you know. And I macro photographed that thing. I'll tell you, when I was posting it on Facebook, I could actually feel the excitement of a lot of people being like, man, this is like, I feel like we're like, It was like when you watched a fetus, you know, like photographs of a fetus for the first time.

2:57:39BubblemanIt was like photographs that people really hadn't seen before. I love always that sort of, bringing that sort of thing to the people. I never have done a book, but I definitely could see a small little book in my future, at least with my photography.

2:57:58SpeakerWell, the books start off small. They seem to grow. You realize I have more knowledge than I realized. You just start to put it down and write about it and pretty soon you've got a lot of pages. You also start to wish for photographs and information that you don't have. You start to find out what you don't know also. The process of making a book is a very interesting process.

2:58:22BubblemanYeah, I mean, I can only imagine. I've written a lot of articles, and the articles I write are not just paragraphs. They're usually multi-pagers, and I feel I come across that very same thing where there's just like I use a lot of photographs to convey my messages. My book would be much more of a photograph book than anything because it's like a photograph with a small little sentence to explain what's going on in the photograph, and there's always that picture that you're missing.

2:58:48MarkThat's the book I want to write. I was just going to say that's exactly how I look at any weed book today. I don't look for what's in there. I look at what's not in there, you know. That's how you look to see like what are they missing? What are they talking about in this one? No one's really covered extracts, have they? In a book? Yeah, not in like a textbook format, have they?

2:59:13MarkI mean,

2:59:14BubblemanI mean, probably the best book I've ever seen on extracts is from my buddy Javier from Medical Seeds in Barcelona. It's all in Spanish right now, and I'm certain that he's getting it translated into many languages, but he's just done so many different extracts. It's a good foundation in the sense that, I mean, he probably does like a half a dozen or more solvent extracts. He does all the water hash.

2:59:41BubblemanHe does the dry sifting. He's He's basically just every type of extraction process that he knows about. He's not biased. He loves them all. So he has like a good information and background with pretty decent pictures. And I think that one is called something about extraction. I'd have to get the title. I'll post it in the Hash Church group once again. And hopefully our good buddy, Zach Prudhoe, he goes through Hash Church.

3:00:11MarkYeah, I know. I love that, Mark. The fact that he does that, that's wonderful that he does that. Thank you very much.

3:00:18BubblemanYeah, so that's a big shout out to Zach. He's definitely taking a lot of his time.

3:00:23MarkAnd really, I mean, just like the way I wrote the song, Somebody out there should be inspired. There is literature that needs to be written on rosin. There's literature that needs to be written on all the stuff that you hash makers know how to do. Be the next Mel Frank. Write your stuff down. Bring it to a publisher. Be inspired to create the next literature that's going to teach the next generation of hash makers how to make what we do every day.

3:00:55MarkTotally.

3:00:55BubblemanWell said, Mark. That's totally an accurate, awesome thing to say to the audience because it's like, it's our community.

3:01:03MarkYeah, and we need to ride it, not some fucking douchebag who doesn't know what they're doing, right? We need to do that.

3:01:11SpeakerWell, someone's... Here in hashtags, I just got the cover of Kenny's new book, Marijuana Horticulture Fundamentals, A Comprehensive Guide to Cannabis Cultivation and Hashish Production.

3:01:21BubblemanNow, that's a title.

3:01:24SpeakerYeah, yeah, and definitely didn't go for the short title. Definitely not.

3:01:29BubblemanI really look forward to that book. That's obviously going to be a keeper.

3:01:36SpeakerYeah, I completely agree. Kenny is really, he's pretty unique and a very serious researcher and researching is always on his mind. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. It's been a long, long time since he handed over that manuscript and since this came out. And I'm sure some of it has to do with adding extraction information to it.

3:02:01BubblemanYeah, you know, my connection to Kay and how I really sort of met Kay would have been walking into Rob's place in Amsterdam one year and this guy, I think Annie Reakin was there, and another guy by the name of Nick. And he was from England and he had a magazine called Red Eye Magazine. Nick was totally awesome and I walked in and they were like, oh, we're judging the cup.

3:02:30BubblemanWe've got all the hash entries right here and I walked over to them and I looked and there was like 27 entries and he had them all out and I just, I grabbed one and I said, this one will win. I was real cocky at the time and we sort of got to talking and at first he was like, he told me later, he was like, I thought you were like Rob Clark's nephew or something.

3:02:52BubblemanI wasn't really quite sure who the fuck you were but you were just kind of like, you had this little cocky air to you and you seemed to know what you were talking about. But he put more attention into it afterwards, after the cup was over and the one that I picked won first prize. That's when he got back to me and said, listen, I want you to write for Red Eye Magazine and it was through writing for Red Eye Magazine that I really sort of was introduced to Kay because he was also, Nick seemed to just like hand pick, cherry pick like just very few people that he wanted to write in his magazine that was very much like, he was like the main writer that he could write like a 30 page story in Red Eye Magazine and it would be awesome, like you would read every word of it and he had great photos and He put himself out there in a way that I'm not sure I've really ever met another cannabis journalist that was maybe that insane.

3:03:47SpeakerYeah, Nick was pretty incredible because he was a one-man band in terms of putting out that magazine. He's one guy. He puts out the whole damn magazine. So I gave him stuff just for free. He'd call me up and say he needed something, and I'd just give him everything free. And I know Kenny did too. He's putting out great stuff, you know.

3:04:08BubblemanOf course, yeah, it was the same way. I never took any payments. You know, I would maybe ask for a... I think I even still paid for my ads because he was a one-man band. And the bottom line was, without a shadow of a doubt, his magazine was classier and nicer than any other magazine that you compared it to. Absolutely, yeah. In this industry, absolutely. Hands down, it was just a beautiful magazine and I guess that goes back to that one man show of really like, I think he had like five pages of ads and they were only at the end of the magazine.

3:04:42BubblemanHe didn't like to have them like in the middle of the magazine and stuff. Can't have those nasty ads in there.

3:04:50SpeakerYeah, the production, everything. It was like the best thing out there.

3:04:55BubblemanI would love to see a reemergence And I think that there's a quality that exists in the community now that if Red Eye came back into being, it could literally be like that sort of collector magazine that it was from back in the day. It would never have to be huge and do hundreds of thousands of copies, but I'm sure it could do 40 or 50,000 each issue.

3:05:18BubblemanIt was such a nice magazine to hold in your hand. He must have just gotten the highest quality everything when he went to put that to print.

3:05:27SpeakerYeah.

3:05:28BubblemanSo good on you wherever you're out there, Nick. I hope you're listening, man. We love you and we miss you and you've done an enormous amount for the cannabis industry in Europe and abroad. If you can find these magazines, Red Eye Magazine, there are some companies like there was a company in the UK or in Scotland. That had, they had a bunch of the magazines after he sort of closed the doors.

3:05:52BubblemanThey ended up with boxes of them. So, exactly. Someone just put up the link. It's highland, high-land.co.uk. So, Red Eye Express, get them while you can, man. Those are some great magazines. You had a beautiful photo on the cover of one of those issues. Did you not, Mel?

3:06:11SpeakerOh, I'm sure at least one, yeah. I think you did. Might have done a... A photomicrograph there. It's a blue background. I'm picturing it. Yeah. It's like times 100. It's like the best 100 shot I ever got. Beautiful. Do you remember the strain?

3:06:27BubblemanYes. That was tie stick. Now, that's legit right there. Let me tell you. If someone tells you they have a favorite picture and they don't remember the strain, that's just not legit.

3:06:36SpeakerTie stick. That's awesome. I never heard that. That is true. I'll see a photograph. It's a nice photograph. I can't remember what that was, but the ones that I liked, all the stuff that I really liked, yeah, I know every one of them.

3:06:51BubblemanWell, even when Todd held up the book today, or someone held up the picture of my trichome, I legitimately recognize that picture, so much so that I'm going to go into my light room and I will post that picture in the Hash Church link as well because that was, I'm pretty sure it was the Afghani bull rider and it was just a real, I remember taking the shot, it was the first time that I could perceive what seemed to be like terpenes or something like floating in the gland head in these little patches that I

3:07:26SpeakerYeah, you see it's like a bio in there or something.

3:07:30BubblemanYes, exactly. Something that's not mixing in. It's, you know, suspended.

3:07:36SpeakerLook at this photo. This is from the Grower's Guide Deluxe, Jim? Yeah. And this photo right here of these broken trichromes, I mean, is this one of your shots, and if so, you know, how did you take it, and what, yeah, okay, of course, and what year, what year did you, I mean, this is obviously, you know, this is amazing considering this is from 1980-something, and that's what I'm trying to ask.

3:08:00SpeakerWhen is this from, and how did you take it? 76 or 77. Either one, yeah.

3:08:07SpeakerWhat happened, you know, I just, I was in Berkeley and I wanted to get a closer look at these things and I ran into some guy, a young guy who, we got into a conversation and he was taking photomicrographs of these thin, thin pieces of lunar rock, right, from the moon mission. And through certain lighting of it, they could tell the chemistry of it. So that's what he was doing for NASA.

3:08:38SpeakerAnd he said, you know, he says, I have a microscope and I'm going to sell it because, you know, now I made some money and I'm going to upgrade. So I said, sure. So I just bought this microscope from him. And he gave me an attachment where you could, yeah, that was right there. Hey, Mark. Yes. 1970 what? 1971. Is it better? It's 76 most likely. 76, 77.

3:09:03SpeakerYeah. Right.

3:09:04Etienne FontanHey, Matt, this is your original with cassette. Did you take this photograph as well?

3:09:15SpeakerNo, I didn't. That was a stock photograph the publisher did.

3:09:19Etienne FontanBut this is the original, correct?

3:09:22SpeakerIt is, except is that a... That is a little tape in there.

3:09:26Etienne FontanYeah, it's an audio cassette with it says UNF name on it.

3:09:29SpeakerYeah, this is all stuff that I never received a dime for, and they weren't even supposed to be selling that, right? First time I've seen it. Classic. I can help you get it signed. Yeah, right. That's amazing that I asked for audio and book at the same time. I'm like, wait a minute, you've been on that. Look, you got a tape for me to listen to? Like, what was on that tape?

3:09:58SpeakerLike the sound of fans blowing? Like just relaxing stuff to read? No, no, no, they had somebody read the book. I mean, I can remember talking to them about doing it and saying, sure, but then they never told me that they did it.

3:10:11SpeakerClassy.

3:10:13Etienne FontanI've never heard the cassette, and I ended up getting a copy when I worked for Ed, and I got one that was sealed, and I've just never opened it.

3:10:24BubblemanWell, I just found that picture of that trichome that he was holding up earlier, I believe. This is the batch that they came from?

3:10:36SpeakerIt's really cool. Well, you guys, you know what? We're going to go to the Cali Light Deprivation Festival, Cali Dep Fest, and it's like a good drive for us, so I have to pardon our due.

3:10:49BubblemanNo problem, man. That was wonderful. Really great to have Mel come in and share those stories and his background. Of course, you're always welcome, Mel, anytime you want to come share.

3:10:59SpeakerIt was great. It was great to have a conversation with all of you. Nice to meet our A-show, Mark. All that. I also noticed that I do follow Dynasty Genetics already.

3:11:12Etienne FontanExcellent. Follow Mel Frank at MelFrank420 on Instagram if you don't know.

3:11:20BubblemanThanks for the plug. Todd also put the link up in the Hash Church group there, so if you're not a part of the Hash Church group on Facebook, it is a private group. It won't show up on your feed or in your parents' feed or whatever. There were the people that you're trying to hide from. You should probably eventually not have to do that. We're going to keep fighting fights so you don't have to do that.

3:11:43BubblemanAnd yeah, I just thank everyone for coming down. I think as these guys head out to go do their judging, I think we'll just call it a nice short church today. Three hours and 15 minutes. That's commendable. That's respectable. I think... Yes. Very good. Maybe we'll finish it off with a rip and...

3:12:07BubblemanI don't know. Maybe a little Hash Church play out? Mark? You ready for that? Yeah, man.

3:12:19SpeakerOn you!

3:12:36SpeakerYes, we cannabis. Yes, we cannabis. Yes, we cannabis. Yes, we cannabis. On Hash Church. We got Bob and Ed. Talking about making hash. Woo!

3:13:07SpeakerHey! Talk about chemistry. That's it. All the hashtags. Bye! Peace, everybody!