CBD Conversion and Testing

0:01SpeakerOkay.

0:05SpeakerI feel like a deer in the headlights right now. Okay, what now?

0:11SpeakerOkay. Okay.

0:16SpeakerAnd yeah, hopefully this is working.

0:21BubblemanAll right. All right, you are live. There are people in chat talking. There you are. You're it.

0:27SpeakerAll right. Hi, everybody. Sorry we're having technical difficulties. We all apologize for this.

0:37SpeakerDid you get the link I sent you? I'm live. It says live in the corner. Hi. See you in the chat.

0:46BubblemanLet's hope it works better from your...

0:57Etienne FontanOkay, Mark, perfect. Does the previous chat that we're using still work? Or is this a new hashtag altogether? No, it's part two, bro. This is part two. I gotta go find part two and pop up on my other thing. There it is, part two. Okay.

1:15SpeakerSorry, everybody.

1:17Etienne FontanHi, everybody. We're just trying to get this back up. We've never done this before, so Todd and I are going through being mocked at and laughed at by Marcus right now as he's trying to figure out everything else. Hey, there he is, Bubble Man's in, John's in. Welcome, everybody, and thank you very much, Todd, for being the host. Yeah, just call me Bubble Man.

1:38SpeakerWe're back to house church. Nice to see everybody back. I think we're back. I'm trying to find it on YouTube, and I'm having a hard time. I'm trying to.

1:53BubblemanYes, I think we're back as well. Yes, we're here. I see it in the chat. We're moving forward.

1:59SpeakerWe are live on YouTube still?

2:00BubblemanWe are back on YouTube, Todd. Only you would know that, Todd, by it saying live in the bottom middle of your screen, but it does seem to be on YouTube in the chat, yes.

2:11Etienne FontanOn Bubble Man's YouTube page, it does say there is a second, it says part two, so I clicked on that and it went live.

2:19SpeakerIt does say live.

2:23BubblemanSo Todd, if you click on the main picture in the middle of the screen, it's going to lower our boxes and make the person talking a bigger screen. You just have to go one left click. One left click on your face while you're talking or whoever. And then you also have to make sure that you click on everyone's face as they talk. This is the really fun part.

2:47BubblemanNow you got a job, Todd.

2:49SpeakerNow you're busy.

2:53SpeakerI suddenly don't envy Mark's position in all of this.

3:03SpeakerAt least we're live. How do I mute my own mic now? Well, I'm glad we replaced Marcus because the last few episodes, he's been doing a really poor job, and I thought it was time for him to be replaced. Yeah, you know, I'm going to agree. No, Mark is not being replaced. I will tell you that right now. This is not easy.

3:26Etienne FontanAll right, so we were talking, we were last talking, I think we were cut off, we were discussing the whole conversion of THC to CBD, I mean CBD conversion in the gut.

3:38SpeakerWhich doesn't happen in human beings, and Mark's not here, so we don't have to talk about it anymore.

3:45Etienne FontanNo, I'm just trying to pick up where people were so that if people hadn't watched the previous one, they could know where we picked off. I was trying to keep continuity, gentlemen.

3:55SpeakerThat's the trouble with organic chemists. They really think the human body is a test tube.

4:02Etienne FontanWell, it is. I mean, we've been experimenting for years. It's just that they can't replicate what actually happens necessarily. And I agree with Easton until we can actually see, you know, raw data to prove it because I got into this again because of lies in my own smoking circle that I was burning brain cells and then started to research that because I really want to see the research on this.

4:23Etienne FontanAnd that really is one of the things that sparked me down this cannabis rabbit hole was lies and misinformation and wanting to just confirm truth because Back then we didn't have internet, we didn't have information and then next thing I know there was a rally in my college in 89 and there was Jack Herrera and Debbie and the rest was kind of history but it was that always that initial curiosity and so as I've gone around other smoking circles around the You know, the world and talked about all these different things.

4:50Etienne FontanThere's always been this, just like the pervasiveness of certain names and certain linguistics that particularly consistent with cannabis, wherever you go, this somehow conversion theology has seemed to also been pervasive throughout the, you know, the mental cloud of everybody, you know. I think it's rather fascinating. And I thought it was rather interesting that Dr. Russo is one confronting it. But I also found it interesting that Dr. Scaldone is very affixed in his science, which is the fun of scientists and delving into all this in this discussion.

5:32Etienne FontanSo it's interesting. It's rather fascinating sociologically, but at the same time, just as we're trying to debunk the misinformation. Yeah.

5:45Etienne FontanI guess, did we get him a link out there? Did he walk out for the day?

5:50SpeakerI've sent it to Mark and he's trying to get in, so it's just not working right now. But, I mean, what Mark was and what they were talking about, the research papers, is everything was done basically and tested. So, yeah, it hasn't been done in the gut. It's just a hypothesis and what the research and what Sam was talking about. And before you guys, when we got disconnected, we kept talking about it.

6:10SpeakerYou know, it's all hypothesis. We'll see what happens. I mean, does it convert into different cannabinoids? Ethan brought up CBG, CBGA. He brought up different cannabinoids that really might happen. But, of course, at the same time, it's all hypothesis. And what I was saying, and what I talked about, is... I used Horatio Delbert and Jim from Roji Concentrates. I gave them both hemp from hemp fields, CBD, and both of them got some forms of THC in their extractions on three occasions with Roji and twice with Jim, I mean with Horatio.

6:48SpeakerWhat were the ratios of THC? Because hemp does have small amounts of THC in it when it's a plant. And it was like 64% CBD, 11% THC on one extraction he did. I can't really recall the one that Horatio did. It was smaller. It was like a 7 and something else and a 43. But there were, I was trying to figure out exactly by their results, there had to be something there where there was some THC in the plant to begin with and then probably, you know, made it more, what's the word for it?

7:21SpeakerWe were able to view it on results through, well, I think the results came through MJM Labs, so it was a credible lab here on Vancouver Island, because that's where I am right now, Vancouver Island, that did the testing for ROGI. So we did see it three times. There was some type of conversion, but... You're talking about the isomerization, John? Yeah. Okay, yeah, so in a test tube, again, I heard your comment, the body is not a test tube.

7:47SpeakerWell, I guess it is sort of in a way, but pretty dynamic, interesting test tube, biological test tube.

7:56SpeakerIf CBD comes in contact with acid, yeah, you can't keep thermodynamics from happening. So again, the fact that they're not observing this clinically suggests that CBD is not coming in contact with stomach acid. It's getting either absorbed or somehow conjugated or buffered in another way that's just keeping this from happening. Again, it's fascinating to think why it may not be happening when we know That in a flask, if you put acid and you add CBD to it, it converts.

8:25SpeakerThat's all. And again, the interesting result was from 2007, which didn't show that it just converts to THC, although that is known. And again, Mishulam showed this several years ago that you could convert CBD over to THC through something called carbonium ion chemistry, which happens as soon as CBD comes in contact with acid. So if the acid is soluble, and again, this is the kind of thing that if it happens in the test tube, well, why doesn't it happen in the body?

8:54SpeakerWell, something else must be intervening. That's all. And that's the real discovery here is that Something that a chemist would predict inside a test tube is not happening inside the body, so something else is intervening in it. So the question came up when we went offline was, was the CBD administered in like a gel cap so there would be no chance for absorption in the oral mucosa or anywhere on its way down to the stomach so that the CBD is completely locked up inside a gel cap and it doesn't get dissolved until inside the stomach and at that point is exposed to a highly acidic environment.

9:30SpeakerAnd I brought up I take CBD caps every morning. And a gel cap. That's what I mean. And they're...

9:39SpeakerRight. Now again, so remember that CBD is not immediately water soluble. It's very, very little water soluble. So if it's in an oil phase, now the question is, what's the lifetime of that oil phase before it's somehow biologically absorbed into the lining of the stomach? And it's just a question of kinetics. Can that actually undergo any acid-catalyzed chemistry, which is the reason why there's acid in your stomach to begin with, which is to digest the food that you eat, including lipids, including fats.

10:10SpeakerBut a lot of that stuff, again, can be transported into the mucosa of the stomach and be biologically absorbed. I used to mix my CBD with yogurt and eat it every morning. A couple days with yogurt, end with that. I'm pretty aware that CBD can be converted to THC. I mean, they had the isomerization machine, and they also had Dr. Atomic's conversion, you know, both of which I did in the 60s and 70s.

10:42SpeakerAnd the only trouble... And Sam, did that stuff get you very high? Like when you make THC? The real trouble was... I was trying to convert really low THC, low CBD material. And what I should have been doing is with hemp. But at the time, I didn't have hemp. So, yeah. Basically, those isomerization machines were useless unless you had a variety with lots of CBD, very little THC.

11:13SpeakerAnd then you could try and do a conversion process. But nobody was working with those kinds of materials back then. They were working with materials with very little CBD and almost zero THC. Yeah, I know that after reading Ethan's paper, I think one of the major criticisms was the fact that, again, they had a surfactant in there that was helping solubilize the insoluble THC, or I'm sorry, insoluble CBD.

11:42SpeakerSo basically you could start reacting with the aqueous phase, which is the acid. So again, whether or not that's happening in the stomach clinically depends on what the patient has eaten, what is in their gut to begin with, what kind of diet they have, and there's all kinds of ways that This thing could either be absorbed or conjugated in such that you won't see it clinically. What you need, Mark, is do a human clinical trial, either formal or informal, where you inject the THC, or excuse me, the CBD, directly into the gut and then show that the blood plasma levels has THC or THC metabolites which were not present before the injection.

12:25Etienne FontanYeah. So Dr. Sheldon, are you going to do these studies or talk to somebody about doing these actual studies? I will volunteer. We have hearsay and we have conjecture, but we need to put theory to it.

12:38SpeakerI have a gut. Me too. Well, are you going to stick a syringe in there and just start loading it with CBD oil? I've got lots of syringes. I'm a diabetic.

12:53Etienne FontanNot trying to needle you.

12:54SpeakerWell, I think. Yeah, no, I'm not the scientist to carry out this kind of study, but I think what's really interesting here, again, is that you could have All different kinds of reasons to believe that this won't happen. But really, I think that the clinical evidence still is remaining to be seen on whether or not, again, even when you take CBD and not just converting it to THC, but again, to go to what Martin was saying a couple weeks ago is that it's a single molecule.

13:22SpeakerIt ain't a single molecule, man. It gets into the liver and gets torn up into like six different or eight different metabolites. And so whenever you take any of these compounds, They're going to have different, you know, metabolic degradation profiles in the body and create not just one, but many different metabolites that ultimately have a biological effect. But the one they could not find, Mark, was THC or its metabolites.

13:48SpeakerYeah, well, if you look at, again, Dr. Watanabe's study, that would suggest that, again, that probably most of it is converted to CBN, Sam, because THC may not be that stable. I don't know. I'd have to look at the experimental data, and I would want to make sure that, again, they're running the right level of control so you can really make scientific conclusions based on it.

14:15SpeakerWell, I agree that, in other words, I've been telling Ethan for years to do the work that he finally decided. I don't think he did the work, but somebody else finally did. Yeah, I talked to him about this in September of last year when we met. And he said that, yeah, he poo-pooed the conversion and said that it didn't happen and there will be some papers coming out soon to cite clinical data.

14:49SpeakerSo, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it's too, Sam. I mean, if you think about it, again, first-pass metabolism is going to create A whole new set of compounds. And so I don't exactly know what metabolites they were looking for. I mean, you're not going to find CBD for long because it gets metabolized. So when you say they're not finding THC, it's unclear to me exactly what they're looking for.

15:20SpeakerThey were looking for THC and 11-norhydroxy. Right. You're looking for the THC metabolites per se, but maybe what they should have been looking for was CBN. They should have been looking. Looking for CBN or there's two other degradation products that were cited in the Watanabe papers that are not THC and not CBN. I thought CBD can also be directly converted to CBN.

15:47Etienne FontanWell, that's a rumor. It can. Hold on. It can. No, it can't. This happens after it's converted in the liver, not necessarily in the stomach acid, correct? Where it turns to an X-ray hydroxy metabolite. That's been my question.

16:02SpeakerThe bypass effect occurs in the liver, not the stomach.

16:05Etienne FontanOkay, so is there something then that if it bypasses, so what you're saying, Dr. Scaldone, is that if it bypasses the gut and it actually got through processing in the liver, you would see that conversion consistently?

16:19SpeakerThe point I'm trying to make is when you're measuring a patient's blood and you're looking at cannabinoid levels in the blood is that it's already been through a myriad of Different, you know, biological transformations and metabolic degradation. So looking for a single compound is not, is, I don't think it's the way to go. I think you have to look for all of these liver oxidized metabolites. I'm pretty sure they do show up, but the question is, does THC or any of its breakdown metabolites show up?

16:53SpeakerThat's what they haven't showed so far. Right. I guess in the clinical data that they reported on early this year, no. Yeah. But again, maybe the next question to ask Ethan was, well, was this delivered in a gel cap or was this a, how is the CBD administered? Because that might make a difference. I don't have the paper in front of me, but I remember it was orally delivered for six weeks, 700 milligrams.

17:23SpeakerThat's all I remember. Yeah, and I think the major clinical side effect or byproduct of this was sleepiness. Don't we associate sleepiness often with CBN? So maybe they should be looking for CBN, not THC, because maybe the way it's administered and the way it's Actually, Ethan Russo's paper says that sleepiness is not associated with CBD, but with myrcene.

17:52Etienne FontanAnd that study that was done, that was just 100% CBD, there was no other compound?

17:56SpeakerIt was 100% CBD, 700 milligrams for six weeks. I forget the number of subjects. And they couldn't find THC or its metabolites in their blood plasma of any of them.

18:11Etienne FontanNor CBN or CBG or any of those other compounds.

18:14SpeakerI can't say that. I'm not sure about that.

18:16Etienne FontanSo we're not sure that they were actually looking for those in the end.

18:19SpeakerI know they were looking for THC and its metabolites and they couldn't find those.

18:24Etienne FontanGotcha. But that's a different spike than that would be on those others if you're just looking for THC because we know THC is always the largest precursor spike by far.

18:35SpeakerEthan did mention in the talk about the other cannabinoids and there was more research on that. So, I mean, he mentioned it. He didn't say they were finding it, but there was talk about it at the discussion. Like I said, I'll find the talk. I know it was filmed and I'll post it on House Church hopefully tomorrow. Yes, so again, I don't want people to think that I doubt the results, clinical results are clinical results, but it poses, as most science does, more questions to be answered, which is that, you know, why doesn't this happen?

19:05SpeakerWhy does it happen in a test tube and it doesn't happen in a human being? Oh, there must be something else happening. Well, again, that's the subject for 10 more experiments by 10 different investigators to better understand exactly what's happening in the body and how these things are metabolized and degraded.

19:23Etienne FontanSo if there's any researchers watching, there's your actual, your senior thesis or your college research paper or, you know, there's some stuff right there, ladies and gentlemen. We have a question. And then we'll respond.

19:38SpeakerSomething that Tony had mentioned, which is that he thought that you can put these cannabinoids into like an oil phase and that the oil phase would protect them from this digestion in the gut. And maybe there is actually some credence to that. It needs to be shown that you can basically put something in an oil phase and that's not going to undergo this acidic mediated degradation in the gut.

20:05SpeakerOr it does, but it just takes a lot longer to happen. No.

20:13SpeakerSo there had been discussions about using medium chain triglycerides and other, um, Ways to basically emulsify cannabis. Yeah, those things basically create an emulsified form of the cannabis that perhaps can protect it from this type of degradation in the body, which can enhance the life, maybe even lower the effective dose and enhance the overall effectiveness of the medication.

20:45SpeakerDoes that make sense?

20:48SpeakerYeah, and it also makes sense that the body doesn't always provide a perfect atmosphere for these changes to occur. So in a lab, under the correct circumstances, you can maybe make this happen, but in your body, depending on everything, you might not. How about a bong rip, everybody? Let's take a few seconds. Come on. Yeah, and Aaron, Todd, lies a great opportunity for science to figure out what that phenomena is.

21:18SpeakerOh, fully with you, Mark. We don't understand shit about this in all reality. I mean, we've been making leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, but when you think about the fact that we've only known THC and CBD for, you know, half a century, we have a lot to learn.

21:36SpeakerScratching the surface.

21:38Etienne FontanAnd you've got to realize that we've been denying this for research for almost 70 years and only less than a handful of researchers, and we know them by name, who have actually been playing with this plant, have actually been doing it. So hopefully we'll see soon some of these ripples. We just had a visitation from a group from Australia, and there's definitely things happening in Australia medical-wise by leaps and bounds.

22:05Etienne FontanIn fact, The universities are working directly with these scientists and legislators to make them aware and also they're actually doing studies as we speak. They were telling me one has started and another 10 are lined up. So with these other countries coming online, so are their researchers and so are these studies and findings. So it'll be exciting to see what transpires. Welcome back, Indra.

22:35IndraHey, guys.

22:36Etienne FontanGood to see you, John.

22:37IndraThat was a strange disconnect. But I love this subject. There's so much disinformation that we somehow all of us have to come together and Thank you for joining us.

23:14IndraThank you for watching.

23:32IndraAnd it's because of the plorethra. I mean, Mark and I talked about, Mark once a week would now, Dr. Mark, well, I'd bring up one of the most misused terms I found on the internet and then he would correct it. Last week we did the nucleation rumor.

23:52SpeakerWhat's the word this week, John?

23:55IndraI haven't come up with it yet. I've been really tired lately. This low blood sugar thing, once in a while, every couple of years, it really gets me. And it got me so bad the last couple of days that I didn't think I was going to maintain it on earth much longer. But I feel better today. I hate to tell you what my instant solution to low blood sugar is, but here it is.

24:31SpeakerThings go better with Coke. I muted you because you were giving feedback.

24:38SpeakerIt's a real thing. I bet you it does lots of things.

24:45Etienne FontanSo how many feet of snow up there at Whistler right now there, Bubble Man?

24:55Etienne FontanBubble Man, how many feet of snow up at Whistler?

24:57BubblemanNot as much as I'd like to see them at. Mountains don't look nearly as they were early season. I can tell it's been warmer, but it's still nice to be up here. I wish I could be more involved in church. It's still choppy for me when they're really chopping up. I hope it's not like that for everyone else.

25:17SpeakerNo, it seems pretty stable for everybody else, but unfortunately your connection is still choppy. You were even choppy on FaceTime when we were talking, though. Mm-hmm. Totally.

25:28BubblemanWell, I'm glad to be able to be here. I definitely thank all of you guys for showing up, you know, in regards to what he was talking about. People contacting you and asking you silly questions. There's a percentage of people that don't realize what they're doing. There's a percentage of those people that are doing it because they want to just create a connection with you and have a conversation with you.

25:50BubblemanAnd both of those Those people in my mind are the ones that, you know, should be snapped at and should always be respected. But then there is definitely this third group, which I believe you may have spoke a little bit about. And this is the group of dissenters and troublemakers. And they cause problems. And I know, I don't know why I'm like this. I think injury might be a similar way.

26:13BubblemanBut I seem to... Thank you so much for joining us.

26:33BubblemanThank you for joining us.

27:00BubblemanIt's easy to get into arguments and disagreements online, but if you're just out there trolling and it's just... Yeah, I always say if you're just trolling to be trolling, why not go in the other room and get a hold of yourself instead?

27:20IndraBut anyway, Mark, I don't mind people asking me questions, even if they're silly questions. When I said some of the questions are kind of if they could think about it themselves, and I know a lot of people just want to be in contact and Because I see it all the time, I'll answer their email and they'll say they feel so great because I answered their email. But the truth is I try to answer every email that I get one way or another.

27:48IndraAnd I don't slap anybody down. It doesn't matter how silly sounding their question. I always honor every question like it's coming from their heart. And so I try to answer it back from my heart. The few people that we're talking about now that you brought that subject up are just some people who I think would find themselves sitting in the middle of a strawberry shortcake and start complaining.

28:21SpeakerOh, the strawberries are too cold.

28:23IndraThe whipped cream's up my ass. It wasn't free. Nope, they didn't bring me a straw. I mean, it's just those kind of people that no matter what, I mean, they could be in a bowl of pudding and they'd be pissing and moaning. Thank you. Thank you.

29:08IndraThank you for joining us.

29:30IndraIf you did good, that goes with you. And if you did crap, that holds you back and you get to be born here again. And I know everybody's excited about reincarnating here. Even marijuana is probably the only reason I even took incarnation here this time. Anyway, I'll shut up now.

29:52Etienne FontanWell, sorry to hear you're getting trolls, but unfortunately, you know, when you're out there in the world, in this world, there's a lot of trolls, and yeah, fuck them. If we cared what other people think... We all stepped out of our comfort zones. We all stepped out of our everyday lives or whatever those are and decided to live the life that we have. And, you know, some people are just jealous of that.

30:24SpeakerBasically, I've found that most people on the planet Earth are kind of like black holes. What they want to do is suck energy from you, or from life, or from everything. It's just the basic nature of man.

30:42Etienne FontanWell, not only that, it's also in the science. I saw some recent science that shows that people are drawn to your energy and will suck your energy.

30:52IndraAnd all the Chinese say, without enemies, you can't learn anything. So be grateful for the fact that somebody is constantly... And the Dalai Lama... Go ahead.

31:08Etienne FontanSorry. And the Dalai Lama.

31:10BubblemanThe Dalai Lama. Howdy, Ryan. Howdy, folks. Sorry, John, I didn't mean to cut you off there. Welcome, welcome, Chimera. How are you guys doing? I was just going to say, I was going to quote the Dalai Lama. He said... He who would do me great personal harm will see to be my greatest spiritual advisor. Wrap your head around that one.

31:33IndraI get it. It takes a long time to get that.

31:35SpeakerThat's why he loves the Chinese so much.

31:41IndraI like Chinese because of the food. Let's get serious, all right? So you like dog? Only if it's on a stick with honey sauce on it. Sweet and sour dog. Sweet and sour dog on a stick. That's rough. Or you can actually go and just whistle and they'll bring you those. You're like, here boy.

32:12SpeakerThis is great. What can we piss off people with more than reincarnation and eating puppies? 1970, I was living in Kathmandu and I was staying at the In Eden Hashish Center in Kathmandu. I've been there. And my hotel room in Eden was directly above the hashish sales room on the first floor, on the second floor. So what I used to do was I could pound on my floor with my foot and a girl would come up and say, what do you want?

32:49SpeakerAnd do you want tiger tops? Do you want to? And they had all the different kinds of weed and hash because it was 100% legal in Nepal at the time.

33:01SpeakerI found out that you could actually... They must have thought you were playing drums. They knew what I wanted. It was always the same thing. The best weed and the best hash they had.

33:12IndraYou could bang on the floor in that hotel in any room and they would come up and ask you what you wanted. I would not be surprised at all. I stayed there a few times.

33:27SpeakerOh, go ahead, Ryan. I was just going to say, at risk of beating a dead horse on this CBD thing, converting to THC under acidic conditions, I think it's, you know, it's not, for me, it's not as much about it happening in the body. It's that it happens in the test tube, too, right? So forget the gastric juices and all that kind of stuff. But when people are extracting CBD plants and then they're trying to decarboxylate their CBD acid from them, if you're not under a basic condition, you are experiencing some type of THC conversion.

34:07SpeakerYeah, that's thermodynamics, man. You can't keep that from happening. Sure, sure. But just the point that I wanted to make for people is that... You might even have a type 3 plant or one of these plants that's like 22 to 1 CBD or 30 to 1 CBD or whatever it is. But you can be creating THC when you're decarboxylating. So it's something that people should be paying attention to if you're creating products for people that don't want psychoactivity and especially children.

34:38SpeakerYou don't want to be, by mistake, creating some THC in your process and then not having your product analyzed so that people don't know what's in it. So again, just to hammer home the importance of always having your product tested before it goes on the market just to confirm that it is what you say it is, you know? That's a fantastic point. You know, Ryan, I think the one thing that people should look at testing at is not a quarter mile race to the highest numbers but a consistency race to make sure that what they're putting out is what the customer expects.

35:09SpeakerYeah. We did intake for a while or a few weeks at least of dispensary in California and And people would come in with a batch of cannabis and then they'd have lab tests from a batch that they grew like six months before. Right? And it's kind of ridiculous. It's like that's not the point of a... A lab test to go and get one stamp, one piece of information that you can stick on everything that comes down the pipe later on.

35:36SpeakerRight, but very few cities, if you could answer this, ATN, if you know it, very few cities have done what Berkeley did with, let's say, BPG and mandated that every batch that comes through is tested. You have to hold up medicine to test it, correct, before you can put it on the shelf?

35:53Etienne FontanAbsolutely, still to this day, everything comes through is either tested or you have to prove that this batch was tested. Not only that, you have to have molds and mildews and pesticide tests.

36:03SpeakerDo you know of other cities that do that?

36:05Etienne FontanNo, I don't know of any other people who do that. But out of this, the state is going to be doing that. And the reality is that they're going to have to comply with the state because I'm going to now be buying from the distributor. And so the distributors you're going to be dealing with directly and they're going to blackball you. I don't blackball you. They're going to be doing the science.

36:25SpeakerWhat is a batch? Is it a single plant? Is it multiple plants grown under identical conditions?

36:33Etienne FontanIf somebody brings in a pound, we test that pound. Every pound that comes in is tested. We get a representative sample from that pound.

36:40SpeakerAnd does that pound only from one plant?

36:44Etienne FontanNo, it's from multiple plants.

36:46SpeakerSo it's from multiple plants made into a single batch. Correct. I see your point immediately because, you know, you grab a random bud. It could be a good one or a bad one out of that batch of mix. So I get where you're coming from quickly. Yeah, a good sampling procedure really should be five grams, right? You take like a big top, you take a little nug and a medium-sized nug, and they all get ground together.

37:13SpeakerAnd then you get an average.

37:17Etienne FontanWith Arno, we found it was only two grams we were able to get it down to. And we did over 1500 tests in the laboratory before we felt everything was sound with that science. And that was where we would take it, take a representative sample, grind it for a certain amount of times, put it in the alcohol, shake it for a certain amount of times, and then it's actually run.

37:38SpeakerYeah, well, that's, I mean, you know, that brings up... That's just for cannabinoid testing, though, right? So if you're going to archive it, but if you're going to archive a sample for contaminant testing, like heavy metal, biological...

37:50Etienne FontanThis is back when we were first doing testing here in the United States, back when we were pioneering in 2007. So now it is a completely different thing. Now they're using, you know, mass spectrometers, they're using, you know, UVH PLC, and not only that, they're also using plate tests now to actually do, you know, The mold testings and things like that, and that takes time.

38:11SpeakerBut I would assume, I would assume that, again, five grams on a pound of material is really insignificant in terms of the commercial value of it, but certainly it has to be, you know, again, like Ryan was saying, sampled in a right way so that it represents as best it possibly could the entirety of the batch.

38:29Etienne FontanAnd this is the problem that we also found with edibles is that I can then take this part of this edible and test it, but the potency of that edible may be on the other side of that edible. And so these are things that, you know, people are going to have to work with food chemists now and who can actually work with food chemists, where in the past in California you had to be a patient and they wouldn't work with us.

38:50Etienne FontanSo now you can reach out to these food laboratories and actually work on proper formulation and saturation of your product Because now all they have to do is be 21 and over to handle them in the laboratory. So these are again step-by-steps. Ten years ago we tried to do that and they wouldn't handle it because they're not patients. Today they can do that. But yes, the science is also different.

39:13Etienne FontanWhat I was talking about was the science we were doing again ten years ago, getting the representative sample.

39:19SpeakerBerkeley is not requiring potency testing. They're requiring basically contaminant testing.

39:27Etienne FontanPotency as well. All are labeled on our medication.

39:34SpeakerI'm totally hit, but is the city looking for contamination more than they're looking for how much THC?

39:39Etienne FontanYes, yes, yes, yes. The THC is just so that the patient knows exactly what's in it, but the other is to make sure that it is a safe product, and that's the most important thing.

39:50SpeakerSo the problem with most clubs is that they have such a high turnover that they don't test their stuff. They don't hold up their product to get it tested because the city that they're in usually doesn't mandate that that happens. And only they go through the product so quickly, and that's the problem we have here.

40:05Etienne FontanNobody wants to accept the realities of the costs. It costs a great deal. Every scientist here will tell you science is expensive. Science is not cheap. Scott Bann will tell you it's very expensive to get all these tests and run them, and you have to personally pay for this. My company had to pay for it. We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in tests that, you know, if you don't have income coming in to pay for that, You know, no small distributor is going to just randomly go out and get every batch tested and then add that to their cost until it's mandated for them to do so.

40:39SpeakerEd Chen, at least you have a choice of lab or labs to go to. When I set up our lab in 1990, there was no other private lab that was doing this kind of testing.

40:52Etienne FontanAnd this is one of the things where we had to find labs with balls of steel because, you know, these people had to take great risk to allow us in to actually calibrate much less than to start actually doing those tests out of fear of what, $10,000 a fine per test.

41:12SpeakerCan I ask a question? How long does it hang up inventory, this putting the testing into the process? Obviously it doesn't happen overnight.

41:20Etienne FontanWell, this is another thing that people are going to have to learn to deal with and that's storage because you have to store product properly because it hangs around for sometimes up to three weeks before it can hit the floor. That's the reality because that's what it takes to get it in, get the lab testing. You know, that's the frustration. So I have to be able to store that product.

41:43SpeakerEd Chen, have you seen anybody storing with nitrogen? In other words, nitrogen flushed containers of cannabis?

41:50Etienne FontanYeah, lots of people are doing that. People are doing it, but not as much. People who do the cans. I've also, here in California, We have one of the four universities in the United States that actually do packaging. And so over at the San Jose University, they actually have a packaging department. And they have the most amazing, fun equipment to show you how to do packaging and all things proper.

42:16Etienne FontanAnd one of the things they showed me is this coffee, is how they do coffee. Thank you for joining us.

42:49SpeakerWe were using that technology with nitrogen flushing in 1990 by the multiple, multiple, multiple kilos.

43:01IndraYeah, well, I got you beat. I was using that in 1978 to clean up mouse piss smells out of a pot that was started in a big giant warehouse.

43:13SpeakerWe made sure our pot never had mouse piss in it. We were a step above you, dude.

43:18IndraIt wasn't my pot. I was working for somebody else.

43:22SpeakerCome on, tell the truth, John. Yeah, but it was your rat piss, right? Is that what you're saying? Us simple people that don't have nitrogen, I've been using these Boveda packs since I found them. I was going to say, Todd. And I love them. I love them. I love them. I love them. That's what works. And what I'm hearing down in the U.S. and talking with the guys from Boveda, you guys are taxed on weight.

43:43SpeakerSo with Boveda, you can keep that same weight. So a gram always stays a gram. It's kind of cool what they're doing now. But a lot of people don't realize that if you have a kilo of cannabis and it weighs 8 to 10 percent, you know, in moisture, that's 80 to 100 grams. And if you let it dry up, you lose that in weight. You lose that money.

44:02SpeakerIt weighs around it.

44:06SpeakerOne thing I can say for sure is that we used in 1990, we used for packing meat so it vacuum seals meat and it nitrogen flushes. And we had those machines, they were five or 10 grand. You could do a 500 gram bag at a pop. It took about one minute.

44:32Etienne FontanI just got these from Boveda. These are 58% for here in the Bay Area, but they have them also available in 32, 49, 62, 65, 69, 72, 75, 84, and 95. Well, they're not so much in the Bay Area. It depends on, I would store with the 58s, and I like to smoke with the 62s in the jar.

44:53SpeakerI got the 320 gram carrying boxes now, Todd, for like five kilos. Did you get, are they 62s or 58s? 62. We also got the 58s, the regular ones. The 58s for storage. They started giving me the 58s about a year ago, and they're amazing. But I don't like them when they're in my jar for smoking as much. I like the extra few percent. It makes the joint last longer.

45:20SpeakerYeah, and it makes it squish so much better too. For me, it really changed my roles in game 100%. Todd, is that relative or absolute humidity? Relative. It's a two-way relative pack. So what it'll do is if you put the 62% in this glass jar, it will try to maintain a 62% humidity within the glass jar. How does it do that if the jar is in really cold temperature?

45:45SpeakerIt's a two-way humidity pack that absorbs as well as emits moisture. So it will keep it at the right humidity regardless if the temperature is almost freezing or really, really freaking hot. Like anything, it has to have a temperature range. I'm not sure what the temperature range is off my head. But under normal temperatures, you know, 50, 60, 80, 90 degrees, the things work great. I've had Boveda sitting outside in minus 8 degree weather and stuff like that in my car, and it worked out fine.

46:20SpeakerThe reason I'm asking this is because friends who packaged Thai weed in large cans and everything was fine and dandy, as soon as they took it to someplace cooler, the moisture condensed and the cans were all starting to ferment and pop. Definitely, you know, one of my biggest pet peeves with cannabis has always been that I feel that it's destroyed post-production. Most of the problems I had with cannabis in the Amsterdam coffee shops wasn't the grower, wasn't the cultivar, it was how it was handled after they cut it down and then how it was handled by the coffee shops that either didn't give a shit or didn't know better.

47:01SpeakerAnd only dried it for 10 days.

47:03IndraThe day you're going to put it away, the dew point on that afternoon that you decide to pack it or close it has everything to do with how it lasts or doesn't last.

47:15SpeakerAbsolutely. I straightened out these guys just by telling them, use air conditioners in your packaging room. They did it and they no longer had problems.

47:26IndraThat's correct, sir.

47:29SpeakerSo they were having problems with mold? It was molding inside the package? They were making cans. They were sealing cans. And they were doing it in a hot, humid environment that when the cans moved to a cooler environment, they condensed and the water vapor changed into water and then the cans fermented and popped. Yeah, those were cool though. Wasn't that like the 95 cup, the cannabis cans?

48:00SpeakerNo, what I'm talking about is actually in the 70s and 80s.

48:06Etienne FontanBut it was in 95 and it was Lucky Mother's.

48:09SpeakerYeah, Lucky Mother's Coffee Shop, yeah. That was really unique, getting a can of cannabis.

48:16Etienne FontanWell, the thing is, they made it look like a Campbell's soup can that had cannabis and opened it up and it had pot in it.

48:27SpeakerThe cans I'm talking about were four gallon. They were four gallon cans. And so it was just a matter of size. But Sam, was the herb completely cured? So it was completely dried? It was Thai sticks. It was tied sticks, right, but it was packed in a humid environment. So I think the point of your, your, your point here is that even if the herb is dried, there's enough ambient moisture in a humid environment to make this happen.

49:01SpeakerYep. As soon as you put it into a cooler environment, it condenses moisture and the cans go off.

49:10IndraHmm.

49:13SpeakerI was just going to say, depending on how dry the herb would be, the herb itself would somewhat desiccate that moisture, but that's pretty interesting. All you have to do is pack it in a cooler, drier room, and then there's zero problems. Right.

49:39SpeakerWhat is the right drying amount to dry? I mean, again, it depends on the climate you're in for curing, but, you know, did someone say 10 days? 10 days is too short, isn't it? I mean... Yes, that's what they do in Amsterdam where they like to because that way when they ship it out the door, it's got a higher moisture content, they make more money. They're selling water for the price of cannabis.

50:09SpeakerRight, I get that, but let's say you actually want to grow quality cannabis that's not chock full of water and going to get moldy. How do you do it, Mark? No, no, no. We dried for two weeks, then we boxed it for two or three months. Right. We found that cured cannabis after drying is superior to uncured cannabis after drying. I think a lot of people would disagree with that.

50:40SpeakerI know some people think that's the way to go, but I think that there's definitely a movement towards freshness. Yeah, but you know me. I'm an old traditional dude. Can I say this to argue both sides at that point is I've always obviously grown my own, so I've always had fresh cannabis around me, but when I've had enough cannabis that I could put some aside and let everything break down and the oil set up and it becomes tacky, it becomes really smooth.

51:09SpeakerAnd I think it does make her better. I'm a joint smoker, you know, well-cured joints, really nice, you know, but I love a fresh joint too because it has terpenes that are otherwise lost.

51:21IndraWhen you say fresh, Todd, you mean freshly cured.

51:24SpeakerNo, fresh would be freshly dried, meaning that like after about two, in the two to three week range, you know, when you can actually roll joints and it's, you know, it doesn't taste green and it's pretty good. That's what I would call fresh. That's, you know, you're three weeks from harvest, you can smoke it, but if you want to cure it, you take it at that point and you let it go.

51:44SpeakerYou know, a couple months and then what happens in my experience is those oils that are left over kind of harden and set up and the cannabis has a much better body, has a better, in my opinion, a better flavor and a better, it burns a lot smoother, it's a lot less harsh on your lungs. But again, I still like fresh buds between two and three weeks that are just...

52:10SpeakerIf all you want to look at is taste and terpenes, then the pressure is probably better. But if you want to look at the big picture of smoothness and usability and things like that, then I prefer cured for several months. And I always have and I think I always will. Even resin. I don't even smoke catapult. You smoke resin. Right. I was just going to say that even resin is that way because I don't smoke that much cannabis.

52:45SpeakerYeah, but if you're looking at these new modern extractions and the live resins and stuff like that, really a day or two dry just to get the majority of the water out, then they go in and extract it right away to preserve all that flavor and freshness. Right, fresh frozen is the new rage anyway. I mean, they're trying to capture as many of those fresh terpenes as they can without losing them because now everybody's tuning into what happens.

53:10SpeakerYou know, I like that the oil game has come a long way and that people are understanding the loss of quality we had after handling and drying. Well, I agree for taste, the fresher the better.

53:25IndraI'm going to take it one step past that, Sam. What? Way past that. Well, now my latest information, my latest research shows me that a plant cut out of the ground and no longer than an hour later Thank you for joining us.

54:09SpeakerI respect your opinion, but I've never had an oil that I thought was as good as Dry Sift. Never. What about Charis?

54:19IndraI've got to get fresh plant extract to you because it's probably the only thing in the world that's going to change your tune.

54:27SpeakerWhat about Charis, Sam? I mean, the way I look at it, really, Charis and Dry Sift are kind of the difference between You know, like even like a fresh frozen bubble hash or like a processing of dried material. They really are different products, right? Yes, because when they make chars, it's usually from living plants. Yeah, when they're hand rubbed, they harvest the resin fresh, right? They don't dry it and cure it and process it.

54:56SpeakerBut there's also more dirt and debris. With dry sift, you can get a cleaner product. Yeah, I think if you were really careful, you could probably get an extremely fine product. You know how long it takes to pick out all those damn red hairs when you're hand rubbing?

55:14IndraDude, it's not just the red hairs. It's all the dirt and the food that the guy ate at lunchtime. And these people that make the cherries are the poorest of the poor, and they're by the side of the road doing this.

55:26SpeakerIn India, they do not use toilet paper, by the way. Yeah, I'm talking about the theory behind the difference between harvesting fresh resins versus cured resins. Right. I know that there's bad practices. I mean, you're always, you can find bad practices in any market, right?

55:41IndraWell, I've extracted charis. Okay. And I can tell you that the oil that I obtained from that was literally knockout amazing. You know, I did that right in Bangalore when I was in India. And the charis came from Manali. We went up to Manali and then we went up to I can't remember the name of the other one village higher than Manali. There's another village there. But it's a real climb.

56:08IndraI mean, you're climbing long cliff faces and all kinds of other crap. Look down and see how high up you are. And you're wondering, you know, gee, do I actually want to go here? I know they say that is amazing. But by then turning around is not really an option either. So

56:29SpeakerI've been in all of those places and all of those areas repeatedly and I never found any hand rubbed hash that I liked as good as dry sift that I could make out of the same materials.

56:43IndraYou're probably right. Look, the best hash I saw in Manali was this soft, soft brown stuff. It was really brown, which meant less dirt probably and more heads in it. And this guy had a kilo of it and I got it off of him. But it's rare to find it that kind and that soft. Obviously, they were guys who enjoyed getting high at the same time.

57:07SpeakerWell, that's because if you make it in the slow, old, traditional way that goat herders and stuff did up in Kashmir or the Manali area, they could only really make a tola or two at the most a day. That's, you know, 10, 20 grams a day by hand rubbing.

57:31SpeakerA bad hash maker could make 100 grams a day, but the quality was a mere shadow of the good stuff.

57:42IndraThat's because the goat herders stopped along the way and rubbed theirs. The other guys, the commercial guys, right next to the roadside, right where the diesel trucks went by, busy rubbing. I used to see them all the time. But yeah. You got to pick out what guy you're going to, you know, people are in a hurry. It's going to be shit. That's just the, that's life. That's a description of life.

58:03IndraThat should be printed upside down on the inside of every womb as you go out so that you can read that just before you hit the dirt here.

58:14SpeakerIt's the slow weed movement.

58:17IndraYeah. Well, actually it should say, this is a long, dark ride.

58:26IndraLike at Disneyland when you go in Space Mountain.

58:35SpeakerCrickets. I went to Disneyland on Yippie Day. It must have been... Maybe 1970 or a year or two before that. And for the longest time Disneyland had an official policy. They did not allow long hairs into Disneyland. You could not go. They just turned you away at the gate. And they changed that about 1969 or 1970.

59:04SpeakerAnd all the yippies went to Disneyland that day. I also went. And it was the only day that Disneyland got shut down. I think it had something to do with all the naked, acid-infused, pot-smoking hippies running around Disneyland.

59:27SpeakerDisney is better on acid. I can definitely say that.

59:33IndraYeah, the big problem with street land is two hours long lines. You know?

59:40IndraYou got to get in line and wait for two and a half hours to ride for four or five minutes.

59:44SpeakerNo, you as a handicapped oldster can get a special pass where you get to the front of the line and you get in next. What do you mean, handicapped oldster? Well, you're always talking about how, you know, like when you go to the Emerald Cup and stuff, you pooped out. So instead of hiding it, what you should do is put it as a badge on you and take advantage of it.

1:00:13IndraThere you go. A badge that says, I need a hand. All right. Dab me.

1:00:23IndraYeah, I do have some things, but, you know, I'm going to remind you, you know, I fought in Vietnam. I got shot. I got two titanium cages in my back. I rode a helicopter to the ground in Vietnam. You know, I put the body through some pretty serious tests over time.

1:00:45SpeakerLast time I went to Disneyland was Disneyland Paris. I went with my granddaughter and she ran me into the dust. I mean, I needed a wheelchair by the time I left.

1:00:59IndraYeah, I can understand that. I should have taken a wheelchair to the cup with me in the first place. But anyway, the cup was still a great experience. I had the most fun that I've had in years. And everybody there was super nice. And I know somehow I got confused and couldn't find my way towards the food. Todd straightened me out on that. I was the only one at the cup who couldn't get food after getting into 215.

1:01:28IndraBut that's probably some kind of conspiracy. So what can I say?

1:01:32SpeakerNext time take a backpack with some grub in it.

1:01:36IndraYeah, that's it. I'm going to take a lunch sack next year.

1:01:39SpeakerI think next year you can just spend more time with us, John, and we'll make sure you get well fed.

1:01:43IndraI'm going to follow you next year because I saw you eating.

1:01:51SpeakerYes, most definitely you did. But the Emerald Cup, I wish we could get Tim on again soon. It is just such a fantastic experience. I cannot wait until these things are happening in every city, in every town, in every state all over the world.

1:02:07IndraYeah, it was like a concert, you know. I had the same feeling when I went to Woodstock because when I went to Woodstock after I came back from Vietnam, but we had to walk five and a half miles up the freeway. It was another one of those incredibly long lines to get in. And then when we finally did get in, everybody was pushing the fence over and there was nobody checking tickets anyway.

1:02:31SpeakerThe funnest place for events like this might be traditional cannabis producing countries. Imagine a festival like this in India or in Colombia or, you know, countries that have a long, long tradition of cannabis who might crawl out of the woodwork and show up at events like this. Well, you know, though, dare I say that over time, I think the stigmatization that America has placed on cannabis is going to be removed by science and understanding and history and our education about cannabis.

1:03:03SpeakerAnd those countries will be able to, Jamaica, India, Morocco, places where we associate with cannabis, will be able to really be proud of, you know, what they've donated to the world in the way of cultural significance.

1:03:18IndraMy God, we call one of the versions of cannabis Indica. So, of course, we should have a big Indica festival in India. That would be great. Except for my travel.

1:03:31SpeakerMy new variety, I'm calling it Indica.

1:03:34IndraYeah.

1:03:38SpeakerThere is something really special about the California one though. I don't know if you could have it anywhere else. Just because of the culture that's so developed around that area and the variety and the lab testing and you have so many professionals and interesting people, you know, that are there sharing information. On the science level, you're right. But on the tradition, then all these other third world countries have got California beat.

1:04:05SpeakerI mean, California has no traditions before the Second World War. It just didn't exist. Yeah, but I mean, dude, you can walk in and buy like 20, 30 kinds of clones off the shelf. You can buy seeds. You can buy weeds. You can get dabs. You can You know what I mean? It's all under one tent. It's pretty incredible. Harvest machines of every type. You know, like, you don't see that anywhere else.

1:04:29SpeakerI guess what I'm waiting for is when you do see it in India, you do see it in Morocco, you do see it in Thailand. It'll take time, but it's going to be Cannabis will catch up globally. Yes. You know, but California is the new old history because, I mean, when it comes to America, California had the surfers and, you know, they were smoking weed a decade before.

1:04:57SpeakerWe had Dutch coffee shops plus, you know, I mean, look what the beats were doing with it. You know, the marijuana movement arguably started in San Francisco in 1964 when that guy turned himself in and demanded he was arrested and his lawyer then started Lamar. So, I mean, yeah, California has a significant place in the whole cannabis cultural history. And look at how far ahead of it it is than even the states that are legal in many respects.

1:05:27SpeakerBecause the culture is so thick here.

1:05:29IndraIt was epic, you know. The other epic time that I had with Pa was when I got off the plane in Amsterdam and I walked into the Damkring. And that place was just paper mache into the craziest thing I ever saw. And plus, we were pretty high on philosopher's stones and mushrooms at the time. But that was an epic situation when I went in there. And when I went to the cup, I realized it was another one.

1:05:55IndraIt's one of those one of a kind things. It was an epic situation. There was the right number of people were there. The vibration was right. Everything was just right, you know. And tracking you guys down and spending part of the evening with you was all epic. It was all the best thing that I've been involved in doing somewhere for the past four or five years. And so I think we need a lot more of those.

1:06:22IndraI think more than once a year. They should probably have one of those every four or five months or maybe every six months they should have. Hold one up at this end of California just to keep up with what everybody's doing because people are making all kinds of leaps and bounds. And, you know, I love keeping my hand on the pulse on it and paying attention. I mean, I just recently learned how to use my equipment to extract things.

1:06:49IndraCompletely fresh plants. And I remember way back when when people used to ask me that question all the time. Hey, can you extract a fresh one? And I would always go, in my mind's eye, I would always go, crap, that means there's gonna be a lot of hydrosol and I don't really want to do it. And so I didn't do it. But now I realize that there's value in it, extracting the fresh plants.

1:07:13IndraI mean, once you guys all get onto it, you'll see. It's like the difference between eating dried broccoli and fresh broccoli.

1:07:21SpeakerHey, John. Can't you freeze out the hydrosol? Wait a second, John. There's today's word, hydrosol.

1:07:29IndraYeah, there you go.

1:07:31SpeakerScraping that out. People misuse that all the time. And what do they call it? I think they call it other things, but it's just basically the water fraction you get from extraction. And typically it's from a steam distillation. The hydrosol is basically all the water that carries over the essential oil into the receiving flask. So the hydrosol is basically the vehicle at which it drives out all of the terpenes and essential oils.

1:08:01SpeakerAnd that steam distillation process is a... Is a corollary of Riot's Law. So as it turns out, the essential oil components are much higher boiling than water. But water creates a minimum boiling point azeotrope with it. And that's how you're able to get all the essential oils when you distill essential oils. The water layer is the layer that's rich with water-soluble terpenes because you can only Steamed is still water soluble, water insoluble components.

1:08:35SpeakerSo the water soluble components, and I think some of the water soluble terpenes that occur in cannabis are things like geraniol, John, which is what you find is the principal component in rose oil, right? Yeah, it's very... Cannabis though. It's very milky. Right, but it's one of the ones that's water soluble. I was just thinking of one that was water soluble off the top of my head.

1:08:59SpeakerThat was one. But John has actually done extraction of that hydrosol from roses, right? Haven't you?

1:09:08IndraYeah. I used to do the roses for a birthday all the time from Romania. And they would always bring them in a 757 refrigerated 30-foot container. And they were fresh. And we would nitrogen grind them and put them in the extractor and inspect everything. Robert and the company there that grows the outer roses had a very good idea of how much hydrosol there was going to be and they wanted every drop of that and they wanted it insured for an enormous sum of money.

1:09:44IndraThe rose oil itself is $22,000 a pint and the hydrosols they want it insured for $5,000 a pint when we sent it back. So, yeah, a tremendous amount of something in it. Besides that rose hydrosol was potent stuff, let me tell you.

1:10:00SpeakerAnd the rose hydrosol, can it be reduced of its water and converted to just terpenes?

1:10:10IndraWell, here's what I've discovered. I can take that rose hydrosol and spray it on a big wad of cotton. Thank you for joining us.

1:10:41SpeakerTraditionally, what I saw was essential oils made in Switzerland in the beginning, and they all were hydrosol rich.

1:10:53IndraWell, yeah, a lot of the flower stuff that's extracted, they try to extract it as fresh as possible because, of course, as flowers die out, they lose a lot of their... Yeah, they were definitely using fresh materials by the, yeah, huge amounts, like 100 kilos at a time. Yeah, well, I had the biggest extractor, the biggest butane extractor in Switzerland that exists. It's still sitting there. And I also have the biggest one in the world sitting in the one in Kansas.

1:11:25SpeakerYeah, these were steam distillators. And some of them could be moved. So they were like mounted on a truck trailer. But the biggest ones I saw, you couldn't move them. They were too big. Right.

1:11:42IndraWell, somebody just asked us about putting three 500-pounders on the back of an 18-foot trailer so that they could go from farm to farm with it. And I said, sure, excellent idea. You only need one recovery machine for the three of them. And it very well lends itself to mobile harvest extractions.

1:12:06SpeakerYeah, those mobile steam distillation units is exactly what they use in the mint industry today to get mint oil. Those things actually are trailered through the mint fields themselves, which scoop up the hay, and basically, yeah, they distill it freshly, because I think they can get a much higher yield. What do they do with the hydrosol, Mark? I don't know, John. I think that they might actually do some type of secondary extraction or fractionation of that.

1:12:36SpeakerThose people definitely know what they're doing. They've been working those mint fields for years. And so, yeah, they don't let anything go to waste. But from, John, just from like an acre of mint, they can get up to, 70 or 80 pounds of oil from an acre, so that's a lot of oil.

1:12:56IndraIt is, but what I found out over the past 12 years is whatever the yield of a steam extraction for any various crop you can point your finger at will be improved anywhere from 10 to 30% using butane gas extraction instead. When you steam distill stuff, they lose a lot in the hydrosol from incomplete separation, you know, so. And that's why. I sure do. That's just a fact.

1:13:29SpeakerWell, the real problem with the Swiss steam distilled stuff back then was they were using Swiss rope-a-dope. In other words, they had sort of hemp-ish varieties, which they had mixed with Dutch drug varieties. And then they had varieties that they could reproduce and grow outdoors in Switzerland. And it was not what I call really dope. It was rope-a-dope. It's hard to make a good extract from shitty material.

1:14:02SpeakerIt's not the starting place I would like to start at.

1:14:06IndraLook, I've been there. I spent some time in Switzerland. Even greenhouses there, people have coats on when you go in. It's cold even in the greenhouses. Nobody really puts out the heat and The light. No, I remember going to some guy's greenhouse and they were trimming the plants and the plants were about 36 inches long and they had about five inches at the tip that was flower and the rest of the plant was just there for what purpose?

1:14:34IndraI don't know. I guess they just enjoyed growing a 36 inch long plant with a five inch bud.

1:14:40SpeakerI guarantee John in Switzerland, they do have greenhouses that are totally 100% heated and well lit. Yeah, also where you are in the country, you're north of San Guitardo. I mean, it's pretty chilly up there. You're down in the Italian end. We were working in Zurich, and it's freaking cold in the wintertime.

1:15:03IndraWell, we were working outside of Zurich, about 70 kilometers by train, north and east. Little teeny tiny town. I can't remember the first part of the name, but the second part was on the river, on the tour, something on the tour. Anyway, it was an interesting spot because there was a lot of farmers there, and the farmers all had barns full of pot they were drying. Yeah, it was, I mean, the problem with Switzerland is, of course, that there's not enough sun, and it's not out long enough.

1:15:46IndraSo you got to have a well-lit greenhouse there. I did see some hemp that was growing outside there that looked kind of interesting. But I mean, this hemp, how interesting can it be? At the time, CBD wasn't really, I think it was called headache weed at the time instead of medicine.

1:16:11SpeakerRight, the perception of CBD in our cannabis has changed significantly in the past 10 to 15 years.

1:16:18IndraAnd seeds, what about seeds? Remember back in the 60s or 70s when that song, you know, Acapulco Gold's Badass Wade, no stems, no seeds that you don't need? Now nobody's got seeds because of stuff like that that was going back then. People didn't want seeds in their pot. Came about all the Sensamea, everybody wanted Sensamea. And now, look, Sam, he was wise enough to glam on to seed collecting early on.

1:16:46SpeakerWell, not only that, but I always collected male clones, too, because I like males, even though they are being used less and less and less by breeders. I mean, if you look at the cannabis clone collection in America, let's say there's 5,000 or 10,000 clones being passed around. I bet you 95% of them or more are female. Yeah. I bet you 100%. 100%. 99.9%. It's almost 100%.

1:17:21SpeakerI don't think there's any males being passed around. Maybe there are. I mean, there's probably a few. A few. There's a few people that know enough that have males that, you know. But, you know, there's a small percentage. There's no point to keeping a male. I mean, if all you're preserving it for is the Y chromosome, you can do that just as easily in seed. Like, I don't see the value of preserving males.

1:17:43SpeakerAt this point in time, the market doesn't want... I would disagree with that on this, is that, you know, Neville very famously had a male haze that he crossed, you know, and if I buy haze, was that plant. And when that plant got lost, you know, they couldn't make those seeds anymore. And that particular male gelled well with a lot of the varieties that we came to love as haze crosses in the 90s.

1:18:11SpeakerI bet you anything you could make that hybrid at least as well, if not better, with a really excellent haze female.

1:18:21IndraYou used to be able to buy male pollen in number 10 cans, remember? I mean, you could buy a whole shitload of male pollen at one point in time. From who? Where? I thought it mostly came from Spain and Holland. But I'm talking about...

1:18:39SpeakerI've never heard of anybody distributing mails, Paul, on a serious basis. Never.

1:18:45IndraYeah. Well, I have one time. I'll look through my old stuff and see if I can come up. I used to have an ad about it where the guy was sitting in a big giant bag of it and talking about it. But they weren't doing... It wasn't THC... Thank you for watching.

1:19:34SpeakerWell, you know, back 20 plus years, I was actually hanging out with Neville and he brought me a bud because I liked his haze. And I found one seed in it when I was sitting there breaking up the bud and I handed it to him back like, hey, do you want this? And he was like, no, no, you can keep it. And I was just like, oh, well, great.

1:19:54SpeakerThanks. Hope it's a girl. And he said, no, hope it's a boy, because if it's a good boy, you can go mix it with all you good girls and make great pot. And I went, hmm. And then he also said, and it'll cut your breeding time in half. And I thought, wow, that's interesting. You know, if you use females for the shorter, you don't have to wait as long if you're using like a 16-week female to wait for your seeds and to see how it worked.

1:20:20SpeakerSo it makes sense to use the males for breeding. You don't need to wait that long anyway, though. It really is four to five weeks after pollination. So you can still harvest it early. You wouldn't have to wait. Can I ask, that's interesting. On even a 16-week, let's say a long, long flowering variety, the seeds will still be done in five, six weeks after pollination? Yeah, like have you never seen, sometimes maybe you just don't have enough pollen flying around.

1:20:50SpeakerBut like even if you have plants that are pre-flowering and they have those few pistils growing right at the main stalk, Right, like the first flowers, they're actually true pistils. So if you pollinate those, they'll make seed. So you can produce the seed even when the plant's vegetative. Wow, okay. And the seeds will be done then? The seeds will be done before the flowers in the scenario we just outlined?

1:21:15SpeakerYeah, it's usually time. It's like time from pollination. I've even done extreme things like when I was in Switzerland, I had movable hoop casas with darkening over them. So you could take a section of the outdoor field, cover it for a couple of weeks with short photo period, and then take it off, pollinate it, and... Next day, wash it down 24 hours later, and then just let it go back to natural photo period.

1:21:55SpeakerAnd the plant would regenerate back vegetative. But all the seeds were done, you know, a few weeks later. Well, a few weeks later, four or five, six weeks later.

1:22:07SpeakerWell, that's interesting to know that you don't have to let a full-term plant go all the way to term just to harvest all the seeds. Will it continue to make seeds is my second question. No. No. No. It's only from what's pollinated. The pollen's only around for however long, right? Correct. The plants go back vegetative. You basically lose all the flower, which is what you're trying to do.

1:22:31SpeakerYou're trying to speed up the process because in Switzerland, if you try to flower drug varieties outdoors, by the time the plants are finished under natural photo period, the wet and humidity and cold seriously screws them over. But if you can flower them off in July, you ain't got no trouble.

1:22:51IndraYeah, well, I've heard on the radio in Switzerland, the polling count in the middle of June and July, and it's pretty high with marijuana, so somebody around there is growing quite a bit of it.

1:23:06SpeakerYeah, probably hemp. It's probably mostly hemp. Germany has a huge hemp culture also, right? And they also grow a large amount of hemp in Switzerland. Well, you know, don't we think it's going to happen here in California? Hemp just got legalized with 64. I bet you the cannabis industries come together and they shut down the hemp. No, no, no. There's no money in hemp in California. Yeah, there is.

1:23:36SpeakerI'll explain to you how. I'm going to produce tons and tons, like thousands of tons of hemp seeds. And I'll tell everybody, hey man, I'm planting a field in your area and they should pay me. Well, can I just say this, though? I love that. But can I say that, though? The truth is, Ryan, that is the market right there. There's Whole Foods all over the state.

1:23:58SpeakerYeah, but they won't produce the seed in California. Yeah, they could. I mean, we produce everything else. Hemp seed's not, it's not, is it restricted to bring hemp seed across borders? I guess you can just process it on site. No, but you can have freshness and organic California certified. A lot of things can happen, you know. I think there's, people are going to see opportunity in it because there's a very rich industry in the foods market and the food's easily harvested from this plant.

1:24:27SpeakerWell, I went to... Yeah, but the cost to other industry is way too huge. I mean, if the actual medical cannabis market... And I don't want to be rude, but don't you think that preventive medicine, getting ourselves on a balanced diet, eating good whole proteins, getting our balance of omega-3s, EFAs, I mean, this is really where it's at. They're looking at ways of trying to, you know, basically farm fish for GLA, and cannabis contains like five times the amount of GLA than salmon has.

1:24:56SpeakerSo there's a huge market for this when it comes to protein and EFAs. I agree with you, there is a huge market, but they won't be growing it in California, they'll be growing it in like Iowa or wherever else. Hemp doesn't do very well that close to the equator, dude. It's not like, it really, because of the whole day length thing, it prefers being in a more northern climate.

1:25:15IndraYou know, Ryan, I went to two health food stores a couple days ago looking for a five-pound bucket of organic-hulled marijuana seeds so I could extract for Dr. Natasha because Mark never kept his promise to her. And so I can say that now that Mark's not on anyway. But I had a heck of a time. I found zero from California. They were all from Canada.

1:25:42SpeakerYeah, well, that's because it's legal to produce them here. You can't grow them. Nobody's growing hemp for seeding. I guess maybe they are starting to do it in Colorado. I want to depend on the cultivar of hemp we're talking about. I mean, there are varieties. Like, for instance, I know that Hempflax in Northern Europe was having problems with some of the cultivars they were getting from Southern France because they were acclimated to a warmer climate with longer summers.

1:26:06SpeakerAnd basically, they were mandated to use the seed and they had problems. This was 20 years ago. But it basically pointed out the fact that there are different cultivars of hemp. You know, acclimate differently in different climates. I mean, wouldn't that be the solution? Well, it's just, it's also like a high water crop. I don't think it's going to be, that's what they're going to be producing in California.

1:26:28SpeakerYou know, I think they're going to produce other high value crops in California where it makes more economic sense. And the other thing is, is like, if you're shooting off mass amounts of pollen, you have to realize that you're going to be jeopardizing the other industry, which is cannabis that actually makes all the money, right? Medical cannabis. So I bet you'd see counties like banning hemp production.

1:26:50SpeakerBut my weird part is this. Why malnourish ourselves so we can then heal ourselves with the cannabinoids? I love to get high too, but I like to be healthy. Yeah, but dude, like all the lettuce for pretty much all of the United States and all the way up the West Coast, including Canada, is produced in like, you know, Salinas area. Right? It's not... They wouldn't be doing cannabis down there.

1:27:13SpeakerThey're growing other stuff that's worth more. And they'll grow cannabis where it's cheaper, and they'll send it down to California. I'm definitely not, like, saying you're wrong. I totally believe, like, hemp is an incredible meal. You know, it's an incredible food source, hemp seed.

1:27:25IndraYou know what the Dalai Lama says? The Western man works hard all his life, saves a lot of money, a big pile of gold, and then when he gets old, spends it trying to get his health back. So, why do things?

1:27:39SpeakerYeah, no, I've always found it ironic that hemp is this amazing food resource that people don't talk about. It kind of blew my mind to learn about the factual benefits of the nutrition that comes from this simple seed. It really is quite unfathomable when you start comparing it, you know, just for the sake of conversation. What has more protein, beef, chicken, turkey, or hemp? But what tastes better?

1:28:08SpeakerGive me a nice filet mignon. You know though, but once we get past eating for our tongue and we start eating, we don't feed our nutrients based on, you know, anything but what it's doing for the plant. So why do we feed ourselves based on our taste buds and not on what actually it's doing to us? If somebody needs to tell you, Todd, what can I say?

1:28:30SpeakerI mean, I eat because it feels and tastes good. Right, but you feed your plants scientifically, right? You feed your plants on what they need to thrive. No, but they don't complain. I do. Yeah, you gotta remember, too, we also don't live in a natural world. Like, in a natural world, fruits and all those things taste good, right? Because they're good for you. And the stuff that's not good for you doesn't taste good.

1:28:54SpeakerNow we live in a world with fucking McDonald's where they, like, You know, they essentially trick your taste buds into thinking that you're getting something tasty, but it's really just a bunch of crap. It's salty and greasy. That's what a lot of people want. Either sugar, salt, and grease. You can salt your hemp seed oil. I'm going to throw it out there. It tastes great. It's like salted butter.

1:29:16SpeakerIt makes a big difference. It totally brings out the flavor. I'm just saying this, that, you know, people should at least feed their body with the same care that they feed their plants. You know, they check the pH of their water. They don't check the pH of their water when they're drinking it. You know, they're so meticulous about the food and the booster and everything that they use.

1:29:36SpeakerThen they feed themselves McDonald's and it just always just baffles the fuck out of me.

1:29:41IndraDouble message, Todd, is they tell their kids things taste good, and then the kids get a picture in their mind and on their mouth about what tastes good and doesn't taste good. And at the same time they're telling them some things taste good, they go to McDonald's. They get them a kid's meal. They get them fries and stuff. The kids mark this down as stuff that tastes good.

1:30:04IndraYeah, but kids don't go to McDonald's because of the way the food tastes. They go there because they get kiddie toys. They go there because mom and dad brought them there. It's all marketing.

1:30:13SpeakerAnd the reason mom and dad brought them there was because the kids want the little kiddie toys they give free with kid's meals. When I was a little kid, I caught hella shit from my mom because I said that she wanted to bring me to McDonald's and I said I wanted real food and I said nothing happy about a happy meal, mom. She got pissed at me.

1:30:35SpeakerBut, you know, I think that as a grower, I realize how much care we put into what we feed our plants. And I think that when you start learning about hemp seed, hemp seed nutrition, its balance of essential fatty acids, how much better it is than flax oil, how much richer it is than fish, it's really astounding. And I wish more people would get into hemp seed oil, the other oil.

1:31:02SpeakerI love shatter, I love wax, I love butter, I love rosin, but hemp seed oil could actually be what really cures a lot of people of a lot of the problems they have with their everyday life. All they got to do is start using it and it's available at every health food store. Yeah, and that industry is totally new. I mean, They're starting to do interesting breeding and changing the oil profiles in hemp.

1:31:28SpeakerSo there's going to be like a whole series of products that probably come out over the next 10, 15, maybe 20 years. Well, dare I sound crazy, but over 24 years ago, I was sitting down with the guy that owns Sirius Seeds, Simon, and we were talking about him actually starting to search for the highest nutritional varieties of hemp because there's going to be a market for this.

1:31:50SpeakerIt's inevitable.

1:31:51IndraHey, here's the word. Hemp seed oil extracted my way, it tests out to be the best ever anywhere. Ask Mark. And so I think the hemp seed oil market is going to explode, especially for the person who is wise enough to obtain one of these machines and put it to work. Thank you for joining us.

1:32:38IndraYou haven't really tasted the best, Todd, until you tasted some hemp seed oil that I expected.

1:32:43SpeakerWell, you know, I want to say this, too. I've been fortunate enough to test very fresh. I've been able to try oil in Europe, in America. I've been able to try oil that we pressed ourselves, you know, right there at the machine. And it depends on a lot of factors. Thank you.

1:33:20SpeakerFor sure. But you can now get dehulled hemp seed, which is just like a peanut without the shell, and you can sprinkle it on your food when it's fresh, and it enriches whatever it is you're eating. So you can put it on salad or a burger or fries or filet mignon, and it is going to enrich the nutrients. If you don't cook it and you just sprinkle it on, you get all those EFAs without damaging it.

1:33:43SpeakerTodd. If the seed is big enough that gets behold, then it's almost like a pinion nut. You can get really big hemp seeds that when they're shelled, it's almost pinion nut sized. I can't wait until there's like now known cultivars of hemp nut to get.

1:34:03IndraOnce the hull is gone, that's a source of tannic acid. And if you're squeezing them, you're going to get some of that tannins and tannic acid in your extract. If you de-hull them and extract them my way, you get the pure oil with no green in it. It's golden. And the protein isolate Mark had analyzed, and it was 12% higher than any they ever tested then or since.

1:34:29IndraAnd so I would say to you-

1:34:31SpeakerGolden Oil without chlorophyll for sure.

1:34:34IndraAnd the oil is excellent. It's a process they put it through or they use water. Thank you for joining us.

1:35:06SpeakerWe're not even there yet at all. I mean, all we get is one variety at the store. We're so limited right now, but at least we can go get it. We did some early studies, Todd, where we were looking at the nutritional and essential fatty acids of all the different varieties, both drug, industrial, wild. Well, just like the cannabinoids vary from variety to variety, I'm sure the EFAs also change from variety to variety of hemp.

1:35:40IndraTodd, if you get a five-gallon bucket, I'll expect it for you.

1:35:46SpeakerFor sure. We'll get on that right away. As soon as they grow some hemp in California, we'll start trying. You can get a five-gallon bucket on Amazon, can't you?

1:35:56IndraYou can, but I always go looking at the health food markets because there's a date on the seeds and I try to coincide that with the harvest up in Ottawa and that way you can be assured of getting a good fresh load. It's a good idea.

1:36:15SpeakerIt's contact, well, not in California you can't, but in Europe you can contact Jace Calloway up in Finland, and he'll send you the latest batch so you know exactly when it was harvested. Yeah, that would be way more expensive.

1:36:32IndraIf I had more information, I might order one from him.

1:36:37SpeakerYou can't import to California.

1:36:40IndraOh, too bad.

1:36:41BubblemanThe stuff I sent to Indra some year

1:36:48BubblemanIt was older. We didn't check the dates or anything, but I know that when I had it tested in the lab, there were signs of the oil already going.

1:36:59SpeakerYou know what you should do, Marcus? You should not use your live video. You should talk just with the picture. I bet it will prevent you from breaking up.

1:37:12BubblemanYeah, it's hard for me to even get a word in because you guys are all delayed. And so I reckon that usually people break before someone else starts talking. It's tough to fit it in without... Well, at least your voice isn't breaking up now.

1:37:28SpeakerYour voice is not breaking up now, so it's a little bit better.

1:37:32BubblemanPerfect. I will continue to do that. Thanks, Sam.

1:37:37SpeakerThat's a great trichome shot you got on there as your image.

1:37:42BubblemanYeah, that was, oh geez, what was that now?

1:37:45SpeakerIt was Special K from... What I like is the purple streak running up the middle of the stem.

1:37:59BubblemanYeah, the anthocyanin. What I really like on that shot is the... The vacuole. The oils that seem to be like floating in the head.

1:38:11SpeakerYeah, it looks like a vacuole or something, maybe.

1:38:13BubblemanNo, that's hydrosol. I have to say, they do look like the organoplastids.

1:38:23SpeakerMarcus put it up there on special, because today's word is hydrosol.

1:38:28IndraHey, Marcus, send me a picture, and then I'll put a 3D of Earth on the surface of it, or underneath the surface of the trichrome head.

1:38:52SpeakerOkay, it's really hard with Mark lagging. We've got to get Mark a much better internet connection.

1:38:59IndraWell, maybe we need to get him a new PC, you know.

1:39:04SpeakerNo, he's got a really, really, really, really nice computer. Yeah, it's all about connection here, unfortunately. Yeah, I think they're just having an issue because it's winter and I mean, honestly, I've just never seen him have this kind of internet problems before. So apologies to everybody watching. This is definitely, anyone who's known as Chandler knows that he's definitely hasn't been at a lack of internet for years.

1:39:28SpeakerWhenever we see Marcus having problems, he's usually away from his home. Yeah, yeah. Was there some kind of executive order that fucked this thing up? Yeah, I think that's what happened. They realized that Hash Church has become a force, and they're trying to shut it down. So one of those executive orders was to fuck with Bubble Man's internet? No, no, no, no. I think it's funny that they deleted the ONDCP portion of the White House website, and I would love to see them delete the drug war.

1:39:58SpeakerNo, no, we're not going to talk about politics, remember? Back to doobies, folks. Sorry, no more drug war. They really did delete the ONDCP part of the website, though. I was really happy about that part. Really? When was that? I didn't see that. Yeah, they did it in the last X days, yeah. The ONDCP is the official national clearinghouse for drug policy. It's basically the propaganda arm of the White House for their drug war.

1:40:28Etienne FontanIt was basically done on day one as soon as he took office. Not only that, he fired all the diplomats around the world.

1:40:35SpeakerWell, let's not go to the diplomats. We can just stick with the drug war. Look, the drug war...

1:40:40Etienne FontanI'm just saying... Yeah, so that's been done.

1:40:44SpeakerDelete the drug war is all I'm saying.

1:40:49IndraWell, you also deleted the Hispanic. No, no.

1:40:53SpeakerWe're not going to talk about politics. I'm sorry. I was kidding. All right. Let's get out of here. Somebody do a bog rip.

1:40:59Etienne FontanD420 with the bog. Bog rip, mother lovers.

1:41:04IndraEl bongo. El bongo ripo. El bongo ripo. That's the extent of my Spanish right away.

1:41:11SpeakerI knew what you said, so I guess that's all that matters, right? What is Deb in Spanish? No dabble. It's probably dab. Come on, you know, whatever the language is, you just say it in English really slow.

1:41:28IndraOr loud.

1:41:30Etienne FontanDo the French Canadians say dab or dab A?

1:41:39SpeakerThat A is not really a French Canadian thing. That's more of a, I don't know, it's like an Ontario. It's really heavy in Ontario.

1:41:50IndraFuck, I just ran out of gas.

1:41:56Etienne FontanWe'll get more gas, man.

1:41:58IndraI've got it right here. I'm just going to have to put it in before I can take my next dab. I can't taste this stuff around now.

1:42:09SpeakerThank you, sir. Okay, back to Hash Church. What's the biggest field of cannabis anybody has seen?

1:42:22SpeakerWell, I had a picnic in Hempflax's hemp field back in September of 95 that was pretty groovy. How many hectares or acres was that, Todd? I didn't have my helicopter on me, so I'm not exactly sure how big it went, but it went for a long time. You live up there. You know Ben. How many hectares of hemp does Hempflax grow? I don't know. I've been to his fields a few times, but I'm trying to vaguely remember.

1:42:53SpeakerAnyone can go to Hempflax.com and see the beautiful video they have of an amazing flyover from seed to product. It's gorgeous. Nature wins is their motto, and I think it's a great, great motto. I wasn't really speaking about hemp, although hemp is a friend. I was thinking more of, you know, drug varieties of cannabis, you know, big giant, you know, five, ten, whatever foot plants blowing in the wind, but by the thousands and thousands and thousands, you know, like they do in Morocco, like they do in Lebanon.

1:43:32SpeakerA bit of that's...

1:43:33Etienne FontanSmall valleys here in California, but I've never seen anything like I've seen in the pictures of Switzerland, Morocco, or anything like that. Not yet.

1:43:44IndraRishikesh in India, you can drive by marijuana on both sides of the road for three hours. Yeah, but mostly it's not even cultivated. It's just wild, right? Maybe so, but that's where the charities all come from.

1:44:05IndraYou can see all the people alongside of the road rubbing them all the time.

1:44:12Etienne FontanSo have you guys seen, I got this from D-Nail the other day. They've got these... Protective sleeves that go in your piece that keep the resin from sticking so you don't get the lock going on between, which will happen if you tend to use and you don't clean sometimes for a week or even more, you'll get a ring and it'll actually lock in and it can actually shatter this piece.

1:44:36Etienne FontanSo D-Nail now has these sleeves that you can slide it in. Hold on.

1:44:48Etienne FontanOne second, I have to go to the site to see. But I've just been using it this week and it's been solid, no issues.

1:44:54SpeakerIs it silicone or is it hard?

1:44:56Etienne FontanNo, it looks like ceramic. It's a silicone plastic.

1:45:17Etienne FontanSomebody speak in the meantime while I look this up.

1:45:24SpeakerMark's going to laugh us. Well, we can't talk politics. We have nothing to say, right?

1:45:35SpeakerHey, can we talk about science? Did anybody see that the crystal structure of LSD has been reported? Yeah, I did see that. Yeah, so what was that? The serotonin receptor, Ryan? Did you see that? Yeah, I didn't actually read the whole structure, the whole thing through, but yes, LSD works through the serotonin receptor for sure, 5-HT. Right, so I think that that is a very difficult receptor to crystallize, and I think this is, again, a major achievement in protein crystallization because these things just are not trivial to work on.

1:46:15SpeakerI have no idea how much work went into that. I haven't read the paper yet. They must have some new technology for pumping through that because they just recently did the cannabinoid receptor structure also.

1:46:28Etienne FontanOkay, it's a, I have the information now. It's a PTFE joint protector. It helps prevent joint lock and act as an insulating barrier to protect your glass joint from the heat of your nails. Suggested for use with quartz nails and non-tapered titanium joints. Not recommended on titanium, tapered titanium joints. So, or during high cleaning. Yeah, so highly recommend. I've been using it this week and haven't had any issues because I've had issues of lock up and Depending on what can happen, it can actually break your drop down.

1:46:58Etienne FontanSo just something new I saw. I was trying. Cool. That's pretty cool. Technology is always changing, cannabis-wise.

1:47:09SpeakerYou've got some pretty nice pieces, so it would be something to protect, I guess, if you have something like that, right?

1:47:14IndraWhat does the PTFE stand for again, Mark?

1:47:18SpeakerIt stands for polytetrafluoroethylene, a.k.a. Teflon. Yeah.

1:47:26IndraIt's Teflon, that's all it is. I know, I just wanted to demystify. He said it was PTFE and I, you know, you probably... Polytetrafluoroethylene.

1:47:38SpeakerHey, so Ryan, do you think there's going to be a big push in actually people looking to breed different varieties of hemp for nutrition and various things now? Yeah, they're going to use, well, we'll see what happens. Breeding is expensive, right? So there's, you can't really invest in a breeding program unless you're getting some type of reward out of it. So you'd have to have a developed enough marketplace that it would be worthwhile to do.

1:48:08SpeakerOtherwise, you'd just be doing a targeted breeding approach and just going for one molecule, right?

1:48:14IndraOr your name is Monsanto.

1:48:17SpeakerThere's a... Let me see if I can find the paper for you, Todd. Someone else go on for a second as I find this, and then I'll put it up in chat.

1:48:25IndraSo did anybody else read the paper that just came out where they found two new CBD receptors in the human model?

1:48:35Etienne FontanIn the brain or in the gut?

1:48:39IndraI didn't read the whole thing. I just read it day before yesterday briefly.

1:48:44SpeakerWhat were the receptors?

1:48:45IndraDo you know? No, I can't. I don't know them offhand. I'm going to have to go back in my history on my browser and get the page.

1:48:52SpeakerNo, no, no, no, no, no. That's not true. They found a link to the GABA amino acid pathway. That link's actually been established before, but I think it's just another evidence that cannabinoid binding leads to the activation of this pathway. I think they identified a downstream pathway. Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:49:38SpeakerNeurotransmitter in the brain. So whenever something else is turned off, GABA is usually the switch that, or sorry, whenever something else is turned on or fired on, GABA is what shuts it down. So that's also, you know, that's the receptor system that the benzodiazepines work on, right? So Ativan and Valium and all those kind of dopey pills, you know, slow you down pills, but they reduce anxiety.

1:50:09IndraThat one always kills me, the anxiety reduction thing, because usually if one turns around and takes a look about what the anxiety is about, it's not coming from nowhere. You're not imagining it. It's because you're Own internal flawed system of understanding what you're doing versus what everybody else does, plus the added layer of your worrying about what everybody else thinks about what you're doing always produces a nice case of anxiety.

1:50:42IndraYou've just got to be able to say, fuck it, you know, what me worry, Alfred E. Newman had that one down right. Too many people now think Have a whole fantasy thing about what other people might think about you. And it's just really a complete and utter fucking waste of time.

1:51:01SpeakerWe take after our president, right? I know we're not supposed to talk politics, but in the world we live in, you know, here's a guy who's more concerned about what people think about him than what he actually does. No, we don't. We don't take after anybody, especially our president. No, no. We condemn all of our global leaders. We are resistance.

1:51:25SpeakerSo I posted that paper with the altered oil composition. So then what they did is they did a target. There's all these genes that guide oil the way through it's produced. So it's like a pathway, just like cannabinoids are produced in a pathway. Different oil compounds are the same way. You have like one gene that acts on a chemical and turns it into something else in the plant.

1:51:57SpeakerAnd then another gene will take that second chemical that's produced and turn it into something else. So in a lot of plants, what they've done is they've targeted mutations in these genes that turn You know, one chemical into another, and by taking out the gene, you can shut off that function. So a good example in cannabis would be, you know, the gene that turns THC into, or sorry, the gene that turns CBG or cannabigerol into THC.

1:52:24SpeakerIf you shut that gene down, and then you breed a line that is, you know, true breeding for that gene, then you'd have a plant that had high CBG and no THC. Can I ask you guys a question then, especially you, Ryan, and such, is when we ingest EFAs, that in turn helps our endocannabinoid system work? Rob was explaining it to me, but I didn't quite grasp it, but he was basically stating that... You're supplementing the body with eicosanoic acid, which is one of the precursors of the endocannabinoids.

1:53:00SpeakerThat's correct. Yeah. So THC binds to a receptor. We know THC, everybody knows THC and CB1, but we have a couple of endogenous chemicals that also bind to CB1. One of them is anandamide. There's a Brachydontal, Glycerol. And a lot of these molecules, they share precursors like Mark was saying, the, what is it? Iconosodic acid. Icosanoic, yeah. So, yeah, you know, these essential fatty acids, I think they either boost the production or they're also the precursors for these molecules, right?

1:53:39SpeakerYeah, well, the arachidonic acid, again, is a ubiquitous long-chain fatty acid that's actually part of the membrane. I think it's part of the biological membrane. Like, there's actually lipid components that are made of this long-chain fatty acid. And yeah, there's phospholipase A2, and phospholipase A2 cleaves... Thank you for joining us.

1:54:19SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:54:44SpeakerEFAs, which I think was Todd's original question, is extremely healthy because those things serve all kinds of signaling and hormonal functions in the physiology of the human body.

1:55:04SpeakerQuiet. Yeah, sorry. You cut out there for me for a second. That's why I didn't answer you.

1:55:11SpeakerYeah, so these desaturases are interesting because as I know it, what those enzymes do is those enzymes actually remove hydrogen from a saturated hydrocarbon backbone. So these things are actually making These polyunsaturates, which I think what Todd was referring to, a rich source of EFAs in your diet will provide a lot of these long chain fatty acids that you wouldn't normally get from other sources. And certainly there's all kinds of good biological effects that these things have, including being antioxidants, including being, again, involved in the arachidonic acid cascade.

1:55:57SpeakerWhich is where the arachidonial thing from AG comes from. 3-AG comes from that. Right? 3-AG is just a glycerol ester of arachidonic acid. Well, can I ask this question? 2-AG. You're talking 2-AG, right? 2-AG.

1:56:18SpeakerYou're both fucking talking Greek to me, so whatever that bullshit's about. No, I'm just kidding. But if we use hemp seed oil, are you saying that it can help benefit our endocannabinoid system and help our body create the chemicals that basically interact with these receptors? There's some suggestion that, yeah, having a diet high in essential fatty acids, essentially it makes sure you have all the precursors. That these systems operate on, right?

1:56:49SpeakerThey're even, I mean, they were feeding, I don't know if it was, I think it was chickens that they were feeding hemp seed and then they were showing that there was high levels of EFAs in the eggs, right?

1:57:01IndraDon't you think that hemp seed was an important diet, especially in the older times where people could store a vast amount of hemp seed And in the winter, get oil and protein from it.

1:57:19SpeakerYeah, sorry, go ahead. No, what you're saying is absolutely true. And you know, there were, if you go back and you read the testimony that surrounded the Marijuana Tax Act in the 30s, there was the House Resolutions Committee that actually had meetings before the Senate. And they actually had Byrd Basically people that worked with birds coming in and saying that they couldn't basically outlaw hemp seed because without hemp seed, the birds didn't molt.

1:57:52SpeakerThey didn't make their feathers correctly when they took it away. And at the time, we're talking 20s and 30s technology. They did not know what EFAs were inside of the seeds. So they didn't know that they were taking away the essential fatty acids from these birds and that was causing their feathers not to grow. But yes, it was part of gruel, the old recipe in the 19th century.

1:58:19SpeakerAnd you've got to realize every single place in this country that they grew the canvas that they used on the canvas covered wagons and the sails and the ropes was all cannabis and all of that was making seed. And absolutely, there's no way they were not using that as a food product when it was readily available.

1:58:39IndraWell, I know that there was in Kansas, I heard some old timers tell me that during the war when they were growing a lot of hemp, that you never saw a bigger flock of birds that came around. Thank you for watching.

1:59:12SpeakerAbsolutely. But, you know, they saw that there was such a difference that they went and testified in front of our government in the 30s, basically saying, don't take our hemp seed away because our industry is going to suffer because of it.

1:59:24IndraYeah. Might have something there, though. Does that work with chickens? It makes chickens have no feathers?

1:59:31SpeakerWhat if you take away their essential fatty acids? It does a lot more than hurt their feathers. You've got to realize that it's a fundamental building block of cellular development. And if you take away EFAs like we're learning, we all can get. I personally think from the studies that I've done that everyone that's a product of the 20th century I hope you know that I was just kidding

2:00:15IndraWith the chicken remark and the no feathers.

2:00:19SpeakerBut I wasn't kidding. You know, as a kid that had cancer, in a sense, I think I was just tuned into trying to take care of myself. And then as a kid that, you know, started gardening and becoming aware of the food I was eating, you know, it was amazing to me how I couldn't fuck off the pH of a plant or I would have huge problems.

2:00:39SpeakerI couldn't feed a plant 5.6 or 5.0 water with the food and expect them to flourish. And it really caused me to reflect on what I was putting in my mouth and feeding myself.

2:00:53IndraIf I would have came across that scenario and you were standing outside McDonald's and you told your mother, no, McDonald's food isn't real. I want to go get something real to eat. I would have definitely checked myself to make sure I wasn't on acid or something. Because how many kids would actually say that standing in front of McDonald's has got to be infinitesimal. I mean, besides you.

2:01:20SpeakerNo, it was funny. She got pissed at me. I said it wasn't real food. And she said, what's real food? And I wanted a steak. I wanted potatoes. I wanted broccoli and cheese and a glass of milk. And she was like, fuck you. I remember it really clearly. But that's what I wanted. I didn't want a fucking happy meal. I wanted food.

2:01:39IndraShe was trying to convince you that the steak and the milk and everything were all in one thing with that Happy Meal, with that sandwich. It was just ground up and preserved and whacked a little bit and got some yeast and other crap in it.

2:01:52SpeakerYou know, as a kid that grew up in a hospital, I always was befuddled at the fact that they fed us the worst food in the fucking hospital when we needed to get better. You know, we all agree hospital food usually sucks and it should be the best place in town.

2:02:07IndraWell, I agree with you 100% on that. The only way my dad ended up eating hospital food was after I got him on brownies. I started bringing him hash brownies and he would eat some hospital food in between the... You know, sending me out to restaurants to get different things. But the hospital food and prison food, they tell me, never spent any time in prison. The only the reason that they smuggle marijuana into prisons is so that the food tastes good.

2:02:43SpeakerYou know what? I had a lot of marijuana while I was in prison and the food still tastes like shit.

2:02:48IndraReally? That's what I was kind of asking you in a roundabout way. I didn't want to say, you know, outright, but I heard the food tastes shitty. Even pot didn't improve it either, eh?

2:02:59SpeakerYou have no idea, dude. Me and my friends signed up as Jewish just to get common fare. So we would get fresh vegetables and a little thing of cold beans and we were quite happy to get that, let me tell you. You don't even know what tough food is. In the Los Angeles County jail system, when you were locked up in solitary confinement, they fed you what was called jute balls.

2:03:31SpeakerA jute ball was everybody else's dinner ground up and baked into loaves.

2:03:38Etienne FontanHey, it beats MREs, man. Fuck that shit.

2:03:40SpeakerIt's all the leftovers. And it finally got declared unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court, and they had to quit serving it to prisoners. But that's what they got.

2:03:54IndraWell, I hate to tell you what they get to eat in prison in Thailand.

2:04:00SpeakerWell, my message is grow organic weed and eat organic food and treat your body well, at least as good as you treat your plants. And most jails in Thailand, you can get your food delivered to you. Yeah.

2:04:13IndraSend out for Thai food.

2:04:14SpeakerLet's hope we all never find out what it's like to be in a Thai prison. Well, isn't it technically all Thai delivery at that point?

2:04:23IndraYeah. It's impossible for a Westerner to end up in jail in Thailand if you have money in your pocket while you're there.

2:04:34SpeakerNo, that's not true. If they're coming looking for you, that's not true.

2:04:39IndraWell, let's just say on the street, okay? You know, in various situations, like I remember riding a motorcycle there and the cops stopped me. No, I didn't have a license, but 50 whatever. I forget what the money was at the time. And he put it in his pocket and patted me on the back and said, right off. And so, you know, 50 baht used to be about two or three dollars.

2:05:07IndraOK, 50 baht. That was it. Yeah. Anyway, he said goodbye after I gave him 50 bucks. So, you know, my experience in India was unless you killed some... Actually, if you ran over someone in India, it was better to kill them because the insurance limit in India was 5,000 rupees if someone died. And that was the limit. And if you just ran them over and crippled them, you could end up paying 60, 70, 80,000.

2:05:33SpeakerIf you're driving in India, the last thing you want to do is run over a cow.

2:05:44SpeakerSome crowds get really excited about that.

2:05:49IndraWell, they view you killed the cow. You should have been, you know, cows have the right in India, as you well know, sir, to go anywhere. They go in shops. They, you know, go in houses. Nobody, nobody really blocks them off. And so if you hit one, it's because you weren't paying attention to the sacred Nandi.

2:06:12SpeakerWell, you don't have to hit it, but I've seen a lot of cows chased away from a lot of like food stalls and things like that. Probably Muslims. No, no, no, no. This was Christians and Hindus. Well, especially in Goa, they're mostly Christians, but the rest of India, they're Hindu. They will not let the cows come and steal the vegetables or so. They won't let them do it.

2:06:42IndraYeah, I've seen them in Goa shooing them away from the juice carts. You know, the cows track down the juice cart because they want to eat those skins from the juices that they've been making. And so those guys have to kind of beat them off as it were. And what they do is they'll dump the skins in one spot and then move their cart. And all the cows will congregate on that spot.

2:07:06IndraAnd, you know, it's still an ongoing thing. You're supposed to expect that. Respect the cows. It's a blessing to feed them. People at the vegetable markets, you can find someone walking around with a bag full of grass and you can, you know, for one or two rupees, you buy a handful of grass and feed the cows. You need to respect the cows. Yeah. That's where the saying came from.

2:07:32IndraHoly cow. Remember? No, it saves you from reincarnation.

2:07:38SpeakerWell, in Bombay, I would go to the five-star hotels like the Taj or whatever, and I would get a piece of cow because they sold imported beef steaks in the restaurants.

2:07:56IndraAt the Taj, you could get anything. They had all imported stuff. You could get smoked chicken, beef steak, ham, you know. They had it all available there, but that place is what?

2:08:08SpeakerDo they still sell cannabis or hashish openly in any of those old hash shops? Not in Nepal anymore, but I've heard, not ganja, but bong is still available in India, even though they agreed to stop it, but they still haven't.

2:08:31IndraThose bong carts are everywhere. You can't, I mean. It's going to take them 20 years to get rid of all those.

2:08:38SpeakerThey said more than 20 years ago they were going to do it, but they still haven't done it.

2:08:44IndraHaven't even come close. When you go to Rishi, those little bong carts are everywhere, especially in safety.

2:08:51SpeakerAnd in Calcutta, it's distributed through the state tax excise department. You know, it's all tax and regulated the market. And it's sold through licensed bong shops in Calcutta. So, you know, that's not going anywhere.

2:09:07IndraYou know, I don't know if you've ever had it, but in Calcutta.

2:09:10SpeakerI wouldn't say that because they used to have bong shops in Bangladesh. And I visited Dhaka when I had heard they'd all been closed down. And I went to four or five X locations. They had all been closed down by the police and they were no longer there. Huh. So everything changes. Nothing stays the same. That's one thing you can depend on. Yep.

2:09:38IndraThat's why there's no quote unquote going home.

2:09:44IndraHome is where the heart is. That's the gosh of the truth.

2:09:56SpeakerBong rip.

2:10:01SpeakerNicely done it, Jen. If you guys ever sent a sample off and it came back at 39% THCA, would you... I would say bullshit.

2:10:13Etienne FontanI would send it to three other labs and replicate that immediately.

2:10:19SpeakerOkay, so when something comes back at 39%, it would almost have to look like it's white crystalline solid or something, right?

2:10:29Etienne FontanThe plant would be hanging over, hitting the ground from the weight.

2:10:33SpeakerHoney buds are about 40%. Honey buds are about 40%. What are honey buds? The dipment oil. Yeah, but that's not natural. I understand what you're saying. I've never seen... He sent a sample. He sent a sample off. The highest THCA I've ever seen was in the very low 30s. Low 30s, okay. Yeah, I've seen 32, like in the 32 to 33 percent. I've never seen above 34, 35.

2:11:04SpeakerAnd what do those flowers look like? I mean, could you physically see the crystallinity of the THCA on those flowers? Well, not crystallinity, but you could see the resin.

2:11:15Etienne FontanThe resin, right. Yeah, it's all about the resin. And it's definitely, you're like, holy shit, that stuff's stacked. Wait, wait, Mark. That's very few and far between. You don't see that often.

2:11:25SpeakerNo, they're rare. And even most good labs, if they see a number over 30, they'll reprep it and rerun it just to confirm.

2:11:33Etienne FontanAnd we give extra with our samples so in case we ever have an issue, we have a backup for them to actually rerun so that we can make sure it's replicated or not.

2:11:44SpeakerIn our lab in the early 90s, if we hit 25, 26, 27, we were really happy. But we had also learned that THC, although important, it's a skeleton, what you really want is the correct... Possibly other cannabinoids, but especially the terpenes. That's what makes the big difference. More THC, if you don't have terpenes, will not make great pot. It'll make strong pot, but not great pot. You need the right terpenes.

2:12:21Etienne FontanSomeone in chat says, I bet you Todd's beer tests at 39%.

2:12:30SpeakerWe ought to extract Todd's beard in John's extractor. Yeah, but isn't that mostly CBN? We ought to just extract Todd.

2:12:38IndraI don't think it would, but... Yeah, I've extracted greasy things, but...

2:12:48SpeakerWelcome, Tony. What's going on? What used to really trip me out about cannabis was I looked at hundreds of different varieties, both industrial, drug varieties, ganja varieties, hashish varieties, was when grown under identical conditions, the differences in the resin. In other words, when you harvest a plant, some of them are oily and greasy. Some of them are already quite dry and sticky. I mean, there's just so many differences with the resin.

2:13:22SpeakerI think primarily from the terpenes. Did that correlate to THCA level though, Sam? Not always, because if it was a type 3 plant, it would be highly resinous but no THC, right? Correct.

2:13:38SpeakerNot just that easy. It's just that some resin, even after you've dried and cured it for three months, it's still oily and greasy to the touch. You can't let it touch a plastic bag because it just smears.

2:13:58Etienne FontanIt almost marries it.

2:14:01SpeakerYeah, you lose your resin quick.

2:14:05IndraMust have a cascading effect.

2:14:10IndraWhat happened to Mark?

2:14:14IndraYou said if you stuck it near a plastic bag, it would... Mark had technical difficulties. Again?

2:14:22Etienne FontanOh, way, way again. Yeah. Yeah, we had to actually restart the whole thing, running it from Todd this time, unfortunately. And he tried to speak, and even where he was speaking, he was still getting choppy, unfortunately.

2:14:35SpeakerHe's at another one. It's called Crash Site. That explains the last hour and a half I was in two different chats with nobody, and I was just smoking away. And what's really funny is Tony didn't notice they were there until after an hour. Uh-huh. I was like sitting around like you're the only one. I love that you're that patient and your stash is that good that you're like, it's cool.

2:14:59SpeakerI was just like, huh. And then I tried the other link and I'm like, well.

2:15:03Etienne FontanTony, you should have said you were giving all your secrets over in the other chat.

2:15:10SpeakerBut so I decided to clean my rig and then I was like, maybe I have the wrong link. Maybe it's not happening. And then I actually found Todd's link. So. Well, you know, I didn't understand it, so I sent it again. But yeah, well, you know, we're learning. I've only been doing this two years. This happens. Todd is the new Pope of Hash Church. No, no, no.

2:15:31SpeakerI don't want Mark's job. I don't like it. He does multi-task really well. We're going to blow smoke towards Todd. No, I vote Mark. Mark is impressive. He talks to people in the little YouTube thing, which I totally ignore.

2:15:49Etienne FontanWe could pretend we have a democracy here. We could actually vote, you know.

2:15:52SpeakerNo, I quit. No, that's it.

2:15:57SpeakerNo, we vote for Mark or I quit. I think what Todd should do is wear a t-shirt and a mask so he looks just like... I look like Mark. I still couldn't do the multitasking. No, it's hard. I'm slipping bong hits over here, precious bong hits trying to pay attention to you guys. He had me sit down one time in Spain in his little command center and you have to click on people while they're talking and then you have to like, it's just very difficult.

2:16:24SpeakerIt's a full-time situation. It amazes me that he moderates that YouTube chat and talks to us and tries to intelligently get people on. It's quite the little juggle. I don't want this job. I'll say that.

2:16:40IndraAll hail Mark.

2:16:42SpeakerMarcus. Hey, I liked Bubble Man's World. You know, when I, I got to say, you know, it was fun taking, going on the adventures and seeing, you know, how he was doing things and talking about cannabis. You know, when video started hitting on the internet, I thought it was cool that he kind of rode that wave and here we are having this conversation and bringing, you know, the word of cannabis out to people.

2:17:08SpeakerGod knows how many people will watch this.

2:17:10Etienne FontanNot many people would take the chance to speak about cannabis, and he was definitely one of those earlier pioneers who was willing to get out there and do so intelligently. I mean, there's always people who are just getting on and just smoking pot.

2:17:22SpeakerIt put a definitely a different face. You know, he wasn't the stupid stoner. He's out there riding dirt bikes and playing in his boat and, you know, enjoying, you know, the snow and, you know, just really living a healthy life. And this is the view. This is the face of a stoner now. I mean, look at all the snowboardists that have gone on to win gold, you know, the snowboarders.

2:17:40SpeakerAnd I mean, cannabis users are kind of coming out of the woodwork and we're not a bunch of You know, low life, you know, near dwells were actually very successful neighbors of yours who you would never suspected are complete potheads. Are you trying to say that your average cannabis smoker is going to use it as a stepping stone to go directly to snow? Yeah, they're going to go skiing is what they're going to do.

2:18:07SpeakerThey're going to get high, grab a snowboard, and go hit powder, man. It's true. I heard cannabis does lead to life.

2:18:15IndraThere is no evidence to prove either of those theories.

2:18:23SpeakerOh, I'm living this. Do you know, though, I think this whole thing's moving towards wellness because we're all, you know, everybody that's using cannabis medically, you know, they're doing it to pursue a healthier life. I mean, everybody wants to, you know, fully enjoy time with their children and being able to be active and go hiking and have an existence. And cannabis gives a lot of us the ability to live very normal lives.

2:18:49SpeakerAnd I think that's what we all are here for. That's what we all owe to cannabis is this You know, feeling of contentness that it gives us all, and I love it.

2:19:00IndraThere's a YouTube channel, which is a real hoot. It's where they give elderly and vets cannabis for the first time. Try it and smoke it. And they'll usually have anywhere up to a half a dozen people sitting around the table, and they got a bong, and they fill it up, and they keep filling it up. And these old people, I mean, these elderly people, I don't want to say old because Jesus Christ, I'm 70.

2:19:26IndraAnd so, anyway, they take it and they take a few hits and they're very uptight at first, you know, take a tiny little hit and pass on. And by the third time, they're already going, hey, Bogart, pass that bomb, you know, and they're getting a buzz and they're getting high. And then afterwards, they interview them. And a good half of them say stuff like, well, I thought it was going to be bad, but instead it was really good.

2:19:55IndraI think I want to do it again.

2:19:57SpeakerBut can I throw this out there? When I look at people like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, They're really, really freaking old, and they're a voice of a generation, and they are all potheads. I mean, Bob Dylan literally wrote fucking Rainy Day Woman. I mean, so how could everyone from his generation onward not get it? Wasn't Dylan a junkie for a long time? Yeah, he was. Well, junkie aside, he still was a pothead that turned on the fucking Beatles, who wrote Got to Get You Into My Life about cannabis.

2:20:33SpeakerI mean, so, yeah, cannabis has been pretty influential in hippies going way back. I'm not sure I'd want to take the advice of a junk, to be honest. Well, thank God Paul McCartney did. He's a super stoner now. And he wrote a lot of really cool music, Stoned on Weed.

2:20:54IndraAnd he got married for six months to a one-legged lady who then took his fortune and went south with it?

2:21:00SpeakerNo, no. He still has a fortune. He's fine. But anyway, he did write some really cool shit about cannabis. He's still a sir. I mean, look at David Gilmour. They're all total stoners.

2:21:11IndraI'm sorry, Tim. She was disabled. Excuse me.

2:21:17Etienne FontanSo I do know somebody who's working on, because of, you know, I talked last week how, you know, we've tried to do hospice and other things like that in the past with BPG, but I know somebody who's working on trying to do a nursing home that will allow cannabis in California so that people can have, elderly people can have that type of transition with their cannabis safely.

2:21:42Etienne FontanSo She's working on that and trying to navigate the realities of it, but hopefully it will come to reality soon.

2:21:51SpeakerOne of the closest to that, Jen, is the work done by Valerie down at WAM in Santa Cruz. I mean, almost all of her patients were dying.

2:22:02Etienne FontanOh yeah, and unfortunately a lot of them have. Unfortunately, Valerie also lost her land and is now, unfortunately, WAM is... Mobile. I'm not even sure if Wham is even continuing in its present state due to the loss of the property.

2:22:20SpeakerI think it is, and I think that she's going to try to put on an event maybe this spring or summer with a local radio station. So I think she's actually still organizing and such, and they had a pretty decent network of people, so I think she's just networking and pulling it together. I know she's still kind of dedicated to what she was doing. I got an email...

2:22:40SpeakerFrom her not too long ago. Beautiful piece of land.

2:22:46SpeakerShe had it. It was given to her by people who were the owners, and she was trying to buy it, but it was a pretty big piece of land, and it was quite expensive, and she was just unable to swing it after the state and the feds busted, took out their gardens.

2:23:06Etienne FontanWe tried different fundraisers and things like that, but in the end, we could not raise the money to save it.

2:23:11SpeakerLast time I was on her land was with Ethan Russo and Rob Clark. The three of us were visiting Valerie because Rob's known her for decades. I mean, they used to be neighbors in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

2:23:29BubblemanTalking about Valerie Corral?

2:23:31SpeakerYeah, Valerie Corral and also her ex-husband.

2:23:38IndraValerie, I sent, when I was in Switzerland, I sent her tubes of oil. And I sent her one and then I said, how are you, you know, should I send you more? And she's like, I do not fear reprisal from the authorities. Send me more. And I'm like, okay, this lady's got some balls. But I found in the building a bunch of veterinary Thank you for watching.

2:24:23IndraI forgot what the word was in German Swiss. But I sent to Valerie and she'll recall that if you run into her again, the crazy guy in Switzerland, Senator of the Oil, back when she was first starting it, you know, because I had a lot of empathy for her when I saw what was going on. And she, you know, she was, I just still remember that line where she said, I do not fear reprisal from the authorities.

2:24:51IndraSo,

2:24:51SpeakerNot only that, but she was probably the least profiteering and most selfless of the dispensary owners. Am I right about that, HM, as far as I know? Yeah. I wouldn't call what she had a dispensary per se either. I based the San Diego Compassion Club off of what Valerie and Mike were doing. Because I felt it was more in alignment to what I was trying to achieve than what Dennis was doing in San Francisco, which was basically selling weed.

2:25:21SpeakerI was appreciative that Dennis was selling weed, but she was doing more like hospice work. She was getting cannabis to people that were really, really fucking sick.

2:25:31Etienne FontanAnd not only that, the people had to actually contract to work with the plants as well. It wasn't just that you were part of the group. Thank you for joining us.

2:26:00Etienne FontanAnd very trying and even toward end of life situations. They find great solace in having access to creating life and bringing life. It brings a wellness to somebody. And then when they can actually get access to their medicine afterwards, which those that were lucky too, it was just an extra benefit on top. I mean, on top of the holistic and knowing and seeing where your plants were growing on the sun and how like you did those huge, I mean, he just would mangle those root bases.

2:26:30Etienne FontanThank you so much for joining us.

2:26:53SpeakerYeah, Mike was able to consistently produce two or three kilo plants when most people were having trouble getting one kilo. Yeah, he was always an exceptional grower. You know, he was one of the first I saw that was doing a longer pre-growing.

2:27:13Etienne FontanAnd yeah, exactly that. And that was some of the blackest plants I would see too. He had some plants that just direct sunlight would just, the leaves were black. It was amazing. Just beautiful plants, always healthy. And all the way to the end and always the flowers, the end product, the patients got prime grade A medicine.

2:27:38SpeakerYeah, Wham was very influential here in California for decades. I mean, I started the Compassion Club in 95, so we're talking a long fucking time ago. And she was already established in what they were doing was really, to me, the model of what I was hoping everybody would do collectively. You know, because it was more than just providing cannabis to people. They were providing community to people.

2:28:02SpeakerAnd they were giving people the ability to actually understand how their cannabis was created and have a part in that, which is very enriching to anyone who grows, I would say.

2:28:19Etienne FontanYeah, their absence is definitely felt and missed because they were pioneers.

2:28:26SpeakerI think they're just decentralized. So they still have production in some members' backyards or something along those lines is the last I heard. Yeah, I think they're genuinely a collective of patients that are trying to help one another out. Santa Cruz is a unique place that has a lot of good people that have been living there for a long time. And they are very empathetic and very compassionate of their neighbors.

2:28:51SpeakerIt's a really great vibe. I always thought I would end up living there someday in my life.

2:28:56Etienne FontanSo Santa Cruz, they actually, yeah, they let them actually come out and sell on the steps of the city. So that was one of the most earlier ballsy things that we saw was, you know, and I thank Berkeley for following in Santa Cruz's suit. Thank you so much for joining us today.

2:29:33SpeakerThe only trouble with Santa Cruz was always when I first moved there in 1970, property values were already starting to go through the roof after the UCSC was, I think it's called it's 65 or 66, something like that. And prices just went from like $25,000 homes are now worth, you know, half a million plus. So, yeah. As long as you could afford it, Santa Cruz was truly heaven.

2:30:05Etienne FontanSo it's kind of, it wasn't always the expensive place to be, is what you're saying?

2:30:09SpeakerNo, when I first went there and visited before I moved there in 70, I drove through it. What it really looked like to me was a little farm shit-kicking town. I mean, it had none of the culture that you know now. And there was a lot of summer vacation homes that were empty in the wintertime.

2:30:30Etienne FontanAnd it's all, you know, it's all farming around there.

2:30:35SpeakerIt used to be, now they build houses.

2:30:38Etienne FontanYeah.

2:30:44SpeakerI lived in Santa Cruz most of my life in California. I know it really well and I really, really love it. And the Mexican food. So what year did haze become popular? What is the haze? Tell me about haze. Late 60s is when the haze was developed up in the Santa Cruz Mountains by a single grower up by Pacific High School. And For a couple of years it was grown up there, but it was really hard to finish.

2:31:16SpeakerIt depended on the weather and growing haze outdoors without a greenhouse really sucks. But they tried. Then they moved down to the city of Santa Cruz and he started growing it there maybe 1970 and was my neighbor.

2:31:37SpeakerAnd he also had a buddy of his growing it. And that's why people say the Hayes brothers. Well, they weren't brothers, but they both grew it. And it was the same seeds and the same genetics from the original guy. And what he started with was... A Columbian Gold, a Columbian Magenta, and a Punta Rojas Columbian. So it was just three pure Columbians that were crossed and crossed and crossed.

2:32:10SpeakerAnd eventually when the haze started sort of being inbred and petering out, After maybe five or 10 years, they also tried adding South Indian and Thai to try to perk it up a little bit and give it some more vigor. But basically it was just pure Colombian. It was truly, truly the finest, Cannabis I've ever smoked in my life, not only for the flavors, taste and effects and potency, but just the whole ball of wax.

2:32:42SpeakerAlthough the purple ones were maybe the strongest purple haze. They weren't as clear and as uplifting. They were just more sort of like a punch in the nose, but really, really mind-bogglingly strong. Can I ask, when did Hayes make its way across the pond and into the Dutch coffee shop breeding scene? Oh, it was never in the Netherlands until after 84 when I bought it. But 85, I think, was the first year it was grown in any amounts.

2:33:14SpeakerWhen did Neville get his hands on it? 85, maybe 84, I don't remember.

2:33:22SpeakerI always felt like, you know, for the history, you know, don't take it wrong. It was Neville's crossing it with, you know, things like NL5 that made it really famous in my history. He definitely made it popular because he would sell seeds to anybody in any country. Whereas I was much more conservative and wanted to obey the law. But the end effect of it was, That's a very interesting plant.

2:33:50SpeakerIt's a really good plant, but it's not pure haze. It's a hybrid that's mostly haze. And pure hazes are so different about them. I don't know what to say. Gotcha. So was the NL5 by haze one of the first representations of the case process that started to come around in the... Hold on a minute. I've got to push a button.

2:34:21SpeakerWas NL5 by Hayes? Why not? Sorry. Was it NL5? That's awesome. That was you making all those cracks? No, it wasn't. It was fucking Ryan, man. I was over here trying to ask a button, but I realized I had the power to make it stop, so I was like, ah, shit. See, fuck this. I don't want Mark's job. I mean, I've been on for a long time.

2:34:43SpeakerIt's way too difficult. I was going to Todd's head, I'm telling you.

2:34:48IndraYou know, it seems that I remember getting Neville's Haze pretty early on when I was going back and forth between India and Amsterdam all the time.

2:34:59SpeakerI think if it was Neville's Haze, it would have been in the later 90s. What year are you talking about? 97?

2:35:05Indra98? Well, I started going there in 85.

2:35:10SpeakerNo, I understand, but what year were you getting Neville's Haze from Neville?

2:35:15IndraI'm trying to remember. I got seeds from him, and I brought them to India, and we grew them on the roof of our house in India, and they never grew over two feet high. They just started flowering at the second time.

2:35:27SpeakerWas it pure haze, or was it a haze hybrid with Northern Lights? Um... Well, if they only grew two feet, they were definitely a hybrid with Northern Life.

2:35:37IndraThat's what I'm thinking, but I don't know. I thought I had a couple. I bought them directly from him.

2:35:43SpeakerWeren't A's, I'll say that. But he sold everything, you know, John. He sold, you know, he was the fucking Holland Seed Bank. He had everything. I know.

2:35:52IndraListen, I bought... I grew, I took it back to India to grow, especially in Bangalore, because in Bangalore, when you plant them from the second set of leaves on, they start flowering because it's right on the equator. And so you get a three foot tall bud.

2:36:07SpeakerThat's not, that's not true, John. If you grow a South Indian Kerala variety in Bangalore or in Goa or any place else, they, they can easily get five, 10 feet tall. Well, I hate this girl like mad. I mean, the ones I got from Neville never grew over three foot tall. They must have had widely drug variety hybrid. Must have been the urban rights time says. There's no way a three foot, if a fucking plant, a haze didn't grow over three feet high.

2:36:41SpeakerCome on.

2:36:42IndraI'm just telling you that's what we had.

2:36:44SpeakerNo, no, then it wasn't Hayes is all my point really is. It could have been anything coming out of Neville's pocket. It was a Hayes hybrid. He used to sell Hayes hybrids that were like three quarters Hayes and one quarter Northern Lights. I completely am aware of that. My favorite was NL5 by Hayes, but then Jack was with the same Hayes male, Jack Herritt, and then later on, I mean, Silver Pearl was the same male, Hayes male, right?

2:37:12SpeakerI don't know, I just remember. What became Silver Haze and what became Neville's Haze? Did you know that Rob developed Silver Pearl? No, please tell me about it. Yeah, no, Rob did it. He sold it to Neville. Does it have haze in it? No, it doesn't. What is in Silver Pearl? It's Pollyanna times Early Girl. Wow, Pollyanna. Whatever happened to Pollyanna? I have no idea. The last one I know who had it was Neville.

2:37:47SpeakerOh, okay. Okay. Well, I love it when I stand corrected. You know, there's so many great varieties from back then that I wonder just, you know, whatever happened to a lot of them kind of just got kicked off. Well, I'd say in general, cannabis is getting more potent. But it's also, unfortunately to me, getting more similar to itself. In other words, a lot of the varieties don't have a lot of distinctiveness.

2:38:19SpeakerAnd that's what I really like, especially with narrowly drug varieties with the right terpenes. That's, to me, that's the holy grail. Yeah, Hayes dominated the cannabis cups in Amsterdam in 95, 6, 7.

2:38:33Etienne FontanWe saw when we actually did testing, you know, after doing over a thousand tests, we saw that it's right. A lot of the genetics are very similar in chemical structure. We were looking for the anomalies and that's how we found CBD.

2:38:49IndraWell, I was showing oil at around 96, 97, 98 in Amsterdam when I was there. I would show oil. I mean, I don't know if you guys remember or any of you knew Steve, Big Nose Steve. He had a mushroom and pot shop on the corner right by the train station and a couple of other spots. But anyway, I showed it to him way back when. And he was...

2:39:15IndraWhat the fuck is that at that particular point in time? Because he was selling a lot of hash and flowers. And so I showed it to him. I brought some oil from India with me from the seeds that I got from Neville the year before. And it made some really potent oil, let me tell you.

2:39:34SpeakerSteve was always really nice. I hope he's doing well. He was always a really happy person for me to see.

2:39:41BubblemanTalking about Steve Hayes.

2:39:43SpeakerYeah, Steve the nose. Yeah, he always preferred hazes.

2:39:49BubblemanYeah, of course. I follow him on Facebook, so I see his updates.

2:39:56IndraIsn't he in Ibiza now or something?

2:39:59BubblemanI think he's in Amsterdam.

2:40:02IndraUh-huh.

2:40:05IndraI know he usually buys two apartments and rents one out. Many, many times when I went back and forth between India and Amsterdam, I would rent his upstairs apartment, or at least a bed in it, where we would stay waiting for the visas.

2:40:27IndraThose were the days. That was when you could stay in a hotel in Amsterdam for 30 guilders a night.

2:40:38IndraActually, everything in Amsterdam was fairly reasonable then when it was a pot tourist town. You could eat yourself silly for seven or eight guilders.

2:40:47SpeakerAlso, too, at that time, the dollar was high compared to the guilder. So it made it really easy. Now the euro is pretty fucking strong.

2:40:57IndraYeah, and they cost double to stay in the same hotel a couple of years ago.

2:41:04SpeakerI think more than double, but whatever. I mean, you can't stay in a decent place in Amsterdam for less than 100 euros a night.

2:41:12IndraYeah, well, that was a big change, though, wasn't it?

2:41:18IndraAnyway, the only reason I went there was for the visas, and I could have picked anywhere. I could have gone to Hong Kong or whatever. But in Amsterdam, you can go to a coffee shop, get pot, sit down and have a cup of strong coffee and talk with like-minded people. And it was hard to do at that point in time. So it was a great time. I enjoyed Amsterdam.

2:41:42IndraI think I got in on Amsterdam while it was still Something to be gotten in on. I don't think so anymore though.

2:41:49SpeakerEvery one of my friends had been to Amsterdam before me. Because I didn't visit until 84. And they all told me that I would love Amsterdam and I should go visit it. Well, in 84, I visited and I found, I checked with the laws and I found out that it was legal to grow cannabis in greenhouses for seed. You couldn't sell the marijuana, but for seed, that was legal.

2:42:17SpeakerAnd I moved here the next year.

2:42:22IndraYeah, you hopped on that at the right moment, didn't you?

2:42:27BubblemanNo doubt. That's awesome, man.

2:42:31Etienne FontanAnd you changed the world.

2:42:35Indra98 was a year of vast changes for the world. And you know vast changes are better than half vast, right?

2:42:49IndraCome on, that was a pun.

2:42:51SpeakerI thought you were gone, Todd. No, no. Amsterdam was incredible. I feel fortunate that I got to start going there with the 94 Cannabis Cup and discovering Amsterdam and that side of the culture. It has just bloomed into the whole industry in Europe now being pro-cannabis in a way that I It's great. In a way, I would say I wouldn't imagine, but in a way, I did imagine it.

2:43:18SpeakerI mean, do you remember the first time in Germany the B.O. Fock allowed hemp and they started with all these hemp plants upstairs on the third floor? In the next year, they had them growing out in front of the B.O. Fock. They put them outside the following year? Yes, correct. Yeah, in other words, at the entrance. Oh, my gosh. Wow, and good for them. You know, they were such, they were so freaked out when they saw actual hemp plants in front of them that they didn't know how to react to plants.

2:43:50SpeakerIt was really quite, it was pretty funny. Not funny. The display looked beautiful when you had them all out.

2:44:02SpeakerCannabis world is like a giant waterbed. One place starts to bulge out and become the center of the cannabis world. And then the authorities push back and push back. And another area bulges out and bulges out. They can't stop it. It's unstoppable. There's too much information and too much knowledge, too much usefulness in this plant. It's unstoppable. Yeah, I like your analogy. That's It's funny that you say that because the cannabis business started shortly thereafter.

2:44:34SpeakerThat started September of 96, I believe, in Germany, the first cannabis business, if you remember that. And then the cannabis trade started in Switzerland the following year. I used to go to both of those.

2:44:46IndraI attended all of those concerts.

2:44:51SpeakerYeah, they were fantastic. And then years and years after, after the new millennium, we got Spannabis, but... It's awesome to see how it's spread around. Exactly. You know, cannabis culture has taken over. I believe that cannabis culture is the new commodity. So everybody out there listening that has the capability of producing events and organizing their friends, you know, do it. Because that's what we need to show the world that we should be treated equally.

2:45:19Etienne FontanThis is a great question because somebody asked today or the other day I had a philosophical discussion on What is cannabis culture? We have cannabis culture that we've dealt with underground. We see what people are trying to capitalize on it. But what truly is cannabis culture? I think that's a great discussion and great thought. It's culture.

2:45:41SpeakerBecause you know what? I made a comment before that, you know, cannabis was responsible for the cultural evolution of humanity. And the person I said it to was Dan frigging Rather of all people. And he said to me, You know, don't you think that's a bit of a stretch? And I said, no. Don't you think paper was important? Clothing was important? Robes, sails, paints, varnishes, you know, all were very important to the cultural evolution of our species.

2:46:07SpeakerSo if you take cannabis out of that, how long would it have taken us to make sails and robes? And paper and paints and varnishes. I mean, cannabis was the key ingredient and a lot of fundamental products that really brought us out of the dark ages.

2:46:29Etienne FontanBut that culture has changed. So what is interesting is as the culture is going to continue to change as it becomes more commercialized, what will that become? What will be infused from the past to bring forward? Those are also parts of that cultural situation. You know, you have lingo that will become more universalized. You'll lose You know, terms like lid and things like that that will become further down the lingo line, you know, which has been lost to generations, you know, for really, Andrea.

2:47:01Etienne FontanYou know, I know we know what it is, but, you know, you say to a kid, what's a lid? You know, watch their eyes fucking light up, but they also have terminology.

2:47:10SpeakerOne finger, two finger, three finger, four finger lid?

2:47:14Etienne FontanExactly. You know, back when we used to score from the dead kids up on Haith and Ashbury, that's how they did it. This was an eighth, that was a quarter, that was three quarters, and that was an ounce. You know, that's how you did it when you didn't have a scale on the street. But that's not going to be how people buy it. That's not how going to be people are.

2:47:35Etienne FontanBut There are parts of the culture. People force the whole blacklight thing on stoner culture, but the entire stoner culture isn't blacklight. What is the culture is exactly that. It's because cannabis crosses every socioeconomic boundary. It includes culture in itself, honestly. But what is then specifically cannabis culture? We know what we've come from from our smoking circles. However, each and every one of us here have evolved and seen cannabis evolve exponentially.

2:48:08Etienne FontanOver, you know, the last 20 years and it's going to continue to. So culturally, what has it been? Culturally, what will it be as it becomes what it is? Because we didn't envision it going to be what we have currently, which are dispensaries or places where people can actually come in and physically buy cannabis, be it in the Netherlands or be it in the United States or even up in Canada.

2:48:31SpeakerI disagree. You know what I disagree with is that shit about the blacklight, man. Why are you hating on blacklights, man? Don't you get a little blacklight flashlight and a little glow-in-the-dog bong last time I fucking checked?

2:48:43IndraYou're still a fucking hippie with your blacklight. I want to admit something right now that has bugged me for a long time. I actually started the first California mobile dispensary. Because I used to stand on the street corner down by Fisherman's Wharf in 1969 with two pockets full of tie sticks. And people would walk by and I would get tie sticks. And another guy stood next to me had mushrooms and he would go acid.

2:49:11IndraAnd so I look at those at the earliest, earliest mobile dispensaries. And we were really on the forefront right there. We used to buy big heavy coats to wear. So that we had a lot of room on the inner pockets to sell stuff. And we never got recognition for being the first mobile dispensaries.

2:49:29SpeakerYeah, you did. Everybody knows about the mysterious mobile peacoat wearing drug dealers. I mean, that's part of 60s history. That's hilarious. In fact, I think I had a peacoat that was full of all kinds of various green leafy substances at various times in my life. Well, especially in 1965, 66. Yeah.

2:49:55IndraI mean, that was what was going on then. They didn't call us dispensaries.

2:50:01Etienne FontanRight, but that's stereotypes. So you basically then committed to a stereotype just as now you've got either, you know, the starter kit from the Bob Marley and the Rasta and, you know, colors and things like that that are also now almost specifically skewed toward marijuana, but it's not specifically the culture. It's been forced upon the culture and it's commercially been accessed as part of the culture, but it's an over-commercialization and a It's like a tree.

2:50:29Etienne FontanThere's a lot of different branches. I mean, some people are involved with the industrial culture of cannabis.

2:50:50SpeakerOther ones are the recreational, the medical, the spiritual. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And each branch breaks into smaller branches. So yeah, it's really huge. But the core of it, of course, is cannabis in all of its forms.

2:51:10IndraWell, it did turn out to be a gateway drug, cannabis. I mean, it directly led me to taking LSD, and it led me right to mescaline, and it led me to MDA. So it was a gateway drug in that manner, but it did not lead me to heroin. It did not lead me to pills and downers. It didn't lead me to speed and any of the rest of that.

2:51:34IndraWell, that's good. You've got something to look forward to. Yeah, what? I still have all my teeth, yeah, and most of my hair, and that's probably because I wasn't a speed freak or whatever. I can remember when LSD first came around, I went from selling joints on the Fisherman's Wharf to telling people at the various concerts that were going on, acid. You know, we would get a gram of acid from the guys over in Marin, and we would put it On paper or whatever we were going to put it on and go to the concerts and sell it.

2:52:11IndraAnd yeah, those are the early days. That was after I came back from Vietnam. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was busy doing the same thing that everybody about that age does. After you come back from a war, you feel so fucking suppressed that you no longer want to hear anything to do with authority. And you want to start doing everything that bucks authority.

2:52:33SpeakerFirst time I took acid, it was 100% legal. A year later, it was not.

2:52:41IndraYeah, same thing here. You could buy it in a number of 10 cans when I first took it. You could buy it in a bag of magazines, these chemistry engineering magazines, where they also, you know, as soon as they find out about any various drug, they produce it until it becomes illegal.

2:53:00SpeakerYou could buy LSD by the vial in the back of a magazine?

2:53:04IndraYou could buy it by the number 10 can in the back of a magazine when it was first available. It was research drug. It wasn't looked down on for any reason. It was, you know, you could just get it.

2:53:17SpeakerWhen you say a can, like a can of paint, like what do you mean a can?

2:53:22IndraLike one of those paint cans that holds a gallon of paint. You could get a gallon of liquid? No, you wouldn't get liquid. You would get it and it would be full of these tiny packages of it that were packaged to not let light mess with it. But you could buy that. You could buy 2CB at the time. You could buy a number of drugs that were being commercially made in these laboratories before they were made illegal.

2:53:53IndraIt depends. You had to be paying attention to it. And I was. I told you guys at the time I was working for the guy who, the first guy who made MDA. And he made it and popularized it. And, you know, I used to, it was always interesting to me way back when he produced some 2CB and we tried it at the end of an MDA trip.

2:54:15IndraAnd it just blew the whole thing all up over again and made the MDA trip come off like gangbusters again. Was he German? Was he German? He was a Prussian guy.

2:54:26SpeakerNo, the reason I'm asking is because wasn't the first MDA made in Europe?

2:54:32IndraOh, well, yeah. Merck made the first MDA. They were looking for a diet drug, and then all these German women kept coming back going, yeah, I want to lose some more weight. Can you give me again? That's fantastic. And so they stopped that right away because anything that made you feel good was a no-no. But it didn't get made again. That That set, Merck had that patent for years.

2:54:57IndraAnd my friend was the first one that picked that patent up and started making it and selling it.

2:55:05SpeakerI thought the, is it the MDA or the MMDA patent? Which is controlled by Rick Doblins at NAPT.

2:55:17IndraI don't know. I know MDA is what we made. That was the first itineration of MMDA.

2:55:26SpeakerMAPZONE is one of them, but I forget.

2:55:29IndraMDMA. Well, there's MDMA, there's MMDA, depending on how... No, that's what MAPZONE is.

2:55:38SpeakerThe research that's going into what you call ecstasy is into the MDMA chemical. Rick Doblin started the multidisciplinary... Thank you for joining us.

2:56:09SpeakerYes, most definitely. Rick has been a champion in medical cannabis. He's one of the people that actually first put together the vaporization studies in the mid-90s with California Normal, if you remember them, versus vaporizer.

2:56:23Etienne FontanThe first event I ever worked was the 50th anniversary of LSD, which was sponsored by MAPS and Cal Normal.

2:56:29SpeakerWe have had Rick on previous episodes of Hash Church, and I can have Rick on again. He's been a friend of mine for almost a quarter century.

2:56:38Etienne FontanHe's an amazing human, an amazing researcher. And not only that, he has taken the boundaries and pushed them so that he has been working for, I mean, he's been working on the MDMA stuff for 20 plus years to arrive where we are here. So he's one to show and has led the struggle all the way to show that you can get this done as a researcher. It's just going to take time, research.

2:57:00Etienne FontanYou're going to have to work on the funding, but it is possible. And he is a living testament to making it happen.

2:57:07SpeakerIn the case of cannabis, he has had very little progress. I mean, to be honest. Yes, no, he's been up against a lot. And yes, it's really crazy to think he's gotten further with MDMA than he has with cannabis. Yeah, I was about to say that. He's gotten further with MDMA, yeah. But society has moved cannabis along in a way that his influence could not have.

2:57:32IndraHey, Todd, if you talk to him next time, ask him if he knows about right-hand molecule just straight MDA. Not left-hand. Usually he uses tartaric acid, the chiral modifier, and just get the right-hand molecule MDA.

2:57:50SpeakerThey have an annual event here in the Bay, John, and if you'd like to come down for it, I can arrange your tickets and such. It'd be no problem. I'll look into it and get back to you. Everyone that's paying attention, maps.org is their website. They're a completely non-profit organization and they do incredible work and do a lot of subjects like even Dance Safe that everybody would be pretty interested in to some degree.

2:58:17Etienne FontanAnd they sell arts and books, and if you're looking for any books regarding psychedelics or any type of amazing psychedelic art, go to maps.org. They have always amazing things. I've picked up amazing Alex Gray art through them and things like that. So they're a great organization to support because they put their money where their mouth is, and they've been out to support drug policy for decades. So they're an organization that can always use your support.

2:58:47SpeakerRick has really done a good job of not just approaching it politically, but approaching the culture and getting artists like Alex Gray and, you know, Alexander Shulgin and his wife, Ann, rest his soul. You know, these people were some of the more fundamental parts of the psychedelic community and Rick, through his organization, reached out and created Or, you know, basically events around them and included them in.

2:59:15SpeakerI think what he's doing is really cool. But anyone who's been a tripper would benefit checking out everything that they have going on.

2:59:27SpeakerOr even not a tripper, really.

2:59:31Etienne FontanAnd then money goes to research. Hey, whatever happened, I heard they were raffling off or they were trying to raise money for that kilo of MDMA for research.

2:59:40SpeakerRight, last time, they're still, I think, raising the money. Last time he was on this show, they talked about how they're legally trying to raise money to purchase a kilo of pure MDMA for research purposes.

2:59:55IndraEasy enough to make.

2:59:58SpeakerIt is, but they have a limited source that they can get it from. Right, and they have to buy it from them, yeah. And if you have a license, you can't use illicit MDA. Right. Illicit.

3:00:13Etienne FontanYeah. Well, you have to prove source and efficacy as well as purity and standards. And that's why that all has to be done on this tightrope so that we can do the research properly because he hasn't wasted all these times and years to do it wrong. He's only trying to do it right for everybody.

3:00:28SpeakerOkay, well then Psychedelic Science 2017 is coming to Oakland, California April 19th through the 24th of 2017, which is pretty significant. I didn't realize it was almost a week long at Merritt City Center in Oakland.

3:00:46IndraMy birthday is April 22nd, so that would be an outstanding experience.

3:00:51Etienne FontanThey'll have books and art there as well, and sometimes Alex Gray comes out and usually speaks and stuff like that.

3:00:58SpeakerI'm sure he will. They're talking about to share and discover new research and the benefits and risks of MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine, ibogaine, medical cannabis, and more. One of my old time favorite books on the subject is Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford. Yeah.

3:01:23SpeakerYeah. That's a compendium. 79 days away. That's cool.

3:01:32IndraI tell you, for years when I was working for my friend Ben when he was making that, I used to think that... Someone should take, we should have taken a truckload of it and dumped it in the reservoir in Los Angeles so that enough people could feel the experience of their heart opening and realizing that there was love in the world and you could obtain it. Because I clearly remember the first time I took the MDA and when I came down the next day, I wasn't completely down.

3:02:04IndraBut my first question out of my mouth was, how do I get myself to feel that way all the time? That intensity of love and that much radiating it and receiving it myself in the universe. And that's what I wanted to do.

3:02:19SpeakerWhat a difference, huh? The first time I took MDA, I really didn't like it at all. It made me gnash my teeth. And yeah, it just, I don't like stimulants basically.

3:02:31IndraWell, see, that's why I said about right-hand molecule. Left-hand molecule is the definitely fidget on the couch for an hour. But a right-hand molecule is you don't even... No, it's come on. You've taken it. Half hour's gone by. You're sitting talking with someone and suddenly you realize you're in perfect sync with them and you want to stop talking and just lean over and give them a hug.

3:02:52IndraAnd that's what right hand molecules like. There's no fidget.

3:02:56SpeakerDo you think that MDA and associated MDMA are true psychedelics or they just feel good drugs?

3:03:06IndraI think they're ethnogens, and in the case of MDMA, an intactogen as well. But you'd have to ask Dr. Sheldon for a clearer explanation on that, but that's how I feel about it. It's definitely an ethnogen.

3:03:23SpeakerRight, but what I mean the way LSD, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, those are true psychedelic drugs.

3:03:34IndraYeah, I don't... MDA, it wasn't to me. I don't think it's... You know, I have had some strong doses. I mean, I've had as much as a gram of right-hand molecule MDA while we were sitting out in the desert at No Name Hot Springs in Southern California. And... It got pretty psychedelic. I mean, either we imagined it or some beings came in a dark vehicle with green windows and watched us while we were in the hot tubs.

3:04:08IndraAnd they repeatedly came and when we tried to walk towards them, they would silently disappear again. So now, was that the drug or, I don't know. The experience felt as real as real can be to me at the time. And I still, when I think back on it, I still remember and feel, you know. But being high and having that experience left some of the detail out of the experience.

3:04:34IndraBecause I've gone to that place many times and I've always felt something there. It's one of those places where you do feel something. And it's five miles off the road out in the desert. I don't know if anybody else has ever heard of it or been there, but it's an amazing spot. As far as a true psychedelic, I don't know. It comes close to the line. It starts to cross the line into the...

3:05:04IndraPsychedelic experience, but it's so much more body than it is mind. And when you take mushrooms or LSD, it's really mind.

3:05:13SpeakerI discussed the same thing with Dr. Lilly, who thought ketamine was a true psychedelic. I did not. To me, it was a depersonalization drug. It's a Cadillac compared to PCP's beat up old Ford, but it's still really, really similar. You don't think ketamine's a psychedelic? No, not at all.

3:05:39IndraMe neither. I didn't want to take it two times in a row. I thought, you know, yeah.

3:05:44SpeakerNo, it didn't ring my bell, but I have done it more than once.

3:05:50IndraNo, I've done ayahuasca I don't know how many times, but ketamine, I did that and afterwards I was like, ho-hum, you know.

3:05:59SpeakerI actually didn't have a ho-hum. The first time I did it, I went to John Lilly's house. My friend asked me if I wanted to go do deprivation floating, so sensory deprivations floating. I said yes. And when we were driving out to Malibu, he told me that it was at John Lilly's house, and I was pretty blown away. And when we got there, John was actually there.

3:06:20SpeakerAnd I got to sit and hang out with John. And when I went to, you know, I showered and when I went to go into the tank, his assistant basically offered me a ketamine because he said that's what they usually use when they go in. And I was, you know, at John Lilly's house. So I said, yes. Freaked out initially and then while I was freaking out, my friend was in the living room talking to John and his assistant and John heard me flailing and he then did some ketamine himself and went in the bedroom and he laid down on the bed.

3:06:54SpeakerWhich was next to the deprivation tank I was in. And it felt like a very psychedelic experience because I felt like he kind of came into my trip and guided me to calmness. And then after I tripped, because it only lasted like an hour, I took a long shower. And then when it came out, me and him sat there and I smoked joints and he smoked cigarettes.

3:07:12SpeakerAnd we talked about a lot of things. And I don't know, I felt like it was a psychedelic experience. And then I've done it again with someone sitting on this panel. And that was pretty trippy. I mean. So I don't know. I kind of think it is a similar experience. With DMT, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, there is absolutely no doubt. Those are different. Yeah, I'm not saying DMT is great, as is LSD, so is psilocybin.

3:07:47SpeakerI'm not knocking any of them. But ketamine in its own right. And unlike those other things I just named, I did want to do those again. I really, really did not want to, I don't like ketamine.

3:07:59IndraMescaline is the thing, man. Look, pure peyote drip is the top of the pile. You don't even want to kick a stone out of your path. John, you don't like mescaline sulfate better? Oh, well, I do. Or hydrochloride, either one. But, yeah, mescaline is, to me, the queen of all of it. I never saw hallucinations, but on mescaline, I saw things that were red would pour off that red onto the floor, and everything would vibrate, and colors were immensely vibrational.

3:08:35IndraAnd I was aware on so many levels. I went outside and put a plank on a couple of rocks on the ground and communicated and watched a bunch of ants for hours on end. And so I, you know, to me it was really the right kind of thing. It was very enjoyable. It is something that I would do again and again.

3:08:58SpeakerI would. Yeah, people in the chat were saying that sensory deprivation is like a psychedelic experience and I gotta say they are totally correct. Depending on, because I got John's tank afterwards, he gave it to me and so I had it set up in my bedroom for a while and I used to be able to float and it is definitely like a psychedelic experience when you have your Thank you for joining us.

3:09:43IndraDepersonalization again, like Sam was talking about ketamine. Some people, it affects that way. It's a depersonalization. And afterwards, you know, you can get the sensation of ketamine through meditation, the depersonalization thing.

3:09:59SpeakerYou can get it. Ketamine is like a woe, you know, but, you know, it is what it is. Yeah, ketamine. I don't know. I like the deprivation tank without ketamine, personally. I like the deprivation tank just meditating, personally. Having one and being able to spend a lot of time with it was a different trip, if you will. It was really cool. I highly recommend it. They're not that difficult to make.

3:10:26SpeakerI used to meditate in a swimming pool. It was about almost body temperature in the swimming pool, but I would float. So what I would do is I would purposely slowly let my air out, sink to the bottom, and then push up with my toes up to the top, take a breath, and I would repeat that hundreds and hundreds of cycles until it was almost like a flotation device.

3:10:53SpeakerThat was too cheap to have a flotation device. Well, I never, other than the movie Altered States, which is based on the life of John Lilly, I would never really put much thought into it until somebody offered me to go float in the darn thing. And then when I went floating in it, I loved it, to say the least. It's really good. I mean, on a lot of levels, I think meditation is a really good way to reorganize your mind and your body and get a balance between your, you know, Mind, body, and spirit.

3:11:25SpeakerSo I've always practiced meditation and being able to use that deprivation tank to meditate was like a whole other experience.

3:11:38Etienne FontanThat tank was amazing. Yeah, I've been inside the tank, you know. Sorry, my connection kind of froze up there, so I wanted to speak back during it instead. Yeah, it was interesting. I don't know how I would classify ketamine because I've done it before as well, and I don't know. I definitely had psychedelic experiences in that situation while we were experiencing it, but... Yeah, it's definitely not something I would do again, but I felt the same way about MDMA.

3:12:13Etienne FontanI didn't like MDMA. I did that a couple of times, and for some reason it doesn't vibe with my system. The comedown on both of those, MDMA doesn't have as long a comedown, but the comedown from ketamine was so long and so dragged, I didn't like it at all. But the wonderful thing was, of course, the tank, the tank and that, Being able to go in, of course, as long as you didn't have any paper cuts and have the salt stings remind you that you're human, you're allowed to definitely go within and go away.

3:12:47Etienne FontanIt was definitely something I had never experienced to have all your senses completely taken away and your eyes can be wide open and all you see is black and you're just floating there in space. It's a beautiful thing. I definitely recommend if anybody ever has the opportunity to do so. The tank is an amazing experience.

3:13:06IndraI can tell you one better as far as the floating experience. You mix and slip the stuff they pour clay molds from. You can buy them from the hobby shops. You pour that in a tub and you put it in 60% slip and 40% water. And it's denser than the human body. And when you lay down in it and lay back, your head will float out so good your ears don't even get wet in it.

3:13:33IndraYou can actually lay down and go to sleep in it. I've done it numerous times. And it's definitely... Just don't turn on your side, right?

3:13:41Etienne FontanWhat? Just don't turn on your side.

3:13:45IndraWell, you could even turn on your side because your whole face wouldn't go in. But when you're so relaxed when you're laying on your back in it, so much of your body is floating out of the water because of the density ratio between the clay and the water mix. And guess what? It doesn't sting you. Nothing gets in any cuts. And when you get out, you have like an afro.

3:14:08IndraMaybe you would have like a crew cut when you got out. But it really affects the hair. I mean... It puffs the hair up like you can't imagine. If you have hair, that is.

3:14:21Etienne FontanI was about to say, it really doesn't, you know, it can make my chin look good.

3:14:26IndraThere you go. Puff it out a little bit, man. What's that calling you, Puff Daddy?

3:14:34SpeakerNo, no, that's hilarious. Well, guys, you know, I'd say let's wrap this up. Thank you for everybody putting up with us fucking having so much technical difficulties and Big shout out to Bubble Man. We miss you.

3:14:51SpeakerSo anybody have anything they want to say?

3:14:52IndraOh, it was good talking to all you guys again this weekend. And have a good week coming, huh?

3:15:00SpeakerAll right, John. All right. Good night and goodbye, everybody. Have a great day. Good night, everybody.