Cannabis Consumer Protection Science

0:13BubblemanOh, recording in progress.

0:14Etienne FontanWell, I better figure that out.

0:16BubblemanLet's see what we got happening here. We need to have this. All right, there we go. Let's see if I've got everything organized. We've got it going on here.

0:35BubblemanThat is not working. So we are going to have to do a little bit more. Fixing. There we go. All right. Here we go. Here we go, guys. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. This is Hash Church Season 11, Episode 32. Is that what we're on today? My goodness, that is serious. Anyway, sorry about that, guys. I was doing my technical stuff. We're going to shout out our sponsors here real quick.

1:04BubblemanAnd then we will get into a beautiful, wonderful show. Thanks, everyone, for showing up. Geez, I probably sounded like Trump there, a beautiful, wonderful show. Sorry.

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4:21BubblemanSo pretty stoked about that. Let's see who we got as the early birds, the gung hoes, the can't get enough, the show up before everyone else. Huge surprise. It's Etienne.

4:36Etienne FontanAs you would assume, nobody.

4:39BubblemanIt's more gung-ho than Etienne. And it looks like Jeff Rawson's in the house as well. Is that your buddy that you met at the Canomed, Etienne? Hello, Jeff. Oh, maybe you guys can't hear me. Can you hear me? I hear you. Okay, perfect, perfect. Jeez, I was worried about that. Welcome, Jeff. Welcome, Etienne. Welcome.

5:01JeffHi, Etienne.

5:04BubblemanAnd another Mark just popped in. Mr. Ph.D. Mock. How are you doing, Dr. Mark Chaldone?

5:11Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat is going on? Hey, ATN. Hey, Jeff. How are you?

5:17JeffGood. Hey, Mark. All right.

5:21Dr Mark ScialdoneGlad to introduce you to the Hash Church community. You know, for those of you who don't know Jeff, Jeff's PhD chemist, like myself, he worked for a really super famous chemist at MIT named George Whitesides. I'm sorry, Harvard, right? Wait, did I get that right? Harvard, right? Not MIT, right? Okay, yes. So how cool is it that we have him here in the cannabis community to make sure that, you know, cannabis companies aren't selling crap or, you know, I'll let you do your own intro, Jeff, but man, it's just, it's so cool just to have another brilliant chemist thinking about some of the problems.

6:12Dr Mark ScialdoneThat exists in the industry today and kind of setting the groundwork for like where we need to go to. And I think, you know, ATNU had sent us, everyone who's on the Hush Church Mailer got a notification about this recent report that talks about this Cryptococcus neoformans thing we could talk about. But it's so important again to have scientific grounded People like yourself, Jeff, who who know what it's like to investigate things at the molecular basis, you know, be one of the contributors in our in our newly found industry.

6:51Dr Mark ScialdoneBut I'll let you introduce yourself. And yeah, thanks for joining today. Totally.

6:56JeffWow. I'm embarrassed by the introduction. Thanks. It's really nice of you. Yeah.

7:11JeffAll right. Should I say more?

7:13BubblemanYeah, of course. Give us a little introduction. Yeah, we'd love an introduction and a little lowdown on who you are and where your focuses are and kind of how you came to be on Hash Church.

7:24JeffAll right. Yeah. Well, my name is Jeff. I'm a chemist. I... I...

7:34JeffI had kind of a long and challenging progression through academia in which I got a PhD in what's essentially physical chemistry. And I...

7:52JeffThen went and was a research scientist in Germany for a few years at a like a national lab there that was really focused on solid state physics. So I've had like a pretty diverse education and like kind of all across the sciences at this point. But the reason that I ended up in cannabis is Actually, partly it's tied to what Mark referred to. I got tired of doing research that was impossible to explain to people.

8:31JeffAnd I started understanding science in a different way. That's what happens when you get more perspective and you branch out from the things that you started working on.

8:45JeffI started understanding what makes some things more important than others, and a lot of it has to do with how many people it impacts, obviously, right? So I wanted to do research that would maybe impact a few more people, make more sense to people, and maybe touch on like health, like public health. So I left Germany and I went to Harvard and I worked for a fairly famous scientist who

9:12Dr Mark ScialdoneThat's an understatement, Jeff, right?

9:15JeffEventually encouraged me. He actually encouraged me to move in to investigate cannabis. He was interested in the electronic cigarettes because it's new. He was interested in anything that's new. And

9:33JeffBut he knew that a lot of new, he recognized that a lot of new science was going to come out because a bunch of prohibitions on research were going to be lifted and it's going to be a big scientific opportunity. It's green pastures. So he pushed me in that direction and

9:55JeffAnd encouraged me to work on cannabis electronic cigarettes, but he said that we weren't ever going to get the DEA license. So I had to figure out what to do. So I did a lot of studies on the hardware and I used x-ray fluorescence. I figured out that you could use x-ray fluorescence to really rapidly screen vape carts. And it's really useful because actually a lot of bunk vape carts, they're made out of brass that's about 3% lead.

10:29JeffSo that's the heavy metal risk. Like the parts per billion of arsenic and lead that's in the filament doesn't matter. You could eat the whole filament without getting like a very significant dose.

10:44JeffBut 3% lead in an alloy that's rubbing all up against your oil matters a lot. That really leeches out of brass. So I studied them and then I ordered, I could study the hardware and then I ordered Delta 8 and I did farm bill loophole research in a Harvard lab. And I literally had undergrads filling vape carts for experiments and we built this little electronic auto puffer

11:16JeffAnd we'd separate the particulate from the gas phase and figure out how it depended on the concentrations of terpenes. Figured out we're working on the material science of the aerosol, basically. So that was not built to last.

11:42JeffEventually, yeah, eventually, like the department chair actually, I think, talked to my advisor and asked him why I was doing all this, like why I talked about cannabis all the time and if I was doing cannabis research. So then I and George was at the end of his life cycle. So he was like kind of he was being forced into retirement and postdocs were leaving really fast.

12:08JeffSo it was pretty easy to push me out of Harvard. So I founded a nonprofit to do consumer protection because I'd learned so much about and gotten inspired by those. I'd gotten inspired by those experiences and studying these vape carts and realizing it's all like a wild west and especially that one of the things I learned in my research, I collected a bunch of vape carts from local high schools, like regional high schools in the Boston area.

12:43JeffThat had been confiscated because if they when they confiscate drugs from children in schools, there's often no real procedure. There's just some assistant principal. It's always the assistant principal. And that guy's usually just got like a drawer or a shoebox full of weird stuff that he's gotten from kids. So I got like a few of those guys drawers and shoeboxes. And I screened all the vape carts and it turned out that of course our system, because kids buy drugs on the internet and not in dispensaries, our system was funneling all the leaded carts to the children because the internet is where you buy the knockoffs.

13:24BubblemanBrutal.

13:26JeffYeah. So I started, so I realized that there's this whole like world of public health that needs to develop. Around the same way, actually, like we have consumer protection organizations, like a pretty famous one might be Consumer Reports. At least I know it because I grew up with the magazine in my household. But it's kind of an interesting story. Consumer Reports, people don't talk about it that much now, but there was a time when Consumer Reports was famous and controversial.

14:05JeffWhen they first started, they actually, Consumer Reports endured several really high-profile lawsuits from big companies that were pissed at them. But they never lost. So yeah, we don't think about it now, but we benefit hugely from a very safe consumer landscape compared to the bad old days, as you might call it.

14:33BubblemanFor adults. For adults, it seems, though, the fear of children and children getting a hold of things, you know, people just don't want to talk about that. They're like, well, that's not happening. You know, we're making sure they don't get access. It's like you can go on the dark web and buy. There's this kid named Goblin, and I think he's got about two million followers on Instagram and X and He's kind of a cannabis personality, but not really.

14:57BubblemanI don't know a ton about him, but what he does is he goes online and he buys all these different like vape pen drugs, like psychedelics and different things. And then he tests them and then he talks about how dangerous or bad they are and sort of exposes that you can just go forget about a gas station like they'll they'll deliver this right to your door. And so it's an interesting conversation that we can get into that is about the children.

15:21BubblemanAnd even you said it perfect. There's a vice principal with a drawer. It's like, well, how does he have permission to have all that stuff in that drawer?

15:29JeffIt's like, he's not, he doesn't even, I mean, a lot of times there's not that much of a system or anything. I mean, some of them give it to the cops, but the cops are like, okay, Like, what? Like, what are we gonna, I mean, what are we supposed to do? The cops just like throw it away or something, you know? Or are they, I mean, what are they gonna do, right?

15:47JeffLike, so, yeah, yeah. So, anyway, like, I've kind of gotten inspired by these, I guess, like, kind of previous efforts that I've learned about. I also, I learned, like, like, You know, when at any time that you have some new sort of like commercial space that involves like, I don't know, like any kind of like chemical or drug or fine product, really, there's almost always like outbreaks of fraud that you have to fight against.

16:27JeffAnd it takes a lot of work, actually. It's like a huge project to regulate industries. You know, like it's, I've learned a lot about that work.

16:37BubblemanAnd when you say fraud, it's not really about like tricking people into buying the fake one. All you have to do is make the fake one and people are happy to buy it.

16:50JeffYeah. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of interesting dynamics when you're, um, when, when your commercial product is like habit forming substances, there are a couple of, there are a couple of interesting like market principles that I've learned about. Um, like there's a, um, Right, like demand is not very elastic is what they say. It doesn't change very much. The demand stays where it stays. You know, so if supply goes down, demand stays pretty consistent and prices just really go up.

17:28JeffSo, um, for example, right. And that's kind of what you're referring to, right. There's like such a huge built-in demand that almost any, yeah, almost any product can get some, some market share and, um, but, and they really compete on price, right. Cause nobody can tell the difference between anything. So.

17:45BubblemanWell, then I always go back to how is a vape, like just to, you know, be the devil's advocate for a second. And I've mentioned this many times. How does a vape company have to care how safe their cartridges are, heavy metals or not, when tobacco is sprayed with radium-226 and sold to the masses as a recreational drug? Thank you for joining us.

18:27BubblemanPerhaps rivaled only by sugar, right? Yeah, exactly. And we just give that. That's the one we can actually give to kids. So you even stepped it up. Really, sugar, tobacco, and alcohol are so available, yet clearly they have to cause the most problems when you combine those three drugs out of pretty much any other substance on earth.

18:53JeffYeah, well, you know, that's a good point that, right? Like our societies have tended to develop more accommodation and more systems around some drugs than others, right? And so we've come to accept them, right? This kind of normalization, right? Like alcohol is just very long normalized by, you know, You know, by long habit, and we've kind of just accepted it all. And that's a good point. Like that's that's a big part of what I'm pushing for with cannabis.

19:32JeffI'm saying, hey, look, like if you're going to start, if you're going to sell it in a store, if you're going to have companies that are, you know, that are that are that are big multi-state corporations. Making it and selling it to people, then like you're, you know, that's, this is, it's a new whole like regulatory project, right? But it's also like a huge step towards normalization and acceptance.

20:04JeffBut that means then, right? Like if they're going to put a number on it, then it's got, and then on the label, Then it's got to be like numbers on labels of other products, right? And there are actually laws about that that are already written, you know, like in consumer protection law in the United States. And I think most places it's the producer of a product when they when they put a number on the label, they take responsibility for that number.

20:35JeffIt's their job. And there are people who make sure that our boxes of Triscuits really contain 500 grams of Triscuits, right? They go out and they buy Triscuits and they weigh the contents of the box. I read about one of these guys once. He files thousands of lawsuits per year, right? He's making sure that we get what we pay for from all these products, right? And you actually have to do that Every system, like if you look at a marketplace, it's like an engineered system, right?

21:11JeffAnd if you're going to control the outcome, which is the accuracy of a number on a label that a consumer sees, right? Or the accuracy of anything else on the label, right? Say, germane to what you were talking about before, right? Whether or not it was irradiated. Right. If you want to know and you want that label to actually be accurate, you're going to have to have someone testing every once in a while and checking because you only control what you measure.

21:42BubblemanThose places have massive metal detectors to all food processing plants, run the food through metal detectors because the ultimate boo boo Thank you so much for joining us.

22:06BubblemanPretty crazy. I sometimes look for cannabis at two cannabis and it's a it's a double edged sword. Obviously, I don't like the overregulation of cannabis because I personally think cannabis is a lot less processed and seems more like produce than, say, Triscuits. You know, now, sure, you could produce cannabis products to be like a Triscuit after you process it many, many times and do a bunch of processes to it and get it to an oil and an edible.

22:34BubblemanAnd now it's a food product and it goes in a box and it has all of that processing. But cannabis itself and hash is very, very mildly processed. And it seems like it would do better as a produce. But my point is that I do appreciate that You know, when I look at cannabis regulations and I'm thinking, wow, some of these are a bit hardcore, but it's like, for the most part, they're set up to protect us.

23:00BubblemanWe hope, and that's why we're going to have this conversation about the mold and Kevin McKernan's work that was discovered recently. We'll get into that in a little bit. Maybe even next week if he can't be here today, but I guess I look at it as And hopefully I don't lose my point here because I am pretty baked already this morning. What was I saying?

23:22JeffWhat was I saying? Well, I have kind of a jumping, I have kind of a thought that jumps off of what you just said.

23:30BubblemanOh, let me, okay, let me, I found it. But don't lose your thought. I won't. Is the fact that perhaps cannabis can help us, the good regulations, the ones that are actually making it safe, Implement them into our food and water and air because we seem to miss the boat on those three things and allow the most toxic shit to enter our body. But with cannabis, it's like, yeah, we shut this company down because they failed their mold count or they, you know, they didn't.

23:59BubblemanSo that was my point.

24:01JeffYeah. Yeah. Well, I think that, I think our, I think our food safety system is actually like really pretty successful at like, I think that I think that our nutrition system is not very successful. But I don't think that our food safety system is... I think our food safety system is pretty good.

24:30BubblemanIt's a hard thing to say because you're not wrong.

24:33JeffAnd it's strained in some ways. But I think that people have a lot of... I think that... I think a lot of the ways that we even think about nutrition, I think are often mistaken.

24:48BubblemanWell, because it fits into the system. When you bend the wheel to the system, all that nutrition stuff goes out the door. And now you're just pumping out products and chemicals. And I mean, what you said was accurate. You guys probably have the most accurate thing. Food. Yeah. You probably have the most like accurate commercial food process for safety, but then they miss the boat that everything they're selling you is poison.

25:14JeffYeah. Yeah. Or at least it should not be eaten the way that a lot of us are eating it.

25:19BubblemanLike 90% of it. If you go to a grocery store, you could get rid of 90% of the shit that's in there. Man, listen, in the world today.

25:27JeffIt's a bunch of, yeah, a bunch of the stuff in the middle aisles.

25:30BubblemanIt's not even allowed here in Canada or Europe, the stuff that's in your grocery store. So it's like, it's crazy to think here's these people all set up for safety and regulatory, but they miss the boat that they're like selling seed oils and other toxic foods. But if you did the smallest amount of science, like a grade eight science student could discover this and be like, oh, these are actually really good.

25:57JeffI actually don't think that the choices of oils are a big difference in the health of foods. I think our big problems are the amounts of refined sugars and carbs that we eat. The way I think about it now is that...

26:22JeffA lot of nutrition research is super reductionist and it focuses on some ingredient, but that's not really what foods are not really like. I mean, other than like a Triscuit, right, which actually is just very few ingredients, right? It's just like wheat, salt and water, right? So like it really is just a few ingredients. I can almost look at it reductively. It's just like a salty starch bomb with some fiber, right?

26:47JeffBut like. All of this reductionist research has focused on different ingredients, but it's mostly our habits around food and how much of different things we eat that really matter. And it's really the bulk stuff. But the other problem that I think we don't understand is that food is a material. So if I just look at the ingredients, but not the structure, then I don't know very much.

27:16JeffAnd it turns out that how foods and how all drugs impact us has a lot to do with the rate at which everything goes into our body and is absorbed. So like I can get the same amount of sugar from an apple. Right. As I do from like, I don't know, like a kid's like yogurt cup. Right. That's really sugary, actually. Right. But they're going to hit my system different ways.

27:45JeffRight. Like the apple sugar is going to hit my system slower because it's more bound up in the materials of the apple. And it turns out that that's like a big part of it. Like where our bodies do a better job of handling sugars when they come from fruits with all that structure of the fruit around them, right? But if I drink the refined fruit juice, the sugar goes into my bloodstream way faster.

28:11JeffAnd it spikes it, right? So I think that that's been a big challenge for people. And some of the concerns about trace ingredients, I think, are a little off target. But I think we should be paying a lot of, you know, we're getting into nutrition here, which is not really my expertise, but... Well, I'm finding it super interesting. I'll share some thoughts. Yeah, no. I'll share those thoughts from a chemical perspective.

28:35JeffI actually, I wanted to come back to a thought that you brought up, right? Which is... The difference between the many manufactured cannabis products and then the produce that's flour, right? And I guess like hash is, you know, hash rosins are, I mean, I would technically call, I mean, it's also an extract, but yeah, it's like a botanical, it's a natural botanical extract, right? That's unrefined, let's say.

29:06JeffYes. Or not completely refined, right? So, you know, I take your point, right? Like it's a little bit more like a fine olive oil, which gets closer. It's like, it's worth thinking about more like that. I think that's a great question. Do I...

29:27JeffDo I go to the store and buy a jar of cherry tomatoes that says these cherry tomatoes all contain this much, like three milligrams of lycopene each, and then hold them to account for it? I don't do that. That's not how we distribute other produce, right? We're bottling this stuff, we're bottling up Little berries. And we're selling them like they're pills. But they're not pills. They're little berries.

30:05JeffSo like, yeah, maybe some of our expectations with how we think about cannabis even sometime or, you know, maybe some of those expectations are wrong. But there is the challenge that if you sell it in a store in America and you put it in a box with a label and a bunch of numbers like you are, you're making an assertion. You're marketing off of those numbers and you're taking responsibility for their accuracy.

30:33JeffSo this is a tension we should really work out. I think maybe for cannabis, for me, flower,

30:45JeffI feel like it's kind of useful for me to know if it's actually like 30% or 18% or 12% total THC. I feel like those very broad gradations actually make kind of a difference that I think is a little bit consistent for me and I can kind of notice something, I think. So, you know, but like, maybe people don't need to be told that it's 25.68, right?

31:12JeffLike, what's the point of that? That's like, that's, it's arbitrary precision that makes people think about it differently, right? Maybe you just tell them a range, or you just say this is about this, you know, like, what else are you gonna do?

31:29JeffThe whole choice of trying to market too strongly based on just a few numbers could be... One of the problems, right?

31:38BubblemanWell, for us, it's not the marketing, it's the regulatory framework. And because the regulatory framework says you're only allowed to be out of the number a certain percent, making sure your starting number is as accurate as possible allows you more room either way on the scale to be that, I don't know if it's 5% or what it is, but it's a very low number.

32:02JeffIt depends on what state you're in. Some states have set tolerances of 10 or 20%. We're in Canada.

32:08BubblemanIt's regulated federally here.

32:10JeffYeah, yeah, yeah. In Canada, it's a federal rate. I don't remember what the number is in Canada. But, you know, like, yeah, so I agree with you that some of this, like, We should be willing to re-examine some of these things. We haven't been doing this for that long, right? We don't need to treat it like these last 10 years are 100 years of beautiful precedent where everything went exactly the way we would want it and we shouldn't change anything, right?

32:43Dr Mark ScialdoneSo Jeff, when you started testing stuff that was in the marketplace, it was mostly in Massachusetts, right? I mean, you're just sort of testing products that you were able to source.

32:52JeffYeah, I live in Massachusetts. So I definitely have tested mostly products here. I've also bought some, I've bought products off the internet and tested them.

33:03Dr Mark ScialdoneSo basically what you have observed since you've been testing products that are in the marketplace is that really nothing lives up to the labels, right?

33:13JeffThere's not... Oh, it's actually a little more complicated than that. I... I...

33:24JeffThere are maybe 250 like active producers in Massachusetts. It's hard to estimate because some licenses say they're active, but they haven't produced much in a while. And there's also a lot of old product in our wholesale system. But, you know, each one of the most, other than the smallest producers, most producers have quite a large number of SKUs actually, a lot of products. And so I am nowhere near able to statistically sample that market.

34:01JeffLike nowhere close. But I have found a real mix of results. Like for manufactured products, they tend to be like their contents tend to be labeled pretty accurately in dispensaries. But if you buy gummies, so like if I buy a gummy from a dispensary, it'll almost certainly be dead on. But if I buy a gummy from a smoke shop or the internet, then it's very likely to be off and also full of synthetic byproducts.

34:32JeffSo that's an example actually of like some texture. And it shows you what, right? Like this whole regulatory system is more like regulatory systems for like manufactured foods. So, um, it makes sense that it would be more successful for the products that look like those. Um, and those companies are approaching this differently, right? Like their consumers want consistency. Um, many people are dosing with gummies. So, um, you know, so I think that's a, that's a useful lesson with flour.

35:08JeffUm, it's usually with flour is almost always slightly lower than the label, um, There are, sometimes I get products that are labeled pretty close to accurate. So I've had some flour that comes in within 10%. I've had a couple of pre-rolls that were really good. But then I've also had some like pre-rolls can often be like the worst. And I've learned recently that there's a special reason, at least in Massachusetts, it's the standard practice to actually have a defined ratio of trim that they mix in with their buds, usually 50-50, so that your pre-rolls are half trim.

35:57JeffFloor sweepings. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

36:00Dr Mark ScialdoneAll trim, don't you think? Some are.

36:02JeffSome of them are all trim, but it's actually often it's very common. What's a very common boardroom? I learned from people from businesses, it's an extremely common boardroom conversation of like, what's our ratio going to be? Like, are we going to give the people 60-40 this week?

36:23BubblemanYeah, that's because the CFO is calling the shots, not the hash maker.

36:27JeffYeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, it's, yeah, it's this really fucked up situation, actually, because, so, yeah, so then they test the nicest bud in the batch. In Massachusetts, a batch can be 15 pounds, right? But in other states, it's different sizes. They test the nicest bud. That establishes all of the values on the certificate of analysis. And then after that, they take all the- And who selects that bud, Jeff?

36:58JeffDoes the grower select it? The grower selects it. And then they take that trim and the same certificate of analysis goes with it. And they put it in pre-rolls. And that's how I buy a pre-roll that's labeled 30% total THC, but it's actually 14%. Now that's huge, man. Like the typical lab-based inflation is a lot less. I think that there's a typical lab-based inflation that's maybe 20% of the value.

37:27BubblemanDid I see? Labs are just interested in getting you over 20% in Canada. It seems like now it's more about terpenes. And if you test for more terpenes, if your lab tests for 180 versus 20, you're going to come up with a higher terpene percentage than other labs.

37:45Dr Mark ScialdoneIn markets like Massachusetts where there's multiple labs, now they could send samples to multiple labs, find the labs where they get the best results and just go with them, right? The whole lab shopping phenomenon, right?

37:57JeffYeah, that has been a real thing. And a lot of my best understanding from interviews with employees of labs and And analysis of data and recent enforcement actions. I think that quite a lot of what happens is really like It's sample by sample and selective. It's shockingly ad hoc a lot of times. I mean, I have heard of situations where they have post-it notes in the lab that tell them how to treat samples from different producers.

38:38JeffSo I know that there are some at least slightly more systematic things that people have done. But a lot of times it's just They don't inflate the THC on every measurement universally. It's more like the producer is satisfied with half of their results and they're not satisfied with the other half. And they keep asking for retests of half of their products until they get the number they want.

39:06JeffSo it's like this, it's, it's pretty ad hoc. They don't necessarily lie about every batch because sometimes the, like a lot of this is fluffing the producer's egos. The producer likes to think that they're really like growing like fire weed all the time. You know, and sometimes the producer is just like, no, man, that can't that can't be 18 percent. I smoked it. That's got to be 25.

39:32JeffRight. And so that's like, yeah, it's shockingly unsystematic in some cases, at least.

39:37Dr Mark ScialdoneCan't tell the difference just by smoking it. Right. But we're not always.

39:42JeffNo, I mean. Sometimes I can tell I've got a bunk batch. I smoke it and I'm like, man, I didn't feel anything. I tested. It's like 13, you know? So that definitely does happen.

39:53Dr Mark ScialdoneSo I mean, I'll maintain that a lot of this THC potency thing is all just like a secondary artifact of prohibition itself, right? Because this, you know, It's the dispensary purchase and the psychology of someone who's in the dispensary has been like, okay, I'm paying for the aquarium. I'm paying for the nice couches. I'm paying for all this nice music and lighting. I'm getting fleeced. I better get the best value for my buck.

40:21Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd what do you look for? Well, see content. But where it really matters, Jeff, and I'm sure everyone would agree on the panel, and maybe ATN, probably you see this all the time, is when you're doing B2B transactions. And certainly, like if you're an extraction company and you're buying from like Trim, from a cultivator, I mean, their THC matters because they're Your THC amount is how much extract you should be pulling out, right?

40:53Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd again, if you're cherry picking results and things always look so much better on the COA than they do in practice, you're like, shit, this stuff doesn't analyze for 15% or 20%. This stuff analyzes for 4% or 5%. And you try to keep it scrupulous as you possibly can because, Jeff, it's crazy. There's an aftermarket for already extracted weed. We'll see you next time.

41:34JeffThat's right.

41:34Dr Mark ScialdoneAnother thing that my son was kind of alerting me to is one of the biggest markets for THCA isolate, isolate that you make by extraction, hook or crook, what does it matter what the quality of material you make the isolate, it has no memory from where it came from. It's just a fucking molecule. A lot of that goes into pre-rolls to goose up the THCA numbers again, because Thank you for watching.

42:23Dr Mark ScialdoneThank you for joining us.

42:45JeffThe weirdest ones I've seen are some where they take fine flour, like finely ground flour material, and they have some coating process so that they can- They have a machine. They have a machine that actually buys it. It's like spray, but they have some material science that makes it so that even though it's coated with a lot of THC, it's not too sticky and it still rolls up well in their joint.

43:14Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I wasn't allowed in the room, but I could see it from the hallway. It looked like a vending machine to me. And they put trays of stuff in there. And when I first walked into the building, we were looking at some properties and it was like, oh man, they must grow fireweed in this place. It's like, there's nothing being grown in this place. They have this...

43:35Dr Mark ScialdoneTerpene infusion machine that stinks up the joints something fierce and we I went by the packaging room and then from the packaging room went over to where they were doing this terpene I'm like wow I can't believe there's a market for that so it might even be already extracted weed so think about it Yeah, already extracted weed. So someone's already grabbed the low-lying really shitty stuff. And now they're they're re-infusing it with terpies.

44:03Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, it's called beasters.

44:05BubblemanWe came up with that shit like 35 years ago, dude. All you do is bounce the weed and then you sell the weed. Now we weren't doing it personally.

44:14Dr Mark ScialdoneYou add THC isolate so it actually, Marcus, the joint will work. You can control it. You can control exactly how much THC isolate you put in.

44:25BubblemanI will say this. I agree with Jeff in this sense because I hear people all the time, we've got to get rid of the THC. It's like, well... Let's not do that. Let's not be so extreme. Like there should be many ways to enjoy perceiving the purchase of cannabis or cannabis products. And it shouldn't all be based on the two numbers that I can assure everyone in this room that it is based on, which is price and THC percentage.

44:49BubblemanI want to know, I love to know my THC percentage. I love to know as much as humanly possible. I got the little NIR unit from Neospectra. I don't know if I've ever played with this little guy. but i've been having a blast with this little dude man the static sifting unit we we we test the sift it's 23 we run it through the static machine the plasmatic we we scrape everything off the positive plate we test that it's 44 in a single pass in under a minute we we we we purified our resin i love connecting the purity To the increase of percentage.

45:25BubblemanDo I care what the percentage is? Not necessarily. I wouldn't buy it based on that. But as a sort of personal scientist guy, I want to know all the numbers all the time as I isolate the resin. I was laughing.

45:39JeffMetrics can guide your process.

45:41BubblemanYou know, listen to how crazy this is. These static sifting machines from Sambo Creek. I have a little home desktop unit right here. This little guy, yeah, it's so insane. You've got a positive and a negative plate on the inside of this thing. And the sift falls from the top and it basically, it just separates.

46:04JeffIt just isolates. I'm a huge fan of the electrostatic force.

46:10BubblemanYeah, so Skunk Man Sam, you know, paying homage to Sam who really turned me on to the static sifting so many years ago. This is like a full circle. By the way, this thing showed up on Sam's birthday. On his birthday, this machine showed up at my house. It was such a trippy sort of thing. But yeah, it definitely it's unique. It has it's it's what I thought of the other day.

46:39BubblemanAnd this is very unique. Imagine this, Dr. Mark. In Quebec right now, they're desperately figuring out ways to cut the hash because Quebec has a cap on 30% THC. Now, keep in mind, the majority of the hash that's been sold in Quebec for many, many years has been under 30%. And I'm talking about the imported hash, not the hash that people are making themselves. But Quebec are no slouches.

47:04BubblemanThey smoke the most hash in Canada by a mile. They are our hashish province. And so it makes sense. Yeah, exactly. So I was thinking the other day when I was testing material and I kept testing the negative plate stuff and it was coming back at 0.57 THC. And I thought this Valen Vera's machine must be broken. I must be doing this wrong. And I tested it like three, four times.

47:28BubblemanAnd I'm like, it's not wrong at all. It's literally reduced the THC to almost nothing. And then I thought, Wow. I could probably sell this stuff into the Quebec market. This chafe that's basically 50.5% THC. That's exactly what they need because it's basically hash.

47:51JeffThere's no good. Yeah, there's no good.

47:53BubblemanYou can't. No, they're using CBD. And I promise that's not as good. It affects everything, especially because you won't get as high.

48:03Etienne FontanHere's something I purchased at the California State Fair, okay? This is a rosin-infused supposedly joint, and on the outside, if you open it, it smells like fake strawberries. So they're using... Wait, wait, wait, I want to show you this, okay? So they have some sort of fluid they're spraying on the outside of the joint, and they're rolling green... You know, green kind of, you know, trichome mix.

48:34Etienne FontanIt's definitely not static separated. And it's got a nice glass tip. Of course, it's got a rubber tip on it because why do you need that? Overpackaging is bad. But I bought this because you're allowed to smoke it to stay fair. Now, I brought a joint of David weed with me, which I actually smoked there because David Watson would want to be smoked at the stay fair.

48:56Etienne FontanBut you got to see your receipt. So I bought this just in case, just to show. And I opened it and smell it. And if you could smell how absolutely fake. So for some reason, they added fake strawberry terpenes to a perfectly crappy joint to spike it so the normal consumer Can relate to that smell, whereas we cannabis people do not like food derived cannabis, food derived terpenes added to our cannabis.

49:26Etienne FontanThat's another, you know, stain. But look, it's got diamonds on top of, you know, supposed rosin. Why do you need to add the fake flavor?

49:36JeffNo, I know that these are some of the things I've been seeing is so nuts. They try to make it taste like candy. Yeah, I wrote a review of one that was they were it was like the trolley peachy rings, you know, like those gum peach gummies and had that just such a strong smell. And I and it was it was an infused joint. So it's like maybe 30 percent, 35 percent total THC.

50:06JeffAnd I referred to it in my review as the four loco of weed.

50:12BubblemanI've always said it's for people that have blown out their sensories. They've been drinking and smoking cigarettes. And when they smell that fake cherry or fake strawberry or fake pineapple, they can perceive it. Whereas a lot of the cannabis, they're just like, Oh, I don't know. It just tastes like weed, you know? It's like, I don't, you know, don't you smell the guava? Don't you smell the...

50:33BubblemanThey don't really perceive that. I've seen it in person. Peach rings, exactly what you're talking about. Like, it's like it was sprayed out of a Lysol disinfectant can. And, you know, the people in the car with me, they threw it out the window because they were connoisseurs. She was just buying stuff. My friend Allison was buying stuff at the different stores. But afterwards, we were like... I said, that's the number one joint in the country, isn't it?

50:56BubblemanAnd she said, it is.

50:57JeffYeah. Yeah, that's what they're selling. A lot of that shit, actually.

51:02BubblemanYeah. Grossest ones. It's like, yeah, it's because people people love it. And that's what we always find on this show is that we're We're set up for a smaller group. We're set up for a little side quest of the cannabis experience, which is like we're over here in the aromatic volatile compound world where all of the non-perceivables, the things that we can't perceive about these compounds or we haven't figured out how to yet.

51:30BubblemanAre the things that sort of are the reasons behind, because you can come on as a chemist and be like botanical terpenes are exactly the same molecule as cannabis terpenes. Yeah, that's true. But the unperceivable, you know, and back then we weren't quite sure. Now we're like, oh, yeah, these long sulfur chains, thiols and thiolates. And there's other things present. Obviously, they're a part of this, you know, aroma as well.

51:58BubblemanIt's very human for us to have like some CBD in our cannabis, like it could just be one of the 800 compounds. And we'll be like, Oh, that's my CBD flower. That's that's CBD flower. And we do the same thing with aromatic volatile compounds. It's the terps. You got to save the terps. It's like, well, definitely save the terps, but save all that other shit, too.

52:21JeffYeah, yeah. I mean, well, look, that's it's true in all kinds of like flavor and odor products. I think it's important to note as well, right, that the natural mixtures of compounds are complex and the sensory experience comes from a lot of different compounds, not just one. And when we try to say like over essentialize, right, like it's sort of like we're always Yeah, boiling something down to just a few essential ingredients, right?

52:58JeffAnd saying, oh, that flavor, you know, banana flavor is this one compound, right? Well, it's not, you know? So, you know, that's why all our candies, right? All our fruity candies taste like fruit, F-R-O-O-T, you know? They don't taste like the real fruit. No. And yeah, so these... You know, like, I think that you, right? Like, Four Loko is like, This is like what you get when you need to get hammered off of one can of something, right?

53:35JeffI've only got $4. Like, right? Like it's like for kids, right? Getting drunk, sneaking out from their parents, right? That's basically where a lot of the weed industry is right now. That's the sophistication of our consumers. In 10 or 20 years, you'll have a lot more hash appreciating people than you do today. I know it's always going to be probably a niche. You know, I think you're right.

54:02JeffYou should look to like other mature markets. Like I think alcohol is a great example where there's many levels and price points. And you've seen like alcohol. You've actually seen a return from a race to the bottom in beer in particular, where there used to be like very bland, very similar corporate beers that dominated the market totally. And now there are at least a whole bunch of there's a range of craft beers.

54:33JeffSome of them are authentically craft. Some are kind of, you know, used to be craft and got bought out. Right. But there's a whole range of tiers. The big beer producers that are bland are still the biggest ones. But they've also been forced to innovate a whole lot. And there's just way more variety for consumers and a whole bunch of different price points and quality points. So like, that's what I think we should hope for with cannabis.

55:00JeffI would love to see all the greatest, most artisanal products actually become the most popular, but that would sort of, I mean, that would sort of defy the McDonald's principle, you know?

55:16JeffFor sure.

55:17BubblemanI wanted to welcome Dr. David Allen and Jen Doe into the room. I missed Logan Dabbs. I apologize. Wolverine Dabbs, Logan Dabbs. Logan does dab though, I can assure you. He was here recently. Yeah, good morning, Dr. Allen. How are you doing?

55:33DrI'm doing quite well.

55:35BubblemanExcellent. You got your eyes fixed recently. How's that been for you?

55:41DrI can read without glasses now.

55:43BubblemanWow. Holy shit.

55:44DrI want to have my other eye done in a week, I think.

55:47BubblemanYeah. You were saying colors are electric when you first got it done.

55:51DrThey're electric. It's unbelievable the difference in colors. And I didn't realize I was as blind as I was. I couldn't really see to shave.

56:02BubblemanI could definitely tell there was something with your eyes when we were filming our show. You know, always have them doing something. I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm 52 and I'm I'm glad there's an operation like that because I can just feel my one eye starting to flicker a little. My left is very dominant. I can see very far and I can see fairly close. But my right eye is starting to the check engine light starting to come on, I think.

56:28DrSo I was a little afraid to do it because I don't trust the medical institutions.

56:34BubblemanWhich is insane because you are a retired cardiac thoracic surgeon.

56:41DrWell, I have something to say about these terpenes and things. Please. And the first thing is jaw over evil, God over evil, okay? And so... You could write this down. If God made it and you use it, it's probably okay. If man touches it, it's probably not. And so these terpenes and things, and this, this, I predicted this 25 years ago, because you go to events in California and the labs that do the testing, They have to zero their machines and so they have to have purified samples of different terpenes and things and they would have a table with 15 or more terpenes and some of them were acrid and some were pleasant and so these people that are adding stuff to cannabis they don't know nothing about physiology.

57:51DrAll they may know their machines and how to zero their machines and all this smells better, but they don't know what effect it has on the lung. They don't know pathophysiology. And the way these terpenes are regulated by law is through a thing called generally recognized as safe, G-R-A-S.

58:20DrAnd what that means is there's like limelight or something. You could eat so much of that and not die. And that's a proven science. But they don't know what happens if you breathe it. And no one is going to pay for a study. Well, if you breathe in banana flavored marijuana, is it going to cause a carcinoma? No one knows that because there's no money in investigating it.

58:51DrAnd so these guys that are experts at extraction and their machines and stuff, they can manipulate stuff. And in Romania, they're adding synthetic cannabinoids because it has quite a punch because they're full agonists. And they're reporting deaths from marijuana. And if I was a DEA agent and I wanted to torpedo the marijuana shift, I would definitely... Put synthetic cannabinoids in pot and make you afraid of buying pot.

59:29DrSo if you buy pot from your neighbor who's growing it is probably going to be okay. But if you buy it elsewhere from an industrial cannabis place, it may not. And they have reason to add

59:47DrThank you so much for joining us.

1:00:09DrWhen I invented the rootless transport mechanism. So I was trying to create root beer flavored pot. So what I did was I took the two liter thing of root beer imported in a potted plant and died a day later. And I thought I smoked myself a doobie. And I thought to myself, well, wait a minute, what killed the plant? And most people know that, that The plant dies from osmosis.

1:00:40DrSo the plant lives by osmosis and the roots are semi-permeable membranes, which means they let water and small particles, especially uncharged particles, go through the roots. But large particles, especially if they have a lot of charges, won't go through the root. So when you over-fertilize your plant, what happens is water always goes to the highest concentration of solute. Dr. Mark, you can correct me if I say anything wrong.

1:01:15DrAnd so by osmosis, water tries to dilute the solute And so if you pour a bunch of osmotically charged particles in the soil, it sucks the water out of the plant. So what happened was when I poured all this sugar and flavoring stuff in the thing, it sucked the water out of the plant and killed the plant. So I invented the rootless transport mechanism because the roots killed the plant by osmosis.

1:01:49DrAnd so I thought, well, how do I get a charged particle into the plant? Because the roots will prevent that from going into the plant. So I thought, well, cut the roots off and put it in a bottle of whatever you want to flavor it to. So I used Mexican vanilla extract. And the next day, The buds were brown and they smelled like vanilla and it took an extra week or so to dry it out.

1:02:21DrBut when you smoked it, it had a completely unusual flavor and it didn't make you cough. But so it worked kind of for vanilla, but You could flavor it with anything or you could put medicines in it. You could put bronchodilators or steroids or antibiotics in it. You could put Viagra in it and you would have boner bud. So I invented boner bud.

1:02:55BubblemanYou are hilarious, dude. I was waiting for the potentially inappropriate Dr. Allen comment today. I appreciate you, brother. I appreciate you.

1:03:07DrI'm a little bent, but I'm not broken.

1:03:10BubblemanDude, you are... You're an inspiration is what you are. And I'm just happy to know you. I'm very glad. I shout out Mark Clokey, who introduced me to you. I want to say 20 to 25 years ago, I think I met you, which is mental. How you doing, Jen?

1:03:30BubblemanI like how you came in on your daughter's name, too. I'm like, Emily, who the fuck is Emily? I didn't send this clip to Emily. No, your name is Jen Doe now. There you go.

1:03:41Jenn DoeYeah, so Emily was one of my old assistants that had commandeered my laptop and did a bunch of shit to it. So now every time it pulls up, even when I click the choice of like stop making it where it does.

1:03:57BubblemanWell, welcome.

1:03:58Jenn DoeThank you. It's been a while. Yeah.

1:04:00BubblemanYeah, it's nice to see you. What have you been up to?

1:04:04Jenn DoeOh, I've been a busy girl. I, uh, Just recently got some exciting news. I am officially growing cannabis legally in the state of Utah. We're one of the licensed companies out here.

1:04:19BubblemanYeah, it's amazing.

1:04:21Jenn DoeI just started last week was my second week. So just kind of getting my feet wet in there trying to get the lay of the lay of the garden.

1:04:30BubblemanThat's your home state, no?

1:04:32Jenn DoeIt is, this is the full circle. I left here, what, like 13, 12, 13 years ago to be able to go grow cannabis. And now that I'm back, I'm able to grow it here legally. And it's, yeah, this is my full circle moment. So it's pretty exciting.

1:04:54BubblemanI remember when it happened for me, my full circle moment of getting like just a federal license to be able to possess and consume cannabis, to have it anywhere I go in Canada, to be able to just take it anywhere. And my limit was ridiculous at first. They shut it down. Now it's 150 grams per medical patient of whatever you want. Thank you for joining us.

1:05:39Jenn DoeMy emotional support kilo.

1:05:41BubblemanExactly. Exactly. That's a, I need someone to use AI and create some images of the emotional support kilo. I want to see what you guys can come up with out in hash church world. I know. So I'm Tony Bologna. Bologna, I'm looking at you. He's going to have one in like four minutes. He'll be sending me one in the Discord. But I want to see your emotional support kilos.

1:06:07BubblemanI definitely can picture them on planes and trains and in automobiles. But where else? Where else would you bring your emotional support kilo?

1:06:14Jenn DoeTo the dog farm. You like that, Dr. Allen?

1:06:17BubblemanYeah, I do.

1:06:21JeffSee, we're bent too. To my next custody hearing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

1:06:31BubblemanSo yeah, I don't know if you met Jeff, Jen, and David, but Jeff is, I believe Dr. Mark and Jeff just met at maybe Kevin McKernan's event. Is that where it was? Yeah, so they're both PhD chemists. That was our first in-person meeting. Hi, Jeff. Awesome.

1:06:48Jenn DoeHi.

1:06:50BubblemanAwesome. And Dr. Allen as well. Meet Jeff, another brilliant chemist for you.

1:06:56JeffI have a funny connection with Mark. Oh, please. Because Mark is at a small Vermont college that is, you know, it's, I wouldn't say it's world famous, right? Not yet. Yeah, yeah, yet. OK, but, you know, on the rise. And but I'm actually very familiar with it. I have I visited St. Mike's chemistry department several times and I helped someone actually pack up a bunch of equipment from there.

1:07:31JeffSo I spent five years of my life in Burlington, Vermont, which is just across the river.

1:07:40BubblemanSo you've seen some fish shows is what you're telling us.

1:07:45JeffI've seen Mo multiple times. Okay.

1:07:48BubblemanI didn't see fish. Damn, five years in Burlington and you didn't see fish. And here I am in Canada.

1:07:55Dr Mark ScialdoneThey don't play in Burlington a lot, right?

1:07:58BubblemanBut they must every once in a while.

1:08:00Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, yeah, they did a flood benefit back in 2011, but... That's it? It's sad in Burlington now because the... Thank you.

1:08:25Dr Mark ScialdoneYou know, padlocked the building and yeah, Nectars. I didn't hear that. Nectars closed? Yeah.

1:08:32JeffThat's shocking. That's like, Nectars was like, I was at University of Vermont and it was like, I mean, that was the, yeah, I would say that was like, that was probably the most important like nightlife spot at the time that I was there in the early 2000s.

1:08:48Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, so what were some of the bands you were seeing at Nectar's?

1:08:51JeffOh, God. I don't know if I can't remember. I mean, I can't remember the names of any bands. It was from then. It was so long ago.

1:09:04Dr Mark ScialdoneThey're probably like Strange Folk.

1:09:06JeffYeah, but yeah, yeah, no, that sounds right. And yeah, oh, man. But yeah, I remember I went a lot. I don't even know if this is still open. I went a lot to this place called The Three Needs.

1:09:20Dr Mark ScialdoneOh yeah, that's still there.

1:09:22JeffAnd they didn't have live music, but they would shut everything down and play The Simpsons and turn up the sound on it when it came on at like five or six in the afternoon every day. It's pretty funny. This like loud pokey bar suddenly shuts everyone. Oh, there it is.

1:09:46BubblemanThere it is. The emotional, the first of the emotional support kilos has arrived.

1:09:51Etienne FontanMy friend, Mike Davis, my emotional support human came up with that. So there you go.

1:09:56BubblemanMike, Mike pulled off the first one. Let's see if there's one sitting in. No, but this is kind of cool. Okay, I got, I don't know if this just showed up or if it showed up a day or last week or what, but I'll show you the one I just got. It's kind of cool. I love AI, just whipping off a little drippy drip on the moon.

1:10:26BubblemanSo that was, that was Torp God.

1:10:33BubblemanCool, Torp God playing around, having fun. I still want to see some emotional support kilos. I want to see them with like legs and leashes. I want to see them like skydiving with you. I want to see scuba diving. I want to see them in the maternity ward, like where you're holding your baby, but you also have your emotional support kilo maybe underneath. Come on, guys. Like, let's get creative.

1:10:56Etienne FontanHolding it like twins, baby in one, the kilo in the other.

1:11:00Jenn DoeWe need the official emotional support vest, you know, the very... And I don't think it has to be a cannabis kilo.

1:11:09BubblemanIt just has to be a kilo. It could be of oil, rosin, you know, bubble hash, maybe full melt, dry sifted heads.

1:11:17Etienne FontanYour emotional support slab?

1:11:20BubblemanMy emotional support slab. Exactly, dude. Now you got it. Dabs from the slab. Remember when that was a thing? Dabs from the slab?

1:11:31Etienne FontanYeah, running a whole sheet, right?

1:11:33BubblemanAnd then just like dipping it into the titanium banger. We've got a funny history, this little community of... I've just, I guess really, and I think it's why Sam was like the, you know, the, at the, I don't know, I don't want to say the king of the community, because he's more of a humble dude. But just, yeah, like Sam understood getting high and loved getting high.

1:12:00BubblemanAnd it never, he was the first person when, when I met him, because we were the hemp guys. And then Hillary was like the medical cannabis. And in Canada, we were all like, Don't come head on. Like, let's come from like this kind of thing. But when I met Sam, he was just like, I just love to get high. That's why I'm doing all of this. I was just like, oh, that's awesome.

1:12:22BubblemanYou know, access for people to have access, both patients and recreational users.

1:12:27JeffI actually I love that, too. That's an important point. So I've started this nonprofit to do consumer protection and I, um, we, we are not here for, I mean, medical consumers have their own organizations already. Like, we're here for the stoners, dude. I mean, we care about the medical, we care about all the consumers, but like... It's really important. And we are super underrepresented. I go sometimes to legislative hearings where our legislative committee, our state legislature committee that makes cannabis laws talks.

1:13:09JeffAnd when I go there, I'm the only consumer advocate in the room for stoners to represent and talk to them. Like there are 90% of the people in the room are business owners. And two or three are concerned mothers who want everything prohibited. They want prohibition. And then there are a couple of patients advocates. So there are a couple of advocates for medical patients, for medical consumers.

1:13:42JeffAnd And then there's me, like advocating for all the consumers who spent billions and billions of dollars now on cannabis in Massachusetts. So like, yeah, it's a really immature time. And...

1:14:07JeffUm, but I, I, I love people. I, I love people who, who value all the experiences of cannabis and all the uses, you know? Um, and, um, yeah, I, I, I hate, like, I, I hate the way that sometimes we have been forced into excessive virtue signaling or like apologizing for liking to get high, you know? Like, It bothers me, even though I understand how this has also been a way, this has also been a path towards normalization for people to show them the most sympathetic and rare cases sometimes, right?

1:14:50JeffBut yeah, yeah, I love- Well, on that note, let's get high. Yeah, I love that we're at that point, you know? Like, yeah, we're at that point where someone can say, I'm here for the stoners and it's allowed.

1:15:05Etienne FontanWell, that's what we enjoyed at the state fair is that not only is it allowed, it's encouraged. You can come sit down, smoke, and that's a pretty big thing, you know, for a state fair to be like, Yeah, you can go buy your weed over there and you can smoke it right over there. And it's, you know, it's in a tent, but you can smell it walking on the outside.

1:15:30Etienne FontanAnd, you know, that type of normalization is something we've fought for and we still have to fight for, right? Because... Oh yeah, a lot. You're correct. We are, you know, marginalized in the sense of what we like. However, you know, I absolutely love that in Canada there's a smoking spot outside of the airport.

1:15:51BubblemanHell yeah.

1:15:53Etienne FontanYou know, I would love that in America. Unfortunately, if I go in smelling like weed in America, I'm going to be detained and asked, are you okay? Because that happened to me. It even happened to me in the Netherlands, you know, which is why I had to realize because I was Remember back in 95, we had so much weed that we were literally smoking in the taxi and giving as much of it to the taxi driver.

1:16:18Etienne FontanThe guy's like, thanks, kid. And literally finished the last smoke and put it out and then walked right into Shipple. And they're just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You smell way too pungent. You know what I'm saying?

1:16:31BubblemanDude, in 95, there was a place in Shipple you could get away with smoking joints in.

1:16:41JeffI mean, you know, it is it is a new era. Like I, I smoke joints all over the place. I smoke joints walking down the street. But I have I've had just once or twice I've had people complain. But I just point out to people, hey, man, look, that guy over there smoking a cigarette. Is it smelling? It's a smell. People complain about the smell. And I say, look, that guy over there smoking a cigarette, it smells awful to me.

1:17:11JeffI was riding my bike yesterday. Some guy blew past me in this pickup truck that belched out black smoke on me. Nobody stopped him from doing that. Like, right? Another guy blew past me with a car with those noise-making, noise-making mufflers that left my ears ringing. Nobody stopped him from doing that. I like the way Bill Hicks was like, we should make it mandatory.

1:17:35BubblemanHey, man, what's your problem? You're taking life too seriously. Here, smoke this.

1:17:39JeffIf you smell it more often, you'll get, your nose will quickly get desensitized to the sulfur compounds and you won't notice it. So...

1:17:49DrGo ahead, Doug.

1:17:51JeffPlease.

1:17:55DrI'd like to comment. Can you hear me?

1:17:57BubblemanI can hear you.

1:17:58DrOkay. I'd like to comment and encourage everybody to, we need to change the narrative. So the drug ward narrative is, oh, I smell that nasty smelling pot. It stinks. So let's change the narrative. And I do this whenever I smell cannabis. I say in a loud, boisterous voice, I smell freedom. And I encourage you to do the same. It changes the narrative.

1:18:32BubblemanI'm absolutely doing that. In fact, since you mentioned that about a week and a half to two weeks ago, maybe even longer, I have done it a few times. And in fact, yesterday, as I left my local beach and I saw two of these sisters that live down the street, my daughter's friends with them, they grew up together. Their parents were very not into cannabis, very alcohol based.

1:18:58BubblemanAnd they they got up. I basically was following them to our we were going to our cars and it just happened to be I was maybe, you know, 50 to 100 feet behind them. We were all walking to our cars and wasn't really paying attention. But they both looked back at me at one point and I was like, just kind of waved like, hey, guys. And I guess they realized it was me and right away they lit up a joint and I could smell it.

1:19:21BubblemanAnd it was very rare to smell cannabis in my neighborhood. I live in a neighborhood where people drink beer on the beach all day long, but not necessarily burning herb. And most likely the people in Lions Bay at the beach, especially myself included, I just don't smoke herb down there or hash because I don't want to expose the kids to it. I don't want them to have to walk through my smoke or Thank you.

1:19:54JeffYeah, well, I'm lucky. I have a very nice friendly bar that's just a couple of blocks from my home here in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And I often will smoke a joint and look at the ducks and swans on a pond on my way to the bar. And I'll sit down at the bar and someone will often say to me, hey, I like your perfume. So I'm here to tell you, man, normalization, it's progressing, all right?

1:20:29JeffBut yeah, we all got to do our part to keep pushing.

1:20:32Jenn DoeI had a cashier the other day that was like, oh, what perfume is that? And I was like, oh, it's weed. She was like, oh.

1:20:43BubblemanIn Utah.

1:20:45Jenn DoeIn Utah.

1:20:46BubblemanSo you've got a big mountain to climb for normalization in Utah.

1:20:50Jenn DoeWe really do. It's a very small market as far as the legally here, but I mean, it's a large market. Everybody, I think we're still all traumatized from all of the prohibition shit. So yeah, but it's very interesting to be walking around Utah and get a little whiff of weed somewhere. I'm like,

1:21:08BubblemanWhat are the... Well, now you guys can all know who each other are. Utah's kind of, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jen, but reminiscent of Texas where people who puff didn't really tell other people. They just kept it to themselves because it's just... The more you went out like this, the more, because I get people from Texas all the time, Utah, to be honest as well.

1:21:28BubblemanAnd they'd be like, there's no, there's no hash in my entire state. And I'd be like, bro, I sell so many fucking bags into your state. And I'm sorry, I can't just like give you addresses and phone numbers for people. But what I'm telling you is the people who have it are probably your neighbors. But they're terrified. They're fucking terrified they're going to have their kids taken away.

1:21:48BubblemanThey're terrified they're going to have their house taken away. This is going back 25 years, and I don't know how long that lasted in Utah. Maybe it was up until last year.

1:21:57Jenn DoeIt's still here. I mean, I had to literally uproot my children and take them to a different state because I was concerned that I was going to get caught and go to prison.

1:22:10JeffI was always really nervous in grad school about how to talk about it or when it would be okay to talk about it because some people can be really judgmental, especially in academic pursuits.

1:22:25BubblemanSo you could be blacklisted out of academia.

1:22:28JeffYeah, maybe not total, maybe not like a hard blacklist or anything, but definitely affected. In some people's minds, you will slip into a different category. And I really experienced that at Harvard because the whole way that I started doing cannabis research was That I got sick from a e-cig that I bought online. So that was why my advisor was interested in cannabis e-cigs connected with me is because I...

1:22:59JeffThere was a negative. I wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe about my experience and I was public about it. And so then after that, some people at Harvard treated me really differently and I could see they could never look at me the same. Other people, they would quietly come up to me in the hall and they would say, thank you for being so brave and sharing your story.

1:23:23JeffIt was really important.

1:23:25Bubblemanit just goes to show you there's always two sides you know yeah yeah but yes got his veterans group and i i went in and sat with them one day and they were talking about cannabis use disorder and that's how they get them they just they just they just tagged them with cannabis use disorder and now they're like okay now you're over here just like those certain people at harvard took you and they put you in this box because of that information that they learned people have been doing that through the lens of cannabis To people for no good reason for, I would guess, a thousand years.

1:23:57BubblemanGo ahead, ATN. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, ATN.

1:24:00Etienne FontanLook what they did to Lester Grinspoon, right? Harvard alumni, Harvard professor, but because he was in cannabis, he wrote about cocaine as well. They never gave him tenure. So even one of the foremost experts there at Harvard got absolutely fucked with multiple times through his years there. So it's not really surprising.

1:24:28Etienne FontanYou know that that's the case. But, you know, Jeff, the whole reason I started, you know, pioneering cannabis testing in 07 and 08 was because I bought something that I got an upper respiratory infection from and I have what's called Gulf War illness or syndrome. And that affects my nervous system. So I know because I have a dispensary and I provide to cancer and AIDS patients here in the Bay Area.

1:24:56Etienne FontanI knew that if I sold something like that, that it could kill the people and I have enough deaths on my conscience from war. I don't need any more. You know, from that. So it's, it's rather interesting that something that happened to us inspired, you know, that scientific exploration because it didn't exist. And so we had to either find it, reinvent it, or, you know, you know, hamstring it together so we can find the scientific results needed so that we could feel comfortable about what we were doing.

1:25:31Etienne FontanYeah.

1:25:32JeffYeah. Yeah. Well, wow. That's an amazing story. Also, thanks for thanks for sharing that. And thanks for your service.

1:25:41Etienne FontanThank you for being an American worth fighting for, as they say.

1:25:46JeffSo, yeah, I think I also I think I had another observation I wanted to share if I'm not too baked yet, which was that, you know, I didn't know what the other side of that bridge would look like, right? Like of going public. And I was really nervous about publishing that column. And I think that's a lot of the hesitation that a lot of people feel is that they just don't, it's the uncertainty that makes them hesitate about bringing it up.

1:26:18JeffAnd that's a lot of the stigma still is, right? You just don't know how people are going to react exactly. And you're worried about it. So some people won't care. Some people will be like, oh man, I burn too. I wish if I'd known we could have smoked together. I smoked 15 minutes ago.

1:26:35BubblemanYou know what? You made an interesting point. The very thing the police have used against us, right? Which is the smell forever, is the very thing that would have connected us. The very thing that would have annoyed the masses, but the few would have been like, hey friend, how's it going?

1:26:54JeffYeah, yeah.

1:26:55BubblemanI smell freedom.

1:26:57JeffYeah. Yeah. You remember in the old days when it was like more taboo and sometimes you'd like you'd be at like a family gathering or something. You see that one uncle with the red eyes. The skunkle. Yeah. And that was me. You know, there's a certain point. Oh, that was me.

1:27:16Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, that was me.

1:27:18Jenn DoeMy family members would approach me separately at family functions back in the day. And they would be like, hey, don't tell anybody, but can you get me high? And I'd be like, sure. By the end of. Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:27:53Jenn DoeUtah. Do you guys realize that we could have like went out back together? This could have been a bonding moment, you know?

1:28:01JeffIt was for you. They had the bonding. It was for me. I got really good one-on-one time with everybody, so. No, that's awesome. They had the bonding paranoia because they're all sitting there having fun saying, I hope nobody can tell I'm high.

1:28:16Jenn DoeBut everybody's so concerned that they're high themselves that they're not noticing that everybody else is high. I just get to sit back and be like, my work here is done.

1:28:25BubblemanI'll tell you one thing. At the airport in Vancouver where we puff and get high, the cigarette smokers are just looking down and puffing. And then all the other people, like personally for me, I was going to Kelowna with Thomas, my partner at Grandmaster LEDs, and we... We pulled out, I pulled out the Puffco's and this girl, I guess she was going to Saskatchewan or something. She was like, she looked, she smoked a big joint.

1:28:51BubblemanShe looked over at, she's like, you guys brought rigs. We're like, yeah. And suddenly it's like this little circle develops. And then there's another guy comes in and the cigarette smokers are all just on their phones. They're like this, they're smoking. They're looking at the ground, but the weed people, they're all kind of like, what are you smoking on? Like, Oh, no, thanks. I don't smoke joints.

1:29:10BubblemanOh, wow. What is that? Oh, it's a Puffco. You know, I'm just putting some rosin in there. And suddenly you're having this whole conversation. My favorite part is literally going into the airport reeking like weed. I go through the check, the security, and all they ever want to look at is my NIR. This is what they want to look at. They want to look at the neospectra and be like, what the fuck is that?

1:29:35BubblemanI explain it to them. They might swab at the odd time. And then Bob's your uncle. There are quite a few people asking about your tattoos, Jeff. Are they indeed a psychedelic molecule or is it cannabis?

1:29:47JeffNo, they're neither. They're chemical structures of compounds that I synthesized in the course of research. So the one on my left arm is actually a pretty complicated compound. It's called a pentosine, but it's very decorated. It has lots of substitutions all over the outside of it. And I actually made that compound in Vermont.

1:30:13BubblemanCrazy. That's a Burlington compound.

1:30:15JeffYeah, yeah. And I got this tattoo done at Yankee Tattoo on Pearl Street in Burlington. Oh, how cool.

1:30:22BubblemanThat might be one of the coolest fucking things ever, dude. Tattooing compounds that you... That's pretty cool. What's the other one?

1:30:32JeffYeah, the other one is a simpler compound called a diphenyl butynone. And I made this for a research project in my undergraduate studies at Bard College. There's a shout out for Hudson Valley's Bard College, a place to think.

1:30:52BubblemanTalk about your tattoos meaning something.

1:30:55JeffThey're kind of like about the whole experience. You know, like I actually, you know, I dropped out of college and then went back to the same college, which is really embarrassing thing to do. And so like I

1:31:13JeffI was kind of surprised that I graduated. I had a lot of unexpected challenges in college and I really struggled with grad school too. So I actually, in Burlington, I dropped out of Vermont after a year. I was a janitor at an auto dealership and I did painting over the summer. And then I went back to college. I went back to grad school at UVM with everyone knowing I had been a janitor.

1:31:46JeffAnd I was so embarrassed. And I got the master's degree. So like, I don't know. And I was actually really good at making gum. I was actually good at the synthesis. So yeah, these tattoos had a lot of meaning for me, actually, about like kind of the struggles of getting through that stuff.

1:32:02Dr Mark ScialdoneSo... Hey, so Jeff, Mark was just talking about his near IR thing. I know you've had one of those... We've talked about testing quite a bit over the years in Hash Church and our audience is pretty sophisticated and so I'd love for you to share some of your learnings about using those portable testing devices because I think they do certainly have a role So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

1:32:59JeffSo, right. And it's almost like it's not that the absolute numbers really mean something, but tracking how they change with things that you do explains a lot to yourself. Right. So, yeah, yeah. Like and I think that that's almost universally the case. I find that. What having metrics and analytics like that in processes, I know a lot of hash makers are very bespoke and hands on and they do what feels right.

1:33:30JeffBut the advantage of that is that they can do a really great job when they're right there doing it themselves. The disadvantage of that is it's very hard for them to teach other people because they Everything is intuitive to them. They don't have words or numbers for it, right? So when you have all these metrics, then you can start turning it into a process and becoming more systematic.

1:33:55JeffAnd even the best pastry chefs keep lab notebooks. For the same reason, because writing down what you do and just keeping track of metrics and writing it down and going back over it over time makes you better. And it also makes it easier to explain to other people how to do it. So the point that I'm bringing up is that having in line Thank you so much for joining us.

1:34:50JeffSo yeah, so yeah, I do have to say that I have like a...

1:34:55BubblemanI have a friend that uses one. He quite likes it. There's a solution for orange photonics, right? Or is that just the purple one?

1:35:03JeffOrange photonics is really neat and different because it's a liquid chromatograph. So it actually has a little pump in it and it runs a solvent system. And... There it's a really I I find it to be a really interesting set of engineering trade-offs and choices that they made where they went in the non-obvious direction right like so many of the approaches to making rapid cannabis analyzers or portable ones have been like near IR but um The advantage of it is that the Light Lab is way more flexible in terms of the different kinds of samples that it can take.

1:35:51JeffIt does a great job with flour. And it also, I would rather use the Light Lab for measuring beverages than I would an HPLC. Because for the HPLC, I have to do so much sample prep and there's, and beverages are already so touchy that like, you know, you lose cannabinoids from beverages from any sort of handling step without even knowing it, right? Like all the time or anything.

1:36:22JeffSo, but with the Light Lab, because of the way that it works, you actually inject just the beverage neat, right? Because the Light Lab column is kind of a shitty column. They really made interesting trade-offs with it. So the disadvantages of the Light Lab are that the detection limits aren't that great for some compounds. Like if I'm not going to get all the minor cannabinoids, I'll have a couple of non-detects because the limit of detection for cannabinoids is about half percent.

1:36:58JeffAll right. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:37:15BubblemanThere's 150 patents in this little device. It's pretty incredible. You can be shaking the table. You don't need any professional. You don't need a chemist to operate it. You could get the janitor to operate it and he could come out and smash the data out. Data resolution just goes up so high because you can take so many tests with this little thing. That's so important. Thank you.

1:37:36BubblemanIt takes about one minute to do a test. You could do literally hundreds of tests. In one day, my friend who has a GMP lab in Holland, he was telling me, I asked him, what do you think of the Valenveris? He wrote me this, concerning the Valenveris, we validated it for cannabinoids compared to our EU GMP lab. Valenveris is actually better and more reliable in my very humble opinion.

1:38:00BubblemanWe can now run much, much, much more samples. And so we can do research with increased data resolution. Ruben isn't getting this device back is all I'm saying. Thank you so much for watching.

1:38:26BubblemanJust a nice little handheld unit, super easy to operate, hooks up to your phone. I can do macro and micronutrients in the plant, which for me is kind of the big seller on this. If you're a grow and you want to know what your nutrients are at, this just tells you within a minute. It's unbelievable.

1:38:47Jenn DoeAnd then Ruben.

1:38:49BubblemanYeah, right. How much does that thing cost, Marcus? Do you know how much that thing costs? It's $12,800 US. And then they're going to have a subscription. And he said, look, if you're happy with it the way you buy it, the day you buy it, great. But every year we're going to be doing all sorts of different things. Ruben works with universities and setups these big protocols and he collects these massive amounts of data.

1:39:13BubblemanAnd then it's Ruben who's got like he came on the show. He's got like three engineering and agricultural degrees. He's got a master's. He's worked at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Barcelona. He's the one that programd all the data into this. You can also get models for this. I have one for psilocybin. You can get like. All of these pieces that attach and you can go right onto the soil, you know, the soybean and tomato and like all these fruit and food industries have been using NIR for a very long time, just as a tool, not as a be all end all, but like as a breeding tool, you can use it to help you with direction of phenotype choosing.

1:39:54BubblemanYou can in the lowest hanging fruit, Because you can test so often, you could harvest your crop at max THC instead of like missing that boat and having it go way down. You could literally be testing it every day. That's like a super base like, hey, you want to grow like three more kilos of THCA on your plants instead of missing that boat because you're not quite sure and you're using the intuition of some grower to tell you where the plant is at.

1:40:22BubblemanThat's that's base. The macro and micronutrients is going to help increase the expression of the plant if you allow it to have what it needs, not too much, not too little. Ruben has really good graphs where it'll shoot out the graph on what your macro and micronutrients are. And then he's got a graph below on where that particular, you know, cannabis plant would probably be happiest at.

1:40:45BubblemanHe's got above, below, and then just perfect. So I've just been having fun with it. It's been a real blast. It's also neat from the perspective as just a person to own it. I can just, I've started a little business with my friend Mark from Craft Greenery. Shout out the Craft Greenery guys. And we're just offering people to send in samples, half a gram. We'll send the sample back if they need it because it's non-destructive.

1:41:08BubblemanThere's no solutions. It doesn't have a cost to run the test. So you can just run and you can run about 600 tests off a battery. I was like, damn, there's a lot of tests. So I'm stoked on it. I had the Gem Assert. I still have it before this one. And the thing that I found was that it was so sensitive. You almost couldn't be in the room with it.

1:41:33BubblemanYou certainly couldn't have music on. You couldn't have a door open even if it was 40 feet away in the room because that vibration would offset these sensors in this machine. Whereas when I first met Ruben and I asked him about his, I said, dude, like, does it work? Like, can I actually be at an event? And he's like, bro. We can do this on the train.

1:41:52BubblemanWe can do this on the plane. We can do this on the trampoline. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, yeah, this is like movement doesn't affect it. I was like, all right, well, that's pretty crazy because the last one is now a paperweight. It was a $15,000 unit and it is now a paperweight, unfortunately.

1:42:11JeffThat's yeah.

1:42:13BubblemanIt's sad when that happens. Yeah, you know, sometimes that happens and I've had it happen more than a few times. I remember when technology was first happening, I became very early on in the downloading world, right? I wanted to access Grateful Dead and Phish without trade taping. I had been trade taping, but I was like one of the, I was very, very early on on PhishNet. I was very early on in like archive sites and I would just trade tapes and get eventually digital.

1:42:43BubblemanBut when I first started doing it, my first MP3 player was 128 megs. And I remember I got two Bob Marley songs, MP3s that I downloaded that filled that MP3 player. That was the technology in the beginning when we started to digitize music. Pretty trippy.

1:43:05Bubbleman25 years ago.

1:43:06JeffYeah, well, that the light lab instrument is pretty, it's pretty robust. It's, it's, yeah, there's more sample prep with it. But the advantages of being able to handle like, any kind of sample are pretty good. And that part's really nice. And, and it's, it's very robust. I mean, you can, yeah, I can drop it, I can bang it around, you know, it doesn't Yeah, it Yeah, so You know, and yeah, it's quite consistent across a lot of different kinds of samples too.

1:43:42JeffIt's fun to be able to do that. But, you know, a lot of, yeah, there's huge advantages to collecting more data points, right? And when you go from your data being, you know, an isolated point to being like a curve with dynamics, like, you know, so much more, right? You can, you know, You'll you'll you see the effects of everything that you're doing.

1:44:10Dr Mark ScialdoneJeff, you know, I've really counted on some of your education that you do through your institute to educate people on what's going on in that world of synthetic cannabinoids. You know, I spoke on that panel down at CanMed, and I think that it's important for the people in medical community understand that, yeah, I mean, there is some basically unregulated API synthesis for all intent and purposes, right?

1:44:41Dr Mark ScialdoneWhen people are finding THCP in very high levels. And I think I remember the one story that one of the nurses had shared with me down at CanMed, which was a young girl who mistakenly ingested a THCP containing gummy and basically almost like went into a coma. I mean, it was just so... Unfortunate that, again, where prohibition has driven us, it's to the point of, okay, you know, THC Delta 9 is a partial agonist, you know, that's what getting high is, right?

1:45:19Dr Mark ScialdoneWe're agonizing our CP1 receptors. And when you think about it, it's like, okay, going... Way overboard, two orders of magnitude to a full-on agonist is you change all the downstream pharmacology that the endocannabinoid system is underpinning in terms of, again, the psychoactive effect, the known psychoactive effect. But I guess the thing that, again, I always think about is that what would... You know, if prohibition went away, if people had access to good hash and good rosin and high quality, high artisan material, as well as the, I guess, the Thank you for watching.

1:46:25Dr Mark ScialdoneAre really more of the microbrew beer example, you know, just extrapolate that onto alcohol. But do you think, and again, I said this down at the panel down there, I was, in fact, do you remember what I said? Everyone wants to get high. And boy, did I hear it from the doctors after that? Well, you know, Mark, not everyone wants to get high, you know? People take this for medicine.

1:46:47Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd, you know, I got that lecture from more than one doctor. But what I would say, too, is that, again, I'd said this. I don't know if you feel the same way, that if people had access to good, high quality hash and high quality rosin, artisan rosin, the market for recreational synthetics would go away. Like there wouldn't be a need in states that have the worst cannabis regulation, like down south.

1:47:16Dr Mark ScialdoneYou know, hate to say it, but it does correlate with the, with the red state, blue state thing. But even if you look at, you know, states where you can go to jail for smoking a joint on a street corner, but on your way to the jail, stop at the gas station and get some THCP, you know, it's like, so I know it's not saying, no, it's so it's nuts and it's so frustrating.

1:47:43JeffUm, yeah, but, um, Yeah, so I have a few thoughts about that, definitely. Like we said before, right, like the demand for cannabis is relatively inelastic. You know, people want it, right? They don't care. Like it's, you know, if it's like when it's hard to get, they still want it. They don't want to stop smoking. So, yeah. When you don't have a readily, easily accessible supply to meet that demand, and you have a culture that delegitimizes uses of cannabis that aren't medicinal, then this is what you get.

1:48:37JeffYou get a bunch of smoke shops that reflect the reality of supply and demand.

1:48:47BubblemanSo, yes.

1:48:52DrOkay. This would be a perfect time to discuss this patent. Please. Since Dr. Marcus here, he could, he could add his evaluation of this patent that I just happened to find this last week because I had my eye surgery and it's called, it's a medicinal acidic cannabinoids. It's a U S patent. Patent number 7,807,711B2, October 5, 2010. And when I read this patent, it tells us that they did some in vitro studies, that means in a tube.

1:49:40DrAnd this patent is not... Thank you for joining us.

1:50:13DrInterleukin 10 is anti-inflammatory. And what this patent says, and I don't think that the people that wrote this patent understand the impact of what I'm about to tell you, because everybody's mind is affected by propaganda, regardless of which side of the fence you're on. So these guys proved that THC Didn't do anything to tumor necrosis factor or interleukin, but THCA had great effect that it decreased tumor necrosis factor and increased interleukin 10, both of which Our anti-inflammatory and so your immune system is regulated by how much of the anti-inflammatory versus inflammatory cytokines exist and the balance between the two measure the immune response you're going to get.

1:51:23DrAnd so what this patent means is if you eat raw unheated cannabis and put it in your diet, It literally means that it could have implications on your immune system regulation. Now, there's no human studies on this or even animal studies, but that could easily be done. But most scientists don't read this kind of stuff because there's no motivation. And I didn't read it for a long time.

1:51:54DrMedicinal acidic cannabinoids. Why would I want to read that boring thing? And so my prejudice... Prevented me from reading this, and it may be the discovery of a lifetime and changes the narrative completely that if you put cannabis in your diet, it might help be immune regulator for you. And hopefully this will stimulate other scientists to do studies on this. And Dr. Mark, what do you think of my evaluation of this?

1:52:29DrWhat's your opinion?

1:52:31Dr Mark ScialdoneAbsolutely right. So the anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties have to do with how these compounds impact the release of

1:52:48Dr Mark Scialdonecompounds that's basically an overstimulation of an immune response kind of like what we referred to as cytokine storm during the days of covid right and so a lot of that collateral damage is some of the reasons why covid patients were basically rendered without the you know basic of pulmonary function right which is basically to exchange co2 for oxygen in the blood But yeah, David, what we discussed too was again that other paper that I keep on referring to as being a very important pivotal study that was published in 2020 that showed, and Jeff, I'm not sure that we discussed this, but this is a really interesting impact.

1:53:36Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat we're talking about is a different Thank you so much for joining us.

1:54:00Dr Mark ScialdoneBut if you were to look at this paper and Jeff, I'll share this with you offline in function that was published in 2020, they identified that cannabinoid acids and in particular, David, if you remember this, it was CBGA that they found out completely blocks something called store operated calcium entry, which is a very important calcium flux into the cell.

1:54:28DrYeah, we should read that. I would like to review that study, so I would like a copy of that.

1:54:33Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I think I'd sent that to you offline, David, but I'll send it to you again. So this calcium current, which is known to ultimately be involved in that Biochemical inflammatory response, which again is the release of these molecules, which cause the inflammatory reaction for a variety of these diseases. But often it's with some type of autoimmune disorder, which is again, extremely important because the body's own way of defending itself against disease is Thank you so much for joining us.

1:55:31Dr Mark ScialdoneVery troubling what I've read here. And this was that a patient had died after succumbing to hospital-acquired pneumonia and cardiac arrest. And they had diagnosed her with an infection of cryptococcus neoformans. And so Cryptococcus neoformans is a very uncommon fungus. It's found in pigeon shit of all places. But it's most notable for it's one of the fungi that's actually what's called a radiotrope. So they find these things growing in and around Chernobyl.

1:56:21Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd they live off a melatonin source. And it's very important. In the fungal kingdom, but this particular case that we're talking about here, and I'll just read a paragraph from the paper if that's okay. We recently encountered a 46-year-old woman with relapsing multiple myeloma. By the way, that's what our dear friend... Wade Hadden, my late uncle, Eugene, who just passed away a couple months ago, died from multiple myeloma.

1:56:53Dr Mark ScialdoneFollowing autologous stem cell transplant, which was treated with Dara to Nabin, that is a biological. So it's one of these biologicals, again, that's used to treat multiple myeloma. Which again is a blood cancer for those of you who don't know what that is.

1:57:21Dr Mark ScialdoneThey were also treated with politamide, which again is another drug that's used with multiple myeloma. And here's, again, I believe my non-expert opinion of the culprit, which was dexamethasone, which is a corticosteroid that was used, again, to treat probably the inflammatory condition that was associated with this stem cell transplant. She presented with several months of dysphonia. Dysphonia is kind of like a hoarseness in the larynx, like inability to kind of...

1:58:04Dr Mark ScialdoneThank you for joining us today.

1:58:30Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd treated with serial lumbar punctures with liposomal amphotericin B, which is a very potent natural product that's used for very serious systemic fungal infections. Also, flukidesine, which is 5-fluorohydrate. Cytosine, which is also used quite a bit in those types of very systemic problematic fungal events. So followed by high doses of fluconazole, again, an azole fungicide that's used quite a bit. She presented two months later in septic shock with bacterial urope sepsis.

1:59:11Dr Mark ScialdoneIt's basically sepsis of the urinary tract system. Hospitalization was complicated with hospital-acquired pneumonia. She subsequently developed arrhythmia and died from cardiac arrest. Autopsy showed persistent cryptococcus, which is basically the colonization of this cryptococcus neoformans involved in the epiglottis lungs and visceral pleurae. And superimposed with bronchopneumonia. So I won't bore you with the other details of the paper, but they did, the patient did present them with four different, patient provided with four different cannabis products that she had purchased from different dispensaries.

1:59:58Dr Mark ScialdoneSo here she is, she's a medical patient in Pennsylvania, right? With multiple myeloma and she's buying weed at a dispensary, right? Loose dried flower, ground cannabis sativa and ground hybrid flowers grown in Pennsylvania. And basically this isn't a fungus that they typically screen for. I see in Pennsylvania, they screen for things like aspergillus, things like E. coli, the stack E. coli, the real bad one. And I think they test for total mold and yeast, which I think total yeast would get this because this is a yeast type mechanism.

2:00:41Dr Mark ScialdoneBut in terms and it's not even known. This is really crazy, Jeff. It's not even known what are the mycotoxins that this fungus produces. Again, on the autopsy of this patient, they found that there was multiple colonization, which is very, very rare, but they traced it back to her exposure was because of the cannabis. Now, it's interesting, again, because down toward the end of the paper, they talk about this, that They believe that the treatment with the steroid is what lowered the immune system that made her susceptible to this colonization.

2:01:24Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd I was just going to read something along those lines here toward the end of the conclusion of the paper. But anyway, I would caution that this is highly rare, but this basically shows that an immunocompromised patient was infected with a very rare form of fungus that became fatal to her probably due to the cocktail of drugs none of which or the least of which included this steroid which is known i wanted to kind of find that part i don't see it right away but it is say it does say that Exposure to that particular corticosteroid and lowering her immune system could have been somewhat responsible.

2:02:13JeffI do have some thoughts about that. Thanks for sharing so many of the details of that because I only... I clicked on the link in the email like five minutes before we went on. So I only had time to see, to really glance over their evidence like briefly. But I mean, the story makes sense to me.

2:02:41JeffI've been treated myself in the hospital for severe pulmonary distress. And I'm here to tell you, Dex is a hell of a drug. You want to feel really high, you take a big fucking dose of steroids. You will feel like a supercomputer on top of Arnold Schwarzenegger's body.

2:03:01JeffBut they're also super fucking addictive.

2:03:08JeffBut my mother died of multiple myeloma. And she had an own blood transplant where they collected her stem cells and then cultured them into... All of these people are going to have to go through a lot of pain and suffering. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened.

2:03:39JeffSo I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened.

2:03:55JeffSo some people are so immune compromised that we can't make big distribution systems that are going to be safe enough for them. So I have a question to be able to make everything. We have no guarantee to absolute safety in anything that we do. And there are big risks to handling whole cannabis, you know, Paul, any produce for people of a certain degree of immunocompromisation and they have to take special measures to protect themselves.

2:04:34JeffSo it sounds like a really tragic thing. I think that we should learn a lot more about this fungus and its role in the cannabis microbiome and what our cultivation practices may or do to encourage or discourage its Thank you so much for joining us.

2:05:15JeffYeah, it's nice science. Right? So it's the strongest evidence of that particular step, which was always like a jumping the motorcycle over the Grand Canyon before. So it's a very important research result. And it tells it, you know, it changes the answer to a question from, can I get an infection from smoking weed if it's contaminated enough? The answer was, I don't know. I think so. Now, now the answer is, yes, that happened to someone.

2:05:46BubblemanIt's interesting because Kevin did the same thing with the COVID vaccine.

2:05:50Etienne FontanAnd it's a legal product that made it through the testing. And that's what's so also interesting, right? Because we're used to all these things having to come from gray market or illicit market cannabis. And it shows again that there are problems that we still have to tackle scientifically. And I presented that to our group. My friend Arturo said, yeah, you can extract a sample and then feed that sample DNA through a system that separates into micro droplets, isolating reaction.

2:06:31Etienne FontanIt helps when detecting something that is there, but in low amounts, which it sounds Yeah, but I think of situation where it is in such slow amounts, but it still made it through. Right. And then possibly, you know, grew larger just because of packaging. Right. And how the packaging standards are. Right. It would only, you know, potentially grow stronger within and how long that packaging was sitting on the shelf.

2:06:58Etienne FontanRight. Yeah.

2:06:59JeffBut I think we have to be really careful about how we like we can get really zoomed in on one case. And it's very scientifically interesting. But like hundreds of thousands of people are killed every year by preventable infections in hospitals. Like this case study is not a public health emergency. Right. Like it's, you know, like it's it's it's it's really important science and research and and introduces a lot of new questions and interesting questions to ask that are important and also safety related.

2:07:40JeffBut at the same time, I don't think that this Yeah, you know, I don't know. Like, I don't think we should launch a thousand research projects to stop this from happening. You know what I mean? Like, we have, you know.

2:07:55Jenn DoeI have some questions because I did read a little bit on that.

2:08:03Jenn DoeSo here's my question. What it seemed to me that I was reading was saying that heat deactivates these spores and kills them. So my question kind of is like, how would that person be exposed to that? Like if this is a huge weed, right? We are burning whatever is in there. How would they be exposed to that? My other question is, how do we actually know that it was in the weed?

2:08:33Jenn DoeLike what if this woman had chickens? Right. And was sitting on her back patio watching her chickens. Maybe the weed was exposed to that as well as her, because it also is saying that you have to breathe it in. So if we're burning that, then that's kind of eliminating the ability to breathe in those spores.

2:08:54JeffSo you have to be really careful because you can't make any assumptions about what this woman did. Yeah, no, exactly. As a person who has been in the hospital because who got sick from his drugs. Let me tell you the first thing you do when you're in the emergency room and you're sick from your drugs. You lie. You lie about what you did. That's what I did.

2:09:20JeffI lied to everyone on my treatment team for like two days. Thank you for watching.

2:09:52JeffYeah, you have to be really careful. You have to be really careful. But they have some really strong evidence associating the weed with the illness. They have like molecular level evidence. They have like genetic evidence that it's the same strain in the weed as in the person.

2:10:12Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, and that's a unique level of proof.

2:10:17Dr Mark ScialdoneSo they also, if you read the thing, they'll say that they got four samples of cannabis products, right? It sounds like loose flour, but they also had distillate and wax. So it's like, if, I mean, I'm supporting what you're saying, Jeff, which is that it points to Secondary contamination. Like, I don't believe that this is a fungus that grows and thrives on cannabis. Somewhere, these three different SKU product categories were exposed Thank you for watching.

2:11:13JeffRight. And already been being exposed to it.

2:11:16Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah. When you say this strain, you mean the strain of fungus?

2:11:19JeffYes, that they detected in her. And so you co-associate it with the weed and the person. But you don't realize that there was actually some other intermediary step that you haven't seen. Right. But and that they're kind of they're both they're both like they have a common ancestor. Right.

2:11:39Dr Mark ScialdoneSo, so the fact that they actually on autopsy cultured her larynx and found out that there was indeed a systemic infection of this fungus, it doesn't necessarily, it, if her like entire home was Infested with this fungus, right? It wouldn't matter whether she was breathing cannabis or whether she was breathing, I don't know, just air or could she have just gotten it from just like steam in the shower or are there other ways?

2:12:17JeffMaybe her sock drawer was starting to get a little funky, you know, right? And that's where she stored her weed. Yeah, and that's kind of my point is we can't necessarily like point our finger at the weed and listen to what they're saying because... You have to be hyper careful because you also read a lot of your own assumptions into the story without noticing, right? You assumed she smoked her weed.

2:12:41JeffHow do you know she didn't have a volcano?

2:12:43Collin PalmerShe vaped it.

2:12:45Jenn DoeThey're still vaping it. That volcano is going to have enough heat.

2:12:48JeffYeah, yeah. But my point is that there's a million assumptions that we can make without even realizing it. And I could be making assumptions too without noticing. Because humans, studying people is fucking hard, man. I do chemistry. Every time I've gotten near human studies, everything gets so fucking noisy and uncertain. It's impossible. I like molecules. They're consistent.

2:13:15Collin PalmerSo, all right. So we've talked about how it's been in her personal, what's called her personal stash, right? Well, just for low hanging fruit. Have we proven or they proven, whoever they are, insert here, whatever organization's looking into this, have they gone back to where it was cultivated? Have they gotten samples from those exact plants? And have they shown what that came from, that particular place, and how through the process of growing, curing, and packaging, that particular, call it strain, ended up in this woman's possession, and why we're talking about it today.

2:14:01Collin PalmerBecause if we can't answer that and connect that, it begins and ends within her four walls of her house.

2:14:11JeffIt's a very good point. It's hard to know. I mean, I certainly wouldn't say that this is an unimportant study or research result. And I'm definitely going to pay a lot more attention to like, yeah. But Dr. Mark, like, is that a lot of great questions, right?

2:14:29Collin PalmerLike, let's just bring up the elephant in the room. Like, there's a lot of missing controls here that don't amount to like. Real fact.

2:14:39JeffYou just have to be really careful about drawing a lot of conclusions from one study. Right. Yeah. It's just a normal limitation of research. There's nothing wrong with it. This is a great.

2:14:49Collin PalmerI'm just questioning it right now. I'm just throwing it into the air like, hey, so like, okay, but do we have plant tissue from the plants grown or the room it was packed in or the jars it was packed in?

2:15:08Dr Mark ScialdoneThese are all valid concerns, but I just think, again, the point that I just addressed, which is the fact that it was not only in the flower, but it was also in the distillate and the wax, says that the point source itself may not be the cannabis flower itself, right? So, and I don't know, Colin, I've never heard of this fungus colonizing plant. Um, cannabis before. So I know that I went to the Pennsylvania regs and Pennsylvania doesn't test for it.

2:15:40Dr Mark ScialdoneI don't know that I've ever heard of this on any cannabis testing menu of any testing lab. But I guess kind of like, again, like if we know that it comes from, let's just say pigeon shit. And like, let's say we know that her house has got a pigeon coop on it, right? And it's like, okay, so everything that she breathes that's in and around that thing could essentially be a vector for this thing to basically colonize her.

2:16:11Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd the fact that she was being treated for multiple myeloma after stem cell, and they gave her a steroid, which basically lowers her immune system, Ability to stuff colonized in her voice box and killed her. And I don't know, you know, again, like, okay, they found it in the cannabis, but did they find it in like the bedsheets? And did they find it in the rug? And did they find it everywhere else where this source of contamination could be from?

2:16:43Dr Mark ScialdoneTo try to identify what that source is, I think would drive a lot of certainty on exactly how widespread this problem is.

2:16:54BubblemanAll you have to know is that they found it in the bud and it was a part of why she died. That's concerning enough to be like to pay attention. And from there, you don't have to extrapolate it any worse or any better because everything everyone said is completely accurate. You could never know.

2:17:10JeffYeah, yeah, we don't we don't we we rarely get all the information that we wish we had. And life is full of uncertainty and unknown hazards or poorly quantified hazards that we kind of know are out there. So it's a good idea not to change your whole worldview as a result of one case study. But it's also a good, it seems like as scientists, or many of us are scientists, or at least curious and interested, like it's perfectly, it's a great thing to look at.

2:17:45JeffAsk questions about, talk about just the way that we are. This kind of discussion itself is some of the most valuable way to kick the tires on this and figure out what we should really, how we should feel and think about this at the end, you know?

2:17:58Etienne FontanWell, it may just be an end of one situation, right? And that's okay too, but... You know, this is the thing that we are concerned about because, again, we've been raised under this false assumption that nobody has ever died from cannabis, right? It was something we used to promote, you know, in the sense of, you know, how benign and how safe it is, right? It doesn't fit on the...

2:18:22Etienne FontanWe've seen people get way too high or our cells have hit that point where it goes beyond comfortable or good sensation where people can go to very uncomfortable and scary places, unfortunately.

2:18:48Etienne FontanI've knocked people unconscious just doing dabs because of the absolute surge and not necessarily understanding at the time what I was doing to an individual and not asking what their actual, you know, what's your titration level, right? And so I think we've learned from our own inexperience that, you know, there's curiosities. And of course, as we've come to find out through You know, you know, various new breakthroughs in science that we can identify some of these problems and understand what they are.

2:19:29Etienne FontanBecause this is why we started to test in the first place, right? It's because we wanted to provide safe and efficacious medication that people could feel that they were purchasing without the fear that they could die from it, right?

2:19:46Etienne FontanSimple thing.

2:19:48JeffYeah. Complicated execution, right? It's super hard to have nuanced conversations about the real level of hazards of things in the world, right? Like we have simple ideas sometimes about safety and what we expect. And yeah, I don't know. I think we also have a lot of intuitive sensibilities about that, right? Without... There may be like these are things that are hard to measure.

2:20:15Etienne FontanBut you also brought up the point, right? We went off the rails in the sense that, you know, we're going off the quantifying these small minuscule extrapolated, you know, specific molecules in something as opposed to the blueberry. Right? It's just a blueberry, right? You're not expecting this blueberry to have this exact number of antioxidants every absolute single time consistently through that, right? It's just a natural byproduct that each one, depending on size and how it grows, et cetera.

2:20:48Etienne FontanSo I think that we've also... You've pointed out how much of an injustice we've done through our own nitpicking nerd science that we definitely took it down the wrong path, right? As opposed to a path that's more realiztic in the sense of everyday products, right?

2:21:10JeffYeah, yeah. I think that, you know, The way I wish legalization would happen is I wish that they, you know, all these states, they rush to open up stores because they want to collect taxes. That's their only motivation for legalizing it at the legislative level and to, you know, and to empower their local business people and to have some easy slam dunks and cash in on the green rush for their state, you know, so, um, So they rush to commercialize.

2:21:45JeffThey establish a state agency, usually under their treasurer's office, because they're thinking of it as a cash cow, like the lottery, right? And then anything else is an afterthought. So I wish that we would legalize home grow first. And then for distribution, the first thing that you legalize is farmers markets, because the commercialization of foods is where the risk comes from. Just like home gardening, It doesn't carry the same risks as commercial agriculture for the participants or the people eating the food.

2:22:27JeffIt's just different risks come from scale. It's just a fact. And large scale commercialization is hard to control. It brings large sums of money and lots of lobbying and a bunch of coke heads usually show up somewhere along the way.

2:22:46JeffThose pesky coke heads. They show up wherever there's a bubble, right? Like in all of our economy, right?

2:22:56BubblemanThey need to just get out of that bubble and get on the bubble.

2:23:00JeffAnd like startup industries and whatever, you know, crypto. Like, yeah.

2:23:07BubblemanDiana had a good point in the chat here. Skunkman Sam's wife, better half. She was asking if it was cryptococcus, and Mark Sheldon assured me that it was, so I texted it there. She said the reason she was asking is because it can be dormant in your body. Huh. You don't have to necessarily get it from like one place. You can, it can be dormant in your body and then like, I guess, activate and the spores themselves.

2:23:37Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah.

2:23:37BubblemanThe spores. Yeah.

2:23:38Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah. The spores on these things are bulletproof. I think that's how they could survive.

2:23:43JeffThat's what the name means, right? The cryptic. It's referring to their badass spores, right? Yeah.

2:23:51BubblemanSpores are intense, man. They're not easy to, uh, to kill.

2:23:57Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah. So, oh boy, yeah. Bungi are amazing, man. I mean, they got, they're so diverse. I mean, they got their own fucking kingdom, right?

2:24:09BubblemanDude, they should probably have two or three kingdoms. I mean, they're the only thing on Earth that we found in space. They have their own, they're on their own quantum levels, right?

2:24:20JeffYeah, yeah, exactly.

2:24:22BubblemanThey just, you know. Amazing.

2:24:26JeffAnd yeah, and we and we can hardly tell the difference between most of them.

2:24:30BubblemanYeah, she's mentioned it again. The fungi can remain dormant in the lungs or other organs for extended periods of times. I'm guessing Diana knows this because of her her liver that she's had to deal with all these years. So she's. Yeah.

2:24:45Dr Mark ScialdoneTransplants. You know, my dad, who actually turns 89 this month, succumb to something that is quite common in the desert southwest called valley fever which is a fungal spore that lives in the desert southwest in the you know dirt and dust of You know, Arizona, New Mexico, you know, Southern California area. And in areas where there's a lot of construction and there's a lot of, you know, new stuff kicking up dust and everything, a lot of people who live all of their lives in Eastern, you know, states and Eastern climates move out there, retire.

2:25:27Dr Mark ScialdoneA lot of them end up succumbing to this, this valley fever. And it's a very insidious fungus that, That lives in your lungs. And I know with my dad, he had it in both lungs. This was several years ago and actually came down with pneumonia in the hospital. And we thought we were going to basically say goodbye to him. But he amazingly pulled through and he gets treated now systemically with an antifungal to just keep the fun.

2:25:57Dr Mark ScialdoneHe had a fungus the size of a baseball inside one of his lungs. And, you know, he's not a candidate for the surgery to remove it because it's a very dicey surgery. You're doing surgery inside a lung to remove a fungal mass that's that's basically trying to take over the tissue down there. I know that his breathing was compromised, but fortunately, knock on wood, he survived it and got out of it.

2:26:27Dr Mark ScialdoneBut a lot of people don't. And a lot of animals, from what I understand, dogs are extremely prone to this valley fever thing, which I had never heard of, but we certainly looked into it when my dad was diagnosed. So fungal invasions of the lung are no fucking joke, man. They can definitely take you down.

2:26:52Collin PalmerYou know, Mark, I had an Aspergillus outbreak in a home that I had. And we had it tested for multiple different things. But it was absolutely an eye-opening experience. My daughter was getting sick all the time. You know, actually, it was Kevin McKernan. I was actually, it was like, you know, you live like near the coast and like, you got to get your, your, your, your air tested.

2:27:19Collin PalmerHe's like, you're, you're sick far too often. This is when we were doing a lot of off the environment testing. I was seeing him like a lot because he's just over in Beverly.

2:27:28Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, for Aspergillus, I mean, I have a very sensitive nose. Like, I can walk into a hotel room and tell you that there's mold underneath the carpets, right? And there's like, you know, as soon as carpets get wet, for the most part, you know, time starts, you know, ticking. So if there's ever like a flood, you know, that... You know, it hits like a hotel room or something like that.

2:27:49Dr Mark ScialdoneActually, what I found out, because I had some water issues in a previous home, is that the little strips of wood that they use to keep carpet to the flooring are very, very prone to, as soon as those things get wet, They just start molding. I mean, because you have nice, easy cellulose and lignin for things like aspergillus. So aspergillus is, you know, very general sort of term, but there's... And it's a nice softwood that's untreated because it's like... Oh, yeah, because there's no challenge for them.

2:28:24JeffNobody cares. There's no...

2:28:26Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I mean, even if you just leave like water inside, like, I don't know, like a Dixie cup or something like that, you'll see at least in the East here in Vermont, within days, you'll start to see it turn moldy because there's just... Thank you so much for joining us.

2:29:03Dr Mark ScialdoneInsulate the air conditioning duct work as to not generate condensation. I mean, think about it. You're sending around cold air through your sends, right? And you get condensation on these really humid, hot days here out east. And then that relates to basically all this water that ends up getting into... We'll see you next time.

2:29:36Dr Mark ScialdoneThere's mold underneath this carpet. I have a sense of enough snuff for this.

2:29:41Collin PalmerSeasonality, too. On the East Coast, our outdoor, there's a reason why there are certain regions that have it more than others. It's seasonality. It's based on where those temperature swings are and for how long. What your harvest window is.

2:30:02Dr Mark ScialdoneIf there's a convenient food source, there's a bug that's evolved a way to fucking eat it, right?

2:30:08Collin PalmerThat's basically what it comes down to.

2:30:10JeffNo, I know it's super hard.

2:30:11BubblemanOr a fungus.

2:30:13Collin PalmerYeah. Hard to get away from it. You know what I mean? But so it's always there, right? Let's just be.

2:30:18JeffThese things are super hard to stop. And I don't know. Yeah. For a case study like that one we were talking about, I would like to know if they checked other sources, if they checked anything other than her cannabis.

2:30:39Collin PalmerWell, did they go back to the producer is the question I have? Like, how granular did they get?

2:30:44JeffLike, I mean, because did they assume? Did they assume there's a lot of assumptions and then test it? Or did they test a bunch of random stuff?

2:30:52Dr Mark ScialdoneThere's eight authors on this paper, right? Yeah. Eight authors.

2:30:56Collin PalmerCan they answer that question? Like, did you go back to the lot? Did you test it? Did you test the plant tissue? Did you go back to the moms? Did you go back to the IPM strategy that they use and what was done week over week all the way to, you know, to it being in the dark?

2:31:13Dr Mark ScialdoneI think they would need to do a forensic analysis of the dwelling that she lived in, right? It's most likely that any, since these were multiple different products, I mean, there's no cannabis... Thank you so much for joining us today.

2:31:59JeffNot to be too nitpicky, but case studies, I mean, you should always be super careful about drawing a conclusion from one case study.

2:32:07Collin PalmerI think it's fair to ask all these questions, though, you know, because it's, you know, if you're going to say that it's a big statement to say, hey, cannabis had this in it. It's like, well, yeah, if you just spray hairspray into it. You start having this narrative. Yeah.

2:32:20JeffAnd you start having this narrative that gets around that can wag the dog. It really does happen. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to highlight. It shapes how people ask questions again, right? Like if these guys said, hey, this was an immunocompromised person who smoked weed and she got a lung infection, they might have said, hey, we should test her weed. Right. That could have led them down the wrong rabbit hole.

2:32:42Collin PalmerTrue. And then to your point, like. Did they go to all the steps necessary to really come to the conclusion?

2:32:49JeffDid it occur to them? Yeah. Did it occur to them to test something other than her weed in her house to say, hey, maybe it's not her. Maybe it's more. Maybe maybe we're just finding this on her weed incidentally. And it's because it's all around her environment.

2:33:03BubblemanMaybe she breathed in the spores, then she smelt the bud and was exhaling and blew spores off.

2:33:13JeffThe funky sock drawer, man. You don't know what she did.

2:33:15Collin PalmerThe funky sock drawer. I like that theory. That's a good one.

2:33:20Jenn DoeI'd be curious to look into the people that wrote the paper to see maybe what benefits they would have by putting a bad light on cannabis as well.

2:33:30JeffOh, people don't need like a concrete benefit. Just following an easy narrative. And publishing a paper is rewarding, you know, like there doesn't have to be anything nefarious. In fact, I think I feel like very little my experience of academia is that very little of that sort of thing happens.

2:33:51Jenn DoeI have Lyme disease and I've dealt with a lot of very nefarious things and they do happen for sure.

2:33:58JeffPeople People fall in love with their own idea, though, is the main thing that happens to the scientists. Like they, yeah, that's the way that science gets misled nearly all of the time. They fall in love with their own idea and they miss the assumptions that they're making, just like that assumption of like, oh, we should test her weed, right? Like,

2:34:30BubblemanOut of all the things she has, they decided the weed was the thing they should test.

2:34:36JeffYeah, yeah, yeah, right. Not the eggs.

2:34:39Collin PalmerYou can't test the eggs in the fridge.

2:34:41JeffYeah, but she's breathing a lot more often than she's smoking. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, it's interesting anyway.

2:34:50BubblemanNo, it's super interesting. You should pay attention.

2:34:55BubblemanYeah, so always try to pay attention.

2:34:57JeffYeah, it's also a good question about case studies and their strength and limitation.

2:35:03Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, does anyone know anybody who grows weed and also raises pigeons? Mike Tyson.

2:35:11Collin PalmerMike Tyson. I think that, you know, he grows weed and raises pigeons all over it.

2:35:16BubblemanSomeone better get this information to Mike ASAP.

2:35:22Collin PalmerKevin always goes back to the idea of 10,000 CFUs. We debate this a lot. What, if at all, does that actually mean and do for us? And what are we missing by putting these counts on ourselves? Because we're limiting ourselves in what we can use to combat certain things in terms of IPM management. And this really goes back to just how Aaron Ward, Plants Grow and Biology Works and how we are to deal with it when, you know, these unfortunate scenarios happen.

2:35:59Collin PalmerYou know, how are you to as a producer to protect yourself against broad mites and soft body insects when you can't use things like, you know, linalool or geranol? You know, and then what does that do for suppression of other organizms and other things that are helping fight These, this balance that we have in nature that just happens naturally sometimes, you know.

2:36:26JeffIt's a really important question of like, you know, how much of the cannabis natural microbiome do you detect from total yeast and mold? Is it possible that the presence of some fungi is actually beneficial to the cannabis and makes it more resilient? Or is trying to grow cannabis in hyper sterile environments actually risky? In unintended ways, the way that denuding organizms of their microbiomes can expose them to other unintended and unexpected risks that didn't seem obvious at first, including allergies and sensitivities, right?

2:37:09JeffAlso, it's reasonable to ask, so if I've got 10,000 colony forming units per gram, right, in a gram of plant matter, I might have maybe like a billion cells, like just to be really crude, right? Maybe a few more since it's dried out and the water's gone.

2:37:35JeffSo those colony forming units, they're not uniquely one cell. I don't really know what they are. It's kind of a phenomenological description. But still, I would say right there in the parts per million at that point of plant matter that I'm lighting on fire and inhaling. Right. So they would have to have some really special molecules. In fact, the presence of that, you have no reason to expect that the presence of some of those cells might make the weed somehow less hazardous.

2:38:11JeffBecause their combustion, I don't know, does some, who knows, right? Like that could happen too. The presence of some microbes could be beneficial in weed.

2:38:21Collin PalmerWell, we know that. For instance, is it difficult to mold and, and, You know, Septoria and others that are happening, you know, so.

2:38:33JeffYeah, I've seen recent research evidence presented at CanMed by Zamir Punja that of endophytic fungi that appeared to have gotten into the cannabis through the root systems from the soil. And, you know, it was actually

2:38:55JeffThey didn't really have enough data to say this very strongly, but they had a hypothesis that was weakly supported that the endophytes had some immune function and made the plants less likely to get colonized by powdery mildew.

2:39:13Collin PalmerYeah, there's a white paper that I think we talked about maybe last season that I brought up that talks about this and also it's It's ability to help colonize in the rhizosphere to help produce more volatile organic compounds.

2:39:30JeffYeah, so we know that there are risks to over sterilization of our environment sometimes. We also know that there are some individuals who are especially vulnerable and need really special treatment and extraordinary measures to keep them alive. And yeah, it's really hard to navigate all of that. And in real time, when we know so little about the actual cannabis microbiome, And it turns out that it's probably pretty important for all the things we're discussing here.

2:40:01JeffRight.

2:40:02Collin PalmerI think living soil kind of highlights a lot of this, this, this, this, this sort of this discipline is, is, you know, we, we all, I think we all talk about this a lot and I know I,

2:40:12JeffThere's a nice intuitive perception, man. Smoke some living soil weed, right? And then try to go back to commercial.

2:40:18Collin PalmerIt's kind of like trying organic coffee and then going back to non-organic coffee. You start to, you're like, why is there like a weird film in my mouth with non-organic coffee? Well, because it's the way it's processed, right? You know, it's the, you know, how it's washed dictates that, right? Much like in hash making. So I think there is there's some direct correlations here. We're still kind of uncovering this.

2:40:43Collin PalmerThe beauty Soil is that, you know, as much as we know, we just don't know. And it's kind of amazing in that way, because there's things happening beneath the soil that I think we're still learning about. I think agronomists are still uncovering new things in that territory. And that's why it's so kind of a renaissance is kind of in terms of commercial is really there. But I do think, you know, target feeding and crop steering, as we've always said, is there's something to be said for that.

2:41:13Collin PalmerSo I don't want to discount anyone's method. But what works for myself these days is really has been been seeing living soil really work for every, not every varietal, but almost every varietal in our stable that we have. It's really It's really elevated the way that our flavor profiles come out.

2:41:38Jenn DoeSo there's a really great book called Teaming with Fungi. It's written in the same series as Teaming with Microbes. And it's quite fascinating to read those because it explains how the fungi and the colonizations and these different Thank you for joining us today.

2:42:09Jenn DoeI kind of relate it to like, so the Lyme disease I'm dealing with, it's not about killing all of the Lyme. It's about finding that balance between the good and the bad and not having an over accumulation of the Lyme. So when that is in balance with all of the good things in my body, it balances out. And so the Lyme's still there, right? It's not like, oh, I'm cured.

2:42:34Jenn DoeBut there's this balance that comes into play where everything has to just, Thank you for joining us today.

2:42:55Jenn DoeI mean, just like you can have an overabundance of the negative stuff, you can have an overabundance of good stuff. I've had friends that accidentally had an overpopulation of rogue beetles, and now all of a sudden they have all these good beneficial bugs that are now an issue. So it's all about finding that balance for the plant to really be able to grow properly.

2:43:22JeffShout out to Jeff Lowenfels. The first rule of toxicology is the dose makes the poison. Absolutely. LD50.

2:43:36BubblemanYeah, Joe's got three, Jeff's got three books, Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Bacteria, and Teaming with Fungi. All incredible, incredible books. Yeah.

2:43:47Etienne FontanGot to get him on again one day to come.

2:43:48BubblemanAnd he's, there's a couple of episodes where he came on and shared and gave some really good insight into, you know, the history of his story and how he came about to write these books and little I think that's it for today. If you have any tips and tricks that you can check out, definitely, if you haven't, they're incredibly valuable insight to having read those books. Even if you're not a big reader, try to get them on Audible so that you can listen to them because they really are worth the time.

2:44:18Collin PalmerYeah, and it's not like a how-to book, so those that are out there wondering, it's very much the principles, and then you've got to figure out how to apply them.

2:44:30Collin PalmerIt's a good read.

2:44:32Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I mean, the plant does not fix nitrogen. These things do, right? They've had the time course of evolution to figure it out. And like, you know, if the name of the game is THC molecule or THCA or whatever, those are all made by synthases. What are synthases? Synthesis are proteins. What are proteins? They're strings of amino acids. Well, what's an amino acid? An amine, nitrogen. And, you know, again, just to get the primordial about it, you know, we all evolved in this symbiotic relationship within the world in which we live in, right?

2:45:12Dr Mark ScialdoneLike we exhale CO2, trees absorb CO2, right? Or plants, I should say plants, right? I mean...

2:45:21JeffIf there weren't organizms constantly producing oxygen, it would be too reactive to even sit around.

2:45:26Dr Mark ScialdoneRight, right. And that's super interesting to consider. And, you know, the other thing, Jeff, I always consider just being a chemist and, again, being someone who is kind of aware of, like, the industrial revolution and the chemical industry and, you know, this petroleum-based economy that we live in today, you know, like, How, if you think about it in all of, since maybe just like the mid 1800s, like when the industrial revolution started and like when it kicked in and when, you know, standard oil and coal became kind of king.

2:46:09Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd to think about all of the hydrocarbon fuel that has been burned in the last 250 years. And we're wholesaling all of this carbon from in the ground, right? Which used to be dinosaurs and swamp creatures and all kinds of shit. That's what we think. All of that carbon into the atmosphere. You know, it's amazing, really, if you think about it, That the Earth's climate hasn't changed more because of the impact of human activities.

2:46:44JeffIt is so directly turning back the pump that made the oxygen and the free separate carbon to begin with. Because again, the only source of oxygen in the universe, free oxygen, is photosynthesis. That's the only way that the universe really has any free oxygen. Earth had no free oxygen at all in its atmosphere until photosynthesis evolved. Because it was all bound up in the rocks. All the rocks are full of oxygen.

2:47:16JeffThey're silicates and phosphates. They're, you know, they're, yeah, they got sulfates per others.

2:47:25Dr Mark ScialdoneAll those eights mean oxygens, right?

2:47:28JeffWell, everything's fully oxidized, man, because oxygen is fucking reactive, homie. It's dangerous. It's scary. It's like, to me, oxygen is like the scariest one. Thank you for watching.

2:47:58BubblemanIt's wild. You know, the first thing John D Rockefeller, I don't know if he's a trustworthy guy or not. I never personally knew him. But the first thing he did was convince everyone oil was scarce. That was like his number one mission. Yeah, let's convince everyone oil is scarce. It's like, really, I think the world is full of it. I know it is because Dr. Mark just said it perfectly.

2:48:24BubblemanForget about the amount that we've burned just in the last 200 years. How about just the amount we've burned in war alone? Nothing else. Not the fucking cars in Los Angeles. Not Thailand and China. Just war. The amount of...

2:48:42JeffWar is quite resource intensive.

2:48:44BubblemanHoly shit, dude.

2:48:47JeffThat is an understatement. In resource intensive activities.

2:48:50BubblemanLike, I would love to know the number that Etienne Fontaine, like, just of weapons. You were armory or munitions, weren't you, Etienne?

2:49:00Etienne FontanI was artillery and they're right there. There's a photo of what I lived under. Oh my God. That's when he lit all the oil fires. And just to give you an idea, you see the horizon there? The horizon, it was 120 degrees. Under that oil fire, it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit or negative two or negative three. That's how cold it was. And that's the sun at midday.

2:49:28BubblemanAnd how long did the, what was there, hundreds of them that got lit on fire?

2:49:31Etienne FontanThey're all burning like just hundreds of barrels per second for like months, years? It was the most surreal thing I ever saw in my life. But oil is scarce.

2:49:43SpeakerYeah.

2:49:44Dr Mark ScialdoneI like smoking oil, but not like that. Holy shit, dude.

2:49:49BubblemanNow when you see ATN going to town on his rig, you're like, oh, okay. I see. I'll take that oil any day. Yeah, Etchan's just laughing at our one gram dabs. He's like, yeah, we were doing like 50,000 barrels a second. Holy shit, brother. I'm sorry. I am sorry that you had to go through that. Really. Truly.

2:50:15Etienne FontanSurvived it. You know, it was an experience, but, you know, nothing teaches you peace like war.

2:50:23Jenn DoeSome of the pictures that you share just like keep me in awe.

2:50:27BubblemanLike, Jesus. Keep me up at night.

2:50:30Jenn DoeYeah, keep sharing.

2:50:32Etienne FontanThey wake me up at night. What are you talking about?

2:50:35BubblemanThat keeps me up at night too.

2:50:39Etienne FontanYou know, you, you, you know, but at the same time, you know, I actually scored hashish in Saudi Arabia. I was smoking Lebanese hash at that time. Right. So, you know, what, what actually, you know, because cannabis was an expectorant. So, you know, but at the same time, I was smoking cigarettes because I was rolling little snakes and sliding it into the tip of my cigarette. Right.

2:51:01Etienne FontanSo, you know, I wasn't doing myself any justice, but at the same time, you know, I was doing some harm reduction by having the hash, but it ran halfway through that.

2:51:12BubblemanIf Rick Simpson can stop cancer using a naphtha extract, and that's naphtha that probably wasn't distilled to have the rust and lead inhibitors removed from them. Like I said, I've always felt that about cannabis. It's like, wow, you can make like a borderline toxic medicine with it and it's still effective. That's crazy.

2:51:38Collin PalmerYeah, it's amazing like how we go ahead first into wellness and not think about toxicology. So, you know.

2:51:46BubblemanLike Dr. Allen said earlier, or physiology.

2:51:49Collin PalmerTrue. It's all kind of wrapped into it, right?

2:51:54BubblemanUm, Well, here's the thing. We're just a bunch of weed people. Yeah, there's a couple of people in the room that have PhDs and are focused on specific things. But holy shit, how are you supposed to know everything about everything all the time? It's impossible. My best way, I've found the quickest way I can go through the maze. Is do things wrong and make mistakes. Those things usually stand out like a sore thumb.

2:52:20BubblemanThey teach me the most. I'm like, oh, geez, I did the wrong thing.

2:52:25Dr Mark ScialdoneIf you don't learn from your mistakes, you're bound to repeat them. I tell my kids that all the time. Right. And yeah.

2:52:31Etienne FontanI made the mistake. We thought our organic leptic testing was fine and that we could, you know, find everything that we wanted. We quickly realized after, you know, eight years that, oops, that's not the case. There's something that we're missing that we need science to figure out because the eye apparently cannot see all. And that was our willful ignorance, right? And we learned from our mistakes and brought science and Don't get me wrong, we're still quantifying and trying to get that science correct, but, you know, we have to start somewhere, right, ladies and gentlemen?

2:53:07Etienne FontanYeah, I mean, what better place to start than willful ignorance?

2:53:12JeffYeah, that's how I started my nonprofit, by having no idea what I was doing so that I wouldn't know not to try.

2:53:22BubblemanWell, that's, listen, that is exactly it. That's, that's why young people are the future, right? You're always like, because young people have so much potential, they're still willing to do things that they don't have enough to do what they're doing.

2:53:36JeffExactly.

2:53:37BubblemanListen, that stupidity is everything. That's why intelligence isn't everything.

2:53:44Collin PalmerWell, it's like last episode, we talked about Robert Randolph. Like, what has really changed from this like this here that held joints to what we sell joints today not a whole lot and the subject matter is sure is we've gotten a little deeper but we've we've kind of known a lot of this foundational stuff and we're now exploiting more of it you know it's kind of like This tin is insane to me.

2:54:19Collin PalmerIt's like, this really is, this is their version of bulk. And then that other container was the... No, no, no, that wasn't their bulk.

2:54:28Etienne FontanThat was their packaging. The doctors were the ones who decided to use the pill bottles, right? But that was the government's idea of how it should be, right? And then it would go out in this, right? 300 joints with seeds and stems in it, right? Heavy paper, right? Which was palm oil paper, which had... We're burning things in the paper itself. Extra glue. And this is after it's been sitting for months in a 50-gallon container ground together seeds and stems.

2:55:03Etienne FontanWait, after. You're going to love this, Jeff. After it's been harvested and dried in the sun on the black plastic in Mississippi.

2:55:15Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat a process. It's so beautiful. Yeah, you know, Jeff, we were talking about the plant biome before. It's interesting in 2010, El Soli published a paper and reported like 19 new cannabinoids, right? And I'm like, whoa, let me check this out. What's going on down there, right? And we all know, we've heard it anecdotally that they grow moldy weed down at that schwag farm at Old Miss.

2:55:45Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd, you know, El Sole is just a wonderful guy. And he certainly, you know, was given an opportunity to somehow, you know, again, be the government's source of NIDA funded material and all this kind of stuff. But he reported all of these hydroxylated Cannabinoids.

2:56:07JeffSo it's kind of like the products of fermentation.

2:56:11Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, basically what it is. He called them new. Oh, 19 new. And I'm like, wow, 19 new phyto cannabinoids. Holy shit. This is going to change the world. When you look at the compounds. All of them without exception are hydroxylated compounds. And what Jeff tuned in on immediately is that's a hallmark sign of microbial oxidation. So it's basically... That's what they do.

2:56:42JeffThey chew up all these, they chew up all these benzylic compounds, right? Right, right.

2:56:48Dr Mark ScialdoneOr they oxidize like where the double bond used to be in the north ring of THC. Now there's an epoxide there. Now there's a, then you could ring open the epoxide with a molecule of water so they have the diol, right? So it's just, it was funny because I think when it was reported in J Natural Products, they're like, oh my gosh, We'll see you next time.

2:57:18Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd you know, when I met Professor El Soleil in San Diego at the ACS meeting just this past spring, and certainly I have nothing but respect. I told him, similar to the same thing I said to Mishulam, I've read all of your papers and some of them I've read twice, you know. I mean, I let him know that I knew his Contribution and I knew his literature and Chris Hadala from Pro Verde Labs was sitting right there and Chris heard me buttering up, you know, El Sole and El Sole is like, well, ho, we got to take a picture together now.

2:57:56Dr Mark ScialdoneIt's like, so yeah, so we got our phones out and took a selfie together. But yeah, and I have nothing but ultimate respect. For Professor El Soleil. But again, yeah, so that that notion of does cannabis exists in a microbial environment? And like I was saying earlier, you know, the plant itself does not fix nitrogen, right? And all those amino acids, all those synthases and all those Thank you so much for joining us.

2:58:51Dr Mark ScialdoneI think we know again that through the time course of evolution, there's something about roots in the ground, right? I don't know. Is it something about the geomagnetic sphere of the earth or something like that? Or the fact that, you know, if you're growing land-raised cannabis in an area that's had the time course of evolution to evolve that, What do we call it with wine, right? That regional...

2:59:25Dr Mark ScialdoneThat relationship that the plant has, not just with the soil, not just the growing medium, but all of the microbes and fungi that live together.

2:59:37JeffSoil is a complicated biomaterial, right? Yeah. It's really complex processes that bring the nutrients from the soil to the plant in the native environment, right?

2:59:50Dr Mark ScialdoneExactly. Just to finish my thought for a second before it dies of loneliness is the notion that these things that we don't understand have had the time course of evolution. To do their chemistry and to look at the different symbiotic relationships that happen between beneficial microbes and insects and how there's the recruitment of different fungi to the root zone by molecules that are exuded from the roots of these plants.

3:00:34Dr Mark ScialdoneThat that give colonization in and around the roots to feed the roots what the root needs and there's a particular insect or again another fungi that comes in and feeds off the waste of those things because again this is the time course of evolution where we can't you know even the best I don't know hydroponic can you possibly even think That you could even come close to what mother nature has developed over the time course of evolution.

3:01:09JeffIt's so elegant, right? Have you learned about molecules like siderophores? They're compounds that are excreted by organizms. The compounds go out into their environment, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:01:40JeffBut they were made by bacteria. You know, I mean, it's like the interconnection and the intricacy of the processes that bring nutrients into the plant and its native environment and how ham-fisted the comparison is if you just dissolve it in water and dunk the roots in, and then the ions are just floating around, kicking up against the roots constantly, right? Not in their little carriers, not with the organizms around that usually help, that mediate the rate of the dosing.

3:02:10JeffSoil Grown. Soil Grown. Soil Grown. Soil Grown.

3:02:29BubblemanI want to shout out Skunk Man Sam because El Sole getting dropped. Sam would have had some random like insert epic Skunk Man Sam El Sole story. There's been enough of them on the show over the years, but I could literally hear his voice, you know, like, oh, I showed him this.

3:02:49Dr Mark ScialdoneI funded him.

3:02:50BubblemanI funded him. I created him. I patented him. No, I patented him. Like the legitimate, like, You know, he was always inspired by anyone who was doing cannabis research, especially if you were doing it through those legal channels. He would open himself up. You would be able to gain from his insight. He wanted that sort of industry to stand on his shoulders. He was more like Elon in the sense of sharing than trying to hoard everything that he knew.

3:03:19BubblemanAnyway, interesting. Shout out to Sam. I think it's time for a bong rep and then we should have more awesome conversation because we got 58 more minutes of Hash Church.

3:03:33Etienne FontanAny giveaways happening this show? Just checking, just in case.

3:03:37BubblemanI don't know. I mean, I feel like I'm giving away the press club stuff. So I was like, although he said, yeah, I give something away. Like, I can't remember if he said every show. I don't want to be like, you know, inundating them. But maybe, maybe we give away like something. We'll see. First.

3:03:54Dr Mark ScialdoneHey, Marcus, I wanted to show you what the rig that I was using today. This is the one that you had arranged sent to me. So, dude, that's a beauty. That's like a brother. I'm forever grateful. So thank you very much. And I have to say, when Jeff and I met down in CanMed, you know, certainly, you know, you're traveling, you're still in the United States, right?

3:04:20Dr Mark ScialdoneBecause Puerto Rico is the United States territory. So, but there's only medical cannabis down in Puerto Rico, but Jeff had his trusty Puff Co. with him. And at one point in the evening, he had me sit down and I forget what it was. What was that, Jeff, that we smoked on?

3:04:39DrOh, there it is right there.

3:04:40Dr Mark ScialdoneRight. Right. Right. So what is that? Sorry.

3:04:46JeffIt's the it's the it's the proxy. It's it was. Oh, yeah. I think I saw my man before had the same blue. So, you know, I like that stem, too.

3:04:59Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, yeah.

3:05:01JeffYeah, so thank you for getting me high that night. I am a consumer advocate. I always carry products with me. I smoke in public. I got two middle fingers to help, you know, like, like, you know, from my cold fucking dead hands.

3:05:21BubblemanI actually picked a bouquet for those people, Jeff. Here, here's a bouquet I picked for them.

3:05:33BubblemanI'll send you that. You seem like the kind of guy that needs that.

3:05:39Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, maybe Jeff, in the last hour, you can tell us a little bit about your institute and like what its mission is and maybe how people, you know, there's a lot of hash makers who watch Hash Church and certainly people all throughout our industry. How can people participate in your mission of, you know, again, being a, I love the fact that you said you're an advocate for stoners because we're all stoners.

3:06:05Dr Mark ScialdoneThis is a panel of stoners. This is a A church of stoners, right? And so really, I mean, so what can we do? Tell us a little bit about your institute and tell us about how we can participate in helping you with your mission.

3:06:23JeffYeah, so... Our mission is to protect and educate consumers of cannabis. And that's all the consumers.

3:06:38Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat's the name of the institute, Jeff?

3:06:39JeffIt's the Institute of Cannabis Science, and you can learn more at cansci.org. That's C-A-N-N-S-C-I dot O-R-G. Yeah, maybe ATN or Marcus. Pretty simple website. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I'm always slow at putting stuff in chats. I like have to click around forever and try to find it.

3:07:02BubblemanBingo will do it. Bingo, do it.

3:07:07Dr Mark ScialdoneBingo is one of our chatters who makes sure that we have a good chat going. So, Jeff, tell us about the Institute and what is the mission? And again, maybe more importantly, how can we help?

3:07:19JeffAnd so the things that we do are... We look at the laws and the regulations and try to make them as consumer friendly as possible. We oppose bag limits and push for and oppose potency limits. We want to make sure that people can buy hash and that concentrates are normalized. Right. There are a lot of people who look at it as a like they see this little spatula in this little smudge of stuff and it looks more like scary drugs to them.

3:08:01JeffRight. As opposed to plant like and so it's a it's a it's a it's it's work to normalize it. And we, let's see, we, I, I buy products off the dispensary shelves and I test them and I write people honest reviews to tell them how they actually are. And I've done research to compare synthetic or rather smoke shop gummies and In dispensary gummies. So for that project, I, I, I went to every store in a narrow geographic area, whether it was a dispensary or a smoke shop, and I bought several gummies from each one.

3:08:54JeffAnd

3:08:57JeffI found that your odds of getting an accurately labeled product were almost 100%. One out of 11 dispensary products had a slight error in its labeling, in its THC content. It was off by 20%.

3:09:20JeffHalf of the Smoke Shop products were off by 80% or more. Several, like a good number of them were blanks. They had none of the purported active ingredient or they had a totally different one.

3:09:35Jenn DoeAnd they're all over the place.

3:09:38JeffThe degree of difference surprised me, right? They're really different marketplaces and it shows you, right? One of the things I've learned, sort of like we were talking about with that other study before, is that your results of your study are really determined by the question you ask at the beginning. And so if you start out with a hypothesis that maybe this woman's respiratory infection came from her weed and that's what you test to prove, then you may miss other things, right?

3:10:05JeffWell, in the same way, we're hearing a lot about accuracy of testing and the safety of weed from companies that make money selling the testing. And like lab shopping has also become a part of marketing for some companies. And that's what they're doing when they do it. And in fact, some companies, right, when they send people to conferences to give scientific talks, they send their marketing officer, not their science officer to give the talk of the conference.

3:10:38JeffAnd that's labs that do that. So you do have to bear in mind that you're hearing About the quality of the testing from people who have an interest in what you think about it and sort of an interest in showing you as many problems as possible. So like actually many of the packaged cannabis products are quite like accurately labeled. And like it's a totally different problem. And that's useful to know because then you start recognizing that maybe more of the problem with like this is the fact that this is, again, like a distribution system for produce, but we're treating it more like bottles of pills.

3:11:21JeffRight. And so like some of the challenge of regulating it may come from like our fundamental assumptions at the beginning and some of our perceptions

3:11:36JeffSome of our perceptions of how successful or not the regulatory framework is may be shaped by who has the money to research that and to advertise the results of their research. Because my institute does not have the budget. I don't do studies as big as testing labs do. Testing labs have way more research sources than I do. So it's, you know, I would say that's like the, that's the reason that you need civic organizations like ours is that we don't have the same kinds of conflicts of interest.

3:12:11JeffOf course, I also want to, you know, some, many scientists like myself are motivated not so much by money, but by a desire for approval. If I'm honest, right? Like Mark, you're smiling, right? Cause like, you know, right? Like, right. You didn't shoot, right? Like, like we like, like, why do we do it? Because it feels important and people approve of it. And so we do, we keep doing what people approve of.

3:12:38JeffAnd so if someone gets a lot of attention for doing a study that shows a bunch of scary things about weed, then they're going to keep trying to do that study. That's what happens with public health as well. That's why so much public health is about the dangers of one particular ingredient, because it's an easy study to do, and then you get a lot of attention sometimes.

3:12:58JeffYou know, so yeah, the thing that I've learned is that the more regulated the markets in general, the better and the better accurate and safer the products are and the less regulated the market. So when I buy the THCA flour on the internet, the evidence is that you're way more, you're going to have a higher general load of pesticides that you're exposed to than if you buy it from dispensaries.

3:13:25BubblemanWell, it just shows you that a certain percentage of humanity will always just, you know, if they're not forced to, then there's a small group of people who will be like, they'll take advantage of that. Oh, we can operate legally without having to do any of this. And they'll do all of it. They'll cut every corner and they'll be like, hey, we're allowed to.

3:13:47JeffIn IPM. You have pest pressures, right? You learn that it's kind of more like a continuous wave. And that's the right way. That's the useful way to think about IPM, right? And you try to lower the pressures and, you know, make maybe specific countermeasures, right? Well, in consumer protection you have fraud pressures there are constant pressures that you're fighting against and your level of scrutiny is what you use to push those down so

3:14:22JeffThe imperfect scrutiny of the regulated market is way more than the no scrutiny of the unregulated market. I mean, all, first of all, think about it. All these operators in the regulated market, look at all the government filings they had to do. At least they can fill out forms and they like, they check boxes, right? And read things. And like, so right there, they've got it like together in a way that like illicit operators may not.

3:14:51JeffRight. Like, and, you know, and they have the kind of personality that they're willing to, like, do all of that, like, and register with the government to sell weed and pay taxes.

3:15:01BubblemanI think the problem is, is that people, you know, for many, many years, decades sold cannabis and it was black market and everyone was fine. And so they have this argument like, no, look, you can buy cannabis safely without all these regulations and they're not wrong. But when you incorporate that group of people I mentioned, the group of people who were like, hey, we're going to look at this as a vector to really make it unsafe, to literally grow it in the most unsafe way, just spraying pylon and other poisons on it, just using the lead I'm sorry.

3:15:36BubblemanI'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

3:15:59BubblemanYou know, there's this dichotomy in the world of cannabis, right? It's like, oh, it should be treated like the berry. It's not a pharmaceutical, but yet it shrinks cancers out of existence sometimes. So it's like, oh, so it is kind of a pharmaceutical drug. So it's like back and forth getting- It's super complex, right?

3:16:18JeffIt's super, it's not, no, it's worse. It's dichotomous. It's foods, it's drinks, it's stuff people smoke. It's fun for me. It's medicine for you. Yeah. It's- Dangerously addictive for some people. It's hardware. It's... Excipients, it's molecules, it's synthetics, it's plants.

3:16:42BubblemanIt's aromatic volatile compounds.

3:16:45JeffIt is necessarily one of the most complicated. Yeah, cannabis has this, and cannabis regulation is hugely complex. Expecting these state agencies to pop up out of nowhere and succeed at wearing these hundred of different hats is nuts.

3:17:02BubblemanRight, because the thing you need to understand cannabis and the relationship you can have with cannabis is the other thing, sort of the human thing that's the most complex thing, which is the olfactory. It plugs right into these senses. These things were made for one another.

3:17:22JeffYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I've learned a lot in the last couple of years from talking to other scientists at cannabis conferences, because one of the categories of chemists who I encounter, who I can sometimes get down on with a lot of detailed chemistry talk, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

3:18:08JeffYou know, few hetero atoms. So right now, they're not made for hydrogen bonding. They're made for not washing away. So they're a lot like, you know, actually like all of the plant signaling compounds that are fragrant to us. And that give us these complex olfactory experiences that tie into our memories and deep into our hindbrain, right, are also signaling molecules for insects. They're also signaling molecules for the organizms in our microbiome and our gut.

3:18:38JeffAnd that's why some spices impact our gut is because they signal our microbiome and make it do different stuff. And they're the same, like they're broadly the same compounds that cannabis plants make that we like in the cannabis plant and that the cannabis plant uses in actually extraordinarily complex signaling to recruit insects, to protect it, to talk to other cannabis plants about threats and the environment, to tell the world how it's feeling today and how good the sun is, right?

3:19:11JeffAnd to ward off all kinds of like predators. That because it's a sessile organizm so like it's shockingly complex the organic chemistry like dialogue that's happening beneath the surface that's also interacting with us that makes this system that's not even a real like our endocannabinoid system is really hardly one system in an in without cannabis because the endocannabinoids the natural the endocannabinoids that our body makes are not long-range molecules So there isn't a global endocannabinoid system without smoking cannabis or without like consuming phytocannabinoids because phytocannabinoids transport in the blood.

3:20:00JeffAnd our long range, and so they tie together all these isolated little short range receptors that were never supposed to talk to each other, didn't evolve necessarily to talk to each other, but co-evolved to talk to each other because we've had cannabis for 6,000 years. It's like the chemistry is nuts.

3:20:19BubblemanThere's a paper called Traversing the... Fungal terpenome. And it's all about these terpene signals. In the paper, they're saying it's one of the oldest languages on the planet with these terpenes.

3:20:35JeffIt's the language of the planet because the bugs are communicating with the plants so the plants can reproduce and the bugs can have food. I mean, it's literally none of these things could have happened without the other. There would not be fun without insects. There's no reason to have flowers without.

3:20:52BubblemanI don't think there would be cannabis without humans. I don't think anyone is perceiving cannabis the way we're perceiving cannabis like it was for.

3:21:00JeffThere is no wild type cannabis left on Earth. Every cannabis plant on Earth is an escaped cultivar. That's the current. Accepted hypothesis. I won't say, I guess it's not necessarily a definitive fact. Someone could still find it.

3:21:17BubblemanI feel like Dave would be saying something right now. I don't know exactly what it would be, but he would be saying something. Let's ask Rob.

3:21:25JeffIt could go either way. Our co-evolution with cannabis plants goes back as far in human history as our earliest cultivation of food crops and our domestication of dogs. Yeah, so we have co-evolved with these with dogs and weed with these few species. These few species go back to the dawn of humanity as we think of humans.

3:21:47BubblemanYeah, yeah, they did. And then all the other stuff came later. So the relationship with humans, very successful.

3:21:54JeffYeah, one of the first domesticated organizms by humans, dogs and weed.

3:21:59BubblemanHey, we're like, I'll take that and that.

3:22:03JeffGo home, build a house. And equally diversified by our selective breeding and distribution of them over the globe.

3:22:10BubblemanWell, I'll tell you, the conversations like these and the many, many, many that we've been having for the last 10 to 20 to 30 years, I feel will slowly bring us to the next evolution or the next phase of cannabis, which I really feel like is going to be a lot more focused on the aromatic volatile compounds, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:23:00JeffYeah, you know, in the future, there's going to be 10 different flavors of THCV flour on the menu, in addition to all the rest. That's my dream, right? And one of them is going to taste exactly like strawberries.

3:23:14BubblemanI mean, it's not going to be artificial. And it's interesting that you said THCV because that's the one that does involve public health and safety. And we learned this from our friend Colton who has Crohn's disease and he ended up with a THCV cultivar and it really messed him up because with Crohn's disease, the thing that he never wants to do is reduce his appetite. He needs to stimulate it, right?

3:23:41BubblemanAnd THCV reduces that appetite. It can completely kill your appetite. And he didn't know. He came on and told the story on Hash Church. I thought, well, that's interesting. You know, there will be things. Of course, there's going to be information like a simple THCV cultivar that says on the package, if you suffer, From Crohn's or any type of wasting or disease, anything like that, this is an appetite suppressant, which is how immediately people who would want to lose weight would probably go and start purchasing that product.

3:24:18JeffYeah, yeah, it's nuts. We're actually at the, you know, I talked about diversity, but in some ways cannabis has gone through quite a bottleneck recently because of the clandestine cultivation, the confiscation of diverse genetics, the... Oh gosh, and the pursuit of THCA over all other. And so we're actually at- And short flowering.

3:24:51BubblemanYeah, and oh gosh, yes, yeah.

3:24:52JeffI should have mentioned, and the selection for commercially friendly characteristics and characteristics that help in clandestine growing, right? So like-

3:25:07JeffSo we're actually at this point where we're recognizing all of those artificial selection pressures that we've been under for decades and looking to ameliorate the situation. And so I'm really excited and enthusiastic about the cannabis of the future that we're going to get because we've liberalized The position of cannabis as much as we have in society at this point, right? Like if you view it as a spectrum rather than a binary of like either illegal or legal, then we've made a lot of progress.

3:25:42JeffIf you look at the binary, it doesn't feel very good, but like cannabis has made enormous progress in society in recent decades, like fast, you know, super fast.

3:25:52BubblemanSo black and white is wild, you know, the same way it was surprising when they're just like, no, I don't care. It's illegal. And then it's just suddenly here in Canada, legal. And those people, those very same people who freak the shit out of me, freak me out even more when they're like, oh, yeah, no, I'm trying it right away. I mean, it's legal now, right?

3:26:11DrI'm just like, yeah.

3:26:13JeffHow do you feel? Obviously, those people seem weird to us because we're like we're here because we're not like that. Right. But like. You know, there's a lot of those people. And I can kind of understand where they're coming from. Like, it changes. Yeah, you know, they're responding to an intuitive sense of how acceptable it is, right? Yeah. In really general terms. Like, that's honestly how most of us are making a lot of decisions in our lives.

3:26:42JeffSo I'm not going to fault them too much. But I know it seems nutty to me too, right? Like, oh, you know, when I went to the hospital, Like one friend told me, well, Jeff, you didn't do anything wrong. I mean, it's legal. And I was like, but I bought, I bought e-cigs off the internet and concealed it. From like my family. Like it was made myself sick as a result.

3:27:14JeffOf course. Was it like a psychedelic? It was stupid. No, it was. No, it was. It was. It was just THC ones that were diluted with vitamin E acetate. Oh, shit. I got sick from that. You know, I was just buying cheap e-cigs and I bought them on the Internet because like I lived in Cambridge and the dispensary was like when they opened adult use in in Massachusetts, Cambridge refused to allow anyone to open a dispensary until there was a social equity.

3:27:46JeffSo I was in a cannabis desert. So funny. So a victim of prohibition. In the back of my lab.

3:27:54BubblemanYou're a victim. You're a victim of prohibition.

3:27:58JeffYeah, I know, isn't it weird? It's such a weird story. Like, I would have never framed myself.

3:28:04BubblemanWell, it's pretty hilarious when you, I guarantee the state you live in has a public health department and they probably pride themselves on keeping their citizens safe, whereas yet they can create and have experiences like the one you went through. Prohibition is generally like that, whether it's the sex trade or illegal drugs or whatever. So if you don't regulate and control it and allow it, then no matter what, it creates people who are never going to stop wanting it.

3:28:34BubblemanSo then other people, that group I spoke about earlier, who has less ethics and morals, that they're just like, look, man, we're just about stacking some paper. Like, of course, we're going to do this. What do you need? You need fentanyl. You got it all here. And it's like, well, if you just made that, there's ways to eliminate people dying from fentanyl. Here in Vancouver, in my city, 500 people every month die of a fentanyl overdose.

3:28:58BubblemanAnd they've been doing it for like well over 10 years. So it's just like thousands and thousands of people. And the thing about fentanyl is... I mean, of course, all drug users are someone's daughter or son, right? Like, of course, they're a human being. But before fentanyl, drug users all had a very similar path. You know, there was mental illness often involved. There was difficulty at home and abuse.

3:29:25BubblemanThere was homelessness. There was a whole variety of things that led to the drug problem here in Vancouver, at least. And fentanyl, Was like suddenly like people like soccer moms were like, oh, I got into an accident and they gave me this drug and it was oxycodone and then I couldn't get it anymore. And now I'm taking this and now she's dead.

3:29:46JeffIt's so dangerous that it can impact people who aren't usually very vulnerable.

3:29:52BubblemanWell, it's leaking out of the drug area of the city and going into like an enormous amount, which I always thought, that's why you got to deal with that problem.

3:30:02JeffEvery drug has its own unique potential for abuse and its own unique hazard, level of hazard. And, you know, like that's a big part of how our society decides which ones we permit and how we do it. But obviously it's not perfect. A lot of it is also, you know, because so much of our, So, um, but still, like, yeah, some drugs are like fentanyl are just super dangerous, right?

3:30:28JeffAnd it's hard to imagine a very, you know,

3:30:41JeffYeah, they're not very attractive or 100% perfect regulatory systems that you could have with it, right? But with cannabis, it seems like you can do a lot better. But you also have to accept that it's never going to be perfect. No regulations are perfect. No system is perfect. Um, that's why there's, that's why there's people like us. Like we, um, you know, a lot of, a lot of the work I do is I put pressure on the politicians and figure out like who makes the decisions, um, and then show them the right kind of information and produce the right kind of information that's gonna help them make the right decisions.

3:31:20JeffSo that's what I do. That's kind of pragmatically say useful. And then, um, uh, You know, our work of publishing reviews that are based both on experience of products and then also on their testing. It's kind of, I feel like it's, It gives people individual, say, examples, but it's sort of limited, right? I can't review enough products to tell you which thing to buy in your dispensary.

3:31:52JeffThey've got hundreds of things on the shelf. But it also kind of teaches you a bit about how to appreciate cannabis, how to value Every part of it, you know, I try to talk about every feature to the best I can. You know, I'm not like an expert. I'm a guy that smokes weed. So, you know, I write my I definitely write my views from that perspective as like not, you know, an expert on chemistry, not an expert on growing weed and not a gangier, not an expert on tasting it, but just a dude who likes weed.

3:32:30JeffSo valid. Yeah, you know, like I'm trying very, you know, and I, you know, I go to, I try to get in front of the legislature, represent the interests of consumers, make sure that they hear, you know, every time they're patting, in Massachusetts, at least, they're always patting themselves on the back with how much revenue Cannabis has generated in our state and how much tax revenue it's generated.

3:32:55JeffAnd they're so excited about it. And I show up and I tell them, you know where all those $7 billion or now $8 or $9 billion came from? Every single one of those dollars came from the pocket of a guy like me. All right. So all that money that you love so much is ours. It came from us, the consumers. So you have to respect that. And otherwise they don't, man.

3:33:17JeffLike deep in their hearts or in the backs of their minds, some of these people are thinking there's just a bunch of dumb stoners.

3:33:24BubblemanYou should link up with Etienne. He's really good at like speaking to governments and politicians. And he's been doing it for I don't even know how long.

3:33:34Etienne FontanAnd don't get him started because he'll tell you like, holy shit, what do you get?

3:33:38BubblemanWho are you guys talking to right now, Etienne?

3:33:41Etienne FontanThat's our work at the United Nations representing the Cannabis Embassy. So, you know, we're actually going to be having a side event for Wade at the United Nations next year. We're planning to bring people who, like Silas's dad, Forrest, we want to bring him to the UN and it's basically a side event that's sanctioned by the UN. They give you a room and they will broadcast it.

3:34:08Etienne FontanAnd yeah, that's one of the things we're going to do this year is honor the work of Wade and what he did with Harlequin and bring out testimonials from those who their lives were saved by his work. So No, we're talking to all kinds of people at the world level. Of course, we talk to the State Department, the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the White House.

3:34:35Etienne FontanWe engage people who are making policy, and we do it quietly behind the scenes. We don't advertise what we do, but We verbally kick their asses. So if you never need help, Jeff, happy to assist and lend my verbiage and my expertise to help move science forward. That's kind of been my one of the legacies I want to leave is, you know, science and doing things right for cannabis.

3:35:05JeffWell, goddamn, ATN, that's amazing.

3:35:09JeffThanks a lot for the kind words too, but it's really impressive stuff.

3:35:16Etienne FontanWe're just trying to, our group is trying to stop executions for cannabis by 2030 because last year while we were at the UN, three people were executed just for discussing a cannabis deal. And they didn't even touch it, you know, and that's unacceptable. So, activism continues. We, you know, yes, we can sit on our ass, but we can sit on our ass and do something. And fortunately, yeah, we had 26 individuals from 13 different countries, because again, this crosses every social economic barrier.

3:35:50Etienne FontanSo, we're just trying to find people in the still done old school grassroots daily person to person. So, By engaging these people, and one of the main things that we're doing is we're countering Kevin Sabet, right? And his myth information, right? His lies, because countries like China, Pakistan, Singapore are all using his rhetoric to continue to execute people, and that's reprehensible. In 2025, that shouldn't happen. Not one more person should die from this.

3:36:23Etienne FontanNo, no one should have to die. And so again, and not only am I passionate about it scientifically, I'm also passionate about that, you know, people, you know, just your justice should not. And fortunately, I have enough like-minded people that I work with in the Veterans Action Council and the Cannabis Embassy that were motivated to make that change. Otherwise, it's going to continue. So... You guys can get active, get involved, participate, write letters.

3:36:54JeffCannabis has been well embraced now by the veterans community. They even let, they allow all kinds of weed events in VFWs too.

3:37:05Etienne FontanWe've worked on that, but one of the main... And the VA, yeah. Yeah, is to get the VA to actually write recommendations and prescriptions.

3:37:13JeffYeah, yeah. The VA has at least liberalized some of their policies about communicating about cannabis. So it's like been one small step in the right direction. Am I right?

3:37:22Etienne FontanWell, that's because of my friend, Michael Kraus, and the work that he's been doing in the VA as an individual going in there and saying, hey, You guys need to give us a guarantee that you're not going to kick us off of our benefits just for discussing cannabis. And so out of that, they created what's now Directive 1315. And one of my recent Freedom of Information request things found is that They are educating doctors and nurses on Directive 1315 because the biggest misconception I still deal with and the biggest myth that I have to deal with every single day is veterans are asking, oh, am I going to now lose my benefits for it?

3:38:02Etienne FontanAnd since 2011, no, that's not the case. Nobody should be afraid to talk to their doctor about cannabis.

3:38:09JeffWe have to be afraid to admit that they consume. You know, we shouldn't have to have that fear.

3:38:17Etienne FontanBut it exists. And especially when it's there.

3:38:20JeffYour health care. I saw it with my dad, too, who's also who was a veteran.

3:38:25Etienne FontanRight. So thank you for his service as well. But we have a lot of work to do to still get it, because even if it passes the House and the Senate. And it's signed into law that's only legal in states where it is legal, right? And so this is a problem we call treatment by geography. Because now then only those veterans get access. What about our brothers and sisters in Kentucky and Kansas and other places where they don't have that type of access, right?

3:38:54Etienne FontanAnd so it's an ongoing fight. And that's, as I say, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, right? We have to participate and be active. And Thank you so much for joining us.

3:39:34JeffYeah, I think what I've learned is that government is like a machine, but it's not a machine like my dehumidifier that I just turn on and walk away from, right? And it does its thing. It's a machine like a car that I have to drive, that I'm constantly operating and directing. That's the... Like government. That's why it requires journalism in order to have democracy. And it requires attention to the right Aaron Weissman, Dean of the School of Business Administration, Dean of the School of Business Administration, Dean of the School of Business Administration, Dean of the School of Business Administration, Dean of the School of Business Administration,

3:40:31JeffThat, yeah, has prevailed in many lawsuits and really changed the standards of what consumers can protect and can expect in this country. So and it requires constant vigilance, you know, so. We actually in Massachusetts, our state has an office that I read about in a very charming article of the Boston Globe. They have this office of six full time employees who go to gas stations and grocery stores and they make sure that a gallon of gas is really a gallon and that a pound of potatoes is really a pound.

3:41:12JeffAnd that's why those things are accurate and not inaccurate. It's because someone checks every once in a while. It's not because someone said it and forget it, you know? So that's the way that things have to work. And you always like consumer protection always started from the civic space. Consumer Reports is a nonprofit. Gosh, the ASTM, which formed to make standards, is a nonprofit that was a group of concerned engineers and scientists.

3:41:42JeffSo it's actually like the thing that inspires me is that there are people who came before me who have actually done exactly the same thing, and they're not usually very famous.

3:41:55JeffBut when you learn about them, they're really interesting people a lot of times. And, you know, so that's the thing I'm trying to create now. At this point now on Instagram, I'm interested in recommendations of Say other like products to try from the internet and test. I'm really curious what people are seeing around like other places outside of Massachusetts. So that's a way that people can reach out and interact.

3:42:26JeffIf you reach out and interact with our Instagram or with me on LinkedIn, whichever of those two you prefer. I'm slow and kind of old. So LinkedIn is actually more comfortable for me, but I use both.

3:42:41JeffYeah, a great way. That's a great way to participate. Just tell us what kind of weird stuff you see or send us a certificate of analysis if you have questions about it and what it means. Those are some of the things that I love taking a look at products. I love answering questions that people have. So anyway, those are some of the best ways for people to interact with us and to start getting involved.

3:43:13JeffAnd then, of course, you can check out our You can check out our website and look for the section called tasting testing. Some people have told me that my reviews are pretty entertaining. And I feel like if you read through several of them, you start actually learning something. You learn some bigger lessons. And it's, you know, cannabis. One of the things I love about this is I actually like, My goal in my life was to be a professor of chemistry and to make chemistry really exciting to people.

3:43:42JeffI wanted to make an introductory chemistry class called Drugs and Fireworks that would teach people all the fundamental principles of chemistry through drugs and fireworks and other really fun stuff. Because the problem with chemistry is all the examples they give you in high school. I hated it in high school. It was so boring. So like I'm actually really passionate about teaching and cannabis gives you great opportunities to get people interested in science.

3:44:09JeffAnd through my tasting testing, I expose people to some of the fundamental ideas about like chemistry and what the testing means and how cannabinoids work and how stable they are in the cannabis, how much it how it ages. You get introduced to standard deviation and error and uncertainty. So this is actually like a lot of interesting fundamental little principles baked into there that makes it fun for teaching people as well.

3:44:37JeffSo it keeps me really plugged in.

3:44:39Dr Mark ScialdoneSo I concur with everything you just said. So I am a chemistry professor and

3:44:47JeffYeah, I mean, it's... Gen Chem was so boring for me, but it's so interesting now, because now I know all the examples. Yeah. Now Gen Chem is so interesting.

3:44:57Dr Mark ScialdoneWith me, Jeff, it was really different because I knew early on, I'm like, I knew, I was just fascinated by chemistry. And after, yeah, you learn all the rudimentary You know, molecular weight, moles, percent, you know, you learn all the unit conversion, which some people get hung up in that math. And then when you get the thermo, you know, and if you don't have a good background of integral and derivative calculus, you're just going to be lost because you need to understand, especially in kinetics, you need to understand differential equation math.

3:45:38Dr Mark ScialdoneThat's just the way it is. You have two different rates changing at two different times.

3:45:44JeffThere are several subjects in chemistry where if you don't get calculus, then you're really going to be out of luck forever getting the underlying stuff or following the rules.

3:45:55Dr Mark ScialdoneThe wonderful thing about being a PhD chemist in cannabis is If I could just pontificate for a moment, because I remember when, so Horatio Delbert, God rest his soul, was the one who pulled me on to Hash Church about 10 years ago, Jeff. So there was a lot of interest in terpenes and a lot of interest in what was going on other than THC in the plant.

3:46:27Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd so he was the one who kind of drew me in and introduced me to Marcus. And ultimately, you know, what, 10 years later, here we are now still on Hash Church, still talking about the chemistry of the cannabis plant. So, yeah, man, it's just such a wonderful, like you say, opportunity to teach people. And it's a wonderful thing, like what you're doing here. I mean, you don't get...

3:46:55Dr Mark ScialdoneRich running a nonprofit that's looking at, you know, consumer product safety, right? I mean, let's safe to say that you could probably take a more lucrative position to make personal wealth doing something else and probably get there a lot quicker than running a nonprofit. But How important.

3:47:16JeffI actually, I'll just interject really briefly because it's ironic. I turned down a potential full-time position at Puff Coco.

3:47:26Dr Mark ScialdoneOh, there you go. So how important will this be in the rearview mirror 10 years from now, right? So here it is. 10 years ago, Marcus, is when Horatio was blowing up my phone saying, Mark, you got to come on to Hash Church because Tony Verzura is talking terpene chemistry. He doesn't know what he's saying. And you need to come on and set this guy straight. You have the PhD in chemistry.

3:47:56Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd I tell you, I mean, having a PhD, yeah, it's wonderful. It just basically means that you've sought to learn more in your academic training. And for me, it was the 1980s. Grateful Dead Tour was just raging. Of course, I'm going to stay in graduate school. Who wants to join the real world, right? And when you get down to, like, where... The cannabis kind of movement, I wouldn't call it industry because industry makes it sound dirty like J.D.

3:48:30Dr Mark ScialdoneRockefeller and, you know, Vanderbilts and all that kind of crap. I just think about it like, yes, this cannabis. Reunification, right? Because last century, you know, I'm quoting our friend Todd McCormick now was the cannabis deficient century. And so now in this century, we're going to reunify. Like humans have always been around cannabis. We've always used cannabis. It guided so much of our early discovery around medicine and around materials.

3:49:06Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd certainly like you can't, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:49:32Dr Mark ScialdoneI'm going to go get my PhD in chemistry because I saw this episode of Hash Church and I saw this guy Jeff just spill all this knowledge about his experience and like how you took your fundamental knowledge of chemistry and are now looking you know in a non-profit to increase Stability for stoners or increased consumer product safety, right, with the stoner in mind. And it's just a wonderful thing.

3:50:02Dr Mark ScialdoneI see new people entering into, again, I'll just call it the industry or just getting industrial jobs, whether it's the head of extraction throughout to Alex Ekman, who I've been following on LinkedIn for a while. You know, very, very wise young man who now is the director of, I think, hydrocarbon extractions for a multi-state operator. I mean, I think it's great that people who are getting the fundamental background of the physical science you and I know and love is chemistry and now applying that knowledge in this space of cannabis where we really need scientific leadership to cut through the bullshit we need like atn who's like interacting with legislators and with world leaders we need to make sure that all that stuff is based in scientific reality and yet it goes back to Do you know what a mole is or do you know what a molecular weight and all that fundamental knowledge you build as a solid scientific foundation to launch rubber bands at the stars, right?

3:51:17Dr Mark ScialdoneAnyway, that's my spiel.

3:51:18Etienne FontanYou got to take your pock shots, right? You got to take a try. But yes, world leaders listen to and are activated by real science, right? They're not going to listen to any hearsay and conjecture. They need to see real fucking data and data better be tight because they're going to give it to their science. We need world leaders from their country. So they take this stuff back to their scientists and they haven't hauled it.

3:51:42Etienne FontanSo you better be solid on your shit. Otherwise, you could throw the whole thing off from the get go by your willful ignorance. Unless their scientist is Adrian Nahas.

3:51:54BubblemanOh, wow.

3:52:05BubblemanOh, fuck. Sorry. Right at the end.

3:52:07Dr Mark ScialdoneOne of the reasons why we got to make sure things are right, because like on Hash Church, people are paying attention to everything we're saying and they're hanging on every word. So we got to make sure that our chemical structures are correct. We got to make sure that our vernacular is correct. And we got to just make sure that people who listen to what we say, and then that informs them and becomes their knowledge base.

3:52:35Dr Mark ScialdoneI mean, I love when I look out in my classroom and I just see, you know, my students again, who are usually taking organic chemistry or general chemistry. Are seeing some of these concepts and they're difficult for them to understand, but I could see in the learning process and sometimes it's a little more painful for some students and other students because other students seem to get it right away.

3:53:00Dr Mark ScialdoneBut I've had other students that need extra help and have to come to office hours and even after explaining it 3 times, they're still not fully grasping everything. So you got to do everything you possibly can. To educate those around you and never put like a limit on who you can learn from. Because if you think like one of the most valuable learning I ever did wasn't from someone who had a degree in chemistry.

3:53:34Dr Mark ScialdoneI mean, so there are so many where places that you could learn and so many people you could learn from. So never be classist and Aaron Weiss, Aaron Weiss, Aaron Weiss, Aaron Weiss, Aaron Weiss,

3:54:00JeffMark, this is a deep example. All right. How many times in your life have you looked another person in the eye, sighting down the ethane molecule and showing them the difference between staggered and eclipsed? And you're making eye contact with them and you can see the moment when they understand it. Right. I've done that maybe a thousand times. And every single time it makes your heart feel like you watch someone learn a thing.

3:54:28JeffLike you're making eye contact. It's so intimate.

3:54:31Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah.

3:54:33JeffAnd how many times have you like showed them, held the cyclohexane model in your hands, looking right in front of someone, showing them the chair and see, here's the chair and here's the boat. See, it's a little boat. Isn't that dumb? Right? And then they get it, and you're like, oh my God. You feel like you just had a baby or something, man. It's so miraculous.

3:54:57Dr Mark ScialdoneIt really worked. Like you say, with stereochemistry, one of the things I've always said, I've said it here on Hash Church, I think one of the reasons why I became a chemist, why I conceptualized Thank you so much for joining us.

3:55:33JeffThat cluster of bricks and I played with- I'd make each model, I'd keep it for a week and then I deconstruct it and use it for parts and never make the model again.

3:55:42Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah. Yeah.

3:55:43JeffAnd I tried to invent these conglomerate things. And right. Yeah, of course. Right.

3:55:48Dr Mark ScialdoneThe thing is, is like with cannabis, too. I mean, because the chemistry was so suppressed. Well, research in general, for the most part. I mean, this wasn't something that, again, I think I'm mentioning it. It took Mishulam's, you know, and again, everyone always says, oh, Mishulam was the first one to isolate THC. No, he was not. They've isolated THC years before, but he was the first one to use NMR to correctly elucidate the Delta 9 configuration because what it did, Confounded chemists up to that point was the isomerization of Delta-9 to Delta-8, and they didn't realize that the plant was actually making the THC molecule in a metastable configuration.

3:56:39Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd Mishulam knew this, man, and you could read it in his fucking papers. And again, I think I've read that 1964 paper probably a dozen times from one end to the other. I know it's like you understand how the man thinks by reading his papers. He's so articulate, I guess, because again, he was his native tongue being spoken. You know, Israeli or Hebrew, I guess he was, you know, thinking about how to most clearly document his work written in English.

3:57:20JeffAnd it was a result of really hard work.

3:57:22Dr Mark ScialdoneExtremely articulate, but like his isolation, right?

3:57:28JeffHe wrote like George. He wrote like George Whitesides. Yeah.

3:57:31Dr Mark ScialdoneYes, he did. He did. Yes. And I'm not as familiar with George's body of work as I am with Mishulam's. But what I can tell you, too, is that, again, we were talking about before the bag of weed, the comfort bag of weed. Well, think about Mishulam, right? This chemistry professor who's on a bus with like two kilos of freaking Lebanese hash. Stinking up the bus. And you can think of people just like, man, who's got weed?

3:58:05Dr Mark ScialdoneSomeone's got weed on this bus. It was this chemistry professor who had the permission from the police to basically take weed. He brought it back. He fractionated it chromatographically. Right. And then what he did, Jeff, is he made a crystalline urethane derivative at the phenolic hydroxyl, and he was able to crash that out as a purified crystalline substance, which again was a very common practice in the mid-century to basically make crystalline derivatives.

3:58:41DrRight. Absolutely.

3:58:42Dr Mark ScialdoneBut then what he did was, so if you recall, it was 1964 and, you know, Proton NMR was, you know, basically developed by Jack Roberts at Caltech who figured out all the splittings and, you know, chemical shifts and, you You know, the whole advent of NMR technology is what, you know, again, Ms. Shulam figured out, ah, I can use this to correctly elucidate the Delta 9 configuration.

3:59:09Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd that was the huge, you know, monumental achievement. Thank you.

3:59:30Dr Mark ScialdoneThank you so much for joining us.

3:59:47Dr Mark ScialdoneThank you so much for joining us today.

4:00:15Dr Mark ScialdoneA flourishing need to have these people in this space and a great place to work, right?

4:00:24JeffAnd expertise in chemistry makes the world look different to you. It's like the difference between seeing in color and seeing in black and white.

4:00:32BubblemanIt's very much actually comparable to macro photography. When I started doing macro photography and started seeing... You understand what everything's really made out of. Yeah, and just seeing like what a bug looks like up close or a flower and the complexities and how like the way Terrence always said, how come... Thank you so much for joining us.

4:01:01JeffHow to destroy it. You know, like how it works.

4:01:06Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd can you bring it on an airplane?

4:01:08JeffCan I bring it on an airplane? And I know exactly how to get away with bringing it on an airplane.

4:01:14BubblemanWith that, I'm going to wrap it up, my friends. One o'clock. I'm waiting to get out into my garden here. But I want to thank you, Jeff, for coming by. That was awesome to have you. We'd love to have you come on again.

4:01:25JeffIt was so great meeting every single one of you. And I loved all the dynamic conversation. Thank you so much for the conversation. It was awesome. Just going through everything, sharing what we really felt.

4:01:35BubblemanYeah, no, we're happy to have you on. Thanks, Dr. Mark, for inviting him. Thanks to Paul.

4:01:43Dr Mark ScialdoneA great speaker for Hash Church. So thanks for coming on, Jeff.

4:01:47BubblemanYeah, thanks.

4:01:49JeffThis is a really cool community that I didn't know about until Mark told me because like, I don't know everything, man.

4:01:56BubblemanWe're kind of hidden. We're not, we're not as exposed as you think.

4:01:59JeffI feel elite just having been invited.

4:02:02BubblemanOh man, anytime for sure. Thank you, Jen Doe, for showing up and sharing with us. It's nice to hear that you're full circle in Utah. That's really cool. Hopefully we hear more from you in the near future. And thank you, Etienne, for doing good work as you always are doing. And Dr. David Allen for coming in and being hilarious again. I wasn't quite as shockingly hilarious today with the boner bud, but certainly a couple weeks ago, he knocked our socks off with his minorly dirty joke.

4:02:34JeffThat guy's a character, man.

4:02:36BubblemanYou don't even know, dude. You don't even know.

4:02:38JeffI have no idea. I can tell there's so much on the surface.

4:02:42BubblemanThank you to Puffco for sponsoring Hash Church and thank you to the Press Club. We'll give something away next weekend, maybe another Press Club spoon. I think I'm flying to Quebec next Sunday, so I may need a little help with running the show. It might be a short one, maybe only two hours, we'll see. Thank you so much for watching.

4:03:27BubblemanThe last two episodes. So now I need someone to email me and tell me what the best free software for ripping YouTube videos off because I currently don't have a copy for like episode 29 and 30, maybe even 31. Anyway, thank you everybody.