Cannabis Legalization and Genetic Sequencing

0:00BubblemanWe'll join you. Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Hash Church episode 88. I'm here with my buddy Adam from Tweed. He's joined us for a few minutes here for the early session of Hash Church. We're just at the Lyft conference right now. I've also got my partner from Jamaica in the room. He's off camera right now, but we're going to come and talk to him in a little bit.

0:20BubblemanClaude in the house.

0:22SpeakerBlessings, blessings, blessings, Hash Church. Jamaica in the room.

0:25ToddHe's off camera right now, but we're going to come and talk to him in a little bit.

0:31BubblemanAnd then we'll send out our links and see if we can't start a beautiful little dialogue today. In regards to the cannabis scene, we've got all sorts of things happening here in Toronto. Obviously, we had the largest mass arrest in cannabis' history for Canada. Actually, for any type of arrest, I believe. It's the most people that ever got arrested in one shot. They raided 43 dispensaries yesterday, or yesterday or two days ago?

0:55BubblemanThursday. Thursday. It was Thursday, and so people are still kind of a little bit reeling from that. It's a bit shocking. Welcome, Todd. Welcome, Etienne.

1:07ToddGood morning. Good morning. Are we going to... How are things in Toronto right now? I can't wait to talk about what happened.

1:16BubblemanWell, you know what? It's interesting. I've got Adam here, actually. He works with the company Tweed. They're one of the larger LPs, the one that signed up with DNA and Snoop Dogg, as you've probably seen in the media. They also are responsible for buying... It's the Hershey plant, isn't it? Yeah, the big Hershey chocolate plant in Smith Falls. Smith Falls, Ontario. So yeah, I just wanted to welcome those guys.

1:41BubblemanAnd I wanted to welcome Skunk Man Sam into the room and Kevin McCurman. Thank you for showing up.

1:48Skunk ManCan you hear me or am I on mute?

1:50BubblemanOh, of course. I had no doubt about you whatsoever. You got the headphones on, your computer's working, we didn't test anything. Bammo. Todd loves that shit.

2:00Skunk ManLook, I even have a fancy mic. He'll like that.

2:04ToddI love you. You know, just the effort makes me smile, to be honest. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. Welcome, Kevin.

2:12Skunk ManYes, yes. I'm not talking. I understand there's feedback going on.

2:17BubblemanYeah, you should probably be okay as you have the headphones on, but if you can mute every time that someone's talking, that would be absolutely wonderful. I'm just sending out the link to Mr. Chimera and a few other folks. So yeah, the vibe in Toronto is that they slammed 43 dispensaries. Now, there was 100 dispensaries that opened in Toronto in the last couple of months, maybe. Maybe three months, I think there's been over 100 dispensaries that have opened.

2:44BubblemanSo the police say that they were sort of targeting out-of-town people that came in just to pop these dispensaries up to pull some quick cash out. There's definitely no denying that some of the dispensaries have a very high dollar amount and they increase the price of the product higher than any other kind of outlet store would do. But at the same time, these dispensaries are incredibly important for access to the patients.

3:11BubblemanObviously, the LPs have their hands tied in the products that they can produce and in the ways that they can distribute the product and they're following strict rules, much the way doctors do when they say things like, well, I can't really tell you that That cannabis shrinks tumors. It's like, yeah, because you went to school for eight years and they'll take away your license if you say that.

3:31BubblemanOf course, the rest of us are allowed to say that because we didn't go to school for eight years, or at least I didn't for that particular license or whatever, you know, your doctor's license. Yeah, your permit to practice medicine. They don't mess up with that. But it's interesting, Todd. It's, you know, the vibe was going to be different at this conference. I think a lot of those dispensaries were going to be present at this conference.

3:53BubblemanAnd I think they may have even had products available almost. I think companies were coming to actually sell hash and weed products, which is obviously not legal. But after that arrest, and oh also, you know, the day before the event, Henry Kissinger was here with one of the ex-presidents of Israel. And there were secret servicemen all over the place. The place was like on a serious lockdown.

4:17BubblemanProtestors outside on the war machine and Zion and all this crazy shit. So it was a pretty intense vibe to come into the event. The day that I came in, Henry Kissinger and all these Secret Service dudes, 43 dispensaries getting hammered down by the police simultaneously. It was like a million dollar bust. They called it Project Claudia. Very not cool. We need access at the same time.

4:42BubblemanIt's not cool to... Jump into an industry real quick to make a bunch of money and increase the price of the cost of the medicine by 100 to 200%. That's a really high profit margin. That's like I'm buying weed in BC and taking it to Manhattan to sell it for top dollar in 1999 type profit margin.

5:01ToddWell, you know, I feel for the police in the sense that, you know, there's a criminal element in every even legal business. I mean, you're not going to get You know, any store, I mean, you can't open a Taco Bell without one of your employees trying to sling shit out the drive-up window. The truth is, though, is when they create a category where all of us are criminals, even the people that are trying to do things legally, it's really hard to differentiate between the ones that are coming in as opportunists and the ones that are actually coming in trying to do the right thing.

5:31ToddSo I see this is going to continue until they really regulate and allow us to be legal.

5:39Etienne FontanIt's really surreal to watch Canada go the way of the United States with raids. It was really bizarre this week to sit back and go, wow, this really isn't happening here much in the United States. It still does happen, don't get me wrong, but it was definitely surreal to see that happening in Canada because for 43 shops, I think it's more than just a million dollars they were combining because you're talking the resources of the police department and You know, now including the courts, what it's going to cost people to defend themselves, lawyers' fees, etc., etc.

6:09Etienne FontanWithout a doubt, it's a humongous, exponential waste in resources in Canada that they can ill afford to waste, to my knowledge.

6:20BubblemanAnd worse than that, Etienne, is the police said it was about a $30,000 cost to them or the city taxpayers to close each one. Obviously, the dollar amount down the road for sure is also going to be brutal. It's not a good situation for sure. Not a good situation in Toronto.

6:38Etienne FontanAt the same time... Are people going, are they being proactive? Are they taking this? Are they reopening their doors?

6:45BubblemanNo, no, I mean there's incredible footage of Jody Emery and Matt the Great Gardner and a bunch of people going down and basically like, I guess the police were doing like a press conference. Thank you for watching.

7:15BubblemanThey were like, show us the victims. Just show us, you know. They were like, we did this for the children. And then someone said, show us where the numbers show that children are having a problem. Like, show us how this is harming children. And they were like, well, we have no evidence of that. So it was just one of these situations where, you know, once again, Jody went in there and just… Crushed.

7:35BubblemanShe really made them look pretty bad.

7:38Etienne FontanShe, I mean, I've got to give her props. I mean, if… You Canadians continue to be like her. Much respect. She is feisty and I got nothing but love for her going in there and just taking over that press conference. She showed how to go in there and kick ass. And if anybody doesn't know it, go watch the video. If you want to know how to go down there and get in the police face, do it logically, intelligently, with the media in front of you, Jody Amory, you are a fucking star.

8:06BubblemanYeah, I would like hopefully to get her on today. Todd asked me a couple of days ago if it would be a good idea to get her on. I'm texting her right now to see if she's going to be able to share some of her time with us.

8:19ToddThat's pretty cool. I think that we really have to fight for kind of a Some type of normalization, legalization, because we're going to be harassed. I mean, people that are talking about decriminalization are asking for this type of shit, because, you know, we're going to let people at the end user have a right to smoke a joint, but we're not going to have a right to get it to them.

8:41ToddWe're not going to have a right to produce it. It's going to create this perpetually.

8:49BubblemanAbsolutely, Todd.

8:50Etienne FontanSo how do the guys from Tweed, you're there, so how does it feel now because you guys are being made out to be the scapegoats as the evil guys who are the big business people who have supposedly, I'm not saying this, this is just rumor control, have lobbied the Canadian government to shut everybody else down and so people feel that you are the monopoly pushing this prohibition so you have to feel that's somewhat unfair.

9:18SpeakerYeah, I think we're looking for safe access for everybody and we really want there to be regulations so that everybody's getting the same fair access to medicine that personally I need and so many other people need and I think it's a very widespread interconnection of various levels of industry that are coming together and I think Lyft is a great Thank you so much for joining us.

10:00ToddYou know, I'm honestly getting really tired of us having to use, you know, some type of medical condition as a reason why we don't drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or do stuff that is totally legal without any medical justice. You know, I don't got to justify a shot of whiskey or a glass of wine. I'm sick of justifying, oh, my neck hurts, I'm smoking a joint, please don't beat me or lock me up.

10:21ToddI'm so over it, it's not funny, you know. So, I totally feel you on the getting access, but man, we need to get freedoms.

10:30SpeakerEven in Canada, eh? It's totally true and I don't think anybody wants anybody to go through things that are happening to people that are trying to do good things. Absolutely.

10:42Etienne FontanIsn't this sort of like a growing pain though of the medical and the realities just trying to find their places in the world? I mean, the medical situation had professionally floundered for decades. A while there since it was grown, you know, in minds for a while there before you guys took over what you're currently dealing with. So you've already had to go through regulatory, the reality. Now you find that regulatory reality is squeezing out other people via this situation.

11:15Etienne FontanSo do you change your dynamics or do dynamics change or stay the same?

11:22BubblemanYeah, I mean, I don't know. The way I look at it is it's like kind of any business. It's going to be like I often tell people like, oh, you know, I don't own an NFL team. I'm not, it's not, I don't have the money for it. I'm not able to get in on it. I didn't fly first class here, but I certainly didn't bitch about the people who did and tell them that it was unfair that they were able to do that because they had that money.

11:43BubblemanAnd so it's hard to limit people who have coin to invest in something that, you know, obviously you can We'll see you next time.

12:12BubblemanThank you for watching.

12:35ToddI don't want to point out the obvious, but a lot of people here in California that are crying about big corporate cannabis coming in are the ones with big, huge greenhouses trying to go corporate. They're the ones that are dreaming of going big. And they're just afraid someone's going to come along with more coin, more ability to do it in front of them. That's really what they're crying about.

12:53ToddWe all have aspirations of greatness. It's what drives the human race.

12:58BubblemanI think Stuntman Sam has been going through this for years. How many years have you been going through this for, Sam? Thirty years? Doing what? Research? Because of the way you chose to do things, have people attacking your character, calling you this and calling you that, when really all you were doing was choosing a platform that was legal and would allow you to do the actual work that you needed to get done.

13:23SpeakerEven further, my real hope was to drag cannabis back into modern Western medicine. It's been out of it since 1937. But with the approval in Canada by GW, it's in fact back in it again because that's a bull plant extract. So I've accomplished small parts of my goal and I hope it becomes legal in the entire world for even smoked cannabis. But we have a long way to go for that.

13:54Etienne FontanHey, Sam, thank you on behalf of society and humanity in general. Thank you.

14:01BubblemanAbsolutely. Inspirational for sure. I thank you for that. Absolutely.

14:05SpeakerI have a question for you, Kevin. Sure. What's new in cannabis DNA? What do we look forward to?

14:14Skunk ManWell, there's a lot going on in sequencing strains. I think we're going to have a good understanding of not just the genetics of the plant, but what we're going to see from beneficial microbes versus harmful microbes. This whole pesticide thing that the SC Labs guys were highlighting really resonates with us because they were showcasing like 50% pesticidal fails out in California. This is probably really wet season so maybe that's extreme but and it was only about 15% failures from from microbials but Much of the pesticides they're using are in fact anti-fungal pesticides, and so I think there are some people a little bit afraid to get onto beneficial microbes because they're going to throw off all the microbial testing.

15:00ToddCan I just point out, Santa Cruz is on the ocean. It is inherently a moist, problematic place to grow. I mean, a lot of the places where we're growing cannabis right now are great places to hide and grow cannabis, but they're geographically not great places to actually grow cannabis.

15:18SpeakerTodd, you know that's true about Santa Cruz, but I'll tell you, while indica varieties got mildew and mold fairly easily there, haze, if it was in a greenhouse and kept dry, never did. So resistance will be the key in the future.

15:36Etienne FontanHey Kevin, could you introduce yourself and who you are and where you're from?

15:40Skunk ManSure, so Kevin McKernan, I'm from Marblehead, Massachusetts, and I've been doing a lot of work in building DNA sequencers over the years, worked on the Human Genome Project, and then in 2011 decided to kind of rage quit and go sequence cannabis. And that's where I met Sam, and not just Sam, but Robert Clark and Chimera and a bunch of others. They are honestly probably the earliest scientific advisors, unofficial though, to medicinal genomics.

16:06Skunk ManThey kind of pointed us in a couple directions back then, and We spent a couple years trying to figure out the law, honestly, and kind of put things on ice, because it got a little crazy in 2012 and 2013, and only recently have we really kicked things back on since Colorado legalized. So we're very similar to others in the field that are looking at sex testing genetically.

16:28Skunk ManWe're looking at sequencing cultivars or strains. I'm going to try and use cultivar here, because I understand that's a favorite word. And we're also doing a lot of microbial identification as we go along.

16:39SpeakerAnd in your mind, who was first to sequence cannabis? Was it your group or Page's?

16:47Skunk ManWell, John Page's group got it published in a peer-reviewed journal first. They used our data in that publication, actually. I think we're in one of their figures. We put our data public instantly. We started this probably in May or June of 2011, went over there, and we extracted like 10 different samples in the Dillon Hotel. And got those things sequenced and put Chemdog up in August. So a couple months later, once we had a DNA assembly together that looked decent, we just threw it up on the cloud.

17:17Skunk ManAnd a few months later, he soaked it up into his paper and published a really elegant paper. Because he also sequenced USO31 and phenola and did a lot of RNA sequencing. His effort was really Herculean in comparison to what we were doing. But ours was really just a What can one person get done or two people get done in a hotel room and make a difference? To this day, we still have to concern ourselves with purifying DNA in hotel rooms.

17:45Skunk ManFor all the authorities out there, this is actually Japanese maple.

17:51SpeakerAre either one of the scans by either your group or their group completely assembled?

17:57Skunk ManNo, no, they're still in 100,000 pieces, and interestingly enough, it's been like five years, and that's not gotten much better. I think part of it is that the sequencers haven't been focusing on plant genetics as much. Human genomes are relatively easy to sequence next to cannabis. The AT content's kind of normal. There's four letters in DNA, AT, C, and G, and when they're Really askew like they are in cannabis, which is like 64%, 65%, 80%, the sequencing chemistries fall apart.

18:26Skunk ManIt's fairly repetitive as well, and it's very polymorphic, which means the mother and fathers can be as far apart as humans are to chimps and still inter-cross, and that makes it incredibly challenging to sequence a genome because you're never sequencing one. You're sequencing both mother and father at the same time, and that makes it difficult.

18:43SpeakerSo what you want is homozygote inbred versions to make it easy for you.

18:49Skunk ManHighly, highly inbred or even homozygous versions of the, they found ways to do this in other organizms. It's unclear if it will happen in cannabis, but there are ways of getting embryos that are haploid.

19:01SpeakerYeah, doubling the haploid, yes.

19:03Skunk ManYeah, yeah, that would be ideal. There are better sequencers coming out, though. We're playing around with a few as well. These Pacific Biosciences sequencers give you nice, probably 40,000 base pair reads, but the accuracy is a real bear. It's about 85% accurate. It's a little bit messy. And then there's other tools that give you 80,000 base pair reads with conventional sequencers using some tricky barcoding systems that look really promising.

19:27Skunk ManSo I think it will come together at least a lot of scale better in the next few years.

19:31SpeakerWell, we know it will because you of anybody knows how fast we've marched forward in this basic technology of DNA.

19:42Skunk ManYeah, it is certainly moving fast. That field... If you track it next to Moore's Law, it makes Moore's Law look ridiculously slow. I mean, this is doubling. We went through 100,000-fold improvement in three years back in 2006. So it's probably a million-fold improvement now in terms of cost per sequencing in a particular base. It's been a little bit myopic on human, so the read lengths did improve as quickly as people wanted to handle plants, but that's starting to get addressed now, and I think we'll see much better references in the coming years.

20:14SpeakerWell, we used to dream about this, and now it's become a reality.

20:19Skunk ManYeah, marker assistance elections here. You can get nice 30,000 SNP maps out of sequencing, and it's fast and affordable, and people are starting to do it. So I think a lot of that has been due to there has been some patents that have issued, surprisingly. The trademark's being real bare about getting cannabis in any name, but the patent office doesn't care, and they are starting to issue patents on cannabis strains.

20:42Skunk ManSo I think we're going to see a little bit of a rush for people to define what they have that's novel.

20:50SpeakerI would not be surprised.

20:51ToddDo you think there will be very many discoveries that are novel, though, in all honesty? Because, I mean, I compare it to music all the time. There's only 12 basic notes in music. We have all this different music. Are we going to find there's 12 predominant strains in cannabis?

21:08Skunk ManI don't think we've seen that. No, no, have a look at, I mean, take a look at Canopedia.net. We've got a map up there of a couple hundred strains, not too different than what Phylos has put forward. You can download 30 of those genomes and align them yourself and play with the data. So they're all quite distinct. I've got to say the terpene profiles and the cannabinoid profiles are the ones that we've done so far are all dramatically different.

21:31Skunk ManSo I think... The question is whether or not the USPTO is going to recognize any prior art in the field that wasn't deemed, you know, was deemed illegal.

21:40ToddThere isn't good record. It's in public. It's in public domain. It's been in public domain for so long. I mean, people with seed companies are now just mixing together the efforts of people that 20 years ago owned seed companies.

21:50Skunk ManYeah, no, I 100% agree. It's a bit of a problem we've got with the USPTO is the amount of human knowledge is doubling Every six months. And their preliminary search reports are broken. They can't keep up with this type of mass increase in information. So when they search for prior art, they don't find it. And they're probably going to have a hard time finding it in cannabis because there hasn't been a nomenclature to genotype link that's been solid for 20 years.

22:16Skunk ManThere's lots of papers and discussions about how there's a strain in ganglion out there. You don't really know what you have. And that's kind of permeating, I think, some of the It's probably going to pronate the thinking of the USPTO. At least some of the strain, the first strain that they issued a patent on last August has probably been in circulation. It's just they have no good written record of it.

22:38Etienne FontanBut you're also, your research will also spawn other researchers to start delving into and start finding those other unique anomalies of those 400 and something plus chemicals that are in the plant that come down to that DNA strand.

22:52Skunk ManYeah, what we're encouraging folks to do is get stuff sequenced and put at least proof of existence of the sequence public. You don't have to put your sequence public if you don't want to. That's up to you. But you can put proof of existence of the public pretty easily these days. There's a mechanism that uses Hash Digest. This is perfect for Hash Church. So if you guys like Hash, here you go.

23:12Skunk ManLook up Hash Digest. This is a SHA-256 algorithm written by the NSA. So it's definitely a Death Star invention from the bare bones of it. But What this thing does is it takes a variable input file and creates an encryption key out of it. You change one letter in that file and that key radically changes. That key is basically a signature for your file. You can then notarize that by putting it into a Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain.

23:37Skunk ManThat gives you a timestamp of when that thing existed. If you ever end up in court with someone claiming they own your genetics, you can say, now my genetics existed in 2011 because I sequenced it and put an encryption key of it into this blockchain that's irreversible. And I can prove that my DNA sequence file that I have right here gets unlocked by that key.

23:56ToddYeah, but can I just ask a question? If your genetics came from a bag of seeds that you bought from Sensi Seeds in 1998 or something, how are they your genetics? And I don't want to sound like a weirdo when I say that, but everyone that's been making their migration to Amsterdam to buy seeds and coming back since the 80s, how are they going to call that theirs?

24:17ToddJust because they purchased that candy bar, now I own Hershey's? It's crazy. I'm not here to defend the USPTO. No, I'm just asking what you think about it. Not in a sense to defend it, but how can people come in? You can't do it with music. You can't do it with books. I can't come in and listen to Frank Sinatra write any one of his songs and say, I own this.

24:39BubblemanEveryone does it with strains. I mean, how many people did it to Dave? I've even heard you say, my OG.

24:46ToddOh, well, absolutely. Well, you know, when I say my OG, it's the one I mean, the one I'm in possession of. But it's the beginning of, that's mine. No, no, no, I've never gone there, Mark. No, you've never gone there. I'm just saying. I've had possession of this. I do have, there is my, I have a virgin.

25:02BubblemanWhat I'm saying is, it's how people begin thinking they own it. It starts with, it's mine. They say it a couple times over the course of many years, and then it eventually turns into mine. This is my strain. I had my own friend, Johnny B, who has a strain called Medi-Kush, and he's like, this is my, he calls it my medicine. It's my medicine. And I'm like, it's awesome.

25:20BubblemanIt's a really nice Kush strain. And he gave it to me, and we were learning about this sharing of cultivars, and he was pretty good. He was sharing all the strains, but he wouldn't share that one. He only shared it with me. And when I eventually shared it with some other people, he was a little bit upset about it. I was like, oh, well, dude, I thought we were sharing these.

25:35BubblemanAnd he's like, yeah, but that one's mine. And I'm like, but didn't you just get seeds given to you by someone? Like, It's a hard thing to own.

25:44ToddThis is the thing. This is a huge difference. I'm not going to walk into a courtroom and try to sue somebody for OG Plus when I know that I got it from Joe or Jim or Mandy or Sue or Bobby. I know the history. What we're talking about is people kind of trying to come in. Some guy starts a seed company in 2008 from seeds he got from his buddy who got them from Sensi back in 1994, and he's trying to come in and say, I have proprietary rights to these genetics.

26:10ToddWhen I'm saying shit, something popped up at his castle.

26:13BubblemanDidn't Sensi do that very thing to you, Sam, where they tried to copyright your strain cultivar names?

26:19SpeakerNo, they were trying to do just a copyright of a name. And they dropped it. But it's kind of like what Big Boot is doing now with cheese. Anybody who uses the cheese name has to pay me royalties.

26:38Skunk ManYeah, so copyright law and patent law for genetics are very different. And I can't justify the logic between that difference, but they're legally different. And I think what we're going to see from the patents side of it on... Whether it be Plant Variety Protection Act or gene patents that are occurring, this mess happened on the Human Genome Project. We had about 20% of the human genome patented after the government paid to sequence it with tax dollars.

27:06Skunk ManIt was a total crime. Kids that were trying to sequence with epilepsy, we had to dance our way through 4,000 different gene patents to figure out whose rights are we stepping on, quote unquote, when we sequence something. Luckily, a lot of those methods have been challenged and they're starting to erode a lot of those gene patents, but One of the reasons why we put everything public in August in 2011 was to prevent that from happening again, to prevent people from just willingly patenting gene sequences.

27:32Skunk ManIt's harder to do today. We've even published methods that navigate a lot of gene patents using particular variations on PCR. We've published two of those papers. But I think what's happening with the patents in cannabis now, it looks as if you have to have a particular, Chemotype and genotype connection in order for the claims to go through. But it's a bit of an unknown. I mean, this is the first one I've ever seen.

27:53Skunk ManI don't pay that close attention to the patent rights that have gone down in the space. I really didn't expect anything to come out. But if one comes out, there's bound to be more, and there's bound to be a bit of a rush on it. And unfortunately, I don't know that the prior art that existed previously is going to be deemed legitimate because it's not been notarized by a bank or it's not been Deemed a legal form of prior art.

28:14Skunk ManAnd now the USPTO is on this thing where its first inventor to file is someone who has the rights. And so what's an inventor in the case of making a new plant if you have crossed it very creatively to create a new chemotype? This is an unknown space.

28:28ToddI've got a question for you though. If a Van Gogh comes along and he creates a painting that is obviously organic and unique to him, But if somebody else comes along and breeds together two dandelions and makes one purple, you're not coming from an organic place, you're just playing with nature. Isn't this a difference?

28:53Skunk ManThere is a difference. I think the Van Gogh thing is going to be copyright trademark, which follows a different set of laws. When you start getting involved in patenting nature, The 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act came out to try and protect farmers who couldn't get patents on nature, and it has a certain set of guidelines on getting a strain that gets that kind of protection. Then, I think it was in 1980, Diamond vs. Chocolate Party happened, where somebody figured out how to modify a bacteria to clean up an oil spill.

29:21Skunk ManAnd it was done with genetic engineering, and they changed the nature of the bug, and that ensued this whole biotech race of patenting chimeric molecules or chimeric DNA to get you a novel piece of life. That then transpired into the court basically changing its opinion on this topic, it seems like almost every five years, with the Myriad Court case, the Mayo versus Prometheus court case, and something known as Sequinol versus Areosa.

29:48Skunk ManSo the story is that you spend a lot of money with lawyers, and We try to encourage people to go defensive here because it's log scales cheaper to just prove your shit exists. That way you can't get counterfeited by someone showing up late to the game with genetics that are identical to yours.

30:15SpeakerWell, in fact, though, Kevin, what happens if, okay, I collect everybody's genetics in the world and I submit it to you for your bit chain thing? Then I'll have the first one on it, even though, in fact, somebody else created it. And by the way, I have no plan to do this.

30:34Skunk ManWell, you are submitting them to our friends over in Oregon, and they're not being very public with their data, so watch out.

30:42SpeakerNo, okay, but what happens if I submit them to you, and you do put them on BitChain, but it's in fact somebody else's property? Don't you understand my question?

30:51Skunk ManNo, I do understand your question. I can't resolve it if someone sends material to be sequenced.

30:57ToddBut this is my point. Isn't this my point entirely that I keep trying to make, that people are trying to come along with stuff that 20, 30 years ago was Sam Skunk One, sold through Neville's Holland Seed Bank or whatever. And now they think they own skunk because they got their hands on some seeds that their mother's brother's sister got 20 years ago and still happens to have in the garden.

31:20ToddAnd I think this is where I say that a lot of this stuff has become, or am I wrong, public domain because it has been in the public domain for so long. How would anybody ever come back with science and say I'm going to put the genie back in the bag with all these seeds in incredible multiplications?

31:41Skunk ManYeah, I don't have the answer to that, Sam, and I don't pretend to know. I'm just seeing what's happening in the field. There's utility for sequencing these things in and outside of intellectual property rights.

31:51SpeakerAnd I'm just saying clever people with lawyers that are basically weasels can find a million ways to try to screw the real breeders.

32:00Skunk ManYeah, so on that point, I've known you and Robert Clark for quite some time. And likewise, Chimera. And you guys are wholesome, loving individuals. I've always appreciated working with you. What I get a little bit worried about in the space is when you see folks doing a lot of the sequencing and hoarding the data. Because that makes me wonder what they're actually doing with it. There's other entities out there doing this type of sequencing, and the data's not getting public.

32:30Skunk ManAnd that makes me suspect whether they're in fact looking for novel genetics in those large data sets that they can then breed and come back and compete with the very people that gave them the genetics or whether they're...

32:40SpeakerI can give you my example.

32:42Skunk ManNone of the genetics were transferred to them, just the DNA, so... Yeah, but the DNA itself is probably where you're going to be able to define If it's novel. So they can utilize that sequence signature to find the clone.

33:00SpeakerYes, they could make markers and try to find other material that possessed it. But all I'm saying is they're not using the material I'm giving them to possess.

33:10Skunk ManAnd that's a good point. It's good that you bring that up. A lot of people don't understand that kind of Jurassic Park thing is that you can't take the DNA and recreate the plant.

33:18SpeakerNo, and DNA is legal to send to America, where living seeds or a leaf, even if dead, is not legal for me to send.

33:28Skunk ManRight, right. But you have a scenario here where this organization has gone through great lengths to create an open cannabis project, which is not open.

33:40SpeakerI can't really argue with your points because I agree with most of them. So let's just hope that in the long run me and Rob's gut feeling is we're correct and we'll see what happens.

33:53BubblemanYeah. Hey, welcome, Chimera, to the room, guys. Just wanted to get that in real quick. He's had a little bit of a water damage this morning, but he's still managed to come and share a few minutes with us. Thanks. Thanks, Chimera.

34:05SpeakerChimera, is that your new Chinese watering system?

34:10BubblemanOh, you're muted. Let me see if I can unmute you.

34:14SpeakerNo, it wasn't that at all. It was the main pump for the house. We're totally without water right now. It's kind of a bummer. Well, that's better than too much water. Better than too much water, I guess, in a way.

34:29ToddWay better than flooded. Way better than flooded, yeah.

34:33SpeakerYou know how it is when there's plants that need food, so.

34:37ToddOh, that's not, oh, this is all bad. Turn the lights way down. My perspective changed radically when you said that. You know, Kevin, can we ask you though, Kevin, how, you know, going back to how many different notes do you think there are in cannabis? How many different cultivars? Are you going back to that you think, you know, like the 12, honestly, learning there were 12 main notes in your music kind of blew my mind because, you know, I'm not a musician and I only play a stereo and I thought it was way more complex than that.

35:08ToddBut when I compared it to cannabis, I thought, well, it kind of makes sense because I don't feel that there are that many different train wrecks, skunk ones, cushes in the cannabis industry. I would love to hear what you think.

35:21Skunk ManWell, so, genetically, I think the number's enormous. There's more cannabis plants sprouted every year than humans, right? So that kind of makes you step back and ask who's farming who. The chemotypes, how much those can actually vary, I don't know if there's as much diversity in the chemotype expression as there is what we're seeing in the genome. The genomes are incredibly varied. I bet there's billions of different strains out there.

35:46Skunk ManJust if you look at the genetics and that a single base can constitute a new entity. I don't know that that diversity actually translates into as much Flavonoid or terpenoid or cannabinoid diversity, but it probably has a role in oil production and fan size of leaves and all these other traits that probably aren't as heavily scrutinized from a consumption standpoint.

36:06ToddNo, and I know there are a lot of different, I know there's a lot of pop, but when you start really smoking cannabis, there's not a lot of distinctly different. I think that there's, if you were colors, there would be primary colors and then there's a lot of overlap in this rainbow of cannabis. You know, and trying to get down to how many specific cultivars started this whole thing.

36:27ToddBecause if you go back to the 90s, if you go back to the 80s, it feels like the field narrows and narrows, if you will. And it's grown into all these complex hybrids, but I just don't think the complex hybrids have come out of a ton of different Cultivars.

36:43Skunk ManWell, it's fair to say there's arguably been a genetic bottleneck for THC, right? We went through prohibition and everybody started breeding for high THC content. Now, they existed before, but they're getting selected for, I think, more and more with prohibition. So we've seen the reemergence of CBD and perhaps some of these other cultivars that Sam's probably had for decades, but the general population has not. So that hopefully will diversify.

37:08Skunk ManWhen we look at a lot of the CBD strains that came out of the Emerald Cup, You're right in that there's only a couple notes of those right now. Like we see a really clear harlequin thread on this Canopedia. There's a phylogenetic tree up there. I'll see if there's a way I can pull it up for you guys. But you'll see a lot of stuff on the ACDC axis and Canatonic axis that are really close.

37:27Skunk ManOtto looks to be completely unique from what we've seen. There must have been a cross with Mingma or some other Asian hep line. And then we get a couple other new CBD strains that we surveyed that are coming through. But I don't think CBD has yet been crossed out to every single terpene family broadly. I think it has been done in a couple places like Napro and others that have been really attentive on this.

37:47Skunk ManBut not out in all the dispensaries. You tend to see a handful, maybe a dozen different CBD strains that when we sequence them, they're highly related to one another. And they're probably limited in the number of terpenes they have. I think that's going to change now that everyone knows what they're looking for. And then once THCV comes in and CBG and these other cannabinoids that people are going to find other utility for, who knows what disease will come next, maybe diabetes with THCV, there's going to be a rush to breed that into every other terpene class as well.

38:17Skunk ManSo I think a lot of these tools are going to help us fill in the holes, if you will. Like this is everything we know that's out there today and here are the novel spaces that we should breed into. And that's why we're big advocates for putting a lot of things public is that we feel that we don't know the answer to this and more minds are better than ours.

38:34Skunk ManAnd the more that we can open source this, the more people are going to jump on board. But at the same time, we're a sequencing provider. We don't dictate what people do with their data. It's their choice. We do whatever they ask us to. If they want to put it public, they can. If they want to get it etched into the blockchain, we'll help them do that.

38:51Skunk ManIf they want to keep it totally private, that's their call.

38:55ToddCan you explain in fifth grade language for people listening and myself included, how Monsanto comes along and makes a plant and then patents it and goes after farmers in Canada for growing something that was cross-pollinated with their patented plant?

39:10Skunk ManThey usually have to make a genetic modification to the plant. It has to be a man modification event. They put in maybe the BT gene into the genome or they put another type of resistance gene into the genome. Or the Terminator gene into the genome so it can't make seeds. And now that there's been a man modification event, the court deems that as being a patentable subject matter.

39:32Skunk ManAnd they usually get a patent on that and then run around and sue farmers for the fact that their pollen violated their own property and invaded another farmer's land and the farmer loses, unfortunately. So that's the mechanism that they're using. And I don't know that, I don't see that happening in cannabis yet just because there's so much to be done with marker-assisted selection, but

39:52ToddCan I ask an environmental question with that, because you just said it, that their pollen invades your property and basically contaminates your plants, and then they come along and sue you because their pollen contaminated your plants. Could you talk about that for just a second? We don't have protection as farmers?

40:10Skunk ManNo, they've succeeded. I don't say it's right, but they have succeeded, and you have to recognize there's a lot of regulatory capture that goes on. I mean, Monsanto effectively has positions high up in the FDA and the USDA. And it looks like they're about to get bought by Bayer. So this is a, it's a human rights violation. I mean they've managed to make the law and bend it in their favor and force out small farmers that they see have seeds or plants that might have their genetics in it.

40:39ToddAnd it's crazy to think that, Or could we say farmers who won't use their genetics? This is a way of, in a sense, messing with them and then coming in and pushing them out of business if they can't,

40:51SpeakerThat's not exactly true though.

40:55Skunk ManI hope to God it never happens in Canada's face because you can already see there's probably some concern over hemp and drug type THC plants.

41:02ToddTo be honest with you, 20 years ago I had to listen to stories of Dutchmen going in and trying to burn Ben's Drunkers hemp fields because they felt it was going to screw up their weed production downwind and it was like so insane and so just In my opinion, greedy and entitlement. So pollen has no right in the wind anymore. It just blows my mind.

41:27SpeakerYeah, but that's not... Yeah, so Sam, how far do they think pollen flies now?

41:31Skunk ManIs it a couple... Is it 100 miles?

41:34SpeakerIt can fly hundreds of miles, but the real question is, is it still viable when it lands? Because the question is not how far the wind can carry it, it's will it do any damage when it lands? For short distances of less than 100 miles, probably it could cause damage. For longer distances, I have my doubts.

41:59SpeakerYeah, there's, I mean, there's a huge...

42:00Skunk ManSo this is all insanity based on 0.3% THC, right? If we just got rid of that third rail, we wouldn't be having these disputes.

42:09ToddI love you for saying that. If we were not talking about the chemical amount of what we're not harvesting in hemp, it would change everything. Because when you look at places like Nepal and stuff, if I'm not correct, I did an article about this 20 years ago, or I published an article, it was about dual-use plants. These people up in the Himalayas were using hemp And also making hash out of these plants that were mid-grade THC.

42:32Skunk ManYeah. There is a bit of a dichotomy here that I don't think is legit, which is this separation between medicinal and recreational use. Maybe the plant's actually telling us that you need both. We can't find health without recreation.

42:48ToddWell, I ask you this. Have vitamins become something that we use in our food and we supplement, we know we need? Are these something we use as medicine now, or is this preventive medicine because we as science have learned the importance of vitamins and minerals in our diet? And will we get to a place where we suddenly, through the endocannabinoid system, realize a need for cannabinoids in our diet?

43:10ToddAnd then will it not be medical, or are vitamins medical?

43:14Skunk ManYeah, they're nutraceuticals according to the FDA, and they want to regulate that space as well, and that would be, I think, another crushing blow to healthcare.

43:23ToddBut did the government not, in the mid-40s and 50s, mandate that vitamins and minerals went into our foods? I mean, because we were bleaching our breads, we were making these empty calories, you know, full of sugar and nothing, and we were all getting really incredibly sick. And, you know, this is when we mandated looking at food nutritionally, because we realized It was the fundamental building blocks of our life, of cellular development, of health.

43:48ToddI think that we're in the same place we are. We were in the 30s where we didn't even know what EFAs were. We didn't know the importance of vitamins and minerals. Right now, we don't understand the importance of cannabinoids, and we don't understand the importance of our endocannabinoid system.

44:04Skunk ManIt's already been in our diet for at least 5,000 years, right? How old was the tune they pulled THC out of? Was it 2700 BC that Ethan Russo, Yeah, cracked some DNA from?

44:15SpeakerYes.

44:16ToddYeah, so there you go.

44:17SpeakerI believe that might be the oldest, or one of them for sure.

44:20ToddAnd then the 20th century is the only time that we tried to basically put all of humanity on a cannabinoid diet. Bad experience. Bad experiment, I should say.

44:33BubblemanYeah, going for the endocannabinoid deficiency is never the right choice.

44:41ToddWell, hence the need for all the pharmaceutical solutions, too. I have a feeling we might move away from that in a big way. Absolutely.

44:52BubblemanWell, I'm going to be in and out. I'm going to be going down to the conference in the next 15 or so minutes, and I'll have Tony come up and take over the computer for an hour, and then I'll come back after that again. So, yeah, just great having this conversation. Good to have you in, Kevin. Thanks for helping out with that chimera. I knew you guys would inspire a great dialogue, so I'm definitely...

45:15BubblemanIt's very interesting. I also feel the same way about the open source. That's pretty good information. I mean, for them to not put that information out, you definitely got to wonder what the agenda is as to why they would hold on to it.

45:29Skunk ManI totally support people getting data and keeping it private. It's just different when it's put on the... When you go through extraordinary efforts to have an open source project, put a facade of open source around and then be the exact opposite is when I start to question. It takes a lot more effort to set up a brilliant scientific advisory board like that than it does to hit the upload button.

45:49SpeakerI agree, Kevin, that they have promised to do so. So let's hope they keep their promise. Do you know, is the University in Colorado, is their information public?

46:01Skunk ManIt is. And, in fact, you can see three papers that have published with some of our data that's been published. There's not only been John Page's work, but Philip Henry put one out in PeerJ. And I think a few of our genomes Ryan Lynch used in the Nolan Cain paper that came out of Boulder.

46:20SpeakerYeah, I saw it.

46:22Skunk ManYeah, yeah, so that should be in NCBI. NCBI is sometimes a little bit slow. I tend to try and put stuff on Amazon first and then NCBI second because they're a bit harder to work with than just being uploaded.

46:32SpeakerWell, I can guarantee you that I'm very disappointed, I can say, by the slowness of silos, but I believe them.

46:48Skunk ManThe Galaxy is very cool. I think it's got a lot of attention, a lot of eyeballs, so I commend them for getting that in the New York Times. I mean, that's definitely going to get a lot more interest into the field, and it's more awareness, and awareness is good. We have to remember, everyone working in this space ultimately, I think, has a good heart, and it's easy to criticize each other.

47:08SpeakerI am incredibly good at picking out people who aren't sincere, and I didn't get that feeling from Mobley at all.

47:18Skunk ManI agree with you. I met him once. The pleasure of meeting him out in Emerald Cup. And he seems like, and I like everything he's got to say in the media. So it seems to be, his actions are, let's make sure that hopefully the company has the same actions as his words because he seems true.

47:30SpeakerI'm looking forward to all four of you posting public and complimenting rather than competing.

47:38Skunk ManYes, indeed, indeed. You know what they say, ego is the number one contaminant to the scientific method.

47:46BubblemanThat's great.

47:50SpeakerI was the one who said that first.

47:52BubblemanAnd is that ego or is that cognitive dissonance?

47:57BubblemanIt could be both.

47:58Skunk ManIt could be both.

47:59SpeakerYou'd probably draw that into a whole bunch of places.

48:01Skunk ManThere's definitely cognitive dissonance. I remember seeing an ICRS talk last year where NIDA was up there showcasing how they couldn't get their rats to take any alcohol unless they added sugar to it. And so naturally everyone in the audience is talking, you know, well is that the gateway drug, sugar? You guys should be aware of this first and foremost. You seem to put out the most gateway literature there is.

48:21Skunk ManAnd so it was cognitive dissonance. I don't think they even recognized their own data was pointing towards sugar as being more of a gateway drug than THC.

48:30SpeakerThat's classic. Yeah, NIDA always has some interesting bullshit to say every year at the ICRF.

48:39Skunk ManSo, Sam, what's new over in Holland? Are there different genetics being passed? I understand the laws over there have gotten worse.

48:46SpeakerMost of the genetics from Holland are produced in Spain. Ah, is this due to greenhouse moving down there, or is that just the... No, it's because the Dutch are sort of have taken a 180-degree turn on cannabis, and if you even help somebody go buy some bags of soil... In a car or something, you could be now given a two-year sentence and a several thousand euro fine.

49:15ToddWell, I would like to say I've been watching my friends in Holland move south for over a decade, really. I mean, the weather's better. It's geographically better to grow cannabis. Spain has been having problems economically and, you know, way more... Amsterdam is not cannabis central.

49:35SpeakerNot at all anymore. Any European city is. It's Barcelona.

49:38ToddBarcelona has. Spanibus has helped it grow, really. It's grown around Spanibus in many ways because they brought the industry right down there. People saw the worth of it. I mean, Ben Dronker's opened up his... I call it his third museum, but his second city in Barcelona back in 2012. And back then there was only a handful of smokers clubs, and now there are hundreds, if not thousands.

50:04BubblemanI just got a text from Jody Emery. She said she would maybe pop up here in a little bit to talk about, it would probably be best to get her perspective on it. I haven't been following it as close as her, obviously. And they just opened two stores in Toronto. I think Cannabis Culture did, i.e. Jody and Mark. The day after the mass arrests, so that's activism for you right there.

50:28Skunk ManExcellent. She called them out, I think. It was really healthy what she did because she got them off of this, oh, there's been 50 complaints to actually you just didn't pay us for the licenses. That's kind of like the course of which that conversation evolved during that pressure. And I was like, oh, just call a spade a spade. You just need to get your grease.

50:48SpeakerYeah.

50:49Skunk ManAnd that seems to be what it's all about.

51:13BubblemanAt the Intercontinental Toronto Convention Center, right next to a really nice hotel. And it's been pretty good. Lots of people from the industry. Some people from Holland. I saw Simon from Serious Seeds is up here with his crew. And they've got a booth set up next to the Great Gardener with Matt and Sarah. Of course, Remo's got himself a big booth with his nutrients. And I got to see Hilary Black, the founder of the BC Compassion Club, now working with Bedrocon Canada.

51:41BubblemanAnd just really a ton, a ton of great people. Tony's down right now working our booth. We have a Blue River Bubble Man brand booth that we're doing, just sort of mostly giving out information, but also selling turps and selling bubble bags and whatnot. And it's been a pretty good event. We're always looking forward to good events. The last couple of Cannabis Cups in Amsterdam, they just kind of were like, For me, who had been doing them for 20 years, they just kind of got a little bit less and less and less.

52:12BubblemanI was getting less and less out of them. And working here yesterday at the Blue River Bubble Man brand booth was super inspirational. We had hundreds of people, like maybe 300 or 400, come up and mention Hash Church and mention all you guys on the panel and how much they appreciate you guys coming out and sharing your time and your knowledge. You know, engaging in this sort of radical openness platform, open source cannabis information.

52:42BubblemanAnd so that was really cool. Made me feel like what we're doing here on Hash Church is a good thing. And here we are at not even 10 o'clock in the morning on the West Coast and we've got about 900 people, 800 people watching right now. So salute to all of you guys out there watching and listening to the conversation and getting inspired. Another cool thing that I want to lay down and say that happened was People were coming by with resumes and they were like, you know, one girl was getting her master's degree in chemistry.

53:12BubblemanShe had just studied terpenes for the last five months. She had this incredible resume of all these wonderful things and people that she had worked with and that had mentored her. And I just thought this is really starting to get cool when the young people are being inspired. To go to school for these things, to go to university and to get degrees because there's hope that you can actually use that degree to do something exciting that you're actually interested in, that is actually helping people.

53:39BubblemanThat's like a full house right there. I don't think that existed for a while. I think people were getting a little kind of, where are you going to go with your direction? It's nice to love what you do.

53:50Etienne FontanI get a lot of emails or people write me via Facebook asking the same questions. I want to get into this industry. I'm in college. What do I specialize in? I love it. I so appreciate that people really realize that we've all been able to not only love cannabis, but each one of us here has eked out our own existence, living slash lifestyle doing it. The reality is that we have to, you know, continue to inspire, but, you know, Kevin, what would you tell aspiring, you know, kids in school that are looking at where to go in college to study what you're doing, or what would you inspire them to go up toward?

54:38Skunk ManSo I'm a bit of, I'm probably bad advice on this in that I dropped out of two Ph.D. programs, so... I can't seem to get shit done, but at least on that front. But I mean, I was immersed in the Human Genome Project, and so when I went to take classes toward a PhD, I realized the books were three years old and what we were actually doing in the lab.

54:56Skunk ManSo I think the most important thing is get your hands in the lab and learn what's going on, because the universities can't teach this. You need to learn and get in front of GCF IDs. You've got to get in front of some sequencers, and I think you should get some bioinformatics background. And if you have those three things, you'll be incredibly potent in the field. And you're probably not going to find universities that don't even teach the endocannabinoid system in medical school.

55:19Skunk ManSo there's no point going down that road if you want to learn about this space. So I think it's very much an unschooling event, if you will, where the places to learn this are probably going to be places like Tweed and others that have growing capacity and have all the analytics right there in sight to try to breed better cannabis and better chemotypes.

55:44Skunk ManWe are hiring too. You can come work for us if you want. I'll shameless plug that.

55:49SpeakerNice.

55:50BubblemanNo, that's what it's all about right there because people are legitimately looking for places and outlets where they can, I mean I saw it a lot yesterday. There was a lot of people interested in getting into this as a job and not just like, hey, I want to like work as a bud vendor at your, no, they're like literally like I have a degree and I want to like be, I want to work in your lab or I want to work In some other aspect of the industry, and it's pretty exciting.

56:16BubblemanYou can't hear me, ATN?

56:18Etienne FontanNo, Chimera's having problems with us hearing him, so I was just typing with that.

56:23BubblemanAh, okay, cool. I was just going to say, man, did I just say all that with my mic on mute? No, we heard you.

56:28Etienne FontanYeah, you nailed it.

56:30ToddI wanted to ask Kevin where he fell on the whole Sativa Indica debate now that Rob and the crew has come out with.

56:37Skunk ManOh, okay, yeah.

56:39ToddI was looking at your website.

56:41Skunk ManYeah, so, you know, we, I don't think we have a position on it yet. It's hard to see. They're so intercrossed right now that, um, I don't... I think we need many more names. I think we need many more names. To call something Sativa or Indica, I think it's just too nondescript.

56:57ToddSo you fall on the side of Rob. Listen, I'm a grower, and I'm also one of the editors of Yampa Wears No Clothes, so I was into the names of things, and Sativa and Indica really are names of description of origin and use more than they have anything to do with growth. I mean, a lot of stuff is named Indica that comes from India, and Sativa was really...

57:20ToddThank you for joining us.

57:49Skunk ManSo for all we know, those descriptors might in fact zero in on just a couple variations in the genome that can easily be crossed or disassociated from their original sativa or indica lines that it would worry me that those descriptions are just imperfect for The entire chemotype of the plant.

58:11ToddI've always felt they were misplaced a long time ago because they don't help growers understand what the plant's going to do. Soil is used northern and equatorial because when I was describing how quickly a plant would flower, I worked at a place called Positronics in Amsterdam and we sold grow equipment and cuttings and we used to teach novice people how to grow cannabis and I would be explaining to people basically how long a plant would flower for and Sativa and Indica really did nothing to help a person understand how long that plant was going to flower for or how it was going to grow differently from something that was northern compared to something that was tropical.

58:50ToddAnd this is where, as I guess a grower, I've always seen the problem with the names. It makes sense.

58:59Etienne FontanBut one of the things we realized early when we did the Medical Cannabis Safety Council, one of the things that we had was a nomenclature committee because of that problem of what has gone through the ether or what has gone through their smoking circles around the world. As opposed to what were the, you know, proper labeling, properly, proper classification. So where do you see those types of classification going, Kevin?

59:26Etienne FontanBecause as we said, the names currently, you know, are indicative of origin, but not necessarily of the species or how it necessarily, I mean, how it grows per se.

59:36Skunk ManYeah, so there's perhaps an ethobotanical perspective here and also a medical one. We're, we sequence about a thousand patients a month at I like what Mark Lewis presented at CanMed, which was a nice terpene, three top terpenes and the cannabinoids that are there. The only reason why I think it's important to couple that with genetics is there are a lot of things in the plant we don't yet track that we might want to in the future, like flavonoids or other types of characteristics that it might make.

1:00:07Skunk ManI think the two complement each other. They have a really good chemotype and genetic profile that we can begin to start classifying these things. And we might need new names for this and new ways of organizing the data. I don't ever want to get rid of the names we have now, though. I think they're too much fun. There's a lot of pride, I think, in having Alaskan Thunderfock or all these other names out there that physicians are completely afraid of, and they want a genotype, and I get that.

1:00:31Skunk ManThat's the language they use to describe their patients. You know, you might have a patient that's got a PCDH19 mutation and they go to the PCDH19 foundation because there's a bunch of other families there that have kids with the same mutation in that gene. You'll find the same thing with the Gervais Foundation and with Angelman's and Duke 15Q. Everyone in the medical system is starting to get aligned into groups of people that have similar genetics.

1:00:53Skunk ManAnd that's the way doctors want to see cannabis is only with genetics.

1:00:57ToddTwo different conversations because part of the problem with the names like Alaskan, you know, Tundra Fuck because it supposedly came from the tundra and then it turned into thunder, you know, and it's like because people didn't know geography so they were like fuck the tundra and so, you know, but names didn't mean shit and a lot of people would go to Amsterdam, buy a bag of seeds and not bring those names back.

1:01:21ToddCall it something completely else, you know, Donald Duck or Big Bud turned into Blue Dream and, you know, this is really what goes down all the time. And when you're coming along and say this chemical type is this, isn't this what Sigma does with terpenes? Because, you know, a specific terpene has a reference number and that reference number is that terpene and there's no variation in this.

1:01:44ToddSo if you call for that reference number, you're going to get this. It's not like you ask for Alaskan Thunderfuck and you get Alaskan Thunderfuck from some kid in Florida who doesn't even know where Alaska really is.

1:01:56Skunk ManThe name was really cool. We've already seen some cases of that in the sequencing. There's Blue Dream and Snoop's Dream. It's best we can tell her the same thing. And someone just wanted to get Snoop's name on there to probably push it further and faster. There's a couple others that are even in the Emerald Cup that looked very similar to ACDC. So there's definitely a game of telephone going on here.

1:02:17Skunk ManAnd I think that kind of goes back to the whole IP discussion. How are we ever going to sort all that out because there's clearly been too much mislabeling going on and perhaps not enough notarized documentation of what's what. So, yeah, I hope we maintain, there's no reason why we can't maintain legacy systems with new systems. This is, I think, important in science because science vernacular is always evolving.

1:02:45Skunk ManIf it doesn't evolve, you're stuck describing things with tools from hundreds of years ago. So, hopefully we just add a layer on top of that and maintain some of the historical themes.

1:02:56SpeakerAt the same time, I don't think it's necessary to keep around systems that don't really offer anything.

1:03:01Skunk ManSam, you look quite pensive there.

1:03:05SpeakerYou talking to me?

1:03:10SpeakerKevin, do you believe the flavonoids are important when you smoke it? No, no, but a lot of people eat it. Yes, that's absolutely true.

1:03:21Skunk ManYeah, yeah, that's probably good. I imagine those get pyrolytic. And the oils, too. There's all this evidence that... Even the omega-3s and omega-6s seem to be feeding the endocannabinoid system. So I've been reading some work in ADHD where they're giving children high doses of omega-3s and omega-6s to try to upregulate an endomide. And the plant, of course, look at this. Old foods. It's legal, but it probably has no CBD in it.

1:03:54Skunk ManBut there is way more omega-3s in this than you can get in any fish oil.

1:03:59BubblemanManitoba Harvest?

1:04:01Skunk ManYeah, yeah.

1:04:02BubblemanThose are my old partners from Manitoba.

1:04:04ToddOh, cool. About five times the amount than that's in salmon. There's about 500 million units of GLA per ounce of salmon. There's about 2,500 million units per ounce of hemp seed or de-hulled hemp seed.

1:04:15Skunk ManI've got to correct you on that. It's actually 420 milligrams, all right?

1:04:17ToddWell, it depends on the product because what I'm quoting came from Richard Rose's The Hemp Nut Cookbook because it's really an astonishing chart. And he was using de-hulled. Thank you for joining us.

1:04:50ToddThank you for joining us.

1:05:13Skunk ManOutside of just the omegas in there, I understand that you can get a really protein-rich diet out of this, which is hard to find in any other plant, right?

1:05:21ToddIt's number two to soybeans, and actually, Jack used to teach us that it was an Edison protein, which was one of the most digestible proteins, whereas soy has inhibitors that stop us from digesting at all. Thank you for joining us.

1:05:53ToddBut the fatty acid profile of emceed oil arrived in the mail, and he wrote in one of his earlier editions of Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill, he wrote, there was my perfectly balanced oil. Mother Nature had beat me to it by a few hundred million years. And then in subsequent reprints, After his balanced oil came out, he pulled that friggin' sentence out and turned a paragraph into a single sentence just talking about flax oil giving him paper-thin skin and him setting out to develop his own perfectly balanced oil blend and then just dropping that part about Mother Nature beating him to the market.

1:06:32ToddIt's really amusing. I actually asked him about it one day at a book signing and he didn't sign my book. He just gave me a dirty look. I was like, whoa, hey, capitalism's not a bad thing. But, you know, the story of how we even learned about hemp seed oil is fascinating. This guy Don Warshap to press some seeds in Ohio and he wanted to get the fatty acid profile of it.

1:06:54ToddOnce he got it analyzed, he couldn't, he didn't understand it. So he sent it to this doctor at UCLA, Dr. Roberta Hamilton. When she got it, she thought somebody was playing a practical joke on her because it was, she was set out to find a high protein source in a common seed plant. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:07:25ToddIt had a balance of LA and LNA. It had a spike of GLA. It had this perfect protein structure. It had all these rich vitamins and minerals. She's like, this has to be fake. So she sent it to Dr. Udo Erasmus up in Canada because he had written a book called Fats and Oils. And he changed up the title to Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill and gave it a bright orange cover because I'm sure it wasn't that rich of a subject matter for a lot of people.

1:07:52ToddHey, let's talk about food fats. But he then devoted a whole chapter to hemp food in it. And it was really what turned me on to validating a lot of the information in Jack's book. Because initially I got into hemp because I read that about nutrition and I thought the guy has to be crazy. There's no way that this seed can be that nutritionally superior to everything else in my kitchen.

1:08:17ToddAnd turns out... Then write it. Yeah, completely right. And it's something I think, you know, we're all fascinated with the oil that comes off the plant and getting high. But truthfully, the oil that's coming out of that seed is a powerhouse.

1:08:33Skunk ManAnd has anyone gone around testing this stuff or if there's any trace amounts of CBD in it?

1:08:39ToddOkay, so the reason that we have this whole Canadian industry feeding the North American or the American health food side is because back in 98, the DEA seized a shipment of hemp seeds coming in and basically said because there was cannabinoid traces in the seeds that they were prohibited. So it turned it into this really big fight against the basically American Hemp Industry Association and the DEA.

1:09:05ToddAnd David Bronner of Bronner's Hemp Soap was a real champion in that where he donated a lot of the company's money to fight the DEA. And basically what happened is the court determined there had to be allowable amounts of naturally occurring cannabinoids in some of this stuff because this is nature. And we're talking about this 0.3% THC. It's obnoxious because we're not harvesting chemicals. We're harvesting cellulose.

1:09:31ToddWe're harvesting fiber. We're harvesting seed, which really does not contain any cannabinoids per the conversation. It's for the oil that you were just holding up. And I think this whole conversation is a little backwards ass because we're focused on what we're not going after, and the numbers wouldn't get us high anyway.

1:09:49Skunk ManYeah, so our attorneys had to come over that whole suit because in order to ship DNA in the mail, as Sam was mentioning, Technically, well, I shouldn't say that this is 100% true because I think we get different attorneys have different opinions on it, so it's so gray. But technically, you should extract DNA from the stalk or maybe the coddled end, something that's deemed not to be flower or leaf so that it goes through the male and was not derived from those plant tissues.

1:10:16Skunk ManNow, what's crazy about this is DNA from either of those tissues is identical. There's no way for us to know. That's ridiculous. And when you extract DNA... Unless you've completely botched it up in some way, you're not going to have cannabinoids with DNA in the same fractions.

1:10:33Etienne FontanOne's lipid soluble, one's water soluble.

1:10:35Skunk ManSo when you purify DNA, it's going to end up in the water phase and the cannabinoids are going to end up in the ethanol phase. So most DNA preps do ethanol washes and clean all the other stuff out with 70% ethanol. And we've tested DNA preps that we have that we do with these little magnetic beads that we use. And you can't find any cannabinoids in the DNA that comes off these things.

1:10:58Skunk ManBut technically, the one reading of hep associates is that if you purify DNA from a flower and put it in the mail, that would be illegal. Even if there's no cannabinoids in it. Unless you put it in something like methanol, and they even have ethanol in there, which is confusing to us, that is not fit for human consumption. So put it in a poison, right? Interesting enough, ethanol they considered one that is fit for human consumption to some level, so that doesn't make any sense.

1:11:27Skunk ManBut yeah, that lawsuit is actually really interesting. It is formulating a tremendous amount of friction, I think, in the research community because we ideally want to be able to measure flowers, right? You want to be able to get not just the DNA, but you want to get the terpenes, the cannabinoids, everything from the same source and not have to worry about state lines when you're trying to share that information.

1:11:47Skunk ManBut today, that's why Sam is sending folks DNA, because that's the easiest thing to ship in the mail.

1:11:55ToddI think what you're doing is incredibly useful for all of us to understand it better, and I think that showing the relative connections to what we have is significant in that we'll all understand this so much better, and I really applaud how open you are with what you're doing in your research. I think it's fantastic. I hope you set a great example for everybody. I hope they notice it.

1:12:18Skunk ManThank you. Well, I appreciate it. I think the next frontier we're going to see is the human side of this. How do we fit the variants we find in humans to response to these different cannabinoids? Because I don't think we're all the same. I've had great discussions with folks online as well about is CBD psychoactive to some people?

1:12:37ToddWell, can I ask you this? You know, when you say that, can I say it in the opposite? Do we have varying degrees of inability to compensate for internal cannabinoids that maybe like we have Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:13:10ToddInner self, but really, I mean, there's a part of me that if I cut my hand knows how to heal my skin, clot my blood, and send me on my way, and then there's the side of me that looks at it in horror at blood dripping out of my body, you know, so, you know, as a child I always tried to tune into that part of me that could, you know, clot my blood and heal my skin, and I think that's what's kind of making us crave certain varieties of cannabis for our own certain, you know, Do you think that's far off?

1:13:56Skunk ManHe basically describes plant secondary metabolites as being a chemical communication vehicle from the environment to the things eating the plants. To warn them, when the environment is changing, it changes the expression of the terpenes or cannabinoids, and the things that are eating it then change their behavior because it modulates their metabolism in such a way to know that change is coming. And it's a really, really wild paper when you start thinking about cannabis having that type of connection with the human endocannabinoid system.

1:14:22Skunk ManBecause arguably we are the largest farmer of this planet. And the chemical profile this thing is spitting out is meant to attract something to breed it and to breed it for certain reasons. And I think we're all a little bit different and want to breed different strains. But what I'm seeing from terpenylene, there's now papers showing that terpenylene is... is involved in changing the expression of the AKT1 gene, and that gene is linked to a lot of anxiety and a lot of psychomimetic effects from patients who use cannabis.

1:14:51Skunk ManYou can get an acute psychomimetic effect, which is a fancy word for acute schizophrenia. It goes away when the cannabinoids go away. And those people tend to have a variant in that gene, or that AKT gene. So I think there's something going on with those terpenes in patients that tend to like certain Jack Herrera-like terpenoline-rich strains because they tend to be easier on patients with anxiety. So I do think there's something to what you're saying.

1:15:18ToddYou know what? It's interesting you're saying this because I feel like if we were to relate it to colors, as a grower, we're really, especially when you look at Emerald Cup data, they're really limited to varieties under 10 weeks. There is a whole other, if you will, you know, part of the box of colors between weeks 11 and 16 that we really don't see in competitions like the Emerald Cup because they're not really going for long cultivars.

1:15:45ToddThey're not really trying to grow out tropical varieties in the hills of Northern California because they don't really finish. I mean, it's just the reality of it.

1:15:55Skunk ManGet more, like, anthocyanin expression in those later weeks? Does it, colors change and...

1:16:01ToddWell, this is the thing in a sense. You know, when I got to Amsterdam and the indoor grow scene and guys like Neville were growing up varieties and Simon, who was just mentioned, when you look at Cali Mist, he's taking a 16-week plant and bringing it together with like an 8-week plant and getting an offspring that's a 10-week plant and that's Cali Mist. And there wasn't a lot of growers out here that are really playing with 16-week equatorials in the first place, never mind then breeding with them.

1:16:30ToddAnd this is where I felt that, wow, there's a whole lot of range that we as growers under prohibition who are trying to hurry our crops through our rooms or our greenhouses are not even, we're not even in this 11 to 16 range so much yet. And we as, we as a, The end consumers are definitely not seeing these equatorial varieties on the shelf next to these quicker flowering, more, you know, dare I say, narcotic feeling varieties that grow and finish faster.

1:17:04Skunk ManYeah, you know, that makes me wonder as well about what's going on with all the microbiologics there, right? Like, we know those things can convert some of the cannabinoids. There's hydroxy modifications that can happen on the tails and sometimes even on some of the terpene precursors involved in that. And that's got to be a completely different expression of microbes in the flowers as well that might be playing a role.

1:17:25Skunk ManWhat scares me the most about what's getting inked into law, at least in the States, is that we're seeing some fairly nondescript microbial thresholds being put in place for like total aerobic counts. Well, there's going to be aerobic cells on this plant. If they're not, you're growing it like underwater. This is crazy. And for you to have cutoffs that it can't have X amount of microbes without having any description of what they are, What kind of genetic selection are we putting on the plants?

1:17:50Skunk ManThey have to pass through that, right? If you have plants that have to have really low microbial content, and that's the only thing that gets to the market, people are going to start breeding these differently in a way that's going to create a huge genetic selection on the plant, and it might change what can actually pass the thresholds. In particular environments.

1:18:07ToddSam said it earlier that equatorials, a lot of the narrow leaf drug varieties were less susceptible to the problems that we see like Santa Cruz testing for a lot of anti-fungicides and they won't need them if they were growing these tropicals. People are going to learn through experience that there are going to be trade-offs where they might have to wait longer for some varieties to finish and they might have to be more mindful of their fertilizer feeding if they're going organic.

1:18:33ToddThey're going to have to compensate after an actual organic decomposition happens. They're going to have to re-fertilize for a short amount of time. They're going to have to figure this out, but they won't have to deal with the mold issues or the PM issues that they're dealing with because the plants they're growing won't We'll be less susceptible to it. You know, but this will be the experience they have when they, and then I would even say some of them don't even have access to a lot of these longer flowering equatorials to play with because they've kind of been kind of bred out of the scene and haven't been treated with as much enthusiasm.

1:19:08Skunk ManYeah, but they've also been bred in. Why do you think that is?

1:19:10ToddThat they're not getting as much traction?

1:19:12Skunk ManIf they have better genetics for microbial content, is it just...

1:19:17Etienne FontanHold on, Kymary, you were chiming in there. You

1:19:20SpeakerI was just saying that, I mean, as long as you're saying that they've been bred out. They've also been bred in since the 70s. I mean, people have been making hybrids with these plants since the 70s, so I don't really think that, you know, a lot of that stuff's actually been pushed out. We might have taken some of the traits out, but we've blended a lot of the flavors and You know, these terpene profiles and probably cannabinoid profiles from those equatorial lines anyway.

1:19:45ToddNo question. Cali, Cali missed it. Like I was using as an example on the other side of it, Neville was using a mail that took like 16 weeks to finish. That was the NL5 by Hayes when we went through the Sensi Cannabis Castle tours. One of the rooms was dedicated just to this, you know, the famous mail that they used with all their great crosses that was responsible for Jack Herrer and a lot of what we're talking about because The way he was going about doing it was using shorter flowering females and mixing it with his longer flowering male.

1:20:15ToddAnd, you know, he told me flat up he did it because it increased the way he could do his breeding schedules and his testing.

1:20:24Etienne FontanKevin, just to go back for a second, were you stating that terpenes are responsible for anxiety in patients or the certain mixture of terpenes?

1:20:35Skunk ManThere is a terpene known as, well, there's one called terpene, which is in Jack Herrera, which has less, I think it dulls down the pro-anxiety effects that some people see with THC. And I'm going to see if I can pull these patients in. There we go. I'm going to probably drop this into the side of the chat.

1:20:52Etienne FontanBecause one of the number one problems that especially older patients are always fearful of the anxiety because they've either read about it or either had an experience in their youth where they smoked a type of cannabis that caused them an anxiety. So if there are ways we can isolate and point them in a direction or steer them Genetically, or, you know, once we can isolate or know that gene is there, then we can also pull those out of genetics in the future, yes?

1:21:21Skunk ManThat's the hope, is that type of sequencing that gives you a profile of your genome, that price is coming down rapidly, that you will be able to know which ones people should start on. Like, if they're going to have some type of anxiety response to THC, then maybe you start them with a higher CBD to THC ratio or one that has terpenylene in it. So yeah, the folks seeing this live probably can't see this, but there is a paper out there that says AKT1 genotype moderates the acute psychomimetic effects of naturalistically smoked cannabis in young cannabis smokers.

1:21:53Skunk ManC.J. Morton published this just a few months ago. And it's linking to a variant in this gene that predicts whether you're going to have this type of psychomimetic effect when you smoke cannabis. So people are beginning to tease this apart. And you can kind of see this in the scientists, right? You see Raphael Machulam's original handing out of that chocolate cake. One person in the room kind of freaked out.

1:22:13Skunk ManThat seems to be a 10% frequency. I've got to check what frequency this variant is in the human population, but it's probably around that. That's what we tend to see is one person in 10 seems to just not tolerate high levels of THC well and gives them an anxiety state. We're thinking that... Oh, go ahead. We've seen that terpenylene is one thing that works in this, but I bet CBD plays a role as well.

1:22:37SpeakerMm-hmm. There's some evidence, too, that terpenylene is an opioid agonist, or at least a partial opioid agonist. There's definitely crosstalk between all these different systems, right? It's going to be a really hard hairball to tease apart, I think.

1:22:57Etienne FontanSomebody in the chat was asking what was our thoughts on liquid nitrogen.

1:23:04SpeakerYeah.

1:23:07ToddI think it's cold.

1:23:11BubblemanFreezing, apparently. It's my favorite way to make ice cream.

1:23:20ToddIt's cold, man.

1:23:22SpeakerIt does make really smooth ice cream with no crystals at all in them.

1:23:29Skunk ManAren't folks thinking about freezing stuff to keep the terpenes there in place, like a freeze-drawing mechanism?

1:23:35ToddThey're doing it. Of course they are.

1:23:37Etienne FontanThey've been doing that for a long time. But it also depends on the purity of the liquid nitrogen to begin with, right?

1:23:49SpeakerSo when are we going to start seeing some markers that are going to be beneficial to plant breeders, Kevin?

1:24:00Etienne FontanOh, he's muted. Let me unmute him. Kevin, you have to start over. You were muted.

1:24:05SpeakerOh, no.

1:24:06Skunk ManI was just searching stuff. I was not talking.

1:24:09SpeakerI think maybe he's not here. Can you hear me, Kevin?

1:24:11Skunk ManI'm going to pin up here in a second.

1:24:13Etienne FontanOh, I don't think Kevin can hear you. Yeah, it seems he can't hear you because when he asks questions. No, I can't hear you. I can't hear Chimera.

1:24:21ToddYeah, no, you're really, you are light. Do you have headphones you could put on?

1:24:25BubblemanHe asked if you thought there was any markers that were going to be beneficial to breeders in the near future.

1:24:32SpeakerThe question was, do you have markers now?

1:24:36Skunk ManOh, well, we have a male-female one that I think folks know about, right? And we're starting, it's a little bit early, but we're starting to see the BTVD allele. I think we have a good understanding of that with all the single molecule sequencing we've been doing. It appears to be covered by mostly amino acid variants inside the genes of THC synthase and CBD synthase. I think what others have seen in the past, whether this was, I believe this was Anofri's work with Etienne DeMeyer, they've been slowly finding this BT, BD allele to move closer and closer in linkage to those two genes, but I think we now know it's actually in the genes itself.

1:25:14Skunk ManParticular knockout mutations in CBD synthase affords THC synthase immunity. Thank you. Thank you.

1:25:50Skunk ManWe mapped it against all of the female references we had, and the sequences that were left over were presumably male, and we assembled those into larger sequences and targeted those with PCR so that they would be male-specific. They're not 100% yet, so we're probably at 96.4% accuracy after studying this in hundreds and hundreds of males, which is a real, it's a hard project to do because no one keeps their males, for good reasons.

1:26:18Skunk ManThe test that we have is arguably very close to the male sex determining factor, but it's probably not in it because we've seen some strains of tangy actually occasionally have, will pop seeds that are in fact male that we missed, but it's very rare. You know, 0.6% or whatever, about 3.6% rare. So it's still a helpful tool. People can screen for male versus female at a very early stage with these once you see the first leaf.

1:26:47Skunk ManAnd with just a hole punch. And that ends up giving you an answer as to X, Y. What we want to have built into that test over time is something that tells you X, Y, CBD, THC, class one, two, or three in the same go. Because then people might keep their CBD rich males and not just huck them if they might be a good parent for something else.

1:27:06Skunk ManBut I think slowly over time we're going to start to find a lot of the strain seek data that we're doing is going to give us markers that might predict terpene expression as well. And the goal is to ultimately drive those markers down into a very affordable and easy PCR assay that would tell you, all right, this one might be terpenylene dominant, this one might be beta-carotene dominant, this one might be limidine dominant, and then real marker-assisted selection can hopefully begin.

1:27:35Skunk ManI can't hear his response, but... No, I didn't respond.

1:27:40Etienne FontanNo response was brought forward. He was speechless. That was pretty funny.

1:27:45SpeakerAre you putting him into a multiplex reaction, though?

1:27:47Skunk ManI think I see Jody seeing up here, so...

1:27:49Etienne FontanHe asked if you're putting him into a multiplex reaction, then.

1:27:52Skunk ManYeah, it is already, I mean, but eventually that's the goal for even the THC and CBD. Right now, whenever we test the sex, we look for the X marker... But also an autosomal control. So we're always going off of one gene that's in the cannabinoid synthase pathway, and that's in every one of our tests. If that doesn't work, the DNA prep's screwed up. That has to light up, otherwise something's, you don't really have valid DNA.

1:28:16Skunk ManSo we always look at that in one channel, and then the X marker in the other channel. So the machines that are out there we're usually working with can probably reliably do four to five colors, so we could throw in Maybe a CBD, a THC, or some other limiting terpene type of marker into the same assay so that you can get in one well, male, female, and maybe some other marker you're interested in, and then expand out to more wells in a 96 well plate if you want to cover more markers.

1:28:44SpeakerOne last question for you, and that is, do the... Now, you know what? I forgot my question there.

1:28:55ToddGood. You're hilarious.

1:28:57SpeakerWell, can we take a minute and say hi to Jody? Absolutely good idea.

1:29:02ToddThat was totally a stony moment, though, Sam.

1:29:05BubblemanAnd my question is... Todd, hello. We just heard you say, can we say hi to Jody? Hi, Jody.

1:29:12SpeakerHi, Doug. Good to see you and everybody else. Oh, bang check. Hey, we're here at the, well, not quite at the Left Expo. The Left Expo is next door, but yeah, it's been an interesting few days. I mean, I was in Spain and Poland, and I was at a medical conference in Poland. By the way, it's incredible. You guys already know far more than I do, but there's a lot of- I watched a little of your social media.

1:29:31BubblemanWhat is social media?

1:29:32SpeakerThere's some neat stuff going on. People know a lot more about cannabis around the world than I thought. I always go to these countries and I'm like, oh, all the young newbie activists are going to teach them a thing or two and then I get schooled. So, you know, there's a lot going on all over the place. But coming to Toronto, I expected I'd be here to speak at the LiftX, which I did yesterday.

1:29:53SpeakerBut we also just opened a new shop. It's a franchise. We don't get a big Peace of the pie. But the point is the brand cannabis culture now has two locations in Toronto. One of them is open at 801 Queen Street West and one will be at 711 Queen Street East. And they are both 19 and older recreational cannabis shops because... I believe all Canadians have the right to access cannabis.

1:30:17SpeakerWe shouldn't discriminate against the healthy or the sick or the able or disabled. And if it's going to be legal, we need places like in Amsterdam or in Barcelona, places where you can go and access cannabis and use it. So both of our locations here are going to be places you can access it. And you can also consume it. We have Vapor Lounge models going in those locations.

1:30:37SpeakerSo unless the Toronto Police Chief comes and gives us grief after I embarrassed him and took over his press conference, maybe we'll still be there and you guys can all visit. But that was our goal, just to come into the expo and open these two locations. And then some crazy shit went down. We actually saw it. Eden was just down the street from one of our spots.

1:30:57SpeakerAnd I saw the cops there with everyone handcuffed inside. And so we did some media and took over. And then the protest the next morning. But that was heavy handed. I mean, we thought it was just one dispensary. And then we heard there were two. And then, wait a minute, there's three. No, all of Kensington Market. And then flood of reports. And it got as high as people thought 80 places were raided.

1:31:16SpeakerI mean, it's just that sort of fear where nobody knows what's going on. But it's scary to know because how bad is it going to get? So that was intense, intense. But I think we've Actually gotten a good response for it because we united the community. There's nothing like some adversity to make people forget about, okay, I'm going to put aside the drama and bullshit and I'm going to get into what really matters here.

1:31:39SpeakerAnd so it's been a fascinating weekend so far.

1:31:42BubblemanYeah, it definitely has been, you know, and it's an interesting thing because you have these groups, you know, you have legitimate dispensaries that are opening to give access and sell for a great price. And those dispensaries are getting caught up in these other dispensaries that are popping up to make a quick dollar with 100% interest on the product. They buy it for $50 and sell it for $100 or they sell it for $150.

1:32:07BubblemanVery high prices, so it's unfortunate. And I guess you've got to be careful in your activism too when you're there fighting for these, you know, because the police are so in their own world, they're seeing like, They're seeing the one aspect of it. It's like, well, these guys just opened five in a row, and they don't seem like cannabis activists at all.

1:32:25SpeakerAnd they're not medical enough.

1:32:27BubblemanAnd they're not even a part of the community or anything. It's like, whoa, you can make tons of money doing this right now.

1:32:33SpeakerIt's a lot. Thank you for watching.

1:32:53SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:33:17SpeakerThat helps set the standard. Then you go, hey, how come you guys don't offer what these guys do? And then any business who wants to stay in business is going to say, oh, what do my customers want? Please tell me more. I'll cater to your needs if I want to stay in business. And we actually saw that today in the Globe and Mail today. There's a big article about how the licensed producers are now going to back away from their anti-dispensary campaign because they've actually, first of all, they've met a lot of the community that they didn't really know or understand.

1:33:44SpeakerAnd that's great. It's all human faces. And, you know, I did an interview with Tweed, too, and, like, we have to talk with each other. But these licensed producers realize that by alienating their customer base, they're not going to reach their desired goal, which is to make money and have good stock market.

1:34:00BubblemanAnd, you know, many of them off the record have said to me, listen, you don't think we would love to be able to sell our herb to the dispensary? Yeah, and they want to be able to do that. Of course they want to be able to do that. And I said they should, too. But here we are caught up in the division of Dispensary versus LP when the real true fence is Health Canada.

1:34:18BubblemanWhy are either ones so worried about each other? Just support each other. And modulate the fence. Modulate the rules and the controls because we're the ones that make the rules and the controls. We tell them what we want and then they give it to us kind of not exactly how we want. Slowly and in small pieces. Kind of not how we wanted it.

1:34:35SpeakerAnd then we tell them again. Yeah, you take what you can get and you always ask for more, right? And these licensed producers are being forced to operate under a really shitty Health Canada Harper style system. Which is definitely not pro-marijuana. It was really restrictive and expensive. And I envision a world where these LPs can provide their very sterile, secure, standardized, tested medicine. Because I promise you, there's a lot of people out across Canada who would never go to a dispensary.

1:35:02SpeakerThey'd never go to an Amsterdam-style coffee shop. And the only reason they're going to use marijuana is because their doctor said, You really ought to try it. And they go, oh, goodness gracious, I'm so scared of the marijuana, but where should I get the good stuff that you recommend, doctor? And he'll say an LP. But as long as everyone can participate, you know, I talk...

1:35:18BubblemanThere's both sides. You nailed it right there. Certain people are going to feel comfortable at these maybe pharmacy-type places or mail order through LPs, and other people really love dispensary models and being able to talk to the person and see the product and ask questions.

1:35:32SpeakerBut a lot of pop people, like most of us throughout history... Don't really have much say. If it's like for me, I don't know what's good. If it's green and it smokes nicely and it works well, I don't care what the strain is. I don't care who grew it. If it's a nice product, I'm going to like it. So there's a lot of consumers out there in Canada who only smoke pot once in a while and it's whatever green leaf they got from their buddy who grows it in their basement.

1:35:54SpeakerSo they don't really even need or desire or want much more information, but there should be places like private stores where you can go in as a recreational or social consumer and And look at all the varieties. And maybe the person behind the counter can't explain them all. I don't think the beer and wine store people can tell you the effects of everything they sell. I'm pretty sure they'll be like, oh, that's the best seller.

1:36:17BubblemanOne word. Oh, that one? Violence. There you go.

1:36:22Etienne FontanJodi, Jodi, I want to ask you a question. First, I want to congratulate you on a kick-ass week here, especially going out there. You were quite an inspiration. I've met you before at Thank you previously for your unwavering support of your husband as well as continuing the fight. How did you hear about the press conference and how did you know where to go because you stepped in there at the most perfect opportune time and if there is ever a way that I could teach activists how to go into a press conference, you did it verbatim.

1:36:54SpeakerWell, that's kind of interesting because we knew that we needed to have some sort of protest against the raids on the Friday, on the following day. So everybody thought, well, where should these protests, where should it be, where should we go? I don't To be honest, from my understanding, because other people organized this, I was so busy with the media, but my understanding is that online, some of the activists in Toronto were kind of fighting about where and when to go and what to do.

1:37:21SpeakerAnd then finally, Chris Goodwin was just like, listen, let's go to the police headquarters. That's the headquarters. Let's go there at 10 a.m. Early in the morning, that's a decent time to go. And then it turns out that not half an hour later, the press release came out from the police headquarters Saying that they were going to hold their conference that same place at 10.30 a.m. So I was doing some interviews and then I showed up at the protest outside, which is really great.

1:37:44SpeakerIt was a street protest. There was tons of media. Toronto is the fourth biggest city in North America. So lots and lots of cameras and a lot of patients and a lot of signs and a lot of people who spoke very eloquently about the harm being done by these raids and the patients who are suffering today because they don't have access. And there was a guy that I met who was not part of the pot movement.

1:38:05SpeakerWe had met him the night before. He's a photographer. And he came to this protest. And he came up to me and said, you know, they're not letting people in. And I said, really? And then he said, yeah, they wouldn't let me go up. And I thought, well, will they let me in? I don't know. Why not just walk in? And I literally just walked past the cops and walked in the door.

1:38:22SpeakerAnd I said, where's the press conference held? And they said, oh, it's right up there. And so I went up these stairs. And it wasn't there. So I came down. I'm like, where is it? Send me to a different room, so I just walked in there and just held up my camera and started filming. It's a 22-minute press conference. You can watch it online. I shared that around.

1:38:41SpeakerI have this problem with bullshit. I can't stand hearing it, and so I'm standing there being quiet. And I'm listening to them and I just started shaking my head. And some reporters were like, Jodi Emery is here. She's shaking her head at police numbers. And I was like so mad. And then I started muttering under my breath because I was just like, that is such nonsense. I just say things because I'm so angry and passionate.

1:39:02SpeakerAnd then when he said, we'll take questions, I was like, right on. Hands up. And I started asking questions. And then Matt Barron, who's awesome, he also started demanding answers. Where's the victim? Where's the crime? Where's the proof of any actual harm? And it was quite, you could say disruptive because he got quite upset to the police chief, but that's because he didn't really have answers. And it was something like they'd never seen before.

1:39:24SpeakerBut what's to the advantage is suddenly some of the reporters know who I am. Most of them didn't because it's Toronto-based and I'm Vancouver-based. But I thought the funniest thing was that when the police chief and them all left, the cameras all turned to me because I just started ranting and raving about... How this is unjustified, and you know, this little video clip that went from global, it's under two minutes, and it's been seen half a million times online, because the message remains the same no matter where you are, and at the end, the press said, well, who are you?

1:39:55SpeakerAnd I said, I'm Jodi Emery, I'm a marijuana activist, wife of Mark Emery, and you know, I just gave a quick little spiel, and I also let them all know I've opened up to Recreational cannabis shops because we have the right to do so. You told them that at the press conference. I said it on the news today. I have said repeatedly to the media I have opened up these two shops.

1:40:12SpeakerAnd so the police don't like, I was shaking in my boots a little every time a siren went by at our grand opening party that night. But here's my advice is that if you do go, try not to be too disruptive. Personally, I would, Thank you so much for joining us.

1:40:56SpeakerI don't want to drag this chick out of here in front of all these cameras. So I managed to actually stay. And somebody, yeah, it was the Vice News said the police press conference ended and Jodi Emery's hosting her own. So we kind of like took it over and humiliated them because a lot of the media coverage even said, Thank you so much for joining us.

1:41:30SpeakerI know, right? Nobody wanted to be that one taking me away because I may be small but I'm full of the fight and so I'm almost like I'd like them to be like, yeah, bring it on, drag me out of here, let me start yelling as you do that.

1:41:41Etienne FontanBut you were also well spoken and on point. You were using profanity. You were actually just being very educated and passionate and conveying your point consistently and that's why the media got around you and that's why you were not dragged out by the police. You weren't being violent.

1:41:57SpeakerI mean, why should you be dragged away? It's a free fucking country. I mean, give me a break.

1:42:01ToddWell, I would like, you know, I'd like to point out she did a great job of really maintaining what the message was, staying on point, and not swearing and not being And not having to resort to going to any of those places, being rude or anything, just trying to get your point across and do it cleanly. And I think that's why that clip went viral.

1:42:20SpeakerAnd where's the harm? Like all of this legalization talk, all of this, everywhere we're having these conversations about driving and young people and teens and all sorts of, it comes down to where's the harm? If there's a crime, there's got to be a victim. And we said, where are the victims? Where's the proof? And police, they have to prove that there's a crime. They have to prove there's harm.

1:42:43SpeakerAnd at this point, everybody can see that pot consumers are not harmful and dangerous. I mean, everybody is starting to wake up and realize that You know, they've been lied to, and so there is no harm. The harm was obviously caused by men with guns going and handcuffing peaceful people. I mean, it doesn't matter what caused those people... It doesn't matter what the details are. When you have men with guns going and arresting peaceful people, wrong.

1:43:09SpeakerWrong. So the injustice is what we have to focus on, and all the little details we do have to talk about. But I will say I've only been able to convey these messages... Because I've had the opportunity to speak so well and meet so many people who have shared their message with me. So many activists from when I first began my activism career 12 years ago, you know, Dana Larson, David Malm-Levine, Mark Emery, these guys, the marijuana man, Greg Williams, they spoke so well.

1:43:35SpeakerOver the years I've met so many others who have spoke very eloquently and educated me in so many ways. And I don't have familiarity with medical marijuana details. I'm I'm grateful to say I'm not a patient that I know of. Maybe I'm using therapeutic medicine. But I don't know and do a lot of things that other people do. And so when I hear others' experiences and I see what they go through, I feel very passionately about conveying their message.

1:44:00SpeakerI mean, I don't know if I mention myself in my press conferences or interviews. I try so hard to focus on all these people that don't have a voice and don't have the ability Thank you so much.

1:44:28SpeakerTurn to the police chief and say, well, wait a minute, like what they said, where are the victims? Where is the harm? Where's the proof? And the police chief is sweating, and so when you get the mainstream media asking the questions that we want to ask, it's all about how you say it, and I try and remain calm. But, you know, I'll give you a little newsflash.

1:44:46SpeakerThe reason I'm a little late here is because I was stopped in the hallway and I talked to someone, and she was telling me how they're now thinking about closing the press conferences to the public. Because of unruly activists. So, you know, maybe I caused a problem, but I think overall we got a lot more gain out of it.

1:45:07ToddI hope more Canadians cause more problems by speaking up.

1:45:12SpeakerYeah, we aren't going to just be sitting and being quiet.

1:45:14Etienne FontanYou know, I'm mouthy, so... Well, you took dialogue and you changed what they were trying to present by using intelligent dialogue to combat it. And they could not use lies to dispel your truth, and you caught them right mid-lie. And you could see everything. You just literally pulled the rug out from under them. So congratulations on a textbook way of how to... Respectfully interrupt and change dialogue.

1:45:43SpeakerThank you. And if anyone wants to see, you know, I have a lot of little interviews out there, and if they're useful talking points, that's great. But one last thing I'm going to say about the lies is how you've got the police chief was saying, you know, none of these products, these edibles, they're not labeled, nobody knows what's in them, they don't have any information. And meanwhile, every single professionally packaged brownie there basically had a THC content, do not give to children, use, I mean, and it was It was a straight up lie.

1:46:12SpeakerThe cameras went from him to all these labeled things. And as I said to him, and I've said to the media, when he goes, well, you don't know who grows it, you don't know who's producing it, and I say, well, duh, you make those people hide underground, because they'll be criminals. They'd be happy to come forward and take credit for their great work if they weren't going to be arrested for it, so maybe you should look into that.

1:46:34Skunk ManHas anyone checked them on How much effort it takes for them to get a patient licensed? I mean, we're hearing on the chat, there's only 40,000 patients licensed for 20 LPs. That's not going to feed 20 LPs. They're going to have to merge or open up the floodgates. It's a great opportunity to show them that here are the people you just hurt. Here are all these patients that can't get access because you made it a paperwork hell for them to get through to become a patient.

1:46:58Skunk ManSo they're going to dispensaries.

1:47:00SpeakerExactly.

1:47:01Skunk ManAnd so I'd love to show them who they just hurt, because I'm sure there's patients right now that you can't get access.

1:47:07SpeakerOh, for sure. And the police chief said there were 50 people who signed a petition to shut these places down. And I said, there's 50 people.

1:47:14Skunk ManThey probably all work for it. They probably all work in the police department.

1:47:18SpeakerThere are more people arrested for working there than who complained about it. So that's madness. But yeah, right now Canada's Health Canada program, it doesn't really meet the needs of everybody. A lot of doctors are still uninformed about cannabis and they don't want to provide access. So many people are resorting to paying $300 to get a naturopath or someone to sign their paperwork. And so everyone goes, well, now you're just...

1:47:39SpeakerThank you for watching.

1:48:00SpeakerBut what the LPs should do is get their product into these storefronts and dispensaries. I mean, there should be medical dispensaries and recreational social shops maybe. There should be variations. But these LPs should not be campaigning to be the sole providers to these storefronts either. They should allow everyone else to participate.

1:48:19BubblemanHow many out of the 20 did that?

1:48:21SpeakerI don't think LP Weed is in any of these places.

1:48:24BubblemanHow many of the LPs lobbied to have dispensaries shut down?

1:48:28SpeakerWell, I know Tweed did, and that's including Canopy and Bedrock County, I think, is under that umbrella. And there is an association, I think, called the Canadian National Medical Marijuana Association. Association CNMMA on Twitter. I just know because on Twitter they always like the ones that diss me, so I guess I'm... I don't know. It feels like high school on the Twitter field. It's so funny. But it doesn't matter.

1:48:50SpeakerI mean, because without... If you aren't upsetting people, you're not doing anything right, you know? And we are emotional. Like, I got emotional when this lady told me that because of me. Shut down the press conferences and you should do better. And I was like, do better?

1:49:04BubblemanYou couldn't have done better, trust me. We showed their life. That police chief is probably pissed.

1:49:09SpeakerOh, I know. That's why I'm excited to get running home tomorrow morning. He is probably pissed. They were embarrassed because literally the articles were police chief owned at his own press conference and shit. So I'm like, oh boy. I think I just made my own John Walters like Mark Henry did.

1:49:23BubblemanNo one likes getting owned, but the bottom line is when you're wrong, you're wrong. Exactly. And when you're right, you're right.

1:49:28SpeakerRight. And we activists, we're right. It's being legalized because we're right. So stop treating us like we're just hedonists who need to be sin taxed to death while we give reefer madness to children. No, we were right. Cannabis is being legalized because Canadians want it, because they know it doesn't hurt anybody. And legalization means you're not arrested and you have access. And if either of those things continue to go on, if you get arrested and if you're denied access, it ain't legal as far as I'm concerned.

1:49:55ToddCan I bring up something? I debated Daryl Gates in the 90s after he went off about all these gangs and all the problems that he was trying to face, which they're doing in Toronto. They're saying that they're going after the criminal element in this. I stopped and I said, you know, that translates into us that you are supporting the criminal element because you're creating the criminal element by creating all of us as criminals.

1:50:15ToddYou're painting all of us with the same brush. None of us have any potential of legalization. There is no production path. And this is the reason we have gangs and violence and all of this noise associated with what we're trying to achieve, which is legal adult use. And medical use. If your kid needs it, your kid needs it. I hope when you're yelling at the cops you say, you know, this is a product of your prohibition.

1:50:39SpeakerOf course, that's exactly what I say. I say, how can you accuse everyone of being criminals and condemn them for it when you're the one who's criminalizing them? And I said, I said at the press conference, if they made coffee illegal tomorrow, every cafe would be guilty of production and trafficking and distribution and possession of the proceeds of crime, and they would all be criminals. So it's the law that makes these people criminals.

1:51:01SpeakerIt's not like a bunch of cartel members came up to Canada and opened up a Thank you so much for joining us.

1:51:32SpeakerIt's a fun little talking point I like because, you know, they're always worried about how far away are these dispensaries from kids and schools and blah, blah, blah. And I say, you know, when you go send your kid to buy candy at the corner store, they sell cigarettes there. So just saying, you know, you sell cigarettes to your kids. And, you know, candy is poison.

1:51:51ToddThey put all of the adult use items at every convenience store. Gas they can't have for cars they can't drive. Liquor they can't buy. Cigarettes they can't buy. Porn they can't buy. It's all not something that it messes them up that they can't have it. We just teach them that they have to wait.

1:52:10SpeakerWhat is this?

1:52:12ToddWhat is that?

1:52:12SpeakerSorry, I got distracted by a giant bag of beautiful flowers. That is nice.

1:52:19Skunk ManWhat do you guys think the cost is to get one of these LP licenses up there? I'm in Massachusetts where it's going to be a taxicab, artificial scare.

1:52:27SpeakerYeah, millions and millions and millions. And so I understand why the LPs are like, well, we need to make our money back. And all the shareholders are saying, yo, I bought your stock. Give me some money. And Tweed's stock went up $2 the day of the dispensary raid. You know, they're connected. But, you know, it does cost a lot of money, but they should be campaigning to get rid of those restrictive regulations.

1:52:46SpeakerYou know, it shouldn't cost that much money, and there's no reason for it. You know, cannabis, it can be grown that way. I wouldn't begrudge a patient... For wanting to have their cannabis produced in a massive sterile facility with all of the standards that these LPs abide by. But these LPs make no secret that they want to sell recreationally, as they should be allowed to do in whatever form, as long as they don't try and criminalize the competition.

1:53:11SpeakerSo, you know, these LPs and what they're doing, it's difficult for them because they're trying to be legal and then they see all these hooligans on the street. But as I remind them, Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:53:45SpeakerThey should also probably be consumers of their own product. I can't imagine being a tomato salesman who never eats tomatoes, but maybe they exist, I guess.

1:53:53Etienne FontanJodi, I have a question. There's dispensaries in Toronto. Do they pay taxes?

1:53:58SpeakerYes, they pay all the taxes that they're able to, payroll tax, and when they pay their...

1:54:03Etienne FontanSo basically, not only did Toronto Police seize all that...

1:54:09Etienne FontanMillions of dollars in products, then they lost however how much we don't know quantifiable tax money on top of that, on top of the money they spent. So what just an absolute waste of time and money. And I hope that you embarrassed them to show them that it was such a waste of time and money. And I think that's what You switched the dialogue to the media to start to look at is, hey, what really is going on here as opposed to just taking the tripe that the police were issuing?

1:54:39SpeakerRight, and the media did say to the police chief, chief, how much did this cost? How much did you spend on this? And he said, no comment. They won't even tell because they know it's embarrassing. I guarantee you there were a lot of conversations about how this is obviously not the way to go because international media attention, you know, BBC and others covered all of this. And, you know, it's kind of, I kind of get a little wave of nervousness and I think, holy smokes, I pissed him off real good.

1:55:06SpeakerBut who cares? Who cares? They should be humiliated if they can't defend their position. They should be made the answer for what they do. And so part of me feels that we won't see any more really heavy-handed enforcement because clearly the blowback was not worth it. And, I mean, just the contrast between here you have all these dispensaries that nobody was upset about really, Thank you for watching.

1:55:46SpeakerIt's about how much money we're not being able to make. The economic benefits are fantastic. And you know, there's a lot of criticism about, you know, I understand critics about capitalism and money, and big money can do big bad things, but money is essential for good things. Charities can't exist and do good things without money, and there's no shame in making money. And like, I don't have a lot of it.

1:56:06SpeakerI got 17 bucks in my bank account, honestly. So, you know, I'd like to make a lot of money, and who wouldn't? Everybody wants to have a job, and everyone should be allowed to have a job. That's the beauty of what the marijuana and hemp industry can actually create is that even if you don't smoke pot, you could build hemp cars with panels that won't be crushed in an accident or you could be an architect who starts using hempcrete to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and self-regulate So you can save on heating and cooling costs.

1:56:32SpeakerAnd, you know, insurance companies would be happy if houses were fireproof with hempcrete too. So, you know, I'm going on a hemp rant here. But my point is there's a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunity available because of cannabis. And that should never be... We're all shamed and everyone should be encouraged to go and open a business, make money, hire people, contribute to your community because if we're all broke, it's a joke.

1:56:55SpeakerWe can't get anything done. There's no shame in making money as long as you don't rip people off and coerce people to spend it with you or campaign to have a monopoly or oligopoly. As long as you just do it by free market and people choose to spend their money with you because you choose to give them what they want, hey, that's groovy. That's win, win, win and that's where we should go.

1:57:16SpeakerYou also have to have a regulated production.

1:57:18Skunk ManI love it, Jody. That's a true Austrian economist right there. Money is not evil. It's a mechanism for communicating value. And if you communicate evil value, it's evil. If you communicate good value, it's good. It's like an invention like the wheel. You can use it to drive a tank or an ambulance. You choose. But you can't get rid of it. Otherwise we can't express what we want.

1:57:36SpeakerThat's what Mark and me did so well with the seed business and why I was so inspired so much because without that money, without those millions of dollars, you wouldn't get anything done. And when we started seeing legalization ballots put forward, I remember when Richard Lee got a lot of flack for supporting Prop 19 with money when no one else was willing to do it. And I thought, well, what's the problem?

1:57:58SpeakerWe need money to actually win. And money does great things. It does. It does. But sadly, money is used to do very bad things, and people do very bad things to get money.

1:58:10BubblemanWell, for instance, the Toronto Police decided that they would spend million to millions of dollars busting cannabis people. Instead of dealing with their city's gun problem.

1:58:19SpeakerOh yeah, and the murder rate here is double what it was last year. Their murder rate is double in this city. And the police themselves are shooting innocent people. So, let's look at that problem, right? You know, if they keep complaining about all the problems that prohibition creates, it's like, you make those problems. Stop punching yourself in the face. Anyway, so I've probably ranted long enough here and I'm supposed to call the Toronto Sun to do an interview and Thank you so much for joining us.

1:58:59BubblemanThank you for tuning in, everybody.

1:59:02SpeakerAnd I don't know, if you want to see some of my rants and stuff that's going on, twitter.com slash Jody Emery.

1:59:07BubblemanThat's where I share most of my opinions and ideas and any media that we get. And you'll see me debating somebody.

1:59:27SpeakerWho's a nice guy. I mean, Adam Greenblatt, he's this activist, but now he's kind of, he called me names. He actually called me mean names this morning. Oh, wow. A vacuous narcissist. But, I mean, okay, I'll take it. I've been called worse. It's okay. You've got to have haters. Thank you so much. We'll see you later. Thanks for all you do educating, and all you guys hold the secrets.

1:59:47SpeakerI know it.

1:59:48BubblemanRight on, Jodi. Sweet. All right. Excellent, guys. Very good. Standing ovation for Jodi. Go slay the sun, Jody.

2:00:01SpeakerI remember my question for Kevin. Did you or others find non-functional THC synthases in hemp or CBD varieties?

2:00:19Skunk ManWe have found them in both. So there's a deletion that occurs in CBD synthase in a lot of the strains that produce high THC, and there are also copies of THC synthase that have been replicated over the genome that we don't know their functional status, but some of them have frameshift mutations. We expect they don't fold and produce THC. And there's a couple copied. The THC ones seem to be more replicated than the CBD ones at the moment in terms of gene copying them.

2:00:48SpeakerThey have found non-functional CBD ones in skunk number one.

2:00:53Skunk ManThat would make complete sense, yeah. I bet it's a frameshift mutation. There's a four-base pair deletion, right, and around a particular amino acid in CBD synthase that I think You see it in all the high-THC strains.

2:01:06SpeakerWhen I was first told about that, I replied, oh yeah, I put it in there on purpose, you know, 25 years ago. I was just joking, of course.

2:01:18Skunk ManWell, somebody did do GMO in it, right? I think, I thought there was some, well, I will let Kybera talk about this. I think there is, in fact, a genetically modified plant out there.

2:01:27SpeakerYeah, I don't know if they're still growing the seeds, but it was... In Scotland, there was a company, a research lab, I guess it was an academic lab. It was university, correct. Yeah, and they made a hemp variety that was resistant to botrytis using transgenics.

2:01:49Skunk ManYeah, I can't hear him.

2:01:51SpeakerNo. Yeah, that's a bummer. The variety was grown in the laboratory, but it was never commercially produced or commercially grown.

2:02:02Etienne FontanWhat do you want to ask, Chimera? I'll convey it.

2:02:07SpeakerSeems a little difficult.

2:02:08Skunk ManI can see him in the chat, so if he throws it up there, I can definitely... Chimera, learn sign language.

2:02:16Etienne FontanWrite it in chat, Chimera. Smoke signals, come on. I'm the only one smoking. I don't see any other signals.

2:02:23BubblemanHey, Chimera. You there, Chimera? Yep. Lemon Cake says what's up. He's standing next to me here.

2:02:33SpeakerRight on. What's up, Lemon Cake?

2:02:35BubblemanWhat's going on, man? How are you? Been good, man.

2:02:38SpeakerGood to see you. Yeah, you too. How's life in Toronto? Beautiful. It's a little hectic on the streets, but been eating great.

2:02:50BubblemanHe's not in Toronto normally. He just flew here for the event.

2:02:53SpeakerYeah. I don't believe I know Lemon Cake.

2:02:59BubblemanIt was definitely the strangest thing ever, coming to this Lyft concert and then seeing all these people picketing out front about Israel and Zion and Henry Kissinger's face with all these different things on it. And then to go into the building and then go sit in the restaurant and look over and be like, oh, that's Henry Kissinger over there. That's why they were picketing. That guy must be like 127 years old at this point in his life.

2:03:22BubblemanYeah. Pure evil, yeah, but you know. Dude, I'll tell you, with the amount of secret service that we're around, I suggested to all my friends that just don't say anything about him in a negative way while we're sitting in this building. Or put it on your phone or do any of that because those guys definitely roll with a different vibe. They're paying attention to all sorts of shit.

2:03:47Skunk ManThey weren't born, they were defrosted.

2:03:50BubblemanI agree with that. They were definitely defrosted. And let's take that Henry Kissinger out of the back there. It's about time we defrost that one.

2:04:00Etienne FontanSo, Kevin, what is the next step for the Genome Project? Are you looking at multiple strains, or is there just one stranger? Thank you for joining us.

2:04:26Skunk ManWe're ultimately trying to bring it down to a QR code that can sit on a product that this has been genetically certified, we know what it is, and here's a QR code that links you to the genetics. If you want to download it, you can. If you want to read about it, there's a page landing for each site. So we're trying to Rifle through as many of those as we can.

2:04:45Skunk ManI think what's going to happen over time is we're going to expand the number of single nucleotide variants that we look at with each strain, ultimately up to maybe a million per strain. That way you have enough marker density to really do quantitative trait loci and marker-assisted selection. So for those that don't know, if you have a variant about every 10,000 bases in the genome, You can use that variant as like a signpost to track traits.

2:05:11Skunk ManAnd if there's particular traits you want to breed for, like high oil content, like we were talking about earlier, or large seeds, you can track a million of these markers in every single strain and see which one of those traits track with the desired outcome. And that's happened in a lot of other agricultural fields, and it should be applied to cannabis with great success because Tomatoes, where this works, the economics work with driving this.

2:05:37Skunk ManIt's like $2 a pound. We're dealing with $2,000 a pound, well, maybe $1,000 a pound now in cannabis. So there's definitely enough market incentive to apply genomics and hunt for these markers inside this plant just because the price gap is there.

2:05:51Etienne FontanSo you're just basically manipulating the strands themselves, pulling things right?

2:05:56Skunk ManNo, no. No, no, no. We're measuring them and utilizing those markers to guide how to breed quicker. Now, we don't breed. We're hoping to enable other people to breed this way. We don't have any cannabis in sight and don't have any intentions to breed, but our interest as a company is to have win-win relationships with third-party testing labs. They're our customers, and we don't want to compete with them or with their customers, which are breeders.

2:06:22Skunk ManSo we want to develop tools that they can use to accelerate breeding. And there's this process known as marker-assisted selection that people utilize when they don't want to do GMO. They want to basically hunt for traits and cross those traits sooner. That way they can accelerate the breeding program and not have to wait for things to fully develop and measure them at 12 weeks. So it's a process of getting enough marker density so you can do that and really pull out the characteristics that you want from the plant and accelerate the breeding for desired traits.

2:06:53Skunk ManSo that's happening. The other side is we're constantly looking at sex testing markers that can perhaps improve things. We're hopeful to try and dig into if there ever is a genetic component to hermaphroditism, if we can pull that out. And then likewise on the mold and bacteria detection, we're putting a lot of effort into understanding the microbiome of these plants because that to us seems to be a really critical component to the cannabinoid diversity that might be undiscovered at the moment.

2:07:20Skunk ManSo

2:07:20Etienne FontanWell, especially as we move forward with large agricultural companies starting to come and look at it because they want something as stable as possible, but we're also going to find when we move things to things like the Central Valley, we'll start to deal with all types of newer pests and pesticides that weren't necessarily specific to cannabis, but we'll find that crossover because of just biodiversity.

2:07:46Skunk ManYeah, and as Sam was mentioning earlier, you know, pest resistance is known to be a genetic trait in a lot of other plants, and so there's likely to be some conditions that express different secondary metabolites that help with pest resistance. I mean, you look at a lot of erythromycin work, and these cannabinoids are playing a role in MRSA, right? There's quorum sensing activity that these cannabinoids perform.

2:08:07Skunk ManThey trigger bacteria and other microbes to dissolve biofilms, so there's They're designed to interact with these other microbes, and getting the beneficial versus harmful microbial balance correct is probably going to be the answer to getting rid of excessive pesticide use.

2:08:26Etienne FontanSomebody is asking, how much would this service cost? Is it affordable to backyard breeders, or is this just for the big agronomics?

2:08:37Skunk ManI think it's going to come down in time. It always has. Right now, since it's new, it's really only getting used, I think, on folks who are, like one of the markets in California where it's really gotten some traction is the secondary wholesale market because in that market there isn't a vertically integrated market where you know precisely what's been grown because you're also dispensing it. In the wholesale market, that connection's broken.

2:08:59Skunk ManAnd so the way to reconnect that is to get genetically certified material in there so people know that this is, in fact, Blue Dream or Charlie Murphy or what have you. So it's been working there and we've been hearing, although I can't verify this myself, but we've been hearing it's capturing a higher price per pound if it's been genetically certified because there's confidence in what's actually being produced and we're also hearing it's enabling the start of a futures market that, okay, now I can be promised a certain price for a certain strain six months from now because I have a mechanism to know that in that time frame it's precisely what it is.

2:09:35Skunk ManSo that's just getting going now and I don't know how long that's going to persist but I hope as the market moves forward we get rid of this concept of having to force people to do vertical integration. No other market does that. That seems silly. You don't grow your own weed to make a beer. And that creates a tremendous amount of inefficiency in the marketplace when every business is forced to do that because it basically means you can't specialize in certain areas.

2:10:00Skunk ManLike you might be very good at storefront, you might be very good at growing, and you might be very good at extraction. To be good at everything at once is really hard.

2:10:07ToddWell, what can we do as an industry to start fighting for equal rights? Because, I mean, initially this is we're fighting for rights in the first place, which obviously we're still at with examples of, you know, the raids that happened this last week. But, you know, the next conversation is ultimately equal rights because your example of alcohol is great. We don't expect every bar that sells whiskey to try to replicate its Jack Daniels recipe, you know, and distill that whiskey itself.

2:10:35ToddIt's totally ridiculous. And it's not really happening in any other industry.

2:10:42Skunk ManI don't, I mean, I tend to lean toward local if there's anything, I mean, I'm some anti-political, I think federally politics is just a big show, but locally it seems to be potent in states' rights, people legalizing the state to state, so all I can point to is Your politics matter locally. They're probably irrelevant globally.

2:11:03ToddThey do, but we have to fight federally. I mean, the reality is that every bottle of Jack Daniels that's made it to every bar on every shelf in America has had to be made over state lines because it was all produced in Tennessee, and that's the reality of that. And so we have to look at this on an equal rights issue. If we're really going to start looking at this as we have a right to this commodity, then we have to have a right to trade it.

2:11:29ToddAnd we as consumers have to have a right to get that bud from Tennessee that we've always heard about. Some bluegrass Tennessee.

2:11:37Etienne FontanLook on the East Coast on everything there's an LTP tax which is a tax going through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. You know, everything that's produced in the Northeast has that on it, FTP tax. So there's got to be something applicable for cannabis. Especially as, I mean, but that, again, it's a federal reality. I mean, we do it currently, then it's interstate commerce, so it has to open up federally, so that's why, you know, Todd's saying we have to still stay on the, you know, the activist level because it hasn't changed.

2:12:09Etienne FontanMaybe it's staying, it's changing state to state, but the reality is until we have that federal acquiescence, we're only going to continue to wallow in the same.

2:12:20ToddI mean, I'm all for state rights. I mean, we have to make a And we have to make progress at every step we can, in my opinion, or we're not going to get anywhere. I mean, just the testing that these guys are doing was, you know, 20 years ago, fucking the third rail of chemistry. If you really wanted to start playing with cannabinoids and stuff, you could get in such trouble, you know.

2:12:43ToddHow, as you as a scientist, how have you seen, Kevin, these changes in acceptance of this as an industry, you know, being taken seriously?

2:12:51Skunk ManIt's still an enormous problem in that you... So, you know, we do a lot of work in the epilepsy field, and a lot of the physicians that we work with are afraid to recommend anything other than Marinol or GW because of DEA scheduling. And, you know, we've... If you haven't seen, there's a great CanMed presentation from John Katanis where he's literally asked the audience, is there any DEA guys here because what I'm going to tell you might make me lose my license.

2:13:20Skunk ManAnd if he prescribes ACDC to, he can't, he has to like point people toward dispensaries and tell them to go figure this out themselves. And that's, from him as a physician, he feels that's not a responsible thing to do ethically because you're leaving the patient to try and figure out cannabinoid chemistry on their own and in their garage. And then on a scientific level, what's ironic today, at least in the United States, is most people who want to work in this space We're seeing this even in Boulder and places that are the epicenter of it that people want to have to jump out and start private companies in order for them to have some latitude to pursue this.

2:14:07Skunk ManI am, it's a part of that I think is that there is federal tentacles into every business and into every university and that is probably the most damaging thing because that centralization of power has meant that they, reversing this is going to be very painful. It's just, it's embedded in the FinCEN regs, it's embedded in the 280E tax code, it's embedded into how universities are funded for doing research.

2:14:33Skunk ManIt's difficult to set up an IRB trial right now. We have a few of these ongoing to actually study patients that are taking cannabinoids that don't come from the FDA. So there's a lot of work to be done, I think, for the research to open up.

2:14:46ToddCan I ask something? If you look at alcohol and tobacco that are not scheduled, is research on tobacco just free and easy? I mean, are there no restrictions when it comes to playing with nicotine?

2:15:00Skunk ManI don't know.

2:15:19ToddYou know, it's nice to hear Barney Frank talking about de-scheduling cannabis because it's what's the right thing to do. You know, none of the schedules really fit it. And the problem they're going to have with cannabis is it grows everywhere. It grows in closets. You know, it grows in backyards. It grows in greenhouses really great. You know, it grows everywhere. And tobacco doesn't. You know, I can't grow tobacco in a closet.

2:15:42ToddI've never tried. Probably could a little, but... You know, it's not the same. Cannabis really lends itself to circumventing the prohibition by being so versatile of a plant to cultivate. Right, right. And that's not going to change. So the more the laws loosen, this is why I support California legalizing even though it's limited. You know, if you allow six plants in every household, Suddenly, all of the enforcement becomes pretty lackable.

2:16:13ToddIf there was six plants in every yard legally growing, cannabis would smell a lot different. California would smell a lot different from ours. But it also would make the enforcement of eight plants or 12 plants or 20 plants absurd. And this is where I think they're going to run into absolutely effective problems when it comes to enforcing stupidity in the future. Where they had fear in the 80s and 90s, they're losing the fear, and now they just look stupid to resist this body of evidence coming forward that it's not only not harmful, it's just super helpful for almost every little thing that ails us as humans.

2:16:57Skunk ManYeah, yeah, it's, of my own experience, in 2011, Grant, I was probably a bit paranoid not knowing much about the field. We did consult lawyers before sequencing the genome, and they told us, get the hell out of the country, go do it in Amsterdam. You're in Boston, Massachusetts, you're going to have to drive for this, and so that probably created a month or two delay where we had to figure out how to do DNA preps in our, basically in our garage, so that we could We're going to record all this stuff over to Holland and get it prepped in hotel rooms.

2:17:30Skunk ManThe hardest part of that was, what can you get through the TSA? I'm now thinking about experiments of how I can get equipment that fits in luggage that gets over to another country, as opposed to thinking about actually sequencing the damn plant. That's a waste of everyone's time, just because there's a lot there that makes them afraid of cannabis leaf or DNA. That's happening at an exponential scale everywhere around the country.

2:17:53Skunk ManI don't think a lot of people understand that.

2:17:56SpeakerYeah, welcome to our world as growers.

2:18:00SpeakerKevin, you're talking about using markers for breeding. Won't that need a whole suite of genes for massive resin production to max out the, say, targeted cannabinoids or terpenes? That you can ID by markers very soon.

2:18:25Skunk ManI'm sorry, I didn't quite get the question there.

2:18:28SpeakerWhat the real question is, is that just targeting a particular compound by using markers isn't enough. You also need to have a suite of markers that could accompany vital, healthy, massive resin production plants.

2:18:48Skunk ManYeah, and they may be unrelated to the actual limiting synthase gene, right? It could be... Oh, yeah, of course. ...high trichome production or something, or large trichome production. Exactly. That's what I mean. Yeah, I think that's why these hypothesis-free approaches are so critical, because you could take a gene-by-gene approach and draw some hypotheses, but what they find, at least in the human genetics world, they do these things called whole genome association studies.

2:19:13Skunk ManSo when you have enough marker density... Thank you for joining us.

2:19:35Skunk ManJust as you said right there, we might think, oh, there's got to be a variant inside limiting synthase that drives it to hyperexpress, but we might be completely missing the picture. It just happens to be with some functionality the trichome had that we didn't even think about. And we're looking under the wrong light post. We have to let the data speak as opposed to hunting for things.

2:19:54Skunk ManAnd when you do that, you need lots of market density.

2:19:56SpeakerI would presume it needs both.

2:19:59Skunk ManYeah, it helps to certainly have a background of where all the genes are, so we do need a better reference because right now the genes are thankfully very well annotated from John Page doing a lot of RNA sequencing. That really highlights where the genes are, at least what's expressing in which tissue. A genome in itself without the RNA, you can put it through prediction algorithms, but they kind of Thank you for joining us.

2:20:52SpeakerI got a bunch of questions for Kevin, but not being able to communicate with you is kind of a pain, so maybe we'll just try again for next time.

2:20:59ToddCan you type them in? Kevin, you can see the chat, right? Yeah, I can see the chat. He's there. Just type them in if you can't, then.

2:21:06SpeakerYeah, it's kind of a pain in the ass.

2:21:10ToddI can hear you now, ironically. Go ahead.

2:21:14SpeakerIt's strange. Kevin can't hear me. You know what I mean? It's kind of weird having to go through a translator.

2:21:21SpeakerAnyway, you guys have a good church today. I'll catch you next time. And Kevin, I hope we see you back at another time when we're able to communicate a little more directly.

2:21:34Etienne FontanYeah, I guess you're right. Thank you, Chimera. Yeah, he can't hear you at all. So he basically stepped away, Kevin, and just said, hey. Hi, Tony. Welcome. How are things going up there in Toronto?

2:21:50SpeakerOh, bit of a madhouse down there. Mark bailed on me to come up here to do Hash Church. So I was like, all right, I'll hold it down. And then I got bombarded. I was really glad to see him, actually.

2:22:06Etienne FontanHow many people? What are the people asking you? What are you seeing?

2:22:09SpeakerOh, man. There's a lot of just information. I think I gave out a lot of different home recipes and how to make a lot of things for a lot of patients. Using coconut oil and like bubble hash or rosin, flowers. A lot of patients like they're growing for themselves or trying to get the information that they want and maybe they're kind of having a little bit of a hard time through the systems that be, you know, obviously because of dispensaries are technically legal and LPs can only deliver to your home and there's just like a little bit of a gap, you know, so there's a lot of different patients that just coming up for information How to make things, how to do things, a lot of that.

2:22:54SpeakerIt's a really cool convention, though.

2:22:57Etienne FontanSo are people sampling your terps? Are you giving out terp samples?

2:23:02SpeakerYeah, we've sold out of the terpings that Mark had. Given them out. We put in some ultrasound diffusers and just a lot of good positive reaction to it. A lot of education with that, too, what temperatures to use. Demoing how to mix it in with rosin, you know, showing it right there, how long it can be extended, just different ways of using and extending the product. What are you puffing on?

2:23:34SpeakerMan, a lot of love here. So there's the West Coast concentrates. This is their 120 freeze dry. I don't know if you can see that. Real gooey. We've got some other West Coast that's not free stride, 73. Let's see that.

2:23:59SpeakerAnd we've got this company that's out here, Glacier Melts. Look at that packaging. I don't know if Bubble Man shut this off, but. No, he didn't.

2:24:10Etienne FontanIt's been a pretty full panel this morning going right into the whole Toronto situation. Then Kevin came in quite quickly, and then we had Jody Emery come in, so he really hasn't had a time. I didn't even see him smoke.

2:24:27Etienne FontanYeah. Yeah, it's just kind of crazy like that.

2:24:31ToddKevin, it's been really nice having you on talking about this today. I appreciate you coming on with us.

2:24:38Skunk ManCheers. I don't know if you can hear me or not.

2:24:39ToddYeah, we can hear you. We hear you just fine. Yeah, I don't know what was going on with him.

2:24:43Etienne FontanThat was really weird. Kevin, I have a question for you. If you could isolate one genetic, what particular genetic are you interested in finding and isolating?

2:24:56Skunk ManOh, that's a good question. We, you know, we did play around with some ancients, I wouldn't say ancient, like maybe 1800s lineage that we were hoping was Australian Bastard that we played around with last year, but I don't really, I'm not even confident that that's actually what it is. So this was a, this was something that they pulled out, I think the workshop found it, there may have been some connection to Mark Emery as well, because I think he had some of these Australian Bastard cannabis samples.

2:25:20Skunk ManAnd the reason we've been interested in that, or I have been personally, is that this is Concept that the plants can be this different and still breed brings into the question whether it's one species or two species and the whole Indica Sativa thing is an outstanding question. But if we can go back far enough, can we figure that out? And when you start getting to strains that have complications breeding with cannabis, like this, there's a couple different names for this Australian Bastard thing, but It has a hard time breeding with cannabis.

2:25:50Skunk ManAnd now that they've, Mark's bred, I think he bred probably some purple skunk into it, it's starting to have a little bit more life to it. But it's a really, there's some... The pictures on our website, it's really a little, the leaf patterns don't even look the same. The terpene and cannabid levels are very lowly expressed in the plant.

2:26:09Etienne FontanDo you want to tell people your website so that they know where to go?

2:26:12Skunk ManOh yeah, so medicinalgenomics.com probably has, there's probably an Australian Bastard page up there that you can dig through. The other side that has a lot of the genetics and medicinal genomics is Canopedia, spelled with a K. Canapedia.net. And there's that sequencing project up there. We presented on some of that at ICRS last year. And I think John McPartland thinks that that strain is probably 1800-ish, maybe a feral hemp strain that got brought down there by James Cook.

2:26:42Skunk ManAnd one part took over a good section of New South Wales. They had to try to eradicate it. But So there's a lot of history there. We played around with that one. But I've been a little bit more focused on the CBD genetics just because the other side of our business is handling all these epilepsy children. We had a shout out to Coleman Whiting that he passed away last Thursday from SUDEP actually involved with Jerry up in Seattle on Project CBD.

2:27:06Skunk ManBut these kids, literally it's life and death for them whether they get CBD and It's still being 5 cents to 20 cents a milligram is not right. We've got to get that down. So there's access to this for everybody. So we have been sequencing a fair number of CBD-rich strains to try to help drive that so that more people are aware of those genetics and know how to cross them and perhaps move around.

2:27:30Skunk ManYeah, so we've got Chimera still here. It does breed. I understand that those samples, yeah, they did come from Oregon, and I don't know how they got up to Mark Henry's involvement in there, but he does have some literature on it on one of the cannabis culture sites. And it breeds, I understand the history of it is it didn't breed very well, but he's, yeah, Mark Henry initially sold the seed.

2:27:56Skunk ManSo if you take a look at the pictures of this thing, it's nasty. He's saying it's ABC Pure and ABC by Flow. So it's a flow cross that's out there. But I don't believe it's very enticing or restraint because of the fact that it grows very slowly and it's wonky.

2:28:18ToddSo you do see a lot of people, let me put it like this, Rick Simpson's hemp oil, as he mistakenly called it, was both the praise and the despise of many in many respects. Tommy Chong went from feeling like it helped him to now saying it didn't help his variety of cancer at all. And I've always been careful. I went into remission From my particular type of disease, when I started smoking cannabis, and I never said there was a cause and effect to that, other than I felt like, hey, I started eating well and sleeping well and exercising and doing all these other things that could have helped my immune system cope with this.

2:29:00ToddBut a lot of the work you're doing is actually showing cannabinoids to actually stop cancer. Am I correct?

2:29:09Skunk ManYeah, it's not work that I'm doing per se, but there's literature out there showing this, and I've got a family member as well that's going through this metastatic stage four. We've sequenced the tumor. We understand the variants that are in the tumor, which is actually very reassuring to see that, okay, these variants are actually pointing to pathways that have been published as cannabinoids inhibiting these pathways. So this is a BRAF mutation that...

2:29:39Skunk ManThank you for joining us today.

2:30:01Skunk ManNow, that being said, every tumor is very different, and they don't always have the same mutational profile, so I think this concept that it's a panacea for cancer can be dangerous for people if they're not careful. Normally, in prostate cancer, people would say, you know, stick with the hormonal treatments. They've been proven to work. You never die from this, unless it goes metastatic. In some cases, it has.

2:30:23Skunk ManBut at the same time, most Most prostate cancers are androgen receptor cancers, right? It's an AD mutation. They've had an upregulation or copy number change in the androgen receptor. And when you find out you're a zebra, you're not the average prostate cancer, you might stop and think, all right, maybe hormonal treatments that are successful are Aren't really harmful for me to do. I should do them because hormonal treatment is actually maybe uncomfortable, but it's not like chemo where you're actually likely to create more mutagenic load.

2:30:54Skunk ManAnd so I think there's a lot of promise there, not just from the plative standpoint. I think it actually is playing a role in shrinking tumors, certain tumor types, and we need to better understand that. So I've always been outspoken. If you have a tumor and you're going through this, check out Foundation Medicine. They're a company that sequences your tumor and gives you an idea of what chemistry and what circuitry is broken.

2:31:16Skunk ManAnd that, I think, is how we're going to figure out which patients should get which cannabinoids.

2:31:20ToddWell, you know, it's fascinating to hear you say that chemotherapy could well be replaced with cannabinoid therapy. You feel that's the future, obviously.

2:31:30Skunk ManOh, yeah, yeah. I don't know that it's in all cases.

2:31:32ToddNo, in certain conditions, cannabinoids may well be the therapy we need to combat certain cancers in certain cases.

2:31:41Etienne FontanYes. Or certain epilepsies or spasticity disorders, et cetera.

2:31:46Skunk ManYes, yes. I mean, in the case of epilepsy, there's 10% of the kids in the GW trial that get worse on CBD. And their seizure frequency goes up like 400%. And that can be intubation that can get you into rescue meds, that can get you into the ER. It's that 10% we need to understand why. And we are involved sequencing a lot of those patients. We've got three or four IRBs now that have been approved at MGH, NYU with Oren Davinsky and at CHOP down in Pennsylvania and now in Alabama to sequence all the patients in that study.

2:32:19Skunk ManAnd this is just being done out of the curiosity of the private investigators. There's nothing GW's not funding this or anything. It's just that everyone wants to have the sequence information here to know is there a signature to who responds and who doesn't respond because if we can figure that out, we can avoid the 10% that get worse. And I think that's the case in terms of...

2:32:38ToddDoes this not become a very, like almost a solution with an infinite amount of solutions, I should say, because you're up in Massachusetts, you know Lester Grinspoon, I'm sure, and one of the things he's always promoted was this ensemble effect that the cannabinoids and the terpenes play together, and he's actually offered this really great paper called Caneopathic Medicine, where he feels that cannabis is going to need to be placed in its own field, if you will, because there's only one source of cannabinoids, and that is cannabis.

2:33:09ToddAnd he feels as such though going forward that it's, you know, trying to understand all these different nuances is going to be the fascination of 21st century medicine. You know, how do you feel about that?

2:33:23Skunk ManSo the challenges with that much complexity going on, it gets in some ways very libertarian in that each person is unique, and it's difficult to imagine the FDA managing this correctly because they are anti-individualistic, right? They're very much herd medicine, get people into cohorts, test them with the same compound, so maybe a single compound applied to everybody, and personalized medicine is really turning that thing upside down in that when you start considering every person being individual, you cannot consider $100 million drug trials for personalized medicine.

2:33:51Skunk ManYou have to Find a way to dissolve that regulatory structure that is making medicine expensive. Now, there's a way to uberize this, I think. And I think the way to uberize this is that every individual begins to understand their genetic structure and their component. That way, we can track this stuff on the internet. I mean, episodes like this, Ash Church getting all this information out, why isn't this happening with genomes and cancer and cannabinoids?

2:34:17ToddWell, you know what, you just made me think of, you kind of made me laugh, you used Uber as an euphemism, and you know, to think cannabis is the Uber of medicine for the people.

2:34:25Skunk ManIt really is. It actually is.

2:34:29Etienne FontanWell, if it is what they say it is, and that's what is so... Important about what you're doing is we're trying to map exactly what it is people are accessing and have access to because what we have now is I have a genetic that's a hearsay and a conjecture because it's yes it's out in the ether but it's in the commonality of man but I cannot without a doubt say that yeah I can smell that this is this genetic but is it truly that genetic and so that's where the depth of what you are doing as well as what it can isolate and then Which ways you can steer it medicinally initially?

2:35:05Etienne FontanBecause as we know, there's more enough research going forward, Kevin, to last everyone here lifetimes and a half. But what is achievable in the next, where do you see this in the next five to ten years if more research comes on hand? What is accessible? What will the patient, the individual see?

2:35:25Skunk ManSo I think it's a revolution in healthcare in that most of healthcare right now is governed through the FDA and that thing was set up 40 or 50 years ago before we had the internet, before we had email, before we had the ability for people to peer-to-peer share what's going on with their healthcare. And don't get me wrong, I know people that work there and they all have good intentions, but it's the structure of having a bottleneck decide what everyone can put in their body is what's wrong with the whole architecture.

2:35:53Skunk ManWe're all different individuals that probably respond differently to drugs. This is well known. What cannabis presents is it's an open source pharmacy bigger than all of Pfizer and Merck that's about to go throughout a dispensary model probably to everybody. And it grows out of the ground. So we now have something that's incredibly cheap to manufacture and grow. It's arguably open source for the most part. And it can get very, very tolerable from the compounds that are in there.

2:36:18Skunk ManAnd we now have the tools to target this to the right patients. We've never had a better opportunity in healthcare to completely change it and turn it upside down, and I do think this is the tool to uberize it.

2:36:31ToddYour science is fostering a homeopathic remedy like map for us because we have cannabis, we figured out it helps us, but now there's so much cannabis it's hard to figure out which cannabis is what we need when we're bumped into our particular ailment. And this is what I'm really excited, in my humble opinion, of what we are doing and what it's doing for us. I hope that calculates it.

2:36:59Skunk ManIt's definitely going to take a very long time, and I hope more and more people dive into the space, like the folks out in Oregon as well, because it's an enormous amount of scientific breadth to be tackled. No one group can do it. There's immense opportunity here, and if you spend too much time worrying about competition, you fail to realize that there is enough growth to support hundreds of companies like this, I think, when you get involved with cannabinoids in healthcare.

2:37:26Etienne FontanIt must be humbling and an honor to be at the tip of the arrow there because that's pretty much where you are. But are you seeing other scientists internationally as well as nationally gravitating off what you're doing and moving this forward as you are?

2:37:47Skunk ManAbsolutely. There's other companies now trying to clone some of the cannabinoid synthase genes into yeast and other organizms to hyper-express this, and that's not emulating any work we've done. Others have done that long before we ever entered the field. But they're perfecting it with some of the genetic tools that are available today. We're also seeing an excellent institution, I understand, opening up in Czechoslovakia that's got a product that has a host of metabolome projects that they're going to be doing in the plant, which is very interesting to us.

2:38:15Skunk ManMatching that with genetic signatures is really ultimately the goal for marker system selection. And I think we're going to see it go into the hemp market. We're going to see it go into some of these polymer markets. There's a host of things that can be done with replacing graphene with different types of cellulostic components of the plant. So it's a wide open field. And when this does legalize, it is going to be an economic boom that is, I don't think everyone I don't think people understand what happens when this, even if it goes to schedule two, I'm all for descheduling.

2:38:45Skunk ManIf it goes to schedule two, I think you're going to see all of Wall Street march right in with money galore to go after this because it is the fastest growing segment in the economy and they're just waiting there on the sidelines for the 280E stuff and the FinCEN stuff to go away. And once that goes away, it's going to be a tsunami, I think, of investment.

2:39:04ToddWell, you know, we're in a really weird space where the plant and the chemical are in two vastly different schedules. When they moved Marinol from a 2 to a 3 in 99, this made a huge statement of the safety and effectivity of Marinol and the lack of street market value it had. I mean, even when they talk about drugs in the mainstream, Marinol is never there with, you know, Rush Limbaugh is never going to be caught in a parking lot, you know, buying underground Marinol pills.

2:39:34ToddIt's just not going to happen. And I think the same reasoning that they use, the same science that they use to take Marinol from a two to a three really is a great argument of why cannabis doesn't even fit in a two.

2:39:48Skunk ManYeah.

2:39:49ToddYou know, if Marinol didn't fit in the two, how does cannabis fit in the two? And I think what Bonnie Crank's saying about not being in the schedule at all is, you know, and I don't think cannabis is going to go away any way that they schedule it. It didn't go away as a schedule one. Here we are having this conversation 30, you know, 40 years after Nixon launched the war on drugs, and cannabis is still growing all over the place better than it ever has.

2:40:12ToddSo... I don't fear the change in any way. I think it's just going to make it more accessible to everybody. What we're going to see happen is the price drop and drop and drop in all reality. Do you talk to manufacturers that are talking of a cost production per unit or per gram?

2:40:33Skunk ManWe're not as much on that side. Some of those folks do contact us to get their stuff sequenced so they can just utilize that sequence to see if anything's ever changed from a production standpoint. But being based in Massachusetts, we're paranoid to even touch the plant. We're just trying to handle DNA.

2:40:52ToddYou came out with a cool thing, what was it called, the pathogen indicator?

2:40:56SpeakerYeah, yeah.

2:40:58ToddCould you talk a little bit about it? I found it fascinating. You know, we are big fans of water hash, and it's inherently a mold issue problem. It's not handled right. And up here in the hills, you see a lot of mold issues. And when I first read about your invention, I guess it is, I'd like to learn more about it, I thought a lot of people are smoking mold and don't know it.

2:41:19Skunk ManYes, that has led us down an enormous rabbit hole. So... So what are we doing there is most people are testing for yeast and mold by putting things on petri dishes, and that's kind of what has been inked into a lot of the regulation of measuring CFUs per gram, which are colony forming units per gram. And this petri dish technology is 100 years old, and it's not very specific, meaning when you try to grow things for three to five days to pick up yeast and mold, invariably bacteria grow on the same petri dish, and they grow faster.

2:41:49Skunk ManAnd you're usually counting bacteria on those dishes. At the end of the day, you have colonies that you have to identify Actually, take that back. According to law, you don't have to identify what they are. You just count them. And so naturally, this is very alarming to people who have high yeast and mold fails because they think they're failing it for powdery mildew or something, and they're probably not.

2:42:09Skunk ManThey're probably failing it for acne, which is on the hands of the people cutting the buds. And that is creating, I think, a big problem in the field right now because we're falsely failing a lot of material for what are probably beneficial microbes people are using to grow this stuff. So we've done a lot of work measuring, can we replace this with DNA-based testing? Can we use polymerase chain reaction to amplify only yeast and mold with a set of primers that target what's known as an internal transcribed spacer region?

2:42:38Skunk ManThis is the region that people use to sequence microbes to put them on the phylogenetic tree and know that, okay, this is actually a mold, this one's a penicillin, this one's a bacteria. It should sequence 18S and 16S regions. Now, We designed a PCR assay to do this, but we designed all of it to try to best replicate 3M and BioLumex and maybe BioMariU is another culture-based system that looks for CFUs.

2:43:04Skunk ManAnd in doing so, we realized we're really trying to calibrate our system to a broken system, and we need to change the system. And this is going to require us having to get a lot of papers out in front of regulators to let them know that the regulations they have in place today are always going to Put us in this chasing our tails scenario of failing things for what might be beneficial microbes, then using more pesticides, which then we fail for pesticides, and then people want to go back to beneficial microbes, and then those end up failing more of these mold tests.

2:43:33Skunk ManWe're kind of stuck in this chasing our tails scenario, I think, on the whole microbial front, that we have to move it to genetics. Now, the downside and arguably a good argument against using genetics is that we can't discern whether the DNA is live or dead. That's not true. There are ways to do that. But it is the fear that if you gamma irradiate something, like they might do at Bedrocan, that you're still going to have DNA there.

2:43:56Skunk ManAnd so you're going to pick that up. And so you're going to fail more material this way. And it turns out that doesn't end up actually being the case. The largest...

2:44:06Etienne FontanWe're finding this problem, Kevin, because I own a Berkeley patients group in Berkeley, California, and Berkeley is the only city that actually has a law that everything has to be tested before it hits the floor. It's one of the things that we've been working on from science testing back in 2007. One of the things that we found is exactly what you're finding, is that the only thing that's accessible is known science, and that known science necessarily isn't applicable directly to cannabis in reality.

2:44:44Etienne FontanWe saw from our site smell, humidity testing, as we call it, organoleptic testing, we knew there was still something more there, and so We saw people just reach out for any type of regulation. In our sense, our city reached out to the only closest thing they could find was milk standards. And so they started to try to calibrate us toward milk standards and we had to make them Thank you for joining us.

2:45:30Etienne FontanWhat science is applicable? What are those real findings? Because we have to have plates. We have to have herbicide and pesticide testing. We have THC potency as well as CBD listings, et cetera. It's just part of the standards that the city has put on us from a labeling standard, but it still goes to testing standards because these labs are only testing labs At that level, and they're not even going into that deeper research, so that's why I'm so thankful there's people like you that are looking past that level of science that is now industry standard, which wasn't Industry or wasn't even a standard five to 10 years ago.

2:46:15Etienne FontanSo it's still an ever shaping situation. So I'm not sure if this is a question as much as it's been an understanding through my direct result in trying to, I have an art background. So I learned all this science and how to actually, you know, through Arno and how to actually get a representative sample and then break it down with alcohol so that we could then, you know, put it through an UVH PLC or a gas chromatograph.

2:46:42Etienne FontanBut what that standards have taught us is that there are specific limitations to cannabis as opposed to what there are with other industries. And I'm wondering the difference between the gene testing and just getting them to understand what that type of... Science is in relation to I can barely get them to understand what plate counts are, much less to milk standards, much less even to understanding what cannabis standards are because they aren't necessarily there, but you are laying that trail.

2:47:19Skunk ManWe're publishing as much as we can. We did put out one paper that arguably scared people and we're going to put another one out to try and readdress that. We put one out in F1000 that sequenced

2:47:32Skunk ManWe compared 3M, Total Yeast and Mold, to BioLumex, which is a culture thing. Instead of growing on a plate, it grows in a tube, and they look for the turbidity to change, and then against QPCR. And QPCR, in that case, picked up more risks, and that probably made people worried to implement it. But two of the risks that we picked up were quite real. They were penicillium strains that make Paxilene and Insitrenin.

2:47:56Skunk ManThose are compounds that could interfere with CBD. They're nanomolar. One's nephrotoxic and one's a potassium channel blocker. We don't know if the microbes are actually making that. We just know the genes there. The genome's there, the bugs are there, and they have the gene that could make it, but we need to develop an entire assay to figure out whether the plants and the microbes are actually making that stuff.

2:48:19Skunk ManWe have not done that yet, but nevertheless, I think it does point to specificity. What we want here is Thank you so much for joining us.

2:48:53Skunk ManYou can't take the ITS sequencing for granted that you've nailed the species. They're pretty good at getting the genus, but the species you really need to confirm with another assay. And so we did that by amplifying the gene that's known to make Paxilene in the bug. That was there, and we showed that. What we didn't show, because it's very difficult to do, is that the microbe is actually synthesizing Paxilene.

2:49:15Skunk ManWe just showed it had the gene that could do it. Paxilene is a nanomolar drug, probably co-extracts with CBD, and it has been published, at least in mice, to have a contraindication with CBD, that it actually reverses the effect of it. So this is something that we should know about if we're going to be extracting things that are moldy. And what I worry about in some states like Washington, for a while, the medical market became the dumping ground for the stuff that failed in the rec market, because they had different standards in the medical market than they had in the rec market.

2:49:44Skunk ManAnd so, you know, you might get used to mold fail and decide to go throw that into the extraction pile and shove it through the medical market and, well, that extraction might actually co-extract some of these nasty things and that shouldn't be a, that should be approached with a lot of caution. But I think that that Paxilene thing that we found is probably very rare and we don't even know if it's making the compound yet.

2:50:03Skunk ManWe need more work to sort that out. What we tend to find is more of the trend in the field is that we're failing too much material. Because bacteria is growing on these yeast and mold plates. And when we fail too much material, it induces people to use fungicides that you might turn into hydrogen cyanide after you pilot and you light them up. And that's something that we want to try to reverse and show the world that, look, you guys eat cheese.

2:50:29Etienne FontanKevin, in the city of Berkeley, our own city municipality water will fail a microbial test on a plate. So if anybody makes water hash in the city of Berkeley or Oakland or Hayward with that municipality's water, you're already failed. And that also shows where the science is failing and where we don't have an actual standard and where we're using an older methodology which is, I don't think, as applicable

2:50:59Skunk ManThank you for joining us.

2:51:19Skunk ManIt's not necessarily written in the regs. It's one thing we have to overchange, and then two, for some reason folks don't want to pay for testing in the marketplace. And I think there's a little bit of a race to the bottom in price wars that goes on in the testing market that can lead to, you know, people don't even do things in triplicate, right? And this is why we're arguing that there isn't consistency between labs, well, it's because we're chasing the price We're really price sensitive on testing, so people skip doing triple kits.

2:51:45Skunk ManAnd then we don't have good lab-to-lab reproducibility, and the whole testing market gets brought into question, I think.

2:51:52ToddI feel like testing went from being scientific fact to a drag race, because everybody was trying to come back with higher numbers, like it was a weekend... Literally drag race. And I thought, this is stupid. I mean, coming back, you know, saying you've got bud that's 33% THC just seemed to me to be so inconceivably incorrect.

2:52:17Skunk ManAnd that's not what's winning the cup. Yeah, it's not what's winning the cup. So maybe we need more of that out there from SU Labs. Look, the high terpene expression, I think, or high cannabinoid expression usually comes at some decay in the monoterps, I believe. They're competing for some of the same GPP precursors. But The Emerald Cup winners weren't the highest THC strains. They're the ones that had different terpene profiles.

2:52:38ToddWell, then that shows the ensemble effect because really it is the nuance of the combination that really attracts it to us. You know, so people listening, Canopedia, you're related, your work is represented on Canopedia. You do a two-dimensional tree that shows all the different varieties.

2:52:57Skunk ManYeah, we have tried some of the three-dimensional ones, but we're not

2:53:00ToddI like your way.

2:53:02Skunk ManI like your flat approach. There's a metric there. We can put them in 3Ds. The challenge we have with 3Ds is that a three-dimensional principal component analysis, by the time you get to the third PCA, each one's an order of magnitude less meaningful in terms of the statistical significance of a principal component analysis. When you get to the third dimension, you're really, I think you're projecting the statistical hallucination, and then you lose track of the metric system between the dots when you do that, but I don't know if that's what's going on with the Galaxy system, because the data's not there, but it's possible.

2:53:34ToddYou know, these are snapshots of a plant that was taken at end of life. And I always had this fascination, you know, 20 years ago I wanted my own testing lab so I could test a plant all the way through flowers. So when she starts making her flowers, you know, in her third or so week, all the way through and then keep it alive for another, you know, all the way through to, you know, what would be almost rejuvenation, you know, to when it was finally like, screw this, I'm quitting.

2:54:01ToddAnd see, I always thought that the chemistry in the plant would change. It would be like a carbolic acid profile that we could see that would slope up and fall off in some way. Is any testing like that done?

2:54:13Skunk ManYeah, there's a great paper on the evolution of cannabinoids and terpenes throughout the growth cycle that was put out. I've got to put it on the link because it shows you those ratios week to week in the growth cycle. And they do ebb and flow a little bit, which is really fascinating to see.

2:54:27ToddWell, they must build up because I've always felt that the peak THC was incorrect because, you know, the old rule of thumb was we were using this, you know, when half of the pistols were red, it was at peak THC and we'd harvest. And, you know, Sam can speak to that more, but I always thought it was incorrect. And now that we're getting into the buildup of terpenes and the buildup of cannabinoids, I think that letting the varieties go a little longer, if, you know, all things are healthy and good, And then you're only going to have more terpenes and more cannabinoids until they stop and fall off, until they give up on you.

2:55:04Skunk ManYeah, here's a link we'll throw in the chat. These guys did a really good paper. Evolution of cannabinoid and terpene content during the growth of cannabis sativa plants from different chemotypes. Let me see if I can find the NCBI link, because that's going to be harder to search for.

2:55:23Etienne FontanCan you copy these and paste them into the Facebook? I found them already. Todd?

2:55:32Etienne FontanYeah, we want to put these up on the Hash Church Facebook page so that people can see these.

2:55:40ToddYeah, I can. It is really cool. Your work is so fascinating.

2:55:45Skunk ManThis is in my work, by the way. Just throwing that out there.

2:55:48ToddNo, this isn't, but the map I was looking at is.

2:55:51Skunk ManYeah, yeah. So the thing that is a little frustrating with some of these maps is if you take 10 more strains and throw them in there, it will self-organize a little bit differently. The strains will all still be neighbors, but what's new might not be new anymore. It might rotate a little bit. And that's because it's trying to compute all of this together, the lateness, once you add 10 more samples to it.

2:56:15Skunk ManYou will see probably another version of that out in a week that will have another set of strains in there that will rotate a few of them. What you'll still see is like all of the ACDCs and catatonics are dead on top of each other, and all the granddaddy purples are dead on top of each other. And there should be a metric number in there that's really small, but it's in the graph in terms of the genetic distance.

2:56:32Skunk ManAnd that's an interesting number we're starting to watch, which is how distant are you to the next 10 strains? And likewise, what's the heterozygosity in your strain? And that's an important number, I think, for folks who are breeding to understand. Heterozygosity is how different the mother and the female are, and the mother and the father are. And so if your heterozygosity is low, you're arguably back-crossed or inbred.

2:56:56Skunk ManAnd if it's very high, you probably have two distant origins, like maybe an Afghan versus maybe some equatorial strain from somewhere else that's been crossed. And so in all these reports, we give people the heterozygosity numbers. They can kind of track that as they go. And then also the genetic distance to 10 closest strains. And that just helps them know where they might lie in that map.

2:57:19Skunk ManAnd what we're hoping to do is what can we find that is orthogonal? Like, here's your strain. Can you breed it with something way over there? And what does that do? And here might be suggested things to breed to end up somewhere new.

2:57:34ToddThose are the strains that dominated the 90s contests, in all honesty. NL5 by Hayes is exactly what you just described, you know, two very different varieties, you know, and a lot of times growers would buy these seeds and go home and select the faster varieties, and it would be so far off from the intention of the breeder, because the breeder was just trying to cut some time off of a very long plant, And when you selected something that was even shorter, you just got a long version of the parent he kind of was moving away from, which was the shorter flowering, you know, more narcotic vibe.

2:58:10ToddWhen I got to Holland, I had a realization that there was this high energy, wake you up cannabis that I didn't experience for a long time. I'd been a grower since 1984, and I'd had very strong You know, one hit wonder pot, and you know, and when I got to Holland and realized, well, there was another side of this, it was more like morning coffee, and I really did enjoy it, and my preference turned towards these equatorial varieties that I felt were much more energetic.

2:58:41Skunk ManAnd do you think those had different turkey profiles? Were they collecting them back then?

2:58:45ToddThey definitely did in this sense. At the time, the coffee shops were dominated by skunks and heavy-yielding, fast-flowering varieties. And when you go in, it was this sweet smell of, you know, they all called it skunk, but you've got to realize no one in Holland knows what a real skunk smells like because there are no skunks in Holland. It's a North American animal. They don't even have a Dutch word for a skunk.

2:59:10ToddSo I had to joke with my Dutch friends who used to be, it's so authentic Dutch. And I'd like, come on, the only skunk you've seen is Pepe Le Pew.

2:59:18Skunk ManYou've got to get on that, Sam. You've got to go bring him a real skunk.

2:59:21ToddRight, we did. Sam brought his interpretation. But you could walk into these coffee shops with like one of these NL5 by Hayes' or Cali Mists and light it up and it would cut right through the scent of everything that had been being smoked there for a month. And people would turn around and look, what are you smoking? Because it was that different.

2:59:41Skunk ManYeah.

2:59:44ToddAnd it's too bad that there's not more of that. There's this amnesia haze now, but it's more like haze skunk, and it's still very skunky. It's not the hazy spicy I remembered so fondly when I was, you know, watching NL5 by Haze win everything, you know, 94, 5, 6, and these Jack Harris. But this was the work of Neville and Sensi Seeds at the time. I mean, they were the one that was mixing this male with a lot of good females and making these really great plants that had this really spicy, high energy vibe.

3:00:15ToddThat are still carrying on today. That male energy is still obviously what's responsible for a lot of what became Jack Flashes and, you know, XJs and others that are all Jack Crosses.

3:00:28Skunk ManIt's arguably the source of this GW revolution that's going on as well. Like, some of these first pharmaceutically-grade cannabinoids that are going through the FDA are, I think, results of some of the genetics Sam really pioneered out there. So it's... There's a lot of history there.

3:00:44ToddI don't doubt that at all. Neville originally got the seeds we're talking about from Sam, who's sitting there quietly. And the truth is, if it wasn't for his work, we wouldn't have a lot of the complex hybrids we know so much and love so much today. I mean, back in the 80s, I understood that it was Skunk 1 that really revolutionized the indoor growing scene, because if we didn't find these We wouldn't have the fast, heavy yielding varieties.

3:01:08ToddWe wouldn't have the hydroponics industry that we know today. That was greatly supported by the cannabis industry and people spending stupid amounts of money to grow something that was literally worth, ounce for ounce, more than gold for decades.

3:01:21Skunk ManYeah, and so Sam, if you're still there, what's the connection between Skunk, the Skunk that you developed, and the folklore of Chemdog coming out of the Grateful Dead Concert, what was that, 71 or something?

3:01:41SpeakerI don't know the history of Chemdog, but Scum's number one was developed 75, 76. It was released, I think, 76, maybe 77. And, yeah, I'm not sure what the question is.

3:02:01Skunk ManWhether or not those are... Share genetics or if they're close relatives or anything. I'm trying to pull them up right now.

3:02:08SpeakerNo, I have no idea. You could probably tell me better because I have nothing to do with Chemdog.

3:02:15ToddWell, you know, it's interesting. I've grown Chem 91 and I've grown OG. I've had them both. I have OG. It's something I've had forever. But, you know, it's so unlike Skunk 1. And it's such a misnomer because I know we call it Kush, but it's not like the Hindu Kushes that I grew when I was in Amsterdam back in the mid-90s. It was definitely just a complex hybrid.

3:02:42ToddThat was something else. And the reason it kind of comes up that way is because I always felt that the skunk I smelled here in North America smelled like actual skunks. Like when your dog would come home and smell like skunk, there was a reminiscent scent of that to the growing of cannabis and the smell of cannabis. That roadkill skunk was something I experienced here in North America and I never experienced over in Holland.

3:03:08ToddAnd it was just the sweet smell of cannabis. You know, perfumey, sweet cannabis. It was very different to me, in all honesty, from what I, you know, and it didn't smell like skunk.

3:03:18SpeakerThe reason for that, Todd, is really simple. When I created skunk number one, it was skunky as hell at first. But what I did over a 10-year period, when I reproduced it every year from seed, I selected slightly closer towards a sweeter version. Then I brought it over to Holland and I did a huge selection grown from seeds, 20,000 plants. And I selected really the sweetest but yet best high I considered and the strongest that was sweet.

3:03:58SpeakerAnd that's what I used to produce seeds from then on. So from that point on, they were all sweet.

3:04:06ToddThat makes sense to me completely. You know, and a lot of people there that I met obviously had only seen skunks in zoos or on cartoons and didn't really know what a skunk smelled like. A lot of my Dutch friends and

3:04:19SpeakerThe plants really looked exactly the same, but they were, yeah, I really preferred the sweeter version. The other one I didn't like the high, even though they were maybe a tiny, tiny bit stronger. They were, you know, more narcotic and low-dose. It's really not what I like. A good skunk number one that's sweet can be incredibly soaring and up and clear and pretty nice.

3:04:45Skunk ManI only see a lemon skunk on here, on our tree, so I'll go dig through our database and see if there's one we can plot. But yeah, it does come out of a different area then. The chem dogs tend to fall off in the New Year, you know, the sour diesel and the NYC diesel, which actually supports some of that folklore.

3:05:01SpeakerWell, I sent both Dr. Osole and George Webley, I sent them my skunk number one sweet seeds.

3:05:14ToddWell, see, you know, I think they're very, even the roadkill skunk we're talking about to me isn't that reminiscent to what became known as OG Kush or the Kush or, you know, Bubba Kush. Those seeds had a uniqueness to them that up until the mid-90s I hadn't experienced. And, you know, when we were in Amsterdam, Hindu Kush was not that exciting of a plant, and Hindu Kush wasn't really widely grown in Amsterdam.

3:05:45ToddWhen I worked at Positronics, we held all these mothers, and we sold, shit, 20 to 30 different clones on rotation every day, way back in 95 and 96. And Hindu Kush was not that popular, because it was really leafy, and it just wasn't that great in comparison to some of the other plants.

3:06:05SpeakerThat was also more of the one Hindu Kush.

3:06:08ToddRight, but in LA, these seeds that Josh and Matt had, the plant they had, that Kush, what they called Kush, absolutely different planet, you know what I mean? Chem 91 and OG Kush are super, super close to me. When you grow them side by side, one just has fuller buds, but they smell so similar, they taste so similar.

3:06:37Skunk ManSo that makes sense. In fact, those are actually falling pretty close to each other on this map. Yeah, a lot of OGs are up there. If you look up and around on that tree that's on the web there, this is in Canopedia, you'll see Chemdog is pointing off at about 1 o'clock if noon is straight up. And you can see it's kind of surrounded by a bunch of OGs.

3:06:58ToddNow I see it now. Yeah, New York City Dizzle have grown too. Girl Scout Cookies is a funnel of OGs across. That makes perfect sense. A lot of these are so similar. You know, I would love to see you doing some of the hazes. You know, Northern Lights is over there around 2 o'clock. So can I ask you, what's the relation here? So if OG is at like 1 o'clock and you have Northern Lights or AK-47 at 3 o'clock, how to go off of the differently?

3:07:25Skunk ManSo that is, your eye will want to look at radial distance, which is actually a bit of a mirage. What you want to look at is the length Of the line at the nearest intersection point, if you were to measure both of those, that would give you the actual genetic distance. So take a look at Jesus and Face Off OG. Those two lines converge fairly far out from the center, which means they're much closer than, let's say, something like, if you look at USO 31 here, which is a hemp line with Diana 2, there's a lot more line that you can draw into the center and out, and that means they're further apart So it's tempting to get confused by radial distances.

3:08:08ToddNo, you know what's funny is Green Crack is almost polar opposite of OG if you go in that way, and they are very different growing them. I love Green Crack. It's so sweet. It's so unique in itself, and it's so unlike OG Kush by far.

3:08:24Skunk ManSo that's... Where are you seeing, where's the green? Is that down at... At 6 o'clock. 6 o'clock, okay, yeah, yeah.

3:08:29ToddYeah, and then you're over here at OG's at like 1.

3:08:33Skunk ManAnd you'll see some of the hemp lines really push the lines outward because they're more distant. But they're also more, I think, interweb with one another if you look at how closely they kind of, they converge much further out from the center, all those lines. And that's an interesting point. You know, we're always wondering, is that because they are regulated in a way with trademarks and copyrights and all that, whatever, plant variety protection acts that, you know, that's an interesting point.

3:09:00Skunk ManA thing that's going on in the hemp industry that arguably isn't going on in the drug type strains.

3:09:05ToddWell, how much will hemp change when we start growing plants that are geographically suited for the area we're growing them instead of chemically suitable for the politics around them?

3:09:14Skunk ManYeah, yeah, totally.

3:09:16ToddAnd this is a problem Ben Dronkers has had up in Northern Holland where they wanted him to grow seeds that were basically from South France. Or he wouldn't be EU fucking subsidizable, and it caused huge problems for him. And it was unworkable, but you couldn't explain this to these idiots in the political offices that you're asking me to grow something that won't finish up here. So it was really quite difficult.

3:09:43Skunk ManWow, yeah.

3:09:45ToddThe politics of stupidity.

3:09:48Skunk ManI think there was even some selection against the Italian lines for this whole .3 THC history, right? Because the French could pull it off and the Italians couldn't because it's closer, you know, the equatorial distance is different. So the Italians got kind of pushed out of the hemp market because they changed the .3 to .2 percent THC, if I remember correctly. I'm hearing this from Ben, or maybe it was Sam, but...

3:10:11Skunk ManThat made it harder for the Italians to get their stuff below the threshold, and so they had a harder time capturing hemp market as a result of that one rake. And that might be the same genetics, just two different places in soil and sun, yeah?

3:10:25ToddRight, right. Because geographically it matters a lot. It's really fun looking at your map, though, and seeing how these fall and seeing the breakdown of it. How long has this map been out, and are you going to be Coming out with another one with more varieties.

3:10:43Skunk ManYeah, so we've had these out. I mean, we've been releasing them almost maybe every other month up on the internet or on the site. So this one's an April map. We'll soon have the May one out. And yeah, we're constantly planning to update it, although it is dependent on who sends us material. We're constantly sequencing the baseline in our time, just we believe we have to build a foundation to make it valuable for others to do it as well.

3:11:05Skunk ManBut some people that send us material to sequence, I don't want it public, and we respect that and don't put it public. Others want to put it up there so they can show a case where their material is. It's probably 85% of the people who like to put it public, but everyone's got different motives for that. And as we can put them publicly, well, each one of them in this tree, what's going to become more apparent in the future is a set of base samples.

3:11:31Skunk ManThese are going to be heavily characterized samples that we call our base tree. They will have been cannabinoid profiled, terpene profiled, We're going to have whole genome shotgun sequence on them. And we may even have done some single molecule sequencing on just CBD and THC synthase. So we have that profile on them. Longer term, we're aiming to also have the microbial microbiome sequenced on them, although that's a little bit further off on that.

3:11:55Skunk ManBy the time we're getting the DNA, it may not matter what that microbiome is. The stuff's been cured and dried. It may have nothing to do with what growers can use. It's just something that we're curious about, whether CBD-rich plants produce different microbiomes than THC plants. And it may help people understand what beneficials they can use. So we're laying that all in on a set of 40 samples that are considered the base tree.

3:12:15Skunk ManSo those are highly characterized, and they've been through every single assay we can think of, and strains all be compared to those. And then the other ones, are going to be a time circuit of the most recent like 200 we've done. And the reason we're kind of holding it at the recent 200 because this map gets really messy when you throw a thousand on it, if you can imagine.

3:12:39ToddI could see that being a problem, really. Expressing data must be a challenge on every level.

3:12:43Skunk ManIt is, and that's why there's some appeal to these three-dimensional tools as well, because you can kind of fit more stuff in those, even if you don't believe the third dimension of the data, it still helps them. It's really fun to dig around in the Galaxy stuff that they've done. So we're thinking about other ways of mapping it so you can squeeze more in a given area and not have it just be a hairball.

3:13:05Skunk ManBut those base ones are there.

3:13:07ToddYou know, a flexible family tree would be cool. A flexible family tree would be cool. You know, trying to express it with, you know, branching out in the different ways. Can I, one question I want to ask you is, where is Ruderalis? Is it a real strain? What have you learned about this mysterious plant?

3:13:27Skunk ManWe've sequenced two of those, and they came from Sensi Seeds and Michael Scott out of Seattle. And so... All we can trace them back to the fact is that they are rudder owl seeds sold by Sensi probably for auto flowering techniques. But I think when I find them on the map here, where are they? I thought they had some close lines. There is, I think they're on here.

3:13:54Skunk ManMaybe it's on the next one that's coming out. But there's only two of them.

3:14:01Skunk ManThere we go. There is one. Over there at 9 o'clock, there's two Rotorales ones next to us. Anything on here that has EC in it was in the Emerald Cup.

3:14:12ToddAnything that's green... It's funny, though, that so Canatonic, which is CBD, is they're hanging out with Rotorales, or no?

3:14:21Skunk ManThey are. I mean, that distance is... They're closer to Canatonic than they might be to, say, some other northern lights that we have over here that has some CBD in it. This is... This is the Northern Lights that's in Massachusetts right now, and it's unfortunate it's called Northern Lights, but it's a 50-50 CBD to THC strain.

3:14:39ToddYeah, that is unfortunate then.

3:14:41Skunk ManYeah. I think what people are doing is they're taking some of the more cherished strains on this map and crossing them into hemp to bring out higher level expressions perhaps, and you can see that with Otto down here. Otto was arguably crossed with... With Mangma and Nishnapal, and you can see some harlequins down here at like 630 or 530. And all of this, this whole CBD, ACDC line over here.

3:15:11Skunk ManWe certainly want to see that happen, which is CBD bred out into all the other terpene profiles that can exist. But the jets we've served today, the CBD restraints are the most overlapping of each other. There's not as much diversity there yet.

3:15:27SpeakerAnd have you found phenola genes in any of the auto varieties?

3:15:34Skunk ManThat's a good question. I'll have to get the phenola, the genetic distance numbers for that, because phenola is on here. Where did she go?

3:15:46Skunk ManWhere is it? No, we got Felina and Fedora. You know, there's whole genome sequence data on phenola. Maybe we just have to thread that in here because we do have that genome downloaded from John Page. So do you think phenola is part of that lineage?

3:15:59SpeakerWell, that's what people are telling me, that the original auto variety was Ruderalis from Hungary that Neville had collected and distributed through Cannabis Castle Hybrid.

3:16:14Skunk ManOh, okay. So I have to be clear. This auto, I think, is from Ben Holmes in Centennial. It's from who? Ben Holmes and Centennial Seeds, I believe. Okay.

3:16:24SpeakerYeah, I'm still interested if, because the auto that people are using now is more determinate. In other words, the original Ruderalis that was collected by Neville, it would start flowering under long photopeed, but it would never end flowering. It just kept Thank you for joining us.

3:17:24Skunk ManWild.

3:17:29ToddReally fascinating map. I'm really glad that your career path turned towards cannabis, Kevin.

3:17:34Etienne FontanKevin, you stated that you worked with genetics as far back as the 1880s. Is that the oldest genetic you've played with?

3:17:41Skunk ManYeah, we haven't, and I have to defer to, I saw some comments in here, I've got to defer to Chimera and exactly the origin of that. I think there's an Oregonian origin to the one that we got. But yeah, we have not gone too far down the paleogenomic side of cannabis, only because I'm I'm hopeful we're going to be able to infer and impute that stuff from everything else we're doing today.

3:18:04Skunk ManIf you look at Iceland, they were able to sequence maybe 5,000 people in Iceland and delineate the entire history of Iceland back to 16 founders once they had the modern genetic information. I'm hopeful we may be able to find something like that in Canada, although the Canada's history is far more complicated than the foundation of Iceland. It's bounced all over the globe in different directions and been reintroduced in different ways that It may be hard to actually impute that distance, but we've been only staying focused on what is current because that seems to be where the money is.

3:18:39Skunk ManPeople who want to know what's on the shelves today, and it seems to be hard to find people to fund sequencing to find out the history of this. I know Philos is putting a lot of effort into that, and I applaud them for it, but it seems to be less relevant to what's going to hit a shelf tomorrow, and so we've been staying a little bit closer to Getting what's currently out there on the map and what's coming down the road on the map.

3:19:03Skunk ManAnd hopefully the data we build might allow and enable people to discern what the mitochondrial evis of cannabis at a future date.

3:19:15Etienne FontanWouldn't you like to play with some of those older genetics like they found from 2800 BC, though?

3:19:20Skunk ManOh, absolutely, yeah. If the DNA's there and valuable, and it is tricky, too. That's the thing. When you go to those old ones, like the herbariums, they're dried out, and they could be contaminated, and the DNA's fragmented, so it can be really hard to actually get the actual sequencing to work on that stuff. And if it's in an oil, you have to wonder, gee, how much DNA is going to be in an oil?

3:19:41Skunk ManThese are really difficult samples to actually get sequenced from. But if you guys can get us DNA, we're happy to give them a go. It'll be interesting to see where they sit on those maps.

3:19:51Etienne FontanHow much of a representative sample do you need?

3:19:54Skunk ManAll of our stuff works off of 30 nanograms of DNA, so this is billions of a gram. Very little amounts, but if it's old, you probably need more. I would imagine 30 nanograms of 1,000-year-old DNA, you might need 300 in that case because it's probably been depurinated and there's abasic sites in it and everything.

3:20:12SpeakerWell, the good thing, Kevin, is that if it's really old, like 100 years plus, it's dead. So they can send the seeds to America legally, no problem.

3:20:24Skunk ManOh, so yeah, those seeds you believe are completely sterile at that point, huh?

3:20:31SpeakerThey're dead. If you can't germinate them, they're legal.

3:20:36Skunk ManOh, interesting. So how does that work if they catch it in the mail? Do they have to have a little, somebody popping seeds to prove whether it's live or dead?

3:20:45SpeakerNo, they'll just believe you if you have an honest face.

3:20:50Skunk ManLike the one you're presenting right now?

3:20:55SpeakerWell, this way, I don't have problems with doing those kinds of things. A few probably have been opened, but I post a copy of the law.

3:21:11ToddOh, excellent. All right. It's amazing that we have to worry so much sending seeds.

3:21:19SpeakerWell, these are dead seeds, so that's really ridiculous.

3:21:24ToddThen it's even more absurd.

3:21:25Skunk ManOkay. Could you talk this out a little bit? Screen share this thing, and I think I can pull it off. Let me see if that works.

3:21:32ToddCan you talk a little bit about StrainSeek and how you developed the idea of ID and certification service?

3:21:40Skunk ManYeah, sure. So I understand some people are offended that it's called StrainSeek, and it should be called FarSeek, I suppose. But that's a debate. If we're going to have that debate, we should have it on Hashish Church, not HashChurch. It is my argument, but... That was very good, actually. I don't know, it was strange to see it is.

3:21:59SpeakerWe'll have it on resin pulpit.

3:22:01Skunk ManYeah, right. So, yes, we call it strange because we're lazy, and Google Trends claims it's winning over Cultivar, but that hardly means it's technically correct. So this is a technique right now that basically takes the genome, digests it with a restriction enzyme. This is not something we invented. This is something that... Arguably, it dates back to the Whitehead Institute with David Altshuler, but when you use a restriction digest to digest up the genome, it cuts on a certain sequence signature.

3:22:31Skunk ManLet's say a five base pair sequence that will digest the DNA. It does that reproducibly from every strain. You then size select that DNA through something known as electrophoresis and take a discrete cut of, let's say, like 200 to 300 bases of DNA. And when you do that, strain to strain, you're getting a collection of the same fragments of the genome in every strain. So it's kind of analogous to ripping the front page of every chapter out of a book and only sequencing those so that you can look at the same region of the genome across all of them.

3:23:01Skunk ManThe reason we do this is it's too expensive to sequence an entire genome for every strain, so you could be over $1,000 a piece and people aren't going to pay that plus a markup. And so you have to do is take a reduced representation of the genome, but a consistent one that's going to give you the same sequence fragments in every single strain you're going to sequence.

3:23:19Skunk ManAnd that's what the strain-seq stuff does. It runs it through this process known as RAD-seq, which is a restriction-associated digest sequencing protocol. Once we have about that sequencing done, we sequence probably two to three million bases in every strain. We then call variants, and we tend to find 15,000 to 30,000 variants in every strain. That gives us what's known as a VCF file, a variant file, if you will, a variant call format file.

3:23:44Skunk ManAnd that's just a list of every single change you have next to the reference genome. And we are using CANSAT3, the one from Toronto, because it's in a peer-reviewed publication. The one that we did with Chemdog was just kind of thrown up in the web, and less people trust that for that reason. But as a result, we've got a file now What we're doing to register these is we run that file through a program that is a hash digest, perfect for hash church, right?

3:24:11Skunk ManAnd it's a SHA-256 digest that gives you a fingerprint of a file, and we submit that into a Bitcoin transaction. So it's on this public ledger that's circulating everywhere in the world, and it can never be taken down. There's a $5 billion bounty out there. If you can hack Bitcoin, go for it. Good luck. But that ledger is going and never going to stop.

3:24:31Etienne FontanAnd that's a great place to do proof of existence.

3:24:34Skunk ManSo you can show that your strain existed at a certain time without having to give them the sequence information. It's a way of demonstrating proof of existence without showing your hand. And some people appreciate that. So they want to get it certified and know that it's there and they can prove that your genetics existed at a certain time stamp that's with that transaction in the blockchain. So that whole process runs and we populate each site or each person who does a submission.

3:25:01Skunk ManIf they want them public, we'll make a website for them that has their strain, it has their genotype, it has the blockchain transaction, it has a link to the file jag tree if they choose to be on that. And others sometimes don't, choose to just keep it private and build their own database.

3:25:18ToddI appreciate you explaining that. You know, I've always been interested in the different varieties and stuff. Hey Mark, you're sitting there with Remo?

3:25:25BubblemanI'm sitting here with a lot more than just Remo, but yeah, Remo is definitely in the house. What's up, everyone? Hash Church. What's up?

3:25:33Etienne FontanHey, Remo. Everybody.

3:25:35BubblemanWe got Claude in the house. We got Tony. That's awesome. What's that? Who's that guy in the background there? Bong Rip! It's D420K! Mitch is in the house. I'll be the only one bong ripping. Come on, people. Come on. Join me here. We're going to be doing a bong rip. So yeah, we just bumped into Remo. We wanted to invite him down. Hey, amazing conversation there. Tony told me that you guys got pretty deep into things.

3:26:00BubblemanI wish I could have heard the microbial conversation, but I will be watching it because we recorded it. Definitely really a pleasure to have you come on, Kevin, and then help walk us and guide us through these pretty seriously articulate levels of conversation and a lot of information that not a lot of us understand, so I do thank you for that. But just figured we'd have maybe a 10-15 minute little talk with Remo and see what he's been up to lately.

3:26:25SpeakerThanks.

3:26:27BubblemanHow's the show treating you, dude?

3:26:28SpeakerIt's crazy. I'm having a great time. I'm really surprised that the public's come out in force, even in light of these raids here, which was a total buzzkill.

3:26:37BubblemanIt was a total buzzkill.

3:26:38SpeakerThat didn't prevent people from coming. That didn't deter them at all. They showed up in force. Actually, there were so many people here yesterday, it blew my mind. Yesterday was so busy. It was popping over there.

3:26:48BubblemanIt's bumping. It was amazing. Our booths are almost next to one another. We're neighbors. We're very close, the Blue River Bubble Man brand and the Remo Nutrients.

3:26:56Etienne FontanAll right. What are you guys puffing on then? You guys must have some rad shit there.

3:27:01BubblemanThese guys gave everything. Okay, first of all, the level of kindness that's going on here and how much hash people are getting given is really kind of out of control. I think I've been given 20 or 30 grams of really nice full-melt and rosin. Loads. I got this so far.

3:27:17SpeakerYeah, look at what Remo's got and given to him so far. He's probably got like a...

3:27:20BubblemanI don't even know what he's got in there, but this is Remo's as well. This is Tangy Full Melt 90 Micron Bubble that stinks so loud.

3:27:27Skunk ManShow them this too.

3:27:28BubblemanOh yeah, this is a bunch more. What's that? 10 grams of rosin and another 3 or 4 grams. So it's very nice to see people are very much proud of their work and they want to show the people that have inspired them like Remo. Thank you. And myself, and Tony, and a lot of other people that are here, and they're really kind of sharing quite a bit.

3:27:45Etienne FontanHey, Remo, it's got to feel good to taste the fruits of your labor, huh?

3:27:50SpeakerAlways does. Always does. It's an incredible show. But yeah, it started off with a weird buzz with that whole busting of the dispensaries thing. It was totally unnecessary. One thing I felt that, why I felt that was unnecessary, we're about to have legalization, but most of the people they busted at these dispensaries are patients. Because most of these patients, they can't get jobs at a regular job, you know what I mean?

3:28:13SpeakerBut when you work at a dispensary, it's okay for you to consume cannabis and work there. So a lot of those people, a few of them are dispensary owners, but a lot of them are just regular $15 an hour people trying to make a living and they're sick. So this is an attack on sick people.

3:28:30Etienne FontanSo are you feeling from what we're seeing is that there seems to be a resolve from people that they're not going to just take this, we're going to fight this?

3:28:39SpeakerWell, what I hope to see is that all the dispensaries group together. I went to save the dispensary demonstration in front of the police station the other day, and it was actually good to see that. I wish there was more people there, but what I think is going to happen is a lot of dispensary owners are going to band together, and they're probably going to do a class action lawsuit, and maybe they'll change the law.

3:28:59SpeakerIt's kind of like how the coalition did. Right. I wish them the best. I'll support them if I can. I'll donate, you know.

3:29:05BubblemanWhat's it going to take? Yeah, absolutely. Jody was in earlier talking about the whole situation and it definitely was a weird vibe to start off on. But it seems to have sort of flown nicely. It's dissipated. It's gone. People just didn't even blink an eye. They just showed up in drones. Yesterday was so busy.

3:29:21Etienne FontanYou couldn't even walk down the aisles. It was incredible. I couldn't leave my booth. How many people do you think are there?

3:29:28SpeakerToday it's a lot less. Yesterday... Just ballparking it. I've been to these things before. They probably did at least 5K yesterday. 5K? I was thinking more than that. I'm not sure. Even at 5,000. It was hard to count them all.

3:29:42BubblemanI mean, I thought it was 10,000 to 20,000 myself. I'm sure they'll release numbers in the next couple of days. Today was way less for sure.

3:29:49SpeakerActually, I talked to Peter from Lyft, and their goal, if they had 10,000, they were going to be happy all weekend. Oh, great. And I think that even if they had 8,000, Thank you for watching.

3:30:19Etienne FontanIt's wonderful. Well, apparently I'll have a lot of stuff to burn through in a short amount of time, so burn the evidence in a small amount of fires, but just a little larger each time.

3:30:30BubblemanExactly. That's what I'm talking about. I like what Kevin's got going on on his ceiling there. It looks like he's at the disco or something.

3:30:36ToddKevin's been great to have on.

3:30:39Etienne FontanHe's been crushing us with knowledge, man. He's been just...

3:30:43Skunk ManI meant to have that on earlier. I just realized I omitted the backdrop.

3:30:47BubblemanDude, it's definitely choice.

3:30:50Skunk ManYou guys, like, have colostomy bags for this show? Like, this is four hours of, uh, how do you pull this off?

3:30:57SpeakerThe pen, so you don't have to stop for shit.

3:30:58BubblemanYeah, I usually shit myself at least twice during Hash Church.

3:31:02Skunk ManThat's what we need. We need a hemp fiber-based pen for Hash Church. You didn't get the Hash Church diaper?

3:31:07ToddOh, my God. Wow. We always have to go there, hey? I thought you were the last person to make, like, Ash Church, Ash Church, but... Ash Church pops up every once in a while.

3:31:23SpeakerIt does. It does.

3:31:25BubblemanIt's happened three or four times. I don't know what's going on, but...

3:31:31BubblemanYeah, dude, a great crew. I think this is a good time for us to put on a song. Claude, my partner in Jamaica here, I don't want to say manages Richie Spice because they have a deeper relationship and a connection than a manager and artist relationship. It's more like they're partners or brethrens, you know, like really close guys and they work together. And so over the last couple of years of hanging out with Claude and getting to meet and know Richie, He put this really cool little song together, which many of you have probably heard from the channel called Dabin.

3:32:03BubblemanAnd so we thought we'd just throw that on in the little background and maybe even ask Claude a little bit about what inspired it, man. Yeah, what inspired it exactly, you know, like how did it come to be that Dabin's got created here. So I'll just try and get it on in the background while Claude maybe explains.

3:32:24SpeakerWell, let me tell you, blessed love to everyone. Bless and love to everyone, whichever country you're from right now. I want to say it's nice being in Canada with Bubba Man, Tony, River Rock, Remo, and everybody right here, you know? Awesome, man. Yeah. Well, the song was inspirational because Tony and Bubba Man came to Jamaica and we learned so much about the cannabinoid system. And Richie got inspired by the fact that Bubba Man is always coming with his...

3:32:52SpeakerMothership, you know? First of its kind in Jamaica at the time. So we got influence. Yeah, real nice jazz. So we got influence just from that. And then Tony brought the signs along with it. So Richie, that was the inspiration that it came from. Separately and apart from Jack Rastafari, right? You feel me? So that's how it all started. And a young kid built a rhythm, and Richie was like, we're dabbing.

3:33:18SpeakerWhat do you think about this? Dab, dab, dab, dab, dab. Let's dab away. And we just started hitting it. And everybody just got in. I guess Bubba Man is trying to pulse it there.

3:33:28BubblemanYeah, I want to put it on the speaker.

3:33:32BubblemanIt's definitely going up here soon. I just want to make sure it goes up on the speaker.

3:33:36SpeakerI'm definitely impressed that you got the word endocannabinoid system. It's good for the endocannabinoid system.

3:33:44Etienne FontanThat's got to be a first of its kind for sure.

3:33:47SpeakerThat's a science. That's a science. You know, that tone. All right, here we go.

3:33:52BubblemanWe're going to dab out. You got your rigs. A couple minutes of listening. It's set up, Richie. Well, I got some chem, 73. Yeah, it is.

3:34:03SpeakerCome on! It's a combination. I'm live. Oh, man! It's a combination.

3:34:15BubblemanI just bumped into Mila speaking of the Dabadoo.

3:34:18SpeakerIt's cool being at these events.

3:34:26Etienne FontanSeems like a little family reunion of the Canna family.

3:34:39BubblemanI really like this culture, this reggae culture that has always sung and educated us about cannabis. It's one of the most amazing forms of activism, in my opinion, touching people through music, talented musicians putting their, you know, like the pipe blowers blowing pipes for us to enjoy incredible glass. The reggae artists have always led the front on promoting good, you know, cannabis etiquette and allowing for people to have this plant.

3:35:09BubblemanAnd to have artists like Richie stepping up and singing about dabbing and the endocannabinoid system and start educating through that platform makes the hair on my arms stand up. What is dabbing? He'll tell you. Yeah, it's good. Dabbing. Standing up. We're dabbing.

3:35:31Skunk ManThere was actually a set of, there was a reggae band that played a role in our story with Chemdog that we ought to throw a shout out to, which is Slightly Stupid.

3:35:42BubblemanI was just going to mute it while he was talking there.

3:35:44Skunk ManWe're loud. We're being loud.

3:35:46BubblemanWhat was that, Kevin?

3:35:47Skunk ManThere was actually a reggae band that played a little role in getting Chemdog sequenced, so they're called Slightly Stupid. Yeah, they provided us rights to tour their songs for an iPad app that we used to help fund the sequencing.

3:36:01BubblemanYou know what, shout out to Slightly Stupid because I had an amazing experience with those guys one time backstage at a Snoop Dogg concert, which I don't normally go to these sort of backstage areas, but this band, I was told about them. It was through the Seedless guy, the Seedless brand. He was touring with Slightly Stupid, and so he was like, yeah, you've got to come and check it out.

3:36:19BubblemanSo I was backstage at one point. And this dude comes up to me and he's like, are you Bubble Man? This was quite a while ago, way before most people knew Bubble Man was at all. There was no YouTube videos or anything. It was just Overgrow posts and stuff. But yeah, one of the members of the band is like on International Cannagraphic and is like a huge, like deeply into the cannabis culture.

3:36:40BubblemanSo he asked me at one point if he could take his picture with me backstage. And even after we left, my wife was like, man, that was weird. Like, Usually people ask the band to take a picture with them. The band came and asked you to take a picture with them.

3:36:56Skunk ManOh, there's an honor right there.

3:36:57BubblemanWell, I brought a big pipe. That's really why I wanted the picture. I brought a beautiful pipe backstage with me, and I had pulled it out, and I was smoking out of it, and that is exactly what attracted his attention. Was it Kyle by chance? What's that? Was it Kyle? You know, I can't remember. I believe he was a trumpet player.

3:37:16Skunk ManOh, okay. All right. That is probably C Money.

3:37:20BubblemanThat sounds familiar, actually. C Money?

3:37:22Skunk ManYep.

3:37:22BubblemanYeah, okay. Right on. Yeah, good. Good to shout those guys out. If you don't know them, go check them out. They've got a really nice style of tunes. And big shout out to Richie Spice for that track, Dabbins. Give thanks, Claude.

3:37:35SpeakerThat's just our small way of trying to educate the Jamaican family about Dabbins. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Bobby, man.

3:37:43BubblemanIt's important, absolutely. Much love, Claude. Much love. Well, what a great church. We did, geez, three hours and 40 minutes. Wow, that's beautiful. That was a good one. Right in the middle of the Lyft conference. I won't miss church. This is like some crazy thing.

3:37:58Skunk ManI'll be like on my deathbed, and it'll be like, I gotta do Hashtag 7423.

3:38:06BubblemanIt's just, Todd's going to be there right beside me.

3:38:08Skunk ManIf they don't bring their headphones, I swear to God, I'm going to flip my shit.

3:38:13BubblemanHe'll be even more outspoken when we're in our elderly years. Right now, Todd and I are just the new old, as Rob and Sam have told us. We're just the new old. They're the old, soon to be the old old.

3:38:27SpeakerI don't know if I like that new old thing.

3:38:28BubblemanWe're the new old, dude. All right.

3:38:30SpeakerWell, you're speaking the new old. Respect it.

3:38:31ToddThe new old. They seemed really old when we met them.

3:38:37BubblemanI want to thank Kevin once again for coming out. We'd love to have you again. Really, it was a wonderful conversation, and we appreciate your knowledge. Chimera for helping set that up. Sorry that you're going through the no water thing. I hope you get your plants watered. We're thinking about your plants. And, of course, Etienne, Skunkman Sam. Todd McCormick, D420K, Claude, and Tony Verzura, and Remo, the urban grower in the house.

3:39:04BubblemanThank you, Jody, for coming and laying it down so eloquently for us. And really thank everyone for watching Hash Church. We do appreciate the audience, and we will keep coming every week as long as you guys tune in and watch and want to hear this stuff. We're happy to share it.

3:39:18SpeakerThanks, everyone. We're tuning out.

3:39:20BubblemanHash Church 88. Yeah. Done.

3:39:22SpeakerPeace, everybody.