Legacy Genetics California History

0:21BubblemanHere we are. Here we are, guys, just staring off into the abyss here on Sunday morning. Sometimes I don't know if the stream has started, but apparently it has started. So welcome, everyone, to Hash Church, Season 11, Episode... 30. Episode 30. But we have done 30 episodes this year already. I'm pretty impressed. As always, I'd love to start off by acknowledging our incredible sponsors who make this possible for us.

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3:20BubblemanAnd in the meantime, let's Bring in...

3:25Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThe gung hoes.

3:27BubblemanYes, these are the gung hoes. They show up at 9.01. In fact, they showed up at more like 8.55. So this is the gung as ho as you can be group in the morning. Appreciate you guys. Really, sometimes it's not so fun showing up on a podcast by yourself in the morning after you took too many milligrams of THC. That may or may not be what I did last night.

3:53BubblemanWelcome, everybody. Nice to see you, Caleb and Etienne and Dominique.

4:00Etienne FontanWe'd like to introduce Dominic Corva, Dr. Dominic Corva. He is what was Caleb's professor. I went during his undergrad. So Dr. Corbett has been working on history, especially California history. And we're going to be working with him in the future on some ideas and concepts. But we wanted to introduce Dr. Korba, because he has a vast experience in cannabis, and not only does he have experience, he's kind of been hoisted into a position of being a cannabis historian via...

4:43Etienne FontanUh, grants and the research that he's doing. So, uh, we've been putting him in contact, um, or trying to find a lot of the elders, uh, so that they can tell story, um, so that he, they can share their truth because a lot of our history is undocumented, right? It's, it's mostly by word of mouth. It's, it's occasionally in high times when high times was going, um, But for the most part, you know, it's it's pretty unsung, challenging work.

5:13Etienne FontanAnd of course, Caleb came in as an undergrad, and now he's rather experienced in, yeah, in the history as well as continuing to document the history. So They've kind of been tied at the hip. So we wanted to bring in Dominic in the past, but unfortunately, some illnesses and things happen as life happens. So we're just happy to finally have him show up. So welcome, Dominic. Please introduce yourself, where you are and what's going on in the world.

5:41DominicHi, ATN. Thanks for that introduction. Hi, everyone. This is Dominic Corva speaking to you from Arcata, California. A little spot that affectionately referred to by the locals as Pneumonia Alley, just up Fickle Hill a little bit, east of the university. My cat is bugging me, so that's, sorry, my screen's going to go a little weird. He'll probably make an appearance. Yeah, so I am currently an assistant professor of sociology here at Cal Poly Humboldt.

6:20DominicWhy is it called that? What is that? We got a question already. The pneumonia alley. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Okay. Well, because, you know, Arcata is kind of foggy and overcast a lot, but just up the hill there, we're in the Redwoods. So my backyard is, I can show you, it's kind of like that. So like, even when it's sunny out, it doesn't really get sunny out. Like you can't even, you can't grow in the backyard here.

6:47DominicAs Jesse Dodd has informed me. If any of you know Jesse, he said, don't bother. It's just not going to work. So it stays kind of cold and wet, even when it's dry out in Arcata, which is rare, actually. I think there's been like three or four sunny days this summer. And yeah, Caleb's been trying to get me to do it anyway. But I have Tony up there in McKinleyville with his micro farm and he gets more sunny days.

7:24DominicSo actually we have some plants up there at some point. We never got Caleb out to Tony's? No, like once or twice maybe. Yeah.

7:36DominicBut yeah, here I am at the moment, institutionalized at Cal Poly Humboldt. And my journey to this situation, I don't know how far back we want to go in terms of introductions, but it definitely comes by way of Seattle and a detour out of academia back in 2013 when I co-founded the Cannabis and Social Policy Center with Sunil Agarwal and Michelle Sexton. Some of you may be familiar with.

8:07DominicAnd for about six years, about eight years, gosh, did that mostly and then got kind of pulled back into academia via a number of things that might bore you. But there was a co-edited book collection and then there was a Cal Poly Humboldt basically asking us to design a cannabis studies undergraduate program. And then Me joining Cal Poly Humboldt. So I kind of got dragged back into academia a little bit.

8:39DominicAnd then on that first year, we landed a fairly big Department of Cannabis Control grant that's called Legacy Genetics, People and Their Plants. And I'm working with Eleanor Kuntz and Janine Coleman and Berkeley's Todd Holmes on that. As Etienne mentioned, Thank you so much for joining us.

9:22DominicA history of cannabis plant genetics during the modern war on drugs. So since we're calling it, you know, 1971, the Controlled Substances Act re-prohibited cannabis at the federal level and cannabis eradication, you know, became a major thing over the next 30, 40 years up until the current situation, which obviously cannabis eradication is ongoing. And so I like to call the current situation prohibition with, not after legalization.

10:02DominicSo we have our subscope in particular is doing this historical geography by interviewing folks, doing ethnographic interviews, which are life history interviews. In which people are particularly conscious about their place and they talk about their communities. And so it's about, you know, how the building blocks, people started playing with the building blocks of lots of genetics, obviously the Mexican, the Colombian, the Thai, the Afghan at all, obviously prior to 1971, but in California in particular, People really started playing around with them and breeding in a way that is knowable to people's life histories around that time.

10:50DominicSo the two directions we go is regions in California over that period of time. So, you know, you think of Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino, but back in the 1970s, like Santa Cruz and Sonoma were probably, you know, more significant in terms of, you know, in terms of breeding in particular that had a wider reach. And then the Afghanicas hit and Humboldt and so forth. So, yeah. This is a little bit of a broad rambling introduction and I understand we have a lot of time so I'm going to keep going with it really quick.

11:36DominicI've been connected with folks like Rob Clark and Mojave Richardson and Ryan Lee since the 2016 Emerald Cup when we had an amazing time with a cottage that's basically A whole bunch of people were staying at, and that included a meeting that had just, you know, a lot of the historical folks. And I knew folks because I've been going to Humboldt since 2009, talking to people, a lot of the OGs, but the broader California kind of historical figures all kind of converged here.

12:16DominicAt that point in time. And so I kind of started with them and we're about 10 months into doing interviews. Um, And it's rolling along. It's tremendous. There's a limit to how much I can talk about who I've spoken with, you know, because of the, you know, the process. It's an IRB process and you got to keep people anonymized till the process is over.

12:42Etienne FontanBut... Hold on. Can you explain that, what that is? Because the layman probably doesn't know what an IRB is. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

12:50DominicSo for a university grant, ever since the Stanford Prison Experiment back in the late 60s, basically, you've had to really protect human subjects. That became kind of a thing you had to do because the Stanford Prison Experiment was traumatizing to the researchers. Back then, if you were a social scientist, you could just kind of just dream up scenarios and put people in them. And you didn't didn't really concern anybody, you know, like, oh, OK, like they thought they were going to die or they thought they had to kill their fellow student.

13:27DominicYou know, like so basically after that, in general, for for for social science research, as with bio scientific research in which like you could like kill someone if you're experimenting on them. Right. You had to protect human subjects. And so every university has a bureaucracy that sort of deals with that. And you got to like write out your plan for how you're going to protect people. And of course, we're talking about, you know, people who are talking about, you know, criminal activity, some of which, you know, the statute of limitations has expired, but you still have to kind of, you know, make sure they're okay with what they've said.

14:12DominicRight. And so, There's a big long process that we go through that involves people checking the transcripts of the interviews and making sure they haven't said something they didn't want to or that on further consideration, maybe we need to keep that quiet. And then you go back and forth and They choose whether they're going to be anonymous or not. That is ultimately up to people. But generally speaking, for what I'm writing about, it's a history of places, not a history of people, right?

14:52DominicI'm talking to people to get the history of places. Todd's work is different on the grant where it's talking to people and it's their histories. So generally speaking, except for people that are impossible not to identify really, like a David Watson who has recently passed, anonymity is chosen or not. That's a good thing to throw in there for clarity, ATN. And so I just want to shout out Caleb really quick as well.

15:25DominicAnd I'll do like I just... Caleb's been introduced here. I know he's familiar. But I just want to kind of reemphasize that...

15:35DominicAs far as graduate student assistants go, like you couldn't really dream up a better team or fit because Caleb has been just awesome with his passion for cannabis history and genetics. And he brings so much to To my knowledge played especially around the modern situation and breeders and just like constantly moving, you know, moving in and with the people who are currently doing it in a way that I'm a little more limited because of having to stay put and do things and take care of my cat or whatever else.

16:13DominicBut also because Caleb's a younger guy and he's, you know, got that energy and he's out there, you know, like, He went out to the Cornell events last year and came back. And all the people I was talking to were my friends, like ATN right here. They just loved Caleb. And so everybody loves Caleb. I love Caleb. And he's awesome. And he wrote a great master's thesis.

16:48DominicLook forward to seeing what he does. But for now, he is still riding with me on this journey. That's kind of a lot, big old exposition dump. So let me pause and see if you guys want anything else from that.

17:03BubblemanWell, welcome, Dominic. Thank you for making an appearance. I did watch the emails going back and forth between you and Etienne and was excited to see that it was working out and that you were going to come share today with Caleb. So that's really awesome. You guys definitely have a big job there. You know, the getting the history from people is a particularly important It's a particularly interesting job because there's a vector that I've seen since I've been involved in cannabis and that is the I am going to rewrite the history of what happened in cannabis based on not the reality of what happened but on what I want to have happened and I see it all the time.

17:46BubblemanI get people all the time telling me for instance that they've been using my bags since the early 90s and I'll say oh well I didn't Thank you so much for joining us.

18:01BubblemanI didn't, I wasn't, I didn't do that. Well, no, but they're your bags for sure. Like, I know they're your bags. And I'm like, okay, like, this is fucking weird. Like, I didn't have, I'm the source of the bags. I didn't have the bags. The bags did not exist. And so I'll get into these conversations. And I've seen it a lot just over the years in just little aspects.

18:23BubblemanI had one happen not too long ago where You know, just for my own small history, I had a friend of mine who works at a pretty big company. She's been making these moves to get me introduced to these very substantial people. And it took her a lot of time and motion to get me introduced to these people. And now we've got a whole thing going on.

18:42BubblemanAnd there might be, you know, even more going on in the future. And somehow this guy who's like a salesperson for this group that I'm getting linked up with, He texted me or something and was like, oh, let me get you so-and-so's number. But I already had so-and-so's number. I didn't need to go into this huge explanation. Well, now this guy thinks the whole reason I'm doing a deal with this company is because of him.

19:08BubblemanAnd now that's his history. He's sharing that history. With everyone, and in reality, it was this girl from this company who did many, many things in order to make that whole thing happen. But you can see how someone just swoops in, they grab a little, they grab the torch, and then they just go off with their history. So, you know, power to you guys, that is not going to be an easy thing.

19:31BubblemanI think much like sensory science, when we have to, as Nick Ziegler on one of our episodes recently on aromatic volatile compounds mentioned, When we do sensory science, we need to learn what our sensitive spots are and what our blind spots are. And that gives us the vision to sort of move forward and understand, okay, my sensitivity is going to affect the outcome of this data. I think the rewriting of history is the thing that would affect the data the most.

20:02BubblemanAnd sometimes I think people even do it almost innocently. You know, because they live in their own heads. You know, I always say never attribute to malice what you can attribute to ignorance. And I think that that's the truth. But I think it also, you know, speaks volumes on why having a young guy like Caleb with his finger on the pulse, you know, out in that, because there's also like, you know, a grain of salt, like taking these stories in with a grain of salt.

20:33BubblemanI'm sure there's times where Caleb takes them in and says, I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that resonated as something that's true. So how do you guys acknowledge and deal with that aspect of what it is you're doing?

20:48DominicWell, I want to turn to like Caleb's speak, but I also want to kind of address that.

20:58DominicThere are many reasons why, you know, people's memories are unreliable narrators, right? As you pointed out, like, it's not always, you know, malice or marketing, right? Which is kind of like the first thing you would, you know, like people wanted their story to be branded with the grand story. Because, you know, they want to be heroes in the narrative, right? But it's also just simply like age and repetition.

21:27DominicLike people have told stories multiple times and they kind of change over time, you know, a little bit. And, you know, we have a keen sense of that. And I think every ethnographic interview is, is aware of that. And you kind of got to put that up front that like the methodology certainly is, uh, um, We're relying on telling stories from people's memories and those may not be perfectly reliable.

21:54DominicSo we say that up front, but the fact that we're interviewing a lot of people in a lot of different eras that also are kind of like telling their stories, you get to kind of corroborate a little bit. Then you can also kind of check, you know, check basic archival, you know, things like when did this event actually happen, right? And then you also have, You know, if people are talking about a particular, you know, variety, like maybe a decade, you know, before it, you know, it got out, you know, you're like, what decade are we in?

22:32DominicYou know, so there's all that. But the main thing is, is that like past people's lifetimes, what we have to go on is not their memories. But the artifacts of their communities and like that's an even less reliable and less precise like way to kind of tell a story about what happened because, I mean, the artifacts can't speak. They have no vision. They can't hear. They're deaf, dumb, and blind.

23:03DominicAnd you're drawing major conclusions out of the record that is there. And of course, 99.9% of history, of course, just disappears into dust. So there's just sort of this key moment where it's like, it's messy. We're not going to make any claims that this is the final story. But here's a synthesis of stories. That you can kind of like start with and corroborate. And if you want to tell a different story, great.

23:35DominicIn fact, let's do that. Let's, you know, let's get, you know, as many people's perspectives and memories out there and build this historical record so that it is, you know, open and living as opposed to like, that's it. I'm the authority. We're done here. Right. It's a different approach. It's the beginning of more history rather than a this is it. It will never be revised. There's no history that's ever been written that hasn't been revised.

24:08BubblemanSo more data points, more data resolution.

24:12DominicYeah, totally. The sample is a human one and it's, there's a fair amount of them. There's a lot of hours that got put in and it's just connected to how connected like, you know, me and Caleb are as well, you know, within the communities. So it's really like our networks and also the networks that want to speak. And then we see up close, there's a big chunk of people who do not want to speak and that is A-OK. That is their choice.

24:41DominicAnd that is also something you put out front and transparently. It's like, it's not just the people we were able to reach. It was the people we were able to reach that want to tell the story and feel like it's valuable. So Caleb, you got other things to add to that?

24:57SpeakerSorry, my signal might be bad. Just that the archive of research is a real crucial part of that. And that what academics traditionally consider the archive, you know, what in layman's terms might be what could be discovered on Google Scholar, as opposed to what could be discovered on Google, you know, proper, which isn't even everything that's on the internet. So really, bridging that gap, I think, has been something interesting, because to what you were saying earlier, Marcus, right, like, The bubble bags story is easily verifiable that whoever thinks it came out a decade before it's first mentioned on Google associated with you.

25:43SpeakerThose are things that are just unrefutable when it comes to courts of law are using now Google timestamping for the internet. Even Kevin McKernan has successfully defended something using a blockchain timestamp. Like, these are things that academics are still catching up with. Yeah, so just wanted to throw that out there.

26:11Etienne FontanWell, I'm curious, Dominic, you know, of all the things you could have researched, you know, in the world and historically researched, why cannabis? What brought you to cannabis?

26:25DominicYeah, so, yeah, that's a question that's about a life history here.

26:35DominicI mean, it's a fair one. I just want to kind of gather myself and not be too, you know, too wordy. So, you know, I've been a cannabis consumer since, you know, the early 1990s. I started maybe a little later than most because I grew up in kind of a very conservative background. And I would say that cannabis and acid kind of helped me out of that.

27:00DominicFor a number of reasons, you know, one of which was just like relaxing me and dealing with like the anxiety of like not having access to the kind of same sort of cultural touchstones as other people. But, you know, people who I smoke weed with, like they took me as I was. They didn't care about like, they're like, oh, we're smoking weed. You know, like this is a, you know, it's all I really need to know about you, you know, or you, Highlight me, you know, uh, acid help kind of reset, you know, some of the, uh, uh, things I was having trouble letting go of, but, uh, I ended up going to graduate school in the early two thousands at the university of Washington, uh, and, uh, got there 2002.

27:43DominicAnd, um, I knew I couldn't like, I was a cannabis consumer, but like at that time, culturally speaking like in the social sciences even even among the sort of like you know lefty you know like uh uh social sciences like it you know it was kind of a joke thing that you didn't study you know like uh there was there was a let me be very clear actually there's a line of kind of like the left academics who went into institutions when they wrote about the history of the 60s the hippies ended up being for them a distraction From, you know, the folks who were trying to change the world because the hippies they saw were too individualistic and focused on changing themselves.

28:34DominicAnd it was a caricature to me of counterculture in many ways. But but really, it was the kind of like left and liberal disdain for counterculture that was still quite prevalent in the academy, even if these people are like, you know, you know, Marxists or whatever else. So I went to work on the war on drugs as a broader topic, especially in Latin America, as a geographer.

29:05DominicAnd so my dissertation work was on essentially that contradiction between the US promoting the war on drugs and also promoting essentially free markets at the same time in Latin America. And then the sort of... The politics that resulted. And I found while I was doing that, that they were actually connected to what was going on here at home in California around cannabis eradication. I found something broadly known in Latin America that I don't think was widely known at the time, which was that in Operation Green Sweep, 1991, that brought the federal troops to Humboldt County, Was a demonstration operation for the heads of Andean State who were pushing back on the coca eradication.

29:55DominicThey were like, hey, like you're making us eradicate and like these against our own people and like they're going to get pissed. And like you're not, you know, like you got you got peasants, too, you know, like and George Bush, the first was like, OK, you know, like, OK. Here we go. Like, of course, we're eradicating again. We're using our troops in particular, our military troops, as opposed to just our police forces, right?

30:20DominicBecause that was the main thing is that, like, you want our armies to do this? Like, we just got rid of dictatorships. And they're like, hey, you don't need a dictatorship to bring your army to police things. You can be a democracy and do it. Look, here it is. So that was a huge thing for me because it was accidental to discover that. That the geopolitics of the drug war pushed policing in the US and the thickening of policing and its connection to the military function.

30:55DominicAnd of course, it wasn't just in Humboldt. There were federal operations around that time in Hawaii and Oregon and Kentucky. And literally, I discovered this kind of geography of eradication that kind of shocked me a little bit. I wasn't super aware of it. And I almost kind of couldn't wait to finish my work on Bolivia because I was like, that's my angle. like i want to study this you know and they can't tell me no uh at this point and so uh i finished that and came to came to humboldt county uh because i was looking for the connection between the 60s social movements essentially and the the modern weed economy uh because that was the connection in latin america as well is ultimately it was the bolivian uh you know Uh mining the the unionized miners that ended up becoming the big coca growers in in Bolivia and essentially capturing the state in 2000 with Evo Morales right like the leader of the coca federation and there's a direct line between like the labor organizing the labor miners that got crushed by privatization Growing coca and becoming a dominant social force.

32:07DominicSo I was interested in kind of this, oh my God, all right.

32:12DominicI discovered just what was back then what seemed like such a wispy trail, which was a connection between Berkeley and a woman named Gentry Anders, an anthropologist, and the weed economy. And got ahold of her and started talking to her and just came out here and started talking to people. And 2009, people weren't talking to people too often. But because I was kind of coming in with this like drug war background and all these like college educated, you know, society dropouts who actually ended up doing so many amazing things here, like they were, they were interested in my perspective, like Douglas Fir and so forth.

32:59DominicUh and then before before too long because it was 2009 and you know what was going on in California in 2009 at the end like legalization suddenly appears as a as a around the corner possibility and people are starting to scramble because prices are dropping and there's like all sorts of like you know things they're causing you know Really like the weed people to come out, right?

33:23DominicThey're getting pushed out by history. It was as though like this bubble that they had existed in was suddenly like they couldn't, it was popped. The redwood curtain, you had to, it was getting thrown open, right? One way or the other. And so I got to see some of the organizing that was happening at that time and then getting kind of invited to be a part of it a little bit Because the old-timers kids and their peers were doing stuff.

33:53DominicAnd Kevin Joder, who's a dear friend of mine now, in particular around Wonderland Nursery, like so much was going on around that. And so they had me join them as the resident academic expert, like even though like I was only a couple of years in on the Blue Ribbon Commission tour, where Gavin Newsom came and charmed us. Pants off a bunch of hippies. I grasped the cult leader thing because I saw how...

34:24DominicDeft that dude was and charismatic around a bunch of people who hated government. And now they hate him again. But just, you know, the dude is slick. And then, you know, the tax people that came out, you know, Fiona Ma and George Runner got to ride along to Sunshine's Farm and other spots, other spots.

34:49DominicSo, so that'll happen and really kind of was like, okay, so basically when Seattle, when, when Washington legalized in 2012, that was like, I'm, I'm going to get off this academic train. I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Latin American political economy. And I was like, I want to be in this field as it opens up. And I have this, like, you know, at least knowledge coming from California that, you know, makes me a little unique there.

35:18DominicSo, you know, joined forces with the folks up there, continued to be in touch with the folks in Humboldt and Associates, what was then Humboldt State. And so... Basically, Humboldt State University had this cohort of people who were like not naive about weed uh and and and one or two that like actually knew and were kind of embedded in the weed economy a little bit that like put together this group that was a research group because they smelled money too uh they were like oh when cannabis is legal now we can get grants uh and so they they formed this group called uh you know the humboldt institute for interdisciplinary marijuana research and i gave the inaugural talk for it and Uh, they, they did some things in, in, in the 2015, 2016 stuff that was, uh, uh, contracts from the state, uh, to estimate things, uh, because MRSA was getting off ground, uh, and.

36:20DominicAaron Ward-Himmer is the name of the Institute. So I was part of that, you know, I was, you know, in that group. And even though I was in Seattle, and then basically when one of the co-directors stepped down, they asked me to join as co-director, even though I was, you know, not affiliated with the university at that time. That happened. And then... At that point, I had been involved in the landscape of legalization long enough to watch Washington, like what happened in Washington, which was the destruction of a community.

36:54DominicI watched legalization wreck things. And I did it kind of, you know, like it was a shock. It was just like two years from this like, you know, euphorious, jubilant atmosphere. Really the connections around medical cannabis, the interest in cannabis education and cannabinoid education. Ethan Russo was local. He was out there giving talks. There were a lot of people who were kind of on the edge, you know, of society medically.

37:24DominicAnd psychologically, I'd say, too, that like this was the thing that brought them joy and was meaningful and made them productive. And they were they were my people. And then I watched them get destroyed and it almost destroyed what I was doing to kind of hung on there by a thread for a little while. And. Uh, you know, my dear board members, uh, and friends, Aaron Varney, some of you may know, um, uh, Dockside, uh, Cannabis would have been the, you know, the main one, um, Donnie Wirtchapter was involved for a little bit, uh, you know, Sunil and Michelle.

38:08DominicSo basically when Humboldt started needing things from me, uh, that was just kind of the path is like, okay, things are petering out up here. And in general, like, I'm not sure where I'm at with the history of things other than as a harbinger of apocalypse, basically, for cannabis and cannabis culture and cannabis people. That legalization was, you know, a train wreck coming right at them. And I was trying to, you know, spread that message to whoever would listen.

38:44DominicInto something productive and constructive and very research related. Basically, the co-edited handbook that we did for Routledge was a really great exercise in pulling together a number of emergent researchers around cannabis that were, broadly speaking, critical of legalization in different ways. You know, some of them were more kind of constructive and some of them were more kind of like, this is a mess. But either way, it was an introduction to like social science, cannabis research in the time of legalization, you know, prohibition with not after legalization.

39:26DominicThat could be realizt because what I saw was all these people, you know, operating in delusional bubbles, like certainly the euphoria of like, oh, we made it, we legalized, right? Like all these people, I was like, you're happy now. You got like about a year, you know, and then all this fucking shit is going to happen. I'm sorry. Can I curse? Probably not a good idea.

39:48Etienne FontanYou can curse.

39:49DominicOkay. We fucking curse all the time. It's okay. It happens. Excellent. Excellent. So, you know, it ended up being a really good exercise in like realizing that there was this emergent kind of like You know, train of research that could happen that were about the ways that like, you know, the way the markets were set up were not functioning correctly. The, you know, the, the, the corporate politics, the commercialization was coming in, you know, then some positive stuff around what you could start researching now, because that was a positive part of legalization is that there was an element of research that was opened up.

40:31DominicAnd so like that was a really satisfying experience and kept me, you know, just kind of grew my connection to Arcata until pretty much, well, sorry, let me just back up. At the same time, roughly exactly the same time, Humboldt County called me up and said, oh, there's these equity grants. Like, can you write an equity assessment for Humboldt County? Like, we're going to apply for it.

40:59DominicAnd so I was like, well, I could just plagiarize my 2014 article pretty much. And, you know, like, let's do that, which I did. And, you know, a month, two months later, Humboldt County had $2 million, you know, for equity grants suddenly. And then, you know, the California Center for Rural Policy at Humboldt State, which was the outfit I did it with, was like, let's take this show on the road.

41:24DominicAnd Mendocino reached out and the word got out through the grapevine that maybe we could write some equity assessments. Ended up doing them with seven distinct ones and consulting on San Diego. So ended up doing the Emerald Triangle, Nevada County, Sonoma County, City of Santa Cruz, Lake County, City of Clear Lake. Uh, uh, in a, in short order over about a two year period, which, which brought me from like the humble kind of specialization to like a California, you know, a sense of California cannabis history.

41:59DominicSo how did I get here and be, be doing cannabis and cannabis history, particular California campus history, man, those, the equity assessment process was huge. So it was all like floating down a river that kept taking me places. It was not planned. Uh, there were moments when like. You know, it didn't seem like, you know, the river was continuing that, you know, we were at a dead end, dead end here and there, but really just kind of been on that path and been lucky to, you know, along the way, meet and cultivate all these wonderful friendships and communities, you know, beyond that, which was immediately around me.

42:36DominicAnd I feel like, I mean, Hash Church, I've been aware of Hash Church since the early 2000s when Reverend Jeff was part of it in Seattle. And we're still in contact. He was a character and a buddy of mine, part of my community. That's how I got to know about Hash Church actually, it was Reverend Jeff.

42:56BubblemanOne of the OGs, man. Like, you know, when I first met Jeff, I remember, well, it was actually Marbleslinger who introduced me to Jeff. Jeff was known as Dorky Jeff back then. And I was like, I'm not going to call him Dorky Jeff. I don't like that nickname at all. And they were like, no, he's Dorky Jeff. He's Dorky Jeff. And I was like, no. No, he's not.

43:17BubblemanHe's just Jeff. But he was a big part of the rosin, you know, releasing of the rosin. We did that together in 2014 where we went at my booth in Spanibus in Barcelona and we basically showed the entire community from like Remo to the Matt the Great Gardener to DNA Genetics to just countless people that came by our booth and we showed them the little hair straightener.

43:42BubblemanSo that was... That was a unique part of the history. And prior to that, you know, he used to get his mom's credit card back in the day and he'd come and drop like four or five grand on bubble bags and then drive all the way down the I-5 to California where he would end up with Space and Corpy, the Bizarre Brothers. And he would give them bags and...

44:06BubblemanThey were kind of like my three original bubble ambassadors, you know, like real bubble ambassadors. Space and Corpy, of course, start well, and Jeff a little bit as well, started the melt factor, the five and six star melts and what that meant. And they had their little hash spot in San Francisco there. And just, yeah, the whole history of it was so interesting. It's unbelievable that both Space and Corpy are gone.

44:34BubblemanSo rest in peace to those guys. Rest in peace to Wade Laughter and Subcool and Frenchie Cannoli and Skunkman Sam and Horatio Delbert and so, so many of our Hash Church congregation has passed away in the last decade. Thank you so much for joining us.

45:11BubblemanWe miss them. Fat Dabs. Really great to hear you talk, Dominique, and share your story. And yeah, that whole scene that happened in Washington was a bloody nightmare. It's crazy how, if you think like prohibition, what could be worse than prohibition? It's like, Maybe legalization.

45:33DominicYou never know. The problem for me is that people are using these words legalization and prohibition depending on where they're at in the situation as though they know what they mean. There's a relationship to them. In a sense, we've had

45:54DominicYou know, at least one legal supply chain since the 1970s through the University of Mississippi all the way to, you know, LV Musica, you know, for example, right? Like, and so prohibition was happening, it was gnarly and stuff, but like there was a legal supply chain, right? And so like, it turns out prohibition meant something a little more complex, right? And I think that the issue is legalization was that word that was like, And I think, you know, freedom, right?

46:23DominicThat meant freedom for a very long time. And there were lots of people with lots of different ideas about what that could be. We all thought they were talking about the same thing. And, you know, the idea that there were different people who had different amounts of power that could push what they thought was legalization, you know, like, That's what, that was a learning curve, you know?

46:49DominicAnd, you know, in Washington for me, like there's a, there's like even a fundamental thing. It's like, you know, there's no home grow in Washington. One of the first states, no home grow. And to me, like, if you, if like, it's a fundamental definition for me of, of, of the, the freedom that should be associated with legalization is like, if you, if you don't have home grow, you don't even have the, the, the foundational building block to me.

47:16Etienne FontanWell, that's why we fight for it everywhere and we're pushing for it in every state because we feel it's not only as important, it's crucial. And so, you know, as long as people are allowed to grow, it gives you an option. I've seen in states like Louisiana where there is no option. Thank you so much for joining us.

47:49Etienne FontanClosed loop systems like that that don't allow access because I know there's growers in Louisiana who could grow great cannabis or who would love to learn how to grow great cannabis but can't because that isn't there and people are pushing for it but it's harder after the initiative or the law is passed correct Dominic it's usually yeah if it actually goes in with the law as opposed to trying to change it after the the laws that

48:17DominicOh, right away, right away. Because I mean, that was the thing that like Alison Holcomb of the ACLU was always like, oh, and they can fix it later. You know, like, and it's just like, and you're not going to be around to actually help push that forward, are you? You know, like, yeah. So by the way, Louisiana, interesting as far as states go, like to my knowledge, the only state whose universities are in particular like LSU and maybe Southern, I don't know if it's public or not, public universities that actually touch the plant without a DEA license, a weird, you know, Weird freedom in LSU for like universities.

49:00DominicAt the same time, of course, as like, you know, strict prohibition is going on.

49:04BubblemanIsn't that where you are, Dr. Allen?

49:07SpeakerMississippi? Yes. I'm trapped.

49:10BubblemanYes. Welcome. Welcome to Dr. Allen. I'm not sure if you know Dr. David Allen Dominique, but he definitely knows a lot of the names of the people that you spoke with in regards to LV and some of the old schools. He's a retired cardiac thoracic surgeon who the DEA came after. Thank you so much for joining us.

49:39BubblemanFucking barefoot Volkswagen vans. Let's do this. This guy was a cardiac thoracic surgeon saving 18 year old boys from bullet wounds in their hearts. So very, very different sort of another part of the history. So I think you guys should know each other.

49:56SpeakerWell, Dominique, I'm very impressed with what you've talked about today. You have great experience and I love you without even knowing you. So I would like to add a couple of things about the semi-legalization of cannabis, which has destroyed a lot of things. There used to be more cannabis activists that you could shake a stick at, and now there's none. Because it's semi-legalization, cannabis is not legal anywhere in the United States.

50:34SpeakerAnd your definition, if you can't grow cannabis, you're not free. So I've been for many years, anytime I smell somebody smoking marijuana, I point to them and yell in a very loud, boisterous voice, I smell freedom. And I suggest anybody that's a cannabis activist, you start doing this because what we're trying to do, especially on Hash Church, is we're trying to change the narrative because this is a narrative about cannabis science that you can't find anywhere else No matter how much you study, the internet is almost useless now to try to look up cannabis science because it's blocked.

51:33SpeakerAnd so I like to tell people that, and I wish you would repeat this, cannabis and hemp are in fact money. And if you legalize in your state, Money will come to your state in one of two fashions. If the people can grow, then the money will come to the people and they will spend it inside the state. If the people can't grow, out of state cannabis cartels will come and collude with the politicians and give the politicians a lot of money And they will spend the money outside of the state.

52:23SpeakerIt's a fact you can't argue against. Let our people grow. Cannabis and hemp are nutraceuticals that should be in the diet of all humans and animals because it regulates a system of homeostasis for the whole body. And You know, I went to the doctors this week. I'm 73 years old. And my resting glucose was 104. And all my labs are perfectly normal. I attribute that to my daily use of cannabis.

53:06SpeakerIt's an Antioxidants and neuroprotectants. There's a patent. Everybody should know this patent. 6,630,507. Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants. In that same patent, they say that THC and CBD should be used in open heart surgery during cardiopulmonary bypass and coronary artery bypass grafts. It says it and you can't lie in a patent and get a number. It's the truth, but it's hidden in the science.

53:51SpeakerAnd that's my, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Okay.

53:56BubblemanWhen Dr. David Allen says the science is hidden, you know, at first I was like, oh, dude, you're being paranoid. But doing our show together, Cannabis Journal Club, where we go over these cannabis patents and scientific research, So, you know, there's a lot of studies that are complicated. Sometimes they're 80 or 90 pages long. They're total scientific jargon. And if you're not, you know, a PhD in this particular science, it becomes difficult to even decipher it.

54:28BubblemanAnd so the show that Dr. David Allen and I started was basically just to break down the scientific jargon on these, you know, even the first time he said it's a patent. So you can't lie on it. That went way over my head. I was like, oh, you can't lie on a patent. Yeah. What does that mean? But it's like, dude, like you can't lie on a patent.

54:48BubblemanLike they do research, they figure out patents. And here's a patent saying that cannabis is cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties unrelated to an MDA receptor antagonism. This is insane. I started realizing this is actually really fucking crazy. But, you know, he's kind of not enough people get it. They're, they're, you know, so we started this show, we started doing these, these, these documents. And it's one of the reasons I invite Dr. Allen on to church today was to see if anyone has scientific papers they want to share with us.

55:21BubblemanWe, we, we need more content to go over. And some of these patents, All of these are really hard to find online, even if you know the patent number, even if you know the name of the paper, it still doesn't always come up. And so we've had a few difficulties finding a few different papers. So yeah, if anyone has the ability to pass on I got a papers.

55:46Etienne FontanI got a data dump for you. I just did a FOIA request through the VA and for the last 10 years. And what we've uncovered is they're using one to two studies to basically block a lot of information. And there's also studies in there that contradict. Now it's almost 3,000 pages in the data dump. So there's a lot to go through and it took us a month and a half to go through it.

56:12Etienne FontanBut I'll be more than happy to share it with you. It's fascinating stuff we're uncovering through the VHA regarding cannabis, cannabis access, as well as cannabis use on VA property. So we're really kind of holding their feet to the fire because Also, what you're talking about is that data is how they're using it to steer conversations. And what we have seen is there's just one particular study they've been using to send to every particular Uh, registered, um, um, Democrat, Republican, et cetera, on any committee that seems to reach out to them.

56:52Etienne FontanAnd it seems to be a concerted effort. And that's a concern because if you're using one study or two studies to stave off a whole trove of access, as well as future studies, that's kind of, I would consider that sort of criminal in my eyes, at least.

57:10BubblemanWell, they learned from the best. Adrian Naha style.

57:13Etienne FontanOh, yeah.

57:16BubblemanJust do a couple of fucked up studies and then cite those studies till the end of time.

57:24Etienne FontanThe Kevin Sabet, as we call it, yes, today. That's the Kevin Sabet.

57:29BubblemanWonderful. So what's next for you guys, Dominique?

57:35DominicSo, uh, What we've got coming up next is a fall tour. We had a spring tour, basically, going around different parts of California, having community meetings that are largely about drumming up participation in elements of the study. But basically, we have a fall tour coming up that starts in Big Sur at the end of August.

58:07DominicWe'll include LA and Sacramento as well this time. But like for my part of the scope, for our part of the scope, Uh, we need to hit kind of the critical number of interviewees and then shift to, you know, analysis, uh, mode, which also includes like going back to the people we interviewed and, and, you know, making sure that, uh, they're approving the information that, that, that will be sort of analyzing from, uh, and so that'll be, you know, pretty much the, after the, after the tour, um,

58:46DominicWe're hoping to see Rob and Mojave visiting the states for their October crop tours. So I'm hoping to spend some of October traveling around and just hanging out with them and then really getting down to it, just hitting it with Caleb and You know, outlining, you know, we will have, you know, thousands of pages of transcripts to, you know, work with. So, you know, there's so much that won't make it into these articles that like, that's kind of part of the process too, is like, you know, Filtering for a broadly receivable and readable account that isn't getting bogged down in too much academic jargon that is also essentially has to pass peer review.

59:46DominicSo there's an element where you're doing historical geography, okay? So let's not worry about that anymore and let's just tell the stories. It can't be more delicate than you think, because for peer review in the social sciences, you've got to frame things in certain kinds of theoretical ways. But that's what's going to be next. It's tough to predict what happens this upcoming year. There are ways in which You know, my time to launch this cannabis studies program is, you know, launched and I want to kind of do more of this, but like staying here might actually get in the way of that.

1:00:34DominicAnd so Michael Poulsen over at Berkeley, you know, we're talking, you know, about just throwing me in to the Berkeley program. Thank you. Thank you.

1:01:07DominicThere's little mini Caleb's now running around because of Caleb actually, who are super awesome. And I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in the world. But yeah, I'm pondering, you know, what to do next. But like, you know what, like, since I didn't really plan any of this, like, it's tough to like ponder what to do next because what... It just, it comes, it comes.

1:01:36BubblemanThe path reveals itself as you start the journey.

1:01:40DominicThat's exactly right. That is 100% right. And so we'll see how that goes.

1:01:51BubblemanI love how you said you need to take all these stories and filter them. I'm like, oh, he's going to collect the 90 micron heads. That's what he's doing. He's going to run all these stories through his metaphorical bubble bags, and he's going to collect the 73, the 90, and the 120, make sure that all fits into the peer review. And yeah, I just thought that that was beautiful.

1:02:15BubblemanLook at that. And welcome to Mojave Richardson, who just entered the room. And I like I like that you made that mistake because that's my last name. So it was kind of like, oh, yeah, Mojave is like my brother. That's why it happened. Yeah, that's awesome.

1:02:29Collin PalmerReally cool, man.

1:02:31DominicMojave is joining us. He just popped in. Yeah, he just popped in.

1:02:34Collin PalmerDominique. Hey, Mojave. What's up, dude?

1:02:43Collin PalmerI guess I'll pop in a sec. Dominic, go ahead. Sorry, I just wanted to, Dominic, something resonated with me, what you said earlier, and, you know, we've had a system, and I was, you know, the other day, I have this, this is Robert Randall's, like, I guess his bulk box, and I also have this, and I was sitting here, I was listening to music, and I was looking at it, and I was like, not much actually has changed.

1:03:11DominicYeah. Yeah.

1:03:12Collin PalmerUm, and this is kind of proof of it. Like we have, this is our bulk, this is our joint case, you know, like, and there's been a system for this thing. It's just now we were actually allowed to now participate. Right. I guess. Right. Um, and I think it's at least, I guess, kind of, I don't even know if that's the right word. Um, but you know, One thing that I had a question for beyond that was when you do these interviews and you're looking for historical things, and from a cultivator's perspective, I had this deep thing in 2017, maybe 16 or 17, to want to try to identify and authenticate these clones, right?

1:03:57Collin PalmerSo we can know what things are for the sake of not even, number one, historical, right? Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:04:34Collin PalmerRight. And there's a lot there's a you know, there's a there's a world of truth that lays within these subjects. Right. And to uncover that truth, truth must be very difficult, I think, because there is so many wavering arrows, as I say, and not many straight arrows. You know, and yeah, it may fly in the air kind of straight, but it's got a wobble to it, right?

1:05:07Collin PalmerAnd I think that if that's the analogy, you know, how do you guys look at, do you find patterns within stories of many people that say things and you're like, okay, this is starting to track and make sense from story to story or... Is it really this person's been around so long that we can trust their word? You know, because again, our mind is our worst weapon, right?

1:05:31Collin PalmerSo, you know, if you can kind of walk me through that. Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:36DominicWell, you can you can trust people while also understanding, you know, that memory is tricky. And that also everybody is going to have a little filter in terms of their stories. But it is about like identifying patterns, right? And those patterns are geographical to me primarily. And they're, I love that you started with, you know, like it's the plants and the people because like the word for that is ethnobotany.

1:06:09DominicRight. And so, so like, you know, Rob Clark, you know, like a hundred percent and, and, but Rob's more on the botany side of the ethno for any number of reasons.

1:06:21SpeakerSure.

1:06:21DominicAnd so like what, what we're doing is more on the ethno side of the botany, but, but greatly informed by the movement of, of, of, uh, you know, genetics, for example. So like a pattern, right. Here's, here's one, this is probably no surprise to anybody. Right. But like, you know, The 1970 to now pattern is the globalization of cannabis, you know, at a level that is the further globalization because it globalized, you know, historically, obviously, from, you know, the Hindu Kush mountains or, you know, plateaus around that or David Watson says Southeast Asia, but it's, you know, Like how did this, how did cannabis like become global?

1:07:08DominicRight. And, and, and there's, you know, the, uh, the Skidians, you know, you know, uh, 3000 years ago, right. There's the, there's the different empires and the trade routes and whatever else, but there's something very distinct about the modern era, uh, in terms of globalization, which is that, you know, like it has happened in tandem with the globalization of attempts to eradicate it and police it. Right.

1:07:32DominicAnd that's pretty weird right there. But if you back off of that and just think about the ethnobotanical diffusion of cannabis, California becomes just this huge center of counterculture that was receiving weed from the rest of the world for the most part, right? In particular, Colombia, Mexico, and then everywhere our troops went, everywhere the sailors went, clearly like Panama's earlier or whatever else. But, you know, Mexico, Colombia, Thai, and Afghanistan, broadly speaking, which is not just Afghanistan.

1:08:14DominicAnd so actually that, hold that in your head for a moment because that actually is pretty important. But like these building blocks come over either as like bag seed or as intentionally collected seed from people traveling the hippie hash trail or Being on tour in Vietnam or you know like you know so many there's there's different vectors and let's just say the hippy astral is really important right and so like here's these building blocks and here's these like enthusiasts they're not just counter-cultural like weed smokers they're people who love to grow plants and really want to know the plants be you know like and really like have this politics about really their food That is about knowing where it comes from and it not being industrial.

1:09:01DominicAnd so they plant it in their garden and maybe they know about like Luther Burbank and like breeding is possible and like, It'd be cool to, you know, breed things and see what comes out, right? Make an F once, you know, like, and so they're doing that. And then like in the 70s, right, when things are a little more liberal, but also still undercover, they get together at like the Sonoma Harvest Festival, right?

1:09:28DominicLike, or you're, you know, Whatever like harvest, you know, gathering you might have in the hills wherever you are, whether it's the San Juan Ridge of Nevada County or the, you know, the hills of Santa Cruz or Mendocino or Humboldt or Trinity, right? Very localized stuff. But then also kind of these regionalized things like the Sonoma Harvest Festival brought people from like Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, right? And so the genetics were kind of like an exchange that way, but like California is like that node.

1:09:57DominicSo all these building blocks are coming here and then the mid 80s happens. And like the policing happens that drives some of these people in particular, like David Watson, right? From Santa Cruz, where things are going along to Amsterdam, where he knows he can continue to relate to the plant as food basically. Right. But like in a, in a more professional way in terms of like, you know, breeding and science, because that was, he just wanted to know everything about the plant.

1:10:24DominicRight. And he's a catalyst. Right? For something that's very different in Amsterdam, because in Amsterdam, there was a hash culture. And like the people breeding grass, since Mia, like, it wasn't really like, there wasn't a sense of me a culture to go with it. And so their, their weed, their grass weed was not that good. But like, David lands with skunk, and haze. And all these building blocks.

1:10:54DominicNorthern Lights is over there. It's not just David, but like, but David has a big chunk of it, right? And they become building blocks for like these breeders in Amsterdam to really like make their seed companies profitable because they can now sell these seeds elsewhere, including back to California, right? So like without really like good sensimia genetics or bred for like good sensimia, like Californians aren't buying Amsterdam wheat, right?

1:11:22DominicRight. So like this sea change happens, it's catalyzed and it comes back to California where like, you know, basically genetics that were bred originally in California, like went to Amsterdam, gotten, you know, uh, refined or, or redistributed and then came back. And that becomes kind of like the global seed banks that start mixing back in with the same building blocks that made them in the first place.

1:11:49DominicRight? Like, cause they're still here in California. Like David didn't take all the seeds, right? There are plenty of people continuing to breed and move along with that. And then of course the emergence of clone only, you know, cultivars really like another wrinkle in the story. But like the pattern that I think is, you know, broadly identifiable is like consolidation in California of all these genetics from around the world.

1:12:13DominicAnd they're mixing up and mixing up and then boom, they go to Amsterdam and then they go out throughout the rest of the world. Right. So the sense of Mia culture and since Mia growing becomes like what you're breeding for in a way that's quite different from like people who were breeding for hash or just trying to grow for hash or or whatever else. So like, there's a pattern.

1:12:36DominicThere's one of the arguments.

1:12:39Collin PalmerYeah, you're touching on so much amazing stuff. And I was just trying to let you talk because I think this is such great information for everyone to hear because it's such truth. The one thing I would add is I think, you know, counterculture of music really carried a lot of this as well. You know, like that's where we congregated, right? A lot of our, you know, a lot of enthusiasts, you know, better words.

1:13:04Collin PalmerBut I think it's, and that's where I think I've grown some of my best bag seeds, you know, like even some of my elders that were, On tour with some of these artists that were, you know, had jars of seeds. Like there was an inflection point during that time, as you're saying, where things were coming back, being crossed in and then they were localized. Right. So there was a lot of interesting stuff being happening at that time.

1:13:29Collin PalmerAnd I think that's where this concept of like this deep acrid skunk and orange. These are orange terpene profiles. And, you know, all these all these things emerge from that inflection point. That we still, I think we use in contemporary breeding today. I think papaya is a good example of that. So, yeah, so when you talk to these people, you know, are you gathering... Are you gathering any sort of like breeding information from them?

1:14:02Collin PalmerYou know, like, are they, you know, where did you get this stock from? And, you know, cause there's so much mystery behind, let's say granddaddy purple and all these, the list goes on. I mean, Mojave, you could, you could jump in here too and name a probably a million varietals, right? And I think it's so fascinating because there's so many people, right? Cause again, we're talking about people that touch these things.

1:14:28Collin PalmerAnd I'm pretty sure I'm just going to call it that there's a lot missing.

1:14:51Collin PalmerFrom individuals, right? That I think is really fascinating. And I love the work that you're doing. And I wonder, here's another question. I think I'm going to get in and I'll stop. But have you looked outside of California? Because there's such a, there's so many, it's a big world, right? We have so many pieces to this.

1:15:16Collin PalmerSo have you guys started doing that at all yet?

1:15:21DominicWell, the answer is yes, we're looking outside of California, but usually as an ancillary or add-on or follow-on to like the California focus because the damn thing is such a big scope as it is. And the important thing about that is going to be to note like There's an opportunity for people to build on this outside of California. The West Coast obviously is super important, but so is New York, Florida, the whole Midwest, the Appalachian region.

1:15:54DominicMan, there's a lot more hidden history out there than out here.

1:16:01DominicYes, we are, you know, I mean, you know, Northern Lights is one of the very important earlier things that comes to Amsterdam that doesn't come directly from California, right? The clone onlys, you know, all that stuff. So that's there, but we got to be aware of scope creep. But like the main thing, again, like how I write this stuff isn't this is the end of the story.

1:16:26DominicAnd yes, we get different. We do, you know, ask people after, you know, like, How did they come into, you know, possession of the seeds or even the bag seeds? So for example, like the early Afghans in the 70s are almost largely, you know, hash, seeds found in hash. There certainly are people who went and, you know, were bringing back Afghani seeds. David brought some of those too.

1:16:54DominicLots of other people traveling did it. It wasn't just David. But like in 1979, a particular cat from Humboldt goes to Pakistan, the Tira Valley, you know, Douglas Fir, and he gets, you know, manages to smuggle about five kilos or a kilo of seeds. I got to check the trends. It's been a bit. And like this lands all at once in Southern Humboldt and gets like dispersed fairly quickly.

1:17:24DominicAnd like without people knowing that story, like even Rob was like Humboldt, like until like 1979, like it was one of the other places. And like, but after that, it was like the Afghan hybrids basically. And it's like the Afghan hybrids were around, but this particular drop made a huge impact. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:18:05Collin PalmerThere must have been a point, right, where, you know, like you're talking about a drop came in of units and they went dispersed throughout, right? And then someone started thinking, well, hey, what if we did this here, right? What was, is there, maybe Mojave, you have a better, I don't know. I'm just asking.

1:18:25SpeakerYeah, let's say, just because, one thing I think is interesting that we're discussing here is California, It is the epicenter of cannabis today, but it wasn't in the past. Cannabis came to California with the people who also came to California. So my mom's from Florida, my dad's from Alabama. Both of them smoked weed in their respective home states before moving to California in the early 60s. So it was already out there.

1:18:59SpeakerThey brought it here, just like Doug brought that Afghani here and it found a home. So as soon as California, as soon as they brought cannabis here and California being an excellent climate for growing cannabis, like for instance, my family, we had, we lived in Big Sur until 73 and then we moved to Manhattan. And which was a pretty intense shift for a brief period. But what we quickly realized is that the people on the East Coast don't have the same quality cannabis as the people on the West Coast in the 70s because there wasn't a lot of locally grown flower.

1:19:39SpeakerAnd the people who were growing didn't necessarily have the right, you know, seeds or the right climate or whatever. So instantly, as soon as California turned on for cultivation, it also turned on for export instantly. So everyone who started growing weed in Cali quickly realized, yeah, there's plenty of people in California who want to buy my weed, you know, but there's a lot of people outside of California who really, really want to buy that weed.

1:20:04SpeakerSo as far, my whole life, I've known growers that exported out of California into other states, right? But that was just, that was quick. So in the early 60s up until 1970 or so, import only.

1:20:19SpeakerBut by 72, 73, 74, 76, and then when Sensimia happened, and it was a closely held little secret, like I remember the book Sensimia came out, and also this ties an interesting thing about Sensimia is, you know, the foreword was written by David Crosby, who was also a friend of my dad's, and also a friend, also part of the whole 420 story with Terry Haggerty and Phil Lesh and everything, right?

1:20:46SpeakerSo that's just a tie-in. When Sense of Media came out, it was published in 76, and then people started buying it in 77. It takes a few years for people to learn the tech. Well, in 81, me and my family, we went to state New York, and we went to this compound in Woodstock in 81. And it was me and two of my brothers and a bunch of family friends.

1:21:13SpeakerAnd Adam Dunn was there, his mom, or no, I don't think his mom was there, but my dad, blah, blah, blah. And so we went to their farm in Woodstock. And the one thing that all of us, even the children walked in and realized right away, it's like, oh, you guys don't pull mails.

1:21:28SpeakerBecause all their weed was seeded and they were drying males and they didn't know what a male and a female, they hadn't learned this very basic, simple thing, which was pull males, right? So that epicenter of the Sensamea thing gave California a huge edge in Big Sur and Santa Cruz and then later the Triangle because they just knew... Just that alone. First, they had good genetics because it was an import hub, but then they learned how to pull the males.

1:21:54SpeakerThey had the better sunshine. So quickly, the value of California weed. They had David Watson. And they had David Watson. Exactly. So it happened. It was a sweet spot. But I think the fascinating thing here, which ties into this discussion, is that it didn't come from California. All those genetics and those people came and created this kind of microcosm of the cannabis epicenter. But it was just a snapshot of all that.

1:22:24SpeakerSo it was only Doug, it was Doug first version of Afghanica that became the big, the big contributor, right? There was lots of other things like the weed that my parents smoked back in, in the South. They didn't bring that to California. Right? So like, it's a big point is that this, the story of when you talk about, you know, granddaddy purple, and you talk about all the heritage lines, they're all little small snapshots of a small group of insular people who decided to say, fuck it, I'm going all in on cannabis.

1:22:57SpeakerAnd that, because they were all in on it for so many decades, that carried on into this transition into the industry. But it doesn't really represent cannabis ethnobotany on a global scale. It doesn't necessarily represent cannabis chemistry on a global scale. It was really just this snapshot. And then it got even more granular when the clone only came around because that snapshot was now just a You know, a snapshot that was photocopied a million times or, you know, replicated.

1:23:29SpeakerSo anyway, I think that that was to me, that's the far out thing about California is that the the the fruits and nuts came here with the seeds. The fruits and nuts were like, man, I'm coming to California. I mean, if you read if you read, you know, Kerouac or something, that book was written in 1948. And you listen to the story about these beatniks traveling across the country, smoking weed everywhere.

1:23:54SpeakerKansas, Florida, Massachusetts. It wasn't a California story about weed, but the fruits and nuts were heading to California because California is California. It's the final destination, the final frontier. So they brought that and then boom, they created the perfect scenario. Fruits and nuts.

1:24:13DominicI am like that, Mojave. The fruits and nuts.

1:24:17Etienne FontanWait, hold on, hold on. You know why California will never fall into an ocean, into the ocean, right? Because there's a wing that on every corner.

1:24:27DominicYeah.

1:24:32DominicThat's awesome. Oh, my God.

1:24:35Collin PalmerI love that insight that you're bringing to the table because it's, you know, I often think about that, you know, it's not that long ago. It really isn't. Right. And there's so much missing. Yeah. From this, you know, and then all of a sudden we're here and we have this Thank you.

1:25:10Collin PalmerYou know, I love the Silk Road concept. I think you're right on. You know, I mean, let's go to the Ice Age after, you know, melted, right? Where'd it come from? India, right? And then it came from there, right? So there's a lot of things that I think from a breeding point of view to kind of go even go back to, you know, people that are, you know, geneticists are looking at genetic markers right now.

1:25:35Collin PalmerHow do you, you know, there's so much to look at, right? So if you don't have historical data, Thank you so much for joining us.

1:26:01DominicLet's get this going, you know? And it's, I love the way you're thinking in terms of like, you know, the ice age actually, because that's how I start when I teach my students. It's like, well, you know, like how did cannabis become, you know, a global plant that starts out with like the, you know, the ice age, you know? And then like getting the kind of, you know,

1:26:28DominicGetting the life histories and the memories of what happened within the lifetimes of the people I'm talking to, which don't start at 1971 at all. Mojave, obviously, you know, showing you really well how that goes. But like, you know, surfers...

1:26:46DominicOlder surfers who have memories of going back to the 1930s being smugglers and stuff like that, you know, like it goes back and back and back and you realize that like it's a thread, you know, like it's not like a sudden thing and like what was going on in Mexico in the 19th century, especially towards the end of it, like is this like mysterious cloud that sets a lot of things up.

1:27:09DominicThank you. Thank you.

1:27:30DominicSeeds were coming through that canal with sailors, right? There's things we haven't been thinking about, or at least the people who've written the histories haven't been thinking about, except as this sort of broad kind of like, oh, comes over with the slave trade. Well, it came over with the indentured servants too. Right from India, like the famines of India and that the British like induced in the late 19th century.

1:27:52DominicLike you could, there are, you know, where most of those indentured servants came from in different parts of India. And you could actually be, go to those places now and look at like the genetics there and like, see if like, is, is there a particular relationship because so many indentured servants that came from these particular parts of India. Right. So like, hopefully, you know, like this is the beginning of that, that line of questioning.

1:28:17BubblemanThat's when the evil took a new turn. They were like, we don't have to go and steal people from their countries. We could actually do a marketing campaign of propaganda to convince people to pay their own way to make their way to where we are. And the second they step off that boat, bammo, you're over here, buddy, not over there. That's fucking crazy. That's like some next level evil shit that someone like was sitting around Satan's boardroom and came up with.

1:28:51DominicThe fucking British, dude. Like, let me say. Yeah, we don't have to build ships. What?

1:28:54SpeakerBuilding ships? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

1:28:57DominicWe're not going to do that. Yeah. No, they took it to another level, man. Most of the shitty things we have today are because of the British Empire. I'll tell you that. Like, yeah.

1:29:12Archive SeedsOne thing I'll say about kind of the history of cannabis, at least in my experience over the last 20 plus years, is the amount of misinformation there is in the space. By my estimation, and I'd say more than 80% of the stories I've ever heard were all false or lies or, you know, stuff that was just made up because essentially between the The financial benefit of making up a story that your dead dad created some strain that never happened and the fact that no one there's no ability to check any of this information against anything these stories become proliferated online especially that just never simply never happened and uh I think that's probably the toughest part about trying to to trace back varieties is We'll be right back.

1:30:30Archive SeedsWhen you start talking to them, whether or not they were actually there. And I think that's important to keep in mind when trying to maintain the cannabis history is that just like regular history, it's written by the winners. And in the case of this as well, cannabis, I'd say it's as much or even more so than anything else. A lot of tall tales.

1:30:50BubblemanNot if you have anything to say about it, Fletch. I see you out there fucking barking people into order and I appreciate it, dude. We need people like that. I said the very same thing when I first came into Dominic. How do you... I think we need to take into account the people who are rewriting the history for whatever advantage that they may need. But I suspect, like anything, even no matter how polluted it is, patterns erupt right like if you ever read the uh uh zachariah sitchin has a great uh group of books called the 12th planet series and it's if what he asks you to do while you're reading those books is to also go and read the torah and the talmud and the and the and the bible and then you'll see The points from those books, those references that predate the history that predates those stories in these Sumerian tablets.

1:31:49BubblemanAnd it shows these patterns of certain things. And more importantly, It shows the manipulation and the lies. So once you can get back to that, those key points of the story that you see repeated over and over again, that you know, okay, those are the truths right there. Everything around that sort of just falls to the way, because you can see, well, that's, you know, that's the baloney.

1:32:14BubblemanThat's the garbage. That's the... The rewriting of history. And with everyone having an opinion and a voice on the internet, it's certainly, you know, back in the day, if you wanted the story to be the story, all you really had to do is get someone in High Times Magazine to write the story. And then if it was in High Times Magazine at that point, it was like, Well, that's what do you mean, dude?

1:32:34BubblemanIt was in High Times Magazine. It's like, oh, if it was in High Times Magazine, obviously, that's got to be because that was the word of God back in the day for us. We didn't have anything else. And then kind of Overgrow became the new sort of, you know, mighty oak that everyone sort of was like, oh, it's on Overgrow. Go check out that. And now it's just blown up to so many different places and so many different people.

1:32:56BubblemanAnd it's I mean, I appreciate you guys doing the work. I'll tell you that much. It's definitely got to be a challenge for sure.

1:33:04DominicBut yeah. And just, you know, Hey, again, like you're transparent about like, you know, the unreliable narrators, but like you emphasize that, you know, like finding patterns that other people can come back and say, no, that's not the right story is also valuable. And then also the quality of the network is huge. And I got to say that, you know, I'm very grateful for the network, not only that I started with, but that has developed You know, these last few years, even if there's still like, you know, some marketing of branding at stake, you know, for some of them, you know, but like, again, like the stories of like strain history, like that's not the main focus.

1:33:56DominicRight. And there there have been way better attempts and thorough attempts at that, you know, over the years. It's about the places and the flows. Right. So all that is very well taken.

1:34:13Etienne FontanDominic, you talked earlier, but I wanted, because some of us have lived through it, but many of our viewers may not have. So why is the period between 1996 and 2012 so important in shaping today's legal landscape that we experience?

1:34:36DominicThere are a number of different reasons, but I mean, obviously, you know, the success of medical cannabis and in particular the, you know, the codification of medical cannabis at the state level in California was a super significant thing that like grew out of its codification at the local and municipal levels, especially in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz. That was the direct result of the HIV AIDS crisis and the connection of like weed freedom with health.

1:35:16DominicUh, and, and, uh, and, and therapeutic, uh, benefits in a way that like the Robert Randall, Robert Randall held that thread for a long time and actually played a significant role in like, uh, you know, get exporting it to the HIV AIDS crisis as well. But like, that was like, you know, um, glaucoma, right. But when it became like all these people that are dying around us, including a lot of rich and famous people.

1:35:40DominicRight. It crossed class lines. And so like was much more significant politically. You know, what that did was like it was, you know, of course, you don't want to be like beating up patients and incarcerating them and all that stuff. And so there was a consensus that that was developed or, you know, organically, but intentionally. And there were particular people who played the role in the story.

1:36:11DominicAnd we, you know, Dennis Perrone, but not just Dennis Perrone, right? Like Valerie Corral and Mike Corral with Wham were a huge, huge, huge part of it. You know, like, and they actually made sure that cultivation was in there, right? Like, but, and then it was like, you know, well, who was growing for Dennis, right? Like, and who was taking care of, you know, like, Dennis was the node in a network.

1:36:36DominicHe wasn't the only one, right? So really, 96 is like, because of the intensity of the HIV AIDS crisis, like there wasn't like a, who gets the money? Thank you. Thank you.

1:37:11DominicSo it sets us on a path, a path dependency that like is mimicked in Washington and Colorado and other states. You know, Washington's 98, Oregon, I think might have been 98 too. You know, there's a path That emerges out of the HIV AIDS crisis. And it's the, you know, it rescued cannabis for popular opinion, which had been, I mean, as you know, efforts to really kind of bring it back as an issue in the late, in the 80s and 90s involved like connections to hemp, you know, like the normalization of weed culture, which...

1:37:47DominicThank you so much for joining us.

1:38:02DominicMan, there was just an epic failure at the end of the 1970s that was a reaction to something, right? And it was part of a broader cultural reaction that brought us the Reagan era, right? And Reagan hated hippies, right? Reagan was the original persecutor of hippies in California.

1:38:19Etienne FontanAnd he hated cannabis, right?

1:38:21DominicHe hated cannabis. So like this was the reaction to the reaction that was, you know, it got amazing people like like you, ATN, you know, in it and involved in it with the Cannabis Action Network and all that stuff. But like it wasn't until it was connected to a genuine fucking health crisis, like the public didn't give a shit anymore. Right. And so...

1:38:47Collin PalmerStill that way today though, man, right? Like look at what happened with Charlotte's Web, right? Like we had to play the heartstrings with Charlotte's Web to remind everyone the same way that that was in their face, which is, again, back to something Marcus said, patterns. There's different, you know, there's, you know, like it's... Precisely. Yeah. Anyway, continue on.

1:39:09DominicNo, you're absolutely right. And then like, this is the thing is that like since the HIV AIDS crisis, medical cannabis has been co-branded increasingly with other conditions and people, right, who suffer. But 96, 2003 was a pretty strong one. What happens as the HIV AIDS crisis recedes and there's not like an emergency population of people that like can be connected to the cultural economy of cultivating and distributing weed, right?

1:39:38DominicLike between 03 and Charlotte's Web is a little while. And during that time period, the kind of commercial, like the brand of weeds became increasingly commercial because that's what people saw. And... You know, like, why is that a big deal? We live in a capitalist country, right? But like, because it's weed, right? Like weed commercialism was absolutely, you know, a nation of capitalists says weed commercialism is bad, right?

1:40:09DominicThere's some form of what they perceive as, you know, capitalism that is bad and it's weed, right? As with like drugs in general. So like, it started in the popular, you know, I think perception was like, I think it stalled out for a little bit, but like it was mostly like the cops fighting back, local sheriffs and whatever else. And they were still losing. They were losing, you know, quite a bit in the courts, but didn't mean they weren't trying.

1:40:38DominicYou know, like the DEA went after Wham in 2001, right? And the entire County of Santa Cruz, you know, government rose up and fought them off, you know, like, but You know, you get 2003, which is in particular the SB 420, which actually, you know, got the card system in place and the card system had been in place in different other areas, but in California, that's where it is.

1:41:03DominicBut then that also kind of like helps the cultural economy thrive in a way that was also like, here's the very commercial aspect and here's also the medical aspect. And they're completely, you know, like what's the difference to the broader public, right? We knew there were differences, right? But, you know, we're more or less on the same page with the more commercial interests, like, because they were still paying their tithes, I'd say, to the movement through medical cannabis.

1:41:33DominicBut it just kind of starts to become a sort of distinct thing. And then actually, like, another co-branding happens in the 2000s of weed with racial justice and mass incarceration. Like we've been talking about it for a long time, but like by 2001, the U.S. was incarcerating a much higher percentage of its population per capita than the Soviets ever did, than anyone in history. Our prison complex was enormous.

1:41:59DominicThe land of the free, the biggest incarcerator in law enforcement, oppressor of its own peoples, especially black and brown peoples in global history of any empire. Right. Like the most authoritarian regimes don't incarcerate people like we do at our rate. And we was part of that. And, you know, that became, you know, something that was, you know, increasingly popular. And so by 2012, especially when Michelle Alexander publishes a book like that, like gets in there.

1:42:37DominicAnd so it's like, OK, there's the commercial interests, there's the medical interests, there's racial justice interests. And that was a coalition. All right. And that carried kind of the politics of justifying legalization. But because so much of it really was like actually not just about the plant and its freedom, but about other people and their freedom that were associated with the plant, like all the regulations were, you know, like, oh, look, we'll carve out this for minorities and we'll, you know, like.

1:43:05DominicMore or less neglect the medical entirely, you know, like until COVID comes around and they got to deploy the medical necessity for the, you know, the legal to stay open. So this is a critical period. And at the same time, man, some really bad environmental shit started happening in the state of California and elsewhere, especially up here in Northern California. On tribal lands, the strict industrialization of weed was happening on tribal reservations.

1:43:36DominicIt was happening on public lands. And it wasn't who was doing it. They blamed on the cartels. But we all know. Thank you for watching.

1:44:08DominicSo then there's like the anti-politics like and that emerges 2008 but like really by 2014 is super strong because of particular media shit. So the 96 to 2014 period all lands us into this precipice where there's all these stakeholders that are not really just about the plant but about you know other people and other issues versus like Increasingly, the environmentalists and the people who are just sort of like generic environmentalists, they don't really understand the locality of the situation.

1:44:45DominicThey blame it all on, you know, all weed is coming from this, right? Which actually some of our legalizers jumped on too. The black market is cartels. And it's like, dude, Don't fucking say that. You know, like some of it is the vast majority of it is not, you know, like by the numbers, if not the quantity, like the vast majority of the black market is small time people making a living, especially in the wake of the financial crisis of 2000, 2008, seven, seven, eight.

1:45:15DominicRight. It's like, how did, how did, how did we absorb all that unemployment and all the people losing their livelihoods, our homes? It's like, they went into weed. Significantly, right? So this is how we end up on the precipice of, you know, what ended up being, you know, Malcursa, right? The MRSA, you know, elements and the, you know, Alma element that Sean Parker pretty much owned because he's the one who paid for it.

1:45:46DominicAnd the MRSA was kind of owned by a number of different stakeholders that really included public health and law enforcement. And like public health, people don't realize public health institutions are now the ones leading prohibition. Law enforcement is their junior partner. And it's the public health institutions and academics that are addicted to NIDA grant money in particular and flows of money from people who are, you know, anti weed for political purposes.

1:46:19DominicLike they're the ones standing in the way of rational regulation, even more than law enforcement at this point. So, you know, I think about that period in terms of like how different kinds of stakeholders developed in the landscape. And of course we had, you know, Charlotte's Web, I think that was 20, was it 11 or 12? Maybe even as late as 13, might've been 11 or 12.

1:46:45DominicBut yeah, instead of the dying HIV AIDS patient, it is the young child with epilepsy. That's the brand of legalization. And there were a lot of those actually. Not just Charlotte's and Charlotte's Web. Fletch.

1:47:05BubblemanYeah, it definitely changed the perspective, you know, it went from being, I mean, you know, like you said, the gay community definitely had a massive influence on cannabis as a medicine, not only in San Francisco and California, but certainly up here in Vancouver as well. With the work that Hillary did starting the BC Compassion Club, I know she had like close ins with that whole community. And I remember talking to those guys back then and kind of being like, you know, this is...

1:47:38BubblemanYou know, this is, he says, there are gay men in every aspect of society. So we have like politicians and judges and we have professors and we have, you know, they were kind of like, this is how we can get this message out from under this dome that it's been pushed under. And they did a damn good job at it. There's no doubt about it. Cannabis wouldn't look the way it looked, at least from the medical perspective of access for the last 25 to 30 plus years.

1:48:07BubblemanUh, in North America. And then the rebrand was the epileptic children, the catastrophically ill children. That was, uh, I mean, who the fuck wanted to argue against that? That was, uh, that nobody wanted to argue against that. No, it was the last leg of sort of that.

1:48:30BubblemanDavid Price- overtly prohibitive mentality that it just dissipated what it was like Oh, but we gave her one drop of oil and then she didn't have a seizure for 11 days, you know she was having 115 seizures a day before that. David Price- You don't have to know anything about anything you don't even have to be a parent it's just it went over so many levels of dislike all you had to do was be human and have empathy.

1:48:59Archive SeedsWell, I think we're kind of like... That was kind of the peak of getting public sentiment to change, essentially, right? And... As that happened, we saw a giant inflow of money into the space, right, to capitalize on this new found accessibility and demand for cannabis that's going to be in medical and all these other things. And we're basically about 10 years past that inflection point, 10, 12 years past that inflection point.

1:49:33Archive SeedsAnd we're now seeing that most of those investments were terrible investments. And most of those companies are going out of business. The cures of all this stuff that they were claiming that they're going to do aren't happening. And most of what's happening is the traditional cannabis market is kind of re-emerging as the main supplier of the space. Look at California. I mean, even just yesterday, you saw Cresco Labs leaving California.

1:49:58Archive SeedsWhy? Because they can't compete in a competitive marketplace. Their whole existence is predicated on a lack of supply, a limited license marketplace, and a capitalization of a product that they know nothing about. And it's interesting to see we're finally reaching that point where the business is actually going to mature. And the high aspirations that a lot of these people had, they're beginning to realize that it's not going to be possible in cannabis because it's too easily produced outside of the system.

1:50:33Archive SeedsThere's too much historical production outside of everything. Most people prefer smoking cannabis not for their medical conditions, not for... Not taking some sort of like Marinol or something like that. And so we're finally seeing a point where I'd say the last 12 years, if we just talk kind of genetics wise, has been the worst, but it's also going to like become the best. Because essentially that messed up situation that kind of blew it out for most people, it's now going to be people, well, I've got to make something new.

1:51:07Archive SeedsI've got to breed something new. I've got to offer something new. I can't just rebrand some other bullshit and expect it to work anymore because there simply is too much competition and not enough demand in the space. So it'll be interesting to see where we have this muddled period we just went through and And it'll be interesting to see where we go from here because this is really kind of the next inflection point in my opinion.

1:51:30DominicYeah, absolutely. I mean, even the prevalence now of breeding for seeds and people selling seeds, which has its own competitive issues, but like that wasn't here 10 years ago. You know, it was clones, man.

1:51:49Archive SeedsExactly. There was very, very few people popping seeds for anything other than production, right? You know, you pop 100 seeds for your outdoor, your 99 plant outdoor grow or whatever, but no one would really keep clones back then generally. That's why the, you know, elite heirloom clones that we have were so important during that time period is because those were the best versions that we had. And the financial cost Plus the risk, like, you know, having a good crop of clones versus a bad crop of seeds of some seeds you pop was just not something most people were willing to, a risk most people were willing to take when it was illegal.

1:52:29Archive SeedsThank you for watching.

1:52:47Archive SeedsNot that the stuff we're coming out with necessarily is better or worse than anything else, but there's more of it happening and more of it happening and more people doing it inherently is going to produce better results eventually, in my opinion.

1:53:01DominicI love it. You know, like I think that it harks back to actually kind of the 70s when the trajectory of more people doing that was happening. And, you know, I feel like it's the first time since the 70s, really, that that's that that's been happening.

1:53:16Archive SeedsIt's economics, right? Back in the 70s, what was an ounce of weed worth? It wasn't worth $500 an ounce. It was 40 bucks or whatever it was. It was a mostly import market. It wasn't quite as scarce of a product in the DEA, like essentially...

1:53:35Archive SeedsThe subsidization of the cannabis market has always been the police. The like how you keep supply down like you would with the Farmers Union or you would with a USDA regulations. It was the police keeping the keeping it down and for So, you know, 30 years, they were so good at doing that, that the price of anything other than brick weed was 300 bucks an ounce. And one comment I wanted to make earlier was that when you're talking about the cartels and drugs, like a huge portion of the cannabis business up until maybe 10 years ago was Organized crime with brick weed or import essentially right originally you know mostly coming through Mexico but then you had the Canadian wave that happened you know mid 90s through or really late 80s but really happening mid 90s through um you know 2010 probably the beaster wave I mean beasters was huge and that was mostly organized criminals that were engaged in Selling all other kinds of drugs too.

1:54:43Archive SeedsI mean, I think an error people forget is that cannabis was hard drug adjacent for a really long time. And that dictated the type of people that you were subjected to doing business with essentially.

1:54:59DominicYeah, but you would also have, you know, within cannabis, like, A minority that were like, they felt like there was hard drugs, soft drugs, and cannabis like shouldn't be adjacent. So like David, ultimately, besides acid, you know, like he hated hard drugs and didn't drink, right? Like you see... All of these things are culturally like regulatory, regulative things that happen. But yeah, put your points super well taken.

1:55:29DominicBut also I do want to ask like, okay, on the spectrum of organized crime, like it seems like the white people, like, well, the hippies, the counterculture, it seemed like, you know, disorganized crime, but kind of on a spectrum to organized crime, you know? It seems that way to me a little bit.

1:55:53Archive SeedsI don't remember the white weed culture being particularly organized. No.

1:55:58DominicRight.

1:55:59Archive SeedsI don't remember that. Not my experience. Maybe individually, but not as a collective group. Yeah, for sure. You know, visiting Humboldt 20 years ago, you know, there's a lot of nitrous tanks in the backwoods. Let's put it that way.

1:56:18SpeakerI don't know. I would definitely come in and say that the organization, you know, I've only been in the in the weed business and the weed industry since maybe 89. And I can only really speak from that time period. But the organization of getting weed from the east, from the West Coast all the way out to the East Coast, having it be a hub and a central, which was Grateful Dead shows, which was also, you know, which hasn't been mentioned, which often is, you know, in On a Sunday in Cash Church.

1:56:50SpeakerBut I think that I was a big part of that, moving a tremendous amount from the West Coast over to the East Coast. And the underground was a lot of single moms, families who were running tremendous amounts of pounds, kilos. In all different kinds of vehicles, you know, I mean, we all know about going all the way across the United States and how people were getting busted and the stories that were coming back.

1:57:26SpeakerAnd it was the white weed culture that continued to transition. Oh, okay, well, you can't drive that car. Okay, well, those plates are not going to work. Okay, well, and although it seemed like it wasn't very organized, there was an incredible central organization of how that information was getting transferred from family to family. You know, who was being successful in getting across what areas, you know, could you get across where there was safe houses, where there was safe towns, safe hotels.

1:58:03SpeakerI could go on and on. And, you know, I really feel like, although it seemed like it wasn't organized, tremendous amounts of flour concentrates All of these people went from the West Coast over to the East Coast super successfully, as well as money coming back. So although we can say that we weren't organized in the same way, I feel like it was sort of a homegrown organization that grew as the money grew, as the need grew from the East Coast, as more people were getting in tune with, oh, shit, I can buy a five pack, I can buy a 10 pack.

1:58:43SpeakerAnd as people started to have that, you know, allotment and started to have that money to pay cash up front, because at the beginning, you know, when we were bringing over 200 packs, there was no way that anybody was going to be able to pay for that shit up front. It was really hard. So sometimes you would have to sit, you know, East Coast for two weeks at a time until even like a 200 pack of cash would be able to come back.

1:59:07SpeakerBut as it started to grow, People were able to purchase those 10 packs, those 20 packs in cash when you arrived. So that in itself was finitely organized. We didn't even have cell phones. We didn't have ability. I mean, we did have flip phones, you know, a little bit later on into that. But the amount of people knowing exactly what telephone booth to go to, you call at this exact location at this exact time.

1:59:39SpeakerI don't even think that we could pull that off today in what we were able to pull back then. So I just sort of wanted to shout out those beginnings and the fact that the organization was actually quite beautiful. And, you know, sometimes you didn't talk to somebody for two weeks, but if you said you were going to meet at that corner at four o'clock and you were going to be there two weeks later, you would be there and or there would be a note to be someplace else.

2:00:09SpeakerAnd I just thought that that is, you know, was extraordinary.

2:00:14DominicWow. Thank you for that. That was beautiful. I definitely am getting, you know, in people's life histories, like, I wish I would get more of it, but there's, there's, there's a lot of it emerging that describes that, but you just like summarized it. That was amazing. Thank you for that.

2:00:43Archive SeedsWell, that was kind of like the birth of the domestic production, right? That where you had domestic production supplying the rest of the country. And kind of what we're talking about is more just like the 80% of the rest of the country that was smoking brick weed. You know, that was the organized crimes that we're talking about. The individual growers and organizations obviously were, you know... Well organized in their individual production, you know, but even until like probably the mid 2000s, finding a farm that produced more than a thousand pounds a year in Humboldt was tough.

2:01:26Archive SeedsBecause most people were going to grow, you could collect a thousand pounds from a lot of places, but most grows were going to be under 99 plants, right? So even if you get five pounds a plant, it's still going to be 500 pounds, right? Which was crushing it back in the day when outdoor was 3,200 a pound. But as a volume, it was still pretty small scale, even in the Emerald Triangle.

2:01:54Archive SeedsUm, up until I'd say more than anything, it was 2008 where the really big farms, I mean, I remember going to, to, um, Humboldt in like 2004, five Humboldt Mendo everywhere. And we had one friend that had cleared an acre and was growing an acre more than a hundred plants. And everybody's like, bro, you're crazy. You're going to get popped for sure. And he did like a few years later, but that was, you know, It was very uncommon to find someone that had over a thousand pounds without having multiple, multiple farms to supply it, back then at least.

2:02:33Archive SeedsNow you've got farms that produce a hundred thousand pounds a year.

2:02:36SpeakerYeah, but then also, you know, you have to also remember is that when it started to get a little bit, you know, crazy with guns and as the grows were starting to get bigger, Then BC started to kick in and there was a lot of growers who way earlier in the 2000s were definitely growing two ton plots, one ton plots of really good, beautiful outdoor before it was like beasters, before it was considered like organized crime.

2:03:09SpeakerAnd again, yet that was Thank you so much for joining us.

2:03:29SpeakerSo there was a lot of people, you know, 2001. That's what I'm saying.

2:03:33Archive SeedsIt took until the 2000s to for it to really start getting big, big farms. You know, that was what I was saying.

2:03:39Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd that's why British Columbia was enticing in the late 90s because it wasn't big in Oregon and in California, but it was up here in British Columbia. It really was.

2:03:53BubblemanI knew guys in 96 and they grew 6,000 pounds outdoor a year. There never was a single seed. And if you found a seed and it was in their flower, they would give you a half pound for that bud.

2:04:09SpeakerOur first year coming up here was 98. That was our first year growing. And there is definitely up here in the Kootenays, a lot of growers who were growing over one to two tons a year and never a seed in it. You would never, and the genetics were phenomenal because there was just such a mix of, People that were coming back and forth from Afghanistan, even kids that were my age that were all hippies and hitchhiking around India and hitchhiking around.

2:04:42SpeakerAnd I know Marcus, you were a part of that. You saw that there was a lot of people bringing back genetics during that time. And growing them outdoors and really beautiful, scentsy, amazing flower that definitely started to change as, you know, Dominic, as the hard drugs started to come in. So there was a time period where in the mid 2000s, later 2000s, you know, maybe the teen 2000s, where organized crime started to make it really enticing for these families who are already starting to become big ballers.

2:05:18SpeakerWe all know what that term is. Big trucks. Everybody was oversized because the money was cash money and there was a lot of it. And then people were able to start trading hard drugs for all of this, you know, beautiful flower. And then as that started to become a really ripe, beautiful market, unfortunately, not beautiful in the sense of beautiful, but in the sense of very financially viable.

2:05:48SpeakerThen you started to have even more of the bottom feeders of the underbelly of the cartel, which was the Vietnamese markets that came in. And then now we went from huge outdoor grows to Thank you for joining us.

2:06:23SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

2:06:37SpeakerWe didn't even know what the fuck it was, some kind of terrible pesticides. So it's pretty interesting at how, you know, this plant has walked with all of these different energies, these different dances, these different people, these different cultures, different, and yet, It's almost like she gains a wardrobe, a new sort of outfit in every single place that she goes or he, I don't want to, you know, the plant, we smoke the female flower in the place that, you know, this plant goes, it gains another outfit and another wardrobe.

2:07:16SpeakerAnd all of the talk that you've been having today, Dominic, about giving us this tremendous history is giving this plant an incredible wardrobe of Thank you so much for joining us.

2:07:56Speakerof going from clones to seeds because all of a sudden whoa got really real and now seeds were easier to travel with but yet that was also a wardrobe that she had worn from the early 60s that you didn't want to with bringing live plants because the seeds in your hem was a little bit easier so it cycles in a way that i just think is really beautiful and holistic i'm rambling on but i really love what uh this conversation today is really Awesome and blowing my mind.

2:08:27SpeakerThanks.

2:08:29Etienne FontanA thing also for our generation was the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead by having cannabis and having that traveling circus also put out cannabis. When I was going to college in West Virginia, I went up to Pittsburgh because they did a show there because they had good weed, you know. Now, I had a hard time because I was bald, you know, and people were like, you're a cop.

2:08:50Etienne FontanI'm not going to sell to you. You know, but that's a 1989 problem. You know what I'm saying? But that's also when Jack came to my university, right? 1989, he came to WVU. And when I was with Cannes back in 93 and 94, All I know is when I traveled through 47 states, I got fresh bud in all 47 of those states. Now, don't get me wrong, Fletch, I did see, you know, my share of beasters as well as, you know, South of the Border stuff, but...

2:09:18Etienne FontanEverybody took pride in showing or donating, you know, their local quote unquote kind bud because that was the term terminology at the time to signify, you know, not your average cannabis, right? So it's something happened for sure in the 80s and spreading around the culture because of course we saw that, you know, the snodgrass, you know, the pipe hole conundrum really grow, right? from the you know the dead you know community because it was the first time i'd ever seen somebody whip out a uh oh you have to see this it's a snodgrass and it was a soft you know pouch and and you know he pulled out the pouch and pulled out this color changing pipe which then became a status symbol on We had a dead tour, right?

2:10:06Etienne FontanIf you had a Snodgrass, you had access to good shit, right? And so it really spawned a culture and counterculture around cannabis, right? Because then we spread 420, right? They had the first 420 shirts we bought on the dead lots. And then we started spreading that information when we would go out on hemp tour, right? 47 states, we hit a lot of people. And most of them were on rock and roll and education tours, right?

2:10:32Etienne FontanWe did horde tour, we did Lollapalooza. And we hit hundreds of thousands of people with these slogans and information in all different parts of the country. So it's fascinating how, you know, I never expected to see fresh cannabis in all those states, but yet it was always there. So there was something happening in all these different areas because on top of that, what we were seeing coming out of BC was amazing flowering cannabis.

2:11:01Etienne FontanSo we knew that the culture And especially the deadhead culture that then fed into the fish culture had their finger on the pulse and not only that kind of made the heartbeat right and spread a lot of that to a lot of people and made our work in the Cannabis Action Network a lot easier honestly.

2:11:22SpeakerWell it became the central marketplace you know everything was brought to dead shows everything was you know I was Selling a lot of kind bud out of Eugene, Oregon, making sure to hit all of the dead shows and barter fair, barter fair, Oregon, Oregon, Oregon,

2:11:47Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineYes, that's where BC and the US were like, how you doing? By the fire. I mean, big drum circles, super powerful.

2:11:55SpeakerAnd the drops of weed were incredible. I couldn't believe it. Like the first year we started going to Tenasca, it was because everybody had all their stuff down. It was dried. It was ready. It appeared by the time Tenasca came around. People were bringing hundred packs down, you know, in car loads or in vans. It was pretty amazing. But Dead Tour, It really became not only a place where finances got attached to cannabis, to dried flower, where it really set the stage for the price of the gram, the price of the ounce, the price of a half pound.

2:12:38SpeakerAnd it was almost like every show, every tour that we went to would be setting the price. And we didn't necessarily even know what the price was gonna be for half pounds. I never really swung super small amounts, but when we arrived on the lot, you didn't know what your ounce prices were gonna be or what your half price, Thank you so much for joining us.

2:13:22SpeakerYou know, I love what you said, ATN. You were like, we were really getting out there publicly and we were having our 420 and we were really getting information out. Whereas there was a huge group of us that were doing exactly the opposite. We were getting in, we were doing everything the opposite of getting out there to make sure that we could get all of it spread out without, you know, being seen or known or...

2:13:49Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWe also were the first recyclers. We were the first environmental groups. We sat for the trees. We built ecological homes. We started straw bales. We learned about generation. We learned about cob. Like it was all on the lot. You could find a commune. You could find a place to live. You could go out of society. And I'll also say that we do share a granddaughter with Bob Snodgrass.

2:14:11Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd we are, you know, beautiful Lucia, you know, is his great granddaughter and our granddaughter. So we're super blessed to be integrated into that scene and into that situation.

2:14:22SpeakerAnd I love what you said, ATN. I was... I'm going to tell just the fastest story ever because it's so fun. I was in Pleasant Hill, 4th of July, 1990.

2:14:32Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThis is a bong rip moment.

2:14:34SpeakerSummertime. And I was sitting down at a fire. And Jerry came and sat down right next to me. And I just thought, oh, my fucking god. Jerry Garcia just sat down next to me because it was out at the Kesey Farm. They had big 4th of Julys. And I had just gotten my first snotty. And I just was like so stoked on this beautiful whale. A whale.

2:15:03SpeakerSo it was a hammer and it was a really big piece and had a big hammer, but it was like a whale head and it had the anyway. And I just thought, shit, this is my moment. I've got good weed. I've got a snotty. I'm going to pass this to the man. And I passed him a big fat bowl and he looked at me and he's like, are you coming on to this LSD that everybody's coming on to?

2:15:30SpeakerAnd I was like, yeah, I think I am. And I handed him in the pipe and he said, whoa, this is one of those glass pipes. I haven't smoked out of one of these yet. This is really awesome. I'm super stoked about this glass pipe. I'm like, yeah, it's called a snotty and it's made by Bob Snodgrass. He was like, yeah, I got to get one of these.

2:15:54SpeakerAnd I got to share his first glass pipe smoke with a snodgrass. It was very iconic for me. And I love to tell that story to Bob because he deserves that.

2:16:07Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThat was a good first moment where we were starting to smoke clean. Starting to smoke cleaner.

2:16:12SpeakerYeah.

2:16:13Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineNo, no. And they were, they had big holes in the bottom of the snoties and they never use a screen. Gotta have the big screen. Oh, weird. So it's not good to smoke heavy metals. Weird. And we would scrape the glass, you know, the metal pipes. It was terrible. Like, thank God for glass pipes. Thank God.

2:16:36Archive SeedsI'd kind of call that the homegrown network. And I'd say the homegrown network, and that's not just cannabis, but that was kind of that whole scene of that era. I'd say the vast majority of today's clone-only varieties are a result of those people. You know, at least 80 to 90 percent, most of them trace back to a grateful dead lot. Some hippie somewhere, some person that was growing weed in their basement and was earthy or, you know, just a homegrown person.

2:17:06Archive SeedsSomeone that's trying to produce their their shit under their control. Because why the hell would I buy some paraquat sprayed import?

2:17:20DominicI got to say, like, this is just gold. All of you. I feel like the conversation here is like synthesizing the story for me. Just so you know, it's just, it's incredible. I just want to say thank you.

2:17:36Etienne FontanWell, thank you for inspiring it through your and, you know, Caleb's work so that, you know, you presented to us a historical perspective that I think rings true with all of us, as well as you're integrating, you know, the, the, you know, the Canadian history with the American history, as well as how international and as well as we know cannabis crosses every socioeconomic system, right? And It's had its influence on us.

2:18:06Etienne FontanDon't get me wrong. I mean, practically 99% of us here are white, you know, so it's not lost on me, you know, but at the same time, it shows you how influencing the culture of cannabis has been rippling around the world, right? Because it's not just Canada and the United States. We know, of course, we've all traveled to and from Amsterdam. It used to be our Mecca for the cannabis cups, right, back in the day.

2:18:32Etienne FontanThat's where I met Marcus and various other people because, you know, we couldn't do it here in the United States, right? It was verboten, right? We had to go to Amsterdam, smoke in a coffee shop. I remember the first time smoking in a coffee shop window and having a cop go by. What year was that? 90, 95. Right? Same with me. Right? Cobb goes by and waves at me.

2:18:59Etienne FontanAnd I did not know how to react. I looked at then my wife and I, we got married at the Cannabis Cup on the stage there at the Milk Vig. And I remember just we looking at each other and, you know, expecting something bad, but he walked on and he was laughing, you know, he's like, those must be Americans, right? Because again, there's usually about 1500 Americans coming to the cannabis cup.

2:19:29Etienne FontanAnd of course, they were not always the most respectful, right? They would smoke outside, they would do things where, you know, the locals would have to look, you can't smoke outside, you have to actually smoke inside the coffee shops, right? And inside that, you know, that coffee shop was, you know, they had windows. So, you know, who's used to back then smoking where people could see you?

2:19:49Etienne FontanWe were all used to hiding somewhere, be it in a van, in a closet, you know, behind a dumpster, you know, wherever, you know, you were not out in a public where people could see you and act normal. So to have that was such a liberating experience for Because then afterwards, what was our first conversation? Wow, wouldn't it be great to feel that way in America, right?

2:20:20Etienne FontanFascinating time.

2:20:22BubblemanAnd to feel that way any other time other than the freezing month of November.

2:20:29Etienne FontanThe very freezing month of November. And then you get Wutkoff on top of the weather's terrible. Half of everything is closed because it's one of those months where the entire Dutch population are like, we're out of here. So, you know, everything is not open. Everything is not accessible. And then, of course, you learn about eating in the Dutch fashion, which takes its time. It does not rush along, which we think in Western culture, we're used to being served quickly and being out within a half hour.

2:21:04Etienne FontanDinners, breakfasts and lunches could last three hours.

2:21:09SpeakerYeah. They don't tip. There was no tipping. That was the big one. Right. Where are you at, Mojave? Where am I? I'm back in the Mojave National Preserve. Of course you are. In your name's sake. My laptop died. I'll give you guys a quick little tour. It's an awesome spot. I won't tell you guys exactly where it is. It's a secret, but...

2:21:35BubblemanCareful, there's that guy on the internet who just sees like a small piece of the mountain in the sky and then like eight seconds later tells you exactly where you are.

2:21:44SpeakerThere's golden eagles up on this ridge up here and bighorn sheep and mountain lion that come all up around this trail. It's a beautiful spot. My laptop's going to die in a minute, so if I disappear, I just want to say goodbye before I say goodbye.

2:22:01BubblemanI'm just glad you came and shared some time with us, brother. Like, that's legit.

2:22:09BubblemanWhat do they look like? You're on some shamanic journey.

2:22:14Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIt's funny to think like we have cougars and those kind of things in our forest, but I'm like, they have a lot to eat. And I just wonder like what, you know, when I see that landscape, it's just so desert like, and it just, it's amazing that there's like the big animals just cruising all over the place and surviving. It's beautiful. Super beautiful. I hope you have a beautiful day, Mojave.

2:22:36DominicYeah, Mojave. It's good to see you.

2:22:42Archive SeedsI think one thing ATN touched on for a second is the effect and influence of high times, which I think is kind of an interesting thing to even talk about right now just because it's just recent. The branding has changed hands, kind of, I guess. You've got the raw genetics guy and one of the original owners taking it back over. So I guess we'll see what happens.

2:23:12Archive SeedsThey don't seem to be as financially motivated as the last 10 years, according to public record that they are saying. But I think that high times had a massive impact on... Every older grower that I know... High Times was like the Bible. It was basically the only place that you could get information about cannabis at that time. That was up to date at all. There was no other place.

2:23:42Archive SeedsI mean, every guy I know that started growing in the 80s, they just tell me they would buy a High Times and they'd go to the back and look at the list of the strains and how much they were selling for and where they were selling. And that was like the, you know, everybody wanted to see that every month. And we kind of lost a lot of that in the commercialization in the last 10 years, the kind of centralized knowledge and marketplace and everybody wanting to kind of put it all in one place.

2:24:13Archive SeedsAnd High Times was really that place until they became a traveling circus.

2:24:23Archive SeedsDid you see they bought it back?

2:24:25BubblemanDid you see Matt Stang and Josh from Raw bought High Times again? Yeah, I talked to Matt. Do you know Matt at all?

2:24:35Archive SeedsYeah, I do. I talked to him. I mean, we'll see what happens. I mean, it sounds like you want to do it right. So, you know, I can't say who knows what happens, but the last 10 years haven't been a good indication of what high times is. So they've definitely got an uphill climb here. But You know, from the 80s, 90s, and even through, you know, 2010, 2012, High Times was really the spot.

2:25:07Archive SeedsThose events, getting in the magazine, going to the High Times Cup in Amsterdam, that was the glue of a lot of, let's call it the market, right? Back or the homegrown market, should I say, not the import market.

2:25:24Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd that is when the beginning of recreational sort of started and bigger shows and other big conferences. And it was really kind of the Emerald Cup era, you know, beginning after that as well, when they started in the Sonoma County Fairgrounds and it starts attracting, you know, close to 10,000 people or something, something in there. And, uh, Then you have these like really many other shows and it just continues to explode.

2:25:53Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineSo it's like, it was like a part of an era where it was like, you know, we got our information from one thing and now it's just blossomed into so many options and varieties.

2:26:06Etienne FontanIt was our pre-internet price list, right? We would knew, you know, because we were going to Boston. Here is Boston. Oh, there's Northern Lights number five is available for 45 and eighth. Okay. Otherwise, we had no idea. There was no, sorry everybody, before internet, we had no real way to communicate and the only real price range with these other Your local dealer, you because you were dealing or you had to look in the magazine to find out, to kind of figure out what things were around a cost as well as a name, right?

2:26:40Etienne FontanBecause really people just called it weed. Nobody was looking for Northern Lights number five Durban poison specific. That didn't come along till really Amsterdam, right?

2:26:54Etienne FontanCorrect me if I'm wrong, people.

2:26:55DominicNo, I mean, I'd be interested in knowing, like, you know, about when that effect happens, because the Amsterdam seed scene really took off after David got there, which was 85. And so certainly by the high times advertised, right? Yeah.

2:27:21Etienne FontanAnd then whipped out the cannabis cups in full on issues, right? They were a special issue, right? That came out that was chock full of, you know, all the advertising of all the seed companies, these genetics, these strange names that now gave reason for people like us to want to travel over there, right?

2:27:49Etienne FontanBecause we didn't have access to this diversity, at least where, I mean, I could go to a dealer and a dealer maybe had two different kind, but you couldn't go and find 20 different types of herb in one place. That was pretty impossible until Dennis Perrone did it, I guess, originally in the 93, you know, 92, 93 with his, he had diversity and different price points. Whereas...

2:28:15Etienne FontanHe had price points going all the way up and down the system, whereas a lot of the Dutch coffee shops seem to have certain prices per gram, right?

2:28:26Archive SeedsWell, I think a big part of it, too, was the isolation of growers, especially in the 90s, you know, as a green merchant happened in what was it, 89 or 91. And that basically, you know, everybody that was outdoor was basically like, I'm not doing outdoor anymore if I plan on staying out of jail. So everybody went indoor all at the same time and everybody isolated themselves.

2:28:51Archive SeedsAnd that was kind of a lot of that emergence of the individual varieties and not really having a market trend because, you know, because no one could talk to each other about what they were growing. High Times Magazine was like the one place a grower who was basically a hermit could actually learn anything about what they're actually engaged in. It's like being a plumber, but you can't look at anybody else's work.

2:29:20Archive SeedsIt's like, well, there's got to be somewhere I've got to learn something. And that isolation and the lack of access to information is really what... Catalyze the like strain market that we have today, in my opinion. Because individual growers became like really, really dialed in with their variety. I mean, I think that's one thing most growers can talk about is whether it's from seed or clone, getting dialed in with what you're growing has a massive impact on quality.

2:29:57Archive SeedsAnd because people only had one clone they were growing and they grew that year after year and people love that individual type, they... That's really what created this demand for these individuals.

2:30:14BubblemanWell, I'll tell you, when I started selling the bags in 99, and I wasn't really sure how it was going to play out because what I noticed about the bags even before I started selling them was that a small percentage of people could find or grow things that were worth putting in them. And everything else was kind of like, oh, this just looks like wet sand. It's just like, I don't know.

2:30:34BubblemanIt's not that great. If the expression wasn't exceptional, the hash wasn't exceptional. And I saw that very clearly. And that was, you know, the reason why people would say, hey, how do we get my hash to melt like yours? How do I? It's like, well, that's a long journey, my friend, that you may or may not be willing to take. But what I did notice when I started selling bags was that just super random people from the middle of fucking, you know, Illinois or wherever had some of the best flour in the world.

2:31:04BubblemanBecause, you know, back then, these fucking psychopaths would send me the hash. They just ship it right to my PO box. They just be like, oh, I want Bubble Man to try some of this hash. In the original days, it wasn't dried properly. And there were definitely the points that you could remove. But even then, you could look at that and go, this is like some of the most insane hash that I have ever been exposed to.

2:31:28BubblemanIt was countless people that were just nobodies. They had no name for themselves. They weren't some industry person. They didn't have a business they were trying to promote. And they had the best hash in the world. That always put a smile on my face.

2:31:43Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI think that's because love grows good weed. So that can be in the backyard of any grandma in Illinois or it can be present in a larger company because people are all inspired, you know, to do something special and then they put a lot of love and heart and soul and it does turn out that the ganja is energetic and it responds to, you know, attention and good feelings.

2:32:14Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineNice to see you this morning, Chimera.

2:32:17Etienne FontanWell, it also drives the thought of why indoor, right? Is because there's advances in technology such as infrared technology, right? Which when we were on Heptor, we learned in Missouri from the locals that Budweiser, which they're a large company, Brewery there in St. Louis purchased not only the infrared equipment, but also donated helicopters, of course, tax write-off to, you know, the local sheriffs and the DEA there in Missouri to then start flying around and not just bust the outdoor grows.

2:32:52Etienne FontanWhy? Because cannabis is around 10 degrees warmer than the ambient room temperature, so it can be read under infrared. So all of a sudden that infrared, uh, You know, but also the problem was unlike that picture that you see here is those are LED lights. The problem that we had back then is we were using high pressure sodiums and, you know, these caused a whole lot of heat Thank you so much for joining us.

2:33:38Etienne FontanThank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2:34:08Archive SeedsLED lights has made it exponentially easier to set up a grow in your basement. That's without question because essentially with HIDs, whether it's MH or HPS, Two lights is basically about how much you could put up before you need to start putting in some heat control, whether it's exhausting and bringing in air or air conditioning. So that makes it where you actually have to put, especially, you know, most people were growing in rentals back then because...

2:34:39Archive SeedsWe'll be right back.

2:34:59Archive SeedsYou know, BC, Washington, and Oregon were some of the main indoor cultivation areas where people really, really started setting it up and really doing it. And part of that was, I'm sure, you know, other cultural reasons historically, but also just because the weather was well, is good for it. You know, most of the year, even Humboldt, It's good to grow indoor. That cold, damp, outside air pulled into a nice hot room with all these heaters in it makes for really good environmental conditions, relatively speaking.

2:35:34BubblemanFor sure. Welcome, Chimera. And welcome back, Caleb. You came, you left, you came, you left, you're back again. We appreciate you.

2:35:42ChimeraIt's funny, you know, listening to you talk about high times and like the TMHQ and How the hell was post somebody writing like what Northern Lights 5 was worth in Minneapolis? I mean, it probably came from like a 400 watt grow, right? It's not like that was the market price. So, you know, placing magazines like High Times as this like pinnacle of information has just been, you know, it's part of why the cannabis community is the way it is.

2:36:12ChimeraAnd it's part of the evolution. It's an interesting anthropological story. But like, you know, talking how it ties into like strains and cultivars and varieties. I mean, they didn't really do us any good service. I mean, even the cannabis, the whole cannabis cup thing was about this business model where they would fill planes with American tourists and ship them over to Holland so that they could make money off them for a week.

2:36:36ChimeraRight. And then they would rope in all the American, or sorry, all the coffee shops and the seed banks into, hey, we'll promote you, we'll push your strains. And, you know, they created this whole kind of insane culture out of the thing. And, you know, having been over there and seen it, it's all Fugazi, right? Like the whole Dutch seed, at least way back then, It's starting to get a little bit better because we're moving into this more industry phase where there's, you know, it's worth it to do the work.

2:37:15ChimeraBut this stuff used to be just people making crosses of plants and closets and it was sold to the world as, oh, we're the people that are, you know, protecting the species and like essentially ushering this species through prohibition.

2:37:31ChimeraSo, yeah, like if you go back to like, you know, starting from The dominant conversation and how cannabis has essentially evolved. It's like it really is a series of lucky accidents. And I think I've come to think of it as the story is, and that's why we kind of idolize cannabis breeders in our community, which is such a weird thing to do. I mean, people don't know the names of strawberry breeders or corn breeders or wheat breeders, right?

2:37:59ChimeraBut everybody... Well, yeah, one, right? He's the one that everybody always says, right? Name me five others. I bet you can't do it. But, you know, I asked you to name me 10 cannabis seed producers. Everybody could do it. And to me, it's like the story is as much or more anthropological than it is botanical.

2:38:22ChimeraBecause what we're doing is we're celebrating the people like Dave, like our friend David. Right. I mean. I think David's impact is bigger on the cannabis industry Then his plans, right? Like his role as a leader and an educator and showing some of us a way that you could kind of like slip through the cracks, right? Or like you could find a way to run the gauntlet to like, you know, he was just such a leader in that way.

2:39:00ChimeraIt was his birthday the other day. I don't know if that was mentioned on the 25th on Friday. It was David's birthday. Hashiest of birthdays. Yeah, I love that you got that hash separating machine on that day. That's such a cool thing.

2:39:14BubblemanAnd no, listen, it was even cooler. As I pull up with my two, well, with my young son, my 10-year-old son, and his friend Jude, who's also 10 years old, We pull up to the top of my driveway and this giant Pelican case is sitting like a fatty, like a big fatty one is sitting right at my front door. And my son goes, or no, I think it was his buddy.

2:39:39BubblemanIt was one of them. Dad, you got a Fortnite package delivered. And I didn't really put it together because I'm not like as slick as that, but I did a little research later and realized, I guess, in the game Fortnite, they send down these big packages that come down on parachutes and they're these giant black like pelican cases. It was exactly the pelican case that was at my front door.

2:40:02BubblemanAnd of course, when I opened it and saw that it was the desktop plasmatic sifter from Sambo Creek Filtration, I just thought, how fucking cool is that on, you know, on his birthday? He's still like, I don't know, I just forever feel like Dave will be kind of like poking and laughing and busting my balls for the rest of my life.

2:40:29ChimeraYou know, it's funny because when we talk about all the things that we're all doing, Right. Grown weed regeneratively like Josh and Kelly or the history or, you know, archive chasing the new gas and the fire. It's all really fueled by that one thing that David, to me, David typified was like, how do you get the most high? Right. Like, how do you how do you find and make the cannabis or work with the cannabis in the way that you can get the most high?

2:40:57Etienne FontanThat's what it's about.

2:41:01ChimeraAnd we explore that thing in all of our different ways and the ways that we all do our art, right? But that's really what's at the core.

2:41:12BubblemanWell, and you know how we said it, Ryan, that very thing, that very thing was boiled down into the motto. If it don't bubble, it ain't worth the trouble.

2:41:24ChimeraWell, and the, you know, what is it? The messenger is the head or whatever, right?

2:41:28BubblemanWell, the one I said was herb is the messenger and bubble is the message.

2:41:35ChimeraBut that's what it was, though. It was chasing the message, right? Like, that's what it was with David. It was chasing the message. Yeah. And how could you find, you know, and how could you find what that was? He was so stoked on it was like, what is what is it about this plant? How can we figure out the thing about the plant that gives us that special feeling that we all

2:41:59Archive SeedsAll of the plants, all of the cultivars, all of the individuals that we're looking for in these populations, these families of seeds. It's all about the diversity of the message.

2:42:27Archive SeedsFlavor has become the thing that is that message though, right? Because all the brands of weed are all a strain. Right? They're all cultivar, right? Even the biggest brands in the space, cookies, what are they named after? Their most popular variety. Runts, named after their variety. I mean, the brands are, the most popular brands, the thing that resonates the most with consumers for whatever reason is the cultivar.

2:42:55ChimeraWell, it always has been. I mean, even DJ Short Blueberry, right? But it goes way before that. I mean, there's, you know, Fred talked about it. David's Memorial talked about David, you know, Thank you so much for joining us.

2:43:36Archive SeedsBasically variety at that point because it was an inbred variety.

2:43:41ChimeraYeah, and it was relatively true to a type. I mean, you could argue.

2:43:44Archive SeedsYeah.

2:43:46ChimeraYeah. So, yeah. Anyway, it's just an interesting thing because when you start going back and looking at the history, it's like there's all these very key moments that without them, including Prop 215 and the AIDS epidemic and people suffering from cachexia or whatever. like it was a big deal right but these key things came together and happened at the right point in time and here we are not even you know really 30 years later i mean 30 it's been 30 years since prop 215. it's still a relatively short period of time i mean there's probably people on the church that are younger watching this but you know it a lot has happened in 30 years and i think a lot of it is like i said it's anthropology it's about the people And now we're finally starting to get these scientific tools to bring into our cultivation and our studies of genetics.

2:44:39ChimeraAnd, you know, we're learning these things about these individuals. You know, it's like I was saying with Kelly the other day, it's like these families, these seed populations are their populations, their families. Right. And the plants that we select from them are just special individuals from within that family.

2:44:59ChimeraSo yeah, there's a lot to go. There's a lot to do.

2:45:03Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI think that the smell is like a huge and the flavor is a huge part of it. And it's interesting how visuals do play into it. And I love how the medicine is isn't just like a normal plant in that way because it captures us and it's part of our consciousness as part of our daily you know rituals that helps us you know through and in that way it's it's a medicine and and we are attracted to its flavor like primarily if it doesn't have good flavor then you have to just rely on just some effect afterwards but The visual is a big part of it because it's purple and then also the touch and feel like of course you can get like a doobie or a joint and there's a lot of different ways to get in all that but I'm just talking like as far as the flower people you get brought brought in by The smell, then you like go to the visual and then you go to like the touch and feel as you start breaking it up.

2:46:02Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd then sometimes there's like this feeling that you're attracted to and the flower like, oh, I love the way this breaks up and goes into the bowl or goes into a joint. So it really is kind of an amazing multifaceted, something like that, you know, sticky finger club, you know. And then the flower, there's so many different. Show it again.

2:46:25BubblemanI already put it in the grinder. Oh my God. This, you can't, you can't. Oh, wow. There you go. That's what's up. That's what's up. Poster bud.

2:46:40Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd all of our environments with individuals in them, meaning all the plants, you know, and thinking of them as individuals and families. When we make our gardens we sort of feel like we're creating an environment for the family and they're an extension of our family and so we walk in there you know we're with like that group you know and that and the crew you know or our homies or our family our grandmothers you know and uh as they evolve they take on different parts of of their you know individuality and they grow and they mature and they Always entice us and bring us in to be a part of that process and to integrate other plants in it and see how, you know, the dance is and how it all goes and stuff is just, it's spectacular.

2:47:32Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd I give thanks every day for the opportunity to do it. And historically till now, and it still captures us like so driven wise, you know, it's a magical plant.

2:47:45SpeakerAnd it's a lot like life, you know, a lot of different situations and different things that come about. And sometimes, you know, you get a seed or an idea or something that sparks you to maybe take a different timeline or a different pathway. And I always just tell people, well, you've got the seed and the idea, grow it all the way out. You know, it's the same thing with the cannabis plant.

2:48:09SpeakerJust grow it all the way out. See what it is that it has for you and I just think that that's just such a beautiful interpretation of life and how we move forward as well. You know, this plant continues to teach us these beautiful, deep lessons of evolvement. And the thing that's so cool about the cannabis plant is just like our own ideas or just like where it is that we're coming from or a path that we're on, every single seed is going to grow out different.

2:48:38SpeakerIt's going to, Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

2:49:09SpeakerCommunity, you know, so many things that we've talked about today have been sparked, have been pushed forward by cannabis community, whether it's been, you know, violently pushed forward or quietly underground pushed forward. It continues to push us to be the best potential of ourselves, which is exactly what the cannabis plant is doing for itself. Like, think about the seeds. Yeah, by attracting us to keep making it better and better, like the potential of the lineage of those, you know, yeah, any of the strains from way back when, you know, it's just has evolved in the same way that our community has evolved, that we've evolved as people.

2:49:56SpeakerAnd I just, I just love the stories and how they interweave. And then just,

2:50:03Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineSuch a way. Crazy diversity in the rhizosphere and into the flowers. I mean, it's never ending. It's honestly never ending.

2:50:12BubblemanI actually planted some seeds that you passed on to me just the other day, Kelly and Josh. I think I'll be able to show it to you. Yeah, right here. I was just I've been playing in my garden quite a bit. These aren't cannabis seeds, but you guys sent me a big old batch of wildflower seeds and I put marigolds and all sorts of beautiful flowers. And so I've got them in some nice organic soil and they are ready to just want to grow a big pot full of like awesome flowers from the dragonfly earth medicine fruit.

2:50:49BubblemanSo I've been spending lots of time in my garden lately. It's my meditative space, trimming out trees. And I actually went and cleaned out my hammocks. I had some Jamaican hammocks back there since like 15 years. And none of the trees except one was affected. But check that out.

2:51:18BubblemanJust from where the hammock was tied on, it cut the growth of the tree from the bottom. It grew as a normal-sized tree above. Like, how trippy is that?

2:51:32DominicThat's wild.

2:51:33BubblemanTripped me out. I've never seen anything like that. That is trippy.

2:51:39ChimeraMust have been years and years.

2:51:43BubblemanIt was 15 years.

2:51:45Archive SeedsBack when we used to do a lot more training and stuff on our cannabis plants, that would happen all the time. You get some like trellis netting wrapped around the branch too much and it'll just eat the trellis netting. Yeah. Well, there was a piece of it that I couldn't get out of the tree.

2:52:00BubblemanOh, I got a little squirrel visiting me or a little chipmunk. No, he's a squirrel. Don't go eating my roses.

2:52:10ChimeraYeah, we're definitely in this co-evolutionary dance with this plant. There's no doubt about it.

2:52:15BubblemanAbsolutely. I wouldn't be surprised if one day we'll find out that there's some sort of fungi that operates within cannabis that like infects the frontal cortex of human beings like cordyceps does to insects and just like gets us to walk through this world and promote and love cannabis on the highest level. We'll be like, oh yeah.

2:52:39SpeakerThat's a guarantee. Absolutely.

2:52:42Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineLet's just name it now. So when they, you know, when they find it, you know, we already named it.

2:52:48Archive SeedsThere should be a documentary called The Most Successful Plant on the Planet. And it's without question cannabis. There's no question it's the most successful plant on the planet. There's more of it grown in more places by more people than anything else. Without question.

2:53:08SpeakerAdoptogenic qualities are unbelievable. What area is going to change?

2:53:17ChimeraRyan dissents.

2:53:20Archive SeedsWhat else is grown in more locations around the world? People growing it in their house. I mean, there's more cannabis grows indoors in every city in the world than there is anything else growing inside people's plants, at least that they consume.

2:53:35ChimeraYeah, but if you look at the number of plants of canola, for example, that are grown or rice or corn.

2:53:40Archive SeedsI'm talking about number of people growing it. Like a canola is like one guy in a farm doing thousands of acres. I'm talking about individuals growing it. No one's growing. No one's got an indoor canola grow. No one's got an indoor corn grow. No one's got any of that. There's an entire industry of selling the products to grow cannabis.

2:54:03BubblemanDude, I got an indoor maize grow. I'm growing the maize. Yeah, I got, yeah.

2:54:09Archive SeedsThere's nothing else.

2:54:09DominicThis is the difference between measuring the value of people and the plant versus like the value of the dollar in the plant.

2:54:18ChimeraWell, it kind of comes back to what I was saying again. Like, it's like you're so focused on the anthropology, not on the plant, right? I'm focused on the plant.

2:54:27Archive SeedsYeah, well, we're just talking about two different things, right? That's all I'm saying.

2:54:30ChimeraYeah. Yeah.

2:54:34SpeakerIt's just, it's how do we define success?

2:54:37Archive SeedsThank you. Thank you.

2:54:38SpeakerThank you. Thank you.

2:55:02BubblemanCannabis.

2:55:02Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThe apple is close to being similar because there are so many different varieties that come out of the seeds. On our property alone, we have 20 different apple trees in like a five acre little spot. We didn't plant any of them.

2:55:15BubblemanYeah. Well, apples do far or fall far from the tree. Even though the saying is the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, that is completely fugazi. Because the apple falls as far genetically from the tree as it possibly fucking can. And that's why, that's how they, he kind of found out the story in the Botany of Desire that Johnny Appleseed was planting orchards for people to make like booze with.

2:55:45BubblemanThat was, the Appleseed people don't like that story being propagated, but Michael Poland.

2:55:51ChimeraYou gotta remember, we didn't understand what made, we didn't understand the microbiology that existed in water that made people sick. So drinking alcohol was about drinking a safe liquid.

2:56:04BubblemanBut it was also about showing up as a pioneer to buy a property that already had your booze sorted and taken care of. So Johnny Appleseed showed up early. He kind of pioneered super early, befriended the indigenous, you know, bought and traded properties and then sold them to, you know, the next levels of pioneers that would come in. This is all just from Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire.

2:56:27BubblemanSuper awesome book. I know people will be like, there's a documentary. It's like, there is, but there's a book. Just read it.

2:56:33ChimeraIf you think of the apples as a population, again, it's no different, right? It's like a population. It's an organizm that exists as a population, not as an individual. Like we talk about the plant, but really it's the species, right? Like there's so many different types of plants within cannabis, right? Thank you for watching.

2:57:15ChimeraRight. And I, I think it's very much the same way with cannabis. Like cannabis breeds kind of in the same way that apples do. Like the, the, the seed does fall genetically far from the type of the parent, right? You don't, that's, that's why strain is not an appropriate term, right? Because a strain is a biological type that when it reproduces, it recapitulates the type and apples and cannabis don't really do that.

2:57:40ChimeraLike when you cross cannabis, even to itself within a family, You get all these different types out in the offspring, right? And that variation is what allows us to explore the differences within the species, you know, all these different flavor profiles. But it's not a great way to, unless you're really breeding the plants to try to make them uniform, it's not a great way to share that unique type.

2:58:05ChimeraThat's why clones are better, right? For if you have, like if you have something unique, like some new flavor, Like Josh and Kelly were telling me about a valencian dominant plant that they had found, which is, you know, like rarer than hen's teeth. That's the type of thing that you have to share via cutting, right? Because when you cross it to something else, that unique type disappears.

2:58:34ChimeraIt's recessive and it's so rare that it's very hard to recover that type. So, um, Yeah, and I think that's one of the real powers of inbreeding in cannabis is that we're able to find these unique things that don't exist, that you can't just kind of, you very rarely stumble across them, right? They're like a Sasquatch. It's like going into the woods and seeing a Sasquatch. It's just so rare.

2:58:59BubblemanMy hope was that as cannabis became more and more prevalent and as more and more people could grow it without fear of persecution, that certain terroirs would produce and express novel and unique aromatic volatile compounds. I was talking to this group recently in New Zealand. And they were saying that their country is like right above this like fucking hole in the ozone layer. And they get like the craziest UV rays through into their crops.

2:59:31BubblemanAnd he was talking about Tom was his name. He was talking about the idea of getting, you know, just having that very thing, like potentially that being one of the vectors for New Zealand, at least to maybe produce something, you know, that is unique, not necessarily breeding wise, because if it has so much to do with the terroir, it Thank you so much for joining us today.

3:00:17BubblemanThank you for watching.

3:00:38Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWe would sell bags of our soil from our gardens and greenhouse to people. And that would be like the seed of our biology into their gardens. And then we would sell like a bag of soil with some of our seeds. And then that would be us selling our terroir along with the genetics that came with it.

3:00:58BubblemanNo, I was just thinking selling the flower itself. You grow the flower. You have your terroir is the expression in your flower. That's what you sell. That's what you have to be able to sell it outside of the country that it's grown in. I want to grow. I want to smoke hash from Lebanon. I want to, you know, smoke some of this New Zealand full melt with the hole in the ozone layer.

3:01:19SpeakerWell, I think that actually you can bring these two ideologies together, which is what Ryan and I were just talking about last week. was that creating greenhouses that had very specific environments, very specific soil and carbon resonance, as well as You know, specific kind of humidity and really try as hard as you could to recreate that environment and then bring in the seeds from say like Lebanon, then bring in the seeds from Pakistan, bring in and really try to recreate that.

3:01:56SpeakerOf course, it would be, You can't recreate it.

3:02:01BubblemanIt's the most ridiculous thing. You've got to be able to grow it in your terroir and send it out to the world who wants to appreciate it. And some people will be like, oh man, I got this like sweet Madagascar live hash rosin. Just this couple of dudes there doing a real small thing. It's super small releases. I just look forward to the day where legalization is less bordery and a little more open.

3:02:26Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI want to smoke Madagascar weed that someone took the excess vanilla and made like garden nutrient out of it. And they just only like fed their plant. I mean, vanilla. And then, you know what I'm saying?

3:02:41DominicOne of the things about terroir is that it is partially culturally defined as well. That it's like a French wine.

3:02:52ChimeraYeah. In a way, it's like a land race. It's about the location and the people and the practices. I mean, you know, case in point was making some pasta sauce the other day and use some of Josh and Kelly's basil. And this, and holy cow. I mean, the most beautiful basil I've ever seen, but not even, not even close, right? We used to grow a lot of basil down in California, like a few, like a bay at least in our greenhouse worth.

3:03:20ChimeraBeautiful sun, beautiful soil. And it was nothing like Josh and Kelly's basil. That's the strongest smelling basil I've ever seen in my life. Just completely turped out.

3:03:29BubblemanYou got that six star full melt basil.

3:03:32ChimeraOh, it was for sure. Like it was, I almost, I almost, you know, yeah, we should get some of those flowers. Your basil flower must be just silly.

3:03:43BubblemanLook it up, bring some, or did you leave there already? No, I'm still here. He's still here. You gotta bring some cuts, man. I need plants for the garden.

3:03:50Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWe are, we'll set you up hardcore.

3:03:52SpeakerWe have so many.

3:03:53Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineYeah. Dude, dude, you don't know how happy that makes me. Yeah, that's coming.

3:03:59SpeakerYou know, one thing that I wanted to mention too is that we have to also really take into consideration all of this incredible research that we've now been learning about our own human biome. We know that if I leave this farm and I go live in India for 30 days, my biome is totally going to change. My breath is going to smell different. Because my tongue is going to look different.

3:04:29SpeakerI'm going to have a whole different metabolic activation going on within my body. And because we are so adaptogenic like that, like it's not like you can take a fish and put it in the desert or something. And then that fish is going to, I mean, I know that's extreme. It's extreme. But it's so cool that we can take that seed from Lebanon and it has all of these incredible things and it could be as stable as 200 years of breeding and then you bring it someplace else and the whole cannabinoid and terpene profile is going to be totally different in the same way that When we go to a different location, we have that interior, you know, microbiome, just like the plant has the endophytic system.

3:05:21SpeakerAnd I just think that's where this plant is just is so leading us forward. I feel like the more that we are integrated with it, the more we're able to jump timelines because this plant seems to do that. It seems to be ahead of so many other plants I don't want to say plants because everything has got its own capabilities and lineage, but a lot like the apple can go all over the world and it tastes different.

3:05:49SpeakerI mean, you can taste a Red Delicious in Africa and you can taste a Red Delicious from Washington State. It's going to taste totally different.

3:05:57Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd I have the Saskatoon's taste different on our property. Every different little spin.

3:06:01SpeakerIt really is. Yeah. Bushes taste different. And I love that. Like they're all Saskatoon's. They're all from the same Saskatoon thing. But yet you go down to one bush and it's got like it's sweet as can be. And they're huge. And then you just even go 15 feet away. And then that whole bush set is totally different.

3:06:22Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineLike mealy. And you just say nutrients, but... The other Johnny Appleseed in the world are just our bears. So when bears, they crush the tree and then they go shit all over the place. The next thing you know, there's a tree growing. And they crush it. You just throw some apples out there in bear zone and all of a sudden, it's chaos. And they break the branches in a way that you can sit in there over the years.

3:06:51Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineSo I'm sitting and... Trees and spots. I'm like, damn, this is a bare spot. This is where the branches were broken repetitively year after year and then just re-grew. I'm like, this is okay. I get it.

3:07:04ChimeraThey're one of the major cyclers of phosphorus into the forest, right? Because they're always taking the fish out into the forest, too. Yeah, they're impressive environmental shapers, those guys.

3:07:19Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWe have two grizzlies cruising around our other farm and stuff right now that have been, and they're smaller and they're not like Aggressive either, but they're just a little bit more keen than a black bear, you know.

3:07:33BubblemanTotally different species. Yeah. It comes with being an apex predator.

3:07:38Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThey look different. We saw a wolf the other day, you know, when we were driving by and heard, I had a crazy whole night of like this wolf crying out in our field and stuff here. And definitely, you know, feeling the animals and the health of the animals. The forest in this area, which I'm very thankful for.

3:08:01BubblemanEarlier, Robert in chat said that Dave and Ozzy Osbourne were in heaven making hash. So this is as close as I could get it with AI. I couldn't get Dave super accurate, but there's Dave and Ozzy making hash up in heaven.

3:08:22ChimeraHe's definitely got the green shirt going.

3:08:26Etienne FontanI thought it was pretty funny, dude.

3:08:29BubblemanIn fact, the first one was actually the best one, but it really looked nothing like Dave. It looked more like Indra. But Ozzy looks happy. I was like, man, AI is too fucking...

3:08:42Etienne FontanI'm surprised you isn't showing him the static tech, you know what I'm saying? Because that's what he'd really be doing.

3:08:47BubblemanWell, I couldn't get AI to listen. AI is only based on things that it can find and see. And so it's like, for instance, if you ask it to make a picture of a clock, the clock will almost always be at the same time. I believe it's 10 after 10. And that's because 99.9% of photos on clocks, all advertisements of clocks, they put it at 10 after 10 because it's the most aesthetically pleasing to the human psychology.

3:09:16BubblemanAnd so there's just weird little glitches in AI, I will say. And it was unable to create a static image. Sam, photo.

3:09:29BubblemanOh my goodness, 12.07, three hours and seven minutes. I kind of was thinking of maybe giving away a press club spoon today. These guys have been so cool with sponsoring Hash Church. They got these really cool bubble hash spoons that they've been making for collecting the hash. It's really nice and sort of fatty. I think I should probably, probably give one of these away. So I'm going to have to, Open Nightbot, which never gives me the actual login to Nightbot, so then I have to punch in Nightbot TV login.

3:10:04BubblemanAnd we'll need to be probably 10 minutes of chatting or so before it enters all of the folks. Let me see here. It's this one, and then it's this one. Okay, so I got Nightbot signed in. And then that just makes an easy, transparent way for us to give away one of these spoons. People are always stoked to receive these. Just a nice little cool little thing.

3:10:32BubblemanEven if you don't make bubble hash, hash rules, everything around me from the press club, small family owned business in California. Good folks. All right. So we're opening up Nightbop. We're going to go into giveaways, active giveaway, active chatters is how we're going to do it. All right. There we go. It's going. So we can chat for a little bit and then I'll just super rudely interrupt everyone to give away this spoon and shout out to Shout out to Press Club for hooking it up.

3:11:04BubblemanI can't tell you 25 years ago how much I would have absolutely, I mean, I can't tell you how much I actually love this thing right now. I'm not going to lie. I'm a total nerd. I'm excited about a fucking spoon. I'm sorry. But 25 years ago, if someone pulled this spoon out of their back pocket, I would have just been like still talking about it. It's like, man, remember that spoon?

3:11:25BubblemanAnd that spoon you had, dude, the big pulse. Oh, man, that spoon. I remember we named it Bertha. Bertha the spoon. Pulling big, big spoonfuls. Anyway, we got 44 entries. We'll wait till we get about 100 and then I will give that spoon away. Stoked on the conversation today. Really, really excited to have you out here, Dominic, and get into this.

3:11:54Etienne FontanLet's keep it going. So how do you keep history from being whitewashed, right? Because as we know, we've talked about how, you know, people will change the narrative as well as you sometimes get conflicting pieces of history, you know, which you have to then dissect or you and Caleb have to go further down wormholes of history. Thank you for joining us.

3:12:39Etienne FontanRoss says that he wants to capture the culture right but culture is undefinable much less it's it's hard to grasp and as we've watched any type of company or companies come along you know and try to capture culture you know it always seems to slip through their grasp so Dominic and Caleb, how do you as, you know, you're kind of gate holders of history of sorts, you know, how do you differentiate and, you know, keep the history true to history?

3:13:12DominicWell, for one, you're just very transparent when you're representing what happened of the, you know, the limits of what you can determine, especially around breeding. So, like, we'll let people speak for themselves and let, I mean, that's how culture is actually made, is that, like, it's, you know, It's organic and it like springs from the, you know, the, the meaning being produced by your social relationship or co-evolution with the plant and the other people who are doing that.

3:13:49DominicAnd so really it's just, it's being representationally transparent. It's like, this is what I mean by culture. And this is what I mean by like, you know, the partial representation of history as being, you know, like, its actual value is not, in fact, the determinant of truth with a capital T. It is to, you know, get at how people make meaning. And so, like, that's the mission.

3:14:28DominicAnd I kind of wanted to say earlier that, you know, when Ryan was talking about, you know, David and the message, right, and spreading the message, is that, you know, the message is the meaning, right? It's the meaning that's being made. And that's the thing is like there's so much really like ecologically healthy and socially healthy like ways to relate to the plant, right? And, you know, obviously Flavor being one of them identified earlier.

3:15:03DominicBut it's like the plant can be so many different things. So there's like, you know, it's such a rich resource and partner for producing meaning.

3:15:16DominicSo, you know, like when I talk about the culture, that's kind of what I'm, you know, I will frame it as, you know, and do frame it as, you know, as much as possible. I don't know if there's a response to that.

3:15:28Archive SeedsWell, I think there's a good thing to mention there is that the flavor having the meaning is really like among our kind of group. There's the whole other 95% of the weed consuming public that doesn't care at all about heady strains, the homegrown network, any of this history or anything. So like at the end of the day, I was really only... Like relative to our discussion, not really to the broader cultural impact of cannabis and the things that other reasons why other people smoke cannabis.

3:16:02Archive SeedsI mean, at the end of the day, the most popular products are not the heady jar of weed. It's the Keef coated pre-roll. So for them, it's a monoculture.

3:16:14DominicYeah. So, so what I would say is for them, it's a monoculture. That is, you know, really like shaped by the commercial forces that bring them their alienated food.

3:16:25Archive SeedsWell, I think it's partially that. And then I think the other thing to keep in mind, and maybe this goes back to half baked the movie a little bit, but it's like cannabis is kind of like the modifier. And so you have like, people are in all these other cultural groups, you know, they're heavy metal, they're rockers, they're, you know, People in the city, people in the country, just whatever it is.

3:16:47Archive SeedsAnd then they happen to also smoke weed. That was like something that I always found interesting. Like, you know, kind of when this was like the medical scene in the medical community, There was this common thread where people were like, well, we're all in the same family and stuff because we all smoke weed. And I used to always kind of be like, I don't really get that because like the group of people that all smoked weed is such a diverse group with all different cultural thing that like, I don't want to be just forced to be culturally aligned with this other person just because we both smoke weed, but I don't align with them about anything else at all.

3:17:28Archive SeedsAnd so that was always a weird thing was like everyone's trying to define weed culture as this thing we all have to have like the something similar in where it was like it really just seemed to me like oh well we all have our other interests and other hobbies and then we also all you know we come together on weed but that doesn't mean we have anything else culturally in common good or bad.

3:17:50DominicYeah yeah absolutely I love the the metaphor of the modifier.

3:17:58Archive SeedsYeah, well, and then, ATN, I think the other thing I wanted to mention is that the easiest way to prevent the misinformation, I mean, I think if the message is good, then maybe, you know, it's good to, you know, publish it however the person tells it. But the easiest way is to know the right questions to ask. So the, you know, knowing the history and knowing, you know, knowing where things actually came from because you've seen it or were there or witnessed it, at least to whatever point you have knowledge, is the easiest way to tell the bullshit from the good shit.

3:18:35Archive SeedsAnd the... The group of people that really were involved with this was so small, the actual people popping the seeds and growing them and collecting the varieties that, um, It's not a huge group, but it's, you know, you can only take it back so far. Most of this stuff doesn't go back to the person that popped the seed. You know, I mean, Chem 91 would be a good example of when we did finally find the person that popped the seed being Greg.

3:19:08Archive SeedsBut, you know, it's very rare that we find the original person even. There's only a certain level we can go back to and then it's lost from there.

3:19:21ChimeraAnthropology. Exactly.

3:19:24SpeakerAnd it's pretty interesting too, because then now we have like a whole culture that you can call cannabis culture that's based out of people or interests that don't even consume the plant. And then there's the culture who, you know, the consumption is number one, just like, you know, you were saying, Fletch, it's like, Thank you so much for joining us today.

3:20:15SpeakerYou know the actual act of consuming of getting high is is the relationship with the plant is the cultural relationship with the plant but yet now there's this whole other culture that has a relationship to it outside of even that It's sort of difficult because we've got this psychoactive plant. It's not so psychoactive. It's activating. I don't want to even get into the definitions because everybody's got something there.

3:20:49SpeakerBut it activates us in so many different ways that, I mean, I really believe that, you know, like a sourdough culture, you can't have a sourdough culture without actually... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

3:21:06Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThank you.

3:21:31SpeakerAnd yet here's this plant that travels all throughout the world. We're ingesting that culture. We're ingesting the culture of the plant. And I just think that that is drawn like spider webs all over the entire world. And as the web gets wider, the weave gets tighter. And I just love this conversation.

3:22:02ChimeraI think it's one of the important things. I mean, cannabis is one of those places where you can have even Republicans and Democrats coming together, not freaking out about stuff, you know, however many things. And that's just Republicans and Democrats are. Just representative terms for different people that are different, you know?

3:22:20Archive SeedsIt's much like any hobby or, you know, a sport or anything you're into. You know, you'll meet people from all different places and everything around the world, but you have that sport or that hobby in common and now, you know, you guys are best friends or whatever, completely different. You know, so cannabis, other than it being psychoactive, is very similar to most extracurricular activities in that sense.

3:22:44DominicWhich are all associated with culture.

3:22:46Archive SeedsExactly. Exactly.

3:22:48SpeakerYeah. It's just, it goes deeper with the idea that we're actually being activated. Our endocannabinoid system, we're actually medicinally being activated by this Kelly Cervantes, WPE Co-Chair, Shea M.D. : thing that not only makes us Kelly Cervantes, WPE Co-Chair, Shea M.D. : put in a different mental, emotional, spiritual space, but it also is doing the same to our body.

3:23:15Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIt's medicinally affecting our microbiome and all of that. Kelly Cervantes, WPE Co-Chair, Shea M.D. : Yeah.

3:23:20SpeakerYeah, so it's so interesting how it can go even one step further. So it's like you're ingesting it and you're ingesting that medicine, that intelligence, that culture. And and with every human being, although it doesn't really matter where the varietal comes from, where the strain comes from, where the family comes from, you're still involving yourself with cannabinoids. That then is bringing that culture inside of yourself. I just really love how deep and spiritual it can get.

3:23:53SpeakerAnd it's not, it's so even defined by that. I mean, you know, Shiva, a whole entire religion and spiritual belief of the plant. And it goes back so many other places and a lot of different religions that have been wiped out have been centered around Thank you so much for joining us.

3:24:44SpeakerThere is some higher conversations that I can have with them. And we probably can make fun after we get high about the differences between our political views.

3:24:54Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineOr the fact that the weeds are organic or not. And I think that long-term non-organic use doesn't have as good of an effect to the body as long-term organic cultivation. And that's just a theory. And that's just the way that it affects the spirit of.

3:25:11DominicWell, it's, it's, it's food politics, isn't it? Right? Like the, the general idea that like, The less industrially processed our food is, you know, the better it is for us. You know, uh, it makes sense. And like all of this relates to like, you know, what you're able to produce a shit, you know, shared meaning by having a, you know, experience of, of eating your culture's food together, whatever that culture is.

3:25:43DominicRight. Um, It is interesting, and that's why I like the modifier. The modification is two social nodes couldn't connect. There was no bridge. And the modifier modifies each other's ability to create meaning together by sharing social space.

3:26:08BubblemanI love it. I'm going to modify a dab right into my head right now. I'm a modifier.

3:26:20DominicIt's why the sesh is such a vital part of everything. Right.

3:26:25BubblemanOf course. The sesh is everything.

3:26:31Etienne FontanWell, it goes back to when we used to be and we used to go hang out with our dealer, right? We used to smoke with our dealer, right? We can't do that dispensary. Lord knows, I really wish we could. However, it's just not the case. But, you know, back in the day, you know, depending on your dealer, you somehow either smoke what you bought from them or brought something with you, you know what I'm saying?

3:26:53Etienne FontanOr... Or they, you know, unless they voluntarily rolled their own, you know, out of the day. So, I mean, it's always been that social aspect of cannabis, right? When you get together as a group, you know, there's rules, there's songs, there's songs about the rules. Pass the dutchie to the right, you know, left-hand side, correct? So, you know... You know, it's interesting how it's interwoven into society.

3:27:23Etienne FontanAnd the majority of people had no idea that it was a bunch of, you know, prepubescent teens singing about, you know, marijuana. But, you know, they were, you know, it became an international hit, right?

3:27:36DominicYeah. Well, when the economic transaction is a social experience, it's a different kind of market transaction. Right, like in the, you know, going to your dealers or if someone was delivering, like, you know, like you generally got high together if you could and hung out for a little bit. And I kind of feel like that's definitely what legalization most clearly cuts off is any social, like, you know, value to a transaction.

3:28:11ChimeraYeah, there's something really interesting there that I thought about before. I mean, You got to remember, drug use in society is like a taught experience, right? There's wisdom and knowledge that's passed down from the elder experience to the novice, like in that whole process. 100%. We've cut that off. We've sterilized that whole transaction in a weird way. It's funny, I mean, I'm sure anybody that can remember back to the old days, I had some pretty funny experiences at dealer during deals, you know, of all sorts of types, like good, bad, ugly, funny, scary.

3:28:53ChimeraBut yeah, you had all sorts of weird, weird things that would go down during deals.

3:29:00Archive SeedsWell, I think there's two distinctly different cultural experiences with cannabis too. There's the experience of dealing it and being in the business of it. And then there's the experience of growing it and growing the plant. And those are two pretty different experiences as well. I mean, even just on the, like, look at Humboldt and the Bay where all the weed went to for many years. It's a pretty drastic difference, the lifestyle that people were trying to live.

3:29:30Archive SeedsThey feed one another. Exactly. And it's much like farms and the food that they sell in the city. It's no different. But it's because we existed outside of the tax system for so many years and it was its own self-regulating free market with the only economic force was prohibition. That was the only thing forcing whatever was happening to happen the way it was. And so we had this unique culture come out of a massive economic boom essentially that happened in the face of prohibition.

3:30:13Archive SeedsThat required not just importing a product, but actually cultivating it as well. It'd be like, you know, trying to get corn at your grocery store and it had to be grown illicitly. It's like that just, or, you know, or it's like moonshine on the East Coast was, you know, 100 years ago, same thing. There's a lot more that goes into it.

3:30:34Etienne FontanWell, you also, as a consumer, you had to also learn your dealer's rules, right? Back in the day, every dealer was different, right? How you contacted your dealer, where you met your dealer, you know what I'm saying? Occasionally, your dealer would share something from their special stash, you know what I'm saying? So you could learn about different types of cannabis besides what was necessarily accessible. So don't forget that whole consumer end, which everybody had to figure out on their own, right?

3:31:02Etienne FontanBy finding somebody, then Thank you for joining us.

3:31:29Etienne Fontanyou know which taught us a lot of us how to be clandestine right we use pagers we use we use pay phones we didn't use cell phones right we we you know and we would wipe the phone when we went away as well you remember that yeah yeah those were you know the old school days which i'm glad that we no longer have to experience thanks to a lot of people And a lot of change.

3:31:52Etienne FontanHowever, I don't think it's the change that we're experiencing now is what we were culturally expecting to see. I think we had a much more utopian sharing in mind than what necessarily came down the reality pipe.

3:32:12DominicWell, I think partially it was because so many of us were living in a bubble that protected us from having to deal with that bullshit.

3:32:24SpeakerAnd one thing that I feel like is important to talk about too is that once things became legalized in ways, whether it was medical or whether it started hitting sort of this idea, even if it wasn't enacted into law, but the idea that maybe your kids couldn't be taken away or you wouldn't be put in jail forever in certain areas or certain countries or certain states. It brought a whole other level of people and business into the industry that people don't really talk about.

3:33:01SpeakerAnd I really feel like that's where the free market, the black market, whatever you want to call it, the fair market became really dangerous. And not only just like dangerous as far as like You know, grower turf, but also, you know, you weren't as worried about the cops taking your kids. You were worried, more worried about getting seriously ripped off at gunpoint with your whole family there.

3:33:36SpeakerIt brought in sort of a different group of people that I would say wasn't originally part of like this super underground pirate badass families. Yeah.

3:33:52BubblemanSo that's, I'm going to, I'm going to give this spoon away. It's 1230. I want to make sure we give it away. We got 94 entries right now. So I am just going to choose a winner. I will let, before I choose the winner, you gotta send me an email the minute you win at bcbubbleman at icloud.com. That email will get put into the chat by bingo.

3:34:17BubblemanSo just please send me an email because then I'm going to tell you a specific sentence to say in the chat and then that confirms with me that you are indeed the person that won. It's how I connect your name to any random person sending me an email. So without further ado, we've got the Bertha. The Press Club Spoon, as I have dubbed it, La Bertha Spoon, coming your way.

3:34:44BubblemanSo let's give it away to Golden Coast. How about that? Golden Coast, you are the winner. So I will simply wait five minutes to see if I get an email from Golden Coast. And if I don't, I will give that away to the next person in the chat. So hopefully they acknowledge that they won. And then they send me an email because you got a cool spoon coming your way.

3:35:16BubblemanI mean, how cool is that? How many people are winning hash collection spoons on Sunday morning? This is like, this is not happening.

3:35:26Etienne FontanIt's a religious experience that can only happen on hash church.

3:35:30BubblemanIt is indeed. And thank you to the Press Club for supplying these wonderful little tools for us to hook up with our audience. Even if you just want to smash vegetarian chili, like this spoon will allow you to smash more of it into your pie hole than any normal spoon. So it's a multitasking spoon. Not only can it collect hash, it can also do that. So did he, Golden Coast, pass it on?

3:36:00BubblemanWhy is he saying pass it on? Let somebody else win it. All right, no problem. All right, we're going back to the giveaway. 100 entries this time, and without further ado, it's Sky Nuts. Sky Nuts. Sky Nuts.

3:36:26Etienne FontanAll right, Sky Nuts, put it in the chat. Reach out to the man.

3:36:30BubblemanReach out to the man, Sky Nuts. Let us know. That's, uh, do you remember the first person I gave something away to on Hash Church, Etienne? Wasn't it Agnes? It was Ben Inya. Ben Inya, that's it. It was Ben Inya. And people were like, you don't know who's Ben Inya? And I'm like, oh, ha ha ha.

3:36:54Etienne FontanJosh and Kelly are going to tend the garden. Love y'all. Be safe. Give love to the garden for us. Thanks, guys.

3:37:01SpeakerThis was such a great conversation, Dominic. I really loved this and the spark and the intelligence, and it was great having Fletch on, and yeah, thanks so much, everybody.

3:37:13DominicYou guys were such a huge part of it. Thank you so much. Wow. Thank you, Caleb. Yeah, thanks, Caleb.

3:37:20Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineMarcus, and it's nice to see everyone out there. I also want to give thanks to Tara Lee for styling me out on the road the other day, and yeah, She's always so sweet and wonderful and she's the best.

3:37:32SpeakerTalk about cannabis culture and people looking out for you. There's always some people that you can find who have always got the good fire and always have a good conversation. And again, thanks, Tarly. Hey, thanks.

3:37:45BubblemanYeah. I'm stoked. I'm stoked for plants. I cannot wait for funky plants.

3:37:51SpeakerYou know what is so fun is if you came out here, Whoa.

3:37:59BubblemanI want to. Trust me. Trust me.

3:38:03SpeakerWe'll talk about things. Okay.

3:38:05BubblemanYes, absolutely, guys.

3:38:07SpeakerOkay, bye.

3:38:07BubblemanHave a good one. Welcome, Adam.

3:38:12BubblemanWhat is up? How you doing, brother?

3:38:15AdamI'm doing good. Let me see if I can get lined up here. I was going to sing you guys a quick song and be out, but maybe a little bit. If I may, may I sing you guys a song? We wouldn't say no to a song. Right on. Or would we? Yeah, blessings. Been real busy. Been trying to take care of the family and just wanted to come in and say hi and bless you guys up for a minute.

3:38:44AdamWell, here we go. This is a song by Don Carlos.

3:38:52SpeakerWhoa, good.

3:38:55SpeakerWoke up this morning, I saw Mr. Sun shining through my window. I said, hello, son. I said, hello, son. I said, hello, son. I was so glad to see your light come shining through. I jumped out of bed. I got a lot of things to do. I can't waste time. Time is so precious to me. I can't waste time. Time is so precious to me. If I waste time, I'll be right behind that line.

3:39:49SpeakerAnd who's to tell? Might even lose my mind.

3:39:59SpeakerI might lose my mind. Time is so precious to me. I might lose my mind. Time is so precious to me. I said hello, son. I said hello, son. I said hello, son. Time is so precious to me.

3:40:27BubblemanOh, yeah, brother. Thanks for that. That was awesome. Don Carlos to rest in peace. Shout out. That was just lovely. Quite enjoyed that.

3:40:38AdamLove you guys. Just want to just want to say thanks. Give thanks for our sons, our daughters, the sun in the sky, the fire, the resin, the sun, honey. Yeah. Bless of you guys. Big love. Hell yeah, dude.

3:40:54BubblemanHope things are going good in California for you.

3:40:58AdamMaybe we'll touch base. I'm showing up and I'm giving thanks.

3:41:04BubblemanLove it. Well, that was quite lovely. I love me some Don Carlos, as Diana just mentioned in the chat there.

3:41:15AdamIt was very cool. He spent a lot of time. He'd come up to Humble. He spent a lot of time in Northern California.

3:41:21BubblemanThat's nice. That's nice when you get the reggae artists coming off the island and spending time with you in your zone. We had a few different ones come up here and do concerts on the glacier where we had to helicopter them into this zone and they're like, you know, they're Jamaican so it's a little different.

3:41:43AdamYeah, it was cool. The homie out in Hay Fork in Trinity brought, set up a coffee shop and brought a Uh, uh, Dr. Octagon, and he brought Lee Scratch Perry out and Yellow Man. He was able to import a lot of these legends. And, uh, yeah, that's very cool to get called to get, yeah, to have, to draw the culture up away from, uh, the cities and.

3:42:13AdamPipe them through these more rural places.

3:42:16BubblemanWell, I love that you came in and dropped on Carlos and I particularly love it because we talked about the sort of anthropological aspects of the work Dominique and Caleb had been doing in regards to collecting the stories. We talked about the Grateful Dead and Fish and we gave them props, but we never gave reggae music props, which is absolutely batshit crazy bonkers. Yeah. Because obviously reggae is going to be given a huge nod to the promotion and maybe even something more at a deeper level than promotion, the spiritual connection to cannabis through Rastafarianism, Bob Marley.

3:43:02AdamIt's worship music. It's, well, I first, you know, I saw Burning Spear in a- Winston Rodney. Cutty little venue outside of Florence, Italy. And the feeling that we were in church, the feeling that the incense that was rising up was uniting people just as well as the rhythm was, and time and space being- Yeah, feeling like it was malleable and like you were enjoying a connected experience.

3:43:35Adam100%. You know, hello, sun. I think, you know, I was singing to my son, you know, not necessarily the sun in the sky, but I think it's all connected. It's all metaphor. It's very poetic. And the more and more people experience it like that, I think the better. It's really a unifying message.

3:43:56BubblemanAbsolutely. Listen, I first met Spear, I want to say 91. And he was playing my friends, my friend Aaron, his father owned this little pub in Ontario. I always forget where it was in Ontario, but he had this little pub and he would bring reggae artists and he brought Winston Rodney. We ended up meeting him in Winnipeg where his first concert was before he went out to sort of a couple hours the other way.

3:44:28BubblemanAnd I ended up meeting the keyboard player. And befriending them, getting them a bunch of weed, and then driving them to the show. And he had a big band, like nine or 10 people. And we had three Volkswagen vans filled with Burning Spears crew as we dropped them off at the little venue. And it was this super... I don't know it was just like paying homage you know like being like hey let us make your trip a little easier make sure you got good food good food good smoke and we're just going to be in the audience uh you know as your as your biggest fan sort of thing so that's awesome that you mentioned uh burning spear and watching him play congos like just on the stage was always so powerful and it was definitely uh he was tapped into something a little deeper than just uh

3:45:17BubblemanAnd just music.

3:45:18AdamEveryone has their place. The elders being part of the conga line. You know, we saw Israel Vibration in Florence also at this Club Flog, I think it was. It was this crazy cool venue, like little small, felt like a big barn. And yeah, that idea that like real simplicity, getting people in the right time, getting that heartbeat going. And also, like you said, the urge to want to get flavor and spirit into your favorite artists to see if it elevates what they're giving to you and have some sort of reciprocal relationship.

3:46:02AdamI think this is something that it's a fun feeling to want to participate this way. Take care of the people that are giving you so much.

3:46:11BubblemanYeah, mad shout out to Israel Vibrations, one of my favorite bands for many, many, many years. Apple and Wiss and Skelly, always like super powerful to watch these dudes on canes after suffering polio as children and still dancing and smiling and just singing the most iry music out of the most beautiful voices, harmonizing in the most epic of ways. Truly, I always loved jam bands. I always loved, you know, The Dead and Phish and all these other amazing bands that have followed bluegrass and that style of music.

3:46:49BubblemanBut the connection I've always had to reggae music that started so early, probably with Bob Marley and eventually into, you know, the militant Peter Tosh and then into, you know, so many other incredible bands and getting to spend You know, so much time being called to Jamaica. You know, I was married there in 95, spent a lot of time in Jamaica, brought bubble bags to Jamaica in like the late 90s, early 2000, and just, you know, disseminated these bags all over the island from Westmoreland to Kingston to everywhere in between, teaching them how to make hash.

3:47:25BubblemanReally embedded me in the Jamaican culture, you know, without, I didn't know it would, but I'm super glad that it did because I have a great deal of respect for it. The amount of, I was watching videos the other day of some of the times, like at the studios with Kiddus Eye and some of these other just amazing Ken Booth, like reggae legends. You know, Richie Spice going to the backstage Marley concert in Halfway Tree in Kingston, Jamaica with with Richie and standing backstage with all of the Marley's as they're going on stage to perform, you know, in Kingston, like the electricity in the air.

3:48:03BubblemanThe feeling I always tell people, if you love reggae music, you really owe it to yourself to go experience it in Jamaica, because that is where it can be experienced unlike any other place on any other stage. There's something about the electricity Of Jamaica. And it's, it's, you kind of owe it to them too. If, if they've exported that music to your place and they've come and you've loved it, then do yourself a favor and go, you know, go listen to it in the roots.

3:48:35AdamThe, the, the San, the San Croy I grade boys too, that I don't know you, Nioh Rah is maybe a newer artist. Do you, you might be familiar with Nioh Rah or N-I-Y-O-R-A-H, Nioh Rah. And then, you know, I love the way you carry yourself. It shows that you have self respect. You know, I, you know, it's it is an amazing vibe, the positive, the positive message.

3:49:08AdamThe worship, the recognition of the spirit that is the sun, that is the herb, that is the ganja, that is God's garden, this kind of encompassing thing. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's cool vibes. We should plan a radio show of some kind where we do a exploration of the music through the ages. This might be fun.

3:49:36BubblemanYeah, absolutely. Sorry, I'm just realizing that Sky Nuts has still not sent me an email. And I'd love to just put it in the bag that I can send this spoon to you. But I got to get that email, man. Otherwise, I got to give it away to someone else. We're running out of time. It's almost one o'clock. We've been doing so precious to me.

3:49:54AdamI got a lot of work to do. I'll see you guys soon. Big love and respect.

3:50:00BubblemanThanks, Wolf Mountain Organics.

3:50:03Etienne FontanBe safe out there, brother. So carrying on the history, Caleb's got to be challenging talking to people about history and being young, because I remember being the young and in the movement and getting all kinds of as well as Dominic, you know, you probably also get the, you know, who are you to be the one to, you know, so how do you handle Being the representative or, you know, stepping into that role as well as embodying it so that you can draw the history out.

3:50:40DominicLet me let Caleb actually answer your question. He hasn't the whole time. I'm so sorry. I haven't let him speak more. Caleb?

3:50:52SpeakerGet away from the music here. See if y'all can hear me. But that's definitely a big challenge. And especially as an Asian-American, when I'm showing up, people are kind of like, who the fuck are you? So, you know, it's really passing people's tests. There's culture tests that are about this whole trust network that we were talking about earlier. And, you know, if you can pass or it doesn't matter.

3:51:19SpeakerWe are how old you are, that kind of stuff. So I think that, you know, helps. But at the end of the day, it really is just about being able to garner trust and being able to not break trust, which, as we see, like in the seed game, that's that's not actually very easy for people.

3:51:41BubblemanApparently not. Apparently not.

3:51:49DominicYeah, I will say for our interviews as well, though, it's, since I started with an existing network, it was easier, but also like things happened that people trusted me because of like what I was showing up to, right? Like David's Memorial, right? So like I met people there that, you know, when I spoke with them, I was like, and I really don't want to get into who at all.

3:52:29DominicBut I think just by being there, it was like, okay, like you're part of this circle. So there's that. And then also the work of people that like, here's one, she's not going to mind me saying, but Valerie Corral. Who I developed a friendship with during the equity assessment and has been incredibly supportive of this effort. She called David three times to get him to talk to me.

3:52:56DominicLike she volunteered to basically reach out to him to get him, get us talking to him. I was like kind of waiting a little bit for the momentum to maybe to get me there. But then it happened because of Val. She believed in what we were doing and So Val vouched for us. And as a result, like, I know David tested a lot of people, you know, upon meeting them.

3:53:24DominicWe were spared that, except in the occasional gentle ribbing that and I feel like it's because of Val. So it's a good question.

3:53:38Archive SeedsYeah, the best icebreaker with weed people is typically just a really good jar of weed.

3:53:46Archive SeedsThat usually works really good. Just save some, you know, really good weed and just be like, hey, you know.

3:53:54DominicYeah, you can't comment on that at the moment. I don't. Well, I guess it's free. You know, it's legal to share in California. So, yeah, it's definitely legal.

3:54:07Archive SeedsI didn't say you had to give them any of it. I just said you show it to them.

3:54:11DominicWell, yeah. This is, you know, Caleb definitely had, you know, yeah.

3:54:21Archive SeedsSome good hash that usually gets the ball rolling.

3:54:25DominicYeah. For sure.

3:54:30DominicBut Caleb, like, reviews weed, you know, like, so, like, he always has a nice variety of... Shareable cannabis as well. So.

3:54:43Etienne FontanThat's how I met him. He had some very delicious shareable cannabis. And yeah, we were like, oh, Welcome.

3:54:52DominicThat's really the only test, right?

3:54:54BubblemanCase in point. Exactly. That's why the one thing I definitely, well, I was doing before I learned from Dave, but I noticed that we had in common was just rolling around With the highest grade, purest form of hash and giving that experience to people was, I mean, I'm telling you, there were some years, I can't even imagine how it was for him because he had it for so long.

3:55:22BubblemanI think he kept it a little closer to his chest, but as he got more comfortable, he was happy to, you know, give that to people and give them that experience. But it was so potent. I mean, I saw him knock people unconscious. I saw people lose consciousness unconsciously. From smoking his hash. And when you say like put through the test, Let me tell you, man, like the first time I went to his house, he put me through the test.

3:55:46BubblemanAnd I'm sure it was like, you know, 30 or 40 bomb rips of his hash that I smoked. He definitely hit like over 60. I'd never seen anything like it. It was like inhuman. And I remember leaving his house and thinking about a story Rob Clark had said so many years prior going, oh yeah, I left David's house. I was so fucking stoned. And I was kind of like young and cocky.

3:56:11BubblemanI was like, Well, how stoned could you be, Rob? Like, really? But then I realized how stoned you can be, like more stoned than you have ever been. And so I carried that with me a lot as well in my initial experiences of turning people on to this, you know, like, It affects people like myself and Dave differently when we smoke like giant dabs of hash. And so we have a real, you know, there's a big group of people who it affects the same way as us, like almost not at all.

3:56:46BubblemanYou're getting high, but you're not like, it's not decimating you the way it does like the regular public. And, you know, back in the day, it commanded respect. You know, the same way Fletch said, hey, all you have to do is really show a jar. It's like, well, a jar could look amazing, right? But it's like the hash. I felt like this was the word of God when it came to the quality of what you grew and expressed in your genetics.

3:57:13BubblemanLet's just extract the heads and then just test those through bioassay. And that's what I spent the last 30 years doing.

3:57:24Archive SeedsIt's the Timothy Leary, you know, methodology. All right. Turn on, tune in, and smoke some hash.

3:57:33BubblemanFuck yeah. Oh, oh, oh, I think I got it. I did. I got it. Yes, it did. I got email, email from Skynets. Can you say?

3:57:49Archive SeedsThis must be some good nuts.

3:57:53BubblemanSome good nuts. Well, one last dab and I'm going to call it a day. I just got linked up with the good nuts there. That's right, Sky Nuts. So I'll make sure that he gets his spoon. I want to thank Etienne for linking us up with Dominic and for Caleb coming in as well, spending time with us as always. Really good to see you, Fletch. Haven't seen you in a bit.

3:58:17BubblemanGood to see Chimera, Dragonfly Earth Medicine. Who's always a pleasure to hear from those guys. And yeah, definitely want to thank Puffco, our sponsor, because they do work. And the Press Club for hooking us up. We're going to send that off to Sky Nuts. Oh, the people in HR. Yeah, we'll be sending that to Ben Inya. And then we're going to send one over to Sky Nuts.

3:58:47BubblemanAnd then we're going to send one over to... The internet names are just, you know, when I chose my name, Bubble Man, did I think it would last like even six months?

3:58:56SpeakerNo, not at all.

3:58:57BubblemanI thought it was just some random little internet name. 25 years later, and the name like has, it's rooted, it's anchored. I'll probably die, Bubble Man. It'd probably be on my headstone if I have one. I haven't thought that far into the future, but... Sky Nuts. Did Sky Nuts get his email? Yes, he did. Thank you, Press Club. So that's great. I've got the right hookup. That is beautiful.

3:59:24BubblemanThanks, everybody, for coming out and hanging out and watching Hash Church. We're going to do another one next Sunday. It'll be episode 31. And may the full melt bless your bowl sooner than later, because really, oh, it's so fucking nice. Not going to lie. Peace out, everybody.