Robert Connell Clark Q and A: Cannabis History

0:13BubblemanOoh, lovely. That's a lovely. Let's see what we got going on.

0:20Rob ClarkGoing live?

0:23BubblemanYes, we are going live. Okay.

0:27BubblemanWelcome everybody to Hash Church, season 11, episode 20, the special Robert Connell Clark question and answer episode. I'm not going to lie. I'm super excited for this episode. So we're going to get into it here really soon. Let me get some things open here so I can do a shout out our sponsors, our wonderful, wonderful sponsors. We're going to start off with the Press Club. So big shout out to the Press Club, trusted by top hash makers from around the world since 2016.

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2:52BubblemanSo shout out to all of those fellows. I'd also like to give a small little introduction to our special, special guest today. Ladies and gentlemen, it is our great pleasure to introduce today's distinguished guest who I've known and been friends for for about 30 years. Robert Connell Clark, renowned author, botanist, intrepid traveler whose pioneering work has left an indelible mark on the world of cannabis research. With a passion for exploring the intricate relationships between plants, people, and culture, Robert has traversed the globe, delving into the science, history, and traditions surrounding cannabis.

3:29BubblemanHis groundbreaking books, including Marijuana Botany and Cannabis Evolution and Ethnobotany, have become essential resources for enthusiasts, scholars, and professionals alike Blending rigorous botanical insights with a deep appreciation for the plant's cultural significance. I would also love to mention his book, Hashish, which was an absolute game changer for me and many, many hash makers the world around. So join us in welcoming this extraordinary visionary whose lifelong dedication to understanding cannabis has enlightened and inspired countless minds.

4:03BubblemanWonderful. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome, Rob Clark. Welcome, Mojave Richmond. Welcome, Ryan Lee, a.k.a. Chimera. And soon we'll welcome Fletch as well. Welcome, Rob. Nice to have you on Hashtag this morning, Dash afternoon.

4:20Rob ClarkThank you very much. It's good to be here.

4:23BubblemanReally good to have you, man. It's been too long. You're in and around Amsterdam enjoying life.

4:30Rob ClarkAbsolutely. Super nice here. When the Dutch are not known for great weather, but when it's nice, it's super nice.

4:38BubblemanWelcome. Vancouver is similar. We get a lot of the Dutch weather. We get a lot of the rain. So when the sun cracks out, we're kind of like more appreciative than, you know, say Mojave down in California who sees it 363 days a year.

4:55Speaker70 degrees and sunny. Exciting. Every day.

5:01BubblemanWonderful. Well, we're just waiting for Fletch to pop in. We're going to get this party started. We got a bunch of folks in the chat right now. We got about just under 200 people watching live. I'm sure we'll get that up to three or 400 as people share out the link. And really excited. We're going to go over the whole story and history of all the incredible work that Rob has done over the course of the last, geez, Rob, how many years has it been?

5:32Rob ClarkOh, gee whiz, moved to Amsterdam almost 40 years ago.

5:38BubblemanReally good to have you.

5:40Archive Seeds40 years ago. That is incredible.

5:43BubblemanWell, I know we were talking earlier and we're going to start sort of with the beginning of the whole sort of scenario. And maybe, Fletch, you wanted to open it up. You had a good question in regards to where things started. Fletch has got a look on his face like he's doing technical difficulties.

6:00Archive SeedsYeah, I got it now, I think. Awesome. Yeah, I think where we were going to start, Rob, is just kind of where... Where you kind of got your start, how you ended up in cannabis and what really got you on the path to, you know, writing your first piece and making your way into Amsterdam.

6:23Ryan Dank AfTell us about your first joint or cannabis experience too.

6:28Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, it's... It all started for me going to university. And I was a science student in high school, but I never smoked. And I just ended up magically at the University of California in Santa Cruz, which of their 11 campuses is by far and away the most experimental and I had a great time there and I learned about the herb. I've learned about the first place I ever saw hashish and started meeting people who actually were directly involved.

7:05Rob ClarkThe first hashish I ever smoked, I smoked with the guy who brought it from Pakistan. You know, as a student, it was pretty simple back in those days. It wasn't, it's pretty easy to figure it all out at the start. And I had, I needed to graduate. You could graduate by writing a dissertation. So I wrote the Botany and Ecology of Cannabis, which I then self-published a year later, came out in 77.

7:29Rob ClarkSo it's been a while. But that's what got me started. It's the educational system. It was the science of it all.

7:36Archive SeedsAnd what materials was there prior to you writing your dissertation? You know, was there very much material to look at even? Or were you really, you know, looking at plants and coming up with this all from scratch?

7:50Rob ClarkNo, there was, it's a library dissertation. It's much like my work today. It's based on what other people have done and trying to put it together in a Uh, form that people can understand. And that's the struggle really. But, uh, there was a lot of stuff then it was mostly with hemp. It was early seventies, um, United Nations sponsored work. The Bulletin on Narcotic Drugs. There was all kinds of stuff out there.

8:22Rob ClarkYou just had to get it through the library system. The only book that was there I discovered right off the bat. And that was Mark Merlin's Man and Marijuana. And that was about the ethnobotanical relationship between humans and the cannabis plant. And he, I believe his little booklet, Little hardcover, cute little book, great collector's item. It came out in 76, if I remember right, or maybe a year or two earlier even.

8:51Rob ClarkThere you go. And it really, it showed me as another student, 73. There you go. That's a perpetuous edition. So it actually came out a bit earlier in the 72. There you go. But he and University of Chicago Press, this is like our later work together, Cannabis We're going to talk about evolution and ethnobotany. This is published by a major press. Our book is University of California Press.

9:21Rob ClarkUniversity of Chicago is one of the top five, and America still is. So you can see from that, as an undergraduate trying to graduate, that was a master's dissertation Mark did at University of California, Santa Barbara. So I had a model. It was like, well, hell, if he could do it. And they looked at me, even my sponsors there. He had sponsors, kind of like grad school.

9:43Rob ClarkThey looked at me like, really? And I just held that up for the library when it's been done. But I'm going to do the botany. He did the ethno more than the botany. And They went, okay, that's how it went. And then Mark and I later wrote a book together. It's been golden. It's been a great opportunity, but he's the one that got me started. You know, just go to the library, go to the library.

10:05Rob ClarkIt's virtual now, but everybody, lesson number one, go to the library, look stuff up on the internet. It's all there. It's real easy. It's, yeah, it's better than ever. There's more to look at than ever. Just go for it. I do it every day. It's addictive, but it's fun.

10:22BubblemanI've never seen that book before. So thank you. I'm learning already. That is so cool. 28 years old he was when he wrote that book. And you're right. He earned his bachelor degree in history from the University of California in Santa Barbara and his master's degree he did in geography from the University of Hawaii. Cool.

10:43Rob ClarkAnd his doctoral degree he did at the University of Hawaii where he's still a professor. He retires after 51 years and like three months. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.

11:19SpeakerSo, Rob, so you, I mean, you have this inherently curious mind, but I'm curious if you could back it up a little bit and just like talk about, so you come to university and you discover cannabis, you have this You know, immersive experience. At what point did you start to see that there was this vacuum of information and that it would be a path for you as an educator and as someone who's, you know, as a scientist, To write, to begin writing.

11:53SpeakerBecause, I mean, I know, you know, it's early 70s, it's prohibition is raging. And what was that kind of that spark of just, were you, did you start looking for information and just not find it and were not happy with that? And...

12:08Rob ClarkNo, I knew from the information I'd found what a struggle it was to find it. So that made sense to make that information available. I self-published that first book. I sold 500 that I got printed at the local printer guy in Santa Cruz who let me go in late at night and cut and bind my own copies and stuff. It was pretty folksy. I printed and sold 500 and they sold pretty quick.

12:35Rob ClarkI took them around to bookshops in California and met growers because I'd written the book. That was what kind of that started my meeting growers around California. People, people were so trusting. They'd order my book and send me a personal check with their home address and phone number. Okay. So I had lots of these checks in Oregon too. And I, I went, Well, you ordered my book.

13:01Rob ClarkI'll be in the neighborhood. I'd kind of like to meet you. And more often than not, I got herb. I got dinner. I got a place to stay. I made friends. You know, I still have some of those friends. And it was just such a transparent world.

13:16BubblemanAuthenticity, Rob. It was authenticity. And I can tell you, we have that in common because when I started doing the bubble bags, people were kind of like, who is this guy? And then suddenly it was this trust that was passed on where You get invited into people's grows, into their homes. They're sending you their home addresses. All of a sudden, it's kind of a responsibility you have as the years go by.

13:37BubblemanYou're like, holy smokes. Like, I don't know if there's a grow you wouldn't be invited into, Rob. Yeah.

13:44Rob ClarkWell, yeah, at this point. But back then, it was just because everybody pretty much trusted everybody else. It was such a common denominator that you're all doing something. Yeah, it was illegal, but it wasn't the 80s yet. Okay. It hadn't gone. The drug war hadn't begun yet. So it was illegal. Helicopters, they messed with people, but it wasn't such a dire consequence and such a Bad thing.

14:10Archive SeedsI think it's also important to note how much certain people value knowledge and information being passed along. And that develops a lot of trust between people because essentially, in my opinion, the most valuable thing that you can pass on and share with people is knowledge, information, and experience.

14:32Ryan Dank AfWas that ended up meeting David with Ecology? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:38Rob ClarkHe ordered it and I delivered it to the door and I didn't meet David, but I met Diana. She was actually pregnant with Maya.

14:46Ryan Dank AfWow.

14:46Rob ClarkThat takes us back a long way, but almost 50, 75 years or something.

14:52BubblemanShe just mentioned in chat that she was pregnant with Maya and 77 when you wrote that book and you guys met.

14:59Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, yeah. I met David later. We met out at a park somewhere. Yeah, began our relationship. But he was, even in those days, he wasn't a guy who went around and introduced himself to everybody.

15:11BubblemanYeah. How did you meet David?

15:13Rob ClarkWell, writing a book. I mean, that's what it took. It wouldn't have, wouldn't have been just hanging out at the beach, smoking joints. So yeah.

15:20BubblemanWow.

15:21Rob ClarkIt took something.

15:24Ryan Dank AfAnd then you both, you kind of expanded upon Ecology and Botany, and that became Marijuana Botany.

15:32Rob ClarkYeah, a publisher at that day and age, and or a press in Berkeley. A friend of mine, friend of a friend, was in the owner's office. They'd already published Ed and Mel's book. The first growers guide they did. And so I knew they were, but I hadn't really approached him. But a friend of mine, he had a copy on his desk and a friend of mine saw it and went, you should ask this guy to write a book.

16:00Rob ClarkAnd he looked at that. He kind of hadn't. And he looked at it. And, you know, it's a little trigger like that again. And they contacted me. And actually, in those days, you got it in advance. And I got a little advanced and I started expanding on what I already had and drawing a lot more pictures too, but expanding the knowledge back to the library, you know, and that's how, that's how marijuana botany came about.

16:25Ryan Dank AfSo that was 1981.

16:29Rob ClarkYes, that would have been the copyright on that one. So it was five, four years later.

16:35Archive SeedsRob, could you kind of describe, you know, what the smoking experience was like in the 1970s as you were first introduced to it? Like the CD varieties available, was it import only, maybe memorable strains from the 70s you never saw again, or not even strains, but hybrids maybe, anything like that?

16:56Rob ClarkTotal late 70s and onward, but there really wasn't any... Homegrown, that wasn't just sort of leaves and stems. I mean, the mid-70s onward, that all changed. Sinsemia came to town and people started figuring out what they were doing. But even the grower's guides before that time didn't really tell you what to do right. So the books, Sinsemia, flowers, whatever it is from... Big Sur. That was a book that really changed.

17:31Rob ClarkIt had pictures of what it was supposed to look like in a garden, you know, and that was pictures are worth a thousand words. People finally got it. But This seems to me a thing changed at all. The early varieties, there was no Afghan. So it was all Colombian, Mexican, Jamaican, little later Thai thrown in. I mean, hey, it's had Indian in it. There's South Indian at the end.

17:57Rob ClarkAnd yeah, there was there. It seems to me a marijuana flowers. Yep.

18:03Archive SeedsI think, I think something people would maybe later in the conversation, people would be interested to hear what you remember of those varieties when they were import still, smell and flavor and stuff like that. But that's, we can get into that later, you know.

18:19Rob ClarkYeah. Smell and flavor is very subjective and hard to describe, but yeah, we can try.

18:26Ryan Dank AfWhat about the plants that became those beautiful pictures that you put in Marijuana Botany? Where did you see those growing and the pure lines? And I mean, you were given full descriptions of all these different land races.

18:38Rob ClarkMost of those things were Colombian or Mexican. Almost entirely. There was occasionally something from Panama or something from Thailand or David had things from India, you know, and more exotic places, but.

18:55Rob Clarkyeah mostly everything was i mean that we were swamped with mexican and colombian so that's what everybody stuck out and and most of it wasn't anything anybody even in those days was particularly interested in but some plants performed wherever they were wherever they were growing and of course the farther south you lived in america the better you did i mean none of those things would would go off at you know oregon even was kind of tough for most things so And we got some other exotics, the Malawi from, from African Malawi came in, in those late years, there was smatterings of interesting stuff.

19:35Rob ClarkAnd so, you know, weighed in some of it, people were curious beasts, man, everything that came along, people planted the seeds. And when it was something that was different from Colombian and Mexican, they got, they got bumped up more interest.

19:53Archive SeedsUm by the uh by the like late 70s early 80s so it sounds like maybe early 80s you met David?

20:03Rob ClarkNo mid 77.

20:06Archive SeedsOkay so uh at what point did you start seeing like his work and some of his breedings and early uh at early stuff?

20:16Rob ClarkOh right after that he already had a place with with Family, and ironically enough, Watsonville. And yeah, I started visiting in there and seeing things. Very small greenhouse, but different things. Skunk number one was in there, Hayes offspring. Afghani one was in that little house. I mean, a lot of the seminal stuff that, tiny little greenhouse, but a lot of the seminal stuff that he very soon after took to Amsterdam and started things there.

20:46BubblemanWhen you saw that, what was your thoughts? Sorry, Ryan.

20:50Rob ClarkIt's always the diversity, of course. It was different kinds of things, similar things. I mean, I'd seen things like this before. It was a particularly nice one, but I'd never seen South Indian. I'd never seen, you know, some I'd seen Afghan, but not that Afghan. And yeah, it was exotic. It's... Diversity, we're kind of, we got really used to it almost after for a bit. And now we think diversity is something that smells like bananas instead of strawberries.

21:20Rob ClarkBut this is not really diversity. I mean, the diversity we experienced every plant you saw and went, well, it's different from whatever, whatever plant it was that you just looked at. The next one was markedly different. Even if there are brothers and sisters and both sisters, it's a, Yeah, very interesting. It was a great time.

21:44BubblemanThat whole journey started in Pinto Lake. That's where you met Dave for the first time.

21:51Rob ClarkYeah, that's the name of the little park there, yeah.

21:53BubblemanWow. I got Diana in the chat room, and she has an incredible memory.

21:59Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, yeah.

22:00Ryan Dank AfThat's real historical. That's where we should put the bench.

22:03Archive SeedsAnyway, yeah, that's very cool. I got a quick question, Rob. Before we move on, Ryan, I think something people, just because Rob mentioned it, would be interested in is, do you remember exactly what Haze was or what its early renditions were and when it kind of went into the world?

22:27Rob ClarkYeah, I mean, it was a serial hybrid. It was half of whatever was new every year. Not unusual for growers even today to do the same thing. You got something good, you cross it with something new. Okay. The new is usually a male. So almost always a male that pollinated females, all of them sometimes in this case. And every year was something added. It started with Mexican and Colombian like everything else, but Thai was added, South Indian was added at some point.

23:02Rob ClarkSo, but it was like maybe a five-year run max. I mean, just for the Hayes development. 76, the independence year was the year the poster came out. And it had been around for a couple of years before that, I'd say. And yeah, I knew one of the guys through a different way and David knew both of them. So yeah, that's, that's history, Bob and Jerry.

23:29Archive SeedsAnd there is no wide leaf drug cultivar that was inbred during those times. It's strictly narrow leaf.

23:36Rob ClarkIt was a narrow leaf, strictly narrow leaf. And yeah, all those ingredients, all those things brought in were narrow. I don't think, I mean, this was running out and All of those were grown in greenhouses all the way through from the beginning. They couldn't really do them outside, not even in Santa Cruz. So yeah, it was, uh, they were challenging, but

24:14Rob ClarkThat started to run out. And after that, yeah, it moved to, ended up moving to Holland, like a lot of things.

24:23Ryan Dank AfSo how did you, what's the story behind you falling in with Malberg and getting, going over to Bloomington, Indiana and ended up at school there?

24:33Rob ClarkWell, I wanted to get back to school. I wanted to go study. So that was the only lab where they had a license, where they're actually doing research that was interesting. There were only three or four licenses then. Mississippi had one. And my mother's alma mater. I almost went to Mississippi. My mom graduated from there, but didn't do that. It was a little too governmental. And Marlborough has done much more interesting stuff.

25:03Rob ClarkAnd growing a variety of things. And yeah, I had a little greenhouse on the roof of the building. It was all kind of quaint. So I went there and studied.

25:13Ryan Dank AfAnd I never graduated. You just reached out to Malberg and applied.

25:18Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, yeah. And I went and took the SAT tests and did all that stuff, whatever the advanced version of it, whatever it was, go back to graduate school version and did the tests and studied before I took them and blah, blah, blah, and went back to school. And it was cool. I enjoyed it. It was, I got sidetracked. I went and joined the circus. I went and joined the Horta Farm Circus.

25:40Rob ClarkThat's what it turned into. But yeah, I never, I actually never finished all that material I developed. I learned about ethnobotany then really. I, I did what Mark had done in a lot of ways. And my minor is anthropology. So I started attending Society for Economic Botany meetings. Now the Society for Ethnobotany, it's called. Recently changed their name. Great group. You meet people who study all kinds of plants and all kinds of weird places and the relations with humans.

26:12Rob ClarkAnd it was just wonderful. It's a field I would recommend to anybody who's interested. diverse and curious but uh yeah fantastic stuff so that was that was why i went there maulberg had the the ticket for being able to grow plants and work with them so so you mentioned a greenhouse on the roof there yeah they had a greenhouse on the roof of the four-story building and uh We'll see you next time.

26:42Rob ClarkBye.

26:56Rob ClarkIt was cool. I had a funny little meeting. When I first got there, it was like the second week there as a grad student. There was somebody there to see me, and it was the two guys who ran the greenhouses on the roof that had other stuff in them, and the greenhouses in front of the building. They had other small greenhouses and public ones. And they came to me and said, you're going to study cannabis here at Malbert's Lab?

27:21Rob ClarkAnd I said, yeah, that's my plan. And they both looked really relieved. They went, oh, great. We don't have to work with those damn opium poppies. Those things are so hard to grow. They got these little tiny seeds and they're really finicky and they have to have sandy soil. And I said, no, no, no, I'm not going to do opium poppies. Other people in the lab had.

27:39Rob ClarkAnd obviously these guys were really happy when I was going to grow cannabis. It's like, oh, that stuff grows like great. It's super easy. You stick the seeds in, it grows, you water it, fine. So they were relieved. They were really happy. I was not going to study the other model.

27:57Ryan Dank AfSo you were there until 84-ish?

28:04Rob ClarkBad with dates, but no, later than that, 86, I would say.

28:09Ryan Dank AfOkay.

28:10Rob ClarkI went to Amsterdam in 87, so...

28:14Ryan Dank AfOK, so David, you know, you came over.

28:17Rob ClarkYeah, that was that was I moved over about an hour after. About an hour after a year after David was there, so. Maybe a little less than a year, but something like that, so.

28:31Archive SeedsSo how different did you kind of see cannabis change from, let's say, you know, 1979 to like 1988 when you moved to Amsterdam? Was there a giant shift in America and in Amsterdam in terms of available seed varieties and things of that nature? What, you know, what maybe stood out to you during that time?

28:51Rob ClarkWell, when I got to Armstrong, there weren't any, there were some interesting seed things available, but they were, they weren't really Sensimia varieties. They were processed between land races. And we can talk about that in a minute. SSSC, you mentioned the Super Sativa Seed Club, those kinds of things. But What happened in the eighties was the drug war. I mean, it, it helped drive me out of America.

29:17Rob ClarkI mean, you could stay there and keep getting in trouble, but what was the point? I mean, it's the handwriting was on the wall. It was getting harder and harder and people were moving indoors. There was the big shift to move indoors to avoid the, the getting caught up in the drug war. And after a growing people were started trying to make a bunch of money if they were going to take the chance.

29:38Rob ClarkThe big timers, we called them in California. They'd move in and buy a place and try to grow a bunch of weed or rent a place or whatever. And outdoors, usually we had a favorable climate, but indoors as well. And yeah, it was a decade where everything changed. It was a good time to leave. I mean, I felt right about, I'd been there through most of it and it just didn't seem like it was going a very good direction.

30:06Rob ClarkAnd You going to school is the only way to be able to do anything there without running into some kind of trouble. And the Netherlands wasn't like that. There was at least a possibility to do things. And while you're exercising that possibility, you likely weren't going to get in a bunch of trouble. So it was a logical, logical situation, really. So that's what brought me here.

30:31Ryan Dank AfSo you transitioned over and were you working with David at the beginning? Right from the beginning?

30:37Rob ClarkYeah, pretty much.

30:38Ryan Dank AfHortifarm. And what about, can you tell us about how Hortifarm kind of developed and the International Hemp Association work that you did and all that kind of stuff?

30:48Rob ClarkWell, David started Hortifarm after I'd been there for a little while, but that was originally to... We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about what we're going to talk about today.

31:28Rob ClarkWhich incidentally was not conspiratorial. He's just the first person to ask. Okay. Anybody with persistence could have asked. There were no special favors granted for any of you remaining conspiracy freaks. But no, it's just he had the gumption to ask first. You know, and the Dutch went, well, they're really wrong with that. We'll figure out how we can do this. And we did. We've had a license for years, but it was just, yeah, just simply because of that.

31:56Rob ClarkBut we could do research and we had to destroy the material, but we do whatever, pretty much whatever we wanted. So that was a good, that was a really good run. It was, uh, A lot of basic research got done. Very basic things that people have gone on and used in businesses, but mostly just continued on with research in the same. Single can have breeding, making, making selfs with STS.

32:25Rob ClarkI mean, the list goes on and on, but.

32:28Ryan Dank AfPolyploids and tissue culture.

32:31Rob ClarkTissue culture. Yeah.

32:34Ryan Dank AfWhat about the AIHA? When did that come about? And. What was kind of the genesis of that?

32:40Rob ClarkEarly in the horde of, pretty early in the horde of farm history. What's our first issue? I think it's 93 maybe, but it's, that was David's idea. And it was essentially looking at the cannabis plant, not from the medical side. But looking at all the rest of it, because David had always been interested in the whole plant, me too. And we had the ties with Wackeneggen at that point.

33:10Rob ClarkWe had Hire Vanderwerf, ATN was coming over to us soon. So we had other, there you go, we had other, oh there it is, 94. A lot of other You know, interest in hemp. So that's where it started. There was no mega, there was no information source for him. I mean, there was the emperor wears no clothes and a few other things and nothing wrong with them, but it was historical angle on things.

33:39Rob ClarkIt wasn't so much a science angle, not an empirical angle too much. So this was really good. And there were, we started going to, Adam Dizzle, Nick, Skully Vibes, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm.

34:08Rob ClarkInstrumental, especially hemp breeders. That was our main interest. But yeah, fantastic stuff.

34:15BubblemanHere's a shot of Goro Borotko from Kiev with Sasha, the farmer. I'm on the far left there. That's my hemp store in 1992, I believe, the Hemp Exchange, 93. IHA was a huge inspiration to us. We would have never gotten hemp growing in Manitoba without the professionalism of those documents, you know.

34:37Ryan Dank AfThank you, Rob. I should say here too, I mean, like with your books, the International Hemp Association placed you and David, the way I've described it as kind of the center of the hub of the cannabis world, at least in terms of information. I mean, you had people, like you said, all these hemp farmers and academics that wanted to learn about cannabis and Marcus's group and others in Canada and other countries.

35:00SpeakerIt's

35:01Ryan Dank AfYou know, David would get, you know, many kilos of seeds of 10 or 15 different varieties and have them on hand so that they could be shared when, you know, anybody from any given country called up the IHA. So you guys became that central hub of information. And I think that that really put you and David in the kind of kind of the center of the cannabis world.

35:23Rob ClarkYeah, and the team we had too, I mean, not long after that, ATN, right around the same time, published his doctoral dissertation, what was it called? Cannabis Diversity or something. And he talked about the heritage of all the different hemp varieties and listed where he could get them and their contacts. So that was like Right there and now in a peer-reviewed article out in the real world on top of what we'd explained about things in the journal and interviewed people.

35:52Rob ClarkSo it all tied together. It was a real teamwork thing. And the Wackeneggen crew were, they were great. There was that three or four year project where they're really looking at hemp as a source of paper pulp for the biomass for paper pulp. They did a lot of really basic Fundamental agronomic research with trialing different varieties with cannabis. And it was here in Holland, they were growing drug varieties, but they weren't tested all the time.

36:23Rob ClarkAnd I mean, that's a leeway. They could try some different things and see how they worked. And it was cool. They had varieties that were quite late flowering and couldn't make seeds here, but you could make pulp. And they did all this work. And the graduates from that, I mean, ATN was one, but... Sebastian Hedink was another one who did really good work there. And, and Heil Vanderwerf went on to France to work and work there.

36:48Rob ClarkHe's just retiring now. I mean, again, this has been a legacy of people and they were all involved from that, that major project. So the Dutch side has been really important in advancing cannabis on all levels.

37:04Ryan Dank AfWell, it was part of kind of like almost a refugia during prohibition in a way.

37:09Rob ClarkYeah, it was, it was a lot of people came here and a lot of people have moved on, you know, but yeah, it was a like refugee. It was a, yeah, it wasn't permanent. People came and used it as a stepping stone, a lily pad, whatever, and moved on. The whole focus on seed companies in Holland moved on a long time ago, moved to Spain. Now it's moved even beyond, but yeah, that whole world changed.

37:36Ryan Dank AfYeah, well, not only for the people, but the diversity of the plant as well, right? Holland County Central Hub, and the Americans were bringing their stuff over, and so many other folks from all over the world, and the coffee shops. I mean, Durban Poison came from Ed Rosenthal finding that at a coffee shop called Transcade, wasn't it?

37:56Rob ClarkYeah, right. But he found that even before we left America. It was the early finds. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and South Africa's come from other sides too, I'm sure. But yeah, that was a really important key in the whole picture. I was just discussing this with Simone earlier today. It was another source of terpenoline that wasn't haze. And it came much in a package that people bred with a lot because South Africa, the Durban poison was...

38:29Rob ClarkEarly. It was the earliest narrow leaf drug variety there was. I mean, there wasn't anything else around that came off any earlier. So it was really important, really important. It was until Afghan earliness came along and it was earlier than a lot of those. It was really important. And that was another way that terpenylene snuck in there.

38:49Ryan Dank AfSo what was the dominant terpene profile in the Indian cannabis varieties then that were brought in?

38:58Rob ClarkThey would have had some terpenolene in them possibly too, but don't really know. I mean, they, most of them, like most of those landrace-y things were more on the spicy side, you know, the teraphylene side and things, especially if they had any time in transit, but even homegrown ones, that was still strong in them, but. Yeah, and other lighter terpenes. At the time, I had no idea what any of them were, but I still struggled to get my nose around them.

39:30Rob ClarkYeah, they were definitely not the kind of aromas you got from Afghan when it showed up. That's for sure. Afghan was much resonier also, but it just had different aromas. It was much more the earthy dankness world instead of the flowery, fruity world. Of course, the hybrids between the two, I mean, they've gone off the chart. Now it's the everything world.

39:57BubblemanYeah. And if something's dominant in anything, that's what it is. So all CBD flower is just CBDs. That's the CBDs. If it's a narrow leaf drug cultivar, oh, that's terpenylene. It's like, but have you smelled it just by itself? It's always a profile that we're always smelling, but we all kind of tend to say things like, oh, That's the smell of terpenylene. It's like, well, plus whatever other aromatic.

40:24Rob ClarkIt might be the dominant one in those cultivars, which it is, but it ain't everything. It doesn't have that dominating and strong an aroma on its own, really. It's kind of a, I think a perfumer would call it something you'd blend with other stuff. It doesn't, if you just open the jar and smell it, it doesn't particularly stand on its own.

40:46SpeakerInteresting.

40:46Rob ClarkYeah. But it certainly has interesting effects, my God.

40:53BubblemanOne of my favorites.

40:54Archive SeedsYeah. I think one thing that's kind of really put you and David at the center of the international cannabis scene to a certain degree was, like Ryan had said, Amsterdam became like the refuge where if you got too big for wherever you were from, Thank you so much for joining us.

41:35Archive SeedsI think that your guys' involvement, not only in the professional side of it or like the IHA, but also, you know, supplying the genetic material for what became a lot of the world's first genetics. Let's call it improved varieties that are good for indoor production and scaled production. And maybe could you kind of go into maybe, you know, mid, late 80s as indoor growing started to kind of to come off?

42:08Archive SeedsWhen did... When did you really start seeing the quality of herb change and some of the strains, obviously skunk one and haze being in northern lights being super influential? What varieties stood out to you and where did you really see the quality change at that time?

42:28Rob ClarkWell, a lot of varieties stood out to me, but I was more into the The earlier things still, I mean, not, I've never been a big Afghan fan. I'm a big hashish fan and we'll get around to hashish here in a few minutes too. But I mean, it's without Afghan, we wouldn't really have hashish as we know it today. But as a herb smoker back in the day, I really appreciated the non-Afghan varieties, pretty much the hybrids made from all the rest of the stuff.

43:01Rob ClarkSo that was all good. It, the big shift, I mean, everything that was being grown was still being selected and bred for growing outdoors. I mean, people didn't really start making selections indoors and still they made clones. I mean, I could ask Ryan what he thinks, but there hasn't been a tremendous amount of breeding And I think that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about some of the things that we're going to be talking about today.

43:32Rob ClarkWe're going to be talking about some of the things

43:48Rob ClarkBut just anything that grows outdoors, 90% of them, even if they're great outdoors, they don't work indoors. So it was a really big selection factor. So that's where things really changed. And you saw some really potent herb and it was all fascinating. It was amazing what people would grow under lights and it still might be improving today. I mean, it's incredible, the technological side of it. But already you're beginning to see that Those that survived were not all there was to it.

44:21Rob ClarkI mean, it's a very narrow gene pool. And because of all this hybrid vigor and mixing all these things together, and we still have one, basically one cannabinoid that rocks everybody's socks is THC. I mean, the same varieties have a flipped chemotype and they produce way more CBD, but it's the same gene pool. You're just watching one thing sort different ways, one trait. But it hasn't, Only the aromatics of what's really kept up what we think of as consumers think of as diversity.

44:56Rob ClarkYou know, because they smell different and they taste different, but they don't have near the range of effects that they did when you had a whole bunch of things from a whole bunch of different places. So I think we'll get back to that eventually. I think consumers are waking up. I've discussed this a lot, especially with Mojave. They're waking up. They're at least aware now, some of them, that there is a difference and something to look for that possibly is hard to find or unavailable.

45:26Rob ClarkAnd they're young smokers. They're not a bunch of old guys who sit around and piss and moan about how it used to be. But maybe some of that finally leaked through. Yeah, it's it's catching on a little bit. I'm a bit hopeful about that. I'd like to see different varieties coming out and people just looking for something different because if you don't look for it, you're not going to find it.

45:50Rob ClarkSo got to get out there. Look.

45:53Archive SeedsWell, do you think the diversity in the effect of those older varieties was because of different terpene profiles or do you think more so different cannabinoids that have basically been bred out due to indoor cultivation and market demands?

46:12Rob ClarkI think it's mostly the aromatic principles. I mean, yes, there was more of a range of cannabinoids Possibly but except for THC and CBD, I'd call them all minor cannabinoids. And they're, I mean, they'd have to be 10 times the strength of THC to have the same relative physiological and mental effects. So, because they're less than 10% as much as there is of THC or more. I mean, that's pretty high.

46:45Rob ClarkNow we have quite high CBE varieties, but they weren't terribly high before either. But that's just simple selection. Yeah. We always thought the differences were the cannabinoids. And when the first analyzes came out and a couple of things from California Normal did this, the San Francisco chapter, and they analyzed like 20 different things. And a couple of them had CBD and people were like, whoa, because everything was just THC.

47:15Rob ClarkAnd that was kind of an awakening for people. And then as testing came online, which was slow and rare in the beginning, people learned that some of their largely Afghan hybrid things had some fair amount of CBD in them, sometimes as much as it did THC. And that's where, in concert with the awareness of CBD, Eric Flint, M.D. : Or because of them, that whole thing marched on together.

47:42Rob ClarkAnd when you had all those Charlotte's Web and things before Charlotte's Web and onward from there, and now CBD varieties registered as hemp in Canada and the EU, and it's all really gone quite far quite quickly. But, uh, Yeah, it, that was about it, but we, we, and that CBD does have synergistic effects and alter the effects of THC and possibly some of these other ones do, THCV, who knows, but it's never proven out.

48:13Rob ClarkAnd with a few limited experiments or people who vaporized fairly large doses of these pure compounds, they don't do much. So, Answered, we had to shift our perspective, which we were stubborn to change from. It's not really the differences in cannabinoids. So what is it? And the more sensimia varieties came online and the more they all tasted different, suddenly or slowly became aware that, you know, must, the differences must slot in the way they taste.

48:43Rob ClarkAnd then people notice similarities. Hazes are speedy. They always taste the same. Okay. Took years for people to really accept that, but people started noticing early on. And that's where we're at now is the aromatic principles. There's flavones, there's all kinds of things in cannabis, but every time they look for something new, they find it. But they're really small amounts.

49:05Ryan Dank AfYeah, they're not enough. And those things aren't psychoactive in that way.

49:10Archive SeedsRyan, I did see you post that vial of THCP and David's little comment on it, right?

49:18Ryan Dank AfYeah, well, that compound, for example, is present in very, very low quantities. The one, when they actually found it in that variety in Italy, it was, we're talking like insignificant amounts. And they only realized that it was more potent when they did the structural assay of it. Right, and did some other tests on the pure compound.

49:36Archive SeedsThese cannabinoids exist, but they're so rare and so rare in volume. They're not. And it's unlikely that those are the main culprit in the effect change.

49:47Ryan Dank AfYeah, and I think also what I was going to say is we know now that THC and CBD are produced from the same precursor, right? And so it's like, for example, if you had a plant that produced 25% total cannabinoids, If you have what we call a type two or a half CBD plant, it really eats up half of the THC potential. Right. And so that causes a different effect because you might have like 12% THC as opposed to 25% THC on a pure CBD variety or sorry, a pure THC variety.

50:23Ryan Dank AfRight. And so having that presence of CBD, what it really does is it turns down the volume switch. And Rob and I were talking yesterday when we were walking about it really being about the ratio between the THC and these other volatiles, right? It's not only that they're there together. It's like, it's like, what's the ratio in conjunction with them? And I, I personally feel that when you like, and I don't know if Rob can comment on this having, cause you've been consuming for a lot longer than I have.

50:53Ryan Dank AfI didn't see a lot of some of these early seventies things. I wasn't smoking when I was two. Um, but. My hypothesis is that the THC, as we turn the THC volume up past 20, it's kind of like standing in front of your stereo with it at like, you know, eight or nine on the scale. Like it's so loud that I think that you kind of blow out some of these finer, right?

51:20Ryan Dank AfAnd that's probably the source of why we've lost some of these more cerebral frequencies. Um, and like just the different qualities of the high is because now we're in this world where we're just blowing ourselves out with these massive amounts.

51:38Rob ClarkNo, there's no space left to notice the subtleties.

51:42Ryan Dank AfYeah.

51:42Rob ClarkYeah. It's, yeah, it's, uh, it's like mine goes to 11. I mean, and, and just, just take another step farther. The dab thing has, uh, just taken it beyond that again. I mean, I love the purity side of things, but now that appeared to be hash-like, but I mean that, yeah, I'm a fan of hashish, that stuff.

52:07Archive SeedsThis is water hash right here.

52:10Rob ClarkBeautiful. Super nice. So yeah, it's modern tech for making, not so modern anymore, but Bubble Man, of course, is the king of that, but Yeah, that's, that's been a good one. I wanted to mention the people are so wild about static, especially since David's secret was divulged and the people would make it static for a long time and people tried all kinds of other things. And Bobby and Adam and all these guys here were messing with trying to figure it out a long time ago.

52:45Rob ClarkAnd for me, it all began before I, Before I met David, I mean, he'd heard about this when I met him, but this had happened a year or two before I even met him, a year probably. And it was a product, it was an idea product. The guy sold you something, but it mostly sold you a piece of paper that told you how to do it. And it was called Azubites, the Original Astounder.

53:11Rob ClarkAnd it's in the Hashish book, which incidentally just came out again on Amazon. We have a facsimile version of Hashish. So it's there, it's in hardcover. And yeah, it is what it is before, except I substituted a few, very few color pictures because I found the slides when I was... making the scans so anyway it's there if people want to find it um and the story is in there ozabiti's the original astounder was sold in high times magazine by a guy named brooke j ivy he was a wacky jazz drummer in san luis obispo california and what it was was The same thing every mom had at the time was a 9 by 13 inch, 4 inch tall brownie pan or sheet cake pan or whatever you want to call it.

53:59Rob ClarkMy mom made brownies in it. And it had a clip-on lid. There were ones with sliding lids too. This had to have the clip-on lid. And you'd put, there you go, that's an early version, first version. And you'd... You'd put up to seven grams of bud, five, seven grams of weed in there, broken up into little budlets, but not more than that, and shake it. Like, you know, affirm it assertively and let it sit for a second, shake it for maybe 15 seconds or something.

54:32Rob ClarkLet it sit for a couple of seconds and flip over the lid and the resin glands will have stuck to the lid. The flower chunks moving up and down like that created a static field. I don't know which charges on top, but on the bottom you got nothing, just the weeds lying there that progressively gets broken up more and the glands on the top. Just scrape it off with a card, tap it on a plate, do it again.

54:57Rob ClarkAnd you can do it repeatedly and every time it gets slightly greener. And pretty soon it just nothing sticks to this roof anymore. There's no resin left. So it's incredibly efficient. You could do it with, do it today. You can do it with just a couple of grams of weed and get a couple of hits of really nice, really high test dry sift, except it isn't sifted.

55:19Rob ClarkIt's electrostatic. But so that was, that product probably came out in 76 or something.

55:27BubblemanInteresting. I will say that in regards to Dave's method, We never released it. He told me I never showed a single person.

55:37Rob ClarkI was telling, I never told anybody either.

55:39BubblemanYeah. So listen to the story. It's kind of wild. I showed, I was showing people carding prior. I, I understood that if you took a card and you went over the screen over and over and over again, you would break up enough of that contaminant in a cold enough environment, and you could leave just pure heads on the top of the screen. So instead of doing this, I was just going like this with a card.

56:00BubblemanWell, I showed my friend D420K and he was like, I need to get a bigger card. And so he went and bought this iTunes card. It's this giant, I think it was a small card, but it came on a big plastic, like the size of a postcard. And he started using that and he hit me up one night. He's like, dude, the heads are like statically attaching to this card.

56:22BubblemanAnd I was like, oh yeah, that's cool. That's neat. And, but he couldn't figure it out. He was like, oh, I think on one side, It's contaminant and on the other side it's heads and he was kind of using a brush and then this guy from nowhere named Mies, Mies, came out of the internet and he said, hey, do it with a DVD case and wrap the spine of the DVD case, this gives you an idea of the timeline, in parchment paper and that began this really strange way of going back and forth the screen and then you'd get like contaminant on one side and you get pure heads on the other.

56:57BubblemanIt was very, very slow. And that's kind of how the static technique became open source.

57:05Rob ClarkYeah. Well, Brooke tried really hard in the mid 70s, but not that many people got it. Well, I know people got side is Sam's secret either also in the book, but that was something I learned about that. Gold sank and shit floated. I mean, that was when the water process thing happened. There you go.

57:26Ryan Dank AfThere it is.

57:26Rob ClarkDiana's lovely, incredibly clear printing. Roddy, you're the only one who can print better than that.

57:34BubblemanYeah, I can make that out with my 52-year-old eyes.

57:38Rob ClarkYeah, me too. Fantastic.

57:41SpeakerSpecial tip, make your own lava lamp.

57:44Rob ClarkYeah, there you go. So yeah, a bit of odd humor in there. But it was amazing that we learned this. And yeah, there it was. So we just told the world, of course.

57:55BubblemanSo thank you for telling the world. We appreciate that. What a history. That was definitely a big part of the history in my whole story. That's for sure. Always, always happy to accurately give Credit where credit is due, right? Where the inspiration came. I'm not sure why people want to rewrite history when it's just like, look, we all got to stand on the shoulders of giants, you know, like, let's just tell the story on how we got there.

58:22Rob ClarkWell, you know, we didn't invent it either. And we learned it at Neville's house at the castle, visiting him one time very early in my living here. But And he, if I remember the story right, learned it from Ed Rosenthal could come and showed it to him and didn't tell him where he learned it, but he must have got it from somebody else or he would have said he'd thought of it himself.

58:44Rob ClarkSo that person would like to step forward. We'd all like to meet them.

58:50BubblemanNeville told me years ago that it was an unknown American, one that wasn't known that came out from California.

58:58Ryan Dank AfThat's the way that I've seen it written too.

59:00Rob ClarkNo, it was, it was Ed. Way in Ed, you can remember and tell us, but I had heard at the time with David that it was Ed that it showed him. And Ed of course got it from some unknown. Yes, there was an unknown other person, but I think Ed was the vector on that one. But yeah, anyway, credit where credit. It got leaked out to the rest of us.

59:22BubblemanYeah. I mean, it's really did, uh, I mean just like all of your books man like it may take time but eventually what happens is that information that it plants a seed and that seed roots and that root goes deep and then it starts growing and once it's above ground you know anything is possible and uh You put an enormous amount of information out there for people to do that with.

59:47BubblemanAnd that's why we, you know, we, we hold you in high regard. We respect you a great deal. Obviously you're a friend and we have love for you, but also you're this other thing that's like, wow, like Rob did this stuff because he made these particular decisions, you know, and traveled this particular path, all of these wonderful offshoots that We're currently on, managed to come off of that.

1:00:13BubblemanSo I would just like to thank you, brother, for playing your part.

1:00:17Rob ClarkEveryone's welcome. Yeah, it's just follow up, follow. I just like to follow a path and there's always offshoots and additional developments and learnings along the way. But cannabis is a really good path to follow.

1:00:32SpeakerBut that's a really good point, Rob, is that your path from the beginning was It was plant-based, it was botany, and it was science-based. And to take a perspective that you and David were both California natives, and this is coming out of the 60s and 70s, right? And one thing that drew me to you as a friend and as a mentor was I also came out of the late 60s and 70s was my culture and my world, but It was shrouded with misinformation on science because it was mysterious and it was unknown and prohibition and erased a lot.

1:01:14SpeakerSo for instance, you know, You know, friends, there were friends, people were writing books like Sensimia and there was stuff was trickling out there, but the driving push behind it wasn't just, wasn't science. And like, for instance, people would talk about hashish growing up. Hashish, how do people make hashish? There was all this mythology around how hashish was made. People had just learned how to grow weed.

1:01:43SpeakerAnd it was your running naked through the field and scraping it off your body and all these weird, you know, things. And then you were demystifying these very simple things from a very, from a agricultural botanical perspective. And I think that's what set you and David apart from the rest of the world was, and even Amsterdam. I mean, when I moved to Amsterdam in 93, there was still a lot of crystal crystal You know, healing, power, herb, love stuff going on.

1:02:17SpeakerAnd there is today. But just this, this driving push towards science being the, what defines the truth. And, you know, so that, that, I think, I just want to thank you for that. And when did you decide that that was going to be your path? You know, Ooh,

1:02:37Rob ClarkI when I was really really young I was going to be a marine biologist even when I went to Santa Cruz that was what I was interested or maybe forestry because I took these uh aptitude tests as we did back then and said I should do a outdoor scientific well I did outdoor stuff I was a fisherman backpacker and stuff and I was interested in the environment and I was obviously a science nerd already so Yeah, that was kind of good suggestion from the system.

1:03:06Rob ClarkSo I but I didn't certainly wasn't planning to become an ethnobotanist, or even a botanist for that matter. But I've always been interested in this scientific method. I was part of junior oceanographers when I was in junior high school. I live near Scripps Institution of Oceanography. So My mom worked for the university. So I was part of that from, I don't know, 13 years old or something.

1:03:32Rob ClarkI did that instead of scouts. I mean, I was in scouts for a while, but I did other more nature things, went fishing a lot. But yeah, that was, science has always been of interest to me. I had science kids. I had a microscope, little microscope when I was a kid. I got for Christmas when I was a little kid. I had a chemistry set. I had...

1:03:54Rob ClarkThe biology set where you got pickled stuff you could cut up and I didn't like that much, but yeah, I really, my parents fed me science stuff. Neither of them were scientists, but yeah, I think my dad always wished he'd been a scientist, but anyway. Yeah. Hmm.

1:04:19Ryan Dank AfWell, you certainly influenced my path. I mean, your book was one of the, I think it was like the third book I read on cannabis and I was in university at the time and I immediately, like, I mean, going through your book and realizing that there was all these, you know, all this scientific literature behind it.

1:04:36Rob ClarkYeah.

1:04:37Ryan Dank AfAnd that sent me right to the stacks. Right. And we had just come across these, you know, obviously this is pre Google pre not really pre-internet, but right at the beginning of the internet. And you didn't really have good databases, so you'd end up sitting there in front of the, you know, computer in the library and just scrolling through stuff and finding scientific articles and trying to track them down.

1:04:59Ryan Dank AfAnd it was...

1:05:01Rob ClarkThank God for open stacks.

1:05:04Ryan Dank AfYeah, but man, you ever send me down on the path and realizing that I could go deep on it? And it just, you know, it just kept expanding.

1:05:12Rob ClarkThat's what Mark did with me. I mean, finding Mark's book in the library had exactly the same experience. Like, well, hell, he can do it. And here's a whole bunch of lists of places to get started. And that wasn't exactly what I was going to do. But as you know, in library research, one thing leads to another. Now the internet leads you from one thing to another.

1:05:30Rob ClarkBut you still have to do the right search. And you can change a search word, a search phrase by one small word. And you get a whole bunch of same, same, but different.

1:05:41Ryan Dank AfNow people don't realize the importance of bibliography in scientific papers because it's like you want to go and read all those references yourself. You don't just take the word of that one person. So every paper really is like a trailhead, right, that leads you down further roads of discovery and thinking. And now with cannabis, it's almost endless. Right.

1:06:04Rob ClarkI mean, yeah, it really is. It's I'm writing a new book. I've been working on it almost two years now. And I had this realization a few months ago that I do have to kind of cap it off here pretty soon or there'll be more material coming in every day than I can process, summarize and put in a book I'll never finish. So, yeah, it's amazing. And part of I will explain this explosion in the preface.

1:06:29Rob ClarkBut that's awesome. I mean, there's just literally Now, instead of a few hundred, I don't read everything. I don't read all the medical stuff. I pass this by, but I'm just talking about things that relate at least tangentially to botany. And there's several things a week that I have to read. There's other things I file and I'll get to before I finish, but it's, it's incredible. It's a tidal wave of information.

1:07:01Rob ClarkSo yeah, it's hard to remain. I've always tried to be kind of have my be a jack of all trades, renaissance man kind of thing. And so I know a little bit about different things to kind of help people know a little bit about a variety of things. But we're so specialized these days. It's hard to know even a little bit about something. It's every field has layers and layers of research and knowledge and And it all comes to, even when you really try to filter hard, it's hard to focus on what you're doing.

1:07:37Rob ClarkBut it's great. I mean, my God, better than the paucity of stuff we had before. She was in the 90s. There was like nothing coming out. The 70s, there was plenty of stuff because the anti... Andrew Berman, Andrew Berman, Andrew Berman, Andrew Berman, Andrew Berman,

1:08:05Rob ClarkWe can thank them for that. And the United Nations, above all, they financed heaps of good research. But that came out in the 70s, the 80s. It dropped right off in the 90s. There's paucity of stuff until the end of the 80s.

1:08:18Ryan Dank AfThe 80s drug war killed it. And then Howlett's discovery with the van of the receptor opened up that whole world of the 90s. Because that's what I was doing. My undergrad was kind of early 90s. And it was the, it was, you know, the endocannabinoid system was relatively new, right? It was back then it was like CB1, CB2, anandamide and 2AG, right? And it's blown up into this massive system.

1:08:46Ryan Dank AfBut I think that that also pulled back some of the acceptance because it was at that point in time, it became just undeniable about the medical and the therapeutic value. 95 was prop 215. And, uh,

1:09:00Ryan Dank AfIn my opinion, that was kind of the domino that set this whole thing off around the world.

1:09:06Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the last since not very long ago that all this has happened, you know, it's really picked up the Sanjay Gupta moment. What year was that? That was an important sort of catalyst.

1:09:24Ryan Dank Af2010-ish or maybe a little later than that.

1:09:26BubblemanWas that Charlotte, Fiji? Yeah. Yeah, that was the last leg of prohibition against medical cannabis. No one except Chris Christie wanted to argue with parents whose children were having hundreds of seizures a day and then just didn't have a seizure for like 13 days from one drop of cannabis oil. That was crazy.

1:09:50SpeakerAnd I'd comment on like the two 15 days here in California when all these...

1:09:58SpeakerShop started opening up, you know, they, they've lacked, um, A conversation they lacked to interface with the consumer and the patient because there wasn't information. And that's one of the things that I did quite a bit was kind of, you know, because I had just come back from Amsterdam and I knew Rob, honestly, you know, that was, people would ask me, like, what do we say to like a patient?

1:10:25SpeakerAnd having Rob's books be like the language of, you know, for one, like hashish, Hashish had so much information on cannabinoid and terpenes and the entourage effect concept hadn't really sunk in in the US, you know, definitely not as a sales, you know, tool. But that, but those books to the 215 era were like the way people spoke to a patient. Because there was a language that they had.

1:10:59SpeakerIt wasn't just weeds good for cancer and AIDS. It was like, what is weed? Well, okay, there's this book. It has all these different things. Here's a chart. So I wanted to ask you, Rob, about Hashish, because to me, that book isn't just about Hashish. It's an amazing book about cannabis and cannabis ethnobotany and culture and everything. And when did you go down that path because that's that was just an amazing publication um when did you decide that your next thing was going to be to do this book that was uh that was when i moved to amsterdam not long after i lived there because i mean to european smokers hashish was

1:11:44Rob ClarkWhat marijuana was to North American smokers. And when I say North American, I really mean U.S. American. Canadians on the East Coast, they were Quebec because it was very much related to Europe and its trade and its appreciation of hash. And so I can't speak for all of North America that way, but basically we were a weed culture and they just didn't smoke weed and You're not hardly at all.

1:12:12Rob ClarkA little bit. If you went to the Transkei coffee shop and got some old bourbon, great. But that was even in those days more for tourists and it wasn't common anyway. Everybody came and smoked hash in Amsterdam. So I met people in the trade. I met people who had interesting stories and had been to all these interesting places. And I realized actually weren't just telling war stories, but had information.

1:12:36Rob ClarkYou know, I could like interview them and get tips from here and there and Leave out the war stories, which I kind of wish I'd taped or written down. They were all great, but most of those people are gone now. But I consciously left them out. And that's one reason people told me a lot of stuff is because I always left that out. Yeah, that was the impetus, really, was moving here to a hashish culture and being able to do that.

1:13:03Rob ClarkAnd then we started, because we're curious, messing around with hash. I mean, there was water hash. There was electrostatic things. There was always a quest to make more concentrated, you know, not extracts, but concentrates. So, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And the cultural side, well, that came from my ethnobotany interest peaking in graduate school just before that. So that's where that comes through.

1:13:35Ryan Dank AfWhat was your work at grad school at Indiana?

1:13:41Rob ClarkI basically was growing... Carl Hillig continued basically what I wanted to do. I didn't meet Carl before he went there. I met Carl not long after he started there, but he followed up with terpenes and also started the alazime analysis. Different enzyme configurations. But that was the first real chemo taxonomy that people had done. And Carl did great work. He's the guy who came up with the whole concept of the different gene pools, as I would call them.

1:14:28Rob ClarkI mean, he had broad leaflet, wide leaflet, he called it hemp, and narrow leaflet hemp, and the things that Mark and I picked up on. And that's all Carl's My tweet of what Carl had already done. Yeah. Published it in his dissertation and with a couple of papers with Malbert. And he also did terpenes. And he was the one first one who said that there were these guine and guile and these things in Afghan that weren't anything else.

1:14:57Rob ClarkAnd yeah, Carl's work was amazing. Actually, I've based a lot of what, what I do on, on his basic findings.

1:15:05Ryan Dank AfI wish he had more plants per N, more Ns per grouping.

1:15:10Rob ClarkYeah, it was a small greenhouse. But yeah, it was on the roof of the building, same greenhouse. Yeah, tiny.

1:15:19Archive SeedsRight.

1:15:19Rob ClarkYeah, he was trying to have as much diversity as possible, and he didn't have enough males in there either, actually, if you want to look at that. But yeah. But he started a lot of other people doing it.

1:15:35SpeakerAbsolutely. Rob, you started in these few pages in Hashish where you're on the cannabinoids, sesquiterpenes and sesquiterpenoids, diterpenoids, triterpenoids. I mean, this was in... When you published this in 1998, obviously you'd been researching this for quite some time, but this was well before the entourage effect had become widely accepted or, you know, however, whatever you want to call it. So I'm just curious, like, how did the research in this book lead to a bigger understanding of cannabis As in terms of its composition and also just who else?

1:16:22SpeakerI mean, you guys, who else put this information out there at this time? Do you know what I mean? I mean, it's out there in lots of white papers, but really, I just want to emphasize how important this book became to all of us. For creating the language that we use to explain cannabis to consumers, to the industry, to everyone. There wasn't another version of this for many years.

1:16:48BubblemanYeah, well, look at what happened when he didn't create a new edition. That book is like $400 or $500 or $600 because that's the value of that book. People are like, yeah. I'll pay that. Like, if that's what I got to do, I got to do it. But it is available again, correct? Because I went to look for the new edition.

1:17:09Rob ClarkIt's on Amazon.

1:17:13SpeakerIt keeps showing me the old one. Yeah, there's a link to it. There's another one. It's a different cover. Just if you scroll.

1:17:21Ryan Dank AfYeah, that's a great plan. I just can't see it. Yeah.

1:17:25SpeakerAnd here, you guys, look at this. I should mark out the... All the addresses on here, right? This is the original hash files, the book.

1:17:35Ryan Dank AfI just posted in the chat, there's a paper from Ross where he talks about terpenes, the volatiles from cannabis. I believe that was 88. Yeah. I'm sure that was probably one of the ones that set you on the path.

1:17:53Rob ClarkThat's one of the ones I was seeing. Yeah, there were not that many Terpene analyzes, and they were only the basic ones, pretty much. I mean, it didn't get too complicated. And some of that work came from University of Mississippi, too.

1:18:07Ryan Dank AfAnd a lot of that was where Ross was.

1:18:09Rob ClarkHe was also there at El Soli's lab. Yeah, yeah. Or Turner's lab, maybe still at that point, but no, El Soli's lab. But yeah, that's right at the turning point there. No, that was, there were some Germans and others who had looked at terpenes and hashish samples a bit and, but not much. There wasn't a whole lot out there. But enough to get you to realize that there's differences between different varieties and different pieces of hash and that they were volatile and the older the samples were, the less was in there and, you know, some of the basic stuff.

1:18:51Rob ClarkThat was all, you know, it seems like just common logic now, which it is. But when you find some scientists who went through the whole scientific method and came up with that conclusion, then you, I at least, have a much better feeling about believing what they said. You know, it's, for whatever reason, they did it. There's been a lot of science on the dark side. I mean, a lot of really good science has been done by forensic scientists who are Trying to find ways to stick it to people in the cannabis business.

1:19:24Rob ClarkYou know, it's, yeah, bad intent, but good science. And I think that in a way needs to be recognized as well.

1:19:32Ryan Dank AfI think a lot of people think that Olsoli and maybe even Malberg's lab, like because they were DEA licensed, they were part of the Death Star. But I think that people don't realize a lot of those guys are quite pro-cannabis and they're very much the plant like we are.

1:19:49SpeakerYeah, absolutely.

1:19:51Ryan Dank AfThey're just, they're just part of the team that got the license, right? But I think that a lot of people in the cannabis community kind of see those guys as, you know, foot soldiers of the empire.

1:20:01Rob ClarkWell, yeah, I mean, University of Mississippi was foot soldiers of the DEA. I mean, there's, they were their lab that analyzed samples that they seized from people. It's also why they have a database of more than they did. They have a database of like 10,000 seizures or something. Even years ago when I had a chance to have access to this stuff. Because they shared it. I mean, the first analysis that Jim and Ed had had by Mississippi, you know.

1:20:31Ryan Dank AfThey were contracted to build that lab, really. Not the lab, but I mean, do the work of the analysis for the DEA.

1:20:38Rob ClarkRight, and also to... They're also to grow the medicinal cannabis that was distributed to so few people. But in research, it was right there. But yeah, it was what, a total of 14 or something, Max, I think, in the heyday. But yeah, they were responsible for that too. So yeah, it was all kind of right there. It was one, they scratched each other's backs, that's for sure.

1:21:07Rob ClarkBut the National Institute of Health and the Did the research side more and the Drug Enforcement Administration had their control there as well. So yeah, it's good science. Super good science still being done. So yeah, whatever.

1:21:23Archive SeedsI think it's an interesting concept to kind of think that because we were spending taxpayer money to keep cannabis illegal, we actually got, like you said, some pretty good research early on on cannabis. And it also basically like the government Um suppressing cannabis supply made the value of cannabis so high that there became that this entire business and everything blossomed from that essentially subsidized value created by the DEA and they're doing the research to kind of for us to to to for the plant to essentially win at the end of the day which it basically has at this point.

1:22:07Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. The plant is definitely, as an ethnobotanist, you're not supposed to get too anthropomorphic, but the plant has definitely used us to its advantage. You know, if you want to flip it around.

1:22:24Archive SeedsI've got an interesting question for you, Rob. Do you think there is any plant other than cannabis that's more widely cultivated in more places around the world today?

1:22:39Rob ClarkIn more volume, sure, the major crops in diversity of geography, probably none, and certainly not combined with its diverse uses. I mean, you've got bamboos that grow in a wide range of places, but people don't smoke them. They eat them, they build things out of them, whatever, almost everything else. And the brassicas, all the Brockley's and rapeseed and all that good vegetables, not real fiber, but all kinds of seed oils and things.

1:23:11Rob ClarkBut no, nothing, nothing has the diversity of uses and the geographical diversity that cannabis has. Nothing I can think of.

1:23:18Archive SeedsWell, and when you think about it, too, in any city, there's probably thousands of indoor grows of cannabis, right? Even still to this day, there's not thousands of indoor grows of anything else. Nobody's paying that kind of money to grow. Maybe orchids would be a close second at most.

1:23:36Rob ClarkRight. I mean, we're getting to a level and indoor growers used to have an exercise closet or an attic and actually make not just stash or maybe make a little money on the side when weed was worth astronomical amounts but uh now we're getting back to the initial level we started out in the 70s hobbyists and and anybody who's in the seed business will tell you that their seed sales are primarily to hobbyists they're small amounts to individuals and those kids you can't possibly call that commercial anymore i mean sure they're supplying their friends and themselves but Nobody's making any money.

1:24:14Rob ClarkThey're spending money now to plant those seeds and bring them to maturity. So it's a hobby. And it's spreading, I think, more than ever because now people don't have to worry so much if their hobby smells and their neighbor notices it. So I think that's...

1:24:31Archive SeedsLED lights and tents too have made it a lot easier to set up a grow room. I mean like HIDs and the higher power usage and running your 240 line, you can put up a couple LEDs with just a couple, you know, 20 amp circuits in a regular bedroom and have a pretty decent grow. You don't need a big air conditioner. It's pretty, like you said, you can get away with the smell now.

1:24:53Archive SeedsSo I think it's just interesting to think that how much this plant has won. Like you said, it's really taken advantage of us because there's no other plant that humans go through as much trouble to grow. And if people lived on Antarctica permanently, I bet you there'd be an indoor grow there too.

1:25:13SpeakerThat's right. And you know, I mean, a lot of the funding around LED research was initially from NASA to like, what is it, Utah State or whatever, with Bugbee's lab. And that was to figure out what can you grow in outer space? And where did that industry end up going in terms of a model? It is to cannabis, the whole controlled ag part of it.

1:25:38Ryan Dank AfI mean, and Fletch, you know, you did the same thing with the fridge, with that freeze dryer, right? It's like cannabis is driving this kind of evolution of the way that we do things. It's like it drives technology. It's driving the way like what other crops are tested like cannabis, right? From like, you know, pesticides. It's like we're kind of bringing an even appreciation for the scent compounds.

1:26:03Ryan Dank AfLike, you know, we're looking at volatiles and all these other plants, not because of cannabis, but The commercial aspect is, right? They're starting to sell it.

1:26:11SpeakerThat's right. If you Google anything about growing anything in the world, cannabis comes first. So it doesn't matter what search engine you use, but you just Google, like, I want to grow at home or whatever. And I grow all kinds of stuff at home here in the backyard. And it does cost me more per ear of corn to grow corn in my backyard than it costs me to buy corn at the market.

1:26:36SpeakerAnd so that is, we're slowly seeing that shift with cannabis now where the price of cannabis is getting so low that to grow a pound of weed at home, it's getting pretty close to the cost of just buying a pound of weed somewhere else. So it's interesting shift. But you mentioned, you know, Fletch, you mentioned, you know, other crops and stuff. And Rob, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the botany of desire.

1:26:59SpeakerBecause you were apparently interviewed for that. And that, I think, was a really important book for just people understanding this thing called agriculture. And cannabis was really seminal in that narrative.

1:27:14Rob ClarkYeah, the origins of well-known plants in general. And what plant better known and more controversial than cannabis? What else? Those other topics. Apples.

1:27:29SpeakerI think that's Tulips were one. Tulips, Tulips.

1:27:34Rob ClarkTulips is one, yeah. Potatoes, no? Potatoes is a, yeah, they were in there. But it was a wonderful book. And he has his, if it weren't for cannabis, I don't think he would have written the book because it was kind of a, The back theme through the whole thing started with his interest in cannabis because somebody had a plant in a garden or he did in his garden.

1:27:56Rob ClarkAnd, you know, he made it rather personal. So it ran through the whole thing. He came to Amsterdam and wanted to interview me and I forget how he got a hold. But we went to the greenhouse coffee shop across the street, Danny Rican and I. And we just, everybody got baked. Let me just put it that way. Totally baked. And I think that was part of, he quotes me a couple of times in the book lightly, but it's, I think that's where he really got the, That there was so much of a relationship between cameras, not just his relationship and his neighbors and the weed growers a few down, but this thing that was bigger thing going on, bigger power maybe.

1:28:41Rob ClarkAnd it was interesting. He came out with a great book. It was fascinating to read. It's a good one.

1:28:49BubblemanYeah. That's cool that he interviewed you for that.

1:28:53Rob ClarkYeah, then we came and I don't remember how he got a hold of me. Through a publisher, I guess, maybe. I really don't remember. But he came to Amsterdam. He's probably interviewing other people, too. But we had a good sesh. It was excellent.

1:29:07BubblemanExcellent. Yeah, I'm a big fan of his work. I've read a lot of his books, On McBoer's Dilemma, The How to Change Your Mind, Botany of Desire. Good stuff.

1:29:15Rob ClarkAbnivore's dilemma really, Botany Desire did him well, but Abnivore's dilemma really pushed him over.

1:29:22BubblemanThat was, I just think it showed how unbiased he is as a writer. Like he just wouldn't choose a side if there even was a side. And when talking about diet, there kind of always is a side.

1:29:34Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, yeah.

1:29:37SpeakerScience doesn't pick sides, so that's the point.

1:29:40Rob ClarkI'm going to just appear for just a minute and dewater and rewater, and I'll be right back. Excellent, excellent. Enjoy the scenery.

1:29:48BubblemanMan, I'm so excited. This is so great. By the way, everyone in chat, there's over 400 people watching live right now, so it's like a good number hash church audience, and people are really loving the stories and the questions, guys. Might have to hit a bong rep.

1:30:07Archive SeedsI think another kind of interesting thing, just with Rob and cannabis and all the work that they did.

1:30:17Archive Seedsis like he was just saying with the botany desire guy how how much this plant relates to so many different people and that's why it's cultivated in so many different places and i think as we're finally seeing gonna see cannabis normalized and all the hot air comes out of the market I think a lot of passion projects are finally going to come back because there's not a financial motivation to just breed purple and frosty shit anymore.

1:30:46Archive SeedsIt's like you want to grow $800 pounds, grow purple and frosty. You're going to need to offer something else than just providing a product. Rob and Dave were just so far ahead of everybody else. It's taken us almost 20, 30 years to take the stuff that was in this book, all the knowledge that you could gain from this, and even put it to market, right? Absolutely. It's just crazy to think, you know, that all of this, they could have all done this 30 years ago had it not been subsidized by legalization to create the scene that we have.

1:31:29Archive SeedsBut it's just cool to, we're in a really special time, I think, for the evolution of cannabis in general. We have just, it's all compressed in a short enough period of time that we do have a fair bit of the original genetics that, you know, were around. There's a lot of people I've seen popping old seeds and getting plants from them and reintroducing stuff into the, you know, even if like myself, stuff I collected 20 years ago, well, I know that's, I think it'll be finally interesting to see things evolve again and see what comes out.

1:32:15Ryan Dank AfI'll tell you, Diana just popped some seeds here for the window. And we were talking about what the best thing to grow would be. And I said, well, take some of the hay seeds. It's like, if that was David's favorite, why don't you take some of those and plant them this year? And so she put down, I think, like 15 of them. I think every single one came up, right?

1:32:35Archive SeedsA little sprinkle of potash. Yep, put one in there.

1:32:41SpeakerYeah, I think prohibition shaped the market. And I used to freak out about it because, you know, as a kid growing up, I just kind of watched like cannabis change like visually and effect-wise and stuff. And I used to have this kind of like fear that we lost something or like the man changed cannabis. But in hindsight, I feel like it just changed the market. It changed it.

1:33:03SpeakerIt created a market demand, a prohibition-based market demand, and not... It didn't change the gene pool because the gene pool was hiding in little cracks and crevices. And it reminds me of a story that Rob told me years ago about the wine industry in USSR, how it got completely decimated by the market. But the diversity in the gene pool stayed in the backyard, in the homes, in the hobbyists, and that that was that was the saving grace for that Aaron for that region.

1:33:38SpeakerAnd I think it's the same with cannabis that 20 years later, 20 years from now, we're going to see a lot of amazing cannabis that came not necessarily out of the Dutch seed industry or the California dispensary scene, but it's going to come out of our backyards from seed producers who are distributing fire that they had hidden, you know, because it's slowly trickling back, you know.

1:34:00Ryan Dank AfWell, interestingly enough, I mean, can't like we keep always saying cannabis is an obligated crosser. And one of the things that does is it keeps random recessive mutations just kind of hidden in the genome. And as people start doing like these isolated inbreedings, like, for example, Freak Show, right, that weird leafy kind of fern looking leaf plant, that was just someone who was inbreeding in their population in their backyard.

1:34:26Ryan Dank AfAnd they had a random mutation in that leaf, in that gene associated with the leaf. And you get two copies of that together, this random gene that normally never shows up in two pairs, finally pairs up, you get that mutation expressed. And I'm sure that like ABC, the development of that ABC Australian bastard cannabis, whatever they call it these days, Bindi or whatever it was. But that's the same thing, right?

1:34:52Ryan Dank AfIt's just a population inbreeding somewhere. And we get this recessive gene combination come together and you get a weird new expression. And yeah, it's that's that's one of the and it has been. I mean, even with the Chemdog and, you know, some of these other lines, that one there on Mojave's, you know, picture. It's like these things happen when there's small pools that are just inbred together and you get an interesting population or mutation pop out.

1:35:23Ryan Dank AfAnd it leads to things like, you know, these We're random phenotypes, physical phenotypes, but also things like CBG, right? CBG dominant. CBG dominance happens when we have a broken THC or CBDG, right?

1:35:37Rob ClarkAnd the- Actually, you have to have both of them broken. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when you start dealing with mutations of two loci, I mean, that really- It makes the odds much lower getting what you want just with adding one more trade. So not all to be disabled. All that chemistry is pretty amazing, really.

1:36:03BubblemanYeah. How about this for a perspective? 420 High Hopes just said this in the chat room. We took away the male from the picture. So the female cannabis plant now is using male humans as a method of reproduction.

1:36:22BubblemanIt's interesting.

1:36:23Ryan Dank AfAnd we're giving them silver. It's funny, you say that we're, you know, how cannabis has influenced us, but, you know, the plant that came into contact with humanity is not the plant that we have today. Right? These big massive flowers full of terps and cannabinoids, like that did not exist. So it's really an example of co-evolution.

1:36:52Ryan Dank AfYou know, and I think it's arguable that, you know, I was saying this yesterday with Rob, there's a cannabis neurotype, right? Like there's a certain amount of people that cannabis really does benefit their mental, not their, you know, their mental state, but their neurochemical state. Right. And I think that there's, there's probably something to that, you know, especially with certain people on a spectrum, you know, there's just something about cannabis that makes you feel

1:37:21Rob Clarkgood in a way that you can go about your day in this society right well it's interesting to me i mean it's it's about co-evolution it's all about how hard you want to drive the concept but i'm more at your end of it i mean two things happening in concert with an exchange of influences back and forth not strictly just keeping it on the gene level but it's definitely true and it just amazes me we bobby and i often talk about this is like Okay, we developed this endocannabinoid system.

1:37:56Rob ClarkInstead of sea urchins, pretty much everything but bees, for some reason, bees and ants, but it's in almost every living organizm, some form of the system. So it's really primal. And then along came cannabis. And as these compounds that fit in that system, they're not any other plants that at least we use for anything that fit into that system so it's just serendipitous or you can go totally cosmic and say something else but it's just amazing that these two independently now very much co-evolving together but they've evolved independently and then came together rather magically yeah well i mean you could argue

1:38:43Ryan Dank AfI mean, beta-caryophyllene binds to CB2. It doesn't bind to CB1, right? It doesn't bind to that system that gets us high, but beta-caryophyllene is a ton of different herbs and pepper. And that binds to CB2. And, you know, I was saying last week, there's evidence that shows that beta-caryophyllene can reduce ulcerative colitis through CB2, right? And they technically call it a dietary cannabinoid.

1:39:11Rob ClarkYeah, I call it the dietary cannabinoid, but that's about where it sticks in the system and a little bit about its structure. It's a terpene instead of a terpenophenolic, but I mean, CBD, all the cannabinoids are half terpene. So, and they come for the same pathway as CBG and all the rest, just a little farther back on it. But yeah, they're all really closely related to begin with.

1:39:34Rob ClarkSo yeah, I mean, it's all this,

1:39:41Rob ClarkYeah, I think all this co-evolutionary stuff is fascinating. How have we evolved together? You know, culturally, from an ethnobotanical perspective, it's obvious, you know, there's all kinds of examples. Looking at it as on a more of a chemical level, it's more difficult to suss out for me, but yeah.

1:40:00Ryan Dank AfYou can definitely see it. I mean, look, I think that you've probably even seen this. I know people that can't deal with terpenylene varieties. Right. And I know people that really like them. They prefer those over the other stuff. And that's even just kind of like one level of trait. But there's also the people that you've seen, you know, some of us might have them as partners that they're just not even into cannabis.

1:40:22Ryan Dank AfLike it doesn't, they don't like it. It's really like the number of humans that are interacting with the plant versus the number of different breedings of the plant. Because breedings of the plant keep bringing up these different You know, chemical individuals is really what they are. They're different chemical types. And, you know, like Fletch and Mojave and myself, we try to find good ones and share them with people.

1:40:47Ryan Dank AfAnd we're really just throwing against a bunch of different genotypes of the plant against a bunch of different genotypes of the people. Yeah. Some don't. It's like the more we do it, the more we grow this thing, right?

1:41:02SpeakerIt's too complicated is what I always say. It's just like, it's not like opium or ethanol or anything else, like trying to marry this like plant human relationship together the way those other plants can. It's a different story. And the weird thing, I think, sorry, I missed the beginning of this conversation, is that I think historically, I don't know, Rob, if you can, but this is true, but historically, the amount of people that interface with cannabis is very small.

1:41:34SpeakerRelatively back in the day, right? Just because the population, you know, the production centers and stuff, it was relatively small as a drug, right? You know, and today we're probably seeing the biggest ever human cannabis interface, right?

1:41:51Ryan Dank AfVersions of it to babies.

1:41:53SpeakerRight. Yeah, exactly. And it's a new thing. But we have this kind of misconception because we have an endocannabinoid system that humans and cannabis have this intertwined relationship for millennia. But it's really relatively fresh to us, which to me is what's so fascinating about this co-evolution thing is that like we split. You know, like on the evolutionary path, we split and created these two different systems on a plant and then on the animal side and then came back together just right now.

1:42:27SpeakerLike in the evolutionary clock at like 12, 11, 59 and 59 seconds, cannabis and humans actually found each other. And that's why it's so dynamic and so interesting. And it just happens to be that humans are heavily populated all around the world now and very diverse. And cannabis is now heavily populated and really somewhat diverse. So to me, it's a fascinating ethnobotany story that is so different than I mean, wine and beer are so important in human evolution and technology and society and culture because they've been so prevalent among the masses.

1:43:07SpeakerBut cannabis is much more narrow.

1:43:11Ryan Dank AfBut it's just starting. I mean, listen, all these varieties that I made down at Napro with the weird combinations of cannabinoids that you don't see in the market, that stuff has never even been able to hit the market. Right? And it's like, what would that do if you start bouncing that off different genotypes of people, right? Like, I'm sure you're going to find all sorts of... Like, we made these varieties that were...

1:43:33Ryan Dank AfUm, six, six THC to one CBD and eight THC to one CBD as a ratio. So you can crank that up to, you know, 25, 30%, but just that elevated like three, two and a half to three, 4% CBD was enough that it didn't really get in the way of the high, like the, that how intense the, the effect was, which is what people want. Right. But it took the edge off.

1:43:57Ryan Dank AfAnd I'm like, I'm sure you give that stuff to like newer consumers and they'd have a better experience. Right. And it's just for whatever reason, mostly market forces. It's like you can't you can't sell enough of that stuff to make it worthwhile because all the Budtons are pushing and culture is pushing everybody towards the highest THC plant. Right. And so we're missing all these plants that have, you know, I know I enjoyed them.

1:44:23Ryan Dank AfRight. Like they have. Even for stuff like we never did this because we didn't have enough production or not enough production, but enough demand for the production. Thank you for joining us.

1:44:56Ryan Dank AfAll right, so we're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.

1:45:25Rob ClarkYou can just breathe a little more of it. And then you get a bunch more terps with it, which is actually what you're after. I mean, you don't, yeah, people get enough THC. They don't get enough terps, I think.

1:45:39Ryan Dank AfAnd they're always driving for more THC. And it's like, unfortunately, what I think the ultimate win is, is not to make the best weed for the stoners. Sure, I want to do that too. But I want to have more people smoking cannabis, or not smoking cannabis, but more people interacting with the plants.

1:45:54Rob ClarkWell, more people, but more of the different genotypes find each other. You know, so, yeah, the more variety.

1:46:00Ryan Dank AfLike the smashing in your face, 35% THCase, that's right.

1:46:04SpeakerAnd more weed for farmers to sell, too, I think is important. That, you know, like getting to these lower number percentages and, you know, like, do you want to sell two pounds or one pound? And we need, farmers need to grow more and sell more because that's just the nature of being a farmer. And the reality is like, we all know that there's plenty of THC. And it's funny because like, I deal with people who are, I was talking to someone the other day who needs a bunch of washing, genetics to wash, right?

1:46:36SpeakerAnd, but they need diversity in their genetics, right? Like we can't, I'm like, well, there's some washers that hit 7% yield, Do you want just those? No, no, no. We need diversity. Well, what if it's a 3% yield, 4% yield compared to seven? Like, well, we have to have diversity. We need products from different aroma profiles. I'm like, well, okay. So, Now, you bred variety A to hit at 30%, but it only returns at a 3% yield.

1:47:07SpeakerAnd then variety B could have been half of that with a double the return, right? And so much of the market is moving towards extract. It's like, that's more important in the yield than the THC amount by far. So a 25% or if it's 20 or 30%, that's a 30% difference. But if it's 3% or 6%, come on. So it's like this whole mentality of like of higher THC.

1:47:36SpeakerAnd I'd also point out, I feel that some of the people that consume terpenylene and have issues with it or those narrowly varieties that spin them out are usually because they're too potent. Not because of the profile as much. That that same thing in a really low potency smoke less of it has a really nice effect that doesn't overwhelm people. It's just that when you do a 20 plus percent hit of high terpenylene cannabis, That's a hit.

1:48:09SpeakerThat's like they call it a hit for a reason. It's as much as you can take without getting knocked out, right? And that's to me what people want is do we want cannabis that helps people function like coffee, like your daily thing that you do all day, or do you want cannabis to be like beer or opioids where you take a hit and get really Hi.

1:48:32BubblemanI think if you have the variety available, the user, the person who's purchasing will be the deciding factor for all of those experiences. Make them available, I say.

1:48:45Rob ClarkKeys to provide the variety. Yeah, it's just make it available.

1:48:49Archive SeedsI have a question for Rob. Do you think that there was some diversity lost because of prohibition that we can't find out of the plant again?

1:49:04Rob ClarkI almost, almost certainly, and there are those who'll say that the alleles still exist there, but that's, how do you make the combinations again? You know, it's, it's, it's hard to randomly put back together the, the deck of cards you dropped on the floor to the order they came in in the pack.

1:49:25Ryan Dank AfWell, especially when you don't know what half the suits or numbers are.

1:49:28Rob ClarkYeah, I mean, even if it was that simple, and there's more than 52 of them. So yeah, they're there. The genes are not necessarily extinct, but the combinations probably are.

1:49:39Archive SeedsAnd yeah, and what percent? How bad off are we?

1:49:47Rob ClarkWell, I don't think we're that bad off, but we have to widen our horizons. And go back a few steps with what's still there to remix again. There are land races out there. I mean, yeah, look at what the India Land Race Exchange guys are doing. Trident Seeds, that bunch out of India. My God, they got a network of people all over the place collecting really cool land races.

1:50:11Rob ClarkAnd they themselves work with them and have plenty of friends, a lot of them in California, as it turns out, who grow their seeds and report back about What happens with them? They have a network of things going on. These are really, these kind of people are the kind of people that make me so happy because it's a bit beyond a hobby, but that's where it started.

1:50:31Rob ClarkNow they're trying to figure out how to really make a business out of it, but they're right. They educate people. They fucking, you know, they do good stuff.

1:50:39Ryan Dank AfBased on their powdery mildew gene, that was, they went back to a land raised variety.

1:50:51Ryan Dank AfAnd I think it was a rainy Friday and grabbed that one gene because it was essentially fixed. This mutant, the gene that left everything susceptible.

1:50:59SpeakerYeah.

1:51:00Ryan Dank AfSo that's what we're back to. Even David, you know, when he was, when he was growing land races, the stuff that he brought back to California, he said most of it was junk. Like even the amount of Thai plants that he filled in the Hornet Farm greenhouse and went through and just was a complete waste of time.

1:51:14Rob ClarkAll the Afghans. Every year we grow at least 50 Afghan females from somebody's new batch they brought in. It's like, Four or five years in a row, we finally, now three or four years, we finally last year, we just gave up on it. We never found anything. The Hindu Kush that we had that we used for years was fantastic. It was just an early grab. A1 was great, but all this stuff would come and it'd grow beautiful plants and they'd just turn to mold.

1:51:40Rob ClarkThere was never one that ever had any kind of resistance and it was not special by any means.

1:51:47Ryan Dank AfWe've done so much with the hybridization that we've done. Like you really like, you know, like you're saying the changes in the plant of the last 30, 40 years, that's a lot that's been done by closet breeders. But the thing that we've been eating out as we go along those things is we've been so, you know, so heavily selecting for cannabinoid content and flower structure and, you know, resin content scent.

1:52:11Ryan Dank AfWe're, we're kind of leaving all the important agricultural Uh, traits like resistances and proper structure. Oh, but you, you know, but when you're, you're improving corn, like if you're breeding, you want to do something to a corn variety, you don't go back to the wild relative and start growing like Teosante, right? You just go a few steps back. And then if you have to use those wild relatives to capture like one gene, you just go back one gene, but your back cross it into the modern stuff.

1:52:40Rob ClarkRight? Exactly. And there's, it's, I don't, I don't really believe that there's, um, any wild populations truly untouched by the hand of humans. Um, maybe somewhere, but cannabis has gotten around so much. It's become such a cosmopolitan plant even centuries ago, and it gotten around to lots of places. And it's the thing that amazes me is all the feral. Phenotypes in these places. I don't know if it's the Midwest stuff that escaped from hemp from Europe or if it's Central Asian feral looking stuff or it's outside of Temple in Yunnan province of Tibetan Temple.

1:53:25Rob ClarkIt all looks the same. It looks like a little Christmas tree. It's usually not more than two meters tall, usually more around a meter or less. A little Christmas tree shape, sparse branches, not too many flowers, and it ripens seeds from as soon as it flowers till it dies. And it's, it's, it's, I talk about atavism sometimes, the return to previous states, in this case, previous phenotypes.

1:53:56Rob ClarkAnd I think this happens really fast. I don't think a plant has to escape the grasp of agriculture for very long to start looking like that. It's just the survivor phenotype. And I think we get back to, that's the plant that they met. Or for our ancestors, that's the thing they met. Something that looked like that. And it's not all that attractive. I mean, it had some edible seeds and I suppose a little sparkle on them from time to time if you're there at the right timing.

1:54:29Rob ClarkBut yeah, I mean, generally, that's I think what we started with. In Nepal, they look much the same. They got a little more resin on them. And they're, you know, back and forth with ones that are a little more selected. They're They're not quite as feral, you might say. They're feral with a bridge. But yeah, there's the survivor phenotypes, I think the best way I can describe it.

1:54:54Rob ClarkAnd plants revert back to that almost everywhere. We saw a lot of different ones at the USDA variety comparisons this year that they did. And They all looked almost all the same. Some are a little bigger and smaller. Some are a little more curved branches at the bottom, but remarkably similar. Or everything else from all over the rest of the planet that they had there was quite different from those and the other ones of, yeah, there's a lot of, really a lot of diversity in those fields.

1:55:29Rob ClarkBut the most similar bunch of populations were the feral ones.

1:55:34Ryan Dank AfWell, it's the plant that would survive without human health.

1:55:37Rob ClarkYeah, that's the way it just does it on its own.

1:55:43Archive SeedsHow would you describe that early Hindu Kush that you said was a winner?

1:55:50Rob ClarkIt was higher, higher than most Afghans, and it had a good flavor to it, too. It had a good Not really a sweeter side, but it had a mintier, nicer high to it. It wasn't dank. It wasn't particularly Afghan. It looked like one, but it didn't have any of the danky, more hashy kind of flavors. It was a beautiful plant, and it hybridized well with skunk. That's what hog was, but...

1:56:27Archive SeedsWhere do you think the more danky, hash planty, you know, let's say someone's trying to, I think a lot of people, this is often discussed online, you know, people are like, oh, just go back to Land Race. And just like a lot of people that have tried that, you find a lot of not so desirable things. If you were going through Land Race... And let's say you're looking for skunky.

1:56:52Archive SeedsWhere would you look and how would you modernize that into a new variety? What do you think, you know, based on your experience?

1:57:00Rob ClarkWell, first of all, you'd have to find one you like. That's the struggle. I mean, breeding with a down line, there's a whole bunch of paths you can take. But I mean, for instance, everybody wants the roadkill skunk back.

1:57:12SpeakerOkay.

1:57:12Rob ClarkRight. Well, We grew lots and lots of imported Afghans and we let them flower as long as they could till they molded and went in the trash. But none of them smelled like roadkill skunk. They smelled like all kinds of organic, nasty, anywhere from, you know, all kinds of bad smells. We don't need to mention them all, but organic kind of smells, not your fruity flowery stuff, but more organic.

1:57:38Rob ClarkThank you for watching.

1:57:58Rob ClarkYeah, musky, not very nice necessarily. And I've been through a lot of land race descriptions, modern ones from guys who've collected them and grown them, the few land race companies that really have some good information out there. Musky is actually a term that's used quite a lot to describe both what's considered, I don't, for the sake of easy communication, sativas or indicas. Um, they, they overlap a lot.

1:58:26Rob ClarkA lot of the terms interestingly do the descriptive terms and, uh, and some of them don't, and I'll explore this and what's coming up, but it's, uh, it's interesting to kind of, for me to kind of think about which aromas are cannabis aromas. Like all of it. And there's too bad hemp isn't in these things too. I wish these Landry's guys also collected hemp varieties because then they would be going out to people who report back to grow them and go, yeah, it smelled like peppermint or I don't get that feedback, but I wish I did.

1:59:03Rob ClarkIt's, uh, I like the whole picture of all cannabis, but, uh, hemp's all, all these fiber hemp things, they have terpenes and they have their own aromas and they're relatively boring, but, uh, In comparison, but they're also different between them. So our Turkish lander smells different than other stuff I smell, for instance.

1:59:22Ryan Dank AfThose descriptor terms, I think that's like, they're really not a good way to, to compare because people mean like scent as an orchestra, right? So what one person perceives out of a scent or calls musty is probably different compounds than somebody else calls musty.

1:59:37Rob ClarkRight.

1:59:37Ryan Dank AfRight.

1:59:38Rob ClarkAnd they mean musty or musky. I mean, it gets it's like, yeah, I don't know as much you could really learn from it.

1:59:45Archive SeedsBut that's where the existence of these clone only varieties that have been shared and have consistent where we can say, hey, this smells like OG Kush or this smells like Jack Hare or this smells like, you know, whatever strain it is or cultivar or whatever. And that's that's I think that's When you can use those types of things and descriptor terms, then you can start to talk the same language as someone when you both have the same experience with clone-only varieties.

2:00:20Ryan Dank AfIt really helps to know the chemical sense. Like yesterday, Rob came by and there was an Alfonso mango in the fridge. And these were special mangoes that came from India that David was really into. And like I'd never had one before. I cut it open and I know I split one and it was like absolute straight up myrcene. Like I've never smelt another mango that had that much myrcene in it.

2:00:45Ryan Dank AfAnd to the point where I like I went out and cracked open the terpene myrcene standard here so you could smell the two of them together. And it's like it's incredibly strong. Right. But his favorite mango. Was it? Yeah, it was. Yeah. Kind of generally considered one of the top ones, right? But it's, um, so I went and I looked up the terpene. I did it. I looked for a GC of an Alfonso mango and I, I screenshotted one paragraph.

2:01:15Ryan Dank AfAnd if you took out the word mango, like you could have been, it could have been talking about cannabis, right? Cause the terpenes are so similar across the board. I see.

2:01:26SpeakerBlack pepper, black pepper and mangoes for breakfast every morning.

2:01:30Rob ClarkYeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Every morning in Laos, black pepper and mangoes.

2:01:35SpeakerSo, but Fletch, you bring up an interesting point and I think it's relevant to where cannabis is headed is it's kind of a seed versus clone in terms of the impact on the gene pool in the market. Because if you look at modern weed, definitely modern seeds and, and OG Kush is like the backbone of so much modern cannabis. OG Kush and Chemdog, right? If you're looking at gas or you're looking at, you know, what is the modern architecture of the flower, everything, you know, almost everything has those two clone only plants in it.

2:02:13SpeakerAnd it's not just because there were They were good plants, but their impact on breeding was so obvious, right? So you could take that, you could take that clone-only plant, make a cross with it, and boom, you have your own version of OG, your own gas, your own chem, your own sour, right? A lot harder with a lot of other, to do that with other packs of seeds that you're getting from Amsterdam back in the day, for instance, right?

2:02:38SpeakerSo this move towards clones, and Rob had this great quote in the LA Times years ago when you guys, Ryan, when you did that panel, With John Page and Mal Glee and Kevin McKernan. And it was clones equal death, seeds equal life. And the whole audience just cracked up. It was great. It got quoted in LA Times because it was just this narrowing of the gene pool.

2:03:04SpeakerAnd I guess what I'm getting at is the question I have is, Will we ever get there with seeds? Because we know we can we know we can create more uniform seeds and we know we can breed for more uniform outcomes. But the market so much demands on that, like replicate this over and over that cookie cutter thing. And then when you have these clone only plants that deliver such a big boom and it's so difficult to go back to their parents and get that boom.

2:03:36SpeakerSo you just use that That backbone beat, you know, to put onto your track. Like, will we ever get to seeds or is cannabis going to be a clonal crop?

2:03:50Ryan Dank AfNo, it's not. But it depends. I mean, and really, it's actually it's not actually the answer is not that difficult. French and I actually had this conversation online last night without really putting it in these terms. But essentially, there's two things in breeding. There's finding something new. And then there's taking something to the point of stability, right? And the reason that you take something to the point of stability and uniformity as a seed population is so you can grow it from fucking seed, right?

2:04:16Ryan Dank AfBecause crops are better to grow from seed. I mean, look at all this stuff like broad mites and cyclone mites and hop late and viride. Like that's, those are the consequences of growing an annual crop over decades. How old is OG Kush at this point in time? So the longer a plant lives on, the more chance it's going to have to pick up these kinds of viral diseases and long-term problematic pests.

2:04:42Ryan Dank AfBut if you're growing things from stable or from seed, you don't get anything new. Right. So it's like you there's always like down in Salinas, there's that one place that grows orchids from seed. Right. Everybody else is growing orchids from tissue culture. These guys grow orchids from seed because they're essentially using the fields in the greenhouses to screen massive amounts of plants. And then they take those few interesting new combinations that whether it's from a chimera or a unique gene combination that they haven't seen before.

2:05:12Ryan Dank AfAnd they take those things and they send those ones to tissue culture, right? And the rest of the plants just get kind of sold in bulk flower. So those are the two different aspects of breeding. And to me, breeding is taking a known type and putting it into a seed line or intentionally creating a new type. The benefits that we've had in cannabis, you know, from home growers and, you know, like Letch was putting up one of these plants the other day where he was using a male plant.

2:05:41Ryan Dank AfAnd it created the new unique chemotype or phenotype at least that had this massively frosty plant. And, you know, you can tell us about the scent, Fletch, but, you know, that's to me that screening, right? It's what people call pheno hunting. But, you know, I've said it before on here. To me, that's like it's pheno stumbling. And so I laughed when you said that, Fletch, yesterday, because it's, again, it's not a directed approach of targeting something and making selections to going after.

2:06:11Ryan Dank AfIt's just growing a lot of plants and seeing what new and special that you find. Right. But if you're going to once you find that plant, it takes breeding and figuring out the inheritance of these traits so that we understand how to move those traits into new seed lines.

2:06:28SpeakerI guess what I'm getting at is how the markets demand. It's not about seeds versus clone in terms of what their benefits are, but will the market... Continue to want clonal plants because we've created this, for instance, that's why I use OG, this gas craze. And is it, you know, we've never seen, and I hope that this is where we're headed, but I've never seen true breeding seeds that can reproduce the same product Year after year, cycle after cycle for one brand who wanted to be, you know, they wanted to have that, you know, Coca-Cola, whatever, Big Mac identity.

2:07:16SpeakerAnd like, as an industry is that where, you know, and, and, and, and because cannabis is so diverse, if we move towards, um, See true breeding seed lines. Will we narrow the gene pool? Because now it's...

2:07:37Ryan Dank AfThey don't need to be true breeding. They just need to produce a uniform crop.

2:07:41SpeakerRight, right.

2:07:42Ryan Dank AfConsistent. Right before David passed, we went and saw that lab, right? Where is it? In Davis. And they were making haploid plants and dihapoid plants. And they were using OG Kush. Like for example, they were using OG. Right. And so the idea, I don't know if that's what they had achieved, but the idea when you're doing that is you bust a plant into its parental chromosome types.

2:08:06Ryan Dank AfAnd then when you cross those two plants back together, you get back the hybrid. Right. So if you had an OG clone, if you had an OG, you'd find pollen, you know, one end plants or haploid plants that represented each of the parental chromosome types. Right. So you've essentially busted apart the hybrid. And when you cross those plants back together, you recapitulate OG Kush. Right. Right. So that's what I mean.

2:08:31Ryan Dank AfIt's like you can't. And that's not true breeding plant. It's no more true breeding than OG is. But every single plant is the same. Right.

2:08:39SpeakerAnd that shows the importance of keeping those clonals. I've always used this example of like, you know, I'm not a huge Elvis fan, but like this thing of like clones are like Elvis, that every now and then you get a thing that's completely unique from its parents that you can't go back to the parents and achieve something new. And you also can't mate with Fine Priscilla and make new Elvises.

2:09:03SpeakerYou know, so you're always going to be stuck with this every now and then you have this one off moment. And that happens with lots of crops where you where the value in that clonal selection is greater than anything you can achieve through breeding. So it itself becomes the breeding tool.

2:09:20Ryan Dank AfYeah, but the problem is, you're right. The problem is that right now, I would say that we have a pretty low standard for what I consider bulletproof plants, right? And other multi-billion dollar industries, they don't use like flimsy plants, like You know, OG's got a great nose, but man, like you got three levels of trellis in these indoor facilities growing it, right? Like there's weaknesses to these plants.

2:09:44Ryan Dank AfAnd so that's why like I keep pushing on people like trying to be able to self and understand the inheritance of a given trade so that you can then capture how that trade is inherited and then you can work it into a plant with a better architecture. But that takes time. And, you know, part of the other thing with the cannabis industry is the market's extremely fickle.

2:10:05Ryan Dank AfNew thing, three, six months, right? And that's just not realiztic with breeding.

2:10:11BubblemanHey, as much as I want to talk about the market, I'm stoked to have Rob here and want to bring it back to some of these great questions of the history.

2:10:18Rob ClarkI was just going to go to one of these questions too. I was just looking at those.

2:10:22BubblemanOkay, yeah, if you want to answer one of those, you're welcome to.

2:10:27Rob ClarkIt's a question people often have. Do most traditional hash making countries dry the flour in the sun? Well, yes, the answer's to that. Even Afghanistan, you know, they're drying it in the sun. They might even have snow on it some of the times, but yes, it's dried in the sun. And There's a number of functional reasons for that. One thing you want to get it as dry as you can, as fast as you can, so you can deal with it.

2:10:54Rob ClarkEven if you're not going to shake off the resin glands yet. These are dry sifting cultures we're talking about, of course. And yeah, you want to, they did it in Morocco too. They did it on hot tin roofs. And when you've seen pictures from Afghanistan and they lean it against rock walls or something and yeah, Just let it bake in the sun. And the other reason is that most people don't realize when you get around to making hashish, you don't want all those monoterpenes.

2:11:26Rob ClarkYou really don't. It makes for problems. It's made for problems in Nepal with people growing modern varieties. It's made problems in Morocco like crazy. There's two, the monoterpenes need to go away. And then just have the heavier, denser sesquiterpenes that still stick a piece of hash together just fine. And some of the monoterpenes are so solventy that they actually keep a piece of hash from sticking together.

2:11:58Rob ClarkSome of them are very much like solvent, and some of the monoterpenes are very sticky. But you get rid of the solventy ones over a relatively quick time. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:12:35Rob ClarkWe've got a couple of questions here. We've got a couple of questions here. We've got a couple of questions here. We've got a couple of questions here. We've got a couple of questions here.

2:13:03Archive SeedsNon, you know, that's basically this whole Piatella craze is basically monoterp, heavy hashish that then, you know, whatever they call it, nucleates, or I don't know the right terminology for it. But whereas when you don't have all those terpenes, then it'll stay in a nice block for a long time.

2:13:22Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, no, absolutely. We always, David and I are always back and forth on why does skunk resin fall apart when you press it? And David was always saying that he thought it was moisture. And in part, I think he was right. But I always argued that it was terpenes. Some of these terpenes are solvent in nature. Limonene, for instance, is used for a solvent. They clean keyboards with it.

2:13:49Rob ClarkI mean, it's not a sticky substance. So hashish is all about sticky. You know, it's got to hold together. And I think some of the terpenes can actually dissolve other ones possibly or solubilize them a little bit and Yeah, I like hashish in part because it is a piece of hashish. I know that might sound strange, but it makes it very accessible. No, these good quality and you smoke it out a pin or you put it in a pipe or you roll it in a joint or whatever.

2:14:21Rob ClarkIt's it's easy to use. That's for sure. It's user friendly.

2:14:28Archive SeedsYeah, well, I think we know it's not. I think we know it's not moisture because we have stuff coming out of the freeze dryers and that's like, you know, and basically everything turns into a piece of hash. It's just how long does it stay a piece of hash is the real question.

2:14:44Rob ClarkExactly. No, you press it together and two days later if it's gone whitey is the term we used to use. It gets white and soft again and it never goes back together. No matter what you fucking do to it, it's been done to it.

2:14:58Archive SeedsYou know, that's a lot of heat till you cook all the terps and everything back off.

2:15:02Rob ClarkYeah, you can go back to just melting it and cooking it.

2:15:05Archive SeedsYeah, that's all you can do.

2:15:06Rob ClarkIt doesn't press back together. It doesn't. It's a one-way reaction when it happens. That's for sure. That's interesting. And it might have to do with the water also because some terpenes are hydrophilic. They actually absorb water, especially the monitor. Right, pulling it from the alcohol.

2:15:26Archive SeedsRight, it could be pulling it from the air, yeah.

2:15:28Rob ClarkIt would be enough to be screwing it up, especially in a, not a firmly pressed piece, but a piece that's just squeezed together a bit, like in a foam can.

2:15:39Ryan Dank AfI think moisture is a good way to describe it. It's not water, but it's wet, right? The terpenes are, you know, they're oils. They're part of the essential oil. Right. That's what happens. You're losing the essential oil and the cannabinoids are crashing out. You see it. You see it happen with dabs, right? It's like they dry out and they become kind of pasty, but it's like, it's really, they're kind of hashifying because you're losing turps or volatiles, not just turps.

2:16:08Ryan Dank AfTurps are a big portion of it, but it's other volatiles as well.

2:16:14Rob ClarkYeah, I've liked looking at some of the research by Abstracts recently, that company Abstracts, and they work a lot with, I mean, they're doing, I just signed up to their newsletter the other day, and I just get bombed with stuff, but they're doing a lot of, you know, vape pen fillers and all this kind of stuff, flavorings for those things, but they also work with the hop industry, and it's interesting to see how that's gone kind of two ways.

2:16:43Rob ClarkIt's If you look up hop analyzes and the way hops are classified, they look at four terps. They look at caryophylline and humuline, which is alpha and beta caryophylline. There you go. They're almost the same molecule to begin with. And they look at farnesine, which is, it's in cannabis, but not particularly prevalent. And one other one, and recently they added linalool. It was like, okay, now they've got, Five, they look at, but there's lots of them in there, but you know, these hop people are also starting to wake up to these hop forward beers.

2:17:22Rob ClarkIt's a lot about the terpenes and all kinds of other aromatics that cannabis doesn't know, but they're really having to get into that.

2:17:30Ryan Dank AfWe did a little at Napro. We developed a hops assay and we're growing. We were growing hops down at the Salinas greenhouse.

2:17:40BubblemanWell, listen, Rob, if you want to, you'll be welcome. We're going to have the abstract guys. We've been planning this show for months. We got Nick Ziegler, who did extractions for Yakima Chief Hops and did all this sort of analytical work on thiols and different aromatic compounds. The abstract guys, Dr. Mark, Ryan, Jeremy Plum is going to be on that show. You're welcome to come on if you like.

2:18:03BubblemanIt's going to be a good one.

2:18:05Rob ClarkOh, I'd love to be on that one. That's good. Is that the guy I met? We, Bobby and I met with Jeremy at an Emerald Cup one time from Yakima Chief that I can't remember his name. Is that Nick?

2:18:16SpeakerThat's Nick. Yeah, we hung out with Nick and you met TJ and those guys.

2:18:21Rob ClarkYeah, we were just wondering about him the other day. It'd be really good to see what's up with him for sure. Yeah, Nick's good. Well, you know, I really interested in the blend of the two and lots of lots of levels. I mean, all the way from the botany to marketing it. So. Yeah, it's it's it's funny to watch the the two kind of come together.

2:18:46Ryan Dank AfYeah, well, yeah, this a lot of this is related. Another example of another industry getting influenced by cannabis, right? Like nobody looking into the. That on a commercial level for beer until the cannabis guys started doing it.

2:19:01BubblemanThose hazy IPAs. Yeah.

2:19:05Rob ClarkYeah.

2:19:07BubblemanBe cool. Yeah, no, that's going to be a great show. So we'll be looking forward to that in the near future. You know, Rob, years ago, you sent me a picture of And I can't remember where you were, to be honest. And maybe you'll remember, maybe you won't based on this description. But you were like, I don't know if you were just standing under this huge tree or if you were like working in a...

2:19:26BubblemanI can't remember exactly what you were doing. But there was this tree with like a trunk the size of my waist and it looked like it was at least 20 feet tall. And when I looked closely, I was like, that's a cannabis plant.

2:19:39Rob ClarkThat's huge.

2:19:41BubblemanDo you remember that plant? That had to be one of the tallest plants.

2:19:43Rob ClarkYeah, exactly. That was actually published in one of the hemp journals at one point in an article I wrote. But that was in northern Vietnam. And normally they grow plants that they harvest when they're six feet tall or a little less and before they flower and they get very fine fibers and they use it for weaving. And then they leave some plants to get seeds so they can sow the fiber crop the next year.

2:20:14Rob ClarkAnd they leave those around the edge usually where the plants branch anyway, so they're not so good for fiber inside of them. Once you go in a meteor, they use that part of the crop for fiber. So this lady... Had a plant that she's probably was growing for seed originally, but it was just outside of a window that had a bone, like a really weak, like 40 watt incandescent bone.

2:20:44Rob ClarkAnd that plant didn't flower. And, and it wasn't intentional. It just happened. But I mean, it had a stock that was seriously, it was six inches across at the bottom. It was, it was giant. And that thing was like 20 feet tall and it was a hell of a bush too. Yeah, it was a huge bush. Yeah, it was really huge. But that's what, that's apparently what happened.

2:21:06Rob ClarkEverything else in the neighborhood just flowers and does normal things. And I noticed there was a light bulb there. And I said, is that on all the time? She said, I turn it on every night. I was like, okay. But it wasn't much of a light bulb compared to this massive plant, which is a little incandescent, glowing, slightly orangey, old-fashioned light bulb. It shows you don't need much light to stop plants from flowering.

2:21:32Rob ClarkLike the ones hanging in the mountains in Columbia.

2:21:35Archive SeedsIt goes to show how sensitive cannabis is.

2:21:38Rob ClarkOh, absolutely. And I would suggest those guys in Columbia could probably get away most of them with about a quarter as many lights.

2:21:47BubblemanI know they put a lot, don't they?

2:21:49Rob ClarkYeah, it looks kind of overkill. David and I used to use for every 10 square meters, and these were big plants. These are mother plants to use the next spring, you know, basically in a heated greenhouse, but not heated so they grew too much. And some of these plants are overhead tall and bushy, but we only used... One bulb for every 10 square meters. That's 100 square feet.

2:22:14Rob ClarkAnd it was 40 watts, a blue bulb. There were just 40 watts. Yeah, exactly. We just strung those things up. And the only time we ever got any flowering was occasionally with a male in the shadow, the very bottom short branches that had grown out where they got more light before the autumn. And they would occasionally, one branch would flower a little bit. It's always a male.

2:22:43Rob ClarkBut very rarely, and those, that didn't take hardly any electricity at all. We left them on all night. We didn't do, we didn't break the night. They were not on all night.

2:22:52SpeakerAnd that's a seven watt LED nowadays too. So yeah, it doesn't take a lot of light. Hey, Rob, can you also mention, you mentioned Vietnam, and one of the things that was just so fascinating about meeting you in Amsterdam was, like, I met this guy, he's this amazing guy, blah, blah, and then you were gone. And it was always, when's Rob in town? Because you were in China and Vietnam for years, and it was always like a treat when Rob came back from this journey, you know, so...

2:23:27SpeakerTalk a little bit about what you did in Vietnam and China over those years, because that was also things that you weren't doing.

2:23:36Rob ClarkNo, that's where I started really getting into hemp, because I was in Asia, and that's the cannabis they do, pretty much. I went first to China. I worked for the Nature Tax Group, which was allied to David. It was all part of our group in Amsterdam. I went there to work with the mill in Shandong to try to maybe grow some Hungarian varieties and see how they would do there.

2:24:07Rob ClarkSo we set a bunch of Hungarian seeds there that Bocha had bred. Unico Bay and Compolti and Compolti Hybrid TC and I think one other thing. And maybe Segeti at that time. And we...

2:24:25Rob ClarkYou're on there and did some things with that. The project fell apart as so many cannabis related projects do. We did that for you. That's what really got me started there. And then later through a hortifarm auspices really, but financed by Hemparella, Richard Rose originally. And then Donnie Wurtschafter, Ohio Hempery got in on it and we worked in Vietnam. That's why I was there. And that was to breed a large seed variety for hulling.

2:24:54Rob ClarkThat was basically the idea on that one. And we started with, uh, We did two things. David also worked in parallel with the same seeds, but these were large, very large seeds that I collected in Union that were used for snack foods. And I got them from different people in different parts of Union Province and grew them all out. They're roughly the same, but there were some small differences.

2:25:18Rob ClarkAnd Use those as one side of it and crows crossed it with Novosadzka from Serbia, former Yugoslavia. And that was through Janos Barony, who's gone now. They That was the latest maturing thing we could get that wasn't monoecious. The Ukrainian varieties are all monoecious and they're also southern ripening for Europe. They're the latest maturing things you can get. They're actually, you know, true hemp, not farm bill hemp and industrial hemp.

2:25:57Rob ClarkAnd we crossed it with that. And that was the beginning of the lines. David selected them in the greenhouse a bit. And I selected them in a number of fields near Hanoi with the Vietnam Agricultural Sciences Institute. And did that for four years.

2:26:16SpeakerWhy that Novosibirsk Friday?

2:26:20Rob ClarkBecause it was the latest maturing, because this, I was crossing with the U90s, which is almost semi-tropical things. Okay. With that kind of latitude. And it was the latest maturing dioecious hemp variety. I needed to be low THC also. So, yeah, it was a registered hemp variety. The latest. And I didn't want a monoecious. I didn't want to bring monoecious into the picture at all. So.

2:26:51BubblemanWhen you say low, you're talking 0.3% THC.

2:26:53Rob ClarkYeah, the stuff from Yugoslavia was, yeah. And my end product needed to be. So we were breeding it to be able to grow it. No, and we've always tried to aim at developing things for the parts of the world where they don't have them. And this is another thing we're really lacking. We're lacking subtropical tropical lower latitude closer to the equator varieties we we have weed that grows there but we don't have We don't even really have improved cannabis varieties, sensimia varieties that will grow outdoors at those latitudes.

2:27:35Rob ClarkThat part of the world is lacking, y'all. I mean, on all levels, there's no seed varieties, there's no fiber varieties. There are a few things that have come through that work okay. There's Frog One, independently developed. It's from UNO and also stocked originally, very low THC, and they use it for a biomass plant in Australia. But not in northern Australia. You know, on the mainland, but not...

2:28:06Rob ClarkIt still has its own band of efficacy, but that's about as close to subtropical as we've got. And we always wanted things that would work in those realms. Cheap labor, big audience. I mean, it's... Yeah, it's too bad, but cannabis really is a northern temperate crop. And where it's gone more widespread is the drug varieties that have spread more to the equator. But yeah, hemp never made it there.

2:28:33Rob ClarkThey're really different, very different fish. But yes, as a crop, it's spread far and wide, but different gene pools, not all of them are spread far and wide. And hemp is quite restricted, so. Yeah, I've always thought there should be a lot of people, French, others that work on trying to make later maturing varieties. But if you live in Le Mans, it's a little bit difficult to breed things without going to great extreme limits.

2:29:07Rob ClarkIf you want something for Zimbabwe, you should grow it in Zimbabwe. If you want it for Kenya, you should grow it in Kenya, you know, and develop these things. There just hasn't been the impetus to do it, but there's no reason we can't. So and while we're talking about diversity, I mean, look at China. My God, they've got 30 degrees of latitude that hemp grows in. They've studied it up the wazoo.

2:29:31Rob ClarkSo much science coming out of China these days. And they've got all this land race diversity. They're not on the drug side. But I think that's pretty available these days. I don't think you have to worry about that. But they've got a lot of other populations where they can snag beneficial traits and bring them into whatever they're working on. And they have huge diversity there still. And it's just there.

2:29:55Rob ClarkIt's not. They also have germplasm banks I've just learned about that are fairly extensive. So the next hemp cannabis breeding power probably in general, but certainly a Fiber and seed varieties is going to be China. They were really late getting started on modern breeding with cannabis, but they will usurp whatever, use and usurp whatever Europe has done over the years. They're on the next wave.

2:30:26Archive SeedsIt's a lot of backyards in China.

2:30:28Rob ClarkYeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm sure they're probably going that way here and there too. But yeah.

2:30:35Ryan Dank AfThey're doing some incredible things. A technology research in cannabis. I saw one. They did a like a overexpression of a gene that resulted in way more flowers per branch. So they're figuring out the actual traits correlated to yield and maximizing them, which is incredibly useful.

2:30:55Rob ClarkYeah. No, that's all good stuff. And that's. But as far as getting back to things we remember from my early days. No, it's not just that we've lost the plants. So we didn't know how to make cuttings. That's too bad. But we lost the cultures. We lost the reasons that these existed in the first place. Land races are, they're about the land and they're about the races.

2:31:27Rob ClarkThey're, they're about their relationships with humans. Because nature takes care of part of the selection and humans, farmers take care of the rest. So That's the thing we're also missing. A lot of these cultures don't have the incentives anymore to do what they used to do or just became too damn much trouble for political and therefore cultural changes. So that's unique for a land race to remain anywhere similar to what it has been.

2:32:03Rob ClarkThe environment has to stay fairly stable, but what's been less So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

2:32:34Rob ClarkThey didn't anywhere near succeed in their goal of exterminating. But they did an exceeding amount of damage. There's no doubt about that.

2:32:44Ryan Dank AfThink of the lost stuff and the things of the past are nostalgia. Like, if we could go back, would we?

2:32:57BubblemanPart of what makes it special might be that we can't go back.

2:33:00Ryan Dank AfYou know, oh, I used to have this one. It's just so amazing.

2:33:05SpeakerWell, one of the things that I think about is... Sorry, Rob. One of the things I think about is as we created the gene pool and we created all this diversity and effect, it was because people were selecting for things. There was selective pressure, right? So that's to me the thing that we lost is to what Rob's saying, it's the culture and it's the why. So why did people choose those chemotypes?

2:33:37SpeakerWhy did people choose those compounds versus what does the market want today? What does the consumer want today? What do companies want? What do seed producers want? And I fear that there's been a divergence there that the why of the past

2:33:57Speakerwas the same why for a lot of things in life that they chose that that it's not just nostalgia it's that we as as people are in a different place which is kind of brings to like to the future of cannabis is like where you know where are we headed in terms of chemical diversity and where does this alignment with people you know because prohibition seemed to shape so much of it So, you know, there's a lot to get here from that, like with the lack of diversity.

2:34:29SpeakerAnd now prohibition is kind of washing away. We're now that selective, we have that option again as people to select for what we want. So on that land race, you know, discussion, like, you know, for one, like what is a land race? And how do you create that diversity and segregate it? You know, because we're now seeing like landrace is a marketing tool, right? So, so I didn't know much about what a landrace was.

2:35:00SpeakerAnd me and Rob have written about it. And we've talked about it a lot. And I still don't, I don't think we collectively really understand what that word means or what it implies, you know, culturally, you know, Landrace is by definition, heterogeneous,

2:35:20Ryan Dank AfAll of these people are part of this population of heterozygous that are used by a culture for a specific purpose, right? So, you know, when you're growing in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it was about the hashish, the individual natures of some of the plants didn't really matter so much, right? It was about the use. And, you know, the other easy example, I think, for people to be able to wrap their heads around is tie stick, right?

2:35:45Ryan Dank AfHigh intensity light, high humidity. Plants are getting way more energy than they need for their, you know, for DLI. So thin leaves is selecting, as the environment is selecting for thin leaves, and airy bud clusters are selecting for lack of mold, right? And those tiny little flowers end up tied onto the stick, right? So it's like, it's all for that purpose. But there's no... And this is, you know, part of because cannabis, again, is obligate out crosser.

2:36:16Ryan Dank AfIt's many plants crossing with many plants. You kind of don't get any, you don't get rid of any genetic diversity or you don't get any loss of genetic diversity, but you maintain enough variability that there's always like a mixture of different plants, right? It's just as long as they fit the use for the culture, then it fits the type.

2:36:40SpeakerSo, so Rob, so what, how do you feel about people today in this culture using the word landrace for as a branding tool to say that, to say maybe that we want weed to be good again, but you know.

2:36:57Rob ClarkYeah, I think a landrace to me is, Ryan just gave a very good genomic definition of landrace, but a more ethnobotanical definition of it is, is A plant that has been developed through the interaction of nature and the farmer, essentially, and from the farmer's selections. He saves his seed every year, and then he sows it the next year. He saves the seed from his best plants, in theory.

2:37:28Rob ClarkSo that's the basic dynamic between plant and human that keeps it going. And that

2:37:40Rob ClarkThat's where when cultures change, you lose part of that element back to what I was saying there. But it's, it's, uh, It's necessary to have everything as a package. And the essence of culture has also changed. I mean, it's not whatever we had in the 70s was a freeze frame. Those things were evolving at the time. They wouldn't have been the same now anyway for whatever reasons.

2:38:05Rob ClarkBut that's the way it was at that moment. It's like just watching one frame out of a movie. And that's, of course, where our memories come from.

2:38:15Ryan Dank AfWell, it's like you're not the same person you were when you were 13.

2:38:18Rob ClarkNo, not at all. And, and our genomes we were born with cannabis wise to go back to that analogy have also have epigenetic changes by now that we, we don't relate to cannabis the way we did when we first started smoking it. And the cannabis is different too. So how do you unravel that? It's not easy.

2:38:38BubblemanWell, it's also that the very thing that the value of say genetic purity, right? Like, uh, Isolation from external gene pools that, you know, which is what I would say part of land race definition is that it's been isolated from these other gene pools. The very valuable, the very value we see in that is let's use that to breed it into other gene pools.

2:39:04Ryan Dank AfYeah, we already did. The thing is, we already did that, right? And like, you know, I remember David telling me this numerous times talking about bringing land races into Hortifarm to grow. It's almost always crap, right? It's like you're essentially going back to undoing all the work that we've done over the last hundred years, right? So I think, again, I think there is a long part of it.

2:39:30Ryan Dank AfIt's nostalgia. Doesn't mean that we can't back some of those traits, but.

2:39:35Archive SeedsWell, I have a question and I've kind of experienced doing this myself. Um, What a lot of people's goal, I think, in the market is, or just in general, is to create a new Terp profile of their own, whatever that is. That's kind of the unique standout thing you can kind of do at this point because potency is on every corner at the end of the day.

2:39:57Archive SeedsSo...

2:40:00Archive SeedsA lot of, a lot of all this, all the, most of the drug cultivars now are such a small pool of clone onlys like Mo was talking about that they don't, you don't really find anything new other than candy in candy crosses, you know, so.

2:40:17Ryan Dank AfNot when you're randomly crossing plants, but I mean, we showed.

2:40:20Archive SeedsSo just going back to like an old land race or something like that.

2:40:29Archive SeedsAnd finding a unique terp profile, let's just say. And maybe the plant kind of sucks or it has no potency, but it has one unique smell to it. And you can hybridize that and essentially modernize varieties. Is that an effective method or not? I mean, I've had success doing that myself, but it's not easy work by any means.

2:40:54Rob ClarkBrian, you want to remember that?

2:40:57Ryan Dank AfWell, I mean, I think the way most people are crossing plants together, it is just random breeding. And there's a concept in plant breeding called wild type, right? And really, a wild type is like the most common expression of a characteristic, right, that you'd see in the wild. But when you start in breeding plants, you can move away to the wild type to some something else, right?

2:41:21Ryan Dank AfLeaf morphology or center flavor. Um,

2:41:27Ryan Dank AfI think I showed through the after eights and breeding for linalool content that you can take a really targeted approach to changing the chemistry of a plant, right? Or selecting for specific compounds. And really, that's what we were also doing with the Napro work, right? It was cannabinoids and terpene chemical signals.

2:41:49Ryan Dank AfI think that's the most effective way. I think the other way is really luck of the draw. It's like random whether you are actually going to get where you want to get to, where you think you're going to get to. It's a lot of crossing fingers and praying. Right.

2:42:08Archive SeedsThat you're going to get. I agree. I think the question kind of, though, is like what you're saying. Let's say you bred your variety to high linalool. Right. But maybe the weed doesn't smoke good. So it's great for extraction, but you can't attack the flower market with that per se. Right. And I think that's where the qualitative analysis of at least for flower consumption plays into selections as well.

2:42:33Rob ClarkWell, that's why it's it's. Usually breeders have lines that breed true for the trait they're after, but also breed true for all the traits they're not after and don't breed true for detrimental ones. So they have lines they understand very well before they start making different crosses between things. And that de-randomizes it a lot. But when people are just throwing one thing at another thing, Because this one has this trait and this one has this trait and trying to get those two traits out of the offspring.

2:43:10Rob ClarkWhat's amazing to me is how many times it's worked. Well, I mean, there's something about this plant that that those kind of things can work and things get lost and you never see them again. But especially with flavors, with these aromatic things, to me, it's it's additive in a way. You tend to keep a lot of them from both sides just when this reno approach, not what Ryan's done, more targeted, but you keep a lot more than you cut out when just crossing two things and then smelling the offspring.

2:43:52Ryan Dank AfYeah, because there's so many notes involved in the orchestra of set.

2:44:00Rob ClarkYeah, there's so many different compounds.

2:44:03Ryan Dank AfBut when you cross two different terpene profiles, you don't get both terpene profiles blended. You get one or the other. But it's that there's all these other layers of scent molecules that do stack. Like we were talking before about stacking mutations. That's really what you're doing is you're stacking different traits that are related to scent. And that interplay... Of all those different combinations together is what gives you this different perception of what we call scent, right?

2:44:30Ryan Dank AfBut really it's made up of 100 or 50 at least notes, right? And just taking one note away or making it present, like for example, like the thiols, the skunks or that garlicky kind of note, like that absence or loss of that characteristic plays a big role. Same with the fruity notes, right? Like all the esters. Right. It's like you can have whatever given terpene profile, like, you know, like the plant that I use called grapefruit.

2:45:00Ryan Dank AfI mean, it's a terpenylene dominant plant. It's there's a lot more other terps than just terpenylene, but it is like a terpenylene dominant plant. But the thing that makes it gives it that grapefruit scent is an ester. I'm sure of it.

2:45:12Rob ClarkYeah. Yeah.

2:45:15Archive SeedsI got a quick question. Do the three different kinds of terps or do the three different kinds of like trichome heads produce different terpenes inside of them? Are they all the same?

2:45:28Ryan Dank AfThey've done a little bit of work on this. I think what they've actually showed is that the capped sessile glands are just a different stage of the trichome life cycle from the capped and stocked gland. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

2:45:43Rob ClarkThere's bulbous glands that have different kind of content, and they're a different kind of gland, but yeah. The capped and stocked, it's about the stock. It's not about the head.

2:45:56Ryan Dank AfI think the younger they are, the glands are the smaller, like the more sessile glands, they're more filled with sesquiterpenes, right? Or they have higher ratio of sesquiterpenes.

2:46:08Rob ClarkRight, right.

2:46:10SpeakerYeah, they did that visual analysis where they actually tracked the growth on a leaf over time. With, you know, locating with using AI or whatever, they locate every gland and then they analyze it over time to show that it was the sessile was turning into a captive stock. Yeah.

2:46:33BubblemanOh, I was on mute.

2:46:34SpeakerSorry about that.

2:46:35BubblemanYou, Rob, you spent a ton of time and did a ton of work with David Watson, a.k.a. Skunk Man Sam over the years. What are some or one of kind of the, I don't know if I would say the things that you're the proudest of, but maybe the thing that inspired you the most or the thing that you're really like, this is good work that we're doing right here because you got to do so much of it.

2:47:00Rob ClarkI thought the inbreeding stuff that ATN was doing to, Move towards getting single component, single cannabinoid lines. I thought that was good stuff. That was pretty, pretty progressive. I like the polyploid stuff we did in Hungary as well with Skunk. That was interesting stuff. Didn't quite succeed with that. Was that in Hungary? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Bocha's team did all that colchicine and microscope work. Oh, I didn't know that.

2:47:38Rob ClarkIt's all done at Compult. The world's crossed. That was David. You see, we cross up the hemp side of things. You go to the Gate Institute where compult comes from, compulty, and you start growing skunk, shitloads of it.

2:47:55Ryan Dank AfCan you tell us about that? So I know, I mean, I've told that story briefly that they essentially contracted Boschka and that institute to grow a couple of hectares of skunk. That was the last of the skunk that didn't get used for the color selections in the greenhouses.

2:48:11Rob ClarkYeah, it's the skunks that, uh, yeah, exactly. It was seed that was a bit, uh, not in our breeding program so much, but just normal skunk, just different parents. And, uh, yeah, we grew quite a lot. We made a lot of hash, which we ended up destroying all of it, but originally it was going to be, uh, used as a raw material for GW type product.

2:48:35Ryan Dank AfHmm. Right. That was because of the, uh, The company that had the license to produce the extract had legal problems. Wasn't that what happened?

2:48:46Rob ClarkThey had extreme legal problems. They had been licensed to work with drug plants and drugs and everything. And I'll leave their name out of it. There's still a company that operates in Hungary. And they got duped. It wasn't their fault. But a Dutch, unfortunately, group of people had ecstasy made and called it something else. And The lab, the lab was making, it was just making something. They didn't realize what it was actually.

2:49:14Rob ClarkAnd they thought it was a legal compound because they got lied to. And anyway, it all got traced back to them. The Dutch got busted with 300 kilos or something of it. It was very ugly. And that happened after we'd signed the contract, but before they could do extracts for us. And we were a Dutch company, which didn't help. And yeah, they just backed off and went, sorry guys, we can't do this.

2:49:36Ryan Dank AfWell, yeah, we made a lot of it into ash too.

2:49:44Rob ClarkSo, but, uh, yeah, we ended up destroying it as usual. And yeah, we've destroyed a lot of very nice weed over the years. That's what breeders do, of course. But, uh, Other circumstances too.

2:49:58BubblemanWell, I'll tell you, it's what I've been doing my whole life. I've been destroying cannabis. I have destroyed every drop of hash I've ever made. I destroyed all the plants I ever grew. I am a destroyer of cannabis. I'm not ashamed to say it.

2:50:12Rob ClarkVery carefully. Every bit of it.

2:50:14BubblemanYes. Well, thanks to bubble bags, all my trash turns to stash.

2:50:19Archive SeedsOh, God. Because, you know, like when you're doing hunts, it's like, you know, throwing away a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. You just keep a top bud and just wash the rest. Yeah.

2:50:33Ryan Dank AfThat's the best way to do it.

2:50:36BubblemanDefinitely one of the good ways.

2:50:39Ryan Dank AfWhat else do you care about? That's Rob. You're working on new books. And what else is going on in life?

2:50:46Rob ClarkUh, not so much. I'm looking forward to going to California in October. Something I... Always like to do, go see what the, how the scenes changed and in some ways not changed, but yeah, go enjoy some time with Mojave and other friends. That's a good run. I like to, I like to, I like to keep up what's going on. That's my home turf, so.

2:51:10Archive SeedsAll right, well, I'm going to bring you guys a couple boxes of jars in October.

2:51:15Rob ClarkYeah, I get to do a little testing. I'm ready for that.

2:51:18Ryan Dank AfAll right. You want to give a teaser about where you're, where you're, We're going to talk a little bit about what this book kind of overview is or that all.

2:51:24Rob ClarkYeah, it takes off. It started from kind of taken off from marijuana botany because it's over 40 years old and lots happened since then.

2:51:37Rob ClarkYeah, it's about science. It's about, uh, it's called cannabis botany, um, 21st century advances. And I don't know when it'll be out. Don't start looking for it yet. It's a year away probably. But, uh, It's about all the cool science that's gone on, not just since in the last 25 years, but since the book was written and even some things from before that time that I was unaware of at the time.

2:52:03Rob ClarkBut both sponsored science, shall we call it, universities, institutions, that side, but more importantly, given a nod to all the cool science that's gone on under the radar during prohibition and post-prohibition now that the doors are open. And the handcuffs are off. So it's it's as we discussed earlier, rapidly developing. There's more and more search papers every day. It's it's incredible. But what went on to bring us to where we are now is an incredible amount of innovative work and things that went on when you weren't supposed to be touching it.

2:52:46Rob ClarkSo that to me is a fascinating part of the story. And I think there should be some recognition for that. Some little bit of recognition for those who did good science for bad reasons. And it's about science, you know, at the cannabis plant. There's kind of an ulterior motive. Just personally, I would like to see the world shift back more to being a empirically based to having a faith in fact and science rather than, uh, Faith in leaps of faith, you know, belief in something that's a little more tangible and repeatable just personally.

2:53:27Rob ClarkSo I'd like people to appreciate science a little more. I think we're slipping more into the world of faith and less about the world of fact. So that would be nice. And I think cannabis makes a nice example and the people who worked with it and around it that science can be a good thing and used for good reasons. So That's kind of the ulterior motive. I don't know if I'll be successful with that.

2:53:53Rob ClarkI'm not a very good narrative writer, but I'll keep working on it. But there's a lot of science in there. That's for damn sure. So, yeah, I try to catch people up on things. And as I catch myself up, it's a lot to study these days.

2:54:09Ryan Dank AfEndless.

2:54:10Rob ClarkYeah, it's incredible. Keeps me busy all day, every day.

2:54:16Ryan Dank AfIt sounds like a nice journey you're on.

2:54:19Rob ClarkYeah, it's good. It's always been a nice journey. Mother cannabis has never let me down. We've gotten a lot of answers to questions over the years, but there's still lots of questions. And that's what keeps you going. The answers are satisfying, but the questions are what drive you onward and keep you going. So there's never any shortage of questions with cannabis.

2:54:46BubblemanOh, I was just going to say, you know, as I think of you and knowing you for all of these years, you know, one of the things we haven't really talked about, which is something that you definitely hold dear to your heart is textile and the textiles of cannabis. You want to maybe talk a little bit about that? I remember meeting you many, many years ago, and I was lucky enough to get invited to your spot and come there and you'd show me you have all these cool little like Tools for harvesting hemp from different countries from like a hundred years ago.

2:55:15BubblemanAnd you had all these beautiful textiles from like Laos and different countries as well. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of your, your, your, your, your desire and your love of those things?

2:55:26Rob ClarkFor sure. Well, part of my process of moving away from doing things with cannabis that was dangerous, like in America, Part of moving to Europe was also becoming more interested in hemp. And this group I was with there, David and others, was also working on a hemp company. That's what sent me to China, as I mentioned earlier, and then working in Vietnam. But in China, a bit later on, not too much later on, I started going to Yunnan province, which is not where I went for work originally.

2:56:00Rob ClarkI worked in the East, Shandong. But in Yunnan, there are a lot of ethnic minority people. Who still grow hemp as they've done for centuries. And that was really fascinating to me. And I started studying and field tripping and going to such huge area and meeting as many people as I could and collecting textiles when I had the chance and taking a lot of photos. And I have the textiles and I have the photos.

2:56:26Rob ClarkI'm Next book, I promise myself I'll publish all this stuff. I started the book 25 years ago and I wrote the first chapter. I still have all the materials and the collection to continue. It's all sorted and well taken care of, but it needs to be photographed and documented and tied together with the book. But that's all there, and I've built quite a collection. It covers a number of countries, and thanks to you introducing me to Amir, I've also spent a lot of time in Turkey where I collected another immense amount of, especially in weight textiles, because they're rather large rugs that some of them weigh 20 kilos each, so...

2:57:10Rob ClarkWe have literally several tons of those. But my collection didn't weigh quite so much and was much more diverse other than that.

2:57:19BubblemanYeah, shout out to Amir. What a great, great human being. Glad you mentioned him. I always forget, you know, that I introduced you guys and that you guys got me such a beautiful gift for that introduction years later with that Turkish pipe and the big wooden box. Just a really... I do hold that dear for sure.

2:57:40Ryan Dank AfYesterday I have a video of Amir busting open a watermelon that was growing as a weed in a cannabis field when we were in Morocco and we were walking through the fields and we found this volunteer watermelon. And so we ripped it out and Amir took a kind of a hatchet shaped rock and chipped away at the outside of this thing until he could finally rip it open.

2:58:05Ryan Dank AfAnd we had one of the sweetest watermelons that I've ever tasted standing under 40 degree sun in the middle of Morocco and a cannabis wheel.

2:58:14Rob ClarkBeautiful for sure.

2:58:20BubblemanOh, I had another thing I wanted to mention before I mentioned Amir. Oh, the photos of Laos and all those Thank you so much for joining us.

2:58:51Rob ClarkMy partner, I'll splash her out here, her name's Gitz Gogland. She's very much the go-to hemp textile expert person. It's amazing that we've ended up linking our lives together. But she's published a book called Cannabis Textiles a couple of years ago, also available on Amazon. And it's really nice. It covers a lot of nice textiles from different cultures and explains a lot about cannabis. About that sort of thing.

2:59:18Rob ClarkAnd she's just launched a website. I don't have the QR code in front of me, but it's called Scoglin Clark. And there it is. That's Cannabis Textiles. And we'll have hemp, more increasing number of hemp things on the site at the moment. Now there's a lot more flax than hemp and we're just getting it going. She just launched it last week, but there she is. So if people are interested in hemp textile kind of things or textiles in general, I mean, This is a cool site, Scoglin Clark.

2:59:47Rob ClarkSo, yeah.

2:59:50BubblemanDefinitely one more cool aspect of cannabis. You know, I can't help but think that we would definitely be in a different place had technology been allowed to thrive in the 30s the way the cotton genie was. We could probably have seen a lot more hemp textiles. Doesn't seem to be quite as easy as a thing to jump into from a Company perspective, like, you know, it's easier to crack seed, crack seed and make oil.

3:00:19BubblemanThat's like good low hanging fruit. You probably won't go bankrupt.

3:00:24Rob ClarkAnd it was just, it was an easy, Ryan and I were talking about this yesterday, but it was an easy transition to growing hemp seed. Once you had phenola, phenola started it all. Then you had a short plant to produce plenty of seeds, matured early, and you can harvest it, that's the key thing, with a normal grain header. You know, anything you can harvest rapeseed with, in case of Canada, I mean, you could also harvest with, By driving a bit slower mostly, but with very few modifications really, covering a few bearings and things and just taking it easy.

3:00:57Rob ClarkYou could use your normal stuff that almost every farmer had or could borrow. And so switching over, it wasn't difficult. Hemp fiber processing equipment is super expensive. The harvesters are, there's ways to harvest without fancy equipment, but there's a lot of compromises there, so. It really takes, would take a lot of money to revitalize that. So hemp companies, of course, they use the limited sources, which is essentially China these days.

3:01:30Rob ClarkA lot of cheating goes on in the hemp textile business. If anybody out there is into hemp textile business, be very careful who you buy from. But China still produces, not that all of it's, Good, but they still produce really good hemp cloth. And Romania and some of the other suppliers have really slipped way down the path or off the track entirely. So yeah, that's all really declined quite a bit.

3:01:57Rob ClarkBut I don't know that anyone's ever going to really bring back hemp textile manufacture. It could be blended in with other things and become vital in some other way, but... On its own, I don't know, I think we're stuck with what we've got and maybe modernizing that a bit, but I don't see any new players popping in and trying to do this. It's just too many millions of dollars.

3:02:22BubblemanYeah, maybe even more.

3:02:23Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, I mean, there's definitely millions, but just how many? But, yeah. And there's also a lack of new technology. I mean, that's kind of spending all that money to basically still do it the way people have always done it. And the flax industry hasn't done anything really new and different either in all these years. So there isn't any tech to borrow from particularly that's more advanced.

3:02:52Rob ClarkAnd people haven't really come up with anything very new. They've tried this green decortication where you don't have to dry the stalks and decorticate the stalks and get the bark. You can just peel the bark off in the field. But then what do you do with it? I mean, it's harder to dry a bunch and process a bunch of green bark strips than it is stalks. At least you can tie them in bundles.

3:03:19Rob ClarkStore them in the barn until you want to use them. Now, there's really problems with the whole, the whole, there's a chain, but the links are not very well connected.

3:03:30Archive SeedsWhat if we ban cotton farming? What if we ban cotton farming? Then what about hemp textiles?

3:03:40Rob ClarkWell, yeah, then they're, I guess, for your cellulosic fibers, you'd be needing them again.

3:03:46Archive SeedsBut yeah, cotton is the worst polluter of like pesticides like in the world. So, you know, if the EPA cared about people, we'd have closed by mandate from the government.

3:04:00BubblemanYeah, but think of all the chemicals that went into cotton as bad as they were and leaching into people's bodies. Now they've like, well, actually, we've stepped it up because now we're actually, we're not really fucking with the cotton as much as we're fucking with the forever chemicals in the plastic clothing.

3:04:17Archive SeedsRight. Oil clothes. Yeah, oil clothes. Oil rags. Living in oil rags.

3:04:25BubblemanI had a couple more questions about hashish because I didn't, I haven't heard as much as I kind of wanted to, you know, like how soon... Timeline wise, after a kind of botany was done and on the shelves book release party, how many years later are you starting to think about the idea of doing this book, Hashish?

3:04:45Rob ClarkOne moment, I was just distracted. I got to switch over to the house. Internet? The house Wi-Fi here. So just let me do that. No problem. I actually shift positions, but give me just a moment.

3:04:57BubblemanThis might be a good time for me to take a big dab, actually.

3:05:02Ryan Dank AfI'm going to cue the girl from Ipanema.

3:05:05BubblemanThe girl from Ipanema. Oh, yeah. Nice, nice hash church. I like these small panels. I'm loving hearing all these stories from Rob. The audience is loving it. We've had 400 people in here. So, yeah, I guess I've got to ask that question again in regards to Hashish, which was how soon after you had done Marijuana Botany. That's released. It's on the shelves. Before you start, and this could be decades, years, I don't know.

3:05:39BubblemanHow long before you start thinking about this concept or this desire to write a book about hashish?

3:05:47Rob ClarkIt was really kick-started by... Yeah, yeah, I just got back on. Good. You want to bring me a beer? You want to... Bring me a beer while you're out here? That'd be great, man. Thanks.

3:06:00BubblemanSuper good. Good friends. We're in Europe. That's a real friend right there. Did you change the Wi-Fi? Yes, I will bring you a beer, Rob. So good.

3:06:13Rob ClarkYeah, we're still in contact here. No, it's when I moved to Amsterdam, and that was 87 or whatever, so five, six years later, something like that. So... Yeah, that, it really was kickstarted by being in Amsterdam. It didn't take very long, but I was just suddenly surrounded by hash guys. I mean, gee whiz, these names won't be mentioned, but we used to go to this guy's houseboat, okay?

3:06:40Rob ClarkA houseboat that hadn't been made into a house. It was just a barge, pretty much. We lived in one end of it, but he'd open up the top of it, like you do to bulk load these barges, And we would sit all night long with Afghan Hubble bubbles and fresh fruit and no beer, no alcohol at all. It was just a strictly no weed, just Afghan hash mostly and some other nice pieces.

3:07:08Rob ClarkAnd somebody asked, what was my favorite hash? I mean, Really, they're all different and really good ones from any country could be your favorite. I mean, a really good Lebanese is fantastic. Really good Afghan was great. All these We're rare. Even back in the day, by the time I got involved, they were not around so much. Turkish was almost finished, but I liked the little bits. I got a chance to try.

3:07:35Rob ClarkNot very strong, but really nice. Elevating kind of thing. But if it's of good enough quality, hashish from anywhere is really nice. The best piece I smoked recently, I'll give a little shout. I almost forgot, but oh, thank you, sir. Fantastic. All right.

3:07:55BubblemanJust in time to tell us about the best piece that you had recently.

3:07:58Rob ClarkBest piece I've had recently. It was in this wonderful place that everybody's heard about for cannabis for years, Thailand. And it was just very recently.

3:08:12Rob ClarkCheers. And...

3:08:16Rob ClarkIt was from the India Land Race Exchange guys, Trident Seeds. It was from their variety they had developed from four land races they'd collected, you know, made hybrids and then made a four-way from that. And it's really nice weed. It's a nice weed to begin with, quite different from the things we normally have, but very nice Cincy. And then they made, just traditionally made sieved hash from it.

3:08:46Rob ClarkYou know, the kind that has just enough particles in it that you can stretch it when it's warm and then you twitch it real fast and it snaps. That kind of texture, you know, but it still doesn't melt, so it's unmanageable. You can still stick it on a pin and make a little snake and put it on a pin and it'll still carry a coal like a piece of incense.

3:09:09Rob ClarkYou know, it's Manageable. And I really appreciate that. You can actually do it on a pin under a glass coaster. Very discreet. But it was a beautiful thing to smoke. It was super nice. It had a really nice high, special high. And there's one quarter of it was an Afghan selection, but all the rest of it's narrowly stuffed from various Indian and other backgrounds.

3:09:43Rob ClarkThat was real special. It was just traditional like I like and knew all this. It was just had everything.

3:09:53Ryan Dank AfWhere did the pen, the pin and the glass and the coaster technique come from?

3:09:57Rob ClarkI have no idea. I saw that so many years ago. It's always the discreet way. It still is the discreet way to travel. It's a Yeah. The only thing you got your piece and you got no paraphernalia. I mean, everybody has a sewing kit. And if you have a stack of odd beer coasters, you're a beer coaster collector. I think it's, it's pretty, uh, I've used it.

3:10:22Ryan Dank AfI've used it quite a few places.

3:10:25BubblemanI felt the same way about the stainless steel screen. You know, that's all I would carry. Then I'd just be like, pop it into an apple, go make some hash, drop that hash in there.

3:10:35Rob ClarkA plastic toilet paper tube. The dookie dook.

3:10:39BubblemanThe dookie do. Yeah, that's the 747 special.

3:10:44Rob ClarkYeah. Well, it's interesting. I mean, you got places like Amsterdam where you never had to be that discreet. You just had to be polite. And I always think there's a lot of mileage out of being polite, especially when you're kind of being an outlaw. But yeah, in California, it was a great place to grow up. It's tolerated and not legalized. And I've been lucky. You know, there's a lot of people in the world who still live in places where it's hard to get away with doing what you want to do.

3:11:18BubblemanSo what did you think after, I'm sure it had been some years before you were hanging out on barges with like no, you know, big openings and hubbly bubbly pipes and, you know, sort of experiencing these different hashish cultures. It must have, I'd love to hear what it was like in your words to experience the first legends of hashish at Simone's restaurant there, The Artiste.

3:11:41Rob ClarkYeah, that was the thing.

3:11:46Rob ClarkThat was a bit of that Hubble Bubble, Afghan Hubble Bubble vibe. That was some of the same people.

3:11:55Rob ClarkI was interested, again, because it was so many different people from so many different places. It was your friends who I'd never met, a lot of them. And people we knew, you'd probably not met all of them either, and it wasn't that many people.

3:12:13Rob ClarkIt was great. People were really into it. I mean, more into the whole idea of hashish. I mean, I've been around weed people who are enthusiastic about contests and things for years. I mean, Since California days. But yeah, it was interesting to see that this traditional thing had some fire left in it. The people were really interested in the concept. Well, they were revolutionized it, of course.

3:12:38Rob ClarkI mean, that was the thing.

3:12:39BubblemanAbsolutely. It's the thing that opened the door to the people that I brought to that party. But the majority of those people came to Legends to meet you and Dave. They wanted to be around you and Dave. That's what they wanted to be like. You were the ones that had been sort of teaching them and kind of putting a spotlight on some of these hashish cultures and stories and concepts and the book itself.

3:13:05BubblemanI mean, listen, there was definitely more than two-thirds of the people that I invited to Legends went to meet you two, for sure. And to be exposed to the Hubbly Bubblies, like, you know, that was special. Those were, to me, Those were like heirloom pipes, you know, they were, they were special.

3:13:27Rob ClarkYeah, they were real Afghan stand up water pipes, if you just to let everybody know what they were, the ones with straight sticks and a straight bowl and you stand up to smoke it. Big water jug, you know, yard tall sometimes. And you go through a lot of hash in one of those. My God, you get huge hits. There's yeah. Remember that Danish guy you brought that time and his lady.

3:13:54Rob ClarkOh my God.

3:13:56BubblemanAsh Bean.

3:13:57Rob ClarkAsh Bean. Mr. Lungs, man. Incredible. But yeah, you, you can really, if you want it, you can get a huge hit and you can Thank you so much for joining us.

3:14:29BubblemanYeah, it was a true room full of aficionados. I'll never forget Debbie Goldsberry one year leaving after like an hour and she's like, I don't know what I was thinking. I don't, I'm sorry that I used a ticket. I'll never try to come to this party again. And for me, I stood out front and pretty much whitey'd with almost every single person that ever went to that event.

3:14:52BubblemanI would see someone come out just white because it didn't have the greatest like, um, Thank you for watching.

3:15:19Rob ClarkI wish I had a smoke on non-non-non-legends events. I mean, the owner's wife was a smoker and they were Lebanese and she didn't give a fuck. So I have a couple of times people would complain because the horror people used to smoke cigarettes in restaurants here when I came. Right. And the restaurant union put an end to that. But they did not stipulate anything about cannabis. So cannabis was, and still is, the decision of the owner.

3:15:52Rob ClarkIt's not the decision of the restaurant union. So owners, very few of them, but a few, there was an Indian restaurant we went to too. They let you smoke. And if somebody said, well, what do they do? And I want to smoke cigarettes. Or they said, no, no. You can't smoke cigarettes, but they're smoking. Yes, they're smoking ganja or they're smoking ashes. They're not smoking cigarettes, you know, but only two restaurants I knew went that distance.

3:16:19Rob ClarkThere's a bar downtown. He's still there too, Peter. He, you know, Phillip, he's, he's solved it a different way. He said, You could bring your glass pipes and smoke those in my bar because nobody smokes tobacco at a glass pipe. And I'm not going to go and ask people what they're rolling every time.

3:16:38Archive SeedsRight. Right.

3:16:39Rob ClarkAnd that was his solution. I thought that was so brilliant. So practical. It's like, yeah, bring your glass pieces, whatever.

3:16:45BubblemanOh my God. Diana just pointed out something hilarious and I forgot about this, but I remember the wives in the back, you know, of the original legends deep in on the back row against the wall. And how they would deal with the, like, it was like being in a house fire, honestly, like there was no difference. This was like being in a house fire once that hubbly bubbly got lit up.

3:17:07BubblemanAnd Diana just reminded me, she goes, we couldn't open the windows because of the neighbors, right? Because we've rent out the whole restaurant and do this major hash aficionado evening. And there was no legal sales or anything like that. We were just hashish aficionados. Adults being allowed to smoke hashish in this venue. And yeah, God bless them for allowing it. They were really cool, Rob. They were cool people.

3:17:37BubblemanThey were great.

3:17:37SpeakerAnd the food was amazing too.

3:17:40BubblemanYeah. Yeah. I was always happy about it. Listen, I'll never forget those nights to me. You know, like I said, no one went for it to be a competition because it was never considered a competition initially. Dave turned it into a competition at the first event. When he was like, I want to see everybody's hash. And everyone was like, I want to show Dave Watson my hash.

3:18:01BubblemanEveryone just started putting hash in front of him. And then it became a thing. And I remember kind of, I kind of fought that for a bit. I was like, it's not a contest. Like, this is just about our love of hashish. And I thought, you know what? Legends is bigger than any of us. Let legends be what legends is. And very much so. People love to flex and they love to show the great hash and I love the idea of people bringing great hash and paying homage to the sort of giants whose shoulders they now stand upon to be able to be like, here's a piece, like check this out in a wonderful atmosphere like Amsterdam where, you know, back then you could do that without feeling like a bloody criminal.

3:18:42SpeakerYeah.

3:18:45SpeakerYeah. Beautiful times. As soon as we got past customs, we no longer felt like criminals.

3:18:51BubblemanYeah.

3:18:53SpeakerExactly.

3:18:53BubblemanEven though the first cannabis cup ever that I went to was at the PAX Party House and it was right next to a police station and I was just like, are you kidding me? This is not real.

3:19:04Archive SeedsAnd I'm Canadian.

3:19:08BubblemanMy American friends could not wrap their heads around it way worse than I couldn't wrap mine. I was just like, after a while, I was like, okay. But for 10 days, they were like, no.

3:19:20SpeakerI would walk around just looking for camera crews and people with cameras and try to get out of the lens. That was the whole thing. That was my big freak out. Everyone was so open in Amsterdam, but I was never that open. But I tell you, speaking of legends, I have been to many events with Rob and every now and then, We get these guys coming up.

3:19:41SpeakerIt's almost like it was a pilgrimage. Like they're holding either like holding the book or they're like, you know, waiting for Rob to sign something and their eyes are like, Rob Clark is here right now, you know, at Emerald Cup or somewhere like that. So I just have to say you are to many of us a true legend, man.

3:20:04Rob ClarkWell, thank you. I didn't ever think I'd Be in any position like this, but the plant brought me wherever I am. So that's, let's thank the plant for that.

3:20:19BubblemanHell yeah. You know, you remind me of Paul Stamets when you say that, Rob, because when Paul, the first time I saw Paul speak and everyone in front of him was like, Like Jonathan Ott from Yale and like all these like psychedelic dudes that were from Harvard and all these prestigious universities. And they'd be like, I'm from Harvard University. And then Paul Stamets gets up on the podium and he's just like humble dude.

3:20:42BubblemanHe's just like, you know, I just learned everything I learned from the mushroom. And I'm just like, ain't that the fucking truth? And I know you've had some experiences with Paul over the years. You guys are friends.

3:20:55Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't seen him in a long, long time, but yeah, for sure.

3:21:01BubblemanNow you got to show up at his place and he'll put you to work again.

3:21:03Rob ClarkYeah, right. Absolutely. I'm sure he's doing well.

3:21:11BubblemanRest for the wicked.

3:21:13Rob ClarkBoy, his pictures of Morocco. Look at that, man. It's like you'd think they didn't grow anything else, which they don't.

3:21:19SpeakerIt was really the first place that I'd seen cannabis grown on that scale in rows.

3:21:25Rob ClarkAmazing. That was Manitoba. I'm sticking up there, but yeah, amazing.

3:21:33BubblemanIt must take a lot of water.

3:21:36Rob ClarkThey don't have enough either. That's the big issue. They've... They fight over water, but the Reef Mountains are not a place that's blessed with water. It's really quite arid. That's one reason.

3:21:51SpeakerThere's Amir with his water.

3:21:54BubblemanLook, you have the video there.

3:21:56Rob ClarkYeah, but this is what they do for water, right?

3:21:59SpeakerThey build these massive and like they've had a few of them break and they take out like, you know, I mean, that's a truck over there, right? Or it's not in that picture, but these are like almost Olympic sized swimming pools. So if they give way, like it's a really problem. So here's a mirror. We found this watermelon. Which one is it? Must be this one.

3:22:28BubblemanIt's There's two of them that are videos. There we go. You're just going to crack that bad boy. Just bang it on the rock, Amir. You got this. Bang it harder. Oh, he's going for the straight like baller. I lift weights method.

3:22:49Rob ClarkLook at that. Perfect split.

3:22:52SpeakerIt was the sweetest watermelon I've ever tasted.

3:22:58SpeakerOne of the things I love from here is like, I remember someone saying, well, where's the property line? And he was like, oh, it's where the variety changes.

3:23:07Rob ClarkExactly. My God. And these look, you see, it feels like this. They look like cons. These are all, you know, all female seeds.

3:23:19SpeakerI think this is where we saw those plants that looked like panorama, Rob. Oh, yeah.

3:23:26Rob ClarkYeah. Yep, there you go. Little squatty guys.

3:23:30SpeakerYeah, there's some in this field that are really... Just these little off types.

3:23:33Rob ClarkThat was an off type you saw. And also about one in a thousand plants was a female gross phenotype, 100% male. Got a flower...

3:23:43SpeakerThere's the Panerata plant.

3:23:45Rob ClarkYep, there you go. Little tumbleweeds.

3:23:49SpeakerThe males were back in that first...

3:23:51Rob ClarkPlenty little, even in these...

3:23:53SpeakerYeah, they are.

3:23:54Rob ClarkInbred, homogenous populations. There's a male. There you go. Like, look at that sucker.

3:23:58BubblemanThat's a male with capital M. Just ready to pollinate 8 trillion cannabis plants.

3:24:06Rob ClarkYeah, I mean, they get seeded anyway. I mean, they're not trying to make seedless weed.

3:24:11BubblemanNo.

3:24:12Rob ClarkBut, yeah, those males that pop out are funny. I'm not quite sure how that happens, but there they are.

3:24:20BubblemanAll these different hash producing countries that you've been to in your life, do you have a kind of favorite or do you just have an appreciation for all of them in their own way?

3:24:29Rob ClarkNo, I haven't visited any that many really, but yeah, I think Naples is the most beautiful point of view, but yeah, Morocco is kind of a nouveau thing. I quite enjoyed going to Morocco 30 years ago. And it was there for a bit more when it was still just the keef plants and they hadn't grown anything modern yet. None of it, zero. But that hashish was better too.

3:25:03Rob ClarkI mean, that was the unique Moroccan hash. Now Moroccan hash is just like modern hashish. Modern hash made from modern wheat. So it's not anything special anymore. But the old varieties I really liked. They had a different high. They were not so potent for one thing, but they had a really nice high.

3:25:20BubblemanIsn't it interesting? The plants are the same as the humans. Sorry, go ahead.

3:25:26Rob ClarkReally good stuff. But that quickly went away. That genetics is swamped.

3:25:32BubblemanWe never seem to see the value of authenticity, like what something is. In regards to even people, like, you know, people are always, when you're authentic, you're always the most liked, the most, just be your authentic self. That's the best version you can be of yourself. And I guess we're always trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. There's the tat, tat, tat, tat, tat.

3:25:55BubblemanThere you go.

3:25:59BubblemanSome serious farmer's grade sift going down. Yeah.

3:26:04Rob ClarkYeah, that tech. Same thing they did 30 years ago. No, no different.

3:26:15Rob ClarkThe sieve, the actual sieve surface that is underneath that is nylon, I suppose, or some other synthetic. It's just a woman's scarf. It's a black thing he just pulled off of there. They stretch it real tight. And so the whole size, the pore size in these sieve cloths varies constantly. And it's really... Yeah, this is really not.

3:26:44BubblemanWe should try pantyhose.

3:26:47Rob ClarkReproducible extraction. Yeah, if they were big enough, they would. Yeah.

3:26:52BubblemanWell, you got to get those.

3:26:53SpeakerYou got to buy them in like middle America. Yeah, I don't know if pantyhose are a big thing in Morocco.

3:27:00BubblemanNo, you got to go to like Minnesota and buy the extra large ones and then bring them to Morocco.

3:27:06Rob ClarkThere you go.

3:27:08BubblemanI'm just being silly. But yeah, that is wild to see that. Yeah, this is the country that produces probably still to this day the most hash for export going by miles.

3:27:20Rob ClarkYep, they do.

3:27:24SpeakerAnd I can imagine back in the day the that sieve that fabric must have been you know like your family treasure like if you had a source of like this one thing that worked for you season after season didn't break down you either had these pieces that you used over and over again or stack or one holy cloth but if you think Because in my early hash making days, finding the right material, the right screen, the right side, the right port side, right thread count, mono versus poly, all that shit.

3:27:57SpeakerIt was a lot to figure out. And if grandpa just pulled out like this is what we use and like.

3:28:05Rob ClarkThat's got to be it. One of the charts in the back of the hashish book that's the most useful is. The pore size in microns, the pore size in millimeters, and the different brands and the numbers they sold the different pore sizes under. Because some brands, the number, the blob, the brand ABC number 72 is because it had 72 pore size. Yeah, this size thing. But there's also a table in the back that has all the...

3:28:37Rob ClarkYeah, there you go. It's got all the...

3:28:39BubblemanListen, this is... Rob, I posted this, a picture of this out of the book in 2009, and I'm telling you, this thing has been looked at over a million times. This is a very... Listen, Micron and LPI are completely in the opposite direction of one another. When it comes to hash, popularizing and learning about water hash, you know about Micron. You want to start learning about dry sift?

3:29:05BubblemanWell, you better not try... My dry sifting over a 70 micron screen. It's 70, you know, it's, it's, you need to understand the difference between LPI and microns. And this simple conversion chart, dude, has helped me help thousands of people. The minute you started mentioning it, I was like, I'm going to go post this right away. The conversion chart for lines per inch to micron. And I think LPI and mesh are the same, correct?

3:29:32BubblemanM-E-S-H?

3:29:34Rob ClarkYes, I think they are. Yeah, it's just...

3:29:38BubblemanEuropean American system or something like that. You even added inches and millimeters like that is a good. Here, you know what the first person said? The first person that wrote like in this post about this, his name was he chose the name Hieronymus Bosch. He said, Rob knows way too much. When was this book written? The 70s? Definitely a pioneer. Thank you for posting this. People are stoked on that, man.

3:30:06BubblemanYour book is packed. This is like one small picture in your book.

3:30:12Rob ClarkIt's got a, it's dense. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's why it takes so long to write books, I guess, but we'll see about this next one.

3:30:23BubblemanYeah, absolutely. I'm sure it'll be a keeper 40 years later. That's a good sort of second chapter.

3:30:31Rob ClarkThis was a pretty field. This was my favorite one on this whole trip, I think.

3:30:36BubblemanYeah, it's already my favorite one. It doesn't look as starved.

3:30:39Rob ClarkThis place had water flowing right through it.

3:30:43SpeakerIt looks like it. You can't tell from this picture, but there was a point where the water came out of the mountain, so they diverted the water as far sideways on either side as they could, and it was cannabis everywhere. Right. And they were they were they had a guy on this mountain face. I think you can see him here. And he was rappelling down the mountain face or the rock face, yanking out plants and throwing them over his shoulder.

3:31:10SpeakerAnd they had this guy down on a horse or a mule or whatever it was collecting the plants. And they had literally every every square foot in this valley. Where they could get the water to, they were growing weed and these other trucks were pulling up with containers and harvesting water for their own farms. And, uh, yeah, you'll see. It's, uh, it's quite a, quite a field.

3:31:36SpeakerWe call it the green valley.

3:31:38Rob ClarkReally a magic spot.

3:31:40SpeakerYeah. When you can see how dry it is everywhere else. Right.

3:31:45BubblemanAnd oh my God, it's the Emerald in the cut. It's probably got all the neighbor's attention.

3:31:52Rob ClarkWhat's going on? That's the road to the coast from there. That's like, it doesn't look like it, but it's actually the major road.

3:32:03SpeakerThis was a secondary road. This one was.

3:32:06Rob ClarkYeah, yeah. It wasn't the highway, but it's still a through road all the way.

3:32:10SpeakerYeah, it was a through road. Yeah. If you're brave. But yeah, see, there's the guys on the road. Oh, yeah. And there, this was all, like, this had all been harvested that day, and they were working their way down to this next section on the left. And it was all very near the mosque, which I think comes up pretty soon.

3:32:34BubblemanWe have 30 minutes left, 28 minutes left in this episode. So if there's anything, Rob, you want us to cover in the last 20 or so minutes here, or if you want to check out any of the other questions that have been asked, or Really, whatever you like, man. I love the stories. I love the pictures. But I just want to give you a heads up that we have.

3:32:54BubblemanWe've done three and a half hours and people have been loving it.

3:32:59Rob ClarkThat's good. I'm amazed that people can hang in like that. That's good. Well, questions wise, why don't this is a tough one, but I'll tackle it anyway. What does Rob think will be the next hash breakthrough? And then some possibilities, extraction techniques, new genetics for hash. There you go. Consumption techniques.

3:33:26Rob ClarkAh, what does 2050 look like? Oh, I don't know. Consumption techniques. I think we've really come a long way. I don't know. I'm not missing any, anything. Extraction techniques.

3:33:45Rob ClarkI'm into concentrates, not extracts, basically. And just for clarification, extracts are concentrates, okay? But not all concentrates are extracts. Concentrates to me are, as the term implies, concentrating the active ingredient, which really means removing the stuff that you don't want. But... When it's done mechanically without solvents, that's the form of concentration that I call hashish. Okay. And it can be rosin. I mean, that's just a real modern hashish making technique, but it's not a BHO or ethanol extracts.

3:34:31Rob ClarkSo those, those are extracts. Okay. Those are chemically done. And that's where I make the separation. And some people don't, don't really follow that, but that's, that's the way I distinguish the two. So extraction techniques, concentrating techniques, Well, we've gone pretty far with that too. We can't really make it any more pure than it already is. But genetics, that's a whole, that's a big, big thing for the future.

3:35:02Rob ClarkI mean, that's the plant breeding coming in. Genetics about having plants that dry sift better or wash better, that could be part of it. Plants that just give up their resin more easily.

3:35:17Rob ClarkI know a lot of our hash, varieties came from Afghanistan and there a lot of the resins on the leaves but the rock bud we got from breeding with Afghan also is not conducive to making hashish um so maybe we could have different flower forms that were more helpful in the big process getting the resin off easier without breaking up the plant material so much but I think it's more about making it easy and and also having hashish's different uh Different flavors and different highs, especially having varieties you can make hashish from that are not the, that are more of the narrow leaf drug sort of types that are not particularly high resin yielders, but maybe there's an economic scenario where people desire them enough that they still work.

3:36:12Rob ClarkHaze hashish. Okay, well, you better come up with a haze that dumps a little more resin than the ones we have today, but... I think that would be fantastic. So I think breeding is going to come in a lot. That'll be the next hash breakthrough will be more dedicated varieties really for making hash.

3:36:32BubblemanDefinitely agree. You're on that point. We can't purify any better. We can only purify faster. That's the only last vestige of the purification of gland heads. It's like we've been doing it like it's never got, it hasn't even gotten better since we were doing it with cake mixers in the 90s.

3:36:51Rob ClarkNo, no. And there's, yeah, there's no, it hasn't been automated. And, and people have tried. But like I say, that just makes it happen faster, which could make it cheaper in the end. But yeah.

3:37:11BubblemanWe're still pulling bags.

3:37:12Rob ClarkIt's getting cheaper for other reasons.

3:37:15BubblemanEven with our Whistler technology equipment with only one person, you're still, it's not automated completely. You're operating it. You're collecting the hash. You're putting it into the freeze dryer. It's more automated than it's been in the past, but certainly not, you know, and really water hash and static sift. You know, we've had water hash in the late 90s. Then rosin came out, which was a big one.

3:37:41BubblemanBecause rosin, different than static sift and bubble hash, because those really shine the best with the best material. But if it's mediocre, the hash or the sift will look very mediocre. Whereas rosin was what you could do with those two mediocre products and then turn it into a dabbleable product. So that was a very big sort of evolution in cannabis.

3:38:06Rob ClarkBut dabs without solvents, that's where you went from extracting To concentrating without X, without solvents and without really extracting. So that to me was a big leap. It's a wide deal with the solvent thing when you can get an equal thing as far as being able to use it in dab rigs or whatever. And that's fantastic.

3:38:33SpeakerWell, there you go.

3:38:35Rob ClarkYeah.

3:38:38Rob ClarkSo yeah, other questions here?

3:38:46Rob ClarkI think we kind of answered that one.

3:38:51BubblemanRob Carroll asked if you were the artist behind the images in Marijuana Botany. Yeah.

3:38:57Rob ClarkMost of them, yeah. Not all of them. Some of them came from a British artist and four of them came from somebody in the Bay Area. But yeah, I did most of them. And they were just like, you know, I'm not a good freehand botanist, a botanical artist guy, but those are pretty much by a technique called camera lucida. It was done a long time ago. It's a, if anybody's old enough to remember back in school days, they had overhead projectors.

3:39:31Rob ClarkAnd those who weren't with the transparency, but they had opaque projectors. Remember those? You could open a book and put it underneath and it broadcasted not that bright, but you can see it on the wall. And if the room is dark enough, it worked pretty good. Well, I had a lot of photos because I used to take slides. And often I'd have a photo that wasn't such a good slide to reproduce, but I would put it on the wall.

3:39:58Rob ClarkAnd with a fairly large piece of paper, maybe two, maybe three feet high sometimes, I would pencil outline the photo, the image that's in the photo, and then sharpen it up essentially by taking the pencil drawing and then inking it. And that's how I did it. And then shrinking them down so they look pretty detailed. Shrinking them more than is recommended for shrinking botanical prints, actually. But I went ahead and did it, and it worked.

3:40:28Rob ClarkIt was kind of interesting. And I'll put some of those in the new book, too, the ones I like the best. But yeah, most of those are mine. And yeah, I wish I'd done more of it. But that's how I did it. I'm not particularly a brilliant illustrator. Anybody can do this, actually. That's a little trick I just taught you.

3:40:50Rob ClarkOne thing photos don't have is depth of field, even with modern fancy cameras and things. These young guys that have the fancy rigs, they create depth of field by moving the camera or moving the focal plane. But back in the day, you could take a generally pretty fuzzy photo, which we had a lot of, and make a sharp drawing. That was the real reason for doing it.

3:41:16SpeakerVery cool.

3:41:17BubblemanWe have... She's no longer with us, but this woman, Mary Comer Miles, she was born in 1933. She used to be my neighbor, and I didn't know this for a long time. And when I finally learned about it, because this woman was always home, and she'd always like have her little etzel set up in her beautiful little perfect forest grove garden, and she's a botanical artist. You can check it out online.

3:41:43BubblemanYeah. Mary's super plant paintings. Really awesome. But that's cool. There's even another dimension to how you created those pictures that you photographed them first and then you did the hand drawing. So that's even more like a personal connection to those photos.

3:42:02SpeakerProbably had to develop the photos yourself as well out of fear of.

3:42:09Rob ClarkI'm quite that crazy, but yeah.

3:42:11BubblemanDude, I was terrified to send photos in in the 80s and 90s anywhere. It was like a guarantee that you would get busted if you took pictures of weed and sent them in to get developed.

3:42:22Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, absolutely.

3:42:24BubblemanWhich is just a bummer.

3:42:26Rob ClarkBy that point, I'd stopped taking photos for quite a while, actually. But, yeah.

3:42:33SpeakerWow. Someone in the chat asked for a picture of me before I lost my hair.

3:42:43BubblemanThat's what you looked like when I met you. Yeah. That is exactly what you looked like when I met you, dude. That is fucking awesome. I love that. Here's one of us, Rob, from years ago. I showed this a couple weeks ago on Hash Church. This was us walking to my room at the Krasnopolsky, and we came across all that ice. And so I don't know who the third person was.

3:43:08BubblemanIt might have been Hash Bean that took that picture of you and me, Rob.

3:43:11Rob ClarkThere we go.

3:43:13BubblemanYeah, classic old photo. Another question.

3:43:17Rob ClarkSomebody wanted to have the man in the Indian's cap with Charis on his hands. That's Charis on his hands, yeah. No, it's not Sandy Weinstein, though. Sorry. No, that's a guy named Jimbo.

3:43:33Rob ClarkOh, yeah, Jimbo.

3:43:34Archive SeedsClassic.

3:43:46BubblemanWell, what a wonderful, wonderful episode today. I'm looking forward to... Seeing how well received this one will be. We had a lot of people watching for the last four hours and shout out to all of you who are in the chat room right now. Organic Farming, OG Brick, Bingo Lombardi for holding it down. Thank you to the Press Club and Puffco for their support as always.

3:44:06SpeakerRob, I got to tell you, we all love you very much, man. You make a huge impact on all of our lives and the community and you just, you're one of the people that like, everybody just loves you.

3:44:20Rob ClarkWell, wow, thanks.

3:44:23SpeakerYou're an important person in our community, not only in the world.

3:44:26Rob ClarkOh, we didn't get the Pollyanna story. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm just going down this list here. Some good questions here. I couldn't get to everything. But, yeah, the Pollyanna story. Pollyanna was grown in 1978.

3:44:46Rob Clark77, there was a plant called Polly that was Colombian, as I remember, and it was a creeper. There's a drawing from it in the book, not particularly stunning drawing, but it was one of these plants that just came out and had a long main stalk and it just came out with branches and immediately went down and all the way to the ground, then turned up. So all the branches were up like four feet or more, all came all the way down to the ground.

3:45:14Rob ClarkAnd, uh,

3:45:18Rob ClarkAn offspring from that, I don't know what the parent would have been. There was an accidental seed in this person's garden, but it was an upright form, very upright. And that's what Pollyanna was, actually. And seeds from that were also some random pollination, but then it went from there as an inline breed with half-sibling crosses and became... Pauliana, which wasn't really ever a stabilized thing, but it went on to be part of other things.

3:45:50Rob ClarkLike Early Pearl, that's where it really moved on.

3:45:53SpeakerEarly Pearl, that's right. Early Girl and Early Pearl. That was your work, wasn't it, Pauliana?

3:45:58Rob ClarkEarly Pearl was Early Girl with somebody else's. It was named after the tomato, actually. Okay. Yeah, I crossed it with Pauliana and made... Early Pearl, which went to Neville and he sold it to people and I hardly ever saw it again. Somebody mentioned it the other day to me. Where was it? It was just in the last couple of months and I was surprised to hear anybody still had one.

3:46:23Rob ClarkBut when I got to New Zealand years and years ago, that was the thing that was early enough. And that's a lot of the bush growers had grown it. And then suddenly there's this return of Early Pearl in my life years later. And there I am seeing it again.

3:46:37SpeakerWell, didn't Early Pearl got used by Cincy in quite a few things that got used?

3:46:42Rob ClarkIt did. It did. It was part of some of those processes. It was Early Pearl. Silver Pearl, that was one.

3:46:48SpeakerAbsolutely.

3:46:50Rob ClarkYep, absolutely. And it was, yeah, that was back in the day when people didn't really cover up what they were doing so much. It was like, the names were still not that innovative a lot of times, but they're, the name would be a hybrid name for the hybrid cross that was made. It's kind of cute.

3:47:12SpeakerSomeone here is smoking a 20 year old silver pearl clone right now. Buckshot Hill.

3:47:19Rob ClarkOf course he is.

3:47:21Archive SeedsThat was when stuff was actually exotic. I mean, you were, you were talking about an exotic country where it came from and what a hybrid of it was before we started really branding weed. It was place of origin.

3:47:34Rob ClarkYeah, for sure. And all those like the stuff I did, the What's in a name that I wrote that came out in 2000, I guess, in Jason King's first Cano Bible. And all that information comes from published seed catalogs, all of them pretty much that were available. And people just said what it was. It was a... South African Kyber Pass Cross that's they sold. That's because it had a South African Kyber Pass parents and went on like that for a long time.

3:48:09Rob ClarkIt got a little complicated there before things listed in a variety name sometimes. But I mean, when Skunk came around, for instance, it had a name besides Afghan hybrid something or other than. Yeah, maybe that's sort of what started a lot of the branding was. It wasn't just the name of where it came from.

3:48:32Archive SeedsYeah, because all the catalogs were like M39 and just letters and numbers kind of for the catalog name. And then all the early Neville stuff was usually, you know, like you're saying, place of origin hybrids.

3:48:48Rob ClarkSSSC was too. Not all, but... If they gave it a number or something, they still said what was in it underneath.

3:48:54Archive SeedsYeah, yeah, exactly. And some things got names and some things didn't, but it wasn't commonplace yet, even by that point.

3:49:02Rob ClarkAnd even if it went by a name, it probably was the same name from somebody else instead of names being changed to protect the guilty, but...

3:49:12SpeakerOrganic Farming says, I remember coming across his book Marijuana Botany in 8990 in my elementary school library. Right on. Good librarian. Right? He was in kindergarten, first grade.

3:49:31Archive SeedsWhen I was, when I was 15, before I even started smoking weed, I would go to Barnes and Noble and go like read the weed books, marijuana botany being one of them. Just like reading it. Cause I'm like, well, you know, there was only so much information. This is like 2000 probably. There's only so much information you could get on the internet. And really, you know, books were still a much more condensed place to learn.

3:49:59Archive SeedsAnd that was, you know, yeah. I mean, this book, I think I bought this when I was like 17, probably.

3:50:06BubblemanThere you go. First edition, baby.

3:50:13Rob ClarkThe pages didn't fall out yet. Amazing.

3:50:17Archive SeedsNo, all my pages kept it.

3:50:20Rob ClarkYes. The color section fell out in some of those first printings. It slid right out. Glue didn't work.

3:50:28Archive SeedsThat's the Bible right here. You can't disgrace it. No. Packed Bible.

3:50:35BubblemanIt's awesome. Oh, yeah. That's right.

3:50:41SpeakerYeah, well, Rob, you wrote the Bible, you did a lot, but you also, you validated our industry in a way that I don't think anyone else has. And I've seen that so many times, and it can't be understated how many times you're cited in people's books and research. And on the research side, but on our side, on the community side and on the stoner and the smoker side, you really did create this kind of higher echelon of cannabis enthusiasts that we all kind of followed.

3:51:18SpeakerAnd in the 70s and 80s and the 90s, there wasn't a person to model after for a lot of people. You were just a stoner or a grower. And I'll just part with this because It you like I remember we were on this call and we were talking to the um the import um office for New Zealand right in the quarantine importation office right and we're trying to figure out what guidelines they used for importing cannabis and what their phytosanitary certification requirements and then and they they didn't even know who you were on the call but then they just they cited Cannabis, they cited Pest and Disease as the book that they use, right?

3:52:05SpeakerAnd they used, they said, where do you get this list of known virus, viroids, and blah, blah, blah. And at that moment, I realized it's like, you've not only, you transitioned us all through it, but now on the other side, The straight side, the new side, they've used your body of work and publications as validation for what this plant is. And just for that, much respect. Right on, right on.

3:52:35SpeakerYeah, like I said before, you showed, I mean, you showed me that we could use science to chase down this plant and learn about it. And I know that's not, Something unique that you gave me. Your books gave that perspective to a lot of people. The trickle down from your work is quite deep.

3:52:57BubblemanDude, one of the first things you ever said to me, if it don't bubble, it ain't worth the trouble, was literally how Dave Watson reached out to me.

3:53:07SpeakerYeah, yeah, yeah. Someone says, thank you for not going into Barry's.

3:53:19Rob ClarkThat's interesting. Who was that?

3:53:22BubblemanBrowsing to learn. Browsing to learn. He said that.

3:53:28Rob ClarkIt's interesting. When I got out of university in Santa Cruz, I looked for work. I did work in the agriculture industry for a while. I worked in a houseplant industry. And when I was on the job search, I looked at... Rod McClellan, Rod McClellan, Orchids, you know, some of the companies that have done pretty well since. And the only real solid offer I got was from Driscoll's Strawberries.

3:53:56Rob ClarkAnd Driscoll's now is known for strawberries, of course, still, but mostly bushberries I get into. And I turned this job down because it was going to be a... Work with Ma and Pa Driscoll kind of thing. It was a little going to be too close. It was going to be like being part of the family. And yeah, I mean, I might be doing very well these days that I'd done such a thing, but I wouldn't have had any time to work with cannabis.

3:54:20Rob ClarkThat's for sure. So I didn't do that, but they went on to be monsters. They're not just Watsonville growers anymore. I see Driscoll berries in every grocery store I ever go into, even in Asia.

3:54:33Bubbleman10 billion plantlets annually, Rob, from their tissue culture plant.

3:54:37Rob Clark10 billion with a B. Un-fucking-believable. And that started with a company that just figured out how to harden off strawberries and keep them through the year and then put them out in the fields. That was basically their starting thing ages ago.

3:54:57BubblemanUnreal.

3:54:58Rob ClarkSo yeah, I didn't go into berries, thank God.

3:55:05SpeakerWe might have psychoactive berries by that point in time.

3:55:09Rob ClarkWhoa. Yeah. Sure. Like eating berries. Yeah. Yeah.

3:55:14SpeakerIf it had been blueberries, it might have been different, Rob. I'd say if they'd been digging berries, then you might've got you.

3:55:26Rob ClarkBest blueberries I ever ate, I think, were in Santa Cruz, grown by weed growers, so.

3:55:36Archive SeedsWell, that watermelon was the best watermelon, so.

3:55:41SpeakerYeah.

3:55:43Rob ClarkYeah.

3:55:45Archive SeedsMaybe the cannabis plant has a symbiotic root relationship with sweeter fruit.

3:55:52Rob ClarkMaybe just a good drip system. Yeah.

3:55:55Archive SeedsIt might be that too. Enough water and fertilizer.

3:55:59BubblemanThere you go. So Rob's message to the audience is pay attention to the science. Let the science teach you the truth.

3:56:09Rob ClarkYeah, ask questions and look to science for the answers.

3:56:14Archive SeedsWell, and reproducible results, I think, is what you said earlier.

3:56:20Rob ClarkYeah, that's what science gives you. Something you can believe in. And scientists are humans and science evolves just like everything else. So scientists change their minds. Just, you know, that's, that's allowed. That's part of the game. I certainly changed my mind over the years, but it's part of the progress. So yeah, I think looking for, looking to science for answers is a good thing. It's just a good start about anything in life, but yeah.

3:56:52BubblemanAnd they can see and find the new book on Amazon, the new edition, I'm guessing third edition, this is with the La Paz cover.

3:57:00Rob ClarkYeah, yeah, La Paz is sponsored. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, it's just a facsimile edition. There's nothing added. There's nothing special. It's just so people don't have to fight over them on eBay.

3:57:14BubblemanYeah, it makes it available. That's enough, right? Obviously people want to have access to the book and got hard copies available.

3:57:21Rob ClarkIt's been out for a while. I think so far there's been 11 copies sold or something.

3:57:26BubblemanOh, we're going to change that.

3:57:28Rob ClarkYeah, now people know about it.

3:57:32BubblemanWell, we'll let people know for sure that this is available and really want to thank you for spending so much time with us today, Rob. Four hours, super stoked from a beautiful farm in Holland. It looks great behind you. It's been just picturesque the whole time. And thanks to Mojave and Fletch and Ryan for coming in and organizing this panel with Rob. You know, it's a little different than how we normally do Hash Church, but how we normally do Hash Church is very much like a zing, zoom, zang.

3:58:05BubblemanAnd Rob was kind of like, hey, let's just focus it a little bit more instead of all the left field stuff. And I was in full agreement. I think it was a great show. You laid out some really good information, Rob, with some good citations, books and whatnot that I was, you know, quickly able to share. Giddich Ranch, Pie Shop, Deli Side. Look at that. There's the boys right there.

3:58:29BubblemanIt's a recent trip.

3:58:31Rob ClarkWell, thank you guys too. I mean, you came up with good questions, people from the audience too. And thank you for your time and effort. And I'll try to weigh in more on... Some of your future shows.

3:58:46BubblemanYeah, you're always welcome for sure.

3:58:48Rob ClarkGet on this next go around. Sounds good.

3:58:51BubblemanAbsolutely.

3:58:51Rob ClarkAll right, you guys.

3:58:53BubblemanMuch love, Rob.

3:58:54Rob ClarkMuch love. Super good. Thank you.

3:58:57BubblemanThanks, everybody. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks to our sponsors, Puffco and Bubble Bags and the Press Club. Thanks for everyone for watching. And thank you guys. Really, Ryan, Mojave. Fletch, thank you for making this a great episode. What a great episode, dude. Rob, we could do 10 parts of it, I know. It opened me up. I'm going to watch this episode and I'm going to realize what we missed.

3:59:23BubblemanI'm going to make notes on all the things we missed that I still want him to talk about because it's important to get that information out there to the world. All right, everybody. We'll see you next Sunday. Have a great week. Peace out. Oh! As always, may the full melt bubble bless your bowl sooner than later.