Aromatic Volatiles Deep Dive

0:07BubblemanAll right, well, let's see how we're doing here. Going live. Let's see how we got.

0:17SpeakerYouTube going on. Here we go. Here she comes. All right, so. It's got to be recording on here somewhere.

0:31BubblemanI always miss this.

0:39BubblemanAll right, looks like she's finally going.

1:02BubblemanAll right, I think we're about live here. Just waiting for myself to show up on YouTube. And there I am. Beautiful. Welcome, everyone, to Hash Church Season 11, Episode 26, the aromatic volatile episode. Not going to lie, pretty excited about this episode. It's been three to four months in the planning. As you can see, I'm not in my regular place at home. I'm actually in Manitoba right now in Lactobani at a friend's house.

1:29BubblemanThank you, Nathan. and uh yeah my son's out on the river in the winnipeg river doing some fishing and a tournament a walleye tournament with my uncle so they're having a great time and i managed to squeeze off this four hours to do this volatile organic compound episode today so as always how i want to start is by shouting out our sponsors because without them Well, without them, we would have no sponsors.

1:58BubblemanLet me just check it out here real quick. There should be a share button in here, shouldn't there? It's unbelievable how, there we go. My share button had disappeared. So we're going to start off with our good friends at the Press Club.

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3:11BubblemanThey go by the name The Press Club and they'll be in there for sure. I also wanted to shout out Puffco for powering Hashchurch. Puffco's game-changing devices like the Sleek Peak Pro, the Versatile Proxy, and the Compact Pivot, all of which I have here today with me, and I'll be smoking during the show, bring unmatched style and performance, making extracts a vibe for everyone. Their passion for cannabis culture keeps our community blazing strong.

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4:09BubblemanElevate your extraction game at www.bubblebag.com and use the code hashchurch10 for exclusive savings. So there we go. Got that out of the way. Let me see. I probably have some folks waiting in the room here. So let's get them admitted into the room and see how we're doing here.

4:30SpeakerAh, Jeremy.

4:34BubblemanJeremy's in the house. Nice to see his smiling face. Always enjoy my conversations with Jeremy. And I see Ian is also in the house from Abstracts. How you doing, guys? How you doing, Ian?

4:48SpeakerHey, Marcus. Great to meet you finally. Yeah. My audio sound all right? Your audio sounds perfect. Awesome.

4:54BubblemanHow about you, Jeremy? Let's hear how yours sounds.

4:57SpeakerHey, Marcus. Hey, Ian. How are you guys doing?

4:59BubblemanGreat. Doing good, brother. Doing good.

5:02SpeakerGood to see you. It's been a while.

5:04BubblemanIt has been a while. Time goes by, doesn't it?

5:08SpeakerIt does. Long enough for Mr. Ziegler to grow a pretty impressive beard.

5:12BubblemanThat is impressive.

5:13SpeakerDamn. I wish I could smell what you've just shared.

5:17BubblemanIt's strawberry lemonade and it smells exactly like lemonade. It's tripping me out.

5:22SpeakerDelightful.

5:26BubblemanYes.

5:26SpeakerNice to see you, Nick. Likewise. See everybody. How was Columbia, Jeremy? I'm in love. You know, I've lived there most of the last year. I just moved out of the Hawaii house entirely. I am no longer there. And at almost 50 years old, I actually literally don't have a home. I'm going between regions. It's a strange but exciting frontier. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Where in Columbia are you?

5:54SpeakerPrimarily going between Santa Marta and Medellin, but I think one of the great delights about Colombia is the 45-minute flight. You're in the capital. I'm on a 45-minute drive from Santa Marta and I'm in Tirona and this like primordial wonderland. Rarely Cartagena. Cali is incredible. I just, you know, it's an amazing country. Hey, Marco. You grew up in Cali? What? Oh my gosh. Oh, that's amazing. I love it there.

6:25SpeakerIt's an incredible place. Nice. Mark.

6:28BubblemanThat's where Maren Barrow sits. Hey, Jeremy.

6:31Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat's going on, buddy? How are you?

6:32BubblemanWelcome, Dr. Mark. Happy to see you. Hey, Marcus.

6:36Dr Mark ScialdoneIan, Nick, how you doing? Well, we got a lot of brains in the room today. Uh-oh.

6:42BubblemanLet's squeeze it out. We're going to squeeze out the juice today.

6:45Dr Mark ScialdoneThings might boil over.

6:50Dr Mark ScialdoneOh gosh, this is great. Thank you, Marcus. This is awesome to be able to talk about this topic here on Hash Church.

7:00BubblemanAbsolutely. Well, it's been a long one in the making, you know, kind of really sort of inspired by Nick originally coming on to the show and kind of breaking down some of the things they were doing over at Yakima with the aromatic volatiles. And I mean, for me, that was the first time I'd heard thiols and thiolates and, you know, a lot of these sort of names.

7:20BubblemanIt really was kind of, to me, and I could completely be wrong, it was really a turning point in the conversation where Terps just wasn't covering Thank you so much for joining us.

7:57Dr Mark ScialdoneUh seem to not follow that rule uh whatsoever that they were well we're here we're here to say that there's a connection you know there's a connection in the biochemistry And the biochemical origin, you know, mother nature's Adam economy is such that, you know, sulfur is a highly sought after element in, in biochemistry and biology in general. So it's, it's thought of again that there's a transfer of sulfur from an amino acid called cysteine.

8:30Dr Mark ScialdoneThrough a reaction, so is a, a very common post translational modification of proteins. Right? So proteins are made in and around the ribosome. Right? Well, the central paradigm of biology, right? Messenger RNA goes to ribosome makes protein and then after the proteins are made, some of the functional groups and proteins are modified chemically. A very common modification is the post-translational modification of cysteine through a terpenylation reaction to make Prenol Cysteine, which, yeah, Ian, since we last talked about biosynthesis, I found this article that talked about this.

9:17Dr Mark ScialdoneI should almost share my screen. Maybe, maybe I will in a little bit. It talked about a, a lyase enzyme that takes that prenal cysteine and decarboxylates and loses the ammonia group. And you end up with a pri, priothenol or a, a, Pre-enolated thiol. Could I share my screen, Marcus? Is that possible? Yeah, absolutely not.

9:42BubblemanNo, no, we're not doing that. No sharing screen.

9:46Dr Mark ScialdoneAll right, I'm sending it. I gotta send a request to do that.

9:50SpeakerAnd Mark, I gotta preface you. We have all the data now on all this stuff.

9:57Dr Mark ScialdoneOh, so you see, you already figured it out.

10:00SpeakerGive me a few months. Yeah, you already figured it all out.

10:04Dr Mark ScialdoneSo can you see my screen?

10:07BubblemanNot yet, but I did give you permission to share it. You should be able to push that share button. Okay, let me try now. Okay.

10:15Dr Mark ScialdoneSo when I saw this, Ian, I got really excited because I had not seen this before. And this was just a... Oh, yeah.

10:27SpeakerThe beta lyase. Yep. That's what I figured. I'm sure Nick, that's the one Nick's familiar with too from the hop chemistry.

10:33Dr Mark ScialdoneRight. And so it's super interesting because I also, I pull up this review too. I don't know. Can you see that review that I have there?

10:43Collin PalmerYeah.

10:43Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, this is just a great review. I mean, this was written in 2008, and it goes through most of the types of compounds. I mean, again, it falls short of identifying some of the compounds that you guys have identified. But isn't it true, though, that these are all basically prenatal precursors that could come very well from the transfer through this prenatal reaction through this amino acid cysteine?

11:13SpeakerYeah, so and this actually, I can't say too much because again, we're literally collecting the last bit of data for this paper. The story is a little bit more complex than that, but in a cool way. But basically, there's multiple types of precursors that we found. And so the story is even richer than just what you just explained, Mark. And like I said, in a few months, hopefully we have this out once we finalize some of our LC data collection.

11:43Dr Mark ScialdoneThat's so cool. I mean, again, it's like, this is to me, like the real cutting edge of like, you know, where, where these two things kind of come together. The other thing that I thought I always think about when I think of this is like with sulfur anyway. So where does the sulfur in cysteine comes from? It comes from homocysteine. Well, Where does the sulfur and homocysteine come from?

12:07Dr Mark ScialdoneIt comes from methionine. Where does it come from in methionine? It comes from H2S, right? And so there it can come back to the primordial soup, right? Because when you have sulfate reducers, You know, sulfate reduced, so like when you go down to the ocean and it sometimes smell sulfury down there, what you're smelling sometimes is H2S that's made as a byproduct of sulfate reducing bacteria, which seems to thrive in brackish and saltwater kind of environments.

12:36Dr Mark ScialdoneSo that's sometimes that smell that you smell down in, you know, dried up lagoons and stuff like that that will really smell bad. It's because you have sulfate reducers in there. And so, yeah, so that sulfur, again, you know, the atom economy is there. I mean, it's got to come from somewhere. So it comes from rotten eggs, which is H2S, which comes from sulfate-reducing bacteria.

13:00SpeakerAnd so I'll just mention, guys, you know, I put together a bunch of... Vignettes that we've kind of looked at research-wise over the years. And some of that's related to, you know, the source of sulfur. So we've done some nutrient studies I've alluded to in the past, Mark, we might've talked about, but I have that data actually to show because we're not going to really do much with it because it was just kind of a one-off.

13:22SpeakerSo if you guys want, you know, I can blow through that. But I just want to mention actually, Nick, or sorry, Mark, you just mentioned the beta lyase. You know, that's a well-known and well-described enzyme in yeast. And it's actually in hops as well, I believe. It's encoded by the IRC7 gene.

13:41Dr Mark ScialdoneSo they know genetically- Yeah, this was mammalian. I think this is- Okay. I think from a bovine brain. Gotcha. I think-

13:47SpeakerSo I know that people have done work, and Nick, you can definitely chime in because I know you work at Yakima Chiefs, so you probably know this up and down. But they've engineered yeast to overexpress this beta lyase enzyme so that you have this thiolized yeast that if you have more of the precursor molecules, so these cysteine-bound 3-mercaptohexyl blah, blah, blah, it can release more of them into your beer and make it have more of those tropical newts.

14:15SpeakerWhat I haven't seen, though, is specifically this conjugate, the parental cysteine conjugate. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because a while back when we were hypothesizing the biosynthetic origins of these compounds, these VSCs that we found, we were interested in, well, there has to be some sort of genetic underlying reason there, especially because we see certain varieties have higher amounts than others. And so, you know, we went and blasted.

14:44SpeakerSo, you know, just go into, you know, the government website where you can take a genome and you can blast a sequence against it. And there were some homologs for that lice in the cannabis genomes that were provided. So, yeah, I mean, I think that not only are the precursors there that you need, but also the machinery is probably in there as well. And so you guys, I'm sure, Jeremy, you had just seen the paper, the pan genome paper that I'll be honest, I'm not a geneticist, so it's way over my head.

15:12SpeakerI mean, that nature paper was just an absolute beast. But, you know, that data dump would be such a great place to mine for differences to try to like identify like if that liase is uh you know produced in higher amounts in certain varieties over others so yeah like everything is converging right now we know the chemistry we have great inkling on kind of the uh the genetic mechanisms now we just got to put it all together and so that's kind of hopefully what we'll be doing in the next you know year well the sulfur had to come from somewhere right Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

15:44SpeakerOne of the things that we have noticed, and especially on the thyalized yeast angle, most, the vast majority of the precursors actually come from the malt. Oh, okay, yeah. That's where all the amino acids are. And so a lot of that, and then there's a lot of the other sulfur-containing compounds that are in there, uptaken by the grain plant. Aaron Weiler, M.D. : During growth, and I mean you can look at the if you want to talk about sort of root sources not going back to like you know hydrogen and iron but like looking at magnesium sulfate calcium sulfate.

16:17SpeakerAaron Weiler, M.D. : Like gypsum is a lot of those things that are that are put on the seat on the fields, just forget for calcium, but also primarily but also for for that sulfate. Aaron Weiler, M.D. : And that sulfate is then used by those bacteria soil bacteria. Jason Eckert, And as liberated as h2s or it's taking it can be taken up by the plant once it's converted so that's that's sort of a good source on the on the source of those those those nutrients and the sort of origin of the sulfur that's added.

16:41SpeakerYou can see some really interesting things by looking at the different precursors and the compounds that come out at the other end of these reactions. So for example, methionine and cysteine will deliver different aromatic, they'll be preferentially going one way or another. And so I don't remember which one it is, but one of them is much more likely to result in thioates versus just straight thiols. And I don't remember which one it is.

17:05SpeakerOkay. And that's, that's, those are the garlic stinky, sometimes dank. Those are aromatics. So it's really cool when they start interacting with terpenes and other aromatic compounds and the pernilation reactions get even more complicated and you get things like terpene thiol, sorry, terpene thiol, which is obviously the very shortened name of it, which is one of the more crucial elements in a ruby red grapefruit aroma and flavor.

17:27SpeakerSo that's pretty cool to look, to play with that. Yeah. And I mean, then there's like what grapefruit, grapefruit mercaptan, right? Which has like, that's the trifling tile. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It has such a low odor threshold. It's crazy. And as soon as you get above it, it's nasty, you know? Yeah. It's like burning diesel and rubber and yeah, it's true. Same thing with 3MH or 3-mercaptahexanol at levels of just, you know, tiny volumes.

17:52SpeakerI remember I was working with someone and we got some new standards and our aromatic chemist came out I don't know who came out with a single drop on a pin. He's like, it's supposed to smell like this and walk through the lab. We had to leave the building for like a four hour lunch because it was so strong. Yeah. Yeah. You got to do that in the hood.

18:11SpeakerThat's for sure. You'll stink out the building for a week. It's awful. But at low levels, it's delicious. It's passion fruit. So, right. Yeah. And it's fascinating because it does seem like at least in cannabis and, you know, I'd say hops as well. Yeah. It seems to make these compounds in the right amounts where they're not beyond that sort of they're still pleasant. You know, I've never really smelt a cannabis plant that if you smell Prenom or Captain or Prenalthiol like in high concentration, it's pure rubber.

18:40SpeakerYou know, it's just that kind of gross sulfuric note that it kind of becomes. But, you know, I've never really seen levels, you know, throughout all our runs that really reach those kind of levels that we've, you know, when we kind of calibrate our noses in the lab to, okay, this PPM, it's still good, it's skunky, it's gassy, gassy, okay, now it's kind of burnt. Right. And so like there are these kind of thresholds or plateaus where things it really starts to change to the human nose, which, by the way, I just got to mention, I have a few slides on how humans detect sulfur compounds that I can share that is, I think, super fascinating.

19:13SpeakerAnd I'd love to share that, you know, when we can. Great. Actually, this is perfect because you just started mentioning thresholds and all that stuff. And I have some, I wanted to talk about this a little bit and look at it instead of from the plant side, let's look at it from the people side, because this is something that is not always discussed as much. And people sort of tend to assume a lot of things rather than then look at kind of what's established because it is, you know, laborious.

19:38SpeakerIs that, is my coding okay to go to a little bit of linguistics and philosophy here and neuro sort of neuro? Go for it. I'm fine with it. So we all smell things unless we are unfortunate enough to have anosmia, the inability to smell. But we also all have thresholds and sensitivities and blindnesses. So there are some compounds that people can be very, very sensitive to at very low levels.

20:03SpeakerFor example, I'm going to use a beer example. I am sensitive to diacetyl at an extremely low level, like well below threshold. And I have people who are completely blind to it, and they don't detect it at all. And just like you said, in terms of intensity, Adam Wendel, Dean of the School of Biomedical Engineering, Dean of the School of Biomedical Engineering, Dean of the School of Biomedical Engineering, Dean of the School of Biomedical Engineering, and Dean of the School of Biomedical Engineering.

20:40SpeakerAnd so looking at that and trying to understand and making sure that people are reporting things consistently and we agree and sort of we agree to call things by certain terms is really key to a good sensory exploration. So this is because we have different personal individual levels. But we also have a way of conceiving of these aromas. And it really has to do with language. There's all these linguistic theories about the signifier versus the signified meaning and the philosophical theories where the word for something conveys the meaning of what that item or that entity is.

21:24SpeakerBut everybody's experience of that entity is going to be particularly individual. And this becomes even more sort of important when you start to consider regional differences or cultural differences to say nothing of linguistic differences. And that's obviously informed by the experience that we have growing up and among the people that we surround ourselves with, what aromatics we're exposed to, what smells and flavors and stuff we're exposed to.

21:51SpeakerAnd the terms we use to describe those. And so when we're talking about this, it can get very, very complicated. Like I can say, for example, this is what I love, is that we look at things like, let's use some cannabis descriptors, okay? Grapefruit, you know, a lot of people in the world have experienced grapefruit. That's fine. It's, you know, it's a citrus fruit that can be fairly easily spread around the world.

22:12SpeakerBut when you get to something like, say, wedding cake, Nick Wiggins, CFO Alphabet and Google

22:37SpeakerBecause they probably will never have had it. Also, what kind of cereal? Cocoa Pops? Fruity Pebbles? Cheerios? You know, what is it? And so when we start talking about these terms, one of the things that I always thought was really important was to try to break it down into constituent elements. If you're working in a lab and you're working with a team that has all that stuff, you can actually use the chemical names for things, or at least shorthands, because some of them are very long.

23:03SpeakerBut that's not really good for the layperson. But if you think about, okay, let's break down a variety's characteristic aromatics. So let's say this has really strong notes of blueberry muffins. Okay, but what are the notes that go into blueberry muffin? Obviously there's blueberry, right? Which is, you know, it's going to be hard to break that down unless you start getting into compounds. But then there's also probably going to be some toffee notes, some bready notes, some vanilla or something like that.

23:27SpeakerAnd so you want to start using terms that are as sort of, All right. Thank you so much for joining us today.

23:52SpeakerSo that's sort of one of the things that I like to see is that I've seen this to some extent more and more lately, but is people using descriptors that are a little bit more precise rather than sort of this all encompassing thing. The problem is then that people don't normally have an experience of reconstructing a blueberry muffin in their mind from first compounds. So it can be very useful if you're sort of like into it and you're really focusing all these things.

24:29SpeakerBut as a consumer, you know, it's easier to say blueberry muffin. But when we're talking about on our side, on producer sides or on analytical sides, if we use those, those, So those key descriptors were able to sort of build an aroma profile, which could be really useful. And when you said earlier, Ian, about hops and cannabis not having those extreme amounts of it, I have had ones that ended up real nasty.

24:58SpeakerAnd that's usually because they were let hang for way too long. They were picked very, very late. And you do start getting that burnt rubber note towards the end of maturation. Yeah, I've heard about that, Nick. And so Tom Nielsen works with us now at Abstracts. And he's mentioned this, that especially with hops, there's this very, with many varieties, like this very narrow window, right? That's what you're referring to where if you don't harvest right then and there, if you're past, it goes from grapefruit, citrus, whatever you want, blackcurrant to literally, you know, savory sort of notes, you know, kind of that burnt sort of smell.

25:32SpeakerThat's what you're referring to. Yeah, absolutely. And we saw the same thing in cannabis is that there are similar or at least analogous harvest windows. You will see the development of the much lighter and less easy to detect or very simple to detect in the beginning. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

26:15SpeakerAnd to separate out these very volatile compounds is a challenge at best, especially on any sort of commercial scale.

26:24Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat's known about the esters and the aldehydes? Are those known?

26:27SpeakerWell, Nick, you know, that makes perfect sense to me what you just said too. We were just doing some data collection for some folks and we were monitoring through flower, you know, kind of how the volatiles were changing. And it's funny how the aroma literally, it's like cannabis to at least the few times that I've done these sort of experiments, they start out much more sweet so you know exactly what you just said makes sense to me the esters the aldehydes coming in first and then you get this exponential kind of ramp and i have data on that showing these vscs just exploding at the end of end of maturation like you're saying so uh and you know that's where that gas comes in super super loud um but yeah damn I should go back and plot the esters as a different curve.

27:10SpeakerI bet you would see this onset and then, you know, the thiol, well, the thiol, you know, the level is going to be completely different. We'd have to normalize them. But, you know, I bet you would see these different onset time periods. That's really interesting. Damn. What are they?

27:22Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat are they?

27:23SpeakerOh, my God. Ethylhexanolate, ethyl acetate, isomel acetate is banana. I think it's kind of an anise-y green or red apple flavor, red apple skin, kind of red delicious aroma. Just acetate gets a little bit more solvent-y and you get ethyl lactate is kind of pineapple and strawberry. You get all these different esters and those are all related to, so those are all esters of acids, of organic acids.

27:45SpeakerAnd so those acids, the presence of those are the requisite precursor for a lot of these esters. And these are in beer, for example. And so like all the ethyl ones, they have to have, there's an ethylene or an ethyl pathway in there and they need to have that substance to react. Yeah. You mentioned about the plotting and sort of normalizing the data, Ian. Something that's really, I've found very useful is to include a relative intensity chart.

28:14SpeakerAnd so you start to develop kind of what your thresholds are or what the, like, you know, this is when nobody detects it. This is when sensitive people detect it. This is when, Jason Gildea, CFO Alphabet and Google.com.

28:42Collin PalmerYou know, guys, I also see this as you refine hash into oils, you start to see a very similar dichotomy here where it's almost the evolution of changing forms and refining it is also... It's the, there's, there's chemical reactions happening. And as a result, you're seeing completely different profiles, not, not totally completely different profiles, but very broad strokes away from where it was, you know, it's, it's perhaps in, for instance, blueberry, this blueberry banana I have here, when it was fresh pressed, it was much sharper.

29:18Collin PalmerAnd then when it was cured, it was much more banana OG, right? It had this banana file, Thank you so much for joining us today.

29:48Collin PalmerYou know, a fresh press and the value that they have in taking that if they're a patient, you know, because you're getting different chemical constituents, you know, so, you know, they're fundamentally different types of medicine. Absolutely.

30:03SpeakerAnd I think that's exactly what should be done. The key is to really sort of Make it accessible and make it something that is, um, that also reflects what's actually going on. Um, I think Jeremy's paper on, uh, how the nose knows is, is really instrumental in that. That's, this is how people shop now, ideally. Um, I mean, this is people we're talking about. Um, but, uh, there are, hang on, you said you answered something earlier.

30:26SpeakerOh yeah. Uh, the, so a couple of things though, is that when you're, um, processing it into like sort of the oils, um, you're really dehydrating it. You're, you're, you're deriving out of all the water as you can. And a lot of those esters are very water soluble. So if you actually collect, if you've ever tried to condense the moisture that comes off of a drying cannabis plant, you will end up with some really interesting aromatics.

30:46SpeakerSo we did this and I ended up with just this, it smelled like lilacs. It was incredible. All the water did, but I couldn't concentrate it because it was all so volatile. So I was a little, You know, I was like, ah, damn it. I want to concentrate this, but I can't do it in a way that's going to make it stable. But then you also have the issues that, you know, the very lighter ones are going to be driven off and drive off over time.

31:09SpeakerSo one thing that I would suggest is that, you know, if you're trying to really capture those very early aromatics, you know, try to figure out a much smaller serving size so that they're not opening and closing the vial all the time, because then they're going to be driving off of that aroma. So a much, much smaller serving Brad Harkness, CFO Alphabet and Google I mean, if you can't even do a single use, that would be probably ideal if you can package it properly.

31:29SpeakerBut that's going to be kind of wasteful. But other ways of doing that. I think it's really good. It could be a really useful approach. I wonder, Nick, I loved when you were beginning to wax philosophic. And if I could actually go back to an earlier part of what you said, and if I could just take up a little bit of space to do some contextualization, I've been really having my mind bent in three different Sansomic collaborations through my consultancy recently.

31:54SpeakerI apologize. My voice is a little fucked. I've just gone through a 12-hour time change. But there's this really exciting frontier, obviously, in the metabolomics. And Ian, it's just been so wonderful to see all of the incredible work that you and the team have been doing. Always, I learn things from Mark, everything that you've shared over the years from a chemistry perspective. And Nick, of course, the great privilege of binding you after Rob and Mojave were like, look, go find the hops people.

32:21SpeakerThat's what matters. And really having my mind blown. These are things I obsess on. I really love metabolomics and chemistry. But in this insomic space, I'm actually far more weighted on the sensory side right now because what I believe is most relevant It's contextualizing this whole dialogue. Like, okay, Marcus, this is a big show. Like, these are some incredibly intelligent folks. This is a really important subject.

32:46SpeakerYou've said this many times that the volatiles are a sort of vanguard of thought right now. But I want to suggest that it's like a revolution in what can happen between people and cannabis. That right now the industry is actually fucked in a variety of ways. And specifically, I want to talk about how consumers relate with the products from the perspective of Indica Sativa Hybrid, wholesale prices, and I'm specifically talking about flower market globally, still correlating with THC potency above aroma character, Systematic misinformation with regard to brands for strains, which do not capture meaningful sensory descriptions most of the time.

33:30SpeakerCereal milk could be an exception, but like in general, they really don't correlate. And then the average consumer, as I'm right now in Europe watching this kind of like global enterprise be expanded from our California ideas basically, and really in an outsized way taking some of the worst ideas and doubling down, the average consumer walks in and has like an interaction with a pharmacist or a medical scene here, and they're hearing this heap of bullshit and lies.

33:58SpeakerAnd then they're navigating this huge diversity of products And they're absolutely dumbfounded and they're not finding experiences that necessarily are what they like and resonate with, are also not finding the therapeutic and the wellness edges as a result. And I just want to suggest that as we progress this conversation, what's really at stake is disrupting all of this outmoded kind of prohibition era framing from a consumer perspective.

34:25SpeakerAnd that getting volatiles right and getting sensory specifically right Is a great threat to the old guard. There is not a more efficient path that I can find after more than 30 years working my ass off in this space to try to build a mass movement for consumer education where we get something like what Yakima Chief or what others in mature lateral industries have had for a long time.

34:50SpeakerYou get some kind of categories. And I've always thought of this as aroma types. You know that there is some kind of segmentation between the incredible amount of diversity of genetics and products that actually breaks down into something that's common sense. Because the fact is nobody's buying wine based on phial concentrations, even though they're incredibly important. I think primarily people, although in some cases are buying beer based on file concentrations, I think mainly people are thinking about a hazy IPA as opposed to a Pilsner.

35:20SpeakerI think mainly people are thinking about a Cabernet Sauvignon as opposed to a Merlot. And those are radically different categories that are very deeply relevant and that serve this broad audience. So I just want to like outside of the amazing geekdom that we all love, try to paint that picture of like I think we're standing at the precipice of a fundamental reframing of the consumer experience that is a wellness experience that's contextualized in some kind of archetypal categorization based on sensory impressions and language.

35:50SpeakerBut I also want to be critical that the sensory language we've used It's a bit ridiculous in many cases. I want to point specifically to published efforts in the last decade that have used a huge amount of adjectives that nobody I know or have ever known in cannabis use that are really like florid, incredible, imaginative descriptors of what's possible from an aroma space. But really, generally, statistically, it's not what's in common use and is more appropriate for more of us, innovators, scientists, and so forth.

36:23SpeakerSo I'm just, I'm constantly obsessing on that consumer category. But if I could refer one more wax philosophical, like this is an extended rant. This is the big one that blew my mind. Why is it that sense of smell is so like beneath and behind all other senses? How did this come to be? Like literally people in a survey would chop off their finger or in many cases trade their iPhone For their sense of smell, the sense of smell is so unimportant.

36:53SpeakerAnd this is like a remarkable thing that I think goes into a much bigger picture that ties back to where I am in Europe. In 1859, a conference happened that was the Society of Anthropology, and the scientist called Paul Broca came forward. And he demonstrated that there was a difference between humans and animals that was based on the massive front lobes in the brain. And this is the history.

37:18SpeakerAnd I think this history is really, really important because it only very recently changed. But basically for the last 150 years, there's been this hegemony and bias toward like humans in the hierarchy of nature being a superior animal. And how we've demonstrated that has been mainly about misunderstanding and pseudoscience when we look at olfactory capabilities. And so the fundamental thing that happened at this presentation was he presented this whole architecture that like literally for the last 156 years has still been greatly influential to the point people will choose their cell phone over their sense of smell.

37:58SpeakerAnd basically, this was really influenced by the church, by the fear of Darwin, by the fear that we were going to fall into atheism and materialism. And this is like classic, like Trumpian science. This is like, you know, it's the same theme, but Here's what's wild. Just a few notes. I think this stuff is unbelievable. But the brains between human and animals weren't different, and the scientists then started to figure this out.

38:23SpeakerThe brains for the humans were massive, but the olfactory brain was exactly the same. There's 10 million neurons in the mouse olfaction, as well as 10 million neurons in the human olfaction. And it wasn't until basically in 2015 at a chemoreception sciences conference in Florida, this guy, Matthias Vaska, who, Nick, I don't know if you're onto this guy. This was actually one of the most mind blowing things I've seen in a while.

38:50SpeakerHe did a study where he looked at 20 species and humans were included and was looking at sensitivity to various odor molecules. At the end of it, there was a slide he presented that like dropped everybody's jaws, where humans were actually only bested by dogs in five of 15 molecules. Humans had better sense of smell than all other animals and species that were looked at. And in fact, we don't have a deficient sense of smell.

39:18SpeakerAnd Nick, you've proven this to me a lot of times, Marshall as well. I wish Marshall was here. We have an incredibly acute, mind-blowing sense of smell. And I think people, Generally lean on this idea that it's connected with emotions and memories and all this unconscious stuff. And I think that's relevant and important. But I actually think it's more about beauty and the transcendent function and things that are vast and hard to describe.

39:43SpeakerBut back to this presentation. There's actually, in the human olfactory bulb, 1 10,000th of our total brain area Thank you so much for joining us.

40:17SpeakerNext, there was this common myth that humans could smell like 10,000 odors. That's been like a number that's been purported for a long, long time. Nick, I actually think you were the first person who were like, no, we need to talk upwards of trillions to really start to get into an accuracy. And the problem is we don't have language, as you were saying, to capture this incredible diversity of things.

40:39SpeakerThe fact is we still don't know how many odors that humans can smell, but the Rockefeller Institute did a huge evaluation of this a few years ago. And this is another amazing piece that came up. And I'm not going to be as cool as Mark and share the paper right now, but I can get some links. But basically, their estimate came up with 1 trillion Based on using a set of 128 odor molecules and varying ratios and then floating that.

41:03SpeakerAnd at the end of it, it was a mathematical model people are critical of. It's not, you know, it's how do you quantify this trillion odor threshold? But bottom line is it's a lot. Next, there's this Nobel Prize called the EEG that's really amazing where the Swedish researchers who won the EEG Nobel Prize, which is sort of like it has to make you laugh and then it has to make you think is the sort of components of this particular aspect of the Nobel Prize.

41:31SpeakerThey demonstrated that these sommeliers were able to detect one billionth of a gram of a fruit fly pheromone In a single glass of wine. And so you could determine the sex of the fruit fly by their odor. And all of the sommeliers in the panel could detect an odor at that threshold, which would be similar to like the butyl mercaptan natural gas thresholds. I know exactly what you're talking about, Jeremy.

41:55SpeakerIt's disgusting. I hate it. You don't want it, but it's a billionth of a gram of a fucking fruit fly and universally the smelliers could smell that. So I just, again, we're incredibly sensitive in our sense of smell that from basically 1890 or 1856 to 2015, there's this hegemony in science that suggests that humans can't smell that well and it's not that interesting and really like, anyways, just move on.

42:23SpeakerThere's only a couple other points I want to make that I think are really important. There's a difference between taste and smell. In cannabis, I hear a lot about taste and flavor. Obviously, if you try to drink a cup of coffee when you're sick like I am right now, it could taste like fizzy water. Or if you just have anybody block their nostrils and then try to determine the difference between mustard and ketchup, you're really not going to be effective in determining that only through odor.

42:51SpeakerWhat's I think amazing is that humans have a unique function in sensory that's distinct from other animals, which is our retronasal capability. The orthonasal is how you smell like sniffing and you're sniffing things and it's coming in. Actually, that's what dogs are doing. That retronasal is coming, the flavor is perceived through the back of the throat. And so when we're chewing, things are being expressed and it's a complicated, multifaceted way to perceive odor and is a human specialty.

43:24SpeakerAnd I think that's really remarkable to note. But at the end, I think it's just important that smell is not just molecules. Smell is also not memories. Smells an active creative process and it impacts the brain. And back to the nose-nose, the paper that I had worked on with ATN team for years in this event called Cultivation Classic. It was very clear that this signal emerged from all the noise in our data that illustrated that the subjective pleasant effects of cannabis was driven not by THC potency, not by any other chemical threshold, but by the perception of aroma.

44:05SpeakerAnd so I just think as we're working towards this kind of evolution and volatiles and things that it can't be overstated that really if we're more keenly sensitized and driven by our sensorial relationship with the product, we're going to be more obviously capable of deriving enjoyment and therefore finding wellness and therapeutic benefit. But I think also we're going to threaten the entire dogma and status quo of the existing cannabis marketing jargon and all the bullshit that stands in the way of a world and a new global audience actually having a meaningful relationship with this product that is revolutionary.

44:44SpeakerAnd I'm super excited about all the science that's under the hood that is represented on this call that is powering that. I just want to also suggest that the sensory aspect is probably from a consumer education side Really important because I think I've made the mistake. I was the first dispensary in the US to put terpenes on the shelf with all of the products. I regret that now.

45:05SpeakerThe hegemony of terpenes followed the hegemony of THC. We've been really chemo intensive. We've been focusing on these molecules. And I think that's really important. Like the work Ian you're doing and the work that teams are doing, it's revolutionary. But I want to suggest that even arguably in terms of global impact, the thing that's needed the most right now is actually simple sensory adjectives that connect with broad audience that start to upset all of the existing status quo.

45:34SpeakerBecause the last thing I want to say, and thank you so much for this time, I really appreciate it, is basically that I think the greatest accomplishment of all the breeders I've known over the last 30 and 40 years is that this increasing complexity of volatiles has emerged. It's never been about potentiating THC. It's been little and probably should have been more about agronomic features. It's mostly been about sensory driven expression.

46:01SpeakerThe greatest accomplishment of the underground cannabis movement to date, in my opinion, in terms of the development on the plant side, is simply this profusion of new components. I've grown numerous heirloom varieties from around the world, and there is very simple odor components. And I think it's an incredible accomplishment. And I think all that gets undermined when we're not like focusing on this, this critical aspect of development.

46:30SpeakerSo just a bit of context. It's so awesome to get to be together. First of all, go ahead, Nick. Oh, just to be quick. Thank you, Jeremy. That's great. I wanted to jump onto that because a couple of things you said that were really important. One is, you know, they talk about that trillion order options. A lot of that has to do probably with synergy and antagonism, is that we're able to detect a lot of things.

46:53SpeakerAnd when these compounds work together, they create an entirely different experience for us. So it's like we're not, I mean, our noses are great GCs, but our minds are not great GC processors. So we have to assign them into these categories of, they're all experiential, they're all very emotional as well. That's why scents are really good at triggering emotions, but it's almost impossible to remember what something smelled like without having a formalized system.

47:18SpeakerAnd you can describe it, but you're actually describing your experience of that thing. And so it's going to be, you can convey the ideas, but have you ever tried to explain a smell to someone or a scent to someone? It's very, very, very difficult unless you have a very, very strong shared common base from which to work, which is why I go on about formalized sensory programs.

47:38SpeakerBecause how can you describe, The indescribable of, say, for me, I always use this example because I find it hilarious. You know those really cheap sugar cones you got with like Carvel ice cream? Biting into one of those is like walking into my grandmother's house because it has that contextual vanilla, kind of dusty, kind of cheap, kind of old lady aroma that seems to pervade a lot of grandmother's houses for some reason.

48:03SpeakerMaybe they have a potpourri that they all share. I don't know what it is. But that's sort of, it's trying to figure out how to deal with those sensations and convey them to people. And then again, when you start looking, and you mentioned the sort of the land races that have, you know, very relatively straightforward, fairly sort of simple, should we say, aromatic or spectra in them.

48:25SpeakerIt's again, when you combine those with different genes from different regions, they will express the sort of the express things differently. And then you also end up with some really interesting interactions between these compounds because you have a different metabolic pathway in one variety or slightly modified metabolic pathway in one variety versus another. And so, but you've given a whole host of new precursors. So it can be really, really interesting to see what happens.

48:48SpeakerThat's why I'm really excited about the metabolomic works that Ian's talking about. Yeah, and guys, I think this is a perfect time. I have a few slides to kind of back this up. And I think this is awesome because it's all tied together. And I'm going to start with Mark. I'm going to quiz Mark real quick. So Mark, you're a chemist. I know, Nick, you are as well.

49:08SpeakerAll of us probably have some chemistry background. But so let me ask you a question. Why is it that Pranol... The same compound as pronal thiol, just an alcohol versus a thiol. Why do you think that has a lower detection limit than the thiol does?

49:26SpeakerCan you think of a mechanism for why sulfur specifically seem, we seem to be so sensitive to sulfur? Do you have any sort of hypothesis why that might be? Think acid, hard, soft acid-based chemistry.

49:40Dr Mark ScialdoneI would, I turn to just evolutionary pressure, right?

49:44SpeakerI'm talking about chemistry, Mark. I'm not talking about evolution. Do you want me to show the screen? I just want to see if you can come to this conclusion because it's super intuitive once you think about it and once you kind of see what they found.

49:56Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, I know that, you know, sulfur's got a different set of orbitals, right? So it's like, it's a row down, right? So if you're talking about the chemistry, right? So it has an extra set of P orbitals, right? So it's based on, what is it? Neon and then 2S2, 2P4? I'm just thinking about the electronic configuration.

50:22SpeakerCan you guys see my screen?

50:24Dr Mark ScialdoneAbsolutely.

50:25SpeakerSo, so let's take it, let's dive into this. Okay. I thought this was just, I was just reading about this, you know, just a few weeks ago. I think this is so fascinating because it's literally gen chem. It's hard, soft acid based chemistry that's going on here. So sulfur is a soft, you know, loose base. Thank you for joining us.

51:08Dr Mark ScialdoneSo I'm sorry, never turned down an educational moment. I mean, it's the one thing I learned as a professor, you know, you got to kind of start with the same set of basis understanding. So Lewis asked, so Lewis was a chemist long time ago. And what he figured out was that, um, On a molecular scale, if things donate electron density, that's a Lewis base. If they accept electron density, that's a Lewis acid.

51:39Dr Mark ScialdoneSo certain catalysts are Lewis acids because they accept electron density and it activates a molecule to do some chemistry. But in this case, we're talking about Lewis bases, not Lewis acids. Okay, go ahead.

51:51SpeakerAnd so this is so fascinating to me because it makes complete chemical intuitive sense, you know, if you paid attention during this section of your general chemistry class or maybe in organic chemistry class, that they've found that basically at least this human olfactory receptor, OR2T11, guess what atom is in there? A copper atom, which again has high affinity for sulfur, right? And so there is a very good chemical explanation for why, you know, it's not just we know that it is, but why is it that way?

52:24SpeakerYou know, why is Prenol not nearly as sensitive to our nose than Prenolthiol? And so it's literally, you know, in our receptors, we have these metal sites That these odorants can bind to, which then induces some sort of structural change. It releases camp and you have downstream signaling from there. And our brain does all the complex kind of interpretation of what that response was. And so anyway, I just thought this was so cool because it kind of gives like a real Basic kind of chemical explanation for, at least in some cases, why certain odorants, you know, specifically thiols in this case and other VSCs, they found that other VSCs as well.

53:03SpeakerI think I have some. Yes. I mean, this is beautiful work right here. This is so awesome. So this other paper was basically taking a whole bunch of different sulfur species, and then they used alcohol controls to basically see if there was a response from the receptor or not. And what you find is that, especially when they dump a little bit of excess copper into the assay, so you fill up all of these sites where this histidine, these two histidines kind of lock it in place in this protein, you see this response over time.

53:34SpeakerAnd you can see that there's a varying level of that response depending on what it is. In fact, Jeremy, you just mentioned the T-butyl mercaptan, which is I believe what they put into natural gas. Look at that. That's what this top right guy is right here. And look at that response. It's massive. And so that guy is super sensitive to the human nose. And so now there's like receptor data backing up what people have known and why they added into natural gas.

53:58SpeakerBut I mean, I think even more fascinating about this is how, again, they, they, they use these alcohols as control and there's almost no response. You can see that it's just fascinating. And, you know, Mark, to me, this is so cool.

54:11Dr Mark ScialdoneThis is Eric Block at SUNY Buffalo.

54:14SpeakerYeah, exactly. Yeah.

54:15Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd Eric has been doing this volatile sulfur research for, oh God, like 30 years, right? Yeah. He's been at this for a while. Yeah.

54:24SpeakerAnd it's, this is just beautiful, you know, and it really gives, it gives me a better appreciation, appreciation that yes, a lot of smell, if, if, if, you know, from a kind of bigger point of view is kind of esoteric and it's, it's, it is hard to understand. I completely agree with everybody, what everybody's saying, but Jason Gildea, CFO Alphabet and Google Docs, Microsoft Office Word Document MSWordDocs.org

54:59SpeakerSo, you know, single compounds smell a certain way, but when you have binary mixtures and then more combinations of those, such as in cannabis where you literally have hundreds or hops, what have you, you know, it's just, it's like its own thing, right? And so people have done some really awesome work on this just literally in like the last decade. So 2023, this paper came out, 2020, so actually the last five years.

55:21SpeakerAnd basically what they're showing is certain compounds can turn off the receptor response for others. And, you know, that makes that makes sense. Like, that's obvious, but it's like there's data to back this up now. And it's really cool because this group showed in a complex mixture up to 12 odorants. So pretty simple. It's this antagonistic interaction. So you kind of turn off that receptor so it doesn't kind of fire, you know, they're stronger, more prevalent with increasing mixture complexity.

55:48SpeakerThat to me is fascinating. So, you know, Jeremy, what you were saying about, like, it's there's a lot going on here. It's like, yes, there is mechanistically. There is so much going on, like we're like this compounds turning this off. This is turning that off or maybe these things together combine to turn things on. And now you start to see just how it's like so damn complicated.

56:10SpeakerBut I thought that this last statement is just really interesting. Therefore, antagonism is a common feature of odor mixture encoding and helps in normalizing activity to reduce saturation and increase information transfer. In other words, we're able, our nostrils are basically adapting to bring as much information to the brain as possible. And it's like, nature's incredible. Like that to me is just such an incredible thing that our noses are doing on a constant basis.

56:38SpeakerNick, what's up? I saw you. It's really interesting like that because, you know, you get also odor and saturation curves. Exactly. For people. And so what you can do is like some of them are so strong, they block everything else out. That's frequent with some of the very, very strong thiols. And that's the signal is they're probably just binding to a lot more sites on our order receptors and they're just it's just blowing the blowing the signal out of the water.

57:01SpeakerBut with H2S, for example, is a really good example. We're very sensitive to it in the beginning, but we quickly then can relegate it down to a baseline layer and then we can smell things on the sort of other side of that of that layer. So we can actually start perceiving some of the other other compounds that are interacting with our olfactory sensors. And so what we're seeing then is that we are tuning our response to be able to then pay attention to these other signals that are coming in.

57:28SpeakerAnd this makes perfect sense because also when you have a huge number of complex compounds together, you might just have, the signal to noise ratio might be very poor, meaning that we're just getting so much thrown at us that all of our receptors are triggering into all these different things. We can't really pull it apart. And that takes training. And that's, so it's, I think you're, this is really fascinating stuff.

57:47SpeakerThank you. Yeah, definitely. I'll show one example because I think this is just so cool. And like this, this could be a business idea because methane thiol is definitely a nuisance odor. But this other group showed this really cool work that so beta-ionone, which is the chemical shown here on the bottom left. But this compound actually can reduce at least the perception of the methane thiol. Which is, you know, it has this nasty kind of sewer, rotten cabbage, fecal kind of smell.

58:16SpeakerIt's gross. So generally speaking, you don't really want methane thiol around. But what was fascinating about it, and, you know, to go to Jeremy's point, as well as Nick's point about, you know, it's important to have a trained sensory panel to be able to quantify this sort of thing. They were able to basically just, you know, do a normal panel on methane thiol. But when they do it in combination with the beta-ionone, it was much more suppressed.

58:38SpeakerAnd that's awesome from the sensory standpoint, but what was really cool They show that beta-ionone is an antagonist for the methane thiol. So whatever receptor that is, they saw a reduced firing of that. So there is a mechanistic underpinning here. Again, it's not just everything's going on. It's like there's a reason for this. Yeah.

59:00Dr Mark ScialdoneIt probably does a Michael addition. It Michael adds across that double bond and now you have a different sulfur compound.

59:09SpeakerI don't think it's that, Mark. I'll send you the paper. I think it's literally the beta-ionone in combination. It acts as an antagonist. So the methane thiol cannot bind to the receptor quite as strongly as it typically would, that sort of thing. It's sort of like an active site, like product and substrate inhibition. Exactly. Yeah, precisely. That's a pretty compelling theory. I'd like to see someone prove that, but it makes sense sort of intuitively.

59:36SpeakerYeah.

59:37Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd then I have one of the things. Well, beta-ionone is a good Michael acceptor and methane diol is a good nucleophile. The question is not why will they react? We know the answer to that. Why don't they react? That's the question to ask. Right.

59:51SpeakerAnd then the other thing I'll just mention for all you cannabis extractors and processors out there, beta-ionone is a decomposition product of beta-carotene. And beta carotene is definitely in cannabis. I was just working with Alex Siegel. He's a guy who does a ton of extraction here in SoCal. And he had run a huge column on a bunch of HTE, you know, live resin. And he was able to isolate this dark, dark orange fraction.

1:00:20SpeakerAnd interestingly, it smelled sort of rosy, sort of kind of like that, you know, what you would expect beta ionone to have. And so we ran that fraction on the GC. We saw it. And then, yeah, it had a ton of the beta carotene in there. So the point being is that these compounds in cannabis that don't necessarily have a smell by themselves, If they decompose, they can definitely produce those.

1:00:43SpeakerAnd, you know, somebody had mentioned that earlier that it's, I think Colin, you mentioned that during the hash making process, you know, it's kind of like Nick, you know, this sort of a survivable compounds concept in brewing. It's almost like the same thing, but in processing of cannabis, where, you know, you have something that's benign odor, you know, from an odor perspective early on, but if it's processed incorrectly, or maybe, you know, something happens to it, exposed to the wrong sort of environment, you can start to bring in compounds that Hey, maybe that's good, right?

1:01:12SpeakerYou know, beta-ionone isn't, you know, it's used in perfume, it's used in tons of, you know, kind of industries where odors, you know, that sort of rosy violet aromas is necessary. But yeah, I just thought this work was so cool because it's kind of bridging kind of the mystery of how all this kind of fits together into, you know, an actual understanding on the, at least the receptor sort of layer.

1:01:33SpeakerWhat happens between the receptor and the middle of my brain? I have no idea. That's kind of like the big mystery, I think, for all of humanity to figure out. But, you know, definitely really interesting stuff. Ian, I just thought of one other quick mystery. Oh, I'm sorry. I loved that mystery. I was also thinking, there's this fantastic book I've been reading by a guy named Luca Turin, who maybe you've heard of.

1:01:59SpeakerHe's a perfumer. And he starts speculating about how all these different movements in science have tried to correlate molecular structure with perceived aromatics and how that really has largely not worked. And then he gets into the very contentious theory around waves. molecular waves oh yeah i've seen that and then i was just thinking of this i actually i don't know if you guys know the two slit experiment double slit experiment the double slit which is one of my absolutely favorite bits but i opened up instagram this morning and i saw this meme and i was so happy because i i'm fascinated about like for anybody who doesn't know basically they were shooting electrons uh with a particle accelerator through two slits Remarkably, in the top, and this is an actual experiment that's been reproduced in several locations and arguably is one of the most interesting quantum science experiments and demonstrations as we talk about quantum biology, which has to be part of the aroma conversation.

1:02:56SpeakerIn the top, there's numerous distributions. And as soon as the scientist observes the behavior of these particles, then it organizes neatly into two groups. All of these are demonstrating this really remarkable behavior in these complex systems. The superpositions collapse, basically, when you try to observe them. Yeah, right. And observation can be just measurement as well. It's not just humans observing. It can actually be measurement, any sort of observation.

1:03:26SpeakerI think unless we bring in full quantum biological perspectives, we're unlikely to achieve the kind of sophistication and accuracy in describing molecular expression of aromatics with the perceived expression that we either see or don't see or smell or don't smell in any case. Yeah. And people, you know, it's so fascinating, Jeremy, because this concept of, you know, basically the concept is Aaron Weiss, You know, different compounds have different vibrational modes, right?

1:03:54SpeakerYou know, that's, those modes are quantum by nature, right? They're dictated by the structure and, you know, that they follow rules, you know, these symmetry rules and whatnot. And, you know, they're all unique technically. But what I saw people had done, I was thinking of putting this in, but I thought it was, you know, I didn't want to have too many slides, but people have taken odorants And then they deuterate them.

1:04:15SpeakerAnd so all you're doing is you're taking the hydrogen atoms on that molecule and replacing them with deuterium. Well, deuterium, that in theory is the same compound. The only difference is you have, well, it's structurally going to be very similar. I see you're shaking your head, Nick. But what does change a bunch from that are the vibrational modes, because deuterium is now twice as heavy because of that extra neutron.

1:04:38SpeakerSo the point is, is when they when they did this, they introduced it to rats. What they found is that they could differentiate these two things. And I think this is kind of leading towards you might be right, Jeremy, that vibrational modes do have an effect, which again, that's that's that's an effect of quantum mechanics, right? You know, everything's vibrating at room temperature, you know, above absolute zero.

1:05:01SpeakerAnd so I think it's just, yeah, like that concept is so interesting to me. And so I would love In fact, you know, I need to write a grant to get this sort of money. I would love to deuterate the parental thiol that's the main gas compound in cannabis and see if it smells different because that's never been done before. But man, that would be so fun to do and verify if I can tell like, oh yeah, that's slightly different from what the, you know, the actual one is found in nature.

1:05:27SpeakerBut yeah, no, that theory is very, you know, I saw it's controversial, but I don't know. It seems like there's a little bit of data to kind of back it up, which is, you know, pretty wild. Ian, it's interesting just to think about that also from the perspective of handedness of molecules, just the different chiralities. We're going to see some very different, we'll probably see some very different responses to the L and D forms, for example.

1:05:49SpeakerOn the Rose node, on the ionome, in terms of the opposition here of being an antagonist to methane thiol, If you mix beta-ionone and phenylethyl alcohol together, you get the most intense rose scent. And it's significantly more than the combination of the two in terms of intensities. So it's really, really interesting to look at that. Yeah. I mean, Nick, that's kind of what this graph up on the bottom is showing, that synergy can amplify, whereas some things can suppress.

1:06:20SpeakerYeah. So I mean, that makes total sense to me. Yeah. Very cool. I don't think, I think, yeah, that was, that was basically it for this kind of the mechanistic background behind kind of how we're smelling some of these compounds. But man, you chimed in earlier. Did you have any comments or questions?

1:06:37BubblemanI've just loved the conversation. I've been so aching for this conversation for so long that I've almost had a hard time putting my thoughts into words. I definitely really appreciated Jeremy's talk, his brief breakdown, and it just got me thinking. I always, okay, so first of all, I have an extremely sensitive olfactory. I've had it my entire life. And I guess I've looked at it kind of as my superpower, especially in cannabis, because it was so advantageous.

1:07:10BubblemanThank you for joining us today.

1:07:25BubblemanThank you so much for joining us.

1:07:53BubblemanI was just like, I just didn't even want to eat it. I was just like, you have to go. But what I would say is that, like I've always seen my olfactory as a bit of a superpower, even though I've always said, and people that know me, I've always said this, there's a lot more bad smells in the world than there are good smells. There is this sort of...

1:08:14BubblemanBrian Smith, Dean of Students, Dean of Students, Dean of Students, Dean of Students, Dean of Students

1:08:33BubblemanI never imagined I'd probably trade both my hands for my olfactory. My olfactory is extremely important to me. And while Jeremy was talking, I just, you know, I saw this sort of, You know, is there, is this, is there a tower of Babel metaphorically to cut people's olfactory off so they can perceive less of the world and figure out and understand less of these rabbit holes that you can go down?

1:09:03BubblemanI've always seen my olfactory as extremely important. When I first met Nick and he, Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:09:37BubblemanThank you for joining us.

1:10:00BubblemanYeah, man, you're missing out on the world. Like, stop destroying your olfactory. So yeah, I'm just excited to learn today and have my brain tickled in different ways. And you guys are all doing that. So thank you.

1:10:13SpeakerMarcus, a couple of bits I loved when you get to the Tower of Babel and like this kind of what are these fundamental architectures that stand in the way of the direct experience that you've embraced and that we found. And I so relate with what you say. I think one of the reasons I have been successful as a producer has a lot to do with my passion and obsession with sensory dynamics in cultivation.

1:10:38SpeakerAnd that really has absolutely driven me. That's why I made less money than anybody I ever taught to grow because I would go through so many diverse varieties and cultivars because I wanted to smell them all. And I wanted to try and change things and try to produce different smells. But one quick bit more on the Tower of Babel that I dropped earlier. Back to Paul Brokaw, the world was divided between osmotic and anismatic species.

1:11:05SpeakerThis was the first idea in the evolution of science in Western Europe. The osmotic were these animals that could like be driven by smell. Their brain was principally devoted to smell. And from an evolutionary perspective, this is about how do we find food? And this is this lower function. It's associated with bestiality. You know, the nix of us and so forth doing this bestial task. I love that with your beard, Nick.

1:11:29SpeakerI'm sorry. Anyways, the anismatic, though, are the humans and a few other species that are at this higher order of function that are driven by reflection and thought and imagination and creativity. And that's the beginning. It actually evolves from there to... Absolute bullshit pseudoscience, which then breaks down people into having greater or lesser smell. And this was really a racist trope that basically exalted Western Europeans as being more anismatic than non-Western European cultures that were still cultures that were related to olfaction and to sensory experience.

1:12:10SpeakerAnd then it's only back lastly till that 2015 paper where all of a sudden all that's blown up and it's like, no, humans have this unbelievable sense of smell. But I think one other thing that is fascinating that we've all gone through is COVID. You know, during COVID, however many millions of people I've experienced a direct loss of perception of olfaction, which I've gone through. I had COVID way too many times.

1:12:33SpeakerBottom line is I did two different instances lose for at least 48 hours completely my ability to perceive things. Truly terrifying. There was this feeling of this could last. This is my career. This is literally, this is my love and life. This is my race and death trap. Like I can't go without this. And I think that struck a chord in a lot of people. And suddenly the importance of sensory is actually on the uptick In part because of being sort of confronted with the possibility of loss.

1:13:07SpeakerAnd there's even a little bit more, which is, I think, reclaiming, you know, outside of what was clear religious influence, which was an impressive perspective that was very intentionally sewn to kind of separate humans from an evolutionary perspective from animals due to the shockwaves from Darwin's On Origin of Species, which really, it all has to do with this reaction and backlash To that, in a sense, at the beginning, I think there really was this notion of that's going to blow up the theology, all the dogma that stands in the way of that.

1:13:39SpeakerAnd I think we're still living through the ripples following that. And it's a radical act to really be driven by your senses and to perceive them and And then back to sensory expression, to be able to articulate them effectively in a way that's meaningful. I really quickly, just one bit on agronomy. Nick, you brought up the contribution of gypsum. So I think about a world where volatiles are really important.

1:14:07SpeakerAnd the various contributing factors. Of course, we do, especially in organic farming, introduce a lot of gypsum. But one of the little known facts is that organic matter, which takes an evolutionary period of time, like geological time, to really produce organic matter, not active organic matter, is a source of leaching sulfur. It's not just phosphorus. It's actually this sulfur is in high titer in most organic matter.

1:14:35SpeakerAnd so if you're farming in a region and you're like at field scale cultivation that has low soil organic matter, you're definitely getting a reduced sulfur profile in that cultivation area. And I think that's fascinating. But then a couple other practical things. If volatiles matter from a producer's perspective, How would you reframe all of the things you do from breeding and selection of plants to cultivation of plants, to harvest and post-harvest methods, to wholesale, to retail, to packaging, to sensory experiences at the consumer level?

1:15:10SpeakerI feel like we've been trying to disrupt this for a long time, that every single one of those things changes if this becomes your priority. Every single one and where the craft lives most richly is in innovations that address means of harnessing and sustaining and creating stability in the volatile expressions, which means everything was fucking built wrong. We still have flowers that are like, you know, two years old on retail shelves in Oregon.

1:15:39SpeakerThere's still like this kind of stuff. It's just volatiles are not... These are not parallel with quality, and quality is the incorrect word, as Nick has pointed out in the past. Character. Character is really the most meaningful descriptor. It's the sense of if product character is ascribed to value, and the value of the product really is a lot about how much character is there, and is it desirable character?

1:16:04SpeakerIs it hedonic character? Then we would do everything differently than currently happens. So I've been really excited about exploring innovations in each area, especially emphasizing harvest and post-harvest, but also working intensely in agronomy. And this has been my primary forum in the last, like, especially three years. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about finding the ability to harness commercial scale expression of these innovative practices, but the world still doesn't care.

1:16:35SpeakerPeople still don't understand these distinguishing variables. Not yet.

1:16:42Collin PalmerI think what you're touching on is really important because when you're commercializing these compounds, it takes a certain set of parameters and SOPs to follow. And you have to, through the whole process, and it's a linear process in some respect, you have to be very careful about what intentions and the things that you're doing throughout that processes that you have. And if you're not really careful, Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:17:37Collin PalmerWe're trying to cure a product. And depending on what your end goal is, is it going to be jarred? Is it going to be frozen? There are different decisions you have to make. So I think back to the volatile aspect of it, these matter. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:18:14Collin PalmerSo, you know, in the spirit, in the pursuit of holding space for aromatics, you know, you have to really pay attention through the processing of what you're doing when you're not only cultivating, but also processing through into whatever it might be. So, you know, it's it's super important that you do say these things, Jeremy. It's it's it really is because people need to hear this because you're doing it at scale.

1:18:43Collin PalmerRight. Much like most of us on this panel here. And it's it's not easy. This is there's there's choices. And, and you're faced with really hard decisions often, you know, so, and I know, you know, at Abstract, you know, and you're, you're working with your team. When I was at Pax Labs, we, we did a lot of really intricate things that I think were really groundbreaking at the time, to be honest.

1:19:05Collin PalmerI don't think, you know, like the sleep formula, I think was a great example. I think, you know, there's just looking at the aromatic, you know, space and in general, and, you know, there's, There's certain decisions you have to make and working, you know, seeing behind the scenes a little deeper into the curtain as to what you do, you know, to tell the consumer or the viewers out there, there is extremely intricate chemistry going on when you're sitting down with a group like Abstract.

1:19:35Collin PalmerIt is, it is... Thank you so much for joining us.

1:19:53Collin PalmerYour experience has just been so incredible.

1:19:57SpeakerWell, Colin, also, I think about what you've done and what Marcus has done and all the hash makers. I think about there's a multi-thousand year hash making tradition, which is the cannabis tradition until very, very recently. You know, like flower wasn't a thing. It just was never a thing. And I just think a lot of people lose that historical context. But similarly, the hash you make is not the hash that was made before.

1:20:23SpeakerAnd the key differentiating point from my perspective is simply that you are harnessing far greater volatile content. You're creating something that is... Emulating the original plant's phytochemical inventory and that aromatic profile is certainly not going to be present in the same way in like some six-star bubble hash that's like absolutely an incredible legendary variety grown well compared to dry sift from, you know, field scale Moroccan production.

1:20:53SpeakerIt's just that I think there's been this line in the sand that then when flower comes into the conversation drives this interest in freshness. And I think freshness is defined better in other spaces. And Nick, another thing you taught me is just simply that notion on the, I can't remember what it's called, something hop freshness index or in indices. Hop storage index, yeah. Hop storage index. So greater than 50% loss of the original aromatic content would indicate that that product is spoiled.

1:21:23SpeakerThere's something to that effect. And like, if back to what you said, Colin, with drying, you know, I did that study with Ethan on CryoKeef, and we were able to systematically show that we absolutely, in our best case scenario, and I'm talking about giant budgets with like 10 drying environments, each with two HVAC systems with like very tight 3D systems. Projected fucking Bluetooth sensor networks that were managing microclimates.

1:21:51SpeakerLike we did the best version of drying I've seen. We still had a greater than 50% loss of original, just looking at monoterpenes, nothing volatiles. And so there's just fundamentally, it's like it's broken from a freshness perspective. And in fact, the only examples that currently are consumer facing that are at least from the plant-based perspective that are demonstrations of freshness are what we made. It's these beautiful like hashes that are refrigerated that have stability and when people first saw batters that were remarkable and so forth like that that's the beginning of the conversation but now I sort of want that premium craft pinnacle product to drag everything else toward freshness and like when I think about what exactly look at the glistening juiciest luster how can you not like this is also what

1:22:42Collin PalmerYeah, one thought on the on the drying. You know, I thought about this a lot over the past three years of freeze drying. I feel like we're almost There's got to be a better way than freeze drying. There has to be because I feel like that in and of itself is we're not actually representing what we're after. We're doing a great job of getting a commercial product to market.

1:23:02Collin PalmerBut from an aromatic point of view, we're ripping all this awesome stuff away that I want to keep. And I, you know, I'm getting we're getting close and we, you know, we collect data and we're We're able to, you know, use LabConcos and all these other great tools to, you know, as we're getting down the vacuum, we're, you know, we're adjusting, you know, we're not just letting it rip down to zero millitore, you know.

1:23:26Collin PalmerBut with that said, you know, as everyone's shaking their head, we're just ripping a lot of important things away from this material that are very therapeutic, very important to, you know, the experience and the association sometimes to these whole plant profiles. So, you know, just... Colin, one quick...

1:23:46SpeakerI know you've been down this wormhole and we all have. I just think... There's freeze drying and then there's freeze drying. And the reality is there are things I'm not privy to talk about that I can only indicate towards, I know as Ian sits on a treasure trove of unpublished science, I've got some also and I can't wait until I can actually talk about it more. But I will say that I have now observed a freeze dried flower product that absolutely...

1:24:14SpeakerIt boggles my mind in terms of preservation of the original aromatics. And so I now I feel absolutely convinced that I will never hang dry any botanical material for the rest of my life if I have my druthers. Nobody will make me if nobody can drag me into that equation. And And there is a really beautiful forward path that in fact is more cost effective, has a far better stability, has far better, if you look at every dynamic, especially from a volatile perspective, that even down to microbiology, we finally have a revolution happening in our post-harvest methodology.

1:24:54SpeakerIt's just that it's still not widespread and the majority of what people have been exposed to sucks. And now judgments are formed, similar to when supercritical fluid extraction came forward. And people are doing it for a bulk cannabinoid process, and they're not looking at subcritical, and they're not doing these incredible techniques that clearly were massively differentiated from a volatile perspective. And now everybody thinks CO2 sucks, and they would prefer to have BHA.

1:25:20BubblemanThey were making doo-doo butter.

1:25:22SpeakerYes, and now there's this brand associated with it. It's like a global consumer perception. And unfortunately, it's totally unfounded on early or applications of the technology I've seen anyways. But back to, I think the Hashmakers are actually leading this full conversation from a quality perspective, from a consumer angle. I don't think people who haven't been exposed to the kind of quality of product that you guys are making, They don't, if they're not breeders or growers, they don't know, or unless they're, you know, somebody in our friend group that's at this like elite echelon of people that get to really see the incredible diversity and intensity of whole plant aromatic contributions.

1:26:04SpeakerSo I'm excited for more people to discover that. And I'm also excited to do that. Back to one thing I just think about Ian with conversation with you is sort of like, you know, there's plant derived components, there's non-plant derived components. And the reality is, I think right now there's also a hell of a dogma about things that are natural versus not natural. And I've been really steeped in the perfume world recently because I think I learned early on that basically cannabis science is like down here, hops was up here, wine is up there, and perfume was kind of in this rarefied world of volatiles and aromatic understandings and insights.

1:26:42SpeakerAnd now I can see examples of like better toxicity profiles, for example, and some synthetic components, a variety of things. It's a complicated foray, but I just want to say that I think that obviously the vapable products and things that Abstracts and the True Terpenes and other teams have been powering are like having massive consumer forums and they're very poorly understood. But I think that's the other exciting spot.

1:27:09SpeakerBut there's this part of me that, you know, my job at True Terpenes is really to create the plants and the processes and the systems to do the plant derived component and path. And that's very intensely what I'm working on. But I also revere the non-plant derived components. And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding and it's a complicated foray, but I love the hash. I'm trying to get back to Marcus.

1:27:33SpeakerThank you for holding this torch in the dark night of the conversation around product character led by these value-added products that were passionately produced at incredible loss with tiny yields that demonstrated the potential that can radiate to all facets of the space. Yeah, Jeremy. Yeah. So this is awesome. What you, what you just mentioned and calling you as well about, you know, that, that process between growth, drying, curing, you know, that kind of, um, that I would, I would argue is the most important step because you can have something that smells amazing up until then, and you can just ruin it.

1:28:11SpeakerWe'll see you next time.

1:28:26SpeakerMoisture, I think, is implicated in those compounds. And so everybody looks at moisture, I feel, as this sort of, oh, yeah, you know, you got to get rid of it. You got to get it to these right levels and you're good. I think there's much more to it than that based on the new chemistry that we know, because some of these compounds are water soluble. So let me tell you guys something.

1:28:48SpeakerI'm probably giving away too much here, but this is the biggest application of this new knowledge we have. Do any of you guys make ice hash rosin?

1:28:59BubblemanI've been known to dabble.

1:29:01SpeakerOkay, great. This is Ash Church, bro. Yeah, yeah. I figured it. People in the audience, I'm sure too. So you're going to love this. All right. Well, I don't know if you'll love it. Okay. So what we found is that some of these precursor molecules are water soluble. You guys probably can already tell where I'm going with this conversation. If you make ice water hash, you are losing those water soluble compounds to the water.

1:29:26SpeakerWe have verified this. We have taken a chemical reagent that can unlock these compounds and volatilize them. And you can just to your nose smell an incredible burst of gas, you know, the skunk. I mean, in fact, the levels are so high. We were talking to Nick about, you know, typically cannabis kind of lays in this regime where it's just gassy. When you unlock all these compounds synthetically, like we did just as an experiment, It was rubber.

1:29:57SpeakerIt was burnt. So what I'm saying is that cannabis has these things stored in huge quantities, massive quantities. And so if you're making ice hash rosin, you are losing some of these potential compounds that might be useful in the actual hash to the water phase. And so somebody had mentioned the esters being water. So I think it was you, Nick, had mentioned the esters are more water soluble.

1:30:22SpeakerSo we had got a... A bottle, you know, after we kind of worked out some of this chemistry, I'd asked somebody to give us, procure a bottle of just the water from a hash from, you know, a producer here in LA. And so they sent us a bottle of it. It smelled amazing. And Nick, it smelled like fresh flower, you know, young, fresh flower. And I'm convinced it's because of those, it's more rich in the more water soluble compounds, AKA the esters, those sorts of things.

1:30:49SpeakerIt was really gassy too. But again, you add This reagent, it explodes in smell. And so my point is, we're so early on in all this research, we need to go to different varieties. And we've done a few. And it's really interesting work across varieties, how these are stored or not. But It makes me wonder if could we breed for, or, you know, and nobody likes this word, GMO, you know, edit in something, but if we can identify what is it that produces these precursors, and then also figure out how are they released, because that's the other part of the equation.

1:31:30SpeakerWhat we found is that these things exist in these bound states, and as Nick knows in the hop world, they're non-volatile, they don't smell, they don't contribute much to aroma or flavor. They're essentially inactive. But over time, things change. They off gas, blah, blah, blah. And so we're going to be doing a time dependent study just, you know, on looking at all these volatiles, you know, the precursors and then the volatiles that we see instead of using a synthetic reagent like we did.

1:31:55SpeakerBut, oh, man, it's just it's I think it's going to change how we approach so much because it is it's it's it's going to be mind blowing. It was mind blowing for me. And for you guys who make cash, I can guarantee you just going to you're going to love it. So. Ian, I love your passion. And I just quickly wanted to mention, I don't know if you saw, Ethan Russo had this notion a while back, and I supported him in the publication of a paper called CryoKeef, that basically we demonstrated the loss of some of the water-soluble components.

1:32:25SpeakerAwesome. CryoKeef truly captures... Those components, it has a lower yield, but I would say is an evolution in terms of being able to harness a broader cross section of the original volatiles. But one other quick thing on the production side, I've been doing a lot of organic commercial scale farming because I'm just from an ecological cost perspective and a Thank you so much for joining us.

1:33:09SpeakerSo intracellular organizms that are definitely upregulating aromas synthase and playing a significant role outside of conventional agronomic perspectives. The soil biology and rhizosphere dynamics with all of these different species Thank you so much for joining us.

1:33:45SpeakerBut I've had the privilege of producing the exact same varieties that have incredible stability in various regions. And one thing I'll say is that when I have a really rich organic crop producing strategy, I'm just simply observing a far more chemo diverse Profile, something that has a lot of nuance and subtlety that I'm not seeing in the controlled environment production where I was using a more limited program.

1:34:12SpeakerBut I think that's one of the many things that from an agronomic perspective are going to be a core source of innovation. You can absolutely impact the endophytic populations. Based on your cultivation strategies. I remember one thing we were doing in Yakima, which I was excited about, you know, well, Yakima has actually relatively poor soil. Sorry. It's really pretty, pretty like farming down to the bones of the earth with conventional crop producing practices.

1:34:40SpeakerYou know, there's lots of rubble in the field. There's like this thin calcitic. Anyways, we brought in a lot of endomycorrhizae. And I mean, a shit ton. And that was an exciting beginning in that path. But I'm now working with actually the world's largest commercial organic farmer, which is based in Columbia. And they've been for many generations working outside of U.S. agrochemical companies to innovate and really build this kind of active organic matter with the existing really high levels of organic matter.

1:35:11SpeakerAnd I'm just I'm seeing things that are like I don't think I'll ever farm in the U.S. again, honestly. I think it's done. I just, I'm throwing in the towel. I've been swimming upstream my whole life. Organic crop production is like less than 1% of cultivation in the U.S. There is a bunch of shitty farming going on. It's incredibly efficient. It's everything else. But back to our subject, it's just not where the goods are.

1:35:38SpeakerAnyways, I'll stop there. That's a pretty extreme statement. Jeremy, you and I have talked about this before, but yeah, feed the bugs and feed the microbes and they will do interesting things. The work that's coming out on endophytic microbes is really, really interesting, particularly because you can also see it on actually the surface of the plants as well. Like certain microbial species will actually induce pretty severe changes, sometimes through a stress response, other times through, I think, possibly direct interaction with precursor compounds.

1:36:07SpeakerAnd I'm wondering how much of the sort of release of aromas and the change in aromas is due to those endophytic microbes and the bacteria acting on the compounds that are already in the plant. And as we've been finding for decades now, plants will sort of exude a certain set of compounds for beneficial bacteria. And like in the rhizosphere specifically, there's a species of maize that actually We've got a lot of stuff going on.

1:36:47SpeakerNick, one quick thing though, what you're describing is very much outside of, back to Ian, when you talk about GMO, I just think about quickly this contrast where I'm now been exposed to multiple programs that are upwards of $50 million CapEx investments now on the genetic side to innovate in ways that have actually, I'll just say for the most part, been pretty underwhelming in terms of the kinds of results that I see in practice.

1:37:10SpeakerWe're on the other side, things like let's nourish this kind of feed the bugs perspective. Let's work on endophytes. Let's work on a vast array of cultural practices that with this incredible diversity of genetics that are now available are able to immediately change the expression of the volatiles and the overall sensory character in a way that's significant. With a very tiny budget with just some design of experiment, some repetitions, some analytical testing budgets, and just field sensory.

1:37:45SpeakerAnd I just think it's fascinating. Like here we have this like incredibly phenotypic plastic plant that basically is just transforming constantly whenever we go in a direction. I haven't found a really compelling argument for any of the kind of gene knockout at this point based on the innovations that we're seeing. On the other hand, I'm not all opposed. It's just not been needed. And Jeremy, you know, I mean, I personally think that the reason that we haven't seen the gains necessarily from that sort of perspective is have we been looking for the right targets?

1:38:18SpeakerYou know, I mean, you look, you know, Nick, you I'm sure you know this. Terpene profiles can look very, very similar in hops, in cannabis. Yet if the underlying chemistry of basically everything else is different, that's where your aromatic diversity comes from. I've seen this all the time. I remember a breeder, I think it was, I don't remember his capulator maybe, but one of these guys had sent some to Masonic, you know, Masonic Smoker to taste test two varieties.

1:38:48SpeakerAnd he put out this on Instagram where he was basically being like, I got these tested at a testing lab for chirpings. They look identical, yet Masonic's like, I love this one. I hate that one. So there has to be more of the story. And I mean, that's all the research that we've done. That's what Nick was doing at Yakima Chief, showing that, hey, it's these really minor components that are driving these things.

1:39:10SpeakerAnd so my point being is, if we haven't known what the minors are, How do we know where to look? Because the biosynthetic pathway may be completely different. It may not be made de novo. It may be made when the plant's stressed. And in fact, going back to what we're going to be releasing here in the future, I actually think that what we're going to find is that these precursor molecules are implicated in stress response for a good reason.

1:39:35SpeakerAnd that's obvious. But what it's tethered to, it really is going to open up, I think, everybody's mind to like, OK, Now that we know this is in there and maybe how it evolves during plant growth, let's try stressing it in different ways. And people do this anyway. I know that you've probably done stress trials, Jeremy, just to see how different conditions affect it. But now we can actually monitor some of these compounds that might be kind of actually Maybe releasing things under certain stress, maybe accumulating under certain stress.

1:40:05SpeakerMaybe you can accumulate and then release later, right? I mean, that's the sort of ideas I'm thinking about where it's like, oh shit, not just a linear sort of application of this, but it's like you can dynamically change the metabolic redox processes that are occurring in the plant. You know, just through environmental stress or what have you. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Two points on that. I'm sorry, can I jump in a little bit before I forget?

1:40:30SpeakerTwo points on that. You know, plants produce things for a very specific reason. And there's two mechanisms for doing that. One is especially in response to stress. For example, they'll produce something. And when we talk about the endophytes, it'd be really interesting to see that, you know, if the microbes are living inside the plant and it's providing a commensal or beneficial relationship, they're going to feed them.

1:40:49SpeakerAnd so I'm wondering how much of the stress response is actually the plant providing these organizms. We're going to talk a little bit more about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit more about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit more about what we're going to talk about today.

1:41:22SpeakerThere's no question that of all the stressors I've explored, this is one thing that you can share openly. It's a stressor you cannot control, that the rice root aphid pressure at a very high level of pressure was able to produce a shocking amount of monoterpenes. We had a plant that tested at 8% by dry weight, total terpene content. And in any case, really quickly, I just want to acknowledge Mojave brother, it's really good to see you.

1:41:49SpeakerI think you missed in the beginning something that was really sweet, which was that, you know, Marcus was talking about how Nick was really the first person to bring forward the notion of dials and dialates. And I was thinking back to a beer that I was having with you and Rob and how really I think this conversation wouldn't have taken the shape that it is, wouldn't even be happening maybe in the same way had it not been for you guys mentoring.

1:42:15SpeakerAnd really inspiring this whole dynamic. And really, it was quite a long time ago now. I mean, it's been a long time. You're like, go to the Hopps scientists. And then I'm listening voraciously to all these Hopps podcasts. And then like Nick emerges to be this towering intellect. I'm just like, Jesus Christ, this guy's fucking insane. Gotta find this guy. And You know, I find a handful of other kind of whack jobs that are way in the deep end, but like Nick was the most fun in any case.

1:42:40SpeakerBut then like the introduction between Marcus and Nick and then these characters and then later Ian, your publications, this whole conversation. But I just give you so much credit, brother. It's so wonderful thinking back to that inspiration and just for all the ways that you've continued to give thought and form and love to this ongoing intellectual pursuit of Thank you, Jeremy. It's great to see you.

1:43:28SpeakerAbout 20 years ago, I remember just thinking about cannabis aroma and just thinking, obviously, you know, Rob imparted me this gift of terpene knowledge before I came back to California from Amsterdam. And so in California at the point was a blank slate and no one knew what terpenes or a lot of different aspects of cannabis aroma. And anyway, I remember diving into what is cannabis aroma about 20 years ago.

1:43:57SpeakerAnd we had a great, a huge body of knowledge then, but it wasn't supported by a lot of research and it wasn't really distributed well, right? But I remember going into this like pyrazines and thiols and alcohol and ketones and all this stuff. It's like, wow, it's all in there. How come we don't know more about it? And then Rob years later, you know, when I used to love wine, but then when this big IPA movement happened and Rob obviously was a champion of that.

1:44:30SpeakerAnd he just, he was completely fascinated by this correlate, this aroma profile that crosses over between hops and cannabis. And he hipped me to this book, right? You know very well, The Love of Hops. And it was in there plain as day. But it didn't say cannabis, it said hops, right? And it was about skunked bottle, light-affected skunking effect, whatever. And anyway, so we put it into an article in Cannabis Business Times, but it was just like a little hint of like, we don't know what the fuck is out there, but we think it's all the same.

1:45:16SpeakerWe think that if what you smell here is there, it just must be the same. And I'll be like a total like outcast on this panel because you guys are like completely amazing aroma scientists and everything. But I'll just say this, we've come really far, but my fear is in our obsession of following, of chasing aroma, we might forget that there's There's the love of aroma and the need and the safety and the things that it does for our brain in terms of aromatherapy and perfume and food.

1:45:53SpeakerAnd then there's aroma and how it impacts the drug effect of cannabis. And I think in our world, those things are dangerously close right now. Because, and I had a really interesting conversation about this with someone the other day, that certain aromas are so powerful that it's not a receptor-based thing, right? It's about overwhelming the whole system of your body with a good, warm, fuzzy feeling. And then on the back end of it might come cannabinoids or other compounds that Give extra layers to that.

1:46:29SpeakerAnd then there's some aromas that are actually modulating and affecting the drug profile more. And so I had this conversation with someone who's an ethnobotanist and studies cannabis. And we were talking about that. And we turned to the conversation about spray packs. And how spraying down cannabis, and I had this experience in South Dakota once where someone presented a joint to me and the aroma that they were chasing was no longer the cannabis version of those aromas.

1:47:02SpeakerIt was just the aroma itself. So it wasn't the cherry notes that we all know in cannabis. It was just cherry, right? Because it's really bad brown weed that they're spraying with aromatic profile to give it. And the people smoking it were loving it, by the way. They're like, wow, try this. This is amazing, right? Because it took that part of the brain. It's hijacked that part of the brain.

1:47:24SpeakerSo and then the other thing, so what this guy told me is the best spray packs out there right now Are when they find really fresh, dynamic, aromatic cannabis, top tier flower, perfect flower, and then spray more on top of it. Because it delivers the drug effect and the relationship between aromatics and the cannabinoids and all the other unknown compounds. But then it pours up on top of it, this thing that humans are highly susceptible to, which is aroma.

1:47:56SpeakerAnd then it drives the decision maker of the decision of that consumer. And I think that that's a dangerous area to be in, especially right now as we're exploring how to add or preserve or create aroma around cannabis, that we don't want to lose what people sought out from cannabis. And that part of that is aroma. But most of that is about feeling good and feeling whole and feeling complete and feeling elated or relaxed or whatever, all the other.

1:48:33SpeakerIt is a drug. And at the core of cannabis is it is a drug. But aroma is more powerful than drugs because it's mom, it's safety, it's food survival, right? So I just, I always feel we have to really dance carefully there Especially someone who's bred and only smokes terpenylene-dominant weed that has a very little of that profile, that modern, that spray-packed profile, because it's not food, it's not candy, it's more savory.

1:49:08SpeakerThat it's the thing of the analogy of the child with the glass. You present a five-year-old with a 30-year-old aged Cabernet, $2,000 bottle of wine at 99 on the Robert Parker scale. And you give that same kid a glass of Welch's grape juice and they spit out the Cabernet right away because it's gross. But to someone who associates the effects, Of ethanol and the rich experience with all those aromas, they have a completely different experience.

1:49:45SpeakerSo as we bring aroma to, as we deliver cannabis to people, and as we deliver aroma to people, we have to be careful that we don't just present Welch's grape juice in order to appease that side of the brain, which says this tastes good. That canvas isn't done. Mojave, yeah, I mean, you're touching on, first off, great to see you. You need to stop by the lab again.

1:50:10SpeakerThat sage you dropped by was incredible. Such a classic terpenoline-rich variety. But I think you're touching on something that I've long suspected, and we're starting to get data to kind of validate this a little bit. So we, you know, when we do our GC collection, we're doing liquid injection. So we do actually collect cannabinoid fractions on our 2D GC. And so we can actually poke around in that area kind of with a little bit more resolution than maybe a traditional lab would.

1:50:37SpeakerAnd we found at least one or two cannabinoids that people rarely discuss. One of them is completely new that we'll be publishing on probably, you know, later this year or next year. But the point being is what's really fascinating is Whereas you don't really see a lot of relationships too much between terpene, you know, superclasses, what have you, terpenylene, myrcene, limonene, et cetera. And like THC content, like they can all be, you know, the THC can always be pretty high with any of those sort of permutations of the terpene profiles.

1:51:11SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:51:32SpeakerI think a lot of these uh you know these things that we're smelling could be just biomarkers for something else that's happening somewhere else in the plant and so could it be that these you know we're looking in the wrong place like we can see this over here but it's actually correlated moving up and down with this other thing that's in small concentration but it's bioactive and you know and uh you know it's in low concentration but it's but there's enough there and the differences between the classes makes us wonder well Maybe that's driving some of what makes these varieties have that sort of medicinal effect over others.

1:52:05SpeakerAnd think about this. Everybody talks about distillate carts or, you know, they're not quite the same. Well, they're not the same. I won't say they're not quite that, you know, nobody would probably rather smoke a distillate cart that's flavored over, say, you know, heavily refined over, say something that's, you know, like a full live, live, live resin or a rosin or something like that. Well, when you, when you distill, you're not just removing necessarily some of the, you know, some of the, obviously the aroma compounds, But you're actually removing other stuff as well that's slightly bigger than the cannabinoids.

1:52:38SpeakerYou know, that's why you get this heavy fraction that people talk about this wax fraction, which, by the way, we're working on a paper for all you extractors out there on that. It's really interesting stuff, kind of solving the mystery of whatever, you know, this fats and lipids kind of conversation everybody's been having. Well, we know actually what that chemically is now. And so my point being is that I think you're completely right that it's like, yeah, you know, we can kind of push, push the plant in different directions.

1:53:04SpeakerBut do they retain the same correlations with other bioactive compounds that might be actually doing more of the heavy lifting than others? And so, um, I think, I think as, as, as people, you know, move beyond THC CBD and look at the other minor cannabinoids, we're going to start to see these sort of relationships to the, uh, you know, to the volatiles, um, at least in certain situations.

1:53:25SpeakerAnd then, you know, that might explain why this one, the tie in limonene and the Terps look identical is very different from this one, the tie in limonene and the Terps look identical. All of these people, yet they have two different effects. And so, yeah, that's been a lot of fun. And so it's kind of going down the same rabbit hole that you're thinking right now, I think.

1:53:44BubblemanIt's definitely not wrong. Oh, go ahead.

1:53:46SpeakerThis is something that Ian brought up earlier, and you just mentioned it again, So, you know, the way plants or a lot of organizms produce compounds is they produce them until they receive a biological stop signal effectively. So like you hit a certain threshold or there's a feedback loop in there and it's telling it, okay, I no longer need this much of those compounds. Well, everything that's in that pathway All of this is now is frequently just dumped into the cell.

1:54:12SpeakerIt becomes sort of a available for other reactions. And you see this particularly in yeast for some positive aromatics and compounds and negative compounds. And I imagine you see similar sort of these biofeedback and sort of almost like supply chain issues inside the metabolics of the plant. And so I wonder how much that's actually driving some of this. Nick, another variable, the atom economy, that Mark always refers to.

1:54:41SpeakerOne remarkable observation is introducing a diversity of genotypes that are at maturity, chemically signaling in ways that are impacting the volatile expression of adjacent plants. That's been something I've observed for a long time and now I'm working with intentionally, but in border zones, you can induce new expression through absolutely nothing but chemical signaling between the plants. Marcus, sorry, you were chiming in.

1:55:08BubblemanNo, I can't even remember what I was saying, but it does remind me of listening to Paul Stammen speak about a type of mushroom that can just grow next to another mushroom, not even be connected through its mycorrhizal sphere and literally acquire attributes, capabilities that the one mushroom has that the other mushroom doesn't. Forget about evolution, forget about a million years. It's like right then and there, bam, just growing next to it.

1:55:33BubblemanSo interesting concept for sure.

1:55:36Collin PalmerI think the other thing I was going to say to Mojave's point is the toxicology behind all this is, you know, widely still understudied, right? And under really a lot of microscopes, but there's not a lot of understanding as to how

1:55:56Collin PalmerIt's going to interact with the body in the ways that we have a lot of olfactory. I think all of us here collectively over the years have felt a lot of the things that we've seen papers be published on or have experienced a lot of the things that have happened. We've been studied, but we don't really know from a tox point of view where the cells would die and at what rate.

1:56:18Collin PalmerBecause there's no real body that's spending time on it on a daily basis with a large enough budget yet. There's some people doing work, but to Mojave's point, we don't really know what happens when you spray flour on top of what's already there. You just don't know. So I think that should be said out loud.

1:56:41SpeakerOne thing important to acknowledge is the ASTM, of course, has really been actively convening with the toxicology perspectives of mine. And I'm sure you're aware, Dr. Shauna, who's on our team, has been really foundational in helping to support that safety perspective. Interestingly, through her interactions in ASTM, I've become privy to a global perspective of toxicology. And I will say, there's been a lot more work done than most people think because of lateral mature industries.

1:57:12SpeakerSo tox people coming from other spaces where there has been heavily regulated products that have very advanced toxicology perspectives are now in that conversation. And it's In any case, there are, I would say, certain outliers currently in the product landscape that, based on what I've learned from the talks perspective, are really, truly dangerous and awful and shouldn't be a part of the conversation and continue to be due to the absolute mess of regulation, especially in the US.

1:57:42Dr Mark ScialdoneBut globally, there's going to be a lot more space, right?

1:57:46SpeakerExactly. They're just to put the fucking, yeah, that. So if you're looking at a global perspective and looking at how European regulations are being handled, they're being handled by people who have dealt with that for decades and have had legions of scientists with massive, unbelievable budgets And I would say it's really one of the features, unfortunately, of the U.S. domestic regulatory fuckery that there's just such an inability to do mature science.

1:58:14SpeakerI mean, that's why, I mean, Ian's work's an outlier, Mark's work's an outlier. It's just there's all these individuals who are passionate and with some resources and so forth. I will say I've spent almost no time in the US in the last year and a half and I can see now that basically my career has moved into I have to like pretty much not work in the US anymore because we can't do the things that are where the maturation is going to happen and It's maddening and frustrating, but that's just the rant.

1:58:47SpeakerGuys, I'm going to go for dinner. It is an absolute privilege to be together. I'm so grateful for your inspiration and the knowledge that was shared. I miss some of the colleagues who could not be with us, and I just want to quickly give acknowledgement to Dr. Mark Lewis, who years and years ago, while on mushrooms, And a boat and Amsterdam at ICRS was talking at great length about aldehydes, esters, ketones, flavonoids, etc.

1:59:16SpeakerAnd I think he's played an important role in this conversation and deserves And also I'm sad that Marshall Ligari is not with us today. I'd hoped that he would be. I will say that while Nick is incredibly sensitive to dasvidal, Marshall has some other sensitivities that blew my head off. The man is an absolutely unbelievable resource in our space. And I do think that in the future would be interesting to all upon Vaishnavi Trivedi, who is on the True Terpenes team, a source of constant inspiration.

1:59:50SpeakerI would argue that probably from a sensory perspective, I think she's the greatest talent internationally that I've ever met. And I've seen her mature and evolve over the last Four years of working together to a point where she can do things that look magical to me in terms of sensory in our space. And I just think there are some other characters that would be wonderful to include in the future.

2:00:12SpeakerBut Marcus, thank you for this. And I just hope the rest of the conversation goes great.

2:00:18BubblemanYeah, thanks. Thanks for all of that, Jeremy. And thanks for sharing some time with us. And Marshall is supposed to be showing up here in a little bit. Dr. Mark Lewis is at his child's Wizard of Oz performance. It's the last ones. So I said, no problem. This will be the first of many Aromatic Volatiles. So yeah, go get some food.

2:00:38SpeakerOh, didn't mention Alec Dixon, of course.

2:00:41BubblemanYes, he also was invited.

2:00:43SpeakerYes. Okay. Anyways, much love. Thanks so much.

2:00:46BubblemanThanks, brother.

2:00:49Dr Mark ScialdoneBye, Jamie.

2:00:50BubblemanInteresting. So one of the things I wanted to mention in regards to going back in a little bit in regards to the water soluble, right? This was pretty early on for me. The first isolator hashes I saw were very drab. They had zero flavor. They were just not good at all. And one of the reasons why my nose helped me kind of do the work that I did in the last 30 years was that it led me towards cultivars That were just dank.

2:01:19BubblemanLike I called it pot to get you busted because the tiniest little piece of it just reeked. It just it just saturated whatever room it was in. It was different. And when I ran that material through water, it retained the majority of its flavor profile. And of course, the only way I would know that is by running the same material All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.

2:01:42BubblemanWe're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.

2:01:58BubblemanSo it was like, let's find the alcohol soluble terpenes. Let's find terpenes that don't melt away in the water. I don't know what was melting in the water. I do know that Kay from Tricom Technologies hit me up in 2014 and he was sitting with Sasha Shulgin, the chemist, And they were, he said, listen, you got to get the aromatics out of the water that are locked away in the water and get them back into the hash.

2:02:22BubblemanAnd he told me this in 2014, and he was talking about terpenes. And I ended up telling two people about that conversation, literally within five minutes of having that conversation. I talked to Tony Verzura and I said, dude, you need to be making terpenes. And then I talked to Horatio Delbert. I said, dude, you need to be doing making terpenes because I just wasn't going to be doing that.

2:02:42BubblemanI was I just knew it wasn't my work to be doing. But Tony, surprisingly, had them very soon after. I suspect he was, you know, my my because he was always very sort of tight lipped about it. My theory is that he was at a very nice lab in Florida visiting when I asked him that question. And he probably just Thank you for joining us.

2:03:24BubblemanThat was kind of the trick. Everyone else had yellow terpenes back in 2015, 20. It was just yellow. They'd heated them up too much. But Tony was making like... Thank you for joining us.

2:03:55BubblemanSo we figured out the hash thing.

2:04:12BubblemanBy just finding the rankest cultivars that seem to transfer the highest percentage of what we were looking for in the flower to be present in the hash. I'm sure there's always going to be things that were missed. And in fact, you know, I used to kind of get into it with Nick and T and be like, you know, solventless really is a misnomer at best. I mean, A, we're putting it in water and then he would always say, right, but we're not using it to like, I'm like, well, we're not using it as a solvent, but it's clearly being one because at the end of every batch I've ever run, that water has not been clear.

2:04:49BubblemanIt's always been a different color. So even though I didn't want to use it as a solvent, unfortunately, it is the universal solvent. And then later I learned that there were, you know, the terpenes themselves were hydrocarbons. And so then it was like, oh, wow, this is like cannabis will never be solventless. And if it is, I don't want it. You know what I mean? I want the hydrocarbons in my cannabis and in my hash.

2:05:14BubblemanAnyway, that's my rant.

2:05:16SpeakerHuff it. Huff them carbons.

2:05:20BubblemanI'm going to.

2:05:22SpeakerNo, the one thing that I've always been fascinated by is in terms of aroma for cannabis. And I am very much jaded by my experience. I think everyone, in terms of aroma and flavor, it's about their family and where they grow up, what kind of food you eat, what you think is palatable. You know, so I grew up in spicy, incensey, aromatic world, right? So cannabis to me was always all of those things.

2:05:52SpeakerAnd so that's always been my preference. But I also feel there's some correlation with all drugs and a lot of other substances, which is that they aren't supposed to be really that tasty. Like there's a, there's a shamanic thing about like the bitter pill, about the little bit of suffering of a little bit of pain that goes along with the healing and stuff, right? So we have, humans have this kind of quest for like how much suffering can I get and still enjoy that moment, right?

2:06:26SpeakerIf you think of You know, sour and bitter and hot and spicy food and stuff like that. Or even wine. If you think of wine, I mean, we really pushed what tastes good because of the reward that came after it. And, and definitely like pepper heads are like insane where they like, they put themselves through this extreme amount of pain for all this endorphin release and all this stuff.

2:06:52SpeakerAnd, and you think even chocolate, you know, like the high, the best chocolate is the chocolate that's almost like to most people to the average five-year-old is really bitter. It's too much, right? But to the chocolate kind of sewer, they know they're getting the stuff that's in chocolate when they eat that, right? And there's this kind of high-end, high-quality things tend to push further away from pleasurable.

2:07:18SpeakerCheese, really simple cheese. Versus really complex cheese that most people think is either off or wrong or you shouldn't eat it, right? So I've always wondered because traditional people have often done things to cannabis to push it in that direction. Like let's remove the freshness part of it. And obviously it's a microbial thing. You're preserving it. You want to dry it out efficiently. But it went an extra step where they weren't just trying to dry it out and preserving it.

2:07:49SpeakerThey were trying to funk it up. And in the funking it up process, they were taking it down that aged wine, aged cheese realm, whether it was with hash or with corn cob, Malawi, whatever. And on the back end, they felt they got a better drug experience. And that's why they did it year after year. And that's why they taught their children. That's why their children adopted the preference for those experiences.

2:08:13SpeakerAnd the new thing with cannabis, with freshness, that's really, really new for one, because we have the ability to do it. But it's a different drug. It's a different experience. And I hear more and more, you know, it seems to me that the needle, as it turned towards tastier weed, moved a little bit away from weed that got you really high. That's just my experience. And I hear that from, you know, like the weed tastes better than ever.

2:08:41SpeakerLike my ability to go find amazing tasty weed is higher than ever for someone who's smoked for 30, 40 years. But the ability to find really iry, super stony weed is harder. So I'm like, are we in this weird crossover where are we gonna end up with wine? Are we gonna end up more with getting the drug effect here and the flavor here and we just separate the two?

2:09:13SpeakerOr is the flavor and the drug going to marry back together the way traditional people did? And because I have this haunting suspicion that we'll never be able to once, like Ian, what you said, like once we isolate what those aromatics and what those compounds that are actually active and having receptor affinity or increasing the potency of the things that do, that we won't be able to just add the flavors that people want to that without obfuscating it.

2:09:44SpeakerSo ultimately, we're not chasing aroma, we're still chasing effect. And if we're chasing aroma more than effect, then we might be washing out or moving away for this thousand-year-old journey of us trying to get the most beneficial effect from the plant. Mojave, I think one of the things that has been becoming more sort of evident, it's not conclusively proven yet, but there's an interaction between the experience and the effect or the aromatic experience and the effect that is stronger than just having that same mix of cannabinoids in the same blend.

2:10:25SpeakerSimilarly, when you're talking about the effect and pursuing that particular drug interaction or what have you, or just the effect of the high or the Michael Bresalier, Ph.D.: Physical effects. Michael Bresalier, Ph.D.: I think you're going to be seeing a lot more of work being done around sort of the minor cannabinoids because the so called myocannabinoids because we've seen Michael Bresalier, Ph.D.: At least, you know, personally for me and many people I've spoken to that combinations of like say CBG, CDC and THC together are All right, so we're going to move on to the next slide.

2:10:58SpeakerSo we're going to move on to the next slide.

2:11:16SpeakerAnd one of the things that, like, you know, just personally, and you mentioned sort of the concept of the bitter pill, the, you know, I prefer it when things taste good. I have an objectively better experience if I have a wonderful watermelon, or not watermelon, like grapefruit gummy or something like that, or passion fruit, you know, beverage or whatever it is, than just drinking, you know, something very bland or just like, you know, just something that's just bitter or on its own.

2:11:41SpeakerAnd, yeah. I don't know how much of that is psychosomatic, but the pleasure and the endorphins derived from those pleasurable sensations, the aromas and flavors, give the sort of healing a bit of a kick for me. And so I think that's something that we shouldn't step away from, but I understand what you're saying. And I think that we've seen similar issues in terms of cannabis breeding, especially in the US for the last few years.

2:12:04SpeakerAnd that's something that Jeremy's talked about at length. And he seemed like he just, he needs to, he wants, you know, stock has not just repelling because it's just, it overwhelms everything. And so, but it's, yeah, it's, it's really, it sells well, it's popular. And Nick, no, and I totally agree with you. And I think that's my point is that I'm not, and I'm playing the devil's advocate.

2:12:24SpeakerI'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I'm just observing it from like an outside observer. Like if you were like an anthropologist or something to see this change happening in the human plant relationship. And I think that because the reactions are so profound from pleasurable aroma and stuff like that, That's why that that's why the five that the child and I'm not comparing us to five year olds.

2:12:51SpeakerIt's I'm comparing the industry to the five year olds. That's why the five year olds who drinks the grape juice goes, well, I get such an amazing experience from this. I feel safe. I feel happy where the Cabernet makes them feel gross. This is disgusting. I got to get this out of my body really quick because that's the kids that grew up on Dynatap.

2:13:12SpeakerSo my point is that if it turns that cannabis becomes this thing where it has these other, that the flavor and aroma becomes so profound and amazing because it is. And this is also, it's the same with hops. So a lot of hops, like it got to the point where, and I love hazy IPAs, but it got to the point where it stopped being beer. Where it was just like, holy man, this is not beer anymore.

2:13:37SpeakerThis is, you can call it something else, but you've done such a good job of pulling out those aromatics in here that I could give this to my kid and he would drink it and go, hey, that's pretty nice, juicy, tropical, pineapple-y, slightly fermented thing you got there. A friend of mine in the industry says, nobody wants to drink beer that tastes like beer anymore. And we also used to go to festivals when I was still brewing, go around and we'd kind of be snarky and say, all right, is that juice or beer?

2:14:07SpeakerBecause it was just like orange juice. It was so hazy and gross. But anyway. And then I guess I'll just finish with this in that the point I'm making is that people and how they make decisions. So the guy who made the hash for the community was the gatekeeper. Right? It wasn't about everybody in the community saying what they want and him making hash the way they want it because they get the best experience for them.

2:14:34SpeakerHe's the hash guy. He's the shaman expert guy who delivers the experience that they think they should have. And when people, when you listen to what people say, which I would say one of the reasons I sometimes have issues with the panel, the aromatic sensory panel stuff is that if you listen to what people say and say, was this a pleasurable experience? Do you like this one better?

2:14:56SpeakerPeople don't always make the best decisions. I mean, we live in a country filled with people who habitually don't make good decisions for the health and wellbeing of their body based off of their need, their impulsive behavior for things like carbohydrates and aroma. Right? So we can't let them be the ones to decide what's best. We have to let the gatekeepers who are the ones that have been working with the plant and know it deeper level, just like the guys making hash, to be the ones to deliver what they should want from it.

2:15:32SpeakerBecause if we just let the people go, then all of a sudden, then you just have The same effect that you have, you have, which is kind of, to me, why we've entered the fast food era of Canada.

2:15:42BubblemanYeah, and you get distillate, botanical turps, and floor sweepings. And spray packs. Yeah, and spray packs.

2:15:50SpeakerSpray packs, exactly.

2:15:52BubblemanDo you see the documentary on spray packs, Mojave? Yeah, there's a documentary out of Atlanta or something. I've been talking to the guy on Twitter. It's pretty eye-opening, man. Holy... They are spraying packs and loving it. Absolutely. I always go back to the same thing that people have blown out their olfactories to the point where the botanical terpenes are something that they can finally perceive. And they are so excited when they perceive it.

2:16:23BubblemanI mean, here in Canada, I'm certain that the number one skew for pre-rolled joints would be a botanical terp distillate, you know, milled flower joint. It would guarantee B. And I know Chris Barone with his clear brand did very much the same thing throughout the US, right? You know, very popular, always the most popular. Hurts my soul, but yeah, I just wonder, like, We've been banging our head against the wall for 30 to 40 years trying to get people more inspired to perceive cannabis on a deeper level.

2:17:02BubblemanIs it that we have to teach them how to perceive before even bringing cannabis into the picture?

2:17:11BubblemanIs there a way that we can propagate?

2:17:14Collin PalmerYeah, dude, I was going to, well, the thing I was going to say, kind of what you're inspiring me to think on is, and I often have thought this, specifically when I was doing a lot of this formulation work over the past three years was, You know, we have so much influence from other industry that are so much bigger than our industry. And, you know, that could be beverage and food.

2:17:40Collin PalmerIt could be the tobacco industry. And I think watching the explosion of vaporizers in tobacco and those flavor profiles spill over into our world, Has been insane. I mean, it's, it's, it's really, I mean, not, not to discount the work that can be done and the things that I know that you're capable of abstract, but it's, is it necessary? I don't, I, I ask myself often, you know what I mean?

2:18:10Collin PalmerDo, do, can we just, Can't we just grow the plants at scale and then extract everything we need and just say, hey, this is your this is your color palette. Sorry, we don't go outside of the primary. But people want neon and they want all these things, you know, as an example. But but, you know, I wonder, you know, how do we fight against that? You know, because it's where these these people that come into the industry are looking at what All of these people in droves can sell for them easily.

2:18:42Collin PalmerRight. They're not willing to really do the work. And that bar is really low for them. That high bar that we talk about in terms of cannabis profiles, these are things that some people just, they want their cherry, as you said, you know, as Mojave has used before. And it's their cough drop Luden's cherry that they're looking for, not a cherry pie that we all know comes from this bouquet of wonderful, amazing, complex, you know, chemical constituents that make that up.

2:19:14Collin PalmerBut You know, going back to one thing, I think you said earlier about the You know, flower itself, you know, not being as terpy. Is it because back, you know, 30 years ago, is it because we've evolved with learning how to do things in a much more, you know, contemporary way and learning that, hey, we actually have to look at set points of relative humidity and temperature and all these things that before it was like chop the thing down and sometimes just let's trim it right then and there, you know, when it's wet, for instance.

2:19:49Collin PalmerSo I just wonder, you know, sometimes, you know, through the maturity of working with the plant itself, we've learned how to preserve these things. And as a result, like I think Nick said it, the

2:20:12Collin PalmerThere are now these new experiences that perhaps we didn't have before because we didn't know how to capture those experiences and allow that to be a part of the, you know, if this is the analogy of color, the color wheel of feelings, so to speak. I just want to put it back to the group, you know, as we evolve, you know, breeding for these aromatics, I think, is the next phase.

2:20:39Collin PalmerYou know, there was, you know, in the world of cannabis growing, I know I've been asked to grow things that are not as aromatic in the past because it was just too difficult to move it around. And now we then we moved into a world of like, can you just make it the most rank crazy thing that blows the room out? What do you guys think in terms of that balance, specifically Mojave?

2:21:01Collin PalmerWhere do you think we go with that? Is it big breeding programs or is this just preservation? What do you think?

2:21:10SpeakerWell, Colin, I think you can't underestimate the impact of clone-only plants that got distributed in terms of aroma. Like OG Kush, for instance. OG Kush, before OG and Sour, Or Kim were widely distributed. Cannabis was all these different things, right? It was all over the place. And then when those plants, they hit, they hit a button, they did something to the consumer. And I don't think the consumer automatically said, oh my God, that's killer weed.

2:21:44SpeakerThey just went, holy shit, I didn't know weed could be like that. Like it was just like they take a hit and they start chomping their mouth like they lick their lips because the smell, the smoke left a residual taste. And that was new. And then those clones went everywhere. So all of a sudden cannabis, which was all these different things, all of a sudden became boom, loud.

2:22:07SpeakerRight. Like we turn the volume up like in three or four years by distributing clones everywhere and every breeder, including myself, even though I used OG and sour and I didn't select for those turf profiles, I used it to cross it into my stuff because no one could resist turning up the volume. Right. And it was partially It was partially because, God, I just thought of a really fucked up story, but I'll just tell this.

2:22:36SpeakerIt was partially because of the effect, but really it was the marketing side. And this is the story. I knew a guy back in the day, one of the OG OGs, and he knew how powerful OG was. He knew that it was like a signal, just like Jeremy was talking about, chemical signals to other plants, right? Altering their chemistry, right? So he was fond of going to strip clubs.

2:23:04SpeakerAnd he had a little thing. He'd take a bud of OG, and he wouldn't put it in a plastic bag. He wouldn't put it in a jar. He'd stick it right in his pocket. He'd go and get a lap dance and watch the dancer freak out. Oh my God. And it was his little thing, a little bit of a predatorial thing, right? That he'd go out there with this OG signaler, right?

2:23:30SpeakerBecause it was powerful. It was that powerful, right? Now we took that and we put it as the backbone to almost everything in cannabis. So when modern people think of cannabis, they think of gas, they think of fruit, they think of these things that are like prevalent in a lot of stuff. But it wasn't prevalent between cloning, for one, and then that clone went everywhere. So it really is, it's the skunk one, Genghis Khan effect thing where all of a sudden this big aroma wheel gets narrowed to like the biggest, loudest neon thing possible, right?

2:24:05SpeakerAnd then all the breeding work that happened after that to bring out all the cakes and the cookies and stuff through that same pathway, you know, and then all of a sudden cannabis is just this other thing really quick. And it's totally different than it was before. Because it's so much more dynamic. And just to that point of that dancer, it wasn't like, oh my God, you've got killer weed, I want to smell smoke.

2:24:31SpeakerIt was, oh my God, what the hell is that? And that's like a evolutionary, I mean, you can't, you're not going to go around that. That's just like, it just.

2:24:40Collin PalmerSo this spawns a question that I have for Abstract. He's like, I was, Max came out to see me in the East Coast and we were hanging out and we were chatting about, I was talking about similar story. I was like, I grew Calio when I was a teenager and man, it blew my head off. I didn't realize cannabis could be that. I didn't know that this bouquet of orange and acrid orange could exist.

2:25:03Collin PalmerAnd, you know, he talked about the research that you guys had done with Tangi, which, you know, Callio is the backbone of Tangi. Those that don't know crossed into into Sam's work, actually Skunk One. So. You talked about the new citrus compound that you had discovered through doing countless studies to get to that. Can you talk on how that came about and what varietal? I think you did use Crockett's Tangirite.

2:25:37SpeakerLike, was that a clone?

2:25:38Collin PalmerWas that from seed?

2:25:39SpeakerOh, so actually the very first time that we had ever really seen the breadth of VSCs that are not gassy skunky, but tropical citrus. And so these are the ones more similar to what you find in hops typically that are desirable. Thermocaptohexanol, Thermocaptohexal acetate. But there's a few in cannabis that Nick, I'd love your input here. That I've seen in cannabis, but not in hops through all the hop stuff I've done.

2:26:06SpeakerThermocaptohexyl butyrate and then the hexanoate that we found last year. So there's a family of these cannabis makes. Nick, have you seen that in hops, the butyrate or the hexanoate? Yes, seen both. You have? Okay, that's fascinating. Yeah, because Tom told me he hadn't. So I'm going to have to tell him that you've seen that. Tom didn't have an STD. Yeah, well, you know, and he's all big on the olfactometry stuff, which we have now actually because of Tom.

2:26:33SpeakerBut yeah, Colin, so it's only first. So Kevin and Max were really big on tangies. They just love those heavy, heavy, dank citrus varieties. Yeah. And so, yeah. We made it a point to, well, let's see if we can figure out this chemistry here, right? And yeah, it was back in like 22, I think, maybe 21, where we really had to crank up basically the mass going into the instrument to detect those ones.

2:27:02SpeakerAnd actually using liquid injection, we actually see them more easily because they're slightly less volatile than some of the other VSCs. So when you do liquid injection, volatility doesn't matter anymore because you're shooting the whole mess of compounds onto your GC. But yeah, I remember seeing the first one we saw was 3-mercaptohexyl acetate in Sour Tangy. It was a rosin from a 710 lab just because we can get it easily around here.

2:27:25SpeakerAnd, you know, and it smells amazing. It smells so good. We saw that. We then, you know, tweaked some of our settings. We found the hexanol, and then we found the butyrate, and then we later worked out the hexanoate, the 3-mercaptohexylhexanoate from another variety. It was another 710. It was a Starburst 36. But yeah, finding those, it was immediately obvious once we had this, you know, the mass spec and then the structures like, oh, this is going to make perfect sense for why it's generating these smells.

2:27:52SpeakerAnd what's so cool about this. And so the reason why I think the, the, because we have about five or six kind of really unique compounds that are different flavors of citrus and tropical. That's why we have this kind of diversity within that sort of regime of citrus varieties that are probably all descendants from Callio, like you mentioned. Callio into Tangy, Sour Tangy from that, blah, blah, blah.

2:28:17SpeakerYou know, now you have Mimosa, now you have Papaya, which by the way, these VSCs are in those. So anything that's kind of like anybody would be like, there's a hint of tropical in there. You have some... distribution of those compounds in there and that's what's so interesting to me is that because you have four you know four or five compounds of the same family so probably the same biosynthetic pathways but they can still be tweaked slightly through genetics you know there's i think there's a lot of really cool room there to keep pushing in that area of flavor space because if you can like maybe take two of those out and raise one up through just breeding you might be able to produce a new version you know a really Pure grapefruit versus kind of like a tangy sort of grapefruit, you know, or if you go with the hexanol, Nick, I mean, again, you can probably remember this better than I, it's passion fruit, correct?

2:29:05SpeakerI believe that's like one of its main aroma descriptors. So if you actually, if you have a ratio of 3-MMP and 3-MH, at a 3 to 1, I think it's passion fruit. Sorry, other way around. The 3-MH being the higher one is more passion fruit. The 4-MMP being higher tends to be ruby red grapefruit. Gotcha. Yeah. So perfect, perfect example where, you know, if you tweak these levels just slightly because they're so odor active, you can get a completely kind of new variant of a citrus smell that just, you know, wasn't on the market before.

2:29:36SpeakerSo, you know, to all the, all the cultivators and breeders who are pushing in that direction, like, man, I don't know. And this is why I'll be honest. Like the, I think all this new science is great that, you know, we're doing and other people are doing. But, you know, it's not practical yet for breeders and people who are doing the work, right? And so that's why we try when we can to work with people to help, you know, help them out, help the industry, whatever.

2:30:01SpeakerBut to me, it's like, we need to get this into testing labs, right? We have to give you, Colin, you, Marcus, you, Mojave, the ability to be like, okay, I think I'm honestly unique here. Maybe it's subtle. But if it's something unique, at least then you can be like, okay, I know it's there. And then you can track things quantitatively, which, you know, hey, the nose is great.

2:30:22SpeakerDon't get me wrong. But being able to watch things track, you know, from a GC is, to be honest, it's pretty, it's not only awesome, but it's also very validating because it's like, hey, I'm pushing this plant to make more of these compounds, you know, through these different breeding practices. So yeah, I mean, those compounds are fascinating for sure. Yeah.

2:30:42Collin PalmerYeah, the one thing I think Mojave brought up is like the, you know, the, the, there are, there are building blocks out there. You know, he talked, you know, sour is a great building block. OG is a great building block. You know, in the flavor world, same thing. Lemon G is an incredible building block. Lemon tree wouldn't be lemon tree without it. You know, Calio is also a great building block if you can find it because those, those compounds from a, This is just what we've seen from just a production standpoint and processing is that those tangies stay.

2:31:16Collin PalmerIt's like why Superboof is amazing. It's because it translates all the way through processing to the finished goods in the final form of whatever it is. If it's hash, it's incredible. If it's rosin, it's incredible. Same thing with lemon G. So if you can work it to just from the plant perspective and the resin perspective to produce the type of resin that you're looking for, And the plant characteristics from a morphology point of view, an agronomy point of view, that's where the magic is to your point.

2:31:43Collin PalmerAnd that's where you can really push it into bigger realms. I mean, look what Starburst did. I mean, it, it, it came in as a, you know, in the, in the hash world, like a wave and everybody was all about it because of that exact reason you just said, because it, but if you look at the building blocks of that varietal, it has all of the constituents that you want to see, you know.

2:32:03Collin PalmerYeah. You know, you know, I mean, as a backbone, you know what I mean?

2:32:07SpeakerSo and Colin, you know what you and Mojave are kind of kind of alluding to here, I think is sort of, you know, OK, we have this genetic tree of cannabis, right? You know, OK, OG spawned all these varieties and then those and those and those something I've always been very interested in trying to map. And, you know, the difficulties is if if we don't know if a product is truly authentic, it's hard to Trust that, you know, trust that you're putting it in the right place on the map.

2:32:32SpeakerBut what I've always thought would be just so fascinating is kind of like that phylogenetic tree. But when did these metabolites start showing up? Right. Because I have I've determined from, you know, hundreds, thousands of data sets. That the real OG Kush should not have a certain type of ester. Because when I've gotten it from, you know, people who we trust, who, you know, Josh D here in SoCal, who, you know, kind of popularized it right here in LA, you know, he has videos of him growing back in like 96 with all these plants and these crazy stories, you know, it's wild.

2:33:08SpeakerBut when we measure his and we, you know, we measure varieties that he might be, you know, kind of playing around in that phase space. We don't ever see this specific class of ester called synecdoates. And so I mentioned this in our paper we published in 2023, where basically a lot of varieties that are more modern, especially kind of sweeter varieties, more sweet, exotic, whatever you want to call it, candy, all that sort of thing.

2:33:33SpeakerThey typically will have these in like fairly substantial amounts relative to other varieties. And so if you go the opposite direction, so we've gotten in some like Cambodian haze crosses that were provided by somebody who got the seeds from Todd McCormick, who I'm sure you all know. And Todd, you know, he's got really solid old genetics from Sam and other folks. But I always thought it'd be so cool to map out when did this metabolite show up Thank you for joining us today.

2:34:18SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

2:34:43SpeakerWe do see them. And so to me, that's like a really cool biomarker because it's like, oh shit, I can almost tell how old or, you know, how true OG is this versus, you know, something that's older that doesn't have them. So, you know, that's the sort of kind of cool, maybe like chemotaxonomic learnings that we can gain from this sort of, sort of work. And again, like if we could have a figure where like, okay, this, this variety brought in this chemical, this variety brought in this chemical.

2:35:07SpeakerI mean, I think that would be just so fascinating and such a cool graphic. Ian, you know, like when Philo started, you know, it was clear that one of the biggest issues that they had is they weren't willing to draw a line in the sand, right? And that was one of the things where we just said, look, if you guys don't draw a line in the sand, then it's just a bunch of noise.

2:35:25SpeakerAnd you just brought us something that'd be awesome. Like this has never been done, right? If you had, you create like a genomics program Tree, a phylogenetic tree, but you draw a line on the sand, you find the people that you think have the best possible representation and like the most likely guys to have the oldest version of Callio or Skunk One or Hayes or Cambodia, right?

2:35:48SpeakerYou get the hundred guys, right? But the criteria is you can't just have the sample, you have to have fireweed. So we need to look at the weed that was grown not 20 years ago, but you got to have old school weed or weed along the whole family history here, but also new, fresh, killer. We need both data sets because no one's ever done that. And that's really what we're trying to do here.

2:36:13SpeakerLike we're really talking about, I mean, the whole point about doing the phylogenetic tree is it's not... It's not botany. We're talking about drugs. We're talking about the market. You know what I mean? I mean, it's botany, yes, but the real reason, what does it support? It supports the industry, right? So that's the data that's so badly missing. And one other thing I want to bring up real quick before I forget is last week, you guys, I listened in on the show.

2:36:38SpeakerIt was such a good show. And the...

2:36:44SpeakerThe data that you guys presented, Colin, your distillate versus rosin chart, that was fucking awesome. And then also, I'm not sure who it was, whether it was Steven or you who brought the AKG stuff. And it makes me think, because AKG is used for when are things psychoactive, right? It's the only definitive way to measure when something... That's what the study was on.

2:37:10Collin PalmerThat's what we used. Yeah, yeah, that was the standard.

2:37:15SpeakerIf that was paired with the EKG work, was paired with aromatic work, like what... What is going on, for instance, identifying which aromatic compounds have a psychoactive response versus all the other analytic stuff because really that's all we're chasing here right so you've got the you've got the profile you know where it is on the curve and then you start tweaking it with different aromatic profiles to see if they have any impact whatsoever you're going to get way better data then than trying to get any type of a receptor affinity type aromatic thing and that yeah so if he

2:37:55Dr Mark ScialdoneHe presented one set of results, Mohave, that were really compelling. So he had in his testing group, he was comparing a really terpy live resin vape pen made versus a distillate vape pen with just some store-bought terpenes added to it. And the data was very, yeah, you could see right away there was a peak. So he was measuring this PEL, which is some measure of... Psychoactive something level.

2:38:29Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, psychoactivity level or something like that.

2:38:32SpeakerBut but sorry, just because this is this is really just I'm just thinking about it out loud. But to Nick's point about the pleasurable experience being so necessary. So you have the first curve, which is just my pleasurable experience with the non psychoactive. I just like the flavor of grape. Right. And then you have the other one, which is the grape flavored weed, which has that curve.

2:38:57SpeakerAnd then you add more grape flavor on there and you see if it when it has any type of an impact on that curve. Because I think what everyone wants to know is like, can you just take my profile of something that I've developed and then make it tastier? Or am I taking away from that?

2:39:15Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I think what I took away from this data, first of all, was the rapid onset of activity versus like the distillate pen. And then if you looked at the overall magnitude of the area under the curve, you could kind of gauge like how high people got, you know, in a way you're kind of like. Thank you.

2:39:50Dr Mark ScialdoneYou know, Ian's company had a really nice, they had two booths at BizCon. Well, I'll let you explain it, Ian. They had one booth that was specifically for sensory analysis, right? So you could just walk up and they had different, go ahead, Ian, you could tell them about it.

2:40:09SpeakerYeah, so, you know, we've recognized, and I wish Jeremy was here because, you know, he's all about this, the sensory, you know, bringing it into the 21st century for the cannabis world. So, yeah, we've been, there's a real lack of kind of infrastructure around that. And one of the hardest parts about getting good quality sensory data is, again, reducing the noise, meaning that people are trained correctly, that you have a large enough cohort of people to represent, you know, some approximation of, We're building it for ourselves, but we'll like, you know,

2:40:55SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

2:41:25Dr Mark ScialdoneIf you get enough inputs, like you say, that are diverse among that cohort. And yeah, so I see this in the lab all the time, especially like with sulfur. So with H2S, someone was talking about this before. Thank you for joining us.

2:42:04Dr Mark Scialdoneevolutionary pressures i mean why the human sensory organ would develop a way of distinguishing something that smells like from something that doesn't smell like i mean there's an obvious thing to it and i i love here so this is the um That review from 2008, and I'll just read a quote. It says, hop isohumalone, which, so isohumalone is an oxidized version of humaline, but it's basically on its way to doing all kinds of chemistry and everything.

2:42:42Dr Mark ScialdoneDegradation is the main source for well-known light struck off flavor in beers, right? This we're talking about beers, right? This should be music to your ears, right? Nick, you know this in spades. It said the main source, what light struck flavor imparted and then here's the compound, right? Three methyl, two butene, one thiol. At high concentrations, three methyl, two butene, one thiol exhibits quite repulsive skunky odors, where at lower concentration, its odor is appreciated by consumers.

2:43:20Dr Mark ScialdoneSo that's what it is in beer, right? And I think in beer, there's all kinds of chemistry that happens once this starts going on, right? Because there's the... There's a series of these isomunchone kind of nitrogen sulfur heterocycles that form all create that kind of skunky essence, which is why beer lines need to be cleaned, right? Beer can foul pretty easily. Well, beer... Thank you so much for joining us.

2:44:11Dr Mark ScialdoneI mean, at Abstracts, you guys are working on hops as much as you're working on cannabis. Isn't that right, Ian?

2:44:19SpeakerYeah, which I mean, it's taught me so much, you know, over the last five years, when we first just bought some hops from, you know, some pellets from a farm and running them and being like, oh, wow, this looks really similar to cannabis in ways, but completely different than others, you know, and It is funny that, you know, they're definitely, you know, kind of from a metabolite fingerprint unique.

2:44:40SpeakerAnd so I was looking for a plot to show you guys in the presentation just to kind of tie these families together, how they're similar, how they're different. But it's funny because when I plotted this on a PCA plot, and again, you know, this is kind of a It's biased towards the highest concentration compounds in this sense, but it was really fascinating because the hop distribution of kind of the 30 samples we had were kind of tight together.

2:45:03SpeakerYou know, there's a little bit of variety. Cannabis was all over here. It was just like there was so much diversity because you have like terpenylene rich varieties, you have osamine rich varieties, you have caryophylline rich varieties. You know, there's so much in the terpene profiles that are unique in cannabis that in hops, it seems to be more constrained. I think I've seen a linalool rich hop variety once.

2:45:23SpeakerNick, I mean, can you... I can hit you up on that, yeah. Please do. So there's seven major components of hop oils. And myrcene is usually between 40% and 65%, up to 70% of those. And then you get linalool that's sitting down around between 1% and 2% if you're lucky. And then you can get geranual, which is going to be similar to linalool. Then you get beta-caryophyllene, humulene, co-humulene, all these things, right?

2:45:50SpeakerIn terms of the major aromatic ones, it's linalool. All that stay in beer is literal geranual. And then the rest of the, so the 0.3%, 0.3 to 1% of the aromatic compounds are what actually make it into those hazy IPAs that some of you love so much. That's why we started looking at these survivables. Like you mentioned the, having the, you know, the two terpene profiles that were identical.

2:46:15SpeakerWe had a similar thing with hops and one of them hops was like, was mosaic. And I forget the other one, but these are two hops that don't smell anything like, and according to our traditional metrics of analyzing terpenes, they should smell identical. And that's when I was like, yeah, no, this, we're not, we're not looking at the right things. We're not looking at the right targets.

2:46:31SpeakerSo that's what we kind of moved. But a lot of those compounds also have, you know, it's suspected they have pretty protective or attractive properties for the hop cones to attract predators to eat mites or to deter other bugs. And we see that in stressed hop products effectively. You can get some like brown hops that actually smell amazing when you'd expect them to smell terrible. It's because they got stressed either through wind or hail damage or through mite pressure.

2:47:03SpeakerYeah, that's super fascinating. So I want to bring something up because Nick, you just mentioned something that reminds me of something. I made this connection recently. This is why I urge everybody, even if you're not necessarily a scientist, but try to read up on, you know, scientific literature in different areas. And so neem oil, I was, I had, I bought some neem oil at the store because I grow tomatoes in my house and I had some bug infestations.

2:47:26SpeakerAnd I'd heard from all these cannabis folks that neem oil is good for, you know, insect repellent, whatnot, what have you. Well, anyway, you know, just like everybody in this room, it sounds like I just smell everything because I just I love the experience of experiencing different smells throughout nature. And neem oil has a very distinct smell. If you guys have ever smelled it, it smells pretty gross, to be honest.

2:47:49SpeakerAnd I was like, oh, God, this has got to have some BSEs in it. And so anyway, I go in, so I go into the lab, I run the neem oil on our GC with that, you know, the sulfur detector on it. And yeah, it just lights up. It has all these unique volatiles that, you know, they're not in cannabis. So, hey, by the way, in theory, you might be able to tell somebody who's spraying with neem because, you know, they're mutually exclusive as far as their presence.

2:48:11SpeakerBut anyway, you know, long story short, what was fascinating about it is I was like, oh, this is cool. These compounds exist in neem, give it its smell. So I go look them up. And it turns out that they themselves actually have some insecticidal sort of repellent properties by themselves. And so these compounds, which are, you know, they're trivial in their chemical structure, but they're volatile. The neem plant presumably probably makes these in some amount as sort of like, you know, creating almost like a barrier for certain types of pests.

2:48:43SpeakerThank you so much for joining us today.

2:49:03SpeakerUh, mites or, you know, I'm, I'm not an insect guy. Any sort of insect might be repellent by certain varieties where these, you know, these things are very loud versus others. And maybe this has been observed anecdotally before, but it'd be great to put some science behind that because who knows, maybe you could make a cannabis derived or a cannabis smelling, uh, you know, insecticidal sort of repellent or something.

2:49:24SpeakerNo idea. You know, I'm, I'm not a business guy, but, uh, you know, that's kind of where my, my mind goes is maybe you can actually take advantage of these characteristics that these compounds have.

2:49:34Collin PalmerI think there was a study done in a Russian hemp varietal that was high in geranol, which they did, I think, a two-spotted mite study with, and it repelled to some degree, I believe. But I think there's... I know actually a group that's working on a bug repellent using just terpenes right now. So I do believe that's totally possible, but from a plant... Breeding perspective. I mean, I don't know.

2:50:06Collin PalmerI mean, Mojave, you ever seen anything that's like super high in gerund? I've never seen any. I've seen in, you know, minute amounts, but not enough.

2:50:17SpeakerYeah, I mean, significant amounts, I guess I can't, not off the top of my head, I'm not good at remembering numbers, but I have seen plant COAs where it did spike my thought. The first thing was that this is a known horticultural oil and you could easily be extracting it from cannabis. I mean, just like all the other things that you can relatively easy extract from cannabis, as opposed to the other plants that they came from before.

2:50:38SpeakerYeah, I don't know. It's fascinating though. I think it's pretty conclusively demonstrated on a lot of crops that if you add some of these things, it's really, really repellent to a lot of insects. And to some extent, other ones act as an attractant. So they mimic insect pheromones, and they'll bring in, if you find the right balance for those, say, the mite predators or ladybugs and with that, you can actually bring them in.

2:51:04SpeakerI would caution people on using neem or tea tree oil on any cannabis plants. Because yeah, they're fairly benign in small concentrations, but not when they're inhaled. And they tend to stick around for quite a while. So that's, I would be, I would suggest finding something else, if at all possible. Hey folks, thank you so much for the time. I need to jet out of here. And Ian, I'd love to talk to you more about sensory, the sensory program you're developing, because I built one with a team at YCH that I think did a lot of what you're talking about.

2:51:35SpeakerAnd so I'd love to see kind of where you guys are going with that, because it's a, It is a tool that's really necessary. And it would be great to have a standard for the industry. Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Nick. Thank you all so much for your time. Thanks so much, Nick.

2:51:47BubblemanAppreciate you, brother.

2:51:48SpeakerLikewise. Appreciate y'all.

2:51:51BubblemanAlways good to go down the rabbit hole with Mr. Ziegler.

2:51:57BubblemanThat is for sure.

2:51:58Collin PalmerWhat a Jeep. What a wealth of knowledge that, man. He's just amazing. What a cool guy.

2:52:05BubblemanYeah, well, you know what? It's interesting because when he was working at Yakima, he said it was a unique situation, whereas a lot of the big hops companies, they want to find a couple of sort of cultivars and stick with that. And Yakima was the opposite. They wanted diversity. And so he was just constantly growing different hops and looking for different things, growing novelty instead of, you know, the same old, same old.

2:52:33BubblemanAnd obviously that's... Well, that's where the excitement is, at least in the science, for sure.

2:52:40SpeakerIn the hop world, Marcus, there have been like a few varieties that have had huge impact. So meaning like the USDA bred varieties that were released and stuff, which went on to become all kinds of things. So I imagine more so than cannabis and hops, if you do breed and select a new variety that has impact, you get a big chunk of the market. Because there's not, it's not thousands and thousands.

2:53:08SpeakerIt's really just a handful. So I understand. I mean, as a, as a hop breeder, it must be, you know, like your likelihood is it's less likely to get a winner, but if you do get a winner, it's really a winner.

2:53:23BubblemanI'll tell you one thing. If you do have access to a hops extractor like Nick, who used one of those giant Thor custom jobbies, I think they spent about 10 million bucks on that extractor. He has a very deep understanding of the parameters that are required to access the textures and the components that you're looking for. Because we were talking about that earlier. I think Jeremy was mentioning how it was unfortunate that CO2 got such a bad name in the extraction world because everyone just seemed to use these default parameters that just produced this orange doo-doo butter.

2:54:05BubblemanIt wasn't really until I met Mike West and Mike West came up here. To work at Embark where, you know, he was, he'd been playing around with CO2 since around 08 or 09. So by the time he got up to us, maybe about five or six years ago, he had a very deep understanding of those parameters. And it was just, it was rare in the cannabis world to find someone that just had an understanding of that rather than just pumping that same template SOPs of just like, well, this is what we were told to do.

2:54:36BubblemanAnd so I got to watch the numbers and make sure at all. All right. Well, whatever we need to do, I guess. Supercritical is a hot extraction, right? You know what? We still have a brand new CO2 5000 PSI EU GMP.

2:54:55BubblemanThank you for joining us.

2:55:15Bubblemanunused and even the company came out and did like the you know the background on it the audit on it to present it to any buyers that showed yeah it's new hasn't been used just too many people in Canada with those things sitting in crates in uh in their facilities it's really unfortunate actually I hate to hate to see any type of equipment just not being used.

2:55:40BubblemanYou know, I always told people they'd be like, these bubble bags are pretty expensive. Like, is it worth it? I'm like, as long as you don't put them under your bed and not use them, it'll absolutely be worth it in some way, shape or form. Now, if you put them under your bed, Because the odd person would tell me that. I'd be like, hey, how did those bags?

2:55:59BubblemanOh, they were useless. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, I put them under my bed and never ran them. I'm like, well, that's you being useless, not the bags. Bags are just a tool, man. Come on. Got to swing the hammer.

2:56:11Collin PalmerMark, is CO2 a good extraction method, in your opinion, from an efficiency point of view? Or is it more targeted than ethanol? Are you asking me?

2:56:24Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah. Well, supercritical is hot, right? It's above like 78 degrees, right? I mean, it's hot. It's going to melt waxes. And I think the promise of CO2 is that you can do an extraction and then do selective letdowns at different pressures to fractionate your fats from your lipids in your and your your terpenes it's not that clean it's not that it's not that easy to do that i mean it it can work but from what i remember it was a really long extraction right it was like Yeah, several hours long.

2:57:09Dr Mark ScialdoneIt's like, fuck, we could have emptied out a butane extractor several times in the same time, even making water hash. I mean, I don't know, like the scalability. I mean, certainly like, I think it was oversold, Marcus. I think like if you want to... Oh, it was totally oversold.

2:57:27Bubbleman99% of people that bought it had no idea. It's too bad we didn't ask this question while Nick was here because he ran a unit for years at like 4,000 pounds an hour.

2:57:39Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah.

2:57:41BubblemanI had a few.

2:57:42Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I was just going to say, if you went to BizCon, like around 2018, 2019, it was all just big, shiny tanks, right, Colin? You go, you walk the floor, it was all these companies trying to sell extractors, a lot of European companies and German companies and companies that, you know, just said, oh, okay, there's a new, you know thing to extract right we've been extracting i don't know whatever Now we're going to extract cannabis.

2:58:13Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd I think they tried to do like a one size fits all solution to it. And it's, it's a hot extraction, right? I mean, so, and the other thing is that it doesn't do well with water, right? So if you're doing like a live extraction, can't extract live material, you can only extract dried material. I know that like some people were able to fine tune it to where they can get a nice Terpene extraction.

2:58:38Dr Mark ScialdoneI've had CO2 extracted terpenes. They are proper. But I think the scalability of it was never going to be what other methods could do. So I don't know. That's just where I come down.

2:58:50Collin PalmerWe had a 210 liter column unit that we had up in a license up in Massachusetts. So there was a department running that and just seemed like eight hours to get through two columns like that seemed like a lot of time. You know, right?

2:59:09BubblemanProductivity. Well, I think that's why everyone just uses a co-solvent. It's like, it's pretty, pretty easy fix. Or get it down to like two hours. I mean, that's what I do. But that takes longer than two hours. And it's laborious.

2:59:25Dr Mark ScialdoneBut you can do a hydrocarbon cycle in less than an hour, you know, with a good recovery pump if you're, you know, do an active recovery. And, um, I don't know. I mean, I'm trying to think of that guy in Colorado. There's a guy in Colorado who is pretty known for his CO2 terp extractions. And I've had his pens before and it tastes great. It tastes proper.

2:59:49Dr Mark ScialdoneI just don't know how it scales, you know, like how productive that is in production.

2:59:54Collin PalmerSo what I remember, I had to bring in a microwave terp extractor to the building to catch up with the demand because they just couldn't produce enough terp. And then they ended up doing blends with the terp extractor that I brought in. And that was a learning curve too. That was early. It was like 2017 when I did that. It was interesting, but there's far better ways to get there as you're highlighting.

3:00:23Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, I've had to fight regulators who are against hydrocarbon extraction because they're like, ooh, CO2 is much more safer. And it's like, really? CO2 is pressurized up to a couple thousand PSI, and this butane extractor is 40 PSI, right? What do you want to stand next to? Something that's pressurized to 1,000 or something that's pressurized to just 40 or 50 PSI? And I guess what they, you know, I've given this spiel a couple of times for regulators.

3:00:57Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat they don't realize is that, you know, in everyone's backyard, right, they have a propane tank hooked up to an igniter, you know, in their gas grill, right? And they're worried about, You know, butane extraction and closed loop systems. You know, all the systems that we put in, we always do, you know, the C1D1 room, you know, proper plum, you know, everything through the wall. And, you know, you got to pay for that and everything.

3:01:24Dr Mark ScialdoneBut ultimately, that type of solvent extraction is going to kick ass over CO2 any day of the week. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

3:01:33SpeakerOver in the hops world, because I've been up to Yakima to like Barthos, one of the big producers, you know, I mean, they have huge industrial scale stuff, but it's primarily used just to isolate the acids. So kind of like if you are using CO2, the analogy in cannabis would be if you really cared the most about THC or THCA, I guess. Right. Because what comes out of the oil in the hop world is just from a fragrance standpoint is not good.

3:02:01SpeakerAnd so these companies at the temperature, what are you, I'm talking about for hops now, Mark, right? I don't know.

3:02:07Dr Mark ScialdoneThey're not prone to decarboxylation.

3:02:09SpeakerThose kinds of acids don't are not, you know, it's different chemistry, right? Hops don't have the same sort of functional groups. You know, so it's mainly like humulone and, you know, co-humulone. These are the, the bittering acids that people need in bud light. And somebody mentioned in the chat, like they need it very standardized. That's very true. And so, you know, when you do these huge, huge amounts of Thank you for joining us.

3:02:51SpeakerShowing the how, you know, butane is naturally selective for the most part for what you want. And so we did a few different extraction temperatures using butane at our facility in Long Beach. And you can basically systematically watch that wax fraction just, you know, drop down to I think the lowest to get that we got. We were at like negative 50 C or so. I know people go lower, but it's diminishing returns at that point as well.

3:03:15SpeakerAnd having a large chiller run a large unit. In the middle of the summer, you know, that, you know, you run into issues with the infrastructure at that point. But yeah, so I mean, that's why butane I think is just so good. You can freeze out a lot of that junk that you just don't really care about. Hey guys, look, I don't have much time left. I got two things that I think that you guys would be interested in just on my slides that I'd like to just kind of show and, you know, go over two little stories and then, you know, I can bounce.

3:03:45SpeakerDoes that sound all right, Marcus?

3:03:46BubblemanIt's perfect. I was going to cut it short today at two o'clock so we can go a few minutes over and finish off your presentation. And then, yeah, I'll thank everyone for coming out and I'll go pick my son up at his fishing tournament and see if he caught some walleye. Oh, yeah, man. Awesome.

3:04:02SpeakerWell, the first one, you know, I saw somebody asked this in the chat, so I figured I'd throw it up here. You know, there's this kind of debate that I think has been had around the industry about different lighting sources for indoor growing. And so we were lucky enough to catch Josh D again, who was cultivating OG, the OG OG. This is about two years ago now, but we finally kind of put it together.

3:04:26SpeakerSoil Grown, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm, Storm,

3:04:47SpeakerAnd what we found is, you know, there's some subtle changes, but to be honest, there's not a ton. And so really this, you know, we were interested in if these gassy compounds would be changing under LED versus HPS. So we see a, you know, a small change in THC content, which again, you know, people care about that. So we're showing that basically, you know, not a substantial difference there.

3:05:08SpeakerThe terpene profile concentrations were identical in essence, you know, they weren't statistically significant. And then when you look at just these volatile, you know, these sulfur gassy compounds like pernil thio, pernil thioacetate, they're fairly similar too. The only thing that we saw that was really different between the two lighting sources was the LED morphology. The bud morphology was much tighter than the HPS. And this is something Josh had told us.

3:05:33SpeakerHe's like, yeah, man, I really, you know, I like the HPS because that's what OG is supposed to look like. Right. You know, OG is supposed to be kind of like light and kind of fluffy, not super tight nugs like a lot of the more modern ones are. But anyway, I thought this was really cool because it basically shows that you can kind of fine tune, you know, the density, at least in some circumstances, maybe not all, but, you know, at least in this OG variety, you know, he was able to do that with while retaining pretty, pretty similar sort of, you know, key chemical metabolites.

3:06:03SpeakerSo I thought that was cool. The next thing is that we did, because we were talking about kind of like how sulfur is metabolized by the plant and there are these microbes that can kind of eat sulfur and convert it into something more functional and more useful. So when we first found these metabolites, we were interested in determining if Well, hey, does just excess sulfur in any, you know, salt form, specifically we use potassium sulfate, does that really change the, you know, the outcome of the metabolites that are expressing in the plant?

3:06:32SpeakerAnd so, you know, the question was, would higher sulfur salt content increase VSC content? So we did this study. We were working with just a local grower. And so we only took two plants. So again, you know, I don't think this is like not publication quality, but I still think the results are probably, you know, fairly consistent. We took three from each plant, three samplings from each plant to get an average across them.

3:06:57SpeakerBut what we found is that the other thing I'll mention is that, you know, we weren't seeing a lot of changes early on when we were using a very small addition of the sulfur salt. And so towards when we flipped over to flowering or whatever it was, we decided to, you know, let's throw in excess if we're not seeing a change. Both from a plant growth perspective, like we're not seeing, you know, leaf burning or any of that sort of thing.

3:07:24SpeakerAnd so that's what we did. We literally just kept throwing more and more in because we didn't know what the range was at the time for throwing in too much potassium sulfate for the reservoir size versus too little. And so we probably started way too low for the reservoir size that he had. But anyway, we ended up tossing in quite a bit excess of the potassium sulfate by the, you know, by the end of the grow.

3:07:46SpeakerBut what we found is that we do see a little bit of differences between the cannabinoid content, slight increase in the experimental group versus the control. And I have this moisture unadjusted and moisture adjusted because this is something if you And maybe people have noticed this, but we've done a few studies since then where we're kind of modifying salt content by bumping up one of them. What we've found consistently is that the amount of moisture retained in those plants where we're adding the excess salt actually resulted in more kind of like with the same length of curing and drying, a higher moisture content.

3:08:22SpeakerSo the control plants came out of this at about 12%, 11, 12, kind of like where you want it. And then the experimental were actually at about 14. And so, you know, when we got the flower in and we did the water activity test, like, oh, wow, that's actually, you know, a little higher than we were expecting. So there is that wrinkle in the data too. But what we found is that basically there wasn't a huge difference.

3:08:43SpeakerSo on the left are the individual plants, on the right are, you know, just averaged together. And basically what this is showing is at least potassium sulfate, you know, maybe a different sulfur source like mag sulfate or calcium might have a different result. Ammonium sulfate. Thank you so much for joining us.

3:09:26SpeakerBut yeah, just thought I'd present this data because I thought some of you guys out there might appreciate it. So yeah, if you guys have any questions, you know, I know we got to hop off, you know, I'll try to quickly answer any.

3:09:38BubblemanNo, appreciate it, Ian. It was a great conversation today. I sent you my digits in the private chat so we can link up. I don't want to have to go look for the email, not find it, and then reach out to Dave and be like, hey, can you give me? So I got my number right there for you. I want to thank everyone for coming out today.

3:09:53BubblemanDr. Mark for helping organize the show. Nick Ziegler, Jeremy Plum. Wonderful to see those guys. Mojave, super stoked that you popped in. Colin, always a pleasure, my brother. And yeah, really, really was stoked to see the, just happy to see the direction that you guys are going in. And I hope this is really just the first of many shows about the aromatic volatiles of cannabis and the olfacts.

3:10:22BubblemanThank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

3:10:40BubblemanA superstar in her own right. So always happy to have these conversations. Thanks everyone for watching. I want to thank Press Club for their sponsorship of the show today, as well as Puffco. I was puffing on mine the whole show. Yeah, may the full melt bless your bowl sooner than later. We'll see you next week. Peace out, everyone. Much appreciated. Bye, everybody.