Breeding and seed making with Masonic Seeds

0:23SpeakerClick, click, stream, stream.

1:04Collin PalmerOkay. Can you hear me?

1:06SpeakerYeah, I can. Yes.

1:08Collin PalmerWait, so I think you're good. Let me let me go to the hash church on YouTube. Masonic just asked to come in the room.

1:20SpeakerI can hear you. Oh, I have to push me mute. I think oops.

1:28Collin PalmerYep. And then is that Marcus on the screen? All right, here we go. Is that you, brother?

1:36BubblemanGot to do some boarding. Got to figure out that. Can I find record?

1:46Collin PalmerOkay, here we go. Okay, I can see myself. Okay, everybody.

1:52HunterIs that you, brother?

1:53Collin PalmerGot to do some boarding.

1:56SpeakerWe are live. Got to figure out that. Good morning, everyone. Can I find record? Okay, here we go.

2:06Collin PalmerOkay, I can. Give me a second, everyone. I'm going to let everybody in. Welcome, everybody. As you can see, Marcus is traveling today, but the band plays on and we're going to have a great show. We've got Kevin Jodry supposed to show up today. Masonic, who's in here now. And Dr. Mark and also ATN is going to come in later. So welcome, everyone.

2:39Collin PalmerSo, Edgar, can you hear me, bud?

2:44Collin PalmerI can hear you. I can totally hear you. All right, everyone. Welcome to episode two, season 12 of Hash Church. My name is Collin Palmer of Vessel Life Science here honoring everyone at Hash Church and the family. I'm taking over for Marcus for the day. He's going to Colorado to support the brand. Super stoked for him to go out there and experience Colorado and go see what, you know, the Rockies have to offer him and go see some of his stores and Just meet everybody that's been rocking his brand out there.

3:22Collin PalmerSo much love to Bubble Man Brand in Colorado and everyone out there supporting it. I guess what right now what I should do is go into let everybody in and we'll get it going. But hopefully everybody's having a good Sunday and enjoying the day. Just give us a couple minutes. We're going to get the show going in a minute. But welcome. Welcome, everybody.

3:52Collin PalmerFor now, until everybody comes in, I'm going to go through the sponsorship deck and get it moving. And we'll start into discussion soon, Edgar.

4:02Collin PalmerSo we'll start with the press club. Press Club at Hash Church, we believe that how you make hash matters just as much as what you make. Craft, consistency, and respect for the process are everything. That's why we're proud to be supported by the Press Club. The Press Club has become a trusted name in solventless production. Creating well-engineered rosin presses, accessories, and tools. I know our lab in New York uses their tools.

4:30Collin PalmerWe're big, big supporters of them. Really thank you guys for that. Whether you're pressing at home or dialing it in professionally, they have amazing products for you. From the precision-built presses all the way for their thoughtful accessories and hardware, Press Club helps focus on what matters, quality in, quality out. We're genuinely grateful for the support of Hash Shirts and our guests and the wider salt in this community.

4:55Collin PalmerSo go rock them, go support them. Pressclub.co. You can check everything out. Also, Puffco. We all love a good Puffco, even though we love our rigs. Puffco has been a sponsor for a couple years now. They've definitely laced us all up with amazing units. I really appreciate it. Roger and the team, really amazing that you guys are able to bring Accessibility to, you know, the masses and ways that rigs are, you know, like they sometimes fall short of.

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7:07Collin PalmerSo I want to welcome everybody to today's show. Welcome, ATN. We're going to dive into some breeding with Masonic. I got some questions for him. I want to talk about some of the new lines that he's been working on. We have Kevin coming in right now. Got some things I want to talk to him about his trips in the Middle East. Talk about some of the genetics that he's been popping since the time that he spent over there.

7:32Collin PalmerAnd dive into what characteristics you're seeing and some breeding practices that you felt or feel have been notable working with some of these newer lines, all the way down to selection and maybe even some germination techniques if that's applicable. So I want to welcome everybody to the show. Masonic, welcome. Obviously, Kevin Jodry. Awesome to have you, brother. Thanks for joining us. It's always great to see you, ATN.

8:02Collin PalmerWelcome, my man. Dr. Mark's about to jump in as well. I also want to mention we've lost an incredible artist, musician, father, you know, someone who's changed Changed music many times over. The incredible Bob Weir. So, you know, condolences to Moy and the family, his wife. You know, it's one of those things that, you know, the life he lived was so incredible, it's impossible to sum that up.

8:41Collin PalmerSo, you know. So yeah, I think just to start the show, I think Mark wanted his set up to play a Bob Weir tribute for those out there. And I think he's ready to do it before we jump in. So why don't you start that and we'll jump into some of the questions I got and we'll do a dab for Bob.

9:09Etienne FontanCan't hear you, Mark.

9:10Collin PalmerYou need to turn up your sound. He's got to get his mic.

9:17Collin PalmerNo, we can't hear you, buddy. So here's what we'll do. We'll jump into the show. And when you get your sound on, we can go back to the song.

9:31Etienne FontanShout out to Bob. He was the only dead member I ever got high with. It was a solo show he was doing with Rob Wasserman, the big tall bass player. And yeah, I was able to smoke a joint with Bobby. He was very kind. I have a lot of friends who have nothing but love for him. I, you know, appreciate that. Hey, we can hear you, Mark.

9:58Etienne FontanWe can hear you. All right.

10:01SpeakerWell, you know, when it doesn't go just exactly perfect, disconnect and reconnect. Just go for it. Right? So guys, let's see. Do a sound check on the guitar. Can you hear this? Lower the volume.

10:15Collin PalmerGood, okay, good. Lower the master volume a little bit.

10:18Etienne FontanYeah, lower the master volume just a hair if you can. A little bit.

10:21SpeakerMaster volume lower just a second.

10:22Collin PalmerOkay, good.

10:23SpeakerYeah.

10:24Collin PalmerIt's clipping.

10:29SpeakerOkay, how about that? Is that better?

10:32Etienne FontanMuch better. Play the guitar and let's do it now.

10:37SpeakerYou can hear the guitar and you can hear the vocals, right? Yep. It's about time I got it just exactly perfect, right? Okay, so what can I say about Bob Weir?

10:54SpeakerI never met the man. I was in the front row a couple times. In fact, I was front row, dead center, right in front of Bobby a couple nights. So he definitely saw me dancing away. And, you know, what can I say about Bobby? He had an incredible guitar style that was just the foil that Jerry needed to keep that music, you know, really unique. Every time it was unique, He had a really interesting way of voicing chords and just loved his songwriting that he did with, you know, our dear friend John Perry Barlow who passed.

11:40SpeakerSo if you want to think about some of the words from his songs, you could think about, you ain't going to learn what you don't want to know and let your life proceed by its own design.

11:59SpeakerThe words of yours, I'm done with mine. Just incredible. And just as the same way I moved when Papa Jerry passed, It really moved me last night when I heard about the news, just like everybody else. And so it's a great time to play music and remember. So let me just play this one Bob Weir song. Let me know if it sounds OK or if it doesn't.

12:31SpeakerDoes that sound good? Thumbs up from Colin.

12:45SpeakerI woke today, felt your side of me, the colors were still blue.

13:15SpeakerMy heart is filled with dread. You might not be sleeping here with me. But it's alright, cause I love you. That's not gonna change.

13:44SpeakerRun me round, make me hurt, again and again. I still sing in love songs, written in the letters of your name.

14:10SpeakerWave the starry cone, for it surely looks like rain. Did you ever wake up to the sound of street cats making love? And gasped for more cranes, you were your

14:43SpeakerYeah, you know Nate's just the last thing they're thinking of They're only trying to make him

15:58SpeakerI don't want to hold you. And I don't want to tear you down. Or fight you in my arms. I want to drown you. It's just that I

16:25SpeakerGod used to have you around. My landscape would be empty if you were gone. But it's alright, cause I love you. That's not gonna change.

16:54SpeakerRun me round, make me hurt, again, and again. But I'd still sing you love songs, written in the letters of your name. They'd be starting to come, for it sure looks like home.

17:33SpeakerThank you. Thank you. Thank you.

18:06SpeakerI wish these fucking blues would go away. It looks like rain and it feels like rain. Here comes the rain. Here comes the rain.

18:38SpeakerThank you for watching.

19:39Collin PalmerThanks, Dr. Mark. Appreciate it, man. Much love to Bobby and his family.

19:44Etienne FontanWell done, sir.

19:48Collin PalmerSo, The Grateful Dead, yeah, it's a lot to talk about there, but in terms of genetics, They were the ones that had a crew of people following them around that held the genetics. So we're lucky to benefit from those individuals.

20:05Etienne FontanAnd blew the smoke in their face the entire time, right? Yeah. You know, there was literally a series of people that used to just hang out in front of the band and smoke pot and blow it in their faces. I don't know many other bands that had that type. And of course, behind them, of course, were the Spinners. And, you know, there was a whole, you know, hierarchy and scene that was self-created, which, you know, got to respect, you know, their longevity as well as what the people created, how they supported each other.

20:39Etienne FontanVery rare, very rare, very beautiful.

20:42Collin PalmerYeah. Well, welcome to the show, everybody. You know, the show is really about breeding and techniques. And I wanted to, you know, invite some key individuals on to talk about history, some ideologies. And, you know, where do we think this is going? Is another question I wanted to pose to the group. But, you know, welcome to Kevin. Thank you so much for coming. You know, you've been someone in the scene.

21:09Collin PalmerYou know, you really started in the late 70s and really have driven your passion for this plant into so many different vernaculars. I've watched you work with large groups doing extremely intricate breeding projects and all the way down to just personal selection projects, which is incredible. And I see you on both sides of the spectrum. The cannabis coin where you're you're pushing the innovation, but you're also respecting the history in ways that I find extremely unique and really endearing.

21:44Collin PalmerWe need more of that, you know, and to understand, you know, you've gone to the Middle East to really study and understand these these really war stricken, you know, regions that have this unique. Thank you so much for joining us.

22:12Collin PalmerYou know, how did you, you know, get started with, you know, thinking about breeding, you know, coming from a growing mentality, you know, you, you like myself coming from the East Coast, it's a completely different world, you know, and, and it really, you know, where you started is not where you've ended. Right. So, um, you know, how did that begin and what did that kind of look for like for you back then?

22:40Collin PalmerYou're muted, bud. Fiona, unmute. There you go. Thank you, Colin.

22:46SpeakerThanks for having me on the show. Appreciate you all. Cheers to the audience and salute to Bob. I'm not a breeder, though. That's the irony. And I have a really clear distinction of it because my mother was a research geneticist. And the reason why I differentiate in that term is that Breeding is unbelievably focused into a very single lane. And you have to remove all variables to achieve the objective.

23:20SpeakerAnd I have a hard time with other interests, right? And so for me, it was an understanding of breeding, but to be involved in projects and collections and sourcing and

23:39SpeakerUsage. It allowed my, I'm going to say like hyperactivity to be more stimulated. And so I was just really fortunate when I was young in that the people that I was exposed to in cannabis were all commercial traffickers. And so, and I was like, you know, what do they call an apt pupil? So I was somebody that was about it and it allowed them to kind of take me under their wing and help me understand what it was that was trafficking, but also this unbelievable appreciation for the varieties that were being brought into New England from around the world.

24:21SpeakerAnd the experience of sitting in someone's room and they, this was when they used to use like fish and tackle boxes, right? The Daiwa fish and tackle box. And inside it would be all these jars of cannabis labeled. And you'd sit down and they'd open up these jars and they'd say, this is the best samples from the last two or three years of collecting. And it allow you to be able to see the world of cannabis in a way that, you know, People that weren't in my position couldn't.

24:51SpeakerI wasn't getting it from a bag from a dealer. I was getting it from people who broke up the bales to feed the dealers, to feed the dealers, to feed the people. And so it allowed me to really start to say like, whoa, of all the Panamanian, this was the best Panamanian. Of all the Colombian, this was the best Colombian. This is the best hash we've seen in years.

25:12SpeakerAnd when those batches would be moving through, they'd let me know, hey, usually there's like an outlier that comes in. And when it does, we'll come over your house and grab you. Because that was still when we had phones at home. And at that time, right, when people went to go communicate with you, they would just pull up in front of your house and hit the horn.

25:33SpeakerAnd you'd hang out your window, yo, and you'd jump in and go. And you get to jump in and they'd be like, you know, hey, check this out, this batch just came in. And so it gave me this real appreciation for difference. It let me experience the world of cannabis in a very different way, a very selected way. It wasn't random. And it let me see the cycles of the production from around the world because the batches come in in terms of their harvest cycles and shipment cycles.

26:07SpeakerSo it was a, A foundation of appreciation that I didn't really even understand that at the time, like that's the irony, you know, like you're a kid, you think you just, you just, you just don't know. And it was just really nuanced and profound because the people that were involved were smart and they, they loved cannabis and their, their desire to share that with somebody who was also really about it was genuine.

26:37SpeakerSo it just gave me a really good, we call like your initial database. And I ended up getting in trouble. I catch a case for cultivation. The, um, we started growing some of the, like the Afghani stock that was coming in. How many plants were you caught with? Oh, shit. Couple hundred at the time. This was 83. And so... Big slap on the wrist. No, I got, yeah, yeah, I got hauled off, right?

27:04SpeakerI got dragged out of high school in handcuffs. So they, it was all right. It was all right. It was expected. Like my whole, I had family in prison. All my friends were going to prison. Everybody was incarceration. We were always in trouble anyway.

27:17Etienne FontanThat was the scene where you were in, right? It was a flooded scene of those that were persecuted, those surviving, and those in the underground, right?

27:25SpeakerYeah, it was, it was... New England in the 80s. And New England in the 80s was troubled. You had, you know, a total collapse of the manufacturing economy, the fishing economy had collapsed. And what you had was drugs filled the void. And so I lived in a fishing village and the commercial fishermen would go out to sea and go grab all the weight from the transport vessels out in the ocean, bring it into the bay and disseminate it in the neighborhood.

27:53SpeakerSo You know, it was just kind of part of the deal. And when I when I got out of training school, I went in the military. And a lot of it was that the neighborhood was just basically melting down. And the crime violence was jumping up. And I just kind of realized, I was like, I don't, and I didn't have a bad time in incarceration. It wasn't like it was a traumatic circumstance.

28:19SpeakerIt was like, it was, I'd already been in trouble multiple times prior. It was just this time I got hit with something real. But it was like, I don't think I want to do this. And my cousin was doing 200 years in prison. So I had a real picture of what a life in prison looks like. And I said, man, maybe if I could get some different skills, I'd be able to have a different opportunity.

28:44SpeakerSo I thought if I went in the military and I became a salvage diver, I'd have a different opportunity. So I go in the service and I go through that route. But I end up going into- You went in the Navy? What branch? I was in the Coast Guard, but I went to school in the Navy. Okay, respect. So I go in the Coast Guard, then I went to school through the Navy.

29:02SpeakerBut I go into the Coast Guard right during the war on drugs. And so, you know, I'm not thinking about this. I'm not thinking about this irony. And Hawaii was my first station. And when I get to the base at that time, the drug purge in the military was out of control, right? They were purging everybody. So I show up at the base and my ship isn't in port.

29:24SpeakerIt's not going to be here for like another two months. So for two months, I stay on base, working on base. But they used Base Honolulu as the holding place for all the people getting kicked out of the service for drugs. So I show up with this attitude of like, I'm gonna be a good guy. I'm not gonna get into trouble. I'm gonna change my life. And as soon as I get to Hawaii and I get into my room, I'm in a room with a bunch of guys that are all getting thrown out for drugs.

29:54SpeakerAnd they're like, hey, we got some Kilo Hawaiian. You wanna smoke it? And I was like, no, no, I'm trying to be good. But then they showed me the bag of weed and I was like, whoa. And I'm like, OK, just this one time. I'm talking like the first day I get just this one time. It was transformational, you know, and I had smoked Hawaiian in New England because we had a partner.

30:17SpeakerOoh, that's clean. I had a partner that his buddy was Hawaiian and he would come into New England after the harvest and move the herb into Boston and Providence. Ooh, that's a jar. Look at that. Oh, you're muted too, Colin.

30:41Etienne FontanColin, you're muted. We can't hear you and we can barely see what you're showing.

30:46Collin PalmerSo if you see this right here, this is a naturally occurring terp ring on the top. This jar has been sitting in a refrigerator for three years. I just pulled it out. I've been doing these experiments with different varietals where I leave them for long set points.

31:05SpeakerNo, that's fascinating, the long holds. I met a cat named Tesky up from University of Guelph. And so in Canada, and he came to visit me at a conference I was speaking at, and he brought me all this aged product that they had been working on. How do you hold things correctly over time to really get the, we would say, the molecular conversions to take place and be stable and reveal and...

31:35Collin PalmerYeah, it's like there's all THC at the bottom of this and then the top is just like it is like literally a half inch of turf layer, but it's almost like vapable form. I was just thinking about it. I was like, I should probably put this into a vape and see what happens and see what, you know. But back to your questions about the things that were coming in at that time, you know, I think the most, you know, the thing that I find fascinating is that We've grown a lot of these varietals time and time again.

32:03Collin PalmerThey've changed names. They've changed, you know, we think that they resemble these older images and things that we remember. But how much of that stuff do you think is still around today?

32:15SpeakerOoh, that's a good question. You have an issue, you know, like... Like what I said, I was talking about Hawaii. Hawaii at that time was primarily Southeast Asia, Mexico, and probably Afghani, not Pakistani. And so stock that had been brought in had been worked and rolled and developed. And so when people talk about Hawaiian, it's not indigenous, just like there's no indigenous humble cannabis, right? It's cannabis that was brought to a region that had a phenomenal impact on the product.

32:45SpeakerBut I got to experience that wave of what we would call Hawaiian, And we go forward, you know, 20 years and people that were younger were talking about the legacy Aloha White Widow cut. And it made me, it caught me because I was like, whoa, wait a minute. The legacy to me of Hawaii was Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Mexico, Afghani kind of swirled combinations. And so I knew that that era had ended.

33:15SpeakerAnd it let me kind of start to understand that we were removing and changing what had occurred. And it's a natural progression, but it's one that I didn't enjoy as much. I didn't like the standardization. And as I look everywhere on earth, the issue is that it's kind of like the cell phone. There's no place on earth that I've been to that there's somebody, I don't care where you are, somebody's got a cell phone and they're looking at IG.

33:44SpeakerIt blows my mind, but it's that comprehensive in coverage. And what it does is it creates a desire to be part of that. And you end up diminishing your own culture for adoption of the digital culture. And it's the same with the variety. So what you have is you have this belief that because it's in a magazine and it's proclaimed to be incredible and the whole world is calling it best at competitions, people didn't realize that all of that was marketing.

34:19SpeakerThey thought it was real. People thought that the high times cups were real. They thought the competitions were real. They thought that these guys that were just lords of cannabis, they didn't realize half the shit that you saw was stolen from someone else. Judges were bought. Competitions were skewed. And the whole point of all of it was to flip a page and subsequently sell material. Here's grow equipment that was used to produce this.

34:45SpeakerSo you didn't really understand that 95% of the magazines that you saw, because there was no internet at that time, that was a marketing ploy. But people took it as real. And it began the THC obsession because that's when you started to see publicly listed numbers and all of a sudden, you know, 19%, the world's strongest strain kind of shit comes out. And it started to make people in these countries believe that their product wasn't the right product.

35:16SpeakerAnd it started to compress the gene pools. And I started to realize it just from what I experienced in Hawaii in the 80s, where I said, whoa, the things that were unbelievable. I think Hawaii has probably some of the best grown climates on earth. And I think that the varieties that were acclimated to that area And then subsequently developed and sourced was Profiled. I mean, I got so fucking high one time I couldn't navigate off the freeway.

35:46SpeakerEvery time I got to the exit, it was like too overwhelming to turn the car off the exit. And I would loop around the island. And I bet I drove for a couple hours until I came down because I was so high. And the quality of the effect, and it was organically produced, so it was my first introductions to really what is native ag from people who are growing small batch, because the Hawaiian cultivation wasn't large scale.

36:17SpeakerThey were going through the helicopter raids just like Humboldt County was. All those... What we call the militarized conquests were occurring simultaneously. So everything was more small batch, better quality, very nuanced. And then you flash forward and all of a sudden you realize that Aloha White Widow is the legacy variety of the region. And for me, I got lucky that I was in Northern California. So I get to NorCal in the 80s and I'm in the Bay Area and the Bay Area was bumping.

36:52SpeakerAnd I start making connections with locals and I start getting friends in Mendocino. So I didn't get up into Humboldt till in the 90s, but in that late 80 period, I had Mendocino friends. So it started letting me see what Mendocino cannabis was. And it was phenomenal cannabis, but I didn't see the differentiation that I'd seen as a kid. And it's that time period from 78 to 84, that six year period of 12 to 18, that 12 to 18, that foundational 12 to 18 time period, it gave me,

37:37SpeakerAn indelible impression of unique. It allowed me to understand that every one of these regions had plants that evolved under the pressure of the region and under the desire of the people. So as we started to standardize and homogenize the products, we without question improved production capabilities. We were better at understanding how to handle it. We were better at understanding how to process it. We did all this stuff around the creation of it.

38:08SpeakerBut in terms of the preservation of unique and the understanding that, Which is what we kind of all didn't realize that you weren't going to be able to go back to the source of origin and just go get the material. You forget that regions that are, you're growing cannabis, but now cocaine is the currency. You're growing cannabis and now opium, poppy is the currency. You're growing cannabis and now the area is militarized.

38:40SpeakerThere is no cannabis. And I didn't understand that when I was young. In my mind, I think, oh, the world is this refrigerator filled with all this good shit. And all we need to do is go back to the source. But as you start to mature, you realize that the source might never be sourced again. And it really changed the way I saw cannabis in terms of like sharing varieties.

39:05SpeakerAnd so for me, Anytime I got something really good, as long as there was no restriction on it. Like if someone gave me a plant, gave me seed stock, I'd say like, what can I do with this? If I was free to share it, I shared it. And it was really just to try to get material into the system so that maybe it might exist in the future.

39:29SpeakerAnd it was controversial at the time. And it was hella controversial when I got into commercial cannabis because the variety was the power. If you had the right plant, you had the power. But I didn't really associate cannabis and power. I didn't put them together the same way. I understood what power is. And cannabis was kind of the antithesis to it. It's gentle. And being able to be part of something in that regard and share, What it did was it allowed me to see as much cannabis as anybody I know.

40:03SpeakerBecause I was constantly sharing things with people that didn't have what we would call like social rank. I just, you just had to be a cool person. And I'd be like, oh, hey, I got you. You're solid. I got something that you would probably benefit from. And what it did was it allowed people who were aficionados, you know, very focused, desirous to be in cannabis, it gave them their first step towards the goal.

40:31SpeakerAnd in that process, It allowed me to be able to get into their lives in a really nice way because they said, whoa, you opened up the door. We would love to be able to let you come in and out of our house at will. So it started to allow me to see all these different spheres of influence and directions. And when we got involved in doing a lot of the work from coming in from Mexico, What I was able to do was I was able to go find products in the market that I thought was superior of that genre.

41:02SpeakerAnd we were able to get the people from Mexico to come into the U.S. And I could show them the products that we needed. We need these products. So it allowed them now to go back into Mexico, find the right products, bring it back into the US. And in the process, it let me go look at all these different genes because I was growing all the seed stock.

41:23SpeakerSo I had my own indoor operation in the late 80s. And I didn't sell cannabis that I grew. I sold cannabis that I trafficked. I was growing cannabis strictly because I wanted to see what cannabis looked like in the modern world of electricity. What's it look like under lights? And so every time I get anything from anybody that was coming from international or any new material, I could grow it myself.

41:52SpeakerAnd just experience it. And I, to this day, I wish that I had a cut. We got out of Mexico seed, but I swear to God, it was like, I used to smoke cigarettes a long time ago, but I was a Marlboro smoker, but Salem's and Newport's, you know, with that, that menthol, I had a Newport cigarette cannabis variety that it was so menthol-y in your mouth.

42:15SpeakerIt was mind-bending. To this day, I haven't experienced anything like it. And it started to allow me to really have this really different appreciation for native lines that were under modern production methodologies. And I think that's what people really, when they talk about brick and all this other, they didn't realize that there was varying levels of quality. And depending on where you were on the supply chain allowed you to see the better quality.

42:44SpeakerBut the fact was the products had to go move across the ocean. So by the time you got a bag of grass, it might be eight, nine months old, which is funny, but that was really where you got all your stabilization and your polymerization in. And so... You start to understand aging because when you consume it fresh, you're like, whoa. So I started getting all this education and information and I never I never really had a mentor.

43:11SpeakerIt was more just the mentoring occurred as a kid about collection and varieties. But from that point forward, it was self-driven. And when I looked at any of the grow books, you know, Ed had some grow books. I knew that he didn't write them because there was contradictory information within the book that let me know that if you had written it, you would have put a disclaimer here saying, here is...

43:38SpeakerThe thing that I talked about earlier, but this is where we do it different. So I knew that it wasn't written by one person. Yeah. So I knew right away that this wasn't real. And so what I did is I just started trying to understand plant science so that I could understand what it was I was trying to do. And then I just allowed myself to get sucked into the world of cannabis to the point where, you know, you basically like freak, you know, you're living and breathing and There was no internet at the time, so it was all people that you'd meet.

44:12SpeakerAnd you could, if you were cool and you had the right kind of weed, when you lit it up, it would suck people to you like a vacuum cleaner. And then that would open doors to be able to experience their world. And so all of that, you know, in that late 80, early 90 time period of me trying to really dig into what I loved and do it in a way that made me feel good, Where like I wanted the money and I wanted the weed, but I really enjoyed that private community and it was genuine and it didn't, the only agenda was like in goodwill.

44:53SpeakerAnd so when you put that into your life, it just makes your life so much better. It's a lesson for young people that the money is needed. And when you don't have it, life is brutal. But when you have cash and you have no friends, you're basically poor. The money doesn't buy you friends. It can buy you companionship. It can buy you all kinds of distraction. But it doesn't buy you...

45:18SpeakerThe intimacy that real friendships provide where there's this different type of connection. And cannabis provided that in that community. That's where the dead was interesting because I only saw the dead a couple of times in the early 90s in Oakland, but it was the dead parking lot. Thank you so much for joining us.

46:03Etienne FontanKevin, I want to go back to Hawaii because you kind of glossed over there because there's a lot of curiosity as well as I travel to the islands and you know Maui Waui was the you know the known known and today there's availability of a there's a medical variety that's a pre-72 that's as close to I think that original Maui that varietal but I don't have it to show it to you.

46:31Etienne FontanI'd love to smoke it with you at some point to, you know, to know. But a lot of, of course, the genetics came from, you know, around the world that migrated, you know, to Hawaii. And because you're a Coastie, and another friend of mine was in the... Air Force, he was stationed on Guam. And he said that, you know, the further west that you went in the Pacific, the much stronger, you know, the cannabis became.

46:58Etienne FontanAnd of course, a lot of those made it to Hawaii. So you see, with your knowledge now and seeing the varietals that were on Hawaii, if you can remember that far back, where do you see those varietals as coming from mostly from your experience?

47:14SpeakerWell, you know, in terms of, you know, living in Hawaii, I worked on all the islands, but I used to do work all the way out to New Guinea. So I got to see all the cannabis through Micronesia too. And that stuff was psychoactive. Like, I mean, it's frighteningly powerful. But the stock in Hawaii, you know, now that I had plenty of experience to kind of compare, and I'm lucky that I have a good memory.

47:39SpeakerThank you for watching.

47:53SpeakerAnd so that would be your Vietnamese, your Laos, your Cambodian, your Thai. And then you had herb coming in from surfers, which would have been Colombian and Mexican. And I just got some really killer Panama Maui stock from Seattle Greg. So his crew in Hawaii Did a bunch of breeding work and they they had some stock and and I just love that the seeds that he sent and I sifted out a nasty plant.

48:18SpeakerBut I would say, you know, it's Panamanian and then the what we would call Maui is more of a Mexican concentration. And it was phenomenal. But each island had its own profile, too. And if someone asked me where I thought the best herb came from, I think it came from Molokai. I think that Molokai, because Molokai had the least amount of law enforcement presence and you had the most, I would say, native density.

48:47SpeakerAnd because of it, you still had more of a purity in the cultivation process versus trying to create product to sell to the holiday.

48:57Collin PalmerAnd they had water, right? And all the resources.

49:01SpeakerOnce you started moving it to tourists, the quality went down the drain. And some of the best fake pot I've ever seen in my life was produced in Oahu. I'm telling you, these guys were geniuses. They would build a bag of grass out of any kind of material. And when you looked at it through the back, you'd be like, holy shit, that's phenomenal. And you'd open it up and it wasn't weed at all.

49:22SpeakerAnd we were cracking up. But I was lucky. I had Hawaiian partners in Hawaii. That were, I was in the service with them, but they were native to Hawaii. So it allowed me to be able to experience these types of things, not from a tourist perspective. Just like when I got to California, I had friends that were from Petaluma, Santa Rosa. And so they were north enough of the bay where they were getting all the herb coming out of Mount Tamalpais, out of Marin, and they were picking it up from everything north of the bay.

49:55SpeakerSo it let me experience these regions in a more accurate version versus, you know, here's herb that could be coming from anywhere. And I think that, you know, the crime in Hawaii is that when they went into medical cultivation, they removed the ability to grow outdoor. You know, cannabis in Hawaii has to be begun indoor and that's a financial consideration. That's basically a fuck you to the locals because they're like, if you don't have the money to create extensive infrastructure, you can't participate.

50:28SpeakerAnd I don't think people have really experienced what Hawaiian cannabis is. In that soil, in that altitude, with the purity, with the iodine, with the totality of microbiome that is so unique because it's a hardwood forest on Hawaii. I mean, they cleared it, but fungally dominant, like very different than when we think of a jungle. And the impact on the herb was unbelievable. So It just helped me understand.

50:59SpeakerAnd then I went back multiple times because all the guys I roll with, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Tokelauan. And so we go back to Hawaii for years and it had ended. I never saw those type of plants again. And it just really, and that would have been in the 90s as well. So it started teaching me about that the ideas I had as a kid of going back into the refrigerator and pulling the goodies out, the refrigerator doesn't exist anymore.

51:27SpeakerAnd so it started the idea of collecting. And that's when you start really putting plants together and you start holding them in libraries and you're holding your seed stock and you're consciously trying to create a diversity in your collection to reflect the nuances in the world around you, even though it's not necessarily what you're pushing in the market. So the market considerations are different than private considerations.

51:55SpeakerAnd What took place was we got used to standardized, homogenized cannabis, and you started to lose the desire for things that didn't have coverage in magazines, things that didn't have specific morphology, things that, just like today. Today you got the shit better be colored, it better have this level of shine, and it better be over 25%. And if it doesn't fit those three criteria, you can't even enter it into a market.

52:25SpeakerSo what we do is we keep artificially compressing these gene pools and we get so excited about like a new thing, but it's really the same thing. It's like all Z hybrids. It is like a hundred of them, but fundamentally they're all pretty similar. That's what my beef with herb is, is that we've lost this ability to have different experiences with the flower and in the resin.

52:54Collin PalmerYeah, no, I think everything you're saying is so there's so much to unpack here. I think we should all dive into a couple of key things. I have some some thoughts as you were talking. I wanted to bring up and I just want to introduce a couple of the other people here that came in the room. What's up, Russ? How you doing, brother? Nice to have you.

53:13Collin PalmerThanks for coming on. And Hunter, pleasure to meet you. You know, those that don't know Hunter, he's been working super hard at his craft. He's Dempier certified like myself and others here on the panel. He's been, you know, working his craft, selecting his genetics for quite some time, and he's been winning quite a few awards. Thank you so much for joining us today.

53:54Collin PalmerWelcome to the show, Hunter. Hidden Forest Farms, for those that don't know his brand. He's located up in Maine. So welcome to the show, brother.

54:05HunterThanks, man. Appreciate you having me on.

54:09Collin PalmerFor sure. So, yeah. So, Kev, you know, I think, you know, one thing that, you know, you brought up was the refrigerator, that going back to You know, going back to varietals that you feel you could always just go get like I, you know, I'm much younger than yourself. And I, you know, I feel like I started super late. I started in the 90s, even though it seems like it's a long time.

54:36Collin PalmerI felt like I was in this golden era of genetics where like I, there was like four years where like everything I pop was just like rank, dank, incredible herb. And it just was like all herb that I'd found on Deadlot or Fishtour or whatever. And it's just not like that anymore, right? Like you could just pop a hundred seeds and you're like, I just, that was a way, not a waste of time, but I learned a lot about myself there, trusting and trusting in this, right?

55:07Collin PalmerYou know, and I don't know how others feel about this, but you know, it takes a lot of effort to find Thank you so much for joining us.

55:36Collin PalmerIt's cool. There's someone out there that wants to do that. That's not my my intention for all of this. Right. I want to preserve. I want to explore. I want to see that like a flyer that looks terrible, that washes like crazy. And we all said was going to be worthless, but found out that it's the best plant in the bunch. You know, that's that's what I'm looking for to explore.

55:58Collin PalmerSo with all this said, you know, I know, Russ, you've done a ton of brand breeding as well. Hunter, you're doing kind of the similar thing where you're finding plants that work, but then you're washing each plant, right? In the Masonic, like you've done a ton of work, you know, utilizing the backbones of other genetics, but then wholly finding your own voice within all this, right? Like you've, you've really kind of, um, Thank you so much for joining us today.

56:47Collin PalmerYou know, so it's really cool to see the work that you're doing because it's completely different than a lot of other seed makers, right, and breeders out there. So, you know, how do you guys view what Kevin said? You know, there's no refrigerator to go back to. Is this like something you've thought about individually? Have any of you guys thought about that as, you know, Thank you so much for joining us.

57:23SpeakerSo I've had a trying to go back to old seed stock, even from like 2015, 2016. And you didn't store it correctly. You know, there's the figurative pattern. And then literally it won't pop, you know, and if you didn't store it correctly, you know, good luck. And so now I've been more keen about storing. Thank you so much for joining us.

58:09SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

58:30SpeakerFor like the one you had immediately, like it could be a different one and they're just calling it the same thing. So I do keep that in mind and it is like depressing sometimes looking at tons of seed that is badass. Like I have a bunch of old thug pugs, Sherb Breath, and you know, like all those packs with the little puppy on them. And I'm talking about like 30 packs, 40 packs.

58:55SpeakerAnd I'm just like, they're all duds. You know, like I know they're all duds. You know, I pop, Some of my favorite breeders gear that I didn't store right, all duds, you know? And it's just like, it's not even disappointing at this point because I pop so many and it's just, yeah.

59:12Collin PalmerSo how would you preserve it? So like this brings the question just to the listeners and everybody out there. Like I, you know, I've been taught to preserve the seeds in particular ways, pelican cases, you know, using silica packets to keep it dry, all the things. But what are you guys doing? You know, I always have more seeds

59:55SpeakerLike I keep more seeds for myself than what I put out. And so I'll have, you know, like bags of the same of the, you know, genetics. So if, if it has a low germination rate or if something's wrong, you know, I can always take it to TC. But if for long-term storage, if you're trying to keep something long storage, what I would recommend is a desiccant and then putting it in the fridge.

1:00:23Collin PalmerThat's what I do. I mean, I have pelican cases that are labeled and there's a, I went as far as to make an Excel sheet and I labeled it all, folded it up, put it inside the box. So when you open it up, you're like, oh, this is what's in here. You know, how many of the seeds are there?

1:00:40SpeakerNowadays, though, if you're having problems popping seeds, you can just crack that outer shell. You know, you do all your sterilization, everything and put it in tissue and tissue culture media. You know, so there's like, That wasn't a really popular option or really even an option, you know, back when, you know, I was like, you know, trapping and stuff like that. So we have tons of options.

1:01:05SpeakerAnd not only that, but there's other things that people have done before TC, like using amino acid when they soak or using Gibralin, which is a hormone, you know, things like that. Yeah, embryo recovery. It's tough, though, man. If you don't dial the concentration and you get crazy rice syndrome, you'll get an extension that's like 11 inches over the course of a three-day period. You ever play around with gibberellic acid on any kind of seed stock?

1:01:35SpeakerOh, that shit's amazing what it can do. Yeah, and what's really cool about the different hormones is you can see crazy stuff happen morphologically when you start manipulating plant hormones. Things can get real weird.

1:01:50Collin PalmerYeah, well, that's the other thing about this is, you know, we have to remind ourselves we're artificially sort of, you know, inputting some hormones, you know, it's just like a human, you know, you can't just start putting hormones in your body.

1:02:03Etienne FontanWell, I mean, gibberellic acid was also used, I learned about it when I was doing a bonsai, right? If you want to extend a particular... Bonsai follow a particular, it's either Korean or Japanese standards for those who are aware. And so for particular things, sometimes a elongated branch, like a cascade or something like that is wanted or desired. And so I had learned about that when I was working, oddly enough, for Ed Rosenthal, we were playing with gibberellic acid to make seeds, et cetera, to stress out the Female so that they would produce male pollen and then we would use that.

1:02:39Etienne FontanAnd of course, the stock was shit. But, you know, it was still fascinating to go through the process of of stressing out a female and causing it to hermaphrodite and then pronounce, you know, it can be done successfully. I just haven't I was not aware or of a successful team that did so successfully.

1:03:00SpeakerI think with seed preservation, I think that what people don't understand about aging a seed is that every time the seed experiences an increase in moisture, it cellularly starts to activate. It says, oh, it must be spring. And so it starts to activate and it starts to utilize the existing energy source within the embryo, which becomes your coitaledon. And so each time the moisture fluctuation occurs, it turns on the metabolic switch and then we dry it and it turns it off.

1:03:33SpeakerAnd if you do it enough, you eventually have no sugar source left to create the energy needed until photosynthetic action can take place. And that's where Brandon was talking about putting the desiccant. I like put oxy packs in them too. So I just cracked some seed that was put away probably 20, 24 years ago. And the germination rate was phenomenal, but it was oxy pack, desiccant pack, and then put into, in this case, it was frozen.

1:04:03SpeakerEven Rice works. Yeah, it'll pick it up. Rice will pull it off. But it's just that with the packs, you have set control. Yeah. I think the real issue is those prolonged exposures to excess humidity. Yes, because it activates and it enzymatically activates the metabolism. Yeah. And then you don't go in. Colin brought us something earlier, too, about, you know, when you got into the 90s, what you had was you had heterosis.

1:04:30SpeakerSo fundamentally, people were putting things together that was so dissimilar genetically that when you put them together, you got you got that hybrid vigor phenomenon and you got really a representation of an F1. And even though it doesn't technically fit the F1 category of two inbred lines put together, but fundamentally they were so dissimilar and they were still pretty stable. And what we ended up doing was we made some real terrible mistakes, both from making selection using chemical assistance.

1:05:03SpeakerSo we used fungicides, pesticides, growth regulators, which was rampant in the industry at the time, right? In the 90s, that shit, people still using it. But the point is that it changed the selection basis to where you would use anything and let the chemical do the work. And the traits of interest that we lost, which is what people call genetic drift, but in breeding, genetic drift is just really losing track of the traits of interest to where those allele are no longer present in the gene pool and you can't find them.

1:05:36SpeakerAnd that's in any breeding, that's in dog breeding, that's in fish breeding, that's in herb breeding. And so that 90s era to me was this golden moment and you saw it go downhill. From that point, and it's people trying to like resurrect and bring back quality traits, stable lines, things with natural resistance, ability for plants to function without all the chemical support. And then the outdoor revolution reoccurred when they started to lessen the penalties on cannabis.

1:06:07SpeakerSo California, once they went into 1996, you got into medical, Medical said you could have plants. You started to be able to have the ability to have a criminal defense. It started to allow people to go back outside again. And it was the beginning of like the outdoor organic movement resurrected from the 70s. So you got to kind of see if you're watching these cycles. I remember that when we used to go up to go get our work packs back in the early 2000s, everybody was still growing, you know, 100, 200 lighters on diesel generators and nobody was really doing depths or outdoors and that and then it started to pick up around like 2006.

1:06:49SpeakerAnd then by 2008, it seemed like massive amounts of sour D was being grown and then shipped out of the East Coast. And it was all, it was all depths, depths and outdoors. You had a DA here, Brandon. There was a DA named Gallegos. And Gallegos was, he was aware that the world was changing. And what he said was the 99 limit the feds put on is what I'm going to follow.

1:07:18SpeakerSo he said, if you got 99 plants per parcel, I'm cool with it. And that's, that began the 10 pound plant revolution. That would have been like, I caught the case in 202. So I've been like 204. So in 204, the DA said, I'm cool with 99. And all of a sudden I started seeing 400 gallon pots. I had never seen a 400 gallon pot. I was like, it looked like a pool.

1:07:43SpeakerAnd it began that outdoor wave, but it also brought all the organic farmers, people that didn't really enjoy chemical indoor, it brought them back into the world of cannabis cultivation. And you started to see the reselection process for things that could hold themselves up under load, things that had natural resistance, things that could function in a biological manner. So it's been so interesting to see every one of these evolutions And you're seeing it now indoor where you're seeing the, the, the mentality of, of Exudate driven systems, but created under lighting.

1:08:24Collin PalmerYeah. You know, the one thing I talk a lot about with like, you know, I consider my older generation, the guys that brought me up, they were like, Colin, like, you gotta remember like a lot of these cats that are talking smack on how big it was back then. Like you were there, it was 99 plants. And we got, remember the year we got super pissed at you and your buddies for trying to do 200?

1:08:43Collin PalmerI was like, yeah. They're like, you're blowing it up. You're going to ruin it for everybody. You know, so I think people don't remember. Maybe they just don't remember that it wasn't as big as we think. And it was it's why it was so tight. And to your point, why the herb was so good. You know, it was because we had the attention to detail and you were there all the time.

1:09:08Collin PalmerYou know, you didn't leave, you know, to your point. So But the diversity that you're talking about, yeah, the diversity you're talking about, you know, I think you're calling it right in 2004, it really did change, right? I mean, I remember the shift because I was living in New York at the time. And we were all talking about how we needed to get more material because it just was going bonkers at the time.

1:09:33Collin PalmerYou know, we were looking for ways to get more diesel and that was the way. Give them the clone. Let them go crazy and let them, you know, bring it back. You know, so, you know, I don't... I don't know if people realize that we're still in an infant stage in that respect. We still haven't figured out scale. And if we have, then we might have a better market because the cost per pound back then, we didn't really pay attention to at all.

1:10:04Collin PalmerI didn't at all until I had to look at P&L for the first time. And I started realizing like, yeah, I've got a lot of experience, but in what? Right.

1:10:15SpeakerYou were more time in Boston legal fees like that, like this. It was that was the joke was that you had to always have enough money stacked to handle having a lawyer on retainer. No, for sure. And so, you know, you went that direction. But it was it was like Blue Dream is a really good example where when Blue Dream first popped out, my partner had a he was from Santa Cruz.

1:10:36SpeakerSo he comes back to Humboldt and says, check it out, man. This is this thing called Blue Dream. And he had some weed and we smoked it. So that's pretty cool. And it yielded really well. And at that time, all herbs moving at, you know, thirty eight to four thousand a pound. Yeah. And we're like, that's all right. And a friend of mine planted one clone. He had a hole in the ground that he used to dump his used material and his used media from the indoor.

1:10:58SpeakerSo he probably had, you know, a thousand gallons of soil in his hole. And he said, I'm going to plant one in it. Just curiosity. And I'll never forget it. He came into the room at the end of the year and said, man, I said, I think I got like, you know, 12 to 13 pounds off that plant. We looked at him and we were like, what?

1:11:17SpeakerWe couldn't believe what he said. And instantly you started to see this hunt for these, you know, so I started collecting plants that could produce copious amounts of herb in large form. So it changed the selection process again.

1:11:32Collin PalmerTotally. I remember a guy online that was in Australia that would post these outrageous photos of these plants, these single plants. And just like you're explaining to me, I can't really be a madness or something. I wish Marcus was on because he would know exactly what I'm talking about.

1:11:50SpeakerOh yeah, the Mullenbees. The Mullenbees, it was that guy, right? They literally were like 20 feet tall.

1:11:55Collin PalmerDude, it was the most, like as a young guy, I was like, holy crap, I need to figure out where this is coming from because I, you know, you're like, I've never seen anything like this.

1:12:05SpeakerNo, you know, Tom Hill Hayes, you know, Tom Hill from the Hayes, the Hayes fame.

1:12:09Collin PalmerI still have a pack of those seeds.

1:12:11SpeakerI wonder if those will pop. On the internet, I think Tom was one of the first really focused big plant cultivators where he was constantly putting up, you know, just look at, look what I'm doing. And it allowed people to understand what was possible when you gave a plant root space. And if you, if there's a really good book called Roots Demystified, And there was a guy in the Midwest that was extremely focused on roots.

1:12:41SpeakerAnd what he would do is he would excavate all plants and he would literally with the brush, brush away every bit of dirt on a root system. And his work has never been equaled. Like his obsession with root systems was phenomenal. But he, in one of the pages, they have a cannabis plant. And it was, you know, that cannabis tops out at around seven feet, almost eight feet in diameter in terms of its root.

1:13:07SpeakerAnd it goes down, you know, anywhere between 18 to like 32 inches. So it doesn't have anything really excessively deep, but the root mass of a plant left unimpeded is phenomenal. And once you understand what the plant can actually do if you don't limit it, and you can kind of see it if you're in a cube, because when you're running, like we use Rockwell, of course, as an example, or even that solo cup challenge that they just did online, right?

1:13:34SpeakerWhere they put a solo cup and said, how big a plant can we get? If you can maintain root zone health, And give it what it wants. You can trick the plant into being much larger than you would think you could get out of it. So out of a rock wall block, you can get a plant that's mind bending because we can now measure and manipulate what's taking place.

1:13:54SpeakerBut naturally, you're having to create such a large mass because you're having to mine from that mass all the different mineral and nutrients through microbial uptake.

1:14:05Collin PalmerWell, it reminds me, have you ever studied giant pumpkin growing before? Have you ever looked at people like Mark Wallace is a great example. I grew up actually around giant pumpkins and growing giant pumpkins. So this like really strikes a chord with me. You can target, right? Like this has been an age old thing and you can do this in many different ways. I mean, shoot, Russ, like your products, for instance, are a great example of this.

1:14:31Collin PalmerYou know, there's... There's a lot of ways to get a maximalist approach to the plant. It's really cool that you're going into this because people just don't realize that there's true science behind targeting certain growth stimulation and what you're after. In this case, it's larger plants. You know, in some cases it could be other other things. But but yeah, I encourage others to like look into Mark Wallace out there.

1:15:05Collin PalmerHe's even today. He's still got some really cool, some really great stuff to learn.

1:15:10SpeakerWhat's interesting about those giant pumpkins is they're they're specifically training. They're cutting off any other fruits. They're only having one. And then what they're doing is they actually bury the nodes. And so those roots grow at those locations in there so they can fertilize Thank you so much for joining us.

1:15:43SpeakerI'm not going to do it like I've been doing it because it's so unmanageable, especially if you have like high insect pressure like I do out here in the Midwest to try to like do integrated pest management practices without having to get like on a ladder and like do all this extra work. And so starting things later in the season. And doing like a bumper, like a bumper crop, like doing peppers and tomatoes beforehand is going to be my approach just for more manageable plants.

1:16:11SpeakerBut I totally understand why people were aiming for, you know, massive plants is because they were trying to maximize the amount of product that they could get in a time where prices were still high and numbers were low and numbers were low. Yeah, yeah, because anything over 99 was an instant fed case, right? Yeah. So what's up, boy? I haven't seen you in a while. How you been?

1:16:32Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWhat's up, Captain? Nice to see you. Love you guys so much. Good, you too. Super into the conversation.

1:16:40SpeakerWhile we were talking about the giant pumpkins, because you're sitting, I was researching the giganticism in Alaska.

1:16:47Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineYeah.

1:16:48SpeakerAnd it was about certain valleys have microbial content that's ultra efficient at conversion because it acclimated to the higher light cycles and then shorter seasons. And it creates this hyper efficiency and it's why you can grow all these mega cabbage and mega plants. But when they take that humus and they export it, they they wipe out the synergy in the microbiome and it doesn't effectively work. It only works in that location because of the totality of the relationship.

1:17:19Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineBecause the pressure and the atmosphere, the type of water that it gets, the raw materials that even create the microbes to begin with, like microbes are either living or dying. And they're either they're living when they have something they recognize to eat. So you can't just bring Alaskan humus to All of those things, you know, have to be, you know, have to be, you know, have to be, you know, have to be, you know, have to be, you know, have to be, you know, have to be, you know,

1:18:09Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineYou know, a bunch of soil or a giant compost pile and growing out of it that, you know, makes it huge, you know, so it's definitely genetics, which is same with herb, you know, like not every, you can't take a blackberry cush and grow it to 18 feet. Like it's just not going to work, you know what I mean? But and I'll just say this really quick story and I think this is important for the subject which our Irish horse farmer friend who's in his 80s now grew up in Ireland and they used to use reeds for their roof like they used reeds like grass roofs right you know and and and the reeds always grew a certain way because it was they were natural just out of the bogs and out of the water and the roofs would last like 80 years, you know, a long time.

1:18:53Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd then modern farming started to happen. And there was nitrate and nitrogen runoff that would go into the water. And all of a sudden, the reeds were getting like way taller. And it was just a natural thing because it was going into the water. And the reeds were all of a sudden, you know, two times taller. And everyone thought, wow, this is great. We have way more reeds now.

1:19:15Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineLike this is kind of like a little side thing that works. But in the end, the reeds didn't last as long. It was almost like their body like outgrew their genetic potential and it lost its natural strength to exist. And I find that with ganja, you have to start that herb like in January, you know, and or February, grow it inside, then acclimate it, bring it outside and then put it in a giant dirt, grow it huge.

1:19:45Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThank you so much for joining us today.

1:20:14Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineFrom a natural setting rather than the light, let it grow natural under the sun, let it grow up natural. And now we're just like it doesn't even use trellis. It grows itself perfect. It has its own natural defense. It doesn't attract Uh, uh, aphids and different things in the same way. Go ahead. If you have something to say. Okay. Yeah. And so that's just a thought, you know, sometimes we can outgrow a plant's potential and then all of a sudden make it susceptible to things.

1:20:49SpeakerOne of the things that you, that you had mentioned is the over fertilization with nitrogen. And that has been, there's been studies that show that that actually does attract, uh, Plant feeding pests. But also one of the things that I wanted to mention is there's a really intricate balance between nitrogen and calcium. And that has a strong effect on plant morphology and in calcium uptake. Really, really affects plant signaling and the overall health and the ability for that plant to be able to fight off pathogens and insects.

1:21:28SpeakerCalcium is like one of the most, it's one of the most used nutrients, even though it's considered a secondary nutrient. If you look at it from like a parts per million of what your solution should be and the actual highest PPM of nutrient in leaf tissue, it's calcium. Or it should be calcium. So that's one of the things too, like calcium is one of the most underrated nutrients.

1:21:55SpeakerYou can't really overdo it. You know, you can cause antagonisms with other... Would you define it as a mineral or a nutrient? Well, here's the thing with calcium. So calcium is typically a mineral form, right? So you have natural forms like gypsum, which is calcium sulfate. You have forms like basalt. You have calcium silica, which is elastinite. You have bone meals. You have calcium phosphates. I'm actually doing a full podcast on all these different forms.

1:22:20SpeakerYou even have things like dolomitic lime and high calcium agline. So different calcium sources will actually do different things and they have different solubilities. So you can actually stack calcium sources. So gypsum for the highest solubility, and it's also going to bring in sulfur, which is important for protein metabolism and terpene production, also for thiol production as well. And then you have things like the welastonite, which is calcium silica and calcium phosphate, which has a lower pH.

1:22:51SpeakerSo when you stack these different types of calcium sources, what you're allowing for is

1:23:17SpeakerImmediate solubility, mid-range solubility, and then long-term solubility. So you can stack these certain calcium sources, but you also have to be aware of what you're using. Because if you're using something like high calcium agline, that could increase your pH. And if you have problems with like phosphorus uptake or micronutrient uptake, or if you're already in a calcareous soil, then that could antagonize other nutrient uptake. So calcium's like a really...

1:23:46SpeakerDynamic element and it's always attached to something. So it's either attached to phosphorus, sulfur, or like a silicate mineral.

1:23:55Collin PalmerWell, it's funny, but it's that's great. You broke that down for everyone because, you know, one thing I was going to ask is, you know, the use of sulfur and how that incorporates with that, because we know that sulfur is a catalyst for enzymatic reaction.

1:24:10SpeakerSo protein metabolism mainly is what sulfur is used for protein metabolism. So it has to build up all of these proteins, which are essentially how they, you know, it forms these these metabolic pathways. And We know that crops and we see this in scientific literature and lavender is a really good example. So lavender, there's research that shows that the oil production that comes from lavender and the essential oils that come from lavender are better expressed under high sulfur conditions.

1:24:47Collin PalmerMm hmm. Yeah, I mean, there's there's slowly more and more evidence. There's some white papers out there that suggest it for, you know, being a precursor molecule. And, you know, it's really fascinating what we're learning. But, you know, again, there's more to unpack on it. I'm here for it to learn and understand more about it. I just know that in practice. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:25:40SpeakerThe majority of organic cultivators are getting their sulfur from things like their gypsum, from things like their Epsom salt, their magnesium sulfate, from things like potassium sulfate, and from micronutrient sulfate. So there's typically adequate sulfur levels in, or sulfate levels in organic agriculture. And then also like, you know, there's naturally sulfur in the earth as well, which is converted through microbes.

1:26:11Collin PalmerYeah, no, well distinct. Yeah, really good to break that down for everyone. It's, you know, these are things that are, you know, talked a lot in passing a lot, you know, and I feel like defining it is super important because people go out there and they make mistakes based on something they heard. So defining that is really everything, man. So thanks for doing that. Go ahead, Kayla.

1:26:36Collin PalmerWhat's up? Well, hi, everybody.

1:26:39SpeakerHappy New Year. Really love all you guys. And this conversation is just absolutely hits a really deep place in my heart because I feel like we're having the same conversation as like when I have a patient or a client that I work with and they come to me and they're like, okay, I've got these issues going on. And so I'm going to start to sort of relate human health, soil health, and plant health, because I feel like it's really important as we start entering into 2026, And we can see that the supplement business and vitamin business and herbal business and mineral business is skyrocketing, as well as a lot of now this information about how minerals and vitamins and nutrients for soil and for plants.

1:27:31SpeakerAnd now what I'm finding is that in the same way as plants uptake, humans uptake, So if we're going to be taking a medium and we're going to be adding a lot of different supplementation to it in the same way that I would say, oh, okay, well, somebody has this problem maybe with thyroid. I would just make up something or digestive issues. I could give them a whole slop of supplements and I could give all of these different reasons why all of these supplements work and the importance of the supplements.

1:28:01SpeakerBut I know that when that person takes it, they're going to only uptake 10 to 15%.

1:28:09SpeakerNow, if I am giving the same herbal remedies, and I'm giving the same nutrients and the same minerals, and I'm growing it out in a plant form, and then I'm telling somebody, hey, here's this very amazing nutrient rich tea, let's go ahead and now this tea has all of the minerals in it, all of the herbs in it, because I mean, all of the nutrients in it, and now they're gonna drink that.

1:28:37SpeakerThat person is going to be getting like 80 to 100% uptake of all of those nutrients. It's the same way as if you take nettle tea and you steep it overnight as opposed to you take apart those nettles and then you look at the minerals that are in those nettles and then we start supplementing each individual mineral. I just believe that our metabolism Is much more intelligent than the supplements or than the nutrients or than these concentrated values of nutrients or nutrition.

1:29:14SpeakerAnd I believe the same for plants. I believe the same for soil. And I believe that if you have another plant that's uptaking nutrients or minerals and And then you take down that plant and then you feed it to the soil. Then the soil has 100% ability to break that down. If we're just giving it like sulfur or we're giving it and I'm playing the devil's advocate here.

1:29:40SpeakerI'm playing like the health devil's advocate here. It takes a tremendous time for that soil to break down those pellets, those nutrients, even if it's totally micronized, even if it's 100% soluble, they'll tell you that it's 100% soluble. How much is the plant actually uptaking? How much can the plant uptake? And how much ability does the plant have to even be able to uptake? You know, you guys had said it before that plant obesity is one thing, but also, you know, And I just feel like now that we're entering into 2026, we have the ability to look at how we as humans uptake, how plants uptake, and then start utilizing more natural forms so that we know that the plant is gonna be getting 100% of what it needs.

1:30:33SpeakerSo if there's an intermediary, Like soil that's been there for a really long time is an intermediary because it's had a tremendous amount of carbon that's died on it. Plants have died on it. It's already maybe nutrient rich, maybe in a forest soil, old growth forest. You're going to see all of the nutrients are already in there totally available because it's come through plants. It's come through time.

1:30:59SpeakerIt's come through water raining down on it. It's come through, you know, vegetation dropping their leaves. So I just think that if we were to feed a whole side stripe of vegetation, all of the supplements that Brandon is talking about, and then we feed that to the plants, now we've got 100% uptake ability and we fed all of the supplements to another plant. Do you understand what I'm saying?

1:31:30SpeakerLike you could grow nettles out with those supplements. You could grow alfalfa out with those supplements. You can grow all different types of plants out with those supplements, chop them down, then feed them to the ganja. And now we're talking 100% viability, 100% nutrient uptake. Now the soil is super intelligent. I just wanted to bring that up as an option. You can never have just, like you can have a soluble nutrient solution.

1:31:56SpeakerYou can have things that are carbon chelated. But typically, you can never really have like soils that has everything is 100% available because you're basically fighting the laws of physics, thermodynamics, and you're fighting, you know, entropy. And so like these minerals and these things are going through natural processes. And so when you have something like you're talking about, I do agree with you. You do get a higher use efficiency when you have nutrients that are bound to.

1:32:31SpeakerAnd that is that is the difference, right? So when you have things that are bound to organic molecules, humic and folic acids, organic acids. What happens is the cell, the cells can actually acquire those more efficiently. However, nutrients will be liberated in soil. Sometimes they'll be mobilized and immobilized by microbes. Sometimes they'll get tied up. Sometimes they'll be converted into a precipitants or weakly binded particles that have to be I forget really a hundred percent of what's in your media, but you are correct in your thinking of the efficiency of delivering nutrients through organic organic means.

1:33:22SpeakerAnd that's one of the reasons why when I'm talking about plant nutrition, I'm usually associating it with things like fulvic and humic acids and organic acids because all those soluble organic complexes creates greater efficiency for uptake.

1:33:39SpeakerYeah, and the reason why I bring this up is because, you know, I work with a lot of pregnant women and we'll have their blood tests taken at the very beginning of their pregnancy. And then I can have some women in some areas of the world that only can take supplements. They're only taking supplements that you can buy from the store. They're going to be taking the most expensive supplements that they possibly can.

1:34:01SpeakerAnd then we're gonna test their blood at the third trimester to make sure that everything is all good. Or then I'm gonna have women who I'm feeding tea and I'm making sure that all of their nutrients are totally taken care of, that tea is steeping overnight. And during their entire pregnancy, They're only drinking teas as their supplementation. And now we look at the blood test results of these same women in their third trimester.

1:34:27SpeakerThe women who drank the tea are going to be fully viable with all of the minerals, all of the nutrition, all of the correct blood cell, you know, all of the red blood cell counts. And we're not going to be seeing the leukocytes. It's all going to be really good. So I'm just seeing now after 30 years of working with women and working with plants that I truly believe that if we have some intermediary of a plant that does the uptake of the non-soluble or of these hard minerals or of the hard nutrients, then that allows our body.

1:35:00SpeakerIt's the same as like you can take a conch. So I can't eat an entire old growth tree. I can't, I can't eat a whole old, old growth tree. You can take it and you can, you can, you know, chop it up and we could boil it and we could take all of the nutrients from it. But, but if you take a conch that's growing, grown on that old growth tree, a polypore, that's a concentrated value of that entire tree.

1:35:30SpeakerAnd now that becomes a hundred percent absorbable into my body as well as a hundred percent absorbable into the soil. So thanks. I think that's really important parts of how we absorb and how nutrients absorb.

1:35:45Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineSoil in a natural setting, there's millions and billions of allies. If you go to the store, like it's limited. It doesn't matter. Like you can get some of the things you can get 18 different calciums and 19 different nitrogens, but it's not the same as picking up. A crazy, fertile, natural soil. It's just different.

1:36:07SpeakerBut I also don't want to, you know, say that here we are. No, no. And I also want to say, you know, what we're trying to cure and what Brandon is working on and what a tremendous amount of people are working on is we have dead soil all over this world, horrific dead soil that big ag has taken. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:36:50SpeakerThese huge, in these huge big swaths of dead land that needs to be remineralized. And now it may be the only way that we can do that. So it's interesting to have these two different conversations of getting to the same place in different ways.

1:37:07Collin PalmerSet and setting. Yeah. And I think, you know, that's such awesome, powerful stuff, Kel. It's like, yes to all of it because it's so important, right? And, um, You know, it brings you back to the question for breeding. Like, how does your soil health correlate to seed health and longevity of the seeds? And then how does that pass that health on to the next person that's going to grow those out?

1:37:34Collin PalmerYou know, because I think that's ultimately everyone has a different way, but we all make seeds, right? But everyone has a different way to get to that end goal. And I often wonder Are seeds grown in environments that encompass these ideologies going to outlast those that don't? You know, and it's a question more than an answer. It's really, I don't know the answer, but I wonder, I think about that a lot, you know, because it's, I grow a ton of seeds and not all of them pop.

1:38:07Collin PalmerAnd man, there's some brand new packs out there that I've gotten, you know, so, you know.

1:38:12SpeakerThat's a good question, but like it, I saw the other day, Craig from Alpenglow, I gave him some stock from Pakistan, which is as dry a climate as one can envision. I mean, you're literally dehydrating just standing there, almost no precipitation, all water fundamentally from glacier flow, right? So like is this unbelievable amounts of water moving through the region, but none of it's coming from rainfall, it's coming from glacier melt.

1:38:42SpeakerSo as dry as it can be, they have almost no, you know, say, botrytis issues. But Craig's and Humboldt, and they have the seasonal fluctuation, but they took some stock that I gave them and they ran it out almost 10 months. So they just harvested it recently through all this inclement weather and all these issues and no problems whatsoever. And it was, you know, this is just, you know, my thoughts on it, but the plant, Communicated with that living soil of Craig's operation.

1:39:13SpeakerSo Craig and Mel, they're DEM crew. And the combination of that living media with seeds that had inherently always been chosen for survivability. So the Pakistani stock, it's not random. They maintain, like all females get left, but they call out males that they think are undesirable. And they only leave the males that they believe have the best traits to create the subsequent seed stock. And it's never one type of male.

1:39:48SpeakerIt's a range. So there's always this survivability concept. Because at the end of the day, cannabis was food. So before it was anything, it was food. You ate seed. And so for them, that is still a huge food source item in their diet. They utilize it to get the omegas and the healthy fats. I think that when you are talking about correct parental selection combined with healthy bottom end, you have the best seed stock.

1:40:40SpeakerYou have something that's going to transmit value over time. And I want to say a more broad base applicability. You can use it in more different situations because it has the genetic information present to be able to work with what's present.

1:40:57Collin PalmerHas that intelligence.

1:40:59SpeakerYeah. I have a question for you guys. You know, In working with children and babies and mothers and generations, you know, one of the one of the things that's really put forward is, you know, old midwives always talk about teeth and children's teeth. And they say that if you have good teeth, or if you have bad teeth, that it's from seven generations back. That our teeth are from our seven generations ago.

1:41:29SpeakerSo seven generations ago, your genetics, if they were good, you've got good teeth. If they ate well, then you're good. And if you did, and if they didn't, then, you know, you're not going to have very good teeth. So I'm wondering about that sort of genetic drift over a long period of time. I got fucked up teeth.

1:41:50SpeakerI have fucking straight English teeth. You know what I mean?

1:41:56SpeakerSo I'm really interested in what you all think about, like, if we're, if our teeth are seven generations, how do we feel about our ganja seeds or, or how many generations does it take to get them healthy? Any ideas?

1:42:10Collin PalmerI mean, Kev, you, you can answer this really well. Cause you ran a nursery. I mean, it's, I mean, I seen it in my, as I call my little world of, of Yeah, I think it does. I think it's I think it does affect it. I think environment affects all the way down as you pass it along. It's why.

1:42:28SpeakerOh, yeah, that's that's epigenetics. I think nutrition is a big player, too. Yeah. Oh, guaranteed. Guaranteed. It's it's but it's picking up nutrition. So plants that evolve in low nutrition evolve better uptake. But they also. All of these things restrict ultimate expression because they have less to work with, but they produce really interesting metabolites as a defense mechanism to offset what they didn't get. So, I mean, ultimately the plants, a bioreactor, and it comes down to what was it reacting to?

1:43:04SpeakerAnd I think that that's one of the issues we have is that it's kind of like the story of sour diesel where the sour isn't allowed anymore. And fundamentally, it doesn't need to be because we've gone so many generations away from its original source material that it no longer has to provide that signature. So at some point, the parents had a need to be that loud. And then they imparted it to the progeny.

1:43:33SpeakerBut each time we clone it, it still picks up epigenetic influence from the cloning process. And even TC, That provides a whole nother set of stimulus through the hormonal formulations that gives us change as well. So I don't think that when you get down to it, there's never a single set point. It's always a moving point through time. And because the plant's alive, it adapts and follows.

1:44:00SpeakerAnd I think that for us, like in cannabis, that we've been doing it for a long time, you're just grateful you got to experience it. You can say, I remember when it would stink through a cement wall. And that's not the case anymore. It doesn't mean that it didn't happen, but the idea that you're going to get it to repeat isn't necessarily true either.

1:44:19Collin PalmerYeah. Things have a window. Yeah. So I have a question about Hunter. So like, you know, I've been watching you from afar. You've been, you've been kind of quietly doing your thing and. You know, you've been building your beds for I don't even know how many years. What do you what are you doing up there in Maine? I know because you have a different environment, like you can even go get lobster shells and you can go to the coast and do things that, you know, a lot of us wish we could do.

1:44:46Collin PalmerWhat's kind of what's working for you up in Maine?

1:44:50HunterUh so the property that we were on was was logged like about 15 years before we got onto the property and it was pretty much a clear cut of most of the good sources of carbon obviously for the previous owners to sell and then flip the property and essentially it was just kind of forgotten about and um the Best area for us to cultivate on has like no carbon or real like what you would call soil that you'd want to see so it wasn't very suitable for any type of agriculture so um We went with Hugo Culture to build up, build a carbon on top of basically like clay and kind of mineral rock, which was all we're pretty much working with.

1:45:36HunterThere's like big pieces of ledge through my field and stuff. You can't see it or tell anymore. But yeah, we also, just to comment on a little bit of the previous conversation, we still operate a plant count here. So I am growing huge plants with robust root systems. And growing them as big as I can, because without that plant count, I would pretty much need an adult use 10,000 square foot permit to do the same thing I'm doing now in the medical program.

1:46:12HunterWe really focus on the root systems and keeping them healthy because we need these plants to get big to be able to hit numbers to fill our space and I think um you know it's all just about keeping healthy plants regardless of if you're in old growth soil or you're in brand new crappy soil or you know however you're doing it and if you're using supplemental style nutrition as well as overall soil uh you know microbial value and just general nutritional value of some of these soils that have been around uh it's really just focusing on plant health um and whatever type of system you're in whatever style you're growing and same with these with you know with seeds um so really focusing on all the elements together is kind of what we're doing uh we have animals so we're working on uh We've been doing a lot of research on how we're going to be able to do that.

1:47:08HunterWe've been doing a lot of research on how we're going to be able to do that. We've been doing a lot of research on how we're going

1:47:28HunterWe kind of take little bits and pieces from everything, but we've been really diving into a lot what Brandon is talking about with the soil chemistry. At first, we were really focusing on soil biology. And that's really what kind of got us into the overall land management style that we're using. But now we're really learning a lot more about the physical chemistry of soil structures. And then further than that, the actual nutritional values balance and how to restore that within our parameters of natural farming and our kind of ethos here, which we've taken so much knowledge from the Dragonfly Earth Medicine family.

1:48:16HunterAnd then have kind of used a little data driven approach here with soil testing to kind of learn more about soil chemistry. And honestly, those two Those two worlds colliding for us is what has really created true soil health and plant health and animal health. Going back to Kelly, how it's all connected. It's not just plant health. It's soil, plant, animal, human health is all together. So we're really just learning as much as we can.

1:48:44HunterI've been a little quiet so far because, like, honestly, I'm just so inexperienced in comparison to most of you guys with breeding and everything. Trying to learn and sponge up as much as I can. I've already learned a lot just kind of sitting here listening. And I just bred for the first time in an indoor scenario. And so far, the seeds are just not as good. Not necessarily the results from the phenohunt we just did, but the quality of the seeds, the size of the seeds, you can just look at them.

1:49:21HunterI actually remade a few of the same crosses Just to be redundant and have more. And it's like half the size. And they don't pop quite as fast. And I think that it's tough to beat a system that is more natural, especially with plant, just overall plant health, which I think will then correlate directly to the seed health. We're just kind of working with the laws we have and the land we have.

1:49:54HunterWe're pretty limited in both of those things. But a really beautiful thing about Maine is that we have these older laws because once you start getting these square footage licenses, basically it goes wreck and you got to be You know, you're basically playing with playing in the big leagues. Here in Maine, we've been able to really keep our medical program so far. And yeah, that that 99 plant law like that was Maine's that that was Maine, you know, people weren't signing up for any program.

1:50:28HunterThey're just running their 99 plants for a long, long time here. And we still do that for the most part. So Yeah, just to touch on everything I've heard, you know what I mean? That's kind of the general consensus here is just focusing on plant health without really limiting ourselves into some box. There's so many different elements to plant health that we need to keep learning about and plant nutrition and delivering the nutrients to the soil for the plant to access from the soil, you know, is...

1:51:02HunterWe've had to learn.

1:51:21HunterNumber one, how to get that nutrition at the PPMs we need, whether it's calcium like Brandon was just talking about, that's extremely, extremely key for our success from what we've found. And doing it in as natural way as possible, right? So like with compost sources and mining the minerals from the existing soil and trying to really like encompass all of those natural ways, but also with measuring the soil and making sure we're hitting those marks.

1:51:54HunterBecause if you don't have the plant nutrition in that media well before the plant needs to access it, You're going to get problems. You're going to get crop crop loss. You're not going to have terpene expressions to the to the level that we need to see them. So we've really just been trying to learn as much as we can from all these other people that have kind of paved the way and plug and play into our system to just see what actually produces results.

1:52:29HunterBecause realiztically, The cannabis side of our situation is our cash crop. That is really what has allowed us to focus on the homestead and raising animals and has funded that. And so, yeah, I'm just grateful for the plant so much to have it provide for us to learn and play around with all these different methodologies. And yeah, from what I've seen so far, nothing's beating outdoor full season seed production.

1:53:04HunterNothing is coming even close for us. Not sure if that's what everyone else has found or not, but we're pretty novice with the seed making. We've only made like two lines so far. So just trying to learn.

1:53:15Collin PalmerYou've been winning. You've been out there selecting and winning cups, you know, so something's obviously working.

1:53:25HunterI think that's a key with seed making.

1:53:33HunterBefore we've ever grown, I was just a passionate consumer. And without understanding... So, you know, having moms and, you know, all that energy that that takes to have like 70 to 100 plus different, you know, moms that are happy and healthy that you can clone off of. I just never understood like how people are losing these plants. With planting grow experience, I was like, yo, no, that's the best shit.

1:54:01HunterLike it's gone. They're like, yeah, it's gone. And so when we started, I... Really wanted to make sure that didn't happen to us. And I look back and I'm like, that was a great decision because we don't lose plants. They got 100 to 200 different plants and we're growing about 20 to 30 of them. So when we started breeding, the library was there to create. We had the female.

1:54:27Collin PalmerOne thing I want to mention for everyone out here, you know, I've been watching Hunter online a little bit and I see when you post your data, That's you're doing the real work by doing that. I just want that to be said out loud because not everyone understands that each plant has a unique potential and taking that time to address that Most people just mix wash, you know, like I got to get it done.

1:54:53Collin PalmerYou know, I got to sell this thing or whatever. But you're trying to find the magic in the mundane. And that's what it's about, man. You know, so we need, you know, keep pushing on those things. That's what's going to take you to the place that I know you can go. It's what I do. I was doing that in the late 90s, dude. Like I was like washing each individual one because I was like, why am I getting like 1%?

1:55:18Collin PalmerThis is insane. Like I was just like, you know, like hitting walls nonstop and I didn't have anyone to ask. You know, now you have so many peers around you to like call and talk to and look at their work online. And that's it's amazing that we have this community to talk to now. I would have died for that, man. Like it My version of that was like DMing Marcus on Overgrow being like, yo, I'm going to do this.

1:55:42Collin PalmerAnd we would get on True Stoners chat and talk with like four other guys and talk through like what I was going to do. And that was like the best we could do, you know. So, you know, fast forward to today, it's like we have this amazing opportunity to share this knowledge and, you know, kind of come together in a way that, you know, It's so open.

1:56:02Collin PalmerHow rad is it? I really respect your work and I think it's awesome that you're taking the steps to do the right thing. It's difficult to just be disciplined. Good on you, man. That's super rad. Thank you. Thank you, appreciate it.

1:56:22Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAlso, time to mention the Culture Cup, you know.

1:56:26Collin PalmerYeah, I was going to, I want to give him a chance to talk, yeah, Culture Cup, and you're bringing it to NorCal, I think that's something you should talk about for just like two seconds. Yeah, go. Yeah, so go.

1:56:37HunterYeah, so just a little brief history. The Culture Cup was just a group of us here in Maine trying to push each other. I'm a very competitive person. I wrestled my whole life and wrestled in college, so I... I have like a, I push myself personally, but I really like to be pushed by peers. And I think there's a lot of negativity that people kind of take out of competition, but there's so much more positive to take out of it.

1:57:09HunterAnd it really is just like you versus you, you know? So we wanted to get a group of good people together and see who has the best hash and hopefully learn How to perfect that process to make it accurate and be able to use the feedback to just get better, you know, so. That's what it was. It was just a private event. We had like a potluck party and we sat down and pretty much ego style, ego clash style, just passed the jars around, which at the time was kind of the only really bigger competition that was out there.

1:57:44HunterSo we used that as a model and went from there. And fast forward, it's turned into this, you know, countrywide event. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:58:08HunterUm, it was kind of like, let's mash it all up. Let's get some reggae music. And we ended up, uh, last, last year we had Barrington Levy come. We had a really successful event where the public was allowed to come for pretty much the first time. Um, and we definitely had a group of some of the best makers and growers in the country in the hash sector, uh, 100%.

1:58:30HunterSo fast forward to now, um, There is no real Cali competition in my eyes that is really hitting the mark. And we essentially just got the call from all the homies like, you guys got to come out here and do this. And me and Matt, my business partner, were just kind of laughing like, are we about to do this in two months? Like, and we did. So January 22nd and 23rd.

1:58:55HunterIn Hoplin, California, we'll be having the Culture Cup, Mendocino County, and very honored to step into the space. California is like the birthplace of all this. So I'm a little nervous, but very, very excited to bring everyone together out there and just celebrate what we've sacrificed for. And with California and the regulations, people have just been kind of voided. And they feel like they don't have an outlet.

1:59:28HunterThey can hardly, you know, they can't grow as much. You know, they can't get a, you know, a permit at least. You know, there's people doing their thing regardless, obviously. But it's become kind of a hash maker's world out there because it's a lot fucking easier to just build a little mini lab and just... Basically taking people's material and enter it all over the country. And we've been seeing all these hash makers basically taking trophies from the farmer in my eyes.

1:59:58HunterAnd so we're here to kind of switch that back to where it should be and kind of bring the vibe, a little East coast vibe to the West coast and, and just cherish and focus on the grower. So. You know, if anyone is going to be around on those dates, feel free to reach out and we'd love everyone to be a part of it. So what are those dates again?

2:00:25HunterJanuary 22nd and 23rd, Thursday, Friday.

2:00:29Collin PalmerYeah, it's going to be epic, man. I tried to get him hooked up with some friends in Ukiah, but it's just the farm didn't work out. But that maybe in the future, man, that would be...

2:00:38HunterThat's the ideal spot. Yeah, that's, that's where I want to throw it. I would, I didn't want to just.

2:00:44Collin PalmerYou could stay in, like people could stay there and it's got that. Yeah, it's pretty magical. But, uh, so yeah, that's cool. You know, and welcome Ryan. Nice to see you, brother. Um, always good to see you. And I was waiting when you wondering when you'd come through. Um,

2:01:01Collin PalmerBut yeah, you know, I like that you're what you're doing. And, you know, I appreciate that, you know, you're pushing, pushing things forward in a meaningful way. And it's, it's honorable, man. There's a lot of people just trying to throw comps and, you know, do exactly what you're saying. Anyone takes in material, enters it from any farmer and says it's theirs. It's like, come on.

2:01:24Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI don't like that. That happened to us in Prague when we were there last. Someone bought our hash and then entered it into the cup and won. And we were the hash judges. We were the hash judges. No one had hash like we had. It was so odd.

2:01:47SpeakerBut it was really cool because it was the first cup that we ever won that we never entered.

2:01:53Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineBut I also wanted to say I love- Can the trophy say that?

2:01:57Collin PalmerI mean, that would be brilliant.

2:01:59SpeakerIt was awesome. I was like, wow, we won. We've never entered a cup. We totally won. So it was really awesome.

2:02:07Collin PalmerThe best cup we've ever entered. First place trophy.

2:02:12SpeakerAnyway, also, also Hopland is where you guys are having it, you know, want to say to everybody else. I just wanted to say to everybody who's listening and people who are maybe thinking about coming or thinking about, you know, joining you all, we're definitely going to be trying to make it there. You're probably going to 99% we're going to come down and be with you guys. Number one, because we want to support what you all are doing, Hunter.

2:02:39SpeakerIt's absolutely incredible. I feel like it's really raising the bar. And number two, you know, supporting Ned and those guys who are in Hopland, really creating this. We've already had several plant medicine sessions there with a lot of the community. We've been in and out of there and it's just, It's such a feel-good place. So anybody who's thinking about maybe coming, definitely make it happen.

2:03:05Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineOkay, let's just say this. The setting, it's a 25, 30-year-old biodynamically set up space. It's 25, 30 years into like this magical thing that was created. So just to walk into something and say, what? Because you always walk into farms like, dude, I just created this. Check it out. It's perfect. You're like, sweet. Like, I want to see it in 20 years because shit changes and everything grows and things crack and you had mistakes you had to fix.

2:03:35Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd so it's really cool to see what systems took off, what systems didn't. And so I love the setting. We didn't enter the cup yet. We might, but we weren't super confident because we had already Made a bunch of hash that we already saw. So we were just kind of like, ah.

2:03:53SpeakerIs it too late to enter? Can you tell everybody, is it too late to enter?

2:03:58HunterNo. Well, Rosin is full. That's really easy to fill. No, we got the melt.

2:04:05Collin PalmerWe got the melt. Is it melt and Rosin only, guys? Is that the two categories? No SIFT or anything like that?

2:04:14HunterNo, no SIFT. You kind of need your own. Thank you so much for joining us today.

2:04:47HunterThere's a lot to gain from it. Not only, I think the main thing is focusing on the feedback from your peers. And our job is to make sure that feedback's actually accurate because that's a big issue in the competition scene is you're just like, how the did that happen? It doesn't add up. And then you don't really want to take that home and use it, you know, to better yourself.

2:05:14HunterSo we, I think a lot of these competitions, one, aren't thrown by growers, hashers slash competitors themselves, which is like, that's the obvious issue. Like there's a disconnect. They're throwing an event and they're focusing on like the sessions and the dinners and uh you know the celebrity judges and and all of these other things that realiztically you could get all right and then screw up something as simple as the scorecard being terrible and not reflecting the winner and so we're we just try to let all that other stuff like like you know that's secondary and we're just we're gonna focus on Making it accurate, getting the best competitors that we can find, including the unknown.

2:06:04HunterAnd that's what we really work very hard on getting is the goal is to get all those big names that everyone hears who wins and put them up against two by four tent growers in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. And, and, uh, You know, we've had so far the three champions at our competition have beaten big names like the Real Cannabis Chris and Tricone Tortoise. Like they all lost to most cases a hobby grower, which we all know it's hard to match that passion when you're running a business from it versus it's for fun.

2:06:41HunterLike so the passion we want to shine through, um, And we want, you know, I don't care if it's big or small growth. That doesn't mean anything to me. I just want to make sure that they're all represented and we'll see how the cards fall, you know, and that's kind of our goal. We just want to get the best people Thank you so much for joining us.

2:07:28HunterThank you so much for joining us.

2:07:56Collin PalmerSo awesome. You know, like like letting people experience the culture of the of the region, I thought was like a really nice touch that you guys had and lobster rolls and like just stuff that, you know, when you're coming from Cali, it trips you out to like be like, I'm eating a lobster roll and oysters in the half. So like what? You know, I think that's pretty awesome that you guys are thinking in those ways.

2:08:19Collin PalmerAnd I, you know, I encourage those that are looking at the comp and the event to go. I mean, I, I had, you know, my, I lost my father last year. So I appreciate you reaching out to me at the time, but I just was in a wild head space and needed time. But I'd love to be a part of it in the future. So we'll talk more about that.

2:08:41Collin PalmerBut yeah, Hunter, man, we love you, man. So keep pushing and just keep doing your thing. It's really great. I love that you're making seeds now. I can't wait to see more of that and more selections. Because it takes, like you're saying, the best grower to me is the guy with just a few plants that tends to that every day. And that's very hard to be that guy.

2:09:05Collin PalmerYou know, I'll just be real. I think you're saying it well. You'll lose.

2:09:09SpeakerI love that he said chemistry is more important than biology.

2:09:15SpeakerAll right. Yes.

2:09:16HunterI'm a chemist, man. I think they're both just intertwined, obviously.

2:09:23Collin PalmerYeah. Time out. Kelly wants to get in.

2:09:26SpeakerYeah, I'm not kidding around. I'm just like thinking that, you know, chemistry or biology is just Mother Nature's chemistry, right? So it's... Thank you for watching.

2:10:02Collin PalmerMuch love, everybody.

2:10:05SpeakerI grew some of that Pakistani land race that you gave me last time we saw each other in Missouri. I have a toe to that. I never trimmed it up or anything, but it's definitely different than what you typically see.

2:10:21Collin PalmerWhat would you describe it as? Like what, what, like morphology wise or, or like explain, what do you mean by different?

2:10:28SpeakerI was, I was actually expecting something short and squat. It was quite the opposite. And this was actually, this particular plant was grown in probably the least fertile part of the yard, but it still was like 16 feet tall, really lengthy. It had a very low leaf to calyx ratio. But it also had really long spacing in between the flower sets. And what I found interesting about this, it wasn't very potent as far as the terpenes, like the way that they represent themselves.

2:11:03SpeakerIt's kind of like a peppery incense. But the actual flavor of the smoke is completely full-bodied and it almost tastes like Nag Champa.

2:11:17Collin PalmerIt reminds me of PIF a little bit, you know, like PIF's kind of like that, where like, you're like, yeah, this is like corner.

2:11:23SpeakerIt reminded me of like the African haze, which was, which was really interesting to me because it came from Pakistan.

2:11:30Collin PalmerWell, you know, the thing I, cause I keep going back to this idea of PIF and I'm, I'm like always thinking about it and I'm like, man, there's like so many different things that were passed around at the time that were called this and you know, what defines this and how do we really, um, You know, how do we know, you know, all the origins of it?

2:11:50Collin PalmerAnd it's very confusing. You know, I think there's a lot of opinions flying around that say it's this or that, but I'm pretty sure it's all pretty fucking good, right?

2:12:01SpeakerTimes, and I always smoke on PIF or these African haze varieties, which is, I think, what most of them are, because they all... Have like a similarity, although they're they'll have, you know, different expressions of different, you know, terpene profiles. They're not all exactly the same. They do have this almost like similar essence, which is more of that, like that, that like perfumey thing that I get in this right here.

2:12:30Collin PalmerThat's cool. Yeah, I mean, I love, like, I'm always searching for things that are just totally unassuming. It's, it's, you know, I've been, when I, when Earzang started sending me stuff way back, like, not way back, maybe seven years ago or something, I started immediately going through all that stock and I was finding interesting stuff. But it was, it was very, it was very assuming. It was very short and squat.

2:12:54Collin PalmerIt wasn't like what you expressed, Brandon. Like, it wasn't this, like, It just didn't do this. It didn't, it had no elongated branches. It was very short and squat. I didn't really find anything that was worth keeping for myself. And I did make some out crosses, but I didn't, again, I didn't find the lines that I ran. It would take a long time to find something worth continuing working with, if that makes sense.

2:13:22SpeakerI grew the Pakistani from crickets and cicada, the Peshawar open population pollination. Yeah. And, you know, kind of piney, cherry, very green plant, tall plant and made a couple of crosses. But I phased it out just because there's so much other stuff. But and the library is at about 300 right now. And I just kind of got to choose what I can keep and what I can't keep because I'm limited to space.

2:13:49SpeakerBut I have grown. various you know quote unquote land races and they're everywhere depending on who you source them from you know trident seeds inoculate the west land race mafia a a person personal sending it to you you know we're talking about uh guam earlier they sent me some stuff from saipan way back and that stuff was super intersex you know and hermaphrodite tendencies it was very piney you know we we might say like a jack type strain you know and and and they're everywhere like i've grown Land Race Mafia, the faction, you know, I've met them in Barcelona and they gave me like Hopar Valley and this, this and that.

2:14:28SpeakerAnd I brought it back. And like you guys are saying, I'm thinking I'm going to get some squat Afghan Bubba type strain. Nope, complete opposite. Tall, piney, like, so it's just like, and then I've grown stuff from Inoculate the West, who's a sorcerer, probably like a second party, third party sorcerer. And he gave me like Balk and Mazar and, and, uh, Tarkush Khan and Cash and all these regions.

2:14:53SpeakerAnd I just kind of just skimmed through them really fast. And those were more up the rubbery, earthy, dirty, Aromas as opposed to everything else, right? So it's all like, like, I just take it from who I got it from. And I hate to like respect respectfully with a grain of salt. I take it, you know, figuratively. And I just kind of take it for what it is and push it forward for what it was.

2:15:18SpeakerAnd I never try to make it more than what it actually is on a physical level when I hold it and smell it and sometimes smoke it. But yeah, that's my experience with Pakistanis. And even we were talking about Guam and and and and you know regions on that side I went to Guam to go judge a cup and there's a magnificent growers and hash makers there and uh they're like you know the the crowd that I was in to go judge because I was invited they didn't really care for the land race stuff you know they're like dude we need rainbow belts like we don't care we need honey banana and rainbow belts in it and it's like ah it kind of hurts but every you'll find a person here and there that hyper focuses on that type of stuff but they're they're hard to find and That's why, you know, you know, I love it, man.

2:16:03SpeakerGenetics are fun. But yeah, just wanted to touch on land races and Pakistanis and crickets and cicadas. I grew there, Peshawar, Pakistani open population. I grew the African haze from Bronson Farms. He sent me his cut. That one was really nice. I've grown Cuban black haze. They sent me the cut back in 2018 and Thank you for watching.

2:16:46Speakercrowd like i'm talking about the vanity crowd almost respectfully you know like they are taking a tune to the piff aromas like doja's platforming it and he's probably like the pinnacle as far as you know other factions are concerned and they're like oh check out this haley's comment you know i was talking down on the haze but not all haze is the same and this is more of a frank incense sandalwood myrrh type of haze as opposed to like a piney type of haze And, and yeah, like it's, it's getting traction.

2:17:13SpeakerAnd to me, it's all like, told you so, you know, like everything's great for what it is and everyone's quick to disregard a variety. And if it didn't exist, even Blue Dream, I would be wanting it that much more tomorrow. But like, I don't disregard a strain as much as I might. Kid Around, like all these land races, I don't know why I grow them. And this pine, oh no, please don't give me no pine.

2:17:36SpeakerBut as much as I might joke about it, I love them all. And I love to grow them more than I love to smoke them sometimes. And that's just my relationship with breeding and seed making or whatever you might want to call it.

2:17:48Collin PalmerYou know, it shows, man, like the things that you're doing is, you know, you're you're you're you're going head first into passion and you're thinking about it in dynamic ways, like the way you're speaking about PIF, you know, PIF was like the fabric of like my growing up. Like it was just the same as sour. It was just like PIF or sour. What do you want? You know, in New York City.

2:18:10Collin PalmerSo it was these, you know, When you're thinking about growing things and looking at your library that you guys, you have specifically Masonic, like you've got a lot of, like I see you, you even, didn't you have a Tom Hill Hayes? Like just hanging out. I have it. I have it.

2:18:26SpeakerIt's there right now. It's literally there.

2:18:30Collin PalmerIt's like, I love that. You know, you're just like, oh yeah, it's just like, I don't know, it's in somewhere back here. Let me grab it.

2:18:35SpeakerHere it is.

2:18:36Collin PalmerBut it's, that's amazing. It's, you know, like I said, that's the beat maker scene. You're like, I got that somewhere in a folder. Oh, there it is. And I think that's really cool that you're able to find that niche for yourself. And, you know, back to the piff, you know, someone mentioned in the comments, it's a general thing. It's a general flavor profile and it's not a singular plant, you know, and I think that's one thing that should be said out loud for those that are listening so they understand that PIF is not a singular plant.

2:19:10Collin PalmerIt is, there's many plants that make up that kind of flavor profile. So, yeah.

2:19:17SpeakerIt started as one though.

2:19:19Collin PalmerIt did. I was just thinking that in my head. What do you think that was, though? What do you think that one plant was, in your opinion?

2:19:30SpeakerYou know, they call it like the Cuban black haze, but I think that what you had was it, because it matches chronologically the release of haze genes. And so I think that almost all this stuff is really, you know, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Colombians. And then what we did is we added Afghani, Pakistani into it to bring the time down because we're obsessed with more efficient. And, and you can maintain the profile.

2:19:56SpeakerOh, I love it. Look at that. I love it. Two fairy coins. So, so you can maintain the profile, but I don't think, and I haven't experienced it yet. I don't care how many people tell me. When you start to chop the time out, you start to chop out certain components of the high. A hundred percent. Right. Like it's just it's it just is. I don't care how you bend it or how much you add to reduce.

2:20:22SpeakerYes, it's close, but it's never that upper limit. I know it comes down to what an individual wants, but I just don't see it. I don't see people taking 110 and turn it into 70 and telling me it's the same as 110. What do you think? You know what's interesting that you say that? I got to fire back a little bit because it's in my personal experience and I've smoked, you know, I've grown out ties and land race and this and that and I've grown long flowering varieties and they do not affect me any differently than...

2:20:53SpeakerThank you for watching. See you next time.

2:21:12SpeakerThe way that I experience there's either like it's going to be kind of either sedative for me where it's like oh I get drowsy and I go to sleep or it's or it's stony where it's like head stony and most of the stuff that I smoke is more like on the the head head high type you know stone but I've never experienced either something that somebody's given to me or that I've personally grown myself long flowering varieties that had Thank you.

2:21:39SpeakerThank you. Thank you.

2:22:07SpeakerBut for the way my body responds to it, the clarity of that longer flowering, it holds me, it keeps me satiated longer. I don't want to smoke again as quickly.

2:22:19SpeakerYeah, the hazes tend to do that. You know, one thing that I wanted to mention here is that absolutely out of all of our 30 years of breeding, The strains that have absolutely been the varietals, the varieties, the individuals, the individuals, that's what Ryan wants to hear. The individuals that have absolutely been the highest quality without a doubt. is the ones that we're sharing. It's the seeds that go all the way to Maine, that go then all the way up to Alaska, and then all of the people who are holding on to either a pot, Or a seed, they're revering it.

2:23:06SpeakerThey get it in the mail and it's just like, they call you immediately, dude, I got them in the mail and everybody's all excited. And then that seed then is grown out for a whole season. And then you say to, then that person is like, oh man, I know that I want to get it into Jersey of all places. I know this great place. And then they get the seeds.

2:23:26SpeakerAnd then It's like become some five-year project. And then by the, yeah, Indiana. And every person that gets it only wants to make it better in the environment that they're at. And that hype and that feeling and that connection and that vibration and frequency to the seed, I can definitely say after all of these years, The ones that have held the strongest and the truest and the ones that I always want to smoke and always want to go for are the ones that have had many breeders that we know and love.

2:24:01SpeakerSoil, hands on it.

2:24:04Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI was just going to say on the Masonic what he was talking about. Another person to shout out in California is Michael Cagu from Coastal Seeds in Santa Cruz. He has a ton of really amazing old genetics and I love having these guys in my life because you, the problem is that it's all our, our history is oral, right?

2:24:34SpeakerBecause anything was recorded, you, you, you, you risk it all kinds of, what do they call it? Indicia. That's, that's the correct term for it in terms of legal shit. Indicia was found. And Having the ability to talk to these people, I love having the relationships with them, with Jim Melfranc and Seattle Gregg and Coastal. I'm 60, right? And so being able to touch the people that are 80, it's just critical so that you at least can understand the mindset, its approach and how they viewed it.

2:25:08SpeakerAnd it lets us kind of transfer an appreciation. Otherwise, It gets lost and it doesn't influence people. Not everyone has to care about what I care about. That's not important to me. It's just that if I can hold some information and I can transfer to those that do find value, you become that link in a chain of what I call cannabis culture. It's appreciation. And like we were talking about, Masonic was talking about all those regions.

2:25:36SpeakerWhat tripped me out about Afghanistan, Pakistan is that the region has an impact. It has its own terroir, but it's not a variety. They all share genes and genes are moving all over constantly, right? So, I mean, I got partners that are Iranian that go into Afghanistan to cultivate and then go back to Iran to live. And they were constantly, jeans are moving back and forth. And each village I talked to in Pakistan, I asked them, is this your line?

2:26:03SpeakerAnd they said, no, no, we constantly share with each other so that we're always improving the quality of the product. And so you have to think of those names as more an impact from an area if you wanted to buy a finished product more than, It's unique to that situation. Each farm will have subtleties. It'll pick up influences from soil. It'll pick up influences from native plants.

2:26:26SpeakerSo you'll see the plant responding to the environment. So when you pick it up, you're seeing the response. But what I learned was when you regrow that plant, we're not having the same stimuli to create that metabolic response.

2:26:40Collin PalmerWe create our own. You know, it's funny when he was bringing up the regions, you bring up Iran, Iranian stuff. The best stuff I've ever ran was literally from Iran, like literally the best because it was selected. And it was like you said, it wasn't necessarily from Iran, but it came from the person that sent it to me, you know, collected it from an Iranian collector.

2:27:05BubblemanAnd

2:27:05Collin PalmerYou know, it just had the best resin. It was unbelievable. I still have the seeds. I still have a bunch of them.

2:27:12SpeakerWhen I went to Mexico recently to visit my uncles, turns out they're farmers of pot, I found out recently, and they've been doing it for a while. I'm all like, what's your, you guys got any like regional stuff? They're like, dude, we want what you guys have. And the only shit that we have is some stuff we call Lachetti, which is the cherry. And they gave me some, and it reminded me like, it had like, Thank you for joining us.

2:27:57SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

2:28:18SpeakerWhen I went on a personal level, they didn't have something that I was looking for. I was looking for something like, oh, we've had this since you were a baby, you know, like, nope. Now we got La Cherry and we're looking for LCG. And it was like, oh, that's that's the story. I could imagine that being a reoccurring theme all around the world. Mexico's got a phenomenal culture of smoking though.

2:28:40SpeakerLike we're talking, you know, Asia, it's more hash culture that we kind of bastardized into smoking culture. We took the plants, but we didn't take the production of hash until 30, 35 years later. Right? Like when the hash culture developed, it uses that location as its primary source to extract from. But we took hash plants that aren't meant to be smoked as flour and we smoked them and grew them as flour because it fit the American consumption model.

2:29:10SpeakerBut the American consumption model is really Mexican. Where they're there, that's who we got our most influence from. When they came in back into the US in like 1910, they brought with them marijuana, the culture, and we adopted that form. And if you, there's collectors in Mexico. I got a guy named Brian that I talk to all the time, and he's been in Mexico for probably 30 plus years, but he might have 40 different lines that he collected throughout the entire country that reflect regional specificity and genes that have been sitting there.

2:29:43SpeakerI mean, Cortez is the one that brought the hemp into Mexico, right? So you're talking 500 years of acclimatized development, selection, and a culture that likes to smoke. And I think that in the dream world we live in of herb, if each country could do some sense of preservation, then what you would be able to develop is really the experience you want because so much of the work that we think is subpar is subpar because post-harvest handling.

2:30:15SpeakerThat's the difference. That's what we have different. We have an ability with technology to do stuff that none of these countries can in terms of production where cannabis was rarely sourced. I was working in Colombia, same deal, the Americas, Asia. They just don't have the resources that we use to create the product that's current today. But The ability to work on what they do have the ability to do and refine the process would allow us to go to Mexico and experience stuff from Oaxaca, stuff from regions down, you know, next to Panama.

2:30:58SpeakerWhen you're getting down into that lower area, about like 13 latitude. So, you know, Mexico is, you know, 30 to 13. Its gut is stripped, it's unreal. And it's the same with Pakistan, where you looked at the product and you're like, man, I wish we could have somebody come in and just do an extraction using modern technology so that we could see what it looks like from our perspective, because that's what we're most accustomed to now.

2:31:27Collin PalmerYeah, no, I think you're bringing up some really valid stuff. I know Rob Clark brought this up. Many times, I mean, he said this to me when he, Mojave and him visited my lab in California when I had it in Van Nuys. It was, I, you know, he, he mentioned that he's like, you have to remember, man, like they just put this stuff outside and then they let it age and they age and they age and then they bring it once it's minus, you know, below 32, they bring it into the inside and that's when they start, you know, breaking it up and breaking it down.

2:31:59Collin PalmerYou know, so for us, you know, we're, it's the moment it's made, it's being preserved. And we're thinking about these, you know, the foresight begins, right? We're thinking about what does the chain of events happen and need to happen therefore after. And that's kind of, you know, that's a kind of a Western ideology that we've kind of imposed on the rest of the world by showing what happens when you take preservation techniques to, you know, a product or just a plant like this, you know, it's, You know, it'd be really interesting to adapt to your point some of these techniques to actually create some of those products, you know, properly.

2:32:36Collin PalmerLike, could we age the resin in a way before on the plant to make a temple ball, for instance? I don't know if we'd get through testing, but we could try it. Totally. You know what I mean? And trying to find what could actually work in the construct of rules and regs, because that's another ceiling that, again, that ideology doesn't have to deal with.

2:33:01SpeakerWe also believe that the profiles we choose are right. Right. Like inherently, humans are always right. Right. What your desires are. Right. And so when I was and it tripped me out because when I was talking to a Pakistani farmer, he was like, we don't like gas profiles. And I said, it's so ironic because this is where they come from. He said, I know, but we don't like it because it gets us too befuddled and it makes us not as sure footed.

2:33:27SpeakerAnd they're living on the side of a mountain like Until you explore that area, you don't quite catch what the phrase verticality implies. And they were so honest. They said, if we get that high, we'll fall off the hill and die. So we tone back our product so that it gives us more of a warm blanket feeling where for us in the States, like we want to be basically blasted from that product.

2:33:56SpeakerAnd that's what you get from capturing all the metabolites in that preserved form. So part of it is adjusting the impact of the product to the desire of the people in the region. And that's where it's hard for people here to understand why they do what they do, because we only understand it from our perspective. So it's funny, but every time I go someplace, I realize how undereducated I am.

2:34:21SpeakerAnd I think that that's the joy is that you find out that you really don't know much at all and that if you just show up and shut up, you'll get a good education.

2:34:30Collin PalmerThat's the wise words, my man.

2:34:34SpeakerYou know, and I really think that language is super important when we're talking, you know, of course, Kev, I really feel like, It's half of it. You know, the curation of it is curating it all the way through. When we use the word cure or curation, we're actually curating a seed all the way through to a flower and an experience. We're curating it. And when we use the word, you know, I'm going to be drying my crop, You know, if you're just drying your crop, then, you know, that's not gonna be the experience that you're looking for because in actuality, it's a fermentation.

2:35:17SpeakerThat's what's happening. Every time that we are curing our plants, we're fermenting them. It's a fermentation. And I would love for the community to utilize that word more When they cut down their plants, that the fermentation process has started, not just the curing process or the drying process, because then we can look at it.

2:35:41Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineGashes.

2:35:41SpeakerWe can look at it as far as the trichomes and then where the leaves touch the trichomes and then where the leaves hit the stem. All of that fermentation off gases adds and subtracts different microbiology that creates different type of lipids. Yeah, metabolizes everything. And depending on your fermentation really has to do with what type of microbiology that you've curated during the entire process is what is going to, you know, I really notice every single year.

2:36:21SpeakerNo matter what, it never fails that no matter, we always usually grow about 80 different varietals. And within that, maybe out of those 80 different varietals, we'll grow maybe 30 large individuals of those each varietals. And we'll grow all different types, everything. But no matter what, one year is everything is going to be pulling all of the fruity out of every single one of those individuals. And then the next year as an overlay of everything, all of a sudden it's going to pull out all of the skunky.

2:36:58SpeakerSo if there's any skunk in the lineage of those particular plants, every single one of our greenhouses are going to sort of have a skunky smell or an earthy smell. And I really wonder If the curation of the environment, of the temperature, of the humidity, of the soil, of our weather really adds to what type of terpene flavor experience that we're going to get, of course, they're all going to be individuals and they're all different.

2:37:36SpeakerBut guaranteed every year, one particular tone is going to take over the garden. And I feel like that has to do with the curation and then ending in the fermentation that is naturally happening Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so happy to be here with you. I'm so happy to be here with you. I'm so happy to be here with you.

2:38:21Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineMark sometimes there's more elk and more who knows but and and and that the flavor changes and that's why the bio region and the terroir and the Appalachia is so dope and fun and cool to work with so go ahead like what do you guys think about I it's funny you say that because I can totally like there's a reoccurring terp among even different varieties from stuff I've grown

2:38:44Speakermultiple times like i got this honey banana granddaddy gorilla that the first time i grew it didn't necessarily uh give me the terp that i picked up more constantly and and i'm over here like is it the water is it is it am i doing something wrong but no i like it it can't be wrong i like it and and this aroma that i'm getting you know uh from from you know it'll be two completely different uh varieties It's like this yeasty beer.

2:39:16SpeakerIt's like a good thing though. And I like it. It's like a, it's, it's rotten. It's funky and it's nasty. And I'm like, maybe, maybe it's a, cause I look at my backyard. I've been growing there for like 10 years now. It's like the whole backyard's a pot because it's all dirt and the chickens rummage. And it's, it's just free for all the plants. We throw them down.

2:39:33SpeakerWe just throw them down. Who cares? We, we, we wash hash and throw it on the floor, everything on the floor, just leave it on the floor. And, uh, Yeah, I get this reoccurring Thank you so much for joining us.

2:40:14SpeakerIt's something, maybe it's my water source, maybe it's a collection of everything, you know, the pressures and everything. But yeah, on just like an observation level, yeah, I can see that being a thing in my things that I grow for sure.

2:40:33Etienne FontanI was just posting a chat. We need a scent library, right? Because everybody's referencing these different scents and these things that they remember, right? So if they were able to get, you know, Kevin Jodry and others to, you know, start setting these profiles. No, but there is one. It's called a gas chromatograph, right?

2:40:53Ryan Dank AfLike, that's the thing. You know...

2:40:58Ryan Dank AfLook, there's this, there's this thing we go by and it's, if you don't measure it, you can't manage it, right? Like if you're not like it's, it's people, somebody said it in chat earlier, how much of us thinking back about the old seeds is really how good they are and how much of it is nostalgia, right? And part of enjoyment of a product is like, sure, it's the product itself.

2:41:21Ryan Dank AfIt's like we said, Kelly, the other day, it's set in setting, right? And I think that you're very in tune with those What I consider like anthropology threads that run through this thing we're doing and a lot of people confuse that with breeding and the genetics because they intertwine the seeds themselves with the guy that they got them from right so there's this emotional attachment to the seeds and With the way that I do things, just being so focused and driven on based on science.

2:42:00Ryan Dank AfLike, you know, like it's been interesting listening to this conversation because I have like a real background in genetics and molecular genetics and population genetics. And so I hear some of the things that you guys are talking about and I think, oh, that's very easily explained by like X, Y, or Z. And you guys are attributing all these other like kind of like anthropological reasons for it happening to the story, right?

2:42:24Ryan Dank AfTo the understanding.

2:42:28Collin PalmerSo I think I think Ryan, the one thing I think to bring an analogy to it, they're much like music, right? Because you're a musician. You can understand this. The song, like, let's say, let's just take Miles Davis. His kind of blues still the same as it is from 19 when when he wrote it. The genetics are very similar, right? But it's like you said, it's environment.

2:42:58Collin PalmerAre you listening to it on a vinyl, sitting on a couch with the fireplace rolling? Or are you outside like free running and you're like smoking a joint and you're all hyped up about stuff? To your point, yes, I think environment influences how you feel emotionally towards something, but it's still... There and it is great, right?

2:43:18Ryan Dank AfNo, absolutely. It's a real thing and I'm not discounting it. Like I was saying on this podcast this week, there's a thing about like, there's something we call the breeder's equation in plant breeding, okay? And essentially it measures variation in any given trait. And part of that variability can be described to genetics, but part of it is due to environment. Right. And, you know, we all know that G by E, like the genetics by environmental interaction, like phenotype is the result of genetics plus environment.

2:43:51Ryan Dank AfRight. And it's especially interesting for me with Kelly and Josh, having gone and spent some time in their farm and see how they do things that they have this really abnormal in a good way environment. Like it's people, I don't think I certainly didn't understand, but I would bet most people don't understand the level of biodynamic All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about the bioavailability of the bioavailability of the bioavailability of the bioavailability of the bioavailability of the bioavailability of the bioavailability.

2:44:39Ryan Dank AfSo they're like, when you look at their garden and their phenotype, it's incredibly influenced by the environment in a way that's like totally well off the scale for I think what most people are doing. Like, I don't think people can really understand the, the, and that's why like the hash is winning competitions, right? Like I was smoking the hash this summer. It's fantastic. It's next, it's next level.

2:45:03Ryan Dank AfI would love to have like a research station set up at their farm though, so that you could measure all the stuff that they're talking about. And that's the one thing it's not a criticism with Josh and Kelly. It's something that everybody in the cannabis community does because it's expensive. We start trying to like project our own reasons for why things are happening onto, onto the plants.

2:45:24Ryan Dank AfAnd I think even ignoring things that we could be directly measuring like terpene profiles. Right, like gas chromatograph, like gas chromatograph or all these other volatiles. Now that's expensive, right? Like luckily we have these tools that show up now, like the Valenveris IR machine, right? That's quite good at analyzing THC. We need something portable and cheap and high throughput to do TERPs, right? And volatile analysis of plants because that's really what they're talking about.

2:45:59Ryan Dank AfRight. Is like, you know, I said this, I've said this many times. I don't know. Some of you guys probably recognize it, but scent is an orchestra, right? Like it's not just the turps. It's the turps plus the esters layer plus the files. And all of that stuff is really highly invested by not only like, I mean, somebody was talking about sulfur deficiency earlier on in the episode.

2:46:21Ryan Dank AfIf you have sulfur deficiency, you're not going to have like a lot of the high prevalence of the thiols. They're sulfur based, right? Terpene synthase is part of the enzyme. The way it works is it has to have a magnesium cofactor. Right, so there has to be enough like iron available, or not iron, sorry, magnesium available in the plant that it's not a limiting factor on this like, it's not like a rate limiting influence on this enzyme, like ability to synthesize terps, right?

2:46:53Ryan Dank AfSo there's like a ton of science going on. And I love the passion that you guys have when you're talking about like the breeding And the seed making, and it was incredibly humbling. I think here was Hunter talking about, or maybe it was Brandon talking about like the first years making seeds and recognizing that it's not all what it could be, right? But you can do like real plant breeding is not out of the reach of any of you guys, right?

2:47:23Ryan Dank AfIt's just that a lot of you don't have the tools and the basic biology to understand like some of these really basic things that explain a lot of what you're seeing. And those things are tools that you can like harness to, Make a breeding program. It's funny. I've been going down this road pretty deep the last week trying to explain it because Kevin asked me to speak on a conference up in Vancouver on like 19th and 20th.

2:47:50Ryan Dank AfAnd so I'm going to do a genetics presentation and kind of going through like a breeding program and like, you know, like showing the things that we can control. Right. Yeah. And the things that focus.

2:48:04Collin PalmerThe question for you, like, just to continue, like your thoughts on this, like, you know, what, what are some things people can be doing at home to help them better, Understand the ground underneath them when they're looking to actually breed, you know, like to actually like, what can we do to further align in a direction? So because I think it's a good opportunity for you to express.

2:48:29Ryan Dank AfWell, that's the thing, bro. It's like I can't give an answer in even five, ten minutes, right? Like it's such a large topic that I think, you know, when I see the hunger from the community, like, It's not enough. It's not like I can't just sit back and bitch and say, I don't wish people were doing better if I'm not going to show them how to do better.

2:48:48Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThey can get the Valanveris machine. Like you said, that's something you could like retell people. It's semi-expensive, but if there was someone at home that didn't have a large connection, they could get something like that. Right.

2:48:59Ryan Dank AfBut I mean, there's the tools that you need to make plant breeding better isn't the Valanveris. Valanveris is a technology. What you need is the knowledge and the understanding of how plant breeding and chromosomes and meiosis work. And so that's something that I can teach you guys as a community. We need community then.

2:49:17Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThat's why we need each other.

2:49:20Collin PalmerThat's why we're here, Ryan.

2:49:22Ryan Dank AfWhen I see the passion, when I see the passion, the thing that's missing is the, fuck, I'm going to take enough time to figure this thing out and understand how it works. And that's where, and I'm not talking about anybody in specific, but that's where as a community, the cannabis community fails. Right? It's like, you know, I'm also part of like, you know, Colin was saying, like, I'm a musician.

2:49:47Ryan Dank AfSo I'm part of a musical company or community. And in that musical community, the passion is always to get better, always to do better. And very often that's not in the cannabis community, right? Like everybody's ready to just sit back and be like, I know how to do it. This is the way I do it.

2:50:05Collin PalmerSo would you say like most people don't I get because I don't disagree with you at all. I feel like one thing I say often is in hindsight, I wish people said I don't know more than they said I know. I just wish they would be honest and say, I just don't know. Well, and that was a question here. We could do all this stuff and spend all this money and end up nowhere, right?

2:50:30Ryan Dank AfYou don't need to spend money to do these things. That's the beauty of it. It's just a matter of growing plants, keeping notes, and using your mind right at the end of the crop.

2:50:41Ryan Dank AfLike I said, like, you know, I don't know if it was, again, sorry, my, my, my apology. I don't know if it was Hunter or Brandon that was saying this earlier about the first year seeds. Um, that's the perfect time to learn this shit, right? Is because it's like, you're getting going and you want to understand what you're doing. And so, you know, what I've been trying to do, and I think I need to do a little bit more clearly is teach people the basics of these biology basics.

2:51:06Ryan Dank AfUm, like Colin, you've read my thing on backcrossing going back like 20, a hundred percent, dude. I mean, I was 25 years ago, but it's like, you know, I, I want to give like the reason for doing that is because I want people to understand the why. Right. And so like, I have to take the time to give you guys the why. And, and there's such a request for it when I go into the chat on hash churches, like.

2:51:29Ryan Dank AfI got to start doing like a weekly show of like an hour. You know, maybe Marcus will let me use his channel and do like a breeding show every hour or two hours, maybe following church or something so that we can start learning some of these basic concepts. And I give you guys the tools to just do it on a, just a much higher level. Sorry. And an additional layer that you're already doing it right.

2:51:55Ryan Dank AfThat you can incorporate into the way you do things because it's like, You know, Josh and Kelly, they have this massive opportunity to doing things and they're finding incredible plants. Like, you know, I put in this presentation, this plant that they have had identified and unfortunately lost, but it was like a one in a billion plant, right? Like it was a really unique thing. And that's part of like having the tools is to be able to capture those things or like capture the genes for those things.

2:52:29Ryan Dank AfBefore the plant goes off into the universe, because we all die, right? Everything expires in time unless you pass it around forever. But, you know, it's like the clone thing we were talking about in the chat. It's like everybody's going around trying to collect all these clones. And it's like, guys, you're better off getting 100 S1s and growing those because you can find something better than that clone, right?

2:52:53Ryan Dank AfYou can find the next iteration of that thing and Instead, everybody ends up chasing the same thing so that they can have the thing that the cool kids have.

2:53:03Ryan Dank AfAnd we end up foregoing all, we're not continuing the furtherance of going down the path, right? But everybody wants to have the X, Y, Z clone so that they can make more money off of it, right? And, you know, unfortunately that leads to like this monocropping kind of mentality where everybody's growing the same thing.

2:53:23Collin PalmerWell, I think monocropping is a result of what the demand of a singular jar having everything be the same in it. I mean... COA costs too, though.

2:53:34Ryan Dank AfDid you see that thing this week of the most sold flowers in California? I think it was like Blue Dream was like 85% of the sale.

2:53:42SpeakerOh, yeah, yeah. I mean, like double the next layer. Well, in flowering and pre-roll, we have Blue Dreams still crushing it.

2:53:52Collin PalmerWe have to remind ourselves that way. We have a real issue in our industry and I got to call this out because the data is like Swiss cheese because I is as like this day I'm a buyer for like x brand they're like Colin we need to move x amount of pieces and um and I go to my guys I'm like hey farms like I need x and one dude's like yo I got this this and then I got this and this is on sale and Thank you for watching.

2:54:43Collin PalmerAll of those people, they secured the material, ran it all the way up on the retail side, and they made everybody believe in the market that Blue Dream's number one. And that literally, I've watched this happen over the past decade. I've lived it. I was like, yo, why are we doing this? And I think that that skews data because we can go to the lab and say, I know that says that that's Blue Zushi, but I need that to say Blue Dream right now.

2:55:10Collin PalmerAnd they're like, cool, man, whatever.

2:55:14Collin PalmerAnd now all of a sudden I have Blue Dream out the yin yang you and everyone thinks it's Blue Dream because I needed to make numbers happen. And I have to say this out loud because everyone needs to understand that that truly happens every single day. Of course it does.

2:55:30Ryan Dank AfAnd it's got to stop. Yeah, it happens up here too. The, you know, in Germany, you have to register a cultivar before you can sell it on the market. And part of it is because they talk about like sterilizing using like IR or not.

2:55:45Collin PalmerYeah.

2:55:46Ryan Dank AfSome of these like, you know, high energy, high intensive energy radiation. You know, yeah, the rad machines. Yep. Yeah. And that can degrade terps. And therefore, if it degrades them, it's changing them into other plants. Right. So what they do is they do these fingerprints of the plant. You have to register the plant with the authority before you can sell it. And that process takes like three months.

2:56:06Ryan Dank AfBut, you know, in the process, you're doing a fingerprint of the plant.

2:56:10Collin PalmerThat's really cool. I felt like that was what Phylos was kind of trying to do in the very beginning and Canopedia kind of tries to do now. I just, I wonder, in your opinion, Kevin, and maybe even Ryan, like, do you guys believe that that type of... You know, prior art, if you will, or whatever you want to call the certificate. Is that enough to keep people honest?

2:56:34Collin PalmerOr is that still, is there still wiggle room to like do what I kind of what I explained?

2:56:40Ryan Dank AfListen, I don't think that it's a plant IP thing, but I look at the future in terms of all production as like a blockchain thing.

2:56:50Etienne FontanRight. Right.

2:56:51Ryan Dank AfInevitably, all inventory systems move to blockchain and that allows you to have like verifiability along the process. And sure, people are going to manipulate it and try to like, you know, oh, we'll just put in a couple of buds of blue dream to analyze so we can pass off our stuff. But, you know, like nobody like, for example, nobody counterfeits the Macintosh Apple. Right? Like if you bought a Macintosh Apple, if you go into a shop in Amsterdam or like California or like Ontario or France, like it doesn't matter.

2:57:25Ryan Dank AfIt's the same fucking Apple. Do we get there? Cannabis? Who knows? Like I don't, I can't, I can't actually say. It feels like my impression of the market is that there's this unfortunate, like what actually amounts to like an unrealistic demand for novelty. Right. Like the, the, the public wants the new news at an, at an actually an unreasonable rate because it's like, you can't do R and D that fast.

2:57:55Ryan Dank AfRight. To be keeping up and iterating. Um, everybody just wants the new thing. And I think maybe that has more to do with the fact that like, if you smoke the same thing over and over, you get used to it. We've all noticed that. Right. And that's why you wanna have like, um, a library. Of things like, you know, a chest of drawers that you can dip into.

2:58:17Ryan Dank AfI want some of this for this effect and some of this for this effect. And that way you're always kind of rotating up the THC plus all these other chemicals. I think you get used to a specific chemistry if you puff it over and over and over again.

2:58:30SpeakerYou know, one thing that I wanted to say to just, that's just so interesting is that You know, there's two different modalities going on here that I see is that we're dealing with this plant. It is also a huge part of the discussion. And then we've sort of got the way that we describe it. The way that we look at it as humans. So we've got two different things going on.

2:58:56SpeakerWe've got the plant going on and we've got the human going on. And the human needs, and no matter what you place on the table as tools, whether you're going to throw your tarot cards on the table, you're going to throw your gas chromatography on the table or whatever science that you're going to throw on the table, it's all an explanation for the human mind. But yet the plant just keeps going.

2:59:19SpeakerAnd so the question that you said earlier, Ryan, was are we benefiting the plant by not being able to describe it or guide it or get the data for it? The human mind needs the data.

2:59:38SpeakerBut the plant is just moving. And the plant continues to get whatever we throw at it, no matter how we describe it. And I just wanted to say, all of the tools, all of the modalities are important.

2:59:56SpeakerBecause the plant just keeps moving forward. And on the last episode, we were talking about how the plant has been moving with us. Are we rising the plant up? Is it a better way? But it continues to show up because we've brought it there and it's brought us there. We're working together with it. And I just think that it's really interesting, like how much we care and are we really pushing this plant forward?

3:00:23SpeakerWell, of course we are.

3:00:25Ryan Dank AfWe're saying the same thing, Kelly, but we're looking at it in a different perspective.

3:00:29SpeakerWe're saying exactly the same thing.

3:00:31Ryan Dank AfWell, like to me, there is no plant. There's this like amorphous, continually varying species.

3:00:38SpeakerSure.

3:00:38Ryan Dank AfOkay. And the most incredible thing about this species is not only the genetic variation, but the chemical variation. The genetic variation leads to the chemical variation, right? And the way that we recombine and mix it, match it, gives it all the sense and flavors. What I'm saying though is that it's like, you know, we were talking, it's the same conversation that we were having about selfing. Like, you know, you guys are, you guys are by nature of the way that you are, you're continually outcrossing.

3:01:07Ryan Dank AfRight. You're against, like Josh is, you know, like you guys are kind of against selfing. It's okay to say it, right? It's like, it's not the way that you guys.

3:01:14Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIt's a tool that people use that we don't really like. Yeah, you're right.

3:01:19Ryan Dank AfAnd again, I'm not making a judgment about it. I'm not, there's no judgment there about that. Like, so it's just that the selfing tool allows us to go down a path and explore a depth of All of the chemistry that you can't get to by outcrossing.

3:01:37SpeakerBut the point of the whole thing that I was saying is that all of the tools need to be thrown on the table. All of the tools need to be thrown on the table, because then if we want to rise the plant up, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:02:11Ryan Dank AfYeah, I made this plant when I was in California. I think I might have told you about it, but maybe not. But it was like a non-psychoactive plant, right? Like for most of the people that use cannabis, it would be completely boring. But the idea was to make a plant that was better for the children that have this intractable epilepsy, right? And so we took, it was, you know, I was making a CBDV plant.

3:02:35Ryan Dank AfI was trying to make CBDV plants. And we got far enough down the program that it was like, okay, now what terpene background can I put it in? Right? Like what, what are we, we're going to talk entourage effect, you know, or ensemble effect. How can I best create a plant that will be made into oils for kids that have epilepsy, right? And so I ended up going through the literature and doing a big deep dive on terpenes and like the pharmacological effect of terpenes, of specific terpenes.

3:03:06Ryan Dank AfAnd I figured out that linalool and beta-caryophyllene both have like anticonvulsant and antispasmodic properties. Okay, so I started breeding the CBDV plant into a background that had those terpenes and ended up with, after like a series of generation, ended up with a plant that had CBD, CBDV, and beta-caryophyllene and linalool as the two top terpenes. So, you know, if you extracted it like correctly, you could theoretically capture all those molecules and you'd have like a whole plant extract That was specifically suited to a given medical condition, right?

3:03:50Ryan Dank AfAnd that's what I mean about like being able to do the... The measuring all of these compounds, because you guys are doing the work anyway, right? It's like, it's just a matter of a matter of a piece going to the lab, but then you, then, you know, for sure, Hey, like you guys wouldn't have lost that Valencian dominant plant, right? Like that would have been something that you guys could have rescued and not only rescued, you could have introduced that to the world, right?

3:04:17Ryan Dank AfLike, yeah.

3:04:18SpeakerAnd the thing you say, you were like, oh, you guys are again selfing. But the truth is, is that we don't have the capacity to collect the data, to go and make sure that we're doing, you know, getting all of the mothers. There's only so much we can do. And also, there's only so much that we're good at.

3:04:39Ryan Dank AfWell, you guys are amazing.

3:04:40SpeakerWe have an enormous amount to learn because we're not good at certain layers of this where we really need community. We need those other tools that are thrown on the table because like I said, when it comes to breeding, I'm going to be throwing the tarot cards, the crystals, and what I like.

3:04:58Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWe got crystals with the GL.

3:05:01SpeakerYeah, that's how I'm going to throw it on the table. And I'm going to throw my 35 years of experience of reading, but then it needs to be taken to the levels that you have. So for us to be able to maybe work together as breeders and community, just exactly like ATN just said, a library where there was something that was able to collect this data So that we could learn even more.

3:05:30SpeakerWell, and the plant capacity.

3:05:33Ryan Dank AfI was in the last night. I was thinking about, I was designing you guys a, uh, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:06:04Collin PalmerI got an idea you're not thinking of, so we're going to we're going to come up and do it together.

3:06:08Ryan Dank AfWell, it was listen, it was it's born out of like when she told me about when Kelly told me about the Valencian dominant plant, I almost panicked that like it was gone or it was potentially gone. Right. That those genes were gone because it's such a unique thing. Like it was like it's literally like the white whale. You know what I mean? It's like, it's the rarest of the rare.

3:06:36Ryan Dank AfAnd it was so rare that I'd never, ever even heard it described anywhere, ever. And I've seen a ton of lab tests and read every scientific article on the planet that mentions, you know, the chemicals in cannabis. And to find a valentine dominant plant is like absolutely unheard of. So, you know, When I think of the possibility of coming across those plants, it's like you have, like, and that's, you know, David was the same way.

3:07:05Ryan Dank AfIt's kind of like this insane Pokemon, Pokemon Go kind of mentality, where it's like you have to collect all of the pieces. Because from a breeder's mind, these are the tools with which you build other new things. Right.

3:07:22Collin PalmerI don't get like instruments, dude. It's like they are have all the stuff. Otherwise, how are you going to get the sounds that you need?

3:07:31Etienne FontanYou need the experience, too, because as you said, yes, you can have the gas chromatograph breakdown of the genetic. But if we don't have somebody who can recognize and name that as that, this is where I was meaning like having somebody like Kevin and going over that information in the library that it's certified that this reminds me of this particular scent of this, you know what I'm saying?

3:07:53Etienne FontanThat's what I see missing. That's the beat maker producer relationship, right?

3:07:57Collin PalmerOr musician producer relationship. Right, so we need that relationship.

3:08:01SpeakerYou can sit in front of that machine and know how to use it. This isn't just something that, you know, is some push button microwave oven kind of thing. This is something you need to have skills and analytical chemistry and there needs, you need to have a, when you have, you have experiences and you need to have the, the, the Dr. Mark, like, listen, you have an experience as a chemist too.

3:08:25Ryan Dank AfLike when you're running these machines, I got to do this a bunch of times and I did it with David. I know Marcus got to do it with David too. When you're calibrating these machines, you have to calibrate them with the standards, right? So you actually have sample vials of these compounds so that like we would build little kits so that you could pop open like a vial of beta-caryophyllene or Thank you so much for joining us.

3:09:05SpeakerISO 17034 Certified Producer of Certified Reference Materials. And those are places like, well, Aldrich, but places more familiar to cannabis would be like ResTech or Cerulean. So they sell these things and they're super expensive. And what you end up doing is you end up creating a calibration curve, right? Because the signal intensity off the chromatograph Thank you. Thank you.

3:09:52SpeakerGas chromatography work historically, and I think things that like Sam had, you know, David had in his lab were ones that use something called the FID, which is a flame ionization detector, which is just detecting anything that burns that comes off the column, right? And now those are coupled with a mass spectrometer, which is really cool because now, especially for terpenes, what you can do is... Look at your mass spectrum, which is how the molecule fragments kind of like in a magnetic field or it's super detailed.

3:10:31SpeakerBut in getting a mass spectrum, now you have a thumbprint of the actual molecule. And most of these things are connected to something that has access to the... NIST database. And so in that database, all the major terpenes and terpenoids are, there's already standards in there. And so you could basically now use that to identify what these phantom peaks are in your gas chromatogram. Did you see this paper that came out?

3:11:03SpeakerThe mass spectrum thumbprint versus, you know, like if you're seeing valensine in there, for example, you would basically get a high percentage hit versus the NIST database. So the thing that I think you're bringing up is that, yeah, it is important to be able to associate, you know, the profiles of these people. Uh, uh, varieties that you're looking to breed and propagate. But, you know, at the end of the day, there's a lot that could affect the overall intensity of that, of that signal.

3:11:41SpeakerUm, some people swear by something called a headspace measurement. And what a headspace measurement is, is you're taking a sample and you're heating it up and the GC is sampling the headspace, which is not Thank you for joining us.

3:12:15SpeakerThank you for joining us today.

3:12:37SpeakerThank you for watching.

3:12:56Speaker10, maybe my method, it's like 16 minutes into the method. That's where we're seeing the peaks for the cannabinoids because cannabinoids just don't have the volatility of these terpenes. A lot of these terpenes are so volatile, they come out at what's called the solvent front. Thank you for joining us today.

3:13:36SpeakerYeah, the other thing, and some, I don't know, Ryan, I don't know, last time we talked, but there's a GC, GC, so you could run another column. Right. You know, GC, you could do the MS, MS, MS, MS is what you would do typically, like if you have something called a quadrupole. So a quadrupole, you have multiple opportunities to do the analysis as the stuff is flying through the vacuum.

3:14:05SpeakerBut the end of the day is that, you know, that's great for like an analytical laboratory or a researcher like me. This is just not practical for most plant production facilities. No, it's not.

3:14:17Ryan Dank AfBut again, it's like if you're trying to do the breeding work. Again, if you don't measure it, you can't manage it.

3:14:23SpeakerYeah, come up with some pistol grip thing that you could just take to a plant, zap it, and get like a terpene profile. Yeah, we're not there yet. I think there are guys out of Pittsburgh trying to do that. Well, I tell you what, man. They never used to have handheld XRF. XRF is X-ray fluorescence. And X-ray fluorescence technology is how they determine... That there's lead in all the toys coming from China.

3:14:50SpeakerAnd, you know, I guess there's always been lead in the toys, but they never had the handheld scanners. Now they got the handheld scanners. They can actually, you know, do that shit right on the dock and send cartons back to China.

3:15:03Ryan Dank AfWe also didn't used to have like these Valenvaris machines, right? Like we had IR, but we didn't have like really accurate IR. That's right.

3:15:11SpeakerHey, if you know those people, tell them to send me one of those. Hey, Marcus.

3:15:16Collin PalmerDude, what's up, Mark?

3:15:18BubblemanDude, I'm in Denver.

3:15:19Collin PalmerThat's so sick. Look at you, man. I'm in America. Welcome to America, my friend.

3:15:26BubblemanWelcome. Dude, it's so tripped out. I walked way over here where there's, like, nobody parked. There's just this one car, and I'm like, I set up, I get myself all sorted out, and then the guy gets out of the car, and he's just a fully militarized policeman.

3:15:39Ryan Dank AfI was like, am I okay to stand here? He's like, oh, yeah, no problem. Oh, did you see the super weird art in the airport?

3:15:47BubblemanNo, I got the fuck out of the airport right away. I'm not like here to visit the airport. I know all about the art though. I know all about it.

3:15:54Ryan Dank AfI used to read David Icke, remember? That's right, you did.

3:15:57Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineDid you go on the underground tunnels of the underground tunnel network of the Denver airport?

3:16:02BubblemanYeah, this is the shape-shifting reptilian home base, isn't it? Isn't that what's going on? Dude, I'm just so glad. Thank you, Colin, for running Hash Church today. Thanks for everyone for popping in. I don't know how long I'm going to be able to stay, but I got my buddy coming here right away, and I'm going to be dabbing in minutes. I just wanted to pop in and say hi to everyone and be like, I'm in Denver.

3:16:25Ryan Dank AfHave a great trip, dude.

3:16:27BubblemanI don't want to thank my wife. You made it happen today. You felt the change in the Hash Force. Shout out to Char and Tanner.

3:16:33SpeakerI felt the change in the American Hash Force that you were here.

3:16:38BubblemanYeah, dude, it's on. It's on. So if anyone's watching and you're in Denver, I'll be at Tetra tomorrow and Tuesday from 4 p.m. till 630. Come hit a dab.

3:16:51SpeakerHoist one for Bobby, Marcus.

3:16:53BubblemanOh, dude, we're going to be going to Boulder tonight, too. There's an honorarium of Bobby, Big Grateful Dead gathering, music, dabs, maybe some LSD, I don't know.

3:17:03Collin PalmerI'm glad you're getting to Denver, bro. That's kind of why I asked you last night. I was like, are you getting to Denver, dude? You got to get to Denver. I mean, up to Boulder. You got to go to Boulder. You got to get up to Boulder. Yes.

3:17:14BubblemanYes, well, I've got a couple of buddies there who've been trying to get me over there, so we'll see how it goes. But continue on, everyone. Sounded like a great show. And yeah, I'll be here listening.

3:17:28Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineLove you, Marcus. Take care of yourself. Enjoy Colorado.

3:17:32SpeakerAbsolutely, brother. On that note, I definitely think we could take a dab or a little toke for Bob here. You know, the music.

3:17:40Collin PalmerWe should definitely do that.

3:17:42SpeakerJust got way better. You know, up and the other side for sure.

3:17:48BubblemanThat's what I said, Kelly. Someone was like, I think it was Paul Stamets or no, maybe it was even Dr. Mark. I can't remember. Someone was like, oh, Bobby's passed away. And I said, well, you know what? We're all sad, but Jerry and Phil are happy. Yeah. Yeah.

3:18:06Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThe rhythm devils.

3:18:08BubblemanDude, imagine Jerry waiting for so long. Just wait. Come on, buddy. Where are you?

3:18:14Collin PalmerWe got plenty of drummers up there, though, you know? Fair enough. We got Mitch Mitchell up there. Holy shit. I know.

3:18:22SpeakerI think it'll be interesting to see if John Mayer tries to continue some kind of Grateful Dead thing, right? Because... I think he got cut in as a partner with Dead & Company. So it'll be interesting to see if he tries to resurrect something. We'll see.

3:18:40Collin PalmerMaybe. Well, I just want to take a moment to thank Kevin for coming on. He's going to jump in a sec. Thanks so much, brother. Really always amazing to talk with you as always. And hopefully we can have you back on at some point. Thanks so much.

3:18:56SpeakerThank you so much for inviting me. It's always a pleasure and it's a privilege.

3:19:00Collin PalmerYeah, likewise.

3:19:01SpeakerIt really is. It's a beautiful community and it's always kind of overwhelming to be part of it. So thank you.

3:19:07Ryan Dank AfWell, and Kev will be speaking or doing the moderation or whatever for this Grow Up Conference 2 in Vancouver on the 19th and 20th. Oh, that's right. Get your ass to BC. Marcus, we'll see you soon, Kev.

3:19:23SpeakerYeah, right now I'm excited. And thanks so much for taking the opportunity. What I wanted was I wanted Ryan to be able to take somebody through a breeding project. How does a professional breeder look at a project? How do they overcome struggle? How do they deal with issues? And he agreed to give a lecture, and I'm just really excited to hear it. So thank you.

3:19:47BubblemanAwesome. That'll be banger.

3:19:49SpeakerIt's going to be hot. No, no, I really did. I was grateful that I got to bring him in because we need, you need all the approaches, but you need scientific breeding to be brought into what we do so we understand how to repeat results. You know, and I wanted to say to you specifically, we were talking about absorbability of nutrients and sort of what reaches the plant and, you know, different modalities of it.

3:20:14SpeakerI just really wanted to thank you because you really tend to be that bridge, that sort of supplement for the community that's just so easily absorbable. Your information and everything that you give, it's incredibly bioavailable. So I really feel that way. And thank you so much. It's a bestowment of your past and your education that you've received that is just, again, so bioavailable. And valuable. Thank you.

3:20:45SpeakerThank you so much. It was good to see all of you and a happy new year, maybe a kind year ahead for all of us.

3:20:50Collin PalmerThanks, Kevin. Take it easy, brother. Peace, man.

3:20:54SpeakerI have a question for all the breeders in here. That's a really popular topic. I get asked it all the time. But what do you guys look for when you are selecting male plants? Because me, myself, I do conventional breeding and I have pretty much my whole career And some of the things that I look for, like one of the things that I look for, that's like, it's an absolute no-go.

3:21:25SpeakerIf a male pre-flowers in any type of stress condition, like small pots, nutrient deficiencies, bad environments, I never, ever, ever use it. That's like my that's like one of my number ones. But I look also I'm looking at vigor and structure, things that will hold itself up. But I want to hear what you guys are selecting for with male plants.

3:21:56Collin PalmerI'll jump in in a minute.

3:22:00Ryan Dank AfI'll answer if no one else has gone to, but my suggestion would be if you're using male plants is actually to not select, right? To keep variation. Males are blind. When you're breeding, you need to be directly selecting for the traits that are of interest to your breeding program, right? Like there's a difference between making seeds and breeding. Like if you're just trying to make more seeds, You can kind of do whatever, but if you're breeding, you're trying to be selecting, you're working a goal, right?

3:22:35Ryan Dank AfLike every breeding program should start out with a goal. Like what am I trying to do in this series of crosses, right? So within that goal, you have to be making choice for a specific set of trays. And males are, because we're so focused on the females of the species, right? The males carry those traits, but they don't really show them. So it's, you're kind of like taking a lottery.

3:23:05Ryan Dank AfIf you're trying to, if you're trying to like breathe through inference of other, of the presence of other traits.

3:23:12SpeakerYeah.

3:23:13Ryan Dank AfRight. And so the way that typically they do it crossing species like cannabis is you let the female or that one side of the cross guide your population. But you want to preserve the genetic variability using the males, right? Like if you're choosing blind, odds are like 50% chance that you're going to be picking the wrong one, right? And so the way in that kind of scenario, you're going backwards if you're selecting the wrong male, right?

3:23:46Ryan Dank AfSo you're better off selecting a whole bunch of males and mixing their pollen and then over generations be selecting for the traits of interest on the females. Yeah. It's one of the things I really love.

3:23:58Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIs that the same pollen from that year type thing? No, no. Each year, mixing the pollen.

3:24:07Ryan Dank AfYeah.

3:24:08Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineOkay.

3:24:09Ryan Dank AfYeah, because you can directly select for the traits of interest on the females. You can't do that on the male.

3:24:16Collin PalmerYou know, Ryan, one thing you're bringing up I think is important for everyone to... Because it's interesting. You're so right. It's... This isn't just, unless it truly is just like this great experiment, right? Then you really need to ask some really non-negotiable things to yourself and put those down and say, I'm going to go after that, right? To your point.

3:24:40Ryan Dank AfWell, and that's the difference between making seeds and breeding, right?

3:24:44Collin PalmerTotally. And that's why I want to talk, just like kind of put a pin on this for a second, like talk about it. Cause like in process, right? It was just talking about process, whatever medium it might be. Without an end result, it is literally exploration. Like music, same thing. It does not matter. And yes, sometimes you can be so skilled where you can play in music and make songs up and be like Keith, you know, Willerton and just, you know, be brilliant like that.

3:25:13Collin PalmerBut if you don't set goals and you don't actually go after them, Thank you for joining us.

3:25:41Collin PalmerBut to your point, yes, I would agree that it often goes in all these different directions. Now, I want to highlight that in my personal opinion, I don't think there's any wrong, because I've seen amazing plants come from both of these, call it ideologies.

3:25:59Collin PalmerBut I think it's interesting if you're going to, I'd like to see some discipline put into some exploration sometimes and see what happens, right? It's like taking a really great musician and being like, all right, man, we're going to structure this and see what happens. You know, and most of the time they come out with some really beautiful, amazing stuff. Hence the Grateful Dead. Once they got into the studio, I was like, huh?

3:26:22Ryan Dank AfWell, and it's not only they get into the studio. It's like, like, again, I agree with you. Like there's beauty in all directions. Okay. I'm not saying that doing it through exploration and just random crosses has doesn't yield results. It clearly does. No, I know. I know you're not saying that. I'm just trying.

3:26:37Collin PalmerI just wanted to make sure that was said because it sounded like I was going in this wild direction of like.

3:26:42Ryan Dank AfYeah, no, I didn't mean that. I didn't mean that. That was more for the viewers. But because they all do have a possibility, like just randomly crashing stuff together. That's what's led us to have all these unique variations. It's just that when we find the unique variation, we want to preserve it. That's. It's time to be disciplined, right? And, you know, like Miles Davis and, you know, whoever is jamming away in like late 60s in a recording, that moment of theirs will never be captured again by them the same way.

3:27:15Ryan Dank AfHowever, there's generations of people that heard that riff and worked it out and created it into something new, right? And I think it's one of the amazing things that like, You know, what I would say the more typical cannabis breeder does is they are just mashing things together and growing through collectively millions of plants, right? And it's those millions of plants just by like lottery ticket that they're going to find something with a unique special combination, right?

3:27:46Ryan Dank AfAnd so like that kind of exploration for sure it serves a purpose. It's just in order to preserve that thing and share it within the community, Is what takes an understanding of how to lock in traits, right? And that's where like understanding meiosis and breeding methods towards a goal is just the only way to go, right? So it's just about having the tools and understanding the tools so that when you find something incredible like that Valencia dominant plant that you can lock it in.

3:28:24SpeakerAlso to add just one more, you know, thing to it, which is what we've been talking about the whole time is the experience. So just like, you know, that Miles Davis did at one time, he recorded it. It never really changes, but every single person who listens to that same exact version of it has a different feeling from it. The Mona Lisa was only painted one time.

3:28:52SpeakerSure, it's just one Mona Lisa, but every person that walks past that is going to have a different feeling from just even looking at it. So then it just sort of goes back to all of what we're talking about has such a huge, valid input to how we move forward as a culture. How the plant moves forward as a medicine or this incredible sentient being orchestration of cannabis that can be put into multiple different facets, whatever we want to call it or whatever it's happening.

3:29:36SpeakerAll of the tools on the table are absolutely important. All of our experiences are really important because That's how the plant wants to interact with us. And also to the tone that Ryan or whatever you all are talking about, the Macintosh apple, in that same sort of sense, the Macintoshes are never going to change. But the Macintosh that's grown in Iran and the Macintosh that's grown here on my farm They could be identical in everything, the way that it looks, the color, and even the COA of it, but yet the flavors could be totally dramatically different.

3:30:20Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWhich would maybe make the COA.

3:30:22SpeakerAnd I just love that, that that is our experience, our orchestration with the experience, the tools that we create, The tools that we came from, it creates this conversation and how everything is going to move forward. And it even creates what type of medicine people are going to want to be able to then push that Breeding forward. So, I mean, everybody knows that right now, everybody in Europe wants something fruity.

3:30:59SpeakerHow did we even get there? We got there from doing all of these things. And who knows, maybe fruity is what is helping out Europe with all of the stress and the pressure that everybody is dealing with, that it's all a real black and white world with a lot of toxins. Let's freaking bring some fruit to cannabis. And it comes there and then... It is orchestrating itself to be a part of that.

3:31:27SpeakerJust adding it all to create a really sloppy painting.

3:31:33Collin PalmerWell, look, I think I like Ryan's approach. I like your approach. I think everyone has a very valid point of view here. And that's why the conversation is what it is. It's like, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's like, I love Ryan's. Let's quantify it.

3:31:50SpeakerMe too.

3:31:50Collin PalmerYeah. Let's take the quantitative and quantify it.

3:31:53SpeakerI want that course.

3:31:55Collin PalmerI think that's important because that's all, you know, I really force rules in sort of our construct of our creative, you know, discipline that we have in our lab and the way we grow our cannabis. So I appreciate that. Like, yeah, let's learn about all the things that we think we know because we, as I always say to our team, like, As much as we think we know, we don't know.

3:32:19Collin PalmerAnd the more we start, we understand this, we learn that we just don't understand this. And that's why we have to document. It's why these existing tools that you're talking about that are already in other mediums, like far outside of cannabis, right? All of these are applicable to learning and furthering this thing. So I totally I love everybody's point of view.

3:32:44SpeakerSo it's a learning process for me from like, you know, not knowing absolutely nothing till now. You know what? I made my first seed in 2016 till now, knowing I don't know nothing either. And it's just like, It's like, how do I choose a Mel? That was the question. And nowadays it's like, oh, it's like an aroma that I really like and I vibe with. So I'm going to encapsulate half of the whole seed line towards, you know, say it's a light debt bust, the indoor bust, the whole summer bust to make this whole project and all this energy on something that you like.

3:33:19SpeakerAnd when it comes to a Mel, it is totally a gamble. Especially if you're not getting aromas from the mel, you know, from my experience, and you're just like, ah, I think this papaya, say you're making a papaya mel line, and you've got papaya regs, and you're just hoping that this mel is going to bring forth that aroma, but it could be something else completely. And that's where sometimes I'll grow a plant and I'll let it go past its regular life cycle, and it'll start like...

3:33:49SpeakerThank you so much for watching.

3:34:04SpeakerEvery year that I've made seeds is like, oh, I made the Wilson seed line first. That was kind of like a hashy thing. And I lucked out that one. You know, I still pop seeds and people still have stuff from that line. And that was what, nine years ago. And then it was just kind of like a development process on seed. What, oh, what, what, what is a Mel?

3:34:22SpeakerHow do I choose a Mel? Oh, of course, grows, grows great. Oh, that's, I popped 30 seeds. That's the best looking one. We're going to choose that one. But I, to me, it's a lot of spotlighting and aroma that I like and I want to see make the full circle or I feel needs more traction because everything came from somewhere. Like some of the things I've spotlighted were like papaya trop hybrid and that's tangy or KC mango.

3:34:48SpeakerIt all comes from somewhere. And then You know, you go forward and it's like, oh, what's the next thing I wanted to spotlight? Oh, the Starburst. Oh, there's another KC hybrid, you know? And then you go, oh, the Shishka Berry. Oh, that's Breeders Steve stuff. And it's always like, that's kind of my selection process is spotlighting aromas because it's going to be half of your project or materializing something new, something someone's not really looking at.

3:35:13SpeakerKind of like back to the music analogy, finding that sample that no one's You're looking at and you're just like, yo, you guys haven't heard this yet. And then you kind of find that in a mail and you bring that forward into a red line. Or if you were to approach a feminized line, you would just grab that clone and just boom, go for the kill. But either way, like that's how my selection process works.

3:35:37SpeakerIt's a lot of what I vibe with. And that's been and that's been a development process because what I liked 10 years ago isn't what I'm more adamant about nowadays. Which, which, which, within A to Z, I liked everything before, and I still do, back to the conversation, but I know what I like. I like Zs, I like OGs, I like Chems, I like Candys, I like Sherbs, and I know what I don't like, so I'm not going to choose a male that is, you know, terpenylene dominant.

3:36:07SpeakerI'm not going to choose a male that is a hazy long variety strain. I'm going to go for these types of male qualities and breed with that. And that's how my, you know, remedial male selection process works. And it's helped me develop nice seed lines. And I found that the male is super dominant. In my two last seed lines, I did a trop line and I did a starburst line and holy cannoli, I can't get it out of the, like, I'll pop a bunch of seeds and yeah, the mango's there and oh, look at the perps and the hues from the trop and it's got those cushy, accurate citrus qualities, undertones, which is, Both really things that I was aiming for when I did those seed lines as opposed to everything prior to which had its purpose like even when I did the open pollination with different mouths from different seed stock and everybody's like this guy's crazy I still um I liked everything that came from it, you know?

3:37:01SpeakerAnd then when I did the freak show line, I did the freak show line because I wanted to see pinite fern expressions in every aroma that exists, right? So like a banana fern, a skittle fern, a gelato fern, And I found that that wasn't as easy as thought about, right? Because I'll pop a hundred seeds and only one of them would have that forward trait with that type of aroma though.

3:37:25SpeakerSo yeah, we were in the green, but still a lot of more work to be done. And it would have to be more hyper-focused among those aromas and that pinite fern, I feel, to make a more, you know, consistent line. But that's just my experience, just like making them and working them and doing it, you know, with my two hands, you know, for sure.

3:37:44Collin PalmerYeah, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, as I was saying, I feel like everybody has a different approach. You know, I look for resin and then I decide whether or not if the flavor profile fits what I'm looking for. But it's all about that for me. And then plant morphology comes into play. And then it's just growing it out after you've done it to enough, you know, is really most of the time the key.

3:38:15Collin PalmerBecause as you said, Ryan, like you can do all the... Selection you want, but until you see the offspring perform, you really, I don't, unless you really understand the genetic markers and the protein and all the things that you know from a geneticist point of view, you're really, you just gotta, you gotta search, you know, and I think that's been my experience with it.

3:38:40Ryan Dank AfI don't really talk about genetic markers because it's a technology that is so far out of most people's hands that it's kind of like it's almost not worth discussing, right? Because it's like...

3:38:50Collin PalmerBut it should be said though because it's... It should be.

3:38:53Ryan Dank AfAnd it's an important thing to understand because it's like that's a way of directly reading the genome so you don't have to grow the plants out to see... The expression of those traits, right? That's the beauty of that technology. But like, you know, Masonic, for example, like I'm going to put, I'll put up this presentation I'm going to do. And like, you're a good example of what I'm talking about with the breeding, understanding the breeding methods.

3:39:18Ryan Dank AfBecause like those things that you're chasing, like the pinnet, you know, fern phenotype with a given scent profile, right? There's very specific ways that you need to go about that. It's not a one generation breeding. It's like a three generation breeding program. And you have to like, you know, it's like if you're going from like Chicago to whatever, Los Angeles, it's like you have to go west and then turn south.

3:39:44Ryan Dank AfAnd there's specific things that you have to do at specific times. Right. And so it's like understanding the journey before you even set out is really the thing that allows you to get to the goal. Right. It's like you can't just go out and start making crosses and like hope that you're going to get there. It's like you have to do specific things at specific times to end up with a plant because you're shuffling that pinnate fern phenotype is a recessive trait.

3:40:11Ryan Dank AfOkay. And a lot of terpene profiles are recessive to terpenylene. Like terpenylene is an incredibly dominant trait. You cross anything to terpenylene. Like if you cross OG to terpenylene, the offspring are coming out terpenylene. So we lose traits like we lose that fern trait in the F1 generation, right? And so there's a round, there's a generation of breeding where essentially you're making crosses blind or alternatively, the only way to do it is through test crosses.

3:40:42Ryan Dank AfAnd like Colin was just saying is like growing the offspring To infer which parent was correct, right? And that means like sometimes doing like multiple parents together to like figure out which, you know, which of your F1s actually have the traits that you're looking for. But if you learn these like breeding texts and like the understanding of why, like how chromosomes segregate and why things like Punnock squares work.

3:41:13Ryan Dank AfAnd, you know, we know these like breeders ratio, like the Mendelian ratios, like the one to two to one or the three to one or the nine to three to three to one. Like those concepts explain the biological processes that are undergoing all of our breeding. Right. And that helps you come up with a plan on how to get to the goal that you like your predefined goal.

3:41:35Ryan Dank AfLike you're saying, like a given scent profile that is recessive with a recessive leaf condition, right? That's like, that's the one in 16 plant, right? Like, so you really need to grow like a lot of plants and be looking for that specific thing in order to get to the goal that you're going for. Otherwise, you're just kind of mashing things together and hoping that it works, right?

3:42:03Ryan Dank AfSo, yeah. And again, I don't mean that as a criticism. I'm just like, it's knowing these tools.

3:42:11SpeakerNo, that's literally what's happening. That's what I said. You know, it's not... I said you have to pop a lot of them to even find a sliver of that pinite fern among the first population. And then you would have to hyper focus even more so, you know, with, you know, to get more ferns, you know, and that would probably help if you did an open population with different males.

3:42:35SpeakerI only used one male because uh that year I was just doing my summer bust and I had males to choose from and there was one male that really vibed with me and it was that freak show and and it was kind of like on the you know oh let's use you you're really vibing me I have my Wilson male that I've been growing and I still keep around since like 2018 but I started to change it up around it and that was a little bit after my open pollination but My direct goal wasn't like, oh, the whole line is going to be a fern line.

3:43:04SpeakerNo, my goal was I'm going to make the stepping stone or just even a population where you could You know, even explore that, and which we have, you know, we got lemon tree fern expressions, we got honeybee with fern expressions, we got a couple of things that aren't normally in freak show lines that I've gotten myself, either it's from like a can of Research Co. with the Blueberry Freak Show, the Humble Seed Co. Freak Show, or other hobbyists that like to grow those mutant type strains where I've grown them out, and the reoccurring theme in those strains is like, Terpenoline or like a floral berry type of thing.

3:43:40SpeakerBut I've managed to make like the F1 with the mel that I used wasn't a piney mel either. He was like this snow, like snow is not an aroma, but he's like a... Like he's, he's like a, like a skunky, cushy, like evergreen male aroma that he brings forward to all the lines. And, you know, we've done Dolce de Uva, Wilson, you know, I have a library with like 300 females and we'll just hit everything and just, you know, put it all on the network.

3:44:10SpeakerI'll grow a bunch myself. And yeah, that's what I was saying. It is not, everything isn't fern. It's, it's very here and there. And the, People would need to hyper focus and that was my goal was just to even entertain that exploration to have myself as seed stock and and even the stuff that isn't full fern expression still has like this crazy crazy leaf pattern where it's either more hyper serrated or you could just tell that it's not your regular cannabis leaf and it's a very neat seed line.

3:44:38SpeakerAnd, and, and the only way to do it was, you know, for me, I wasn't going to wait for someone else. No one that I know is doing freak show lines with a library that I kind of mustered up. And, and so I was like, I have to do it myself. And that was it. Like that, that, that's, that, that's what I, uh, And you're right, you know, it's not like all freak show, finite fern expressions, but there are slivers of it in almost every single, like, you know, offering.

3:45:04SpeakerAnd it's a rare one, like every hundred seed, you'll find that crazy looking plant with an aroma that isn't your common, to me, freak show aroma that it gives off, which is that tiny, Floral Berry Aroma. Besides the Berry Freak, which is the other original female that was chosen among that seed stock, that one had a little bit more pop. More like a jelly, yogurt, blueberry type of thing going on with it, which I didn't breed with that.

3:45:33SpeakerI bred with the male from the Humble Seed line where they used probably Shapeshifter's original offering.

3:45:39Ryan Dank AfYou should sell some of those plants in your F1. You'll be surprised what comes out the other side. Like that's what I was saying. It's a multi-generational breeding program to capture double recessives. Like you have to go down at least to an F2. And so a self of an F1 is what we call a segregating generation. So it's kind of like making an F2 cross, sorry, crossing two F1s together to get an F2 generation.

3:46:10Ryan Dank AfExcept when you self an F1, you're only dealing with one chromosome pair or one chromosome from each of the parents. And so you're able to like really analyze those, the patterns of inheritance a lot more easily than if you're crossing two F1 siblings. But yeah, keep going down that line. Try to sell some of those plants. You'll find some really interesting things. And that's really interesting, the thing that you're talking about, saying that the F1 has increased serration or still some leaf abnormality.

3:46:51Ryan Dank AfThat's what we call a dose-dependent gene effect, right? And so you get it also if you're crossing an auto to... Thank you for joining us.

3:47:20Ryan Dank AfA regular photoperiod plant, and that's also a dose-to-gene, dose-dependent effect. It's like just having one copy of the gene makes the plant faster, but when you have two copies of the gene, that's when you get the full expression of the auto or that pinnate leaf, that fern-like leaf, right? So that's an interesting thing.

3:47:42SpeakerDaz actually gave me some seeds of his... I've always played with autos here and there and just did regular, you know, regular auto.

3:48:05SpeakerUh, crosses and, and, and yeah, like I've heard the quicks term thrown around for sure. And, and, and I've grown them myself and, and, and, uh, here and there, you know, I've, I've popped as many fingers as I have worth of auto packs. You know, I'm not the biggest auto fan, but, uh, like, and I've done seeds with them. You know, I grew, uh, some serious seeds, autos, some of Daz's autos, and he works one of the F ones into a true auto, uh, And it's the creme de la Compton or something like that.

3:48:33SpeakerBut yeah, the auto quick thing is interesting too, for sure. That's how you do it.

3:48:40Ryan Dank AfWhen you take an F1 and you go down to the F2 generation, like a lot of people, they stop at the first cross, right? Like one cross is not a breeding program. It's a hybrid. And usually that's like the last step in a breeding program. But when you cross two plants together, go down, like take, screen some F1s of your cross and Find like the best plants that you have and sell them.

3:49:03Ryan Dank AfAnd like, if people would do that, they would be blown away by what comes out in the next generation, right? Because the F2 is where you get that. Like we, you know, one of the, one of Mendel's laws was independent assortment of trays. And it just means that like, we can shuffle combinations of traits between seed lines back and forth. And in the first generation, you don't get that shuffling.

3:49:27Ryan Dank AfRight. You have to go to the second year to see that.

3:49:30Collin PalmerI did a line, Ryan, that was a purple bubblegum cush that and I did this in like 2016 or something. And I took it from an auto and brought it back into a reg line and I took it to F3. And it was it's a six week, six weeks. You know, I mean, it's it's it's I'd like to see more of that. Go on and, you know, and people explore these ideologies as you're kind of alluding to, you know, and try to further, you know, lines, you know, in the right ways, you know, and go after a target, you know, because it could benefit things that are, That are longer running that we just can't see in commercial settings anymore.

3:50:19Collin PalmerPeople always ask me like, why can't you grow sour diesel? I'm like, cause the rooms don't run at 12 weeks. They just don't. I mean, we could probably outcross it and find something like in the vernacular of the, you know, flavor profile, but it's not going to be, you know, can't be 12 weeks, you know? So how do we make meaningful choices that could be utilized in those ways, you know?

3:50:46Ryan Dank AfYeah, well, I mean, that's, you know, Kevin was saying it earlier about the, hey, about the cutting down the long flowering. It's like that's the type of stuff that you do with molecular genetics, right? Like you follow those traits very specifically. When you're looking at, it's just like Lego, right? Like you're taking one piece of Lego out of one set and changing it like a red, you know, set and changing it with one piece from a blue set, right?

3:51:12Ryan Dank AfRight on one piece of the chromosome. Like it's literally that simple. Um, it's just, it takes finding the right copies, uh, the right combinations of recombinance of chromosome recombinance so that you only do have that one change in the genome. The reason like people, those plants change is because it's not when you cross something else into a haze. In the hybrid, half of the genome is now from that other plant, right?

3:51:42Ryan Dank AfSo it's- 100%.

3:51:43Collin PalmerSo how would you approach, so like you're, I love the idea of S1s, man, because I agree with you. I found like incredible, like CSI, I've like, big shout out to him. I've ran a ton of his S1s and- They're like insanely like it'll make you like challenge question like the chem lines. It'll make you question the original cuts. You're like, yo.

3:52:07Ryan Dank AfOh, dude. Like, listen, we did. I had all those plants in California. I collected all those things. And so I selfed everything. And like you find plants, like everybody holds these things like cookies and Chem D and whatever. They hold them all up as these ground plants. They're not, they're just not like if you self them or make combination hybrids between themselves, you end up with way better plants.

3:52:29Ryan Dank AfThey're like, if you grow a hundred or even like more plants, you'll find way better stuff. Right. And so, let me, sorry, let me just finish that one, that one thought. Like, Caleb from Inspecta, right, from CSI, I think he's, I've said this before, he's doing like an incredible service to the community by taking those things and putting them into S1C form. Because it allows people to like, you know, then we're not just FOMOing for, Having the Chem D cut and settling for something that's like, yeah, it's really good, but it's like by growing through those S1s, you can find something that's better in some regards, right?

3:53:09Ryan Dank AfAnd so as long as everybody's doing that, we actually move forward, like, you know, through evolution, right?

3:53:15SpeakerSo I'm sorry, Brandon. I, uh, last year I did a Chemdog Black Lime Reserve Cross and it's absolutely magnificent. And you could see that it has way, way more vigor than, than the Chemdog parent. It's just, and it's got similar profiles of things like Sour D and the Sours, but it brings in this like Trop Lime. Also, it's really nice. I'm super stuffed. Actually, that's what I've been smelling.

3:53:47Ryan Dank AfIt's Mean Gene, I think. You know what, dude? I've been puffing on the Black Rhyme Reserve, too. I donated some funds last year towards a community member's father's funeral, and in return... Jackson gave me like a whole bunch of the original F1 of the Blackwater.

3:54:04Collin PalmerSame. Yeah. Back in, I think.

3:54:07Ryan Dank AfWe just harvested them like a week ago. Blackwater's great. We ran like 45 of them. And there's some really, like there's a few spectacular plants in there.

3:54:17SpeakerThe most spectacular, because I ran 65 of them. In a hunt and the best plant was this this number 28 which was a male and I've used it for years for breeding and so I know what characteristics it it um brings in because I've seen it in all of these different you know like probably 10 different lines that I've used in it and I've grown all of those out so I know exactly what it brings in to the line and It's a really, it's a just, it's a really great, this, this new cross that I did, it's so good.

3:54:53SpeakerIt's so, I'm so stoked on it.

3:54:56Collin PalmerYeah, that's super rad. And then one last question for everybody. You know, I've been, you know, I've been growing a lot over different markets across the United States and, and a little bit up in Canada. And I, as of late, you know, a lot of people in the Northeast are experiencing plants that have high, We've got a couple of questions here. We've got a couple of questions here.

3:55:21Collin PalmerWe've got a question here.

3:55:34Collin PalmerThat to your point, Ryan, like that's a, that's a project. Like let's, there we go. There's our first project, right? Let's, let's go after an equilibrium. Has any of you thought about this stuff? Like, cause it's, it comes up all the time in commercial settings.

3:55:48SpeakerI did a project recently with medicinal genomics and then we did a follow-up project with a lab out in Stillwater, Oklahoma that we, and we work with OSU with a professor of And we were looking at, I thought it was originally leaf spot septoria, but I noticed it started to hop from different types of plants, from grass to different weeds to the oak trees. And so what I did is we identified what the pathogen was as Alternaria.

3:56:21SpeakerAnd there were several species of Alternaria. However, there was one that was specifically pathogenic. And then we also did an ionomics project. So we're looking at the total ionomic, we're looking at the total amount of different ions in the plant. And we, what we're able to see is that the pathogen rate Of this particular pathogen actually increased with some increases in different nutrients and different ions and especially with like heavy metals.

3:56:54SpeakerGot it.

3:56:56Collin PalmerWell, it's such a big conversation. We're coming at four o'clock here on the Eastern Standard, you know, on the Eastern Coast, Eastern Seaboard here, and 12 p.m. on the Pacific Standard Coast.

3:57:11Collin PalmerThis has been an incredible conversation. I wish, I mean, we can keep going, but I think we've been here for four hours, so if you guys want to... Keep going. We can. I just got to let Marcus's better half know. But if we want to roll out, we should let Mark do another tribute. But, you know, let me know, guys. We can keep going for another few minutes.

3:57:36SpeakerI'm ready to roll out. It was nice hanging with you guys. Ryan, man, nice. You know, you're a very knowledgeable person. Thank you for... Putting me on game on a lot of stuff. And let's get into some Mark action. Russ, nice talking to you. Nice seeing you. Yeah. Nice talking to you, man.

3:57:54Ryan Dank AfYou're a genius. Yeah. And Masonic, again, I just want to give you the tools to do, to do it, to optimize what you do. Right. You're already doing it. Thank you. It's just about helping guide you towards making choices that give you the tools to get the most out of your time. A hundred percent.

3:58:12Collin PalmerYeah. Well, Yo, big love to everybody. Thank you all for coming on. Everybody, like, I mean, it's an honor and I love you all a lot. You guys are deeper than friends to me. This is a family. You know, thank you. We'll continue the conversation next week. Marcus, have an amazing time in Colorado, man. And as Marcus says, may the full mill bless your bowl. Marcus, thank you.

3:58:42Collin PalmerCan you hear me? Mark, yeah, you can do a little like just strum your guitar and do a little.

3:58:50Etienne FontanNot so close to the mic, Mark. Not so close to the mic.

3:58:54SpeakerYes. All right. So wait, let me let me turn down my power.

3:59:00Etienne FontanNo, no, no, that was fine where you were. No, but once you start really singing. You're projecting and your diaphragm pushes into the mic, so just give a little, there you go. My diaphragm.

3:59:12SpeakerAll right. Let's do one more Bob Weir song. For Bob.

3:59:19Collin PalmerYou can hear me? We can hear you perfectly. I think it sounds, now start, give us a little volume on your voice.

3:59:27SpeakerWell, tell me after, we'll just do, I'd rather be here in some dark hollow. Does that sound good? Sounds great. Okay, no clipping.

3:59:38Collin PalmerNo clipping.

3:59:39SpeakerAll right, no clipping. Well, this one's for Bob. Okay, we'll do that. To be here in some dark hollow Where the sun don't ever shine Than to be here in a big city In a small room with your love on my mind. So blow your whistle, freight train. Carry far on down this track. Well I'm going away, I'm leaving today. I'm going but I ain't coming back.

4:00:40SpeakerI'd rather be here in some dark hollow Where the sun don't ever shine Than to be at home alone Knowing that you're gone Would cause me to lose my happy mind So blow your whistle, free dream I carry far on down this track Well I'm going away I'm leaving today I'm going but I ain't coming back guitar solo

4:01:36SpeakerAnd blow your whistle, freight train, carry me far along down this track. Well, I'm going away, I'm leaving today, I'm going, but ain't coming back. I'm going away, I'm leaving today, I'm going,

4:02:10Collin PalmerAll right. Thanks everybody. Thank you very much. Have a beautiful day. Take care, man.