Tissue Culture and Cannabis Genetics

0:04BubblemanAll right, look at that. I think we're live on YouTube right now. All right, let's check it out. Let's see, let's see. It's now streaming on YouTube. All right, well, let's first of all, welcome everyone. This is going to be a bit of a weird hash church. I have very, very few people. Let me start recording it actually. I have very few people who have replied today, and I'm going to have to go on to YouTube, and I'm going to have to find the actual link.

0:35BubblemanOh, there it is right there. Look at that. It's easy. All right, let's do this. Sorry about this, guys. A little bit rusty today, but I'll send the link over here. And I'm not sure if anyone's even going to show up. This could just be me hanging out puffing bowls and talking with everybody. It's been a while since I did a spur of the moment hash church.

1:03BubblemanOf course, our last hash church was in honor of Horatio Delbert.

1:41BubblemanAnd now we're back. I was frozen for a little bit. Sorry about that, everybody. Let's see. Oh, yeah. So let's say hi to the room. We got, oh, we got Happy Guy. We got Kelly. Hello, N-O-G, Manitoba Goat, Medically Fit, Bingo Lombardi's in the chat holding it down. We got Dirty 42 and K2LED and Justin Cash. We got about 120 people watching right now. And I got people in the room that I'm going to let in right now.

2:09BubblemanI got Hemp Guy, I got Colin, and I got someone I don't even recognize. But let's see who it is. What's going on, boys?

2:20BubblemanHey, buddy. How you doing?

2:23Collin PalmerGood, man. I'm literally out in the world.

2:26SpeakerLet me see if my headset will...

2:34Collin PalmerNext here.

2:40BubblemanCutting out a little bit.

2:41SpeakerNot working.

2:46BubblemanYou there, hemp guy?

2:50BubblemanYour microphone, I heard you there. I can hear you. Everything's rock and roll. And then we got this other one here. I don't know who that is.

3:04BubblemanOh, it's Mike. What's going on, buddy? Morning, Marcus. Dude, I got to be honest. I was like, who the heck is that? Dig on M-O-E-Q-A. How did you get your name to be such a crazy name?

3:23SpeakerProbably Firewall. Weird. Nice. What's up, Mike?

3:28Collin PalmerWeird. Hey, Sam. How you guys doing?

3:37Collin PalmerI'm on the coast of Maine right now.

3:43Collin PalmerNice. Just chilling out. See why my headphones, my headphones should be working. I'm just, you know, I came up here. My wife wanted to come up. We live so close to Maine that we've never had a chance to really explore it. And we've been keep talking about it. So it's an hour and a half from us. So I committed to it. And then I got your email.

4:05Collin PalmerAnd of course, it's hard to back out of the commitment when you've committed to it.

4:11BubblemanDude, the last time I was in Maine was in 1994 and I drove all the way to Bangor to see Phish play at like a high school gymnasium. Hell yeah.

4:23Collin PalmerI remember that. Well, I remember the Bangor Maine Festival and that was an incredible, just an incredible run of music for them.

4:35BubblemanYeah, for sure. They did the 37 minute long tweezer from a live one at that show that I was at. That was like the first time, I guess. Maybe not the first time, but it was one of the longest ones they did. And I guess it was a special enough one that they felt they were going to put it on their live double album titled The Live One.

4:52BubblemanHere, let me put you on view so we can see that, Colin. Hey, welcome Johnny B with the long hair. Mute myself and I'm going to figure out how to put my ear pods there.

5:03Collin PalmerDude, you rocking those pros? I am and they're giving me so much trouble these days actually. They're not connecting to my phone right. I don't know why.

5:12BubblemanIt's weird. Yeah, that's not, that's no bueno.

5:15Collin PalmerThis is some cold cure lemon cake.

5:22BubblemanBeautiful. I just, oh, you went on mute there. I just went and pressed some hash church last night. Ooh, how is that?

5:34SpeakerIt's actually really quite nice.

5:35Collin PalmerThe photos were beautiful.

5:40BubblemanI definitely didn't get the yield that I was expecting, but I'm going to do some more. So it was just really a small press on my, my Helix Pro here on the side of my desk. So it was the crank unit. Not the most amount of pressure. Hello, good morning, Etienne. Good morning, sir. How are you today? Oh, you know, pretty good. I got a message yesterday from Ian Davidson, and I've been trying to get him on to Hash Church for a long time to come and share all of his incredible knowledge on not only like growing and greenhouses, but also like starting the tissue culture company and kind of getting into the explanation of initiation and

6:24BubblemanYou know, multiplication and meristemic propagate, micro propagation, basically everything I learned about tissue culture, like 95% of it has come from Ian and probably another, probably 5% of it came from Chimera because he was talking about it almost 20 years ago, way before anyone was, I guess, really able to make it economically viable as a business. I know Skunk Man Sam as well had done it Thank you for joining us today.

7:16Etienne FontanWe'll do that regardless. Yeah. I had an, I knew a group in central California who did that a decade ago, but they had brought in a woman from South Africa who had did it in South Africa for 27 years. And just after she did it, she's like, okay, I'm going to retire now. Goodbye. Oh, wow. So they couldn't continue it. They basically had it started and they had to let it die because they couldn't perpetuate it.

7:41Etienne FontanYeah.

7:42Collin PalmerSo with, with teaching culture, do you guys like, all right, so, There's a lot of people offering it. I get emails all the time. There's a couple of people in the Massachusetts state or the state of Massachusetts. My earpiece fell out. Sorry. You know, the main theme that I keep being told is it will replace your mother room. Now, is that something that everyone feels like the techniques and the I guess the SOPs that you would follow are that solid that we would not have to keep live plants any longer?

8:19Collin PalmerOr would you say that we would want to keep maybe both at the same time? What are your thoughts on that kind of stuff?

8:25SpeakerAs somebody who's worked with tissue culture, I can say that when you reproduce meristems under tissue culture, so in a glass container with agar agar or whatever your formula for For nutrients. One of the problems is every few years, you really need to take the plants out and refresh them by growing them as a big plant and taking fresh new pieces. So, I mean, it definitely takes up less room.

9:04SpeakerBut if you're big enough, it may make economic sense. But Ian at Segram is the man to talk to about this. And yeah, anybody who's interested. Can't wait.

9:21Etienne FontanI hope he shows up.

9:22BubblemanGo ahead.

9:25Etienne FontanIt's an interesting discussion because it was perpetuated in a lab. So I always thought about that. What would you do? Would you maintain the genetic? But As well as, you know, keep it perpetually going. You know, I would always keep some sort of backup data always. I mean, I have that problem with a computer. So exactly. The only thing I would think of to do would be to maintain that same situation with genes, because, you know, if electricity goes out and then, you know, the chamber that that's stored in dies, you know, now what you crack start from those start collecting genetics from other people, you know.

10:01BubblemanI think one of the great ways is maintaining it under very small pieces of it, just the tissue. It doesn't even have to be the living plant. And you can maintain that in liquid nitrogen in a very small, inexpensive method. And I think that way, you can really get into redundancies where you could have two or three different sites where you maintain your library. And it takes up a very, very small amount of room versus how much room it would take for you to keep those mothers.

10:37BubblemanBut I'm in the same boat. I don't think it's gotten quite to the point yet. And it's also when we compare it to strawberries or raspberries, They don't seem to have the same variation when it comes to commercial production. You've got your one banana and your Driscoll's does like your one strawberry. And it's this one sort of cultivar that everyone's just kind of like, oh, I'm happy.

10:58BubblemanI'll just buy the Driscoll's strawberries. I think they grew 10 billion plantlets this year all over the world in different parts of the world. So from those companies' perspectives, obviously, it's going to be a lot easier to keep a plant that's one single genetic. We come from the cannabis industry where, you know, on average, I'm sure we're going to want to have at least 500 plus genetics kept alive.

11:22BubblemanMaybe it's 1000, maybe it's 1500. I don't know. But there's a lot of different varieties of cannabis out there, little variations and phenotypes and, you know, losing those from a cannabis connoisseur perspective. Thank you so much for joining us today.

11:54BubblemanOh, whatever happened to the roadkill skunk?

11:56SpeakerLike, we have nostalgia over these different flavors and it's... Roadkill skunk actually got ran over on the road and doesn't exist anymore.

12:09Collin PalmerYeah, I'm feeling you on that one. Well, you said you heard it here first, folks. It's one of the...

12:19SpeakerDoing this work originally 30 years ago was exactly to keep it maintained. So I wanted, I had 600 clones at that time and keeping them all alive and maintained was a pain in the butt. So I wanted a method where I could take meristems or callus, freeze it, and Keep it the way you're talking about in liquid nitrogen. Then, you know, like you can have a thousand in a small portable unit.

12:55SpeakerIt doesn't even have to be liquid nitrogen because you can get freezers that are minus 50 really easy. And I think that'll do it.

13:05Collin PalmerYeah, it didn't, and Mike, to Marcus' point, it's frightening to lose some of these varieties. I mean, it's, you know, the security that I always had was to give it to your closest buddies and make sure that, you know, if anything were to happen, you could at least call upon them. But it's, you know, we're so far from that now. You know, the paradigm's really shifted. You know, 1,800 square feet of moms, you're not going to be sharing 1,800 square feet of cuts, you know?

13:29Collin PalmerIt's tough.

13:30SpeakerWhat I was going to say was, I'm sure, Many more varieties than exist now have been lost in the past. Think about it.

13:42Collin PalmerYeah, got some good news. That's a good point.

13:45Etienne FontanIt's a good way to put it. I like good news. So I got word from Ebony Worsley, who is Sean Worsley, who is the veteran arrested in Alabama. For traveling through with cannabis and our group, the Veterans Action Council actually sent a letter to Alabama full of a whole bunch of people who have served saying, let him out, let him go. And Ebony let us go, let us know that Alabama is going to be releasing him on parole.

14:19Etienne FontanSo we got some positive news there. And on the same side, We got some bad news. A friend of mine at the Veterans Virtual Happy Hour, Jose Balen and them, were vying for a reschedule. And they applied to the Supreme Court of the United States and got all the way through to there. And then this week, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case. So unfortunately, the rescheduling that we tried for, vied for, unfortunately, again, it was On hypotheticals where the court wants to see you actually be, you know, damaged or hurt by the proceeding somewhere along the lines and they just threw it out.

15:05Etienne FontanSo we got to try again.

15:07SpeakerYeah, you got to try again and wait till after the Democrats win and pack for the Supreme Court. Then use it with facts instead of theory and you'll do it.

15:19Etienne FontanRight. And that's what we're trying to use. We've assembled the veterans from across the United States, and we're going to use our power to, you know, go after Biden, just work on a Beau Biden medical marijuana bill. And, you know, because his son, as even he spoke of, could even have used it. So we're going to not stop. We're going to embarrass them. We're going to use our power and our voices to continue the pressure.

15:42Etienne FontanSo You know, two steps forward, one step back, take it on the chin, regroup, reorganize, and fight again. But Mr. Worsley's going home, so, you know, that leaves some good news. A drug war prisoner is going home.

15:58BubblemanDude, when the fuck does anyone ever get let out of prison in, like, Louisiana?

16:05Etienne FontanIt's Alabama, dude. It's Alabama. So, yeah, it was a jail in case. Yeah.

16:13Etienne FontanYeah, I mean, it was hard finding him counsel. There's a lot of challenges there because there's no medical defense. And he had been busted in Alabama prior and was let go to Arizona to do his parole. And he got busted on parole there, which is why he went back to Alabama. So that he was even to get parole, Thank you so much for joining us today.

16:55BubblemanSharing is caring, which reminds me to give a big shout out to one of my mentors, Ron Hickey, my good old buddy, Ron, who recently sent me two beautiful five foot tall Congolese plants. And I guess it's full circle because five or six or seven or eight years ago, I don't know when, whenever I started really giving the Congo away, he was one of the first people I actually gave it to.

17:22BubblemanYou know, it was kind of a controlled cultivar for a while. Some people felt like they were going to keep this cultivar and really control this cultivar and make seeds and sell it and make the money. And I kind of put the kibosh on that by giving it away to everyone, literally like Dr. Atomic and Remo and Johnny B. I gave it to everyone, man. I gave that thing out to everyone.

17:43BubblemanAnd so now it's come back to me, John. Yesterday, two five foot tall Congo plants, beautiful Congo plants that Ron was growing out on his deck. Um, arrived. And, uh, so I got the Congo back and I'm pretty darn, pretty darn happy to have the Congo back. And, uh, on that note, I would like to welcome, uh, Mr. Regenerative, uh, Joshua to the room with the orange toque.

18:06BubblemanWhat's up, man? The toque.

18:09SpeakerDude, that's Canadian for you. Yeah. What's up, Colin? Are you on top of a rock somewhere? What's up, brother?

18:17Collin PalmerYeah, I'm actually in Maine right now.

18:19SpeakerI drove up here with my better half, as they say.

18:23Collin PalmerNice. We're just exploring the coast here. It's beautiful. But sorry if I feel towering today.

18:30SpeakerIt looks awesome, man.

18:31Collin PalmerI'll try to, you know, there we go. How are you, Josh?

18:37SpeakerWhat's going on, man? I'm good, man. I just heard you guys talking about the Congo. And I got that cut a couple years back when we went up there to do the Regen Conference in Vancouver. It trickled its way down and I've been pollinating with it. I've got a few rounds of pollination on it and it's a cool plant, man. The Roberts Creek one, I guess, is the one we're probably all talking about.

18:59BubblemanYeah, yeah. I mean, I call it Le Mano Negra cut because it was my friend Alex who actually collected it from the pygmies in the Congo. Then it went to Reefer Man and Reefer Man, I think, ended up taking it to the Sunshine Coast and then people on the Sunshine Coast got control of it and then you had... You had your Green Supreme and your Alvy Alchemist and befriended Le Mano Negro's wife, Reyna Ginga, and started trying to control this plant that just needed to be shared.

19:27BubblemanIt needed to be gifted. It needed to be given to people because it is a really unique cultivar. It has a nice, you know, I've heard it has THCV in it is actually what I've heard. I've never actually seen the COA from the Congo. Wouldn't be surprised if some of that South African found its way out. Here you go.

19:43SpeakerThis was tested by Tim through Kind Selections. I have the Congo here right now. And this is what it was on the bottom tested by THCVA. There you go. And this is this is right now, guys, like as you're saying it, I got gifted this the other day when I was at Horatio's actually.

19:58BubblemanWho do you think gave that to Tim? Oh, you did. Along with the East Coast Sour Diesel.

20:05SpeakerYou bet, man. It's good to give these things away. Oh, it smells so amazing. And on that note, I'm doing a dab of the Congo. Let's hit the Congo, buddy.

20:17Etienne FontanThat's what I've been smoking a joint of this entire time, which I'm like, y'all like Congo, Congo, Congo. And my friend Amber has a company called the Congo Club, which she... Amber Senator. Yeah, Amber Senator. She's awesome. And she... Yeah, yeah, she does Congo Club. So she does, she's actually going to be doing a concentrate infused where she's taking keef and actually infusing the Congolese joint with the Congo keef.

20:46Etienne FontanSo we're stacking Congo here, Callie.

20:49SpeakerWhat's the Congolese keef profile like, guys?

20:53Collin PalmerI've had the terpenes, I believe, from the Blue River terpenes, Marcus, of the Congo, but I've not smoked the flour or hash from it. What? What's the profile?

21:02BubblemanIt's very exotic. It's very terpenaline. It's very like perfumey. It's just something different than what you constantly get with the gases and the fruits and all these different sort of musky flavors. The Congo is definitely a special one. I got a big bag of it right now, actually. I'm pretty excited to start squishing it. I squished the hash church last night and made a little bit of rosin, but I think today, maybe even during church, I might press out a little Congo with my little bit of nug that I got left.

21:36Etienne FontanHow much of that hash church did you press and how much came out?

21:40BubblemanI pressed a very small amount and I didn't get a ton, but I pressed it on my Helix Pro and I didn't have it sort of tied to my table with these. You need a really proper table because when you crank the last little bit where you go from about 8,000 pounds, Thank you for joining us.

22:22Bubbleman18%. He said he got around 20 to 22% when he pressed rosin. It makes me a little suspicious as to how it can be so resinous. Maybe it is these hooked trichomes. I'm going to get in on the bud later today and photograph it. It really reminds me of an old cultivar I used to grow years back. Like I'm talking almost 30 years ago from Holland that I got called Dutch Treat.

22:48BubblemanAnd it was it's I've never seen another Dutch treat that looked like this one. It was just coated in resin. It had a really musky kind of like almost hash plant smell. So for me, I've got a little nostalgia on it. I love the way the plant looks and I'm still going to wash it, see how much the mouth comes out and kind of yields I get.

23:05BubblemanAnd I'm pretty excited about it, actually. It's pretty nice.

23:09SpeakerI wanted to say, um, I wanted to hop in back on the, um, the Congo before we moved on. I was just on the phone with a vision creator last week, um, talking about the Congo and he, and I can't remember his partner's name, but they're working with the university up there in BC and they've done S1 line of it that they are just about to release.

23:30SpeakerThey have 1500 seeds. I think they have S1s they're going to release on that. So just maybe give a follow-up to Vision Creator if you guys are interested in getting a hold of those genetics.

23:40BubblemanHe's been- He's usually in the chat.

23:43SpeakerYeah, he's been really cool. I mean, he's the one that was getting it out to all of us, you know, that it trickled out to in my kind of circle here. So- Yeah, that's awesome.

23:51BubblemanThat's awesome. You know, it's one of those cuts, especially now where legality isn't really a problem. I generally just, if I have it, I give it to whoever asks me for it. I just, I can't imagine being like, you know, one of my, one of the guys that likes to control this cultivar and I won't call him out because it's just makes him sound like such a piece of shit.

24:10BubblemanBut he was kind of like, you know, I got to make sure, uh, I got to make sure that, you know, the person is worthy. And I'm like, whoa, like, dude, like that is everything that's wrong in the world right now. Like the person is worthy. Like what if the person isn't worthy, but his little girl is worthy and is having seizures and needs this cultivar to stop those seizures?

24:28BubblemanLike why do we create these reasons to not, to be greedy and to maintain control over something as awesome as a cannabis cultivar? It's like, listen, I get it. If you spent... 20 years or 10 years in your greenhouse and you collected the seeds. I get that. But this is a cultivar that was collected in Africa. It was meant to be given out as a gift. You know, the pygmies meant it to be a gift.

24:53BubblemanAnd it just seems like a strange thing to try and collect and control someone else's work. Just give that shit away.

25:01SpeakerI think... I had a variety from the Congo one time. It was given from the Pygmies to Jean-Paul Hallet, who was a famous explorer down there. I had all these plants to grow massive amounts of it. And I had a logo all picked out, get small. But the problem was that the weed just didn't cut it. Your Congo is great. Mine sucked. Can I ask you this, Sam, because you're probably a guy that's gone through the biggest populations.

25:41SpeakerYou know, like when I was here, Marcus, say that I was thinking, you know, well, that's usually someone that has a lot of insecurities that's holding on to something. And as I've started to run through larger shifts, you know, a 500,000, I've gotten really confident that I don't I don't really I'm kind of sitting in this position right now. And maybe it's it's an immature position to be in.

25:59SpeakerBut I feel like I don't need any one specific elite cut. I can find enough stuff if I go through big enough populations. And so I guess the question is, do you find that to be true or do you still think that it's like, yeah, those elites are elites and they're outliers? What do you consider a big population? I don't know. You tell me. I mean, it could be whatever.

26:20SpeakerIt could be a thousand. It could be 10,000. It could be 20,000, you know? Yeah. Well, at 20,000, You will probably get a very elite cut. In a closet with 10 plants, you're lucky to get an elite cut.

26:40Collin PalmerI absolutely agree.

26:44Etienne FontanThey tried to do the same thing with OG Kush, you know, where they, you know, people tried to hold on to it and people swore and it wasn't until the person who made that original swear died that it finally made its propagation out through the 90s and made its way out. So yeah, I've never understood the absolute I'm sorry.

27:08SpeakerThere's also different ways to pass things out. If you felt you worked for years and years and selection and selection to get a particular cut, then make seeds and sell those. I mean, you can make millions of seeds and pass it out to the community and everybody that wants one can get one.

27:34BubblemanWhat I like is that you actually speak from experience when you said you can make millions of seeds. I thought that motherfucker has done this already. I have done it many times. How about sweet skunk crossed with Congolese?

27:51Collin PalmerSweet skunk. Yeah. Oh, snapper.

27:59BubblemanHey, I wanted to welcome Ian Davidson to the room. Mr. Seger himself has arrived and I gotta welcome him to the room, dude. How you doing, man?

28:06Ian DavidsonHey, guys. I'm good. I ran a little late. I was chasing some horses around here.

28:13BubblemanOh, you know, I was in the forest. I was in the forest yesterday in Squamish picking mushrooms. We were picking yellowfoots, actually, chanterelles. And a horse was walking through the forest. At first, we thought it was a wild horse, but it actually had a person with it. But it reminded me of you. I know how much your daughter likes to ride horses.

28:36Ian DavidsonYeah, we had some breakouts this morning here, but it's all good. How's everybody doing?

28:42BubblemanWe're doing pretty good. We got a little bit into the conversation. Actually, Etienne asked a good, or maybe it wasn't Etienne. I can't remember who asked the question, but it was basically like, are we in a place with tissue culture and cannabis right now where people, oh, it was Colin, that we could get to a point. And I mean, actually, before I ask this question, what I would really like, Ian, is for you to introduce yourself, let everyone know a little bit of your history in the industry and let them know how you came to start And become a part of the tissue culture company, Sager International.

29:15BubblemanThat would be a good start, actually.

29:17Ian DavidsonSure. We have a little spiel here. Hold on. What do I do? Pushing the buttons. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, probably like most people here, I've been in this for a long time in California primarily. And if any of you guys have heard of my business, I started this company, Biologic Systems, and we've got a whole line of certified organic Uh, spill amendments and et cetera down here in Cali, primarily in Oregon.

29:46Ian DavidsonUm, so I've done that for a long time, kind of seeing the industry through that lens quite a bit. And, um, you know, I ended up spending about four years, uh, down in Santa Barbara County, scaling a fair bit of the, several of the big greenhouses down there, working with these Dutch guys and helping them to kind of figure out, uh, you know, what to do. And, you know, in that process, we scaled up to producing about, um, Around 150,000 clones a month.

30:13Ian DavidsonAnd it just really got out of control. You know, I mean, trying to manage a half acre of mother plants and trying to do all that, you know, with the pesticides that we have at hand. And it's just a huge challenge. And so, you know, about four years ago, I started looking at tissue culture. I mean, down in Cali, you know, we watch these strawberry growers come out and, you know, they'll plant a million strawberry plants over a weekend.

30:39Ian DavidsonRight. All from TC. They all look exactly the same. And, you know, that's the way that their business ticks. You know, they got a little jet. They're flying around with their tissue culture plants, making it happen, you know, in all their locations. And so, you know, the question was like, why can't we do it for cannabis? Right. We can do it for these other plants. And so, you know, I started doing my homework and I spent about a year traveling around the world and that Pretty much every company I could find that was claiming to do this work on cannabis.

31:12Ian DavidsonAnd learned all about it along the way. I learned the questions that you ask and, you know, the key metrics, how the business works. And then I met the team at SEGRA in Vancouver there. And they really, to me, seemed to be kind of the clear leader in the space, really for two reasons. You know, our Dr. Zabai that runs our TC program, he's been working on cannabis for 15 years under a federal research license in Canada.

31:42Ian DavidsonAnd then, you know, we also have a genotyping lab that allows us to do, you know, we do over a thousand samples a month right now, just checking everything, right? Checking to make sure we don't mix stuff up, you know, starting to look and observe at and managing somaclonal variation, which is, you know, a huge piece of the TC puzzle and is really kind of the big risk that's involved in it.

32:11Ian DavidsonIf I can elaborate on that a bit, I'm on a little bit of a tangent now, but it's probably a real important one. So, you know, you got all these TC labs popping up all over for cannabis right now. And, you know, what happens in conventional tissue culture, you know, is usually around like four years after making clones from clones from clones in TC, you start to see mutation, right?

32:33Ian DavidsonThe plants start to mutate. Um, and, uh, you know, you're, you're literally, uh, you know, compounding that colonial process. And if there's any kind of mutation that happens, there's a good chance it can carry on because you're making these clones so fast from each other. So. You know, managing that risk, like we're seeing in cannabis at about two years into the process, that some of the clonal variation is starting to rear its head at like statistically relevant levels.

33:00Ian DavidsonAnd so, you know, there's a whole process of how you manage that, right? You can isolate shoots. You know, we have a genotyping lab, so we can isolate 100 shoots that have not mutated. And you start building a population from those. You ramp that population up and you start ramping down the old population. That's what they do. You know, blueberries, bananas, papayas, et cetera. You know, that's the way that business works where, you know, they all know the mutation is a risk and you watch for it and you monitor it and you react to it.

33:27Ian DavidsonAnd you can actually manage it. Now, you know, if you're running a TC lab and you're not watching those things and you don't have the capacity to do that kind of testing, it can be a huge disaster. And we're starting to see that in Cali right now. I've seen several of these labs out here where they're at about that process. You know, they're two years and two and a half years in and they're starting to see really weird things happening and they don't really know any idea why or like the tools to be able to study it and figure out what's going on there.

33:56Ian DavidsonSo. That was awesome.

34:02SpeakerWould you see the same thing like that and say moms over years of taking cuts and trying to hold that mom say over 10 or 20 years? Would you see the same with what you're talking about right now? Because I'm just raising question to myself as you're talking about that. I've had the same genetic drift.

34:19Ian DavidsonYeah, so genetic drift is when you're going to have that mutation happen in live plants. Right outside of TC. However, you know, our assumption at this point from everything that we see, all this research we're doing right now is that 99% of those symptoms that you're seeing are not mutation. They are either viruses. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.

34:59Ian DavidsonYou're probably going to get some infections, right? And, you know, bacteria are going to start working their way into your body. So like when we do the tissue culture process with these serial clones, like these really, really old clones, a couple of the worst have come from yours truly on this call, or Marcus truly on this call, you know, these old clones. They've been, they've been cut so many times and each time you're building up this bacterial load and these aren't plant pathogens.

35:31Ian DavidsonThese are essentially functioning like a parasite in the plant. It's kind of like a yeast infection. Right. And they slow the plant down. They make the plant's immune system drop. You know, and when you do the tissue culture, the initiation process, you know, we've got a technique we do that literally migrates all that stuff out of the plant. It looks like snot coming out of the side of the stem.

35:53Ian DavidsonAnd and, you know, there's some tricks you do to just kind of keep sucking it out. It's really wild. So. You know, so mutation from cloning is very, very rare. And it does it does happen. Absolutely. But it happens very slowly over the course of time. And and and from what we can see from all the genotype testing we're doing in cannabis, we haven't seen an example yet with a clone where we've seen a documented mutation between two clones and any connection to a symptom.

36:24Ian DavidsonSo, you know, what we all really need to be focused on there is the You know, the pathogen side of the equation, that's really what's causing the problem in the cloning, you know, serial cloning process.

36:36SpeakerCan I ask a definition question?

36:41SpeakerTissue culture versus like Mary stem scrubbing. You know, I think that a lot, a lot of people I've heard, and so I'm asking you, you can clarify it for me and for everyone else, but I've heard a lot of people misuse the word tissue culture when they're not going to a true tissue culture or they're doing some sort of scrub. I don't know. Can you explain that to me?

36:57Ian DavidsonI'm kind of, I'm kind of guilty right here, misusing it. Okay. So tissue, tissue culture is, um, is a family of technologies. Right. Okay. Um, and so, you know, the majority of people in the world who are studying the field of plant tissue culture, um, they're actually in the genetic engineering world. Okay. So like, um, there's, there's really two forms that you can execute culture from one is callous.

37:24Ian DavidsonRight. You've got a little blob of undifferentiated cells like you'll see in pictures. It's a little blob in like a petri dish. And those cells are essentially like stem cells. Right. And that's where you can go and like insert your pig genes or, you know, whatever kind of crazy GMO you're trying to do. Right. That all happens through callous tissue culture. Which has nothing to do with mass production, nodal propagation, right?

37:50Ian DavidsonWhere you start with meristematic tissue culture, you isolate the meristem, you know, that's what we do. You start growing from there. And then literally you're making clones from clones from clones, right? You'd refer to that as nodal propagation, right? Or, you know, micropropagation, right? So 90% of the field of tissue culture are these guys, probably more, 95, are these guys that are studying callus tissue culture. Really with the goal of developing genetically engineered plants.

38:16Ian DavidsonThe people doing nodal propagation for production is this really small subset of the business. Like, you know, this guy, Dr. Zabai, that works for us, there's only about 100 of those guys in the world that know how to manage these labs that produce over 10 million plants a year. And it's a, you know, that world is as much farming as it is a science, right? Like these guys that know how to run these big production labs, You know, they can look at a crop of jars like you could probably look at a room full of edge plants and be like, oh, they need a little more of this or a little less of that.

38:48Ian DavidsonYou know, so it's, you know, it's art and science. But yeah, the you know, there's a whole suite of technologies like synthetic seeds. And, you know, it goes on that all of these technologies fit within the field of tissue culture. But what we're really focused on is just that micropropagation. And I didn't understand that. I wasn't trying to call you out. No, no, no. Yeah, that's an important starting point, right?

39:12Ian DavidsonIt's like, you know, we could really be talking micropropagation.

39:16SpeakerSo if, you know, like you're saying, this is going on with strawberries, and I'm hearing you say how actually small the percentage of people, you said that under 100 people are actually doing microprop proficiently, you know,

39:28Ian DavidsonAre, are, is it, I mean, is it, isn't it a bigger, big lab? Yeah, because there's about a hundred of them in the world. Gotcha.

39:35SpeakerSo, they're just, the ones that are doing it can throw out so much that they're making a significant impact, like a strawberry industry.

39:43Ian DavidsonLike Vitro, Vitro Plus, Vitro Plus in Poland, they produce 80% of all the ornamental ferns for the entire planet from a single lab. Ian, that's a good question.

39:54Etienne FontanI have a question. There's a bunch of people who are watching, and if there's only 100 of these people in the world, what would they, if somebody were watching and wanted to learn how to do this propagation and learn this science, what would you recommend that they take in college?

40:10Ian DavidsonI recommend that they go to Chiba University in Japan and study with Dr. Kozai, who is the father of tissue culture, and they have the most advanced tissue culture program in the world there. That's where Doctors Abide studied. And so, you know, it's, you know, it's a great question, like, like to get into the field, you got to get into these labs, you know, it's like, I see a lot of people passing around this like plant and test tubes book, like, You're not going to learn how to do mass production through that book.

40:42Ian DavidsonYou know, like the, uh, the, the real, what really kind of qualifies these professionals is experience at scale. Um, and you know, the ability to, like, I kind of started out talking about that somewhat clonal thing. It's like managing all of this stuff. It it's farming, you know, like you, you get good at it over years and decades of experience. And, uh, You know, that's kind of the most profound parts to me of this whole business is like, it's this crazy intersection of like manufacturing and plants, you know, where we really are getting about as close as you can get to like a manufacturing process, still working with a, with a plant.

41:22SpeakerAre the schools in Japan, you're talking about, do they teach in Japanese or English? Do you have to learn Japanese first?

41:29Ian DavidsonNo, no, you don't. They teach, the science is taught in English. Yeah. Doctors of Eide went there as an English teacher. We're an English student, so no, you don't.

41:39SpeakerSo in this microprop concept, in my mind, I hear, I've heard tissue culture, and I think that, you know, you can hand over your genetics to a scientist, they can chop it up, they put it in the solution, and then it's in a refrigerator, and then I can pull it out of that refrigerator whenever I want, or they can, and they can grow it out. Is that the same with the microprop, or is it more like microprop?

41:59SpeakerYou're just...

42:02Ian DavidsonYeah, yeah, there's there's two different kind of approaches on the storage side is we're doing it right now. Like at Segra, we've got germplasm collections now for 10 of the big LPs in Canada. And we're like backing up their stuff. And, you know, in some cases doing micropropagation, right. But all of that storage in our method, Right. We're storing all the plants still as as nodes, as live nodes in the jars.

42:31Ian DavidsonBut what we do is we put them in a special media that makes them grow really, really slow. Right. Or it just doesn't. You know, so they typically in T.C., we have to move all of our plantlets into a fresh jar with fresh media every four weeks. Right. And if you don't, they die because they're you know, all the nutrients they're taking up are in the agar.

42:52Ian DavidsonRight there. Their whole carbon source is in the agar. The light isn't even the light is basically just tricking them to kind of stay alive like they're growing off of the sugar from the agar rather than photosynthesis. Right. So, you know, we can store plants by slowing them down where that now we don't have to transfer them every month. We can transfer them every three months. Right.

43:12Ian DavidsonAnd in that kind of storage, you can call it up really fast. Right. Let's say you decide, oh, I want that plant. You know, then the other option is cryopreservation. Right. And in cryopreservation, we can actually put that stuff away in the freezer. But if you say you want, and there, you know, without touching it, it can last essentially indefinitely, right? But if you say you want to call something up from cryopreservation, right?

43:36Ian DavidsonYou know, for us right now, you know, that's still an experiment. And, you know, we think that timeline is probably somewhere between six and 12 months to be able to bring something out and actually start working with it again.

43:48BubblemanSo Ian, before we get to taking something out or even putting something in for storage, can you explain now, as you explained the, you know, how 80 to 90% of problems with plants are actually these viruses or fungi or intercellular bacterias. Can you explain the importance of tissue culture in the sense of initiation?

44:14Ian DavidsonYeah, so, so, you know, TC, tissue culture and micropropagation, right, more specifically here, it's a four step process, right? So you've got, you know, initiation, it's the same four steps, whether you're doing blueberries or cannabis, right? You know, initiation is the process where you're going to remove all the contamination. And then you move into multiplication, where you're going to, you know, grow them, multiply them. Third stage is rooting, where you put the roots on the plantlets.

44:39Ian DavidsonAnd then the fourth stage is acclimation, where you're going to, you know, just like with clones, right, slowly reduce the humidity and bring them out into the real world. So, you know, the initiation process is, is really quite fascinating. And I think that's where a lot of people are really struggling, where, you know, they think that they've made it through the process, and they think that they've got a clean culture, and they start trying to move into the next phase and the multiplication, and they really don't, right, there's still some Intercellular bacteria in there.

45:06Ian DavidsonThere's still things or virus that are that are slowing that process down. So, you know, initiation for us, we've done now over 150 cultivars and we've been successful at all of them. We haven't had one. We haven't been able to get through the process yet, but they range. You know, some of them are going as fast as five months through that process. Some are taking 12 or 14 months.

45:32Ian DavidsonAnd it really depends on how dirty that stuff is when it comes into us, right? So, you know, these serial clones that have come in, yeah, some of them have taken a year to get through that process. Other times when we're working right from a seed, you know, that can go super fast. Why? Because the seed isn't chock full of all this, you know, contamination yet. We can move a lot faster with it.

45:53Ian DavidsonSo, you know, you'll hear a lot of people talking about, you know, doing this process and, In a, you know, two, three, four months. And that's just really not realiztic. You know, you really, like when we make a promise to a client, you know, we say it's going to take nine to 12 months. And we've done about 80% of the cultivars in like six or seven months.

46:15Ian DavidsonAnd really, it's just these outliers that You know, do you take that extra time? And, you know, basically what we're doing, right, is we're isolating the meristem, you know, so, you know, in the plant, you know, the meristem is essentially separated from the vascular system of the plant. It's floating, right? And there's kind of a gel layer that separates it from the plant. And that's how these plants have evolved to protect themselves from viruses.

46:37Ian DavidsonSo that growing tip is essentially growing faster than the viruses can move in and infect it. So you isolate that little tiny meristem, you know, it's microscopic, right? And then you're going to grow that out. And then we're going to go through that process again and potentially again if we have to. And, you know, so that's where, you know, if it's clean enough, we can kind of catch it on that first turn.

46:58Ian DavidsonBut usually it's going to take more than more than one cycle to get through.

47:04SpeakerThe other thing you're going to need, of course, Ian, and I'm sure you guys got it already, is a test to confirm the fungi was there and gone now. Test to confirm a bacteria is there and then gone. And test to confirm viruses were there and gone. And few people know how to do that properly.

47:29Ian DavidsonYeah, good question. You know, we've got a lab, our lab, our molecular biology lab in Richmond. You know, we've developed molecular-based assays now for what is like catapthera, rhizoctonia, sclerotinia, botrytis. There's a couple more on there that we have. And then the, you know, the virus testing right now is really a disaster. Like in our opinion, we haven't seen a lab yet that we consider to be validated.

48:01Ian DavidsonDoing a virus test on cannabis. Like A&L in Canada, they're ripping tons of these tests. They're issuing what we're assuming are false positives left and right. You know, virus testing, like we're learning with coronavirus, it's like, it's the hardest analytical testing in the world, right? Like viruses are constantly changing and mutating and are extremely difficult to fingerprint and identify. And so, you know, the, let me get your...

48:31SpeakerIt's even beyond that, Ian. The truth of it is, most of these companies don't know how many viruses have been identified in camera, in cannabis, whether they have symptoms or not is a separate issue. Right.

48:48Collin PalmerNow, are you seeing things with the older clones like Fusarium and things that have been passed on from just backyard to tent grower to Indoor grower and back again.

49:01SpeakerWe were not testing for fungus and bacteria. We were looking at viruses. That was our focus.

49:09Ian DavidsonYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the the key here is like if you look at how these other industries manage this risk, like strawberries. Right. You know, in the strawberry business, like they know that, you know, the use of meristematic tissue culture removes 99.999% of any of these risks, viruses, bacteria, et cetera. And, you know, yeah, they're like studying the viruses. Of course, you know, there's millions of dollars that goes into that.

49:39Ian DavidsonHowever, you know, really from the production side, you know, they're like the crystals and stuff, you know, they're not wasting their time. Right, because they know that the technique removes all that stuff. And yeah, on a very rare occasion, something slips through it. So I mean, you know, of course, they're trying to understand these things. But, you know, the key backbone of all this is that when you look across all of these other crops that have gone through this process, you know, that's the statistical reality is if you do the process correctly, you're going to remove everything, right?

50:15Ian DavidsonSo, you know, it might be another 20 years before we really understand all of these viruses that are in cannabis. And absolutely, they're there. And, you know, the majority of them may well be completely benign. And we're in really, really early days to be able to understand that. And I would use huge caution in trusting the data coming from any lab on these virus assays. Like, you know, our You know, our chief science officer is a PhD virologist, 30 years.

50:43Ian DavidsonHe taught epidemiology at UBC. And, you know, his take on this is basically like, you know, for us, even at SEGRA, it's going to take us probably another two years to have our first virus assays out, you know, really trying to do it the right way. And we're talking like, You know, millions of dollars of research money that's being designated to get to that goal. So, you know, it's a it's it's a very tricky issue right now because we really don't have the analytical tools.

51:14Ian DavidsonAnd and, you know, several of these labs are appear to really be kind of running wild with this testing. I mean, like in California now, the whole hoplite enviro deal here, you know, there's several labs offering it and You know, we've been doing our due diligence, like interviewing these labs, trying to see if we can find a partner anywhere in the world to do this testing. And we haven't found anybody yet that we feel like has really has a validated process for looking at them.

51:43Ian DavidsonSo but I think the key for all of us in the near term is like we do know, like from looking at these other crops, we have a technology that statistically should remove all of those things. But no, we don't have the ability to do All of that testing, like, you know, when things leave our door, we go through our list of six, you know, we've got these six pathogens we can test for now.

52:05Ian DavidsonAnd then obviously, you know, we're doing microscopy and, you know, everything that we can. But yeah, it's really early days still in having credible, you know, virus detection at scale for this business.

52:19SpeakerIt may be the early days, but at the same time, it is the future. If you look at the uh wine growers so when they plant a new field of grape varieties you better believe they're all certified virus free because they don't use anything else it is the future yeah and who you know who's developing most of those cultivars right it's university systems you know and and they've got you know yeah like uc davis you know they got hundreds of millions of dollars

52:51Ian DavidsonThat goes into, you know, developing these lines and developing the processes. And, you know, so, you know, I think as, as you start seeing like, you know, the big, you know, ag institutional universities in the country, in the world start to descend on this, you know, we're going to get answers a lot faster, but, you know, right now relying on, you know, like small companies like Segra and, you know, private small labs to like figure this out.

53:15Ian DavidsonLike, you know, none of us have the budgets to be able to really, um, We've got a lot more to do.

53:22Etienne FontanWe've got a lot more to really do it. Did you say there's only 27 viruses that have been isolated at this time?

53:33Ian DavidsonWhat did you say, David? I don't have a number on that. I think you threw a number out there.

53:40SpeakerI found 27 viruses that have been identified in cannabis. More than half of them do not have any symptoms, but there's some controversy whether or not if you have 10 of those non-symptom viruses, then collectively they may start to show symptoms.

54:03Etienne FontanAnd are these listed in the Hemp Viruses and Diseases book, or are these unclassified at this time?

54:09SpeakerWell, maybe half of them are there. The other ones I've collected And been in contact with viral researchers and add them one by one by one by one until now the total is 27.

54:28Collin PalmerSo I have a question. I've seen a good bit at scale in terms of viral decline in a plant's health. And specifically when it goes from veg into flower, you see the transformation happen. I've documented with photos and I've done this over the past few years. And my question is from a couple of these things I've kept just in hopes that I could bring them into a tissue culture environment and kind of clean them and bring them back to quote unquote life.

55:03Collin PalmerAnd I guess the real question is that hope and that dream to bring that specific variety back, is that real in terms of what you were talking about when you bring it in to clean it? Are you going to come out with genetic drift? And how real is that? And what does that look like for someone like myself that wants to save things and kind of preserve and keep things?

55:27Collin PalmerIt's not that everything has been like that. It's just there's two or three varieties that I've noticed that just don't perform the same way. And you can clearly see it through photos.

55:39Ian DavidsonYeah, you just got to get them into the into the tissue culture process, right? I mean, it's like we can't You know, we can't answer those questions yet of exactly what's, you know, what's there or what's not, right? And, but it's really kind of unimportant. It's like, remove the stuff and, you know, let's see what happens with the plant. I mean, some of these plants, like, you know, we did over the last year and a half, we've done trials with four of the big LPs where we built the TC lab in their facility.

56:07Ian DavidsonWe grew their strains. We plowed the clones next to the TC plants, like, 18 months later, right? Right. And I mean, in some of those examples, some of those examples, the plants came out and they don't even look like the same strain. Like there was one that was like a, was like a, you know, narrow leaf indica, you know, seven years ago. And the plants that we initiated looked like a long leaf sativa.

56:33Ian DavidsonAnd after we removed whatever we did, I don't know what we removed. Plants looked totally different. They looked and the grower was like, holy shit. Like, he showed me a picture he's like dude look at this plant from you know six years ago that's what it looked like right interesting you know so it's the the effect of all of this on the plane you know is is far and beyond you know potentially just like slowing it down or you know you know having little little differences you know it can be it can be drastic now that's an extreme example i'm giving you you know most of the plants

57:06Collin PalmerYou know, what I see are extreme examples. Like I, I can, I should send you some photos. I mean, they're extreme. You see the, the, even the inner node, you know, nodal lengths are just, it's insane. I mean, you, you're, you're looking at very different, completely different plants on us. So, yeah. Um, well, cool. That's, that's, that's really good information. Um, so are we at the point where you think we can replace mother rooms and And put them into, you know, with a trained operator to really run your varieties over and over, like you're saying with micropropagation, or are we still in that in-between stage where we're still learning what the best path forward is?

57:56Ian DavidsonYeah, I think... You know, I think we're still kind of in the middle of that right now. You know, like at Segra, I mean, we're doing it. You know, we're now producing plants at scale. We shipped out orders this year up to 40,000 in a single order. You know, so it's happening. The, you know, the real challenge, well, a couple things, you know, is cultivars. You know, they don't all perform the same in tissue culture.

58:24Ian DavidsonThere's some. Aaron Wade, MD, The, you know, really seem to slip right in there and be very happy. And there's others that aren't right. They don't multiply as easily, you know, and so, you know, like I said, you know, we've got about 250 cultivars that we've put through the process, you know, and out of that, there's about 30 now, you know, that we feel Really confident, you know, in our ability to consistently produce them and, and the acclimation, you know, to know how to bring them out.

58:51Ian DavidsonRight. Cause you'll see, you'll see a lot of these plants that come out looking like Chia pets or, you know, kind of crazy, you know, and, uh, you know, that's, that's again, the whole talent of like, how do you make that transition really smooth, you know, as you're coming out of the process and, and, you know, that's something that takes years of. Chris Brown, Of trials and and so you know there's really kind of a like at this point in the in the evolution of tissue culture cannabis, at least for us, you know it's really kind of a phenotyping process that we go through again.

59:23Ian DavidsonChris Brown, Right with the plant where it's like you give me your thing that's got everything you like, and you know I put it in TC and you know it's going to take us some time. Chris Brown, To figure out how to work with it in that environment, you know, and we've got some cultivars that we're just like that one's going on the shelf, like we're, you know, we could maybe spend a bunch of time and energy working with it and figuring it out.

59:44Ian DavidsonBut it's, you know, at this point in the game, we can't, you know, we're trying to just focus on going with what we have. So the, you know, I think the integration into like production. The thing that's been really interesting is that, you know, these TC plants, you know, there's this term called like a signoidal curve, right? So like when you look at the growth of a cannabis plant, you know, it kind of exponentially starts growing faster and producing more biomass as it gains momentum and gain size.

1:00:16Ian DavidsonAnd, you know, what we've noticed with the TC plants is, you know, for the first two to three weeks of their life, they grow, they do grow way slower than a clone would, right? So, you know, essentially, if you're going to do this, you really are adding about two weeks of time, two to three weeks of time into the overall growth cycle of that plant, right? So that sounds like a bad thing, right?

1:00:40Ian DavidsonIt's like, wait a minute, I got to grow that plant for another three weeks, right? That's time and money and resources, et cetera. You know, however, you know, what we're, what we're tending to do now is, you know, our product is, if you look on our website, you know, we call them a microplug. You know, they're, they're, instead of a 50 cell tray of clones, you know, there's 200 in that same space, right?

1:01:03Ian DavidsonAnd, you know, most of our clients are taking those and then they're putting them into a 50 cell tray. Right. And putting them on a rack for two weeks. So like, yeah, it's taking an extra two weeks, but it's at, on a vertical rack using almost no square footage and very little lighting, you know? So, you know, little energy in the trade off is you get a plant that's consistent and clean.

1:01:26Ian DavidsonRight. But yeah, it does have that extra workflow. Um, so, you know, there's a lot of complaints around, oh, that, you know, the TC plants grow. You know, too slowly, they take too long. And yeah, they do take a little longer. And like, let's say you're doing a, you know, an ultra high density indoor where you only veg for two weeks. Right, right. Yeah, that's like, you know, that's a challenge because, you know, it's, it's going to take longer, you know, our little plants grow so slowly in that, in that first phase.

1:01:55Ian DavidsonSo, you know, that's, you know, one of the challenges, like, you know, the two real big challenges that we're trying to manage are, You know, getting that consistent growth coming out of acclimation and then, you know, keeping our eyes on this whole mutation risk, essentially.

1:02:10SpeakerIan, there was a question in the chat. It was about viruses. And they said, are the viruses airborne? And as far as I know, they're spread by tools, by people, and by insects with direct contact.

1:02:29Ian DavidsonYeah, the only place I think there could be an airborne risk is, is in, you know, post harvest processing, like, if you're grinding up, you know, lots of fresh material, you know, if you're literally grinding material and putting it in the air, yeah, you can have, you know, but it's particles flying around in the air. It's not like, you know, necessarily just, you know, like, like us with COVID of like breathing bacteria, you know, it's not going to just Breathe off the stomas of the plants, right?

1:02:58Ian DavidsonSo yeah, tools, you know, and I mean, like you see, you know, down here in California, like guys that I know down here that are getting more sophisticated. Yeah, they've got systems now where like every employee is sanitizing all of their tools between plants, you know, and that's sanitization is an enormous deal. And like cloning, you know, like if you are doing cloning, like you should be doing it in like a laboratory type environment.

1:03:24Ian DavidsonYou know, like you should be doing everything you can, you know, like, I mean, I'm guilty over the years, you know, it's like you just start getting used to it and, you know, use an old cutting board and some razor blade or whatever, you know, like the use of, you know, peroxide and, and what's the stuff in cleanse? Is it calcium? What do they call it? It's the hypochlorite.

1:03:45Ian DavidsonThere's this other Substance and hypochlorous acid, you know, you should be using these tools, you know, to, to make the absolute cleanest plant that you possibly can. Like, you know, just going into the grow room with your dirty hands and your dirty scissors and, and your tray and chopping away, like, you know, you're asking for trouble. So, you know, definitely cleaning up that workflow can make, you know, enormous, you know, differences in your ability to manage, manage the problem.

1:04:18Ian DavidsonYou know, but the, you know, the real solution will be a concert of these things, right? It's like moving to a real clean stock kind of starting material like TC, you know, and then also, you know, amping up the hygiene, you know, like, like when you go in the big tomato greenhouses, you know, those guys have in a couple of them, I've seen these things like I haven't seen the product yet and can't in product ties, they make them themselves where like, when they squeeze their trip, their scissors on the plants, It like shoots out a little bit of this sanitizing liquid right onto the blade of the scissors, you know, and they've got a little like pouch of their, of their, you know, little sanitizer stuff that they're actually like using out in the garden.

1:05:00Ian DavidsonI've seen that in a couple of these big million square foot greenhouses and like they both made them themselves. I'm curious if anybody's ever seen a product like that. Like I've searched around for one and I haven't been able to find one. But, but yeah, you know.

1:05:12SpeakerThe closest I've seen Ian is where people, Use a tool for one plant, whether it's one chop or a hundred chops on that plant. And then they put the tool in a jar of a disinfectant of some sort and use a different tool and leave them soaking in there a half an hour or so, then they can reuse them.

1:05:37Ian DavidsonYeah, it sounds like fun, right? It's like you're on the greenhouse with 100,000 plants trying to use

1:05:44Ian DavidsonSo, you know, but it's, it will definitely make it, you know, all the sanitation efforts like really do, really do pay.

1:05:52SpeakerIt depends how big your plants are. My mother plant used to be 15 feet tall. I could easily get thousands of clones from one mother, then change a tool.

1:06:04Etienne FontanYeah, yeah. So most of these viruses and bacteria come through the cut part of a plant. They're not being transferred between each plant as they touch each other. They basically get stored in the plant because of how it's propagated.

1:06:20Ian DavidsonWell, you're, you know, the cut is, you know, just creating an open wound site. I mean, you know, you think about in a greenhouse or a grow, like the amount of bacteria flying around in the air in there, you know, of thousands and thousands of species. So yeah, it's really that, you know, that cutting process. So, you know, like again, when you're making your moms, you know, using sanitized tools, you know, if you're making really big cuts on a plant, you know, using something, you know, any of these tree wound type substances, you know, to To cover up that big wound, you know, it's like you wouldn't walk around with a huge cut on your arm, like you're going to put something over it to keep things clean, you know.

1:07:00Ian DavidsonAnd, and, you know, I like anecdotally, you know, these, these risks really, from what I've seen so far seem to be much higher with people who are running soil based systems, unfortunately, you know, I mean, I'm a big organics guy myself, but gosh, you know, and you got soil in that room and All the biology that comes in with that is just another variable. However, a lot of those organizms may be really good at keeping your plant clean too.

1:07:30Ian DavidsonGot all the good guys, so it's a game of roulette.

1:07:37Etienne FontanBeneficial versus non-beneficial. Who wins? Yep, exactly.

1:07:46BubblemanAwesome, dude.

1:07:47SpeakerI think the real key with it is that we want to, you know, support ecosystems that promote beneficial organizms, you know, the, the, the micro bacteria that within the soil that are going to feed the plants, but while at the same time creating a sterile, you know, propagation line that, that way that, you know, each time we propagate that clone, it comes out more sterile than the, than the previous time.

1:08:15SpeakerAnd then, you know, it's just a matter of as you see those bad, you know, whether bad insects or bad microbes show up, there's generally a bigger insect or microbe that'll eat them. You just have to, you know, there's, for example, active bacillus eating mildew, some of the mildews, but the, you know, with the rules and regulations around cannabis, you have to, you know, start from as clean of a cutting as possible just to minimize that contamination when you're restarting rooms or greenhouses.

1:08:51SpeakerIan, I wanted to say one thing, and that was that Many viruses can be transmitted by both seeds and pollen.

1:09:02Ian DavidsonAbsolutely.

1:09:03SpeakerSo I don't know about bacteria and fungi, but viruses, I would say the majority of them can be transported in seed and in pollen.

1:09:19Ian DavidsonThat's a key comment right there. I mean, it's like if you look at crops like papayas, right? You know, you know, they are produced through tissue culture. They're also, you know, they're a prolific seed producing plant, right? It's like, and why they're still done through TC is because of the virus issues where, you know, they carry right through the seed. And, you know, you wouldn't have to, hey, like a global viable, you know, papaya industry without the ability to control and manage the virus, right?

1:09:55Ian DavidsonUm, hold on just one sec guys.

1:10:00SpeakerI was just going to say on the, um, the reason I was so quick to pop on, on the hypochlorous acid is cause I bought this machine about a year ago that makes hypochlorous acid water for me. Um, it's kind of a weird deal and. It's expensive. The brand that I bought, it's not really for farm use, but I think there's some models out there that are for farm use.

1:10:22SpeakerAnd they basically electrolyze and use salt water to make a sterile low pH 2.5 electrolyzed water. And I got it as it was sold as an IPM deal. Like I could spray the low pH to kill insects and then spray the extremely high pH to kill pathogens. And it's been all right working for me, you know, to be honest, I haven't used it as much for that, but what I have used it for, and it's really up my game in taking my cuts and all my tools because I just push this fucking button and out comes this, it's sterile, but it's not bleach, it's not toxic, like I don't mind, Being on me or spilling or whatever, using excessive amounts because I have this machine and I just push the button and out it comes.

1:11:09SpeakerAnd so I use it all over the place and it's really stepped my game up in my sterility, you know, because I am an organic guy and there's a lot of stuff floating around. And then the other comment on that is just like, being being smart you know yes things compost yes there's a bigger guy to eat something but you know there's a time and a place for that and I I like leave the composting for the compost pile and try to keep you know things pretty as clean as I can given the fact that I have a really you know tons of plants growing in there that are not just cannabis there's all sorts of shit so my what for

1:11:43BubblemanWhat about another thing I wanted to talk about in regards to, you know, what you guys are doing with tissue cultures is the lab work and the potential future of being able to use, I guess, genetic identification, like being able to see the gene synthesis, find them in a way. I know we're not quite there yet, but can you talk a little bit about that if you have any idea of what I'm actually talking about?

1:12:09Ian DavidsonI mean, are you thinking about the breeding side?

1:12:11BubblemanYeah.

1:12:13Ian DavidsonYeah. So, I mean, it's, yeah, like, you know, at Segra, like I mentioned, we've got two different businesses, really. There's the tissue culture operation led by this guy, Dr. Zabide, and then we have a separate facility that's really run like a different business. That's our molecular biology lab run by this guy, Dr. John Brunstein. And, you know, they're very intentionally in two different places. You know, like at the genotyping lab, we've got permits there to possess and do testing with all these controlled pathogens.

1:12:46Ian DavidsonSo, like, obviously, we want that to be in a different place. So, you know, in that division of the company, You know, we are working on developing a bunch of different genomics tools that should lead us towards the ability to start doing Merkur-assisted breeding. And, you know, there's, for us, there's a couple things I'd mention here where, you know, the first genotyping test we developed is called this VNTR test.

1:13:16Ian DavidsonAnd VNTR is what's used in essentially every forensics lab in the world. Right. And BNTR has been established to do to be able to tell, like, is the blood on the table your blood? And, you know, if so, you're going to prison for life. Right. So and it's, you know, used in all of these forensics labs around the world. So they have, you know, a standardized test to be able to do this fingerprinting.

1:13:41Ian DavidsonAnd everybody uses the same thing. Right. Wouldn't that be nice in cannabis? So, you know, so we developed that test where like, you give me a plant sample, right? You give me two leaves. I can test the two of them. And I can tell you like a fingerprint if they're the same or not, right? If they have the same fingerprint. But I can't tell any of the trait information.

1:14:03Ian DavidsonI can't tell, you know, if that plant's going to be tall or short or high THC or low THC. Like, you know, that BNTR looks at 12 markers. Which is like we found statistically to be just enough for us to be able to, you know, with an extremely high level of certainty guarantee two things are the same or not, right? But like the key there is, you know, as we're collaborating with other organizations, right, you can give us your germplasm.

1:14:31Ian DavidsonAnd, you know, that's the only kind of genotype test we would do on that plant, right? It's in our contract. It says we'll do a VNTR. And that's just so we can guarantee that we're not mixing things up and that when we ship it out, we, All right, so we're going to go ahead and get started. We're going to go ahead and get started. We're going to go ahead and get started.

1:15:11Ian DavidsonAnd we've been developing tools. It's kind of like, like that's like a digital recording, you know, versus, you know, the, I lost my train of thought there. Yeah, the, you know, the really high resolution testing like Illumina is like looking at a digital recording, whereas like the VNTR is kind of like a cassette tape, right? It's much lower resolution. And, but it's way cheaper, right? We can run these VNTR tests for super cheap.

1:15:40Ian DavidsonSo, You know, we're working on developing tests that are kind of between Illumina and BNTR that are like stepping stones to getting you to those, to using the higher resolution tests like the Illumina test. So, you know, the whole like world here of being able to identify high value markers and utilize those markers actively in a breeding program Um, you know, it's still very much in its infancy.

1:16:10Ian DavidsonLike we figure we're probably about another, you know, two to three years out from being able to apply these technologies to actually utilizing marker assisted breeding and

1:16:22SpeakerYou know, I'm sure some of these big LPs are making some moves there, but it's going to take quite a while to... Like you say, it's not so simple, Ian, because some markers, for example, for a particular cannabinoid or for a particular terpene, That you can see relatively easy. But what you can't see is how much is a plant going to express under optimal conditions? In other words, is it going to produce a whole lot of CBC or practically none?

1:16:56SpeakerNobody's really got their hands around that yet.

1:16:59BubblemanAnd here's another question. If they do see that synthase, can they tell if it will be on or off?

1:17:08Ian DavidsonNot with certainty yet. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, I think all of this is, you know, we're in, we're in the dugout here. We're not even in the first inning, you know, with the application of, you know, molecular breeding tools for, for cannabis. And I think it's, you know, like a big part of this is like, you know, really like the university systems, like once they start getting in and sinking their budgets into this stuff, it's going to start really, really rolling a lot faster.

1:17:41Ian DavidsonYou know, because like on the private sector, you know, the companies that really have the tech, you know, they're not in cannabis yet. You know, they're not, they're not here. So, you know, there's, you know, small companies like ours that are, you know, chipping away at the bigger picture. But, you know, I think the, you know, the big boys will be coming in here at some point.

1:18:02SpeakerThey know it from many other commercial crops. much better than cannabis but they have scratched the surface you know they can find synthases and terpenes and other uh markers but uh the ones that they really need for vigor for resistance those are the ones that uh are going to really change the industry yeah you're right so

1:18:33Ian DavidsonAll right. I apologize. I'm going to have to jump off here, fellas. We got to go. So I'm here at 1030. Dude, thanks for throwing it down. Well, that's a good start. I mentioned you, Marcus. We're doing this webinar on Thursday with Doctors Abide is doing the ABCs of PTC on Thursday afternoon. And if any of you guys want to learn more, that's going to be an awesome opportunity.

1:18:58Ian DavidsonWe'll have an hour. He's going to go through a deck that goes through all the different technologies. And then we're going to have a Q&A. And we're going to try and start doing those once a month or something like that, different related webinars. So we're getting on the webinar train. And if any of you guys want to join us, it's free. It's on Thursday. You can register on our pages.

1:19:21BubblemanI'll put your website up in the comments in the description of this video so people will see it and be able to click on it and go right to registering. Yep, sounds good. I'm going to come check it out as well. Dude, thanks so much for finally making it onto Hash Church, dude. That was an awesome throwdown.

1:19:38Ian DavidsonYeah, and heads up, we're going to be in, we're going to be in the, starting to operate in California this year, working on that right now. So we've been just... MCS! Yeah, yeah, we're getting, we're making the move. Are you in California?

1:19:53Etienne FontanYeah, I'm in Berkeley. So come see us when if you're in Northern California.

1:19:57Ian DavidsonI'd love to give you a tour of Berkeley Patients Group. I live in Auburn up by Sacramento. So, so yeah, I'm in the hood for sure. So great to connect. I'd love to. You should definitely go see ATN.

1:20:10BubblemanYeah, let's do it. Love to. Absolutely. You will be very happy that you did. I can promise.

1:20:19Ian DavidsonI'll take that. Awesome, man. All right, you guys. Hey, everybody. Have a great Sunday. And love to all your families. And be safe. And we'll talk to you later. Thanks, brother. Have a good one.

1:20:36BubblemanWell, I felt like that was some pretty good information. Nice little conversation for about an hour there on tissue culture. And hopefully I'll be able to get Ian back here one day because he is a wealth of information when it comes to this stuff.

1:20:51Etienne FontanThat was fascinating. I love asking questions when I can understand what's going on. Sometimes it can go from zero to, and I'm real stupid.

1:21:01SpeakerLet me tell you, it is the future of cannabis breeding and mass production. That's the way they do strawberries. That's the way they do grapes. It's the future.

1:21:14Etienne FontanWell, if we're going to have our Costco ounces, yeah, no doubt it has to be that way. You know, if it's going to be propagated nationally in a way that is consistent so I can get my same OG Kush here is the same OG Kush on the East Coast without any issues, you know what I'm saying? Or Congolese or We've got a lot of work to do.

1:21:33Etienne FontanWe've got a lot of work to do. We've got a lot of work to do.

1:21:57Etienne FontanTo know that this type of research is out there, that they're calling and pulling out these viruses and bacteria and that there's actually methodologies that are sound that can be doing so. I can't see why any type of large company isn't looking for these type of propagators. So people are watching. They gave you the university in Japan to go to and learn this. There's a lot of.

1:22:22Etienne FontanWe need a lot of you.

1:22:24SpeakerThe big growers in the future, when they have a choice, will take the safe road, you know, the clean road.

1:22:33BubblemanI love it as an opportunity for small growers. I love cannabis to get to a point where you could just open up the computer and be like, I'm going to order up some of these different cultivars that I hear them talking about on Hash Church. And then knowing with like, it's amazing to me how many people in the chat were kind of tripping. They were like, oh, they're hacking plants.

1:22:52BubblemanThey're This is some scientific GMO shit. I'm like, no, no, no. He's literally telling you this is the opposite of that. He's not doing that. He's taking fingerprints and marking a plant so that if you order it, he can give you a guarantee and out of a lab that's actually been validated, which is not a cheap thing to do. It takes a couple of years and it's millions of dollars to validate a lab.

1:23:15BubblemanI know they did. Yeah. Yeah.

1:23:20BubblemanIt has nothing to do, it's actually cloning. That's the first thing Ian ever told me about Dr. Smai. He said, he's as much a farmer as he is a scientist. And he has to be an equal of both for this world to exist. This is not callous tissue culture. This is meristemic.

1:23:39Etienne FontanAnd to think that you could order micro plugs of safe genetics

1:23:45BubblemanOh my God. Right? Dude, what a huge advantage to give. That's the true gift for a patient, in my opinion. Like if patients could be ordering clean plants, do you know what? Listen, let's all be honest. It's not as easy as people sometimes say it is to grow cannabis. It's a lot of attention. It's like having a bloody puppy dog. You've got to take care of this thing or it's going to die.

1:24:07BubblemanYou really have to take care of it. And so to be able to order clean plantlets and have that sort of advantage right from the beginning, rather than get like mited, aphid out, pests ridden, bacteria loaded virus and fungi, the whole nine yards. And then you're supposed to grow something with that. You're like, oh, I got like 26 grams. It's like, come on, man. They need the advantage.

1:24:30BubblemanWe all do.

1:24:31SpeakerIt's also that way with seeds, Marcus. You buy seeds in the hope that they're going to give you what the breeder has promised. And that may or may not be the case. You may get one with 10 different feather types in each seed batch.

1:24:49Etienne FontanAnd a virus in that seed.

1:24:52SpeakerYeah, who knows? Also, yeah, I didn't even want to get into that.

1:24:55Etienne FontanOr how many of those 27 potentially are in that seed?

1:25:02BubblemanThat's what I'm saying. I think it's great for initiation. I love it as a service. Can you imagine if there was just a facility one day where you could just bring your dirty ass, nasty, infested fucking plant, pay a fee, and in like six months, just like return back and be like, have the chance to A, put it into the library, you know, especially if they fingerprinted and it's nothing they've ever seen.

1:25:24BubblemanIt's not a part of anything. They connect it to you. Now you somehow are making something off that plant. And you give it to them to let the rest of the world have access to it or you give it to them only to hold just for you, whatever your mentality is. I just like the idea. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:26:09BubblemanYeah, that's the super-duper future you're living in there.

1:26:15Etienne FontanOr even the super-duper future of you could actually test that seed to find out what viruses are actually inside there. You have to grow the plant out currently, right, Sam, to actually... You can test seed embryos, no problem. You can do the seed, okay.

1:26:32SpeakerYes. Of course, when that destroys the seed, then you no longer have that seed.

1:26:38Etienne FontanRight.

1:26:39SpeakerWhereas with a little plant, but you just need a punch of a leaf.

1:26:48SpeakerYou need the home unit.

1:26:51BubblemanNeed a home unit, Johnny?

1:26:53SpeakerI need a home unit. I saw you going in your garden and looking at your garden like, yeah, that ain't sterile. Oh, shit. I was like, I got like, I got plants everywhere. I got like, Yeah, I'm just, yeah, doing different feeding, different grow meetings, seeing what's taking what under what LEDs and what's feeding better and seeing what's, yeah, I'm just having fun, happy for months, so.

1:27:20SpeakerYeah, but there's nothing sterile here at all, zero, right? So I'm just kind of looking, I go, you know, it's my own research. Johnny, I've had a greenhouse for 30 years. It was never sterile. If it would have, the plants wouldn't have grown as good. There you go. Yeah, that's definitely a lot of fun looking at how he's doing. I mean, I did some of those first rows with Seger.

1:27:47SpeakerI got the strains right here. Remember that, Mark? So I remember that first tissue culture one and just thinking about that and just thinking how he's able to kind of keep those strains alive. And at the same time, just like you say, disease bug free, everything that comes to your fresher. I'm curious after like 15 years of having this strain, I mean, where are the problems lie?

1:28:07SpeakerWhere are the tops of buds just dying and just little things with different, I look at my plants and kind of wonder now, so.

1:28:15BubblemanI'm sure it would be quite different if you got it all cleaned up and initiated.

1:28:24Etienne FontanYeah, I'd love a mechanic shop where I could take my plant in. Will you please pull this shit out? Okay, boom. Yeah, like you said earlier, can you imagine that? You know, clean your genetics. Somebody would make a killing off a cleaner genetics company. I mean, but that would take a decade to even just get up.

1:28:43SpeakerNot only clean your genetics, but imagine taking a plant or a seedling or a leaf or whatever it is that they need They examine the DNA and they say, well, this plant has the ability to produce medium large amounts of THC, medium large amounts of XYZ. And they know not only which compounds they have the ability to produce, but in what sort of ratios and amounts. That will be the future.

1:29:21BubblemanYeah, it'll be interesting to see anyway. I like the idea of clean genetics. I feel a lot of growers would probably instantaneously take the credit, but they're taking the grief when they're growing these plants that are just unable to express themselves, even with fairly decent growers. You get plants that are sick enough and once they're sick, do you not agree, Sam, that they tend to... We're going to have a lot of fun.

1:29:53BubblemanWe're going to have a lot of fun.

1:30:17SpeakerThe best, not only the variety they want, but expresses the smells and effects and tastes and cannabinoids they want, but they'd like the plant to be dependable. So it doesn't have health problems when you treated it in the normal way you treat plants successfully.

1:30:40Etienne FontanYeah, true enough. True enough.

1:30:44BubblemanWell, that's a lot to take in today. Ian was going off on a pretty high level of tissue culture.

1:30:54Etienne FontanMy brain's mush, man. After that, I'm just like, I have, ooh.

1:30:58Collin PalmerI'm just right in my head.

1:31:02BubblemanI like it. Oh, me too. I like science. What? I like it.

1:31:12Etienne FontanYou love science. You don't just like science. You passionately love science in a way that porn producers could never get the pictures of.

1:31:23SpeakerAbsolutely true. Science is almost a religion to me, but I'm not a particularly religious person.

1:31:35Etienne FontanBut your perpetuation of science has helped propagate generations of genetics that we wouldn't have known or had otherwise. So thank you for your science nerdedness and willingness to go there because you made your mistakes early on to realize, I mean, I would assume that you realized early on that science was your friend and not your enemy.

1:31:59SpeakerYeah, I mean, and I can honestly say that Because most of my life I've been doing research and development that I often learn more from mistakes than, I mean, I definitely have made more mistakes than successes, but you learn a lot when you remember, don't do this. And intellectually, you may know it, but when you do do it, then you don't do it again.

1:32:32Etienne FontanThat's the key.

1:32:33SpeakerDon't do it again when it's... Now would they say Einstein made like over a thousand mistakes before he invented the light bulb or something? There's all these things. If you don't make mistakes, you're not learning. You're not moving forward. You're not going forward. You gotta make mistakes.

1:32:53BubblemanDid you just say Einstein invented the light bulb?

1:32:56SpeakerNo, I said that wrong. I'm high. That was awesome.

1:32:59BubblemanThat was like a Johnny B quote. I'm going back and that's going to be, that is going to be, I was going to use one of Ian's little audio bits for the podcast, but now it absolutely has to be. Dude, that was amazing.

1:33:15SpeakerI was like, did you just say Einstein? Yeah, no, that was wrong.

1:33:21BubblemanThat's awesome, dude. I love you, Johnny B.

1:33:23Etienne FontanWhat are you smoking, Johnny B? Because that's some good shit.

1:33:26SpeakerMedi Kush. It's been hanging for 30 days. It's just perfect. And it's getting me super stoned, especially for breakfast. And I'm like on like number like five or six. Plus I'm smoking the hash, the bubble. I'm doing dabs of the Congo. What a great day to hang out on Sunday, right?

1:33:49BubblemanYeah, absolutely, dude. Totally agreed. I had to bounce some dude from the chat. He just kept saying the most ridiculous shit.

1:33:57SpeakerHe's threatened by our conversation. Remember I talked about those little...

1:34:05SpeakerYep, you did. I do.

1:34:06BubblemanI remember.

1:34:07SpeakerI got bags of these and I'm going to be sending these out to certain people. So you guys know who you are. Please send me your mailing address. I can send these out to you, Ed Chen, everybody else. Anybody involved with the half-church entity wants and knows the issue very well, please contact me. So I'm definitely a little momentum of a good friend of ours, right? Thanks.

1:34:29SpeakerThanks, Johnny B.

1:34:32BubblemanI guess, I don't know, if you guys want to chat for another half an hour, I'm down with making it a couple of hours, but I did just plan for a really short hash church this morning because it was such last minute. If you guys had things you wanted to discuss, I'm absolutely down. We've polarized the chat pretty good, or maybe it was just one guy had to bounce from the chat because he was seemingly upset about our conversation about tissue culture.

1:34:55BubblemanHe suggested that we were going to be creating the technology and giving it to the sharks to rape us. I feel that some people are not puffing on very good herbs these days. And I know that people are stressful and are stressed out due to, you know, this whole weird mind control thing everyone's going through.

1:35:15SpeakerIt's like any other tool, Marcus. It can be used for good or for evil. Let's be honest.

1:35:24BubblemanYeah, of course. I just try to keep it good. I'm trying, you know, it's just Sunday morning. I want everyone to have a good day and enjoy each other's vibes and not to not give audience to, you know, because we worked hard for this audience. And it's if when I see people being negative in the chat, I feel like, you know what, there's just you got to go create your own audience for that.

1:35:44BubblemanIf you want to be here and enjoy and, you know, spend your time and share, then everyone's welcome. But if you're going to be negative, you got to. Gotta go.

1:35:53SpeakerOh, yeah.

1:35:56BubblemanMaybe one last bong rip for the hour. One last bong rip for the hour. Did we lose Joshua? Did he bounce? Is he still here? Oh, yeah, he's there. He's there. He was going to get in touch with Kevin Jodfrey and see if he... Yeah, I sent him a message.

1:36:18SpeakerI'm just here, actually. I'm sterilizing my cloners. I have four, you know, big clone or water cloners and it was on my list today and

1:36:33SpeakerLike there is a lazy part inside me still, you guys. And there, you know, I had this voice of this guy ringing in my head. He's like, oh, I just fucking put a little bleach in there, run them and go again. And I actually work them down and scrub them really hard. And it takes me almost all day to clean my four cloners. And so he said that I was like, damn it, Rutherford, like do your thing, clean that shit up proper.

1:36:56SpeakerSo I just started. That's awesome, dude.

1:37:02SpeakerYeah.

1:37:02BubblemanSorry, I'm just torching a bowl and probably nobody wants to hear the torch.

1:37:08SpeakerNo, I love the conversation. I'll just hop in. Like, I'm always thinking from, you know, I long time ago realized the food system and realized cannabis is going that way. And it's taken a lot longer than I thought it would take. But I'm okay with it. Like, I'm okay with the folks that want to fuck us. Not really, but I just am okay that they exist and that's going to happen and it's a reality.

1:37:32SpeakerAnd there's going to be big mega cannabis. And it's going to have a lot of bad impacts, but it's also going to have a lot of good impacts. It's going to have accessibility. There's this whole mixed box. But I look at like my place and our place in it. And it's always like we say, the smaller thing. And so, You know, yeah, let them tissue culture their triploid, you know, fucking sour dub that comes in at like 67%, you know, total cannabinoids and blows everyone out of the water.

1:38:03SpeakerAnd that's going to be here in a couple years. And that's going to be in production. And what we have is something a lot more unique that cannot be produced, you know, with our, you know, terroir, if you will, you know, whether it's regional, individual, the way we cultivate, etc. You know, Just and then and then thinking how does tissue culture play into that and my like craft breeding program because there's no way I'm going to compete in my breeding with these these mega cultivars so I have to focus on doing something that's unique and and then that someone might want to you know smoke because they they care about it a little bit more rather than buying the Costco weed you know and yeah so it's just really interesting thinking like yeah maybe I need to figure this out on a small scale and set up a small little sterile room so I can Be running batches this way and breeding larger batches.

1:38:55SpeakerLike, I don't know. You're just really.

1:38:57BubblemanI mean, just having the ability to initiate your plants would be incredible.

1:39:01SpeakerIf you just have a little closet area where you're like, I'm just going to clean my plants and you clean them and you plant, plant them and start growing them.

1:39:08BubblemanI mean, I saw some of the plants before you breed with it.

1:39:10SpeakerLike you're like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to set off this room for La Paula and I've got everyone lined up what I'm going to do. Let's sterilize it all. And then breed with that clean and you'll make the best seed. Right. Sorry, I didn't mean to just run over you there.

1:39:26BubblemanOh, no problem. I'm also trying to talk to a dude in chat who's asking me something about like PGRs. He's like, you can only get like three and four star from PGRs. I'm like, well, no shit.

1:39:39Etienne FontanSo your consideration then is going towards something that's more artisan specific, artisan specific genetics, you know, is that what you're considering?

1:39:48SpeakerThat's kind of what I was saying. Yeah, artisan specific, you know, unique, the old stuff, the stuff that doesn't work on mass scale, which is what I was doing when I took a break and did tomato farming. I was growing these heirlooms that no company can grow because they can't ship and Whatever. So if I grow them in regionally and support just the local industry and I can drop off my heirlooms on Friday that they're going to cut up that afternoon and serve Friday and Saturday night, it worked and I could get a high dollar.

1:40:14SpeakerSo this is my whole like, you know, I took a break from cannabis and learned all this by reading organic agriculture books and how to like, you know, do all the things that we talk about. Take your product and stack the benefits by maybe make it into something else and And just being an outlier and not, you know, I don't know. I just kind of gave in like you guys won a long time ago.

1:40:36SpeakerYou won. You got it. You have big business. You're going to take cannabis. I love cannabis. Where can I fit in this? You know? That's, you know, I'm still starting.

1:40:45BubblemanI don't think they realize how cannabis is going to affect them. That is the other factor. You're right.

1:40:50SpeakerAs it changes.

1:40:51BubblemanThat's what people, people should have faith in cannabis because, you know, there's a reason why they kept it at bay for so long and kept the nine foot steel door shut on cannabis for so long because even deep down, they have to know how deep it's going to get into everyone's heads. Whether they're wearing it or eating it for health or taking different cannabinoids that are different from THC or straight dabbing or recreational using or preventative using or, you know, the dozen new methods of using that will pop up over the course of the next 10 or 20 years as the science gets deeper and the cultivars get, you know, bred and created that have higher contents of different cannabinoids, different ratios.

1:41:34BubblemanAnd I, for one, am looking forward to where we're going with cannabis.

1:41:39Etienne FontanWell, look what they did with wine. I mean, wine, you know, they had bottles of wine. They realized, well, just selling bottles of wine doesn't work. So maybe if we create an area where people can come and taste the wine. Okay. So I could see many cottage or artisan cannabis doing exactly that model, creating a nice area, a beautiful experience when people come in from when they drive up.

1:42:04Etienne FontanWe'll see you next time.

1:42:23Etienne FontanYou'll never find them in a store shelf, but you'll go to that winery and pick up a couple of cases because that shit's good and they just produce enough just to sell that way or through their mailing list. So I see that model definitely becoming regional, like in the Humboldt or Mendocino. Some of the terroirs have now been set here in California. I can see that type of, you know, So, you know, they can have the experience of seeing it just like the wines growing there at the, you know, at the winery.

1:42:54Etienne FontanThey get the whole experience there in a regional situation. You walk in and buy, you buy an ounce, you get it, you get two grams of oil, rosin.

1:43:18SpeakerYou get 10 cuts and you go home and you get excited for six months down the road. I hope you're right. Maybe you can call me, the breeder, and say, hey, what's going on with me in July? And I'm like, oh, hey, you need a compost tea. I'll brew you one up, come and pick it, whatever. Like that would be the, man, I would just cry just dreaming of that, you know?

1:43:42SpeakerWell, I'm sure it's going to be true. Not only that, I would not be surprised if Costco and Kmart also have tasting rooms, smoking rooms. I mean, come on. It's better for society, the wider it spreads. And, you know, some people like Bud, some people like, you know, craft beer. And I think there's room for everybody.

1:44:12BubblemanThe way it came in through medical, it doesn't seem like they're going to be able to pull it away. I mean, here in Canada, it's very easy to get a license. You can grow your own. Even if you don't have a license, you can grow four plants. Everyone in the country that's over 19 can grow four plants. But if you want, you just go get yourself a license and you can grow 30 or 50 or 100 or 200 plants.

1:44:34BubblemanYou know, well within reason, it's not very difficult. You know, because cannabis is so effective for inflammation, really anything with inflammation can get you a permit.

1:44:46Etienne FontanI'm surprised no one's tried to do it like Christmas tree places where you can come by a live Christmas tree, just go cut your tree. That's a nursery.

1:44:55SpeakerWe're talking about that in Washington, but it's all the laws, you know, but we've been talking about that for patients specifically in COVID. It's kind of gotten the legislators a little more open to look at this. And that was one of the things like, hey, we can bring a plant all the way to fruition and they don't have to pay for the trimming, processing, drying. They can take it home.

1:45:13SpeakerThey can make it into oil, whatever they need to do.

1:45:15Etienne FontanYeah, you could have a freezer on site. They could flash freeze it so it's transportable. Yeah.

1:45:24SpeakerI've been pushing this idea for 10, 20 years. And I absolutely agree. And economically, I think if you grew 100,000 plants and you sold them for $100 each for a plant that can yield a kilo or two after it's cleaned and dried, it's a lot of economic sense. But I think in California, the laws are in the way at this moment. But we can change laws.

1:45:53Etienne FontanOh, well, we've established that. We didn't like 2015. We changed that. And we don't like 64. So we'll change that. So we just know what the parameters are. We'll fix it.

1:46:04BubblemanHell yeah. We did the same thing, man. We had that amazing group, the coalition that took on with John Connor. I took on the federal government here and just basically destroyed the federal government.

1:46:18SpeakerAnd people by numbers maintained the ability to grow. And that's what the coalition did. The medical community got together and fought for a cause and we won. That was awesome. Patients stood up for their rights and we stand up more for cannabis than we have and it's great to see. We need the rest of the world legalized, don't we? We got to do this for everybody. That's what's happening here in Canada and different parts of the world.

1:46:45SpeakerAccess is key. Every person, for any reason, anywhere in the world. Hi, Tim.

1:46:59Etienne FontanAmen.

1:47:08BubblemanAll right, I'll talk. What about these Amanita mushrooms behind me? How sweet is that?

1:47:12Etienne FontanAre those near your house? Are those locals?

1:47:17BubblemanThose are like literally in the parking lot of my work. I have those all over my yard. These are, they're all over Richmond. They're all over Squamish, which is both directions of my, from my house, north and south. They're actually just fairly prolific in and around Vancouver.

1:47:35SpeakerI actually took some a couple of times.

1:47:40SpeakerDon't you have to, how did you like the, aren't you supposed to dry them and smoke them? Isn't that the, no, you don't have to smoke. Mine were dry. I collected them in Santa Cruz and, uh, It gives you, it's sort of a dispersonalization drug. And it makes you sort of take daydreams where you have dreams that you can remember, hallucination dreams or whatever. It's not my idea of a good clean psychedelic, but there are people who liked it.

1:48:20SpeakerI mean, the ancient Vikings, We're called berserkers because they would eat these. And a funny thing about them is, of course, that you could take the urine from a reindeer that ate them, and it cleaned out the impurities that made you more sick if you can swallow the reindeer piss. And the berserker Vikings would pee into the bowls of their servants who would eat it, drink it, They actually had a better trip than the Berserkers because the mushrooms also have toxic chemicals, which are not passed along, but the psychedelic is pretty much on G. Yeah, the psychedelic doesn't metabolize in your liver.

1:49:06BubblemanYeah, muscle problem. Piss it out active. It's incredible.

1:49:11SpeakerYeah. If you're going to harvest them, it's good to try them, expose them to 130 degrees. So that 130 degrees will break it. Fahrenheit will break down the hydrazine, I believe is the poison that causes the nausea.

1:49:29SpeakerSo Sam, have you drank actual reindeer piss? No, I've never seen that or a berserker piss. But I cannot recommend these to people. It blurs your vision. It's not a true, clear psychedelic.

1:49:50BubblemanI wouldn't be eating it, I'll tell you that much. But I find them beautiful to photograph, and that's really why I shared them with you.

1:49:56SpeakerFor some reason, they always remind me of Santa Claus, or maybe it's kabouters.

1:50:04BubblemanYeah, well, why don't I share my golden foots? That's a little bit, we'll put the golden foots up.

1:50:12SpeakerThese I'm gonna be making into- I'm gonna bounce out, you guys. I wish I could talk about mushrooms. I'm getting really excited about it, but I got some folks here, but- Dude, it's the season.

1:50:21BubblemanI hope you're picking. I hope you're picking.

1:50:23SpeakerWe are, we are, man. Me and my son are into it. It's like a cool, fun thing that we're learning together. Mine too, dude. It's so cool.

1:50:30BubblemanWe're both just like- Dude, we gotta talk about it offline.

1:50:34SpeakerYeah.

1:50:35BubblemanCool, man. All right. Have a good night. Good afternoon, everyone. Peace. Yeah. Thanks for coming in, Josh. Appreciate it.

1:50:40SpeakerCheers.

1:50:42BubblemanYeah. Well, that's good. Yeah. These are edibles. Chanterelles, golden, golden, sorry, yellow foots. They're going to go into some cream of mushroom soup later today. Am I all froze up?

1:50:57BubblemanNope. I saw Johnny move, but Etienne still froze. What? Am I froze? I'm moving. I'm moving. I'm over here. I see you.

1:51:07SpeakerYou guys were all in slow motion. I was thinking about my shirt, I think. And it's my friend of mine has this brand. You see him. He was all over Vancouver back in the days. And this is my, when I trim, I wear my West Coast Crawfish shirt. So it's kind of funny.

1:51:24BubblemanWest Coast Crawpers.

1:51:25SpeakerWest Coast Crawpers.

1:51:28BubblemanI mean, thanks everyone for coming in today. I appreciate all of you. I think I'm maybe going to go pick more mushrooms today. There's edible mushrooms out there and they're only going to be going for so long before the season is over. So I implore all of you to go for a hike in the forest, see if you can't even just take some pictures of mushrooms and check them out on the Google app with the camera.

1:51:53BubblemanIt can sometimes help identify. Obviously, don't eat anything if you're not practicing mycologist, but... Definitely check it out. It's worth going into the forest and photographing all these mushrooms. And if you want to become a great part of a really great group on Facebook, I'll hit it up here real quick. There's a group called Mushrooms, Wild and Mysterious. And then it says Seminar with Paul Stamets. So I don't know if my phone now won't let me with the background.

1:52:25BubblemanCheck out that Facebook group, Mushrooms, Wild and Mysterious, Seminar with Paul Stamets. You can photograph mushrooms in and around your place, put them up there, and there's incredible amounts of mycologists. Ideally, if you're going to photograph a mushroom for identification, you photograph under the gills as well as the top and the side, three good photos, and to see what substrate it's coming out of. So don't cut the mushroom off like at the top so you can't see what it's actually coming out of, whether it's wood and rot or life or whatever.

1:52:54BubblemanYou know, all these different things that mushrooms grow out of grass, et cetera. Shit, even for that matter. But thank you, Etienne Fontaine and Skunk Man Sam and Johnny B and Mike West. And thanks, Josh and Colin, who was here earlier. And of course, Ian Davidson, who came and gave us the drop on tissue culture. That was pretty tight. I've been wanting them to come on for a long time.

1:53:20BubblemanSo I was appreciating that. And really thanks guys for coming in such a last minute and making a nice conversation happen today. I know that the, I don't know, 443 people watching in chat live right now. I think they appreciate the conversation. It was fairly polarized today. May the full melt bless your bowl sooner than later, everybody. And peace out for now. Peace.