The Resinator Episode

0:00BubblemanI'm a trick everyone.

0:08SpeakerI'm a trick everyone.

0:13BubblemanAll right, look at that, we're live. Okay, look, I tricked you all. I went live early today and for very good reason. I'm traveling today, so it's a travel day for me. I got to kind of leave a little early today. I was going to get Colin to sort of run the show, but it sounds like he's got to leave early. So we'll do at least two hours with the Resonator crew, and we may do a part two because I'm unable to do the full four hours today because I'm flying out to the US.

0:42BubblemanSo welcome, everybody. Thank you for showing up. Always appreciate you guys. I think we're going to do our... daily sponsorship announcements because uh well we couldn't do it without them well i shouldn't say we couldn't do it without them because i did it for 10 years without them but it's not as fun i can say that it's not as fun without them so without further ado Today's episode of Hash Church is proudly supported by the Press Club.

1:10BubblemanCalifornia brothers obsessed with hash and everything solventless, just like us. Their journey didn't start as a business. It started as a family back in 2014 when a loved one wasn't finding relief through conventional medicine. They turned back to the plant they'd respected their whole lives. They knew cannabis had medicinal power, but they needed something cleaner. And that search led them to solventless. Shout out to Nicotee. Using nothing but water, heat, and pressure to let the plant express itself honestly.

1:36BubblemanThat light bulb moment turned into washing, pressing, and experimenting. And eventually realizing how hard it was to find truly high quality rosin bags and solventless tools that were made in America and still affordable. So they did what real hash heads do. They built the solution themselves. The Press Club stands for clean process, conscious intentions, and tools made by people who actually live this culture. Not corporations chasing trends.

2:00BubblemanWe're so grateful to have the Press Club supporting Hash Church and the wider solventless community, family run, purpose driven and rooted in why hash matters in the first place. Much love to the Press Club and thank you for supporting Hash Church. You can check them out at www.thepressclub.co. And please do, please support our sponsors. It looks, I know you guys are all over that. At Hash Church, we talk a lot about ritual, respect for the plant, and elevating the experience, and that's exactly why we're proud to be supported by Puffco.

2:33BubblemanPuffco continues to set the standards for modern consumption with tools built for people who truly care about flavor, temperature, and intentional use. From the Puffco Peak Pro with the 3D XL Bowl, delivering consistent heat, bigger hits, and unmatched terp expression, to the Proxy, redefining modular ritual-based consumption, and the Pivot, bringing true Puffco performance into a compact, everyday format. These aren't gadgets. They're purpose-built tools for hash and solventless.

2:58BubblemanWe're genuinely grateful for Puffco's continued support of Hash Church, our guests, and our community. Their belief in education, culture, and quality helps us keep these conversations alive. You can support the brands that support the culture by visiting www.puffco.com. Explore their lineup and experience what intentional design really feels like. Puffco, elevate the ritual. I do want to add Yesterday, my wife was holding a Puffco. My wife doesn't really smoke or vaporize at all.

3:28BubblemanAnd she was holding one and she said, you know what? I can see why people like these. And this was coming from the perspective of a sort of Joe Strady, someone that's not into cannabis use really at all. But just the feeling and the design of the unit, they've gone beyond just creating something for heady, heady culture. It's breaking into the mainstream. So shout out for Puffco for that, because that's pretty awesome.

3:53BubblemanYou know, last but not least, at Hash Church, we wouldn't be here without pioneers who helped define solventless extraction and bubble bags are a cornerstone of that history. Bubble bags helped introduce the world to ice water extraction, giving growers and hash makers a simple, effective way to separate resin using nothing but water and ice and agitation. Decades later, their bags remain a true... You know what I just realized?

4:14BubblemanI just realized I'm an idiot. Give me one second. We're going to go back to that because I didn't push record and I have to push record. There we go. Record to this computer.

4:30SpeakerAll right.

4:31BubblemanSorry for that. I will start over by appreciating the Press Club for their sponsorship and appreciating Puffco for their sponsorship and appreciating Bubble Bags for their sponsorship. I totally spaced and shit the bed and forgot to record. And so now we're recording. And that's why you start early, ladies and gentlemen. It's still 8.57 and I'm still ahead of the ball. So I'm not worried about that. I'm not going to read the whole thing again, but I want to shout out Puffco.

4:57BubblemanThe Press Club and Bubble Bags. And you can support those sponsors. We'll be throwing them into the chat room throughout the day. And in the meantime, I'm going to let in our folks. Oh, I'm so glad I clicked record on that. I'm not going to lie. Today, we've got an amazing episode with the good folks from the Resonator. These guys have been doing the cryo cures and the cryo trims and the cryo extraction for quite some time.

5:20BubblemanI myself have been using original Resonator tools for... You know, five or six plus years in my labs. I don't even know how many of my labs have them to be honest. I think that we've got them in Missouri and we've got them in Canada and we've got them in Michigan and really most of my labs have the original resonator. So it's going to be really great to see TJ today as well as his whole team who are just popping in right now.

5:51BubblemanWe got E-Word, Eric, right? Yes. Excellent. Welcome, brother. I thought it was a mistake because when he sent your email address to me, he wrote dot C-O-M-E, but I didn't see that. I just saw E-Word and I was like, oh, he missed the D. And he's like, no, it's not Edward. It's E-Word. Right on, dude. I like the fish poster behind you.

6:18SpeakerOh, thanks. Yeah, my 98, my first Halloween, 98 fish. Okay, 98.

6:23BubblemanThose are some good years right there. I'm not gonna lie. My favorite, my favorite. Yeah. I started in 93 with fish. My first show was at the Commodore Ballroom with Baby Gramps in Vancouver, and then just continued there for Just really a short period of time. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go to the U.S. for so long. I missed really the last 20 plus years of shows.

6:44BubblemanWere you at that 99 Vancouver show? The 9999, the most epic show of ever.

6:49SpeakerYeah, I was up there for that.

6:51BubblemanThat show was insane. That show, I will tell one story about that show. I saw a friend of mine who, you know, we all have that friend that goes to every show, right? And if you have that friend... It goes to every show. Eventually, you see him be destroyed, right? You see him be destroyed. He's the guy that's at the show that comes out and says, if they play down with disease one more fucking time, I'm going to puke.

7:13BubblemanAnd it's like, I'll not be needing to go to any more shows, dude. I think you've seen enough kind of thing. But he came out of the 9999 Vancouver show.

7:23BubblemanI'd never seen him so happy. I'd never seen him so ecstatic. I'd never seen him in so many years say positive things because he's, you know, he'd seen, this was at 9,999. I'm guessing he had already seen hundreds of shows, like maybe, you know, three or 400, like everyone basically since like 80, whatever in Vermont. And so it was nice to see him be happy like that.

7:46BubblemanI also brought Marcel Braun, the glassblower, to that show. I brought a lot of glassblowers to that show, but Marcel was with me. That was his first fish show. And he actually brought the fish bubbler that he made for the Fish 2000 Seminole Indian Reservation show. And he brought it to that show. Dude, he was just passing it around. And when people found out who he was, like, he's kind of a shy guy.

8:09BubblemanHe's not really like, you know, outward going like myself. And he just like... Ran away. Like he literally just ran away. It was so funny. I caught up with him later. He's like, dude, that was just too much. All the people. I was just like, you know, but it prepared him for the 2000 Seminole show where he gave that pipe to someone and didn't see it for hours.

8:30BubblemanIt just was traveling around the crowd. And then it eventually came back. It's like a $10,000 US piece during a time where it was a magical night.

8:38SpeakerIt was a magical night, dude. So welcome.

8:41BubblemanSorry to go into fish stores. Welcome to the whole team. I see HS in the corner there. I see TJ just rolled up with maybe his partner there.

8:53BubblemanHow's it going? Nice to meet you as well.

8:56SpeakerStephanie's the brains behind the operation. Of course she is. Sound check. Can you guys hear me? We can hear you.

9:02BubblemanYou're on mute. It always mutes you automatically. And I will say, although none of you sound bad right now, generally not having headphones will create reverberation in the microphones, but none of you guys have it. If it does happen, I'll ask you to mute your mics when you're not talking, but... Super stoked. Listen, I have a flight today, so I don't know if we're going to do a three hour, a two hour.

9:23BubblemanSo we should get into it and rock and roll. If it's too short today, we'll do a part two and have you guys on again. I usually do four hours, but I fly out today at like one thirty from the Vancouver airport. So I'm at one point in time. We could go till 11 solid for two straight hours and I could shut it down and then leave.

9:44BubblemanOr we could try if ATN comes in and he feels confident in hosting, we can keep it going for at least maybe another hour. I'll just go to the airport, clear customs, crack open my laptop and finish hash church from the lounge at the Vancouver airport. Dude, you look like you're in like an Italian coffee shop or something, dude. I'm in a French coffee shop in Paris.

10:04BubblemanOh, French. Okay, look at that. Last time I was there was actually 1989. Oh, wow. Epic. Yeah, it's been a while. The year my sister was born.

10:11SpeakerRight? It was the year I met my wife.

10:23BubblemanSo your sister's 37 years old. I know.

10:26SpeakerI'm basically the baby here. I was born in 94. 94. Well, I had a great year in 94. That was the year I graduated high school. I started high school.

10:44BubblemanI graduated in 91, I think, but maybe we were supposed to graduate in 90, but we took like an extra year because we were such ragers going to fish shows. Ah, salut, bienvenue, bonjour.

10:57SpeakerI'm saying hi to the guy in your headphones.

10:59BubblemanHe's like, what's going on over there?

11:04BubblemanAwesome. Well, really, honestly, great to have you. I know I'm going to have some of my regular panelists come in at one point in time, but oh yeah, Etienne says absolutely. He usually shows up within the first hour. I don't even know where to begin, dude. I mean, holy shit, you've been doing this for a long time. I guess we should begin at the beginning. Isn't that a good place to begin?

11:23BubblemanThe beginning? The origin story, right? So the question for the origin story for me, and I got this like well-written, I'm like, what was the exact moment you knew post-harvest processing was broken enough that you had to build your own solution? And that may be a buildup to get to that. You know, your beginning may be way before that.

11:46SpeakerThat's a nice keen like segue right into, I mean, I was a grower and I had a big power bill. And taking the sugar leaf that everybody was throwing away or giving away doing splits, I just decided that there was a better way than disposing of it. And so I started making bubble hash.

12:07BubblemanPick us up with the year. What year was this?

12:09SpeakerI would have been circa the early 2000s. We're talking like 2003 to 2006 is where it really started accelerating. It's probably 2006. Thank you for joining us.

12:37SpeakerAnd putting them on, dripping it onto the top of the charcoal for the hookahs. You know, and it was really the kind of the beginning of the pathway to say, okay, there's, you know, we were using all the equipment out there that you could find. And, you know, I tried it all. And there are benefits. Some of the tools are better than others. But at the end of the day, it was just...

12:57SpeakerWe knew there was a better way and I knew some sister mamas that sewed some screens and you know we started cutting 50 gallon barrels in half and using rotisserie motors and duct tape and like kind of MacGyver style this thing together. And we went out in the Humboldt Hills and Mendocino and Lake County up here in Northern California. And just like letting the tumbler run all night, you know, in the cold and coming out.

13:19SpeakerAnd it was kind of the, that was really where things began. You know, I guess the, to rapid fire, the really transitioned was, you know, I had my, my spot was raided in 2008. And that kind of changed directions of the pathway for my life. There was a crossroads. And it was definitely one of those, I had this vision, I knew what the resonator could be. And, you know, I had a couple partners that I was working with and that was what really launched it.

13:50SpeakerIt was like, let's do something different. Let's, cause it was, you know, do I get out of this industry that I love or do I find a way to stay in it? And for me, that was probably the crossroads moment.

14:02BubblemanThat's incredible. You know how incredible that is? You know that I started Bubble Bags after I got busted in 98, right? The whole reason I started Bubble Bags was because I got busted and I was like, damn, I can't do this anymore. I have to really figure this out. And so it was a crossroads for me as well. And I just want to say, A, my second question was before the original resonator existed, what was your personal workflow for trimming and prep and resin collection?

14:26BubblemanAnd I guess, you know, you just mentioned it. You were using the bubble bags to to make bubble hash. You are one of the very, very few. And in fact, you may be the only one who looked at the bubble bags and instead of just copying it exactly, you innovated something different. You know, which is why I always loved supporting you, dude. I mean, almost since day one, I've been a supporter of the original resonator and people like, why are you supporting that?

14:50BubblemanThat guy's just doing what you're doing in a different way. It's like, no, he's not at all. He's got this whole dry sifting thing. He's got the cryo trimming thing. He's got the water. I mean, this is fucking awesome. How can you, how can you be mad at this thing? It's super cool. And I myself have bought, I don't even know how many I've bought, dude. It's gotta be like six to 10.

15:09BubblemanAt least. At least, right? I'm a proud supporter of The Resonator, knowing that you bought at least six to 10 sets of bubble bags back in 2003 and four, probably many more.

15:20SpeakerOh, yeah, man. You're an OG, bro. You've laid a pathway for a lot of us in this space. I mean, and you go back that far, you know, I was starting to put myself on camera and my friends were like, kind of like, What are you doing, bro? You know, like, oh my God, you know, you're talking about cannabis on camera. And for me, it was a transition.

15:40SpeakerIt was an obvious pathway. You know, prior, I think this is a good kind of also point, you know, when you asked previously what I was doing, like one thing I had never was, was camera shy. You know, as a musician, I was happy to get on a stage, you know, and perform. You know, I played, you know, I played a bass guitar in my band. I started a hip hop project.

16:00SpeakerSo, you know, I was an emcee. And so I definitely was not, you know, stage shy. Right. So getting in front of a camera was kind of second nature for me. And that was a big part of like the willingness to get out and talk about what we were doing. Thank you so much for joining us.

16:31SpeakerAnd we were working behind the scenes for years before we actually launched, but that was really when it started changing gears for us. Things became real. You didn't build one before that? Well, yes, in 2011, there was... That's what I thought, 2011. But it was an acrylic, you know, small... Oh, I know. Yeah, yeah, the... You know, was on both sides for the... And that was a partner of my original partner, James, when we were doing this back in the day.

17:00SpeakerBut that was... Some guys who had an acrylic shop, we threw that together for him as a little concept piece. But it wasn't, it definitely wasn't the masterpiece that BJ came up with. It wasn't ready for production and it didn't have CO2. It didn't have multifunction. It didn't, you know, that's where the resonator, as we know it today, when I talk about the one we launched in 2016.

17:21SpeakerThat's the all-in-one concept? Yeah, I knew we had something, and that's kind of like, you know, a good part of the story. It's like, so when the acrylic model kind of came out, we were looking at it, you know, I actually was running a hydroponic shop that I'd opened up at the time out in Sonoma County called Green Universe. City of Sonoma. Yeah, City of Sonoma in Sonoma County.

17:40SpeakerAnd, you know, it was like, I sold a bunch of them to a bunch of friends, but they were Kind of cheap, you know, they broke if you kicked it, you know, it worked, but they are fragile. And I knew that we wanted to do something, but I was worried about the validity of it. And so we went to a patent attorney with this plastic contraption, acrylic, and said, hey, we want to, can we patent this?

18:06SpeakerAnd, you know, we basically shelved it, you know, sent it out, sent the patent attorney some money and kind of went back to, you know, other things in life. And it was a couple of years later, he called up and said, hey, pop a bottle of champagne. Your design patent was issued. And that was really what was like, OK, we got something here. And we pulled it off the shelf, dusted it off and kind of went back to reengineering the thing.

18:27SpeakerAnd I had this concept about a wet dry, like a shop vac. Thank you for watching.

18:51SpeakerI always say luck is the residue of design because we got lucky with the trimming. And we were trying to make some live rosin. It was like 2000, circa 16, 15-ish. And we were taking big buds off the hill and throwing them in the resonator. And instead of waiting 15, 20, 30 minutes like we were for sifting, we were checking it in like two minutes. And we were like, this is trimming the product.

19:12SpeakerIt was wild. We were like, what is? And I quickly understood what was happening. You know, made some changes to a couple of the features of the resonator and the right screens and the recipes. And, you know, it's funny, though, because part of that story, you know, we had to figure out quickly that there was a difference between, you know, obviously trimming a live product versus a dry product.

19:33SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

19:52SpeakerI went back, you know, and it's discolored, it's oxidized, right? And I'm like, of course, you know, I ruptured the cellulose wall. Like, what was I thinking? And, you know, so, okay, is it a dry trimmer or is it, you know, wet trimmer? And I really went, it put me down a six, seven year rabbit hole of figuring how to freeze dry cannabis flowers. Right.

20:13BubblemanYou've been at the head of it for sure, dude. Like you have been pioneering the arrow tip, the spearhead of this particular rabbit hole for sure. And it seems to be growing and growing. I mean, listen, even I, when I saw the cryo can for the first time, the concept, I talked to Baroni about it and I thought this is definitely the future. Having some sort of uber cold unit that can extract on the field Right.

20:40BubblemanAnd then it would change the entire game of extraction because now the water hash folks, the solvent folks, the dry sift folks, no one has to start with flour. They can all start with resin. And when you're starting with resin, you're increasing like when a when a when a Ethanol guy goes, oh, I get a 14% yield. And you're like, oh, really? Well, here's a 55 gallon barrel drum of heads.

21:03BubblemanYou're probably going to get a 65% yield in the same amount of time with the same amount of work, with the same amount of labor. And that is a game changer on so many different levels. Now, obviously, those guys, in my opinion, I don't think they... It never happened. Do you know what I mean? Like they just built this big fancy machine, but it never really happened.

21:23BubblemanWhereas you went the route of like slow and steady down the rabbit hole. And I will admit again, which is amazing, from almost a revelation, almost a mistake. Had you not checked in 30 seconds to two minutes, you would have never seen that. You would have blown right by it. You would have torn the buds all open and you wouldn't have seen that trim job. And it reminds me of Soil Grown, you know, after making flags with his hash, just being like, oh, maybe I'll do it with a bud.

21:49SpeakerI had no desire to freeze dry, man. That was not the goal. It was the only reason we freeze dried is because we created a problem that needed a solution. And they say pot growers are problem solvers, right? Now, I'm glad you said, you know, I talk about resin heads and, you know, the nature of, like, if you're a cook and you need olive oil, you don't start with the olive, right?

22:11SpeakerYou start with the olive oil. And that's the way and the principle that I look at SIFT and KEAF, right? You know, trichomes live up to 500 microns on a plant. So, if we can... Just with precision, precision trichome collection, actually qualify and collect the sweet spot out of the plant because you can go too far and you're going to contaminate your product. I'll run for an hour.

22:33SpeakerSure. 50% yield. Well, look at that under a scope, you know.

22:38BubblemanActually, don't.

22:40SpeakerDon't look under that with a scope.

22:44BubblemanFarmer's grade.

22:48SpeakerYou know, that's what's kind of amazing is when we start unpacking the pathways and unpacking the directional flow. I mean, the craziest thing about what we did is we chose the hardest way. Like, we didn't do one thing. We, by proxy, did it all. I mean, we trim, we sift, we make bubble hash. We do all those things because of the freezing agent in a live application.

23:09SpeakerSo by that measure, it's like a six in one. And then when you get past that, okay, so what's the secondary refinement? What extract are you making? We're not just making rosin. We're not just making live resin. We're not just trimming. Now you got to understand the relationship from A to Z to actually, you know, and then let's complicate the order even further with the introduction of the stainless steel.

23:31SpeakerAnd let's add nitrogen to the equation because prior to stainless steel, we were relegated to liquid CO2. And the cryo band and the function of those, you know, cryogenic properties changes when you get to a true cryogenic, like below negative 150 Fahrenheit, you know, the changes. Started doing the BHO runs with the Keef too back in 2016. So that was something else we were doing besides just doing solventless.

23:57SpeakerWe were able to really, really Be efficient with running it in closed loop machines. And so whenever we're in a bind at our lab up in Washington or whenever we need to get a wholesale thing or anything where we need to get a lot done really quick, we can do a bunch of dry sift or live and actually pack them into socks and do 20 pounds of keef in a run.

24:22SpeakerAnd you get, you know, it saves, I mean, we get like, it's like six to eight times more Which is, what, 100 pounds of bio into your columns? Yeah, you put 100 pounds, yeah, yeah, of, yeah. Instead of running seven columns, you're running one column with the same yield. Yeah, it's insane. And we get so much product out of it. I bet you get way less channeling in Keith compared to Flower, too.

24:44SpeakerYeah, if you pack it, so if you do it right, that was something that we had to mess around with a little bit. So I actually had TJ, we had these original socks that we're using that go, I have the XLS, I had the first XLS machine that he made. We started doing our first Keef stuff back in 2016 when I was in Oakland down in the Bay.

25:03SpeakerGreat spot. Yeah, Harrison, you know. And then I had this other little lab that I was kind of renting out to Harrison.

25:12BubblemanWhy don't you give us an introduction? We haven't really, like both you and Harrison, I'd love to just have minor introductions, who you guys are, where you're at, and how you linked up with TJ, because the audience won't know. Okay, sure. Harrison, you want to go first?

25:25SpeakerYou want me? I mean, actually, Eric's one of my odes. I'd say he should go first because my story and my lore comes after his. Okay. All right. Well, thank you. So for me, I started doing extracts in 2001, 2002, alcohol extracts. This is the first ones I was seeing were isopropyl. And it took a while to figure that out. We were just, you know, boiling isopropyl and then dipping it in for about two, three seconds.

25:54SpeakerAnd then I came up with a whole way of purging that because it was before vac ovens. This was so early on, you know, there was no resources or anything like that. Thank you so much for joining us.

26:27SpeakerAnd then started doing 2008, 2009, actually to the end of 2008, I got in trouble for making hash and ended up on probation for that. So after that, I had to just keep everything kind of quiet because I was like, how am I going to do all this? And so I built a closed loop system right in the beginning around 2010 and was just doing that. And then so I've known for I'm known for the first separation where it's doing like the liquid.

26:58SpeakerWe called it, first I called it the Heisenberg because Breaking Bad at the time, I was just enamored with how much he was into his lab and his science and stuff that I was just into. And I was not formally educated or anything. I just did it all myself. But Then we started calling it Holy Water because I was going to Steep Hill Lab with Addison and just giving Addison all the head stash.

27:23SpeakerAnd then I burned myself actually with that closed loop system, just being in a hurry. And so around 2013, I just kind of disappeared. So I was the only one doing the liquid for quite a few years, I'd say about five years. So people were kind of looking for it and I disappeared for a while. Thank you for watching.

27:56SpeakerBasically, he was just like, yeah, you guys have stuff that tastes good, but I got this friend that I have that, you know, is making this liquid and he calls it holy water. And, you know, I don't see anything else like that. And so, you know, nine months later, after I start healing up, I ended up going out, starting a business with my buddy Noel. It was Nectars, Nectars 710.

28:19SpeakerAnd then we went to that first 2014 Colorado 420 legal 420 contest, the High Times Cup. And then we got third place with that. But that was the first time liquid was shown to the public. Thank you for watching.

28:54SpeakerYeah, we were, so we ended up having a booth. I actually have video of that first 420 with like Pinsky and the guys from IC Collective and a bunch of other people were there. And it was that first legal 420. Yeah, Pinsky. He went and took the video. It's like a, it's a really good video because it's that first, you know, I'm in my compression suit because I had burned myself, you know, I've got like scars and everything and You know, the beginning parts of the BHO stuff, it was very dangerous.

29:20SpeakerThis was before we made the news and people were really hurting themselves. I'd say about two months after I did it to myself, I saw the first story of other people doing it. But I was, you know, I was making my own clothes loop out of like a keg and I was going to the, you know, Glacier Tanks that was making stuff for, you know, beer, making beer and using all their stainless steel stuff.

29:42SpeakerBecause I was seeing Gray Wolf up in, you know, in Oregon, his, his, his turpinator. And he was on his like second version of that, I think. And I was looking at that going, you know, I think I can try to make one of these. And, you know, I did a bunch of stuff with that, but I was in a hurry, you know, operator error as it goes, you have to really, you know, his lesson learned is basically now it's nice to have labs that are very safe.

30:06SpeakerWe do all this stuff very safely. I ended up meeting Harrison. You know, I had, I had my own little lab. Thank you for joining us.

30:32Speakeron the way of just technical people uh they just kind of taught themselves and doing closed loop stuff and we just were back and forth and you know when you get around people who are just nerds about hash and making doing the thing you do you just end up talking for hours and all of a sudden you're just like i gotta actually work but in the end it's actually those talks make it to where you work less because you start learning from each other and that's right You know which is my favorite thing about this business is you know no matter how much you think you know someone else knows a lot of different things and you can always you can always learn from that and dude that's what hash church is yeah and i love that you know it's it's just sometimes people releasing information that they may not i had people before be like dude i don't even know why i said that like i just don't even know i said well for old school people it's it's like you didn't say the thing you know for when i first was doing that's right we couldn't i couldn't talk about it first of all i was on probation

31:27SpeakerSo I couldn't really like claim it. And some of my people I worked with, you know, they started doing it and calling it different things, Terp Juice, things like that, you know, and a lot of different things, HTE, HTFSC, Extraction Earring. He was my old partner. I taught him. And then he claimed that he did it all. And it was just one of those just turbulent times where I just had to kind of sit back and be chill because I had to, because I was in trouble for manufacturing.

31:57SpeakerAnd now I have a job doing the same thing, pay taxes, pay taxes that I have the felony for, which is so funny how life works. It's just, I never thought it would be that way. But here I am now on the internet talking about it. We're in the same boat. Yeah, that's what I was thinking when you were saying that. I was like, oh, that's so funny.

32:17SpeakerI'm not allowed in Canada, which is funny. Canada won't let me in.

32:22BubblemanWe're like America. It's very strict with any felonies whatsoever. In fact, the most people who are kept from Canada and America are drunk drivers. Yeah, I know that. DUIs are felonies and a felony means you got it. And the crazy thing is it's all just like, you know, for the most part to tighten up the border, obviously, but also it's a huge money grab. You know, it's a thousand bucks.

32:45BubblemanYou go get your waiver. How many millions of people do you think have to get a waiver to go down to America from Canada? It's hard.

32:51SpeakerAnd I know people are trying to go to Canada. It's hard. If it's a couple million people, that's a... You know, that's a couple billion dollars. No, totally. I feel like they're missing out because all I know is I'm glad I got that 99 fish show before that all happened.

33:05BubblemanThat was the last fish show. Fish never came back.

33:09SpeakerI know. Last one they did. I know. And I was like, I'm so glad I was there because I wouldn't be able to go back to the next one. At least they let me into Mexico. I was just in Mexico watching, seeing fish. You can get a waiver, dude.

33:19BubblemanTrust me. Canada would give you a waiver. You just got to hire a lawyer and you got to go through the things. And it's kind of a full circle, to be honest. You should get your waiver.

33:25SpeakerWell, I feel like if I had work up there, I know they're a little bit more friendly towards, are you going to help people in Canada make money? And if the answer is yes, then they're more likely. Well, there's a huge industry here.

33:35BubblemanThat's inevitable. If you were able to come up here, you could help companies make money. You just have to have the waiver. And it takes a year to get the waiver. So the problem with the Canadian cannabis company is if you make a deal with them and then wait a year to get a waiver, they won't exist anymore.

33:52SpeakerNo, they'll have been bankrupted.

33:55SpeakerIt's the Canadian. It's not like that. You know, it's good in Amsterdam, which was cool.

34:00BubblemanWell, that's awesome, dude. Well, I remember you being on before and telling your story, but I'm, you know, it's always good for the audience who, I don't know who was watching before and who watched this time.

34:09SpeakerYeah, that was the VHO show. Yeah, that was the one VHO one. That's right. That's right. Yeah, we'll do another one. We'll do another one. Yeah, I would love to do it. Eric's the lab manager up in Washington for a very reputable brand. And he's, you know, been doing his thing for a hot minute. He's the ward on the street on Instagram, personal. And Harrison is, you know, up here in Northern California.

34:32SpeakerHe's a hash engineer. But he had, you know, the IG jail. So now you can find them under not hash engineer. But he is an incredible artist himself. You know, and when I say like standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, I mean, people like for me, it's people like Eric Ward. Thank you. And Harrison is not only local in my community and so I had the opportunity to get to work with him on a regular basis, but the fact that he was able to take tutelage under Eric, you know, there's this lineage.

35:00SpeakerAnd for me, that's very special because our son, Ashton, who we like to call Hashton, practiced with Ashton. So he's actually been learning underneath Harrison as well. So the secrets are continuing to, you know, and to watch it, to me, that's dear to my heart. Because I wouldn't have imagined a world where we get to be this open about cannabis in the way we do. At this stage in my life, I thought I might be an old man in a rocking chair before we were having these conversations publicly when we used to have to go buy, jokingly, a hydroponic tomatoes book at the grow shop because there was nothing online except for a forum like 4200.

35:38SpeakerThat's where we all got the real deal at first. So, Harrison, I wanted to give you an opportunity to take the mic, my man. Well, I guess where does my story start? I started playing with resin in like 2010, 11, but not professionally. It wasn't until 2012 where I actually went to Sonoma State and I would attend this one dispensary called Collective Conscious Apothecary where I got to learn from who I consider a handful of legends in our space.

36:11SpeakerMy first teacher was like Matt Rise and then Nick Catee and then Frenchie and then Subcool for breeding and then Full Flavor. And like this little circuit, this little network of all the most legendary people. And I started my career with this guy named Mark. He is one of the owners of a company called Talia Extracts, who's made massive impressions in our space. And if it wasn't for him and my little career with him, I would probably not have even met Eric.

36:41SpeakerWe met through my friend Ben and this guy named Nick. Nick shared space with Eric. I was vending to Ben in his dispensary out in the East Bay under Medicine Bank. And it was this, you know, just kismet interaction through the Prop 215 days where, you know, I was working with people who were felons and very interested in humans. And then also all the progressive activists who were pushing the agenda in an entirely different way and pushing what I like to call rising theory to the next level.

37:11SpeakerTrying to truly comprehend what it means to work with the plant raising and how many different ways we can. That comes from hydrocarbon to ice water to CO2, distillate, whatever. Every single element of working with that resolution, I would transform it into whatever our goal may be. Right now, my preferred form, solving this and solve it. My first time making VHO properly was with Mark. We got one of the first sub-zero stainless steel extractors.

37:39SpeakerHad a big dry ice jacket around the side. That was 2012 when we went from glass tubes to stainless. Where, you know, I'm nerding out online trying to see what gases interact better with what metals. And like, what's going to be the best solution? It wasn't until... Eric, where I got to see him busy. I had purchased a Bogart LFE. That's where I learned a lot of theory, manifolds, and started really developing my skills in the military.

38:02SpeakerBut at the same time, I was always still working with Bubblers. I was a part of the Ice Wax team. And sieving and air drying and mastering what it meant to air dry, right? Like as much as I learned from Frenchy, that wasn't the preferred technique because I always felt like we were trapping the moisture, squishing it, bound it in that way. So, you know, just different methodologies and just depends on the goal for us.

38:24SpeakerProperly dried hash and properly purged resin as far as volatile extracts. That was the goal. How do you make the canis? How do you make the best? Oh, yeah. I love that sieve tech. I can see that from here. Nice.

38:40BubblemanA little six star, you know, but then again, it's also like the definition of properly.

38:47SpeakerProperly.

38:48BubblemanHere in Canada, the definition of properly from large companies are we're sublimating because we can't take the chance that we're going to fail microbials. Now it depends on where you're at. Say you're in Michigan where microbials, the yeast and mold count is 100,000. Great. Let's air dry. Now let's go over to Illinois where it's a hundred.

39:11SpeakerLet's go back to freeze dry.

39:13BubblemanYeah. So it's properly can change depending on. And in fact, Nick and I learned this very much because, you know, I've been making hash and I don't know exactly what year Nick showed up on the scene, but I showed up around 98, 99 as, you know, bubble man and bubble bags and started promoting that. I don't know if it was 03 or 04 or 05 or 02 or 07 or 08.

39:37BubblemanI really don't have that sort of historical context. But I do remember in the early days him being like, you don't have to like put your hash on pizza boxes. That's so fucked. Like, what are you doing? Like, we just put ours on parchment. And I'm like, right. But you live in Colorado and we live in the Pacific Northwest. So this conversation between Nick and T and I, which was kind of a little bit tense back in the day, it opened up people to the understanding that drying hash in Colorado is not the same as drying hash in the Pacific Northwest.

40:07BubblemanIn fact, it is miles apart from one another. And I learned it even further by spending a lot of time in Jamaica. And trying to ensure to try and dry hash in Jamaica. Go cut yourself in a tropical country and see how long it takes your cut to heal because it never dries. It just stays wet and moist and it just festers. And people are like, I got to get out of this country.

40:32BubblemanOh, sorry. No, no, I heard perfectly.

40:34SpeakerI was saying it's first. My favorite way of properly air drying, at least from like the little circuit, the group, we were using baking sheets, parchment, and lining paper towels underneath 15 to 20 layers because the parchment breathes and it actually whips through the parchment and having either rooms or I would use standup refrigerators with dehumidifiers inside them.

40:57BubblemanWere you in Cali or Colorado?

40:59SpeakerThis is in Northern California.

41:00BubblemanOkay, in California. So listen, Jibs and Ken Wall were doing the exact same thing. Those are the boys. Exactly. So I walked them over in Spain. I showed them. They said, why would you use cardboard? I'm like, because it doesn't shed. And they said, well, paper towels don't either. So I took the paper towels over to the window in front of the sun, and I cracked the paper towel off the roll, and you just saw a cloud of paper towel dust.

41:23BubblemanAnd I was like, yeah, you don't want that in your house. But you're in the room cracking the paper towels. Where do you think the powder is going? Oh, no. That room, different rooms, naturally.

41:34SpeakerYou just get better with time.

41:35BubblemanYeah, but it's flying in the air. It's attaching itself.

41:38SpeakerThe pizza box. Yeah, it's a pizza box. It doesn't shed.

41:42BubblemanIt's a food grade sealed cardboard that wicks triple, triple levels. So the top level wets and then it moist, it wicks down to the next level and that one dries. And then by the time the second one corrugated, right, you want to have like three layers of that cardboard. So that's why I always use that. I can tell you, you would have to ask Ken and Jibs.

42:04BubblemanI don't think they use paper towel again, but they were also in Colorado. They didn't need it. You can air dry in Colorado without wicking the hash.

42:39BubblemanThank you for joining us.

42:57BubblemanIt created so much more novelty. People were now looking for specific things that they could kind of uncover. And in my opinion, every uncovering was never from an expert action. It was always from a mistake. It was never being super professional. It was always being from being a fuck up. And when you were really a good fuck up, you could really discover some great shit. Facts. That's expensive lessons.

43:23Collin PalmerMy fault. And, you know, in the early days, Marcus, I think the reality of it is everybody was so kind of tight with what they were willing to share and when. And that was a real issue, I think, with how everything grew and stifled the just the way the knowledge moved. And that's, you know, it's just not healthy for the segment. So now. You know, when we started building machines and modifying refrigerators and putting dehumidifiers inside of them and, you know, tuning, I had like a whole room just like tuned, just like perfect.

43:56SpeakerYeah, exactly, building drying rooms. Thank you so much. You took the words out of my mouth.

43:59Collin PalmerYeah, like, you know, and like, people were like, why don't you do that?

44:01SpeakerCold rooms with dry cold rooms.

44:03Collin PalmerYeah, because it's tough, you know, but, you know, it's the evolution of it and the sharing of the knowledge. And it's why it's important to talk about it. You know, it's so hard to air dry well. And I think those that still do it, I think it's important to understand that that same nuance carries over into freeze drying. Like your mTOR range changes based on the room environment because the condenser is going to react completely differently based on the room environment.

44:31Collin PalmerSo you can change it You don't have to change your shelf temps, but you can change your mTOR ranges to turn your heater on off to hit at different times so you keep that consistency throughout the cycle itself. I mean, I was just talking about this the other day with Marcus on the phone call. You know what I mean? So it's really important that all these ideologies kind of translate through the discipline because you're just trying to hit...

44:58Collin PalmerYou know, the right dry range, you know, for water activity. So it's, you know, I recommend everyone to start there. Start air drying. You know, that helps you get in more intimate knowledge of the resin. You know, how does it react?

45:13SpeakerI couldn't agree with Colin more. The amount of empirical knowledge I've gained through working with resin with your hands, literally, just understanding the grease factor, the oil content. The type of trichome, the shape, everything around them, the mechanics of that head through air drag taught me more. And really the education for me started on RollItUp.org and the Weed Report and the Weed Nerd, where there was a lot of good information on the forum and on that YouTube channel.

45:43SpeakerThat's where I learned the Ice Wax tutorial ever before meeting any of those people. And that's what really inspired me to want to keep pursuing that education because it was such groundbreaking work in the realm. Right. No one had ever tried those methodologies. And seeing where we are now versus what, 14 years ago or whatever, it's tremendous. It is so unbelievable to see how much work has been done in this space and how much the tech has revolutionized our ability to handle the hardest, highest quality.

46:12BubblemanAnd yet we all sell resin outside of a cold supply chain.

46:19BubblemanSo, so that really breaks it down. Not all the time. It's the craziest. No, listen, it's so hard to keep that cold supply chain. This must drive you nuts, TJ. But we do want to hear from Colt as well. He just popped back in as well. I'd love to hear from him as well. And then maybe you could answer that, TJ. We'll get into this cold supply chain and how spinach seems to have a cold supply chain, but it's too expensive for cannabis.

46:45BubblemanHow much does spinach sell for?

46:49SpeakerWell, is it is it live spinach?

46:52BubblemanSpinach spinach moves across the country and fucking $5.

46:56Collin PalmerIt's volumetric, though.

46:58BubblemanIn reefers.

46:58Collin PalmerThat's all I'll say.

47:01BubblemanIt takes up a lot of space, man. Like she said, five bucks.

47:04SpeakerYeah. Fifty dollars. Why don't I take a moment to kind of, you know, bring maybe Colt into the conversation. Please. Colt is, you know, really an expert in his field when it comes to, we've teamed up with him as a production partner for a new freeze dryer that's been, you know, tailored specifically for cannabis. We already work with one of the leaders in the world out in New Zealand called Cutton, and they make the High Life Edition freeze dryer for us.

47:32SpeakerAnd there's just a lot of incredible things, you know, we've been able to tailor to what it means to actually bring, you know, free, smokable, free dried flour, and of course, subsequently hash, right, into the equation. You know, air drying hash, of course, connoisseur concept and mindset, but, you know, practical scale solutions do require equipment. And one of the things that's special about what we're doing with Colt is there needs to be an affordable version for not just a hobbyist, but for the commercial application and to be able to scale it.

48:05SpeakerAnd these cutting freeze jars, you know, are, you know, they're the Bugattis, the freeze jars, you know, the best in the world, period. And but they're, you know, major capital investment. And that's not something that the average hash maker is going to have, you know, in their lab or, you know, in their, you know, their setup. So what we've done is teamed up with Colt and made a free shire that's exactly, you know, be able to implement all the things that we understand about lyophilization into the equation and then We're going to kind of tailor it to cannabis in a way where, you know, there's, you know, why don't you dive in and let's, you know, we were just talking about military pressures at different, you know, atmospheres.

48:43SpeakerAnd, you know, it's funny because even when we're using weird tools like we have been, where we use vacuum control, where we kind of hack A harvest right freeze dryer, you know, it translates. That's what we've been able to do because we figured out how to do it with what we had. But to be able to develop something that kind of has a virtual popcorn button that's accessible, has great customer service, that's actually affordable, competitive against, you know, the low hanging fruit of the company's house.

49:11SpeakerIt's an actual hash dryer instead of trying to retro the harvest right, like TJ's saying. We had to add the vacuum control to the harvest right to get it to freeze dry flower. This is made for freeze drying flour, so we don't have to add the extra component. Yeah, yeah. So Cole, could you jump in and just kind of say hello? Yeah, so I actually spent a lot of time doing engineering in the mining industry before ever getting into cannabis.

49:39SpeakerAnd then I got into operating a cannabis distillation lab doing extractions. So the All of the equipment and everything was so relevant to me that I started basically hot rodding all of my equipment in the lab, adding tertiary cold traps onto the rotovap so that I could run it quicker, building my own custom distillation setups. And I started looking at the equipment and I wanted to dry cannabis properly with a freeze dryer.

50:18SpeakerSo I started kind of working on it myself as a hobby and then got into some companies asking me to help design freeze dryers for them. So I went through and actually tried multiple companies and finally found one that I wanted to build through and would give me all the specs that I wanted. So like TJ was saying, we incorporated the vapor pressure control into the machine.

50:49SpeakerSo instead of having to crudely dial in the vapor pressure controller and start the run at the same time, it's all together. And what we've done is we've actually given this freeze dryer the perfect algorithm Thank you for joining us.

51:24SpeakerIt does not start drying until it is at X temperature, and then it progresses forward. And we also have monitors near the end of the run that prompt you to check to make sure that you're not becoming too dry. So we've basically taken a very complex system and simplified it in many ways to where they're a lot more stable than any other machine. They're just really well designed and built.

51:56SpeakerYou also have many different sizes to choose from. We, all of the larger machines have a probe per zone. So that kind of gives you that Coudon type accuracy. So that even the different zones within the shelving, it actually balances the temperature because generally like, you know, without RTD probes or anything like that, You're going to get, you know, hot spots and cold spots throughout the shelling.

52:29SpeakerThis precisely keeps the temperature. And since we can control the vapor pressure at any point, it allows us to perfectly track sublimation and it gives us, our recipe also stays above a specific mTOR and it has proven to give you more terpene retention, Um, you'll, your HPLC testing, you'll wind up with a higher THCA content because you oxidize less THCA. So yeah, it's a click and go scientific design for freeze dryers that gives you that high accuracy, but it doesn't have that high level of entry like the Kudan machines.

53:18SpeakerYou know, you can get into. The standard size machine to run like eight pounds of flour and like the entry level. And then you can scale from there. We also have larger equipment. So, yeah, I really built this to tailor the needs for the original resonator. That was the goal is I wanted to, you know, provide them the best machine possible. So I need three of those.

53:48BubblemanYou guys obviously have to have a deep understanding of the different types of water that are present in the flower, the bound water and the unbound water. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between, you know, I guess unbound water is also referred to as free water or water activity. It's water that feeds and supports microorganisms, basically, but I'd love to hear your perspective on it.

54:12SpeakerSo what you have in lyophilization is you're going to first freeze all of the moisture within the material. And then through the process, you're going to be sublimating the ice into a vapor and then capturing it at the cold trap. But once you get across a specific threshold, you run into where you're just removing the last bit of bound water. So it crosses over from sublimation of ice into the bound water removal phase.

54:48SpeakerAnd that's your end phase. So in cannabis, we use specific lower temperatures and freeze drying in order to preserve more terpenes and flavonoids. If we go too high in temperature under vacuum, the terps will come right off the flower, especially if the mTOR is extremely low. So with a hard pulling pressure and a high temperature, it moves too quickly and you lose quality and product essentially.

55:20BubblemanYeah, I was talking to David from Canitrol at a show here recently, and he got into a really interesting conversation about the differences between unbound and bound water and how many people push the drying of unbound water into bound water, which is water that's tied up to ingredients like sugars and proteins or salts. It's generally not available for microorganisms to utilize, which is why Thank you. Thank you.

55:43BubblemanThank you.

56:11BubblemanThank you for watching.

56:35BubblemanTo get you back on for that conversation as well, Colt. I'd love to go deep into bound and unbound water. These are things that a lot of people don't understand. I also have maybe the only freeze dryer group, a lyophilization group on the internet. It's on Facebook. It has about 14,000 members right now. I would urge all of you guys to go in there and join that group.

56:55BubblemanI can send you the link after the show. It's a good one. There's, you know, it's a lot of it is basic people asking this and that. And what should I put my settings? What's that? Already a member. Hell yeah, you are.

57:08SpeakerSo a lot of the, a lot of the difference in our small scale machines compared to any others is that, you know, coming from like that mining perspective and just structural rigidity, every connection on the machine is KF flanged like you would have in any other high quality laboratory parts. There's no, there's no barbed things. There's no real potential for vacuum leaks, so it's just very well sealed.

57:39SpeakerAnd you also, we use what you would call like a double fail safe for oil backflow prevention. So the pump itself has its own backflow preventer. But then the machine has an electronic ball valve that as soon as the pump shuts off, it shuts the ball valve to the machine. So the pump is actually...

58:08BubblemanUh oh.

58:09SpeakerThe pump is what?

58:10BubblemanThe pump is actually... And we'll be back next week to continue this show. Oh my God, that's awesome. We're getting into the deep stuff. Someone in the chat was like, this is really technical. Like, are we going to have anything funny happen soon? I was like, the comedy section of our show will be starting soon.

58:30SpeakerBut there it was. He just did manifest. Well, I wanted to comment on something that Colt said before we were talking about oil or whatever. He mentioned how it keeps the high, the terpenes preserved. Within the cannabis, and that's part of the difference with the live dried cannabis, what we're seeing and accomplishing is higher terpene levels. The sesquiterps and the monoterps, I'm not a scientist and I don't know a ton about those things, but I know that we're keeping the good terpenes and the bad terpenes or the less desirable terpenes are turning into, all converting into good terpenes.

59:15SpeakerAnd all, overall, In the testing, we were finding terpene profiles that were not coming up on traditionally dried cannabis.

59:27BubblemanI mean, it makes sense that you're going to preserve things that aren't preserved when you dry a different way. I mean, as long as I've been involved in all of this, the colder it is, the better it is. And I think it's volatile organic compound preservation.

59:41SpeakerCan we speak on that for a second? Like we're talking about the colder it is, the better, right? Because that's agreed. That's a consensus across the board for extraction of chemicals, right? Sure. Okay, so then like... Except when it comes to rosin, I guess. Well, no, because like this, yeah, that's where it gets confusing for me, because someone who loves both, and I'm not prejudiced against either.

1:00:04SpeakerBut like, why do people always have this negative demeanor with BHO, right? Which costs more to make, it's harder to make, the equipment's more technical, the space is more expensive to set up. Which you can extract at negative 80 Celsius, negative 70 Celsius, realiztically, because most of those chillers can't push, right? You're always stuck in that sweet spot versus something we're extracting at 33 degrees Fahrenheit positive.

1:00:29SpeakerThat delta, the delta is what we're losing in terpenes, all the monos that you can't capture. Chemically, you can't capture them because they're either water soluble or you're not cold enough to bind them and create what we would like to call holy water, right? Mm-hmm. You physically can't capture them unless you took that direction and extra. Now, that's why I preferred volatile just for certain strains. Now, someone who's been cultivating, breeding, collecting for over a decade, for me, the type of trichome is what defines the type of extra.

1:00:59SpeakerIt's going to go this direction or that direction. I don't get to choose. That cultivar gets to choose. We're just here to cater to it, right? So With CRC, everything in BHO got such a bad taste. And I came from a generation with Eric where live resin was the most precious thing, right? To good live resin shouldn't be looked at worse than live resin. You took the same material and you went each direction.

1:01:24SpeakerI would love to get a blind tasting. I think it's something that Dougie had hit me. Here, let's get a picture. Dude, that was hilarious. I think it's funny that guy did the $10,000 bet. Thank you for watching.

1:01:50SpeakerThank you for joining us.

1:02:12SpeakerA lot of the things that I find out is from a mistake or just because I do things repetitively. And then there'll be so how I even figured out the holy water thing was I was doing open blasting into like parchment papers in Sonoma County in my friend Noel's backyard. And it was like five, six in the morning. The light was just coming up and it was snowing, which it doesn't usually do in Sonoma.

1:02:35SpeakerUm, and it was beautiful. I was like, wow, this is a really cool moment. And I'm doing a lot of different strains at once. So it's a lot of little bits. Um, and that's why I just had the shallow parchment paper and they started crashing out because it was snowing outside. It was so cold outside. And I, it took me so long to get back to the original, uh, bit of it that I started seeing the white chunks of, I didn't know what, except for I had looked it up a little bit about, um, you know, um, Thank you for watching.

1:03:25SpeakerThank you for watching.

1:03:43SpeakerReally overcomplicate things. There's like articles and the IC mag stuff and forums of people trying to figure out how to make this liquid. And they were overcomplicating it by so much because there were people with PhDs up on there trying to figure things out. And it was really fun for me because I was being quiet about it, but I was reading all of these like theories on how people thought I was doing stuff and who I was and all this stuff.

1:04:06SpeakerAnd they were looking for this guy called the Pope. And all that. It was really pretty funny at the time. And so that's and but yeah, it's like just in the end, I learned a lot from people trying to figure out what I was doing. They were coming up with stuff that I never even would have thought of. And I was like, oh, I can start doing some of this stuff.

1:04:25SpeakerThat's interesting. But for me, it was like an accident in a lot of ways. I mean, I knew to keep it. I knew the basics of what I was doing. But when I pulled away that THCA and I saved it and it was dry and I smoked it later, I And it had no flavor. And I got really high from it, as you guys have all probably tried this at some point.

1:04:44SpeakerIt works very well, but it's like without the terpenes, it's just like this blank, it's almost like a distillate thing, but just a little different. But it's like, so I just threw it away. So it was like 60% of my yield. And I was just for the first two or three years, I was just throwing away because no one I knew wanted it. But I was getting so much for the liquid because no one else was doing it that it was making up for the portion that I had to throw away.

1:05:06SpeakerSo those were back in the days of like $125 grams of holy water because I was getting really small yields until I figured out, oh, you can do like batters, crumble, all this stuff. But I didn't really have a lot of stuff to read or to look on as to why that was happening. But that's kind of how that was beginning. And I started just seeing separation and things like that.

1:05:28SpeakerAnd I started using dry ice to put the liquid on and coolers to crash out. And just using, you know, Buckner funnels and filters and things like that. But a lot of this stuff that's been figured out, at least by me, has been not necessarily something I was going for, but something I just happened to notice or something that I made a mistake on. Even with the closed loop that I blew myself up on, you know, I learned from that and I helped Boris help design some of his Busy Bee machines.

1:05:53SpeakerAnd so, you know, it does get a bad name.

1:06:16SpeakerAnd we're going with resin. So we literally went down on a salvage mission. And that's kind of where other doors started opening up. But we were taking this soggy material, you know, refreezing it, making certain it was bashed up and then tossing it in and using liquid CO2, right? Getting the sift out, rolling it up in these burrito socks. Thank you for joining us.

1:07:01SpeakerIt's, you know, you can do dry sift, you can do the live, the fact that you can run that for BHO, the fact that you can get so much done, like I said, as far as like, we need to get like thousands, you know, like, you know, 50 kilos really quick of something. The resonator is the way to go because you can start running those key fronts.

1:07:19SpeakerAnd what you were talking about channeling earlier, as far as I was saying about TJ is amazing in the way he can make things happen as far as, okay, it's like I need this. So it's like I head the R&D department of where I work. And so that's why I'm able to figure some of this stuff out with TJ because that's kind of the deal is I get a lot of numbers for him and he works with me.

1:07:41SpeakerAnd so we were able to make bigger socks. They're just slightly bigger than the six inch round material columns. And because of that, if they're a little bit bigger and it gets packed, we notice when we pack it in there a little tighter, not too tight to where we can't work it, but if it's packed in there nice and tight, we actually get so much of the yield comes out in the first two passes.

1:08:02SpeakerLike we were first doing like eight or 10 passes of butane at like 30 pounds of butane each time. We found we really only need to do like a Thank you for watching.

1:08:30SpeakerYou know, straight, straight heads, kind of hard to see without the light. But, you know, you guys know, you guys know the deal. But you know what I mean? It's just, yeah, it's like the goods. And, you know, it's being able to turn things that before we were doing this, they were just sometimes throwing our trim away because we would just have it stored for a while.

1:08:47SpeakerAnd just like we're such a big operation that some things get kind of put to the wayside and then those things really add up. So it's like, you know, even doing dishes and ethanol to be able to, you know, rotovap that back out and get, you know, there's always ways to make the most, get the most bang for your buck. I really feel like the Resonator is one of those machines that's so versatile that if another machine goes down, you can also start using Resonator for other things.

1:09:13SpeakerAnd I don't know really any other machine that's as versatile as that. And so I just got to give TJ props for that. Yeah, yeah. It is one of those amazing machines. You know, it's easy to use too. That sift was a little bit hard to see, but if you go look at TJ's last Instagram post, the two minute sift video he just put out, it's got a ton of awesome footage of heads.

1:09:36SpeakerDrop in a little content. Here we go. You got the light. There you go.

1:09:41BubblemanDude, imagine in 2008, I went to Skunk Man Sam's and I photographed that shit for the first time, the pure heads. Never had I seen pure heads before. When I looked under my camera lens, it shocked me to see heads that pure from sifting, from not water hash. Water hash, it was no problem. You could look at the 120 bag or even the 160 sometimes and it was pure heads, but...

1:10:03BubblemanThank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:10:33BubblemanThank you for joining us.

1:10:53BubblemanHe would grind me like about this process and he'd be and I'd say look dude like this is my loyalty to Skunk Man Sam. I'm not going to show you it and I would appreciate it if you didn't like try to trick me into but what about this and what about that and what about this and I you know I'd be like dude like listen you've got to just think about loyalty because I am loyal to Sam.

1:11:15BubblemanThank you so much for joining us.

1:11:42BubblemanThank you for watching.

1:12:03BubblemanHe made the mistake. He's like, oh, bubble hash. Yeah, Nick T says he coined that. He didn't. I've been making bubble hash since the 80s. Oh, it was Mila. She's the hash queen. Well, it wasn't.

1:12:12SpeakerWho he learned from.

1:12:13BubblemanIt wasn't. I mean, you're wrong. Mila ripped off Reinhardt. She stole the idea from Reinhardt, and she didn't even come up with the idea. I guess the first bag. Listen, no, she didn't.

1:12:23SpeakerBut the first person to brand it, market it, and then I got access to the pollinator bags.

1:12:28BubblemanMark Rose manufactured them. He named them. So when we call Mila the hash queen and get, listen, she did the pollinator. We can give her the pollinator, but she did not invent the bags. She had nothing to do with inventing the bags. She sold them for a very short period of time before Mark Rose realized she was making them with Turkish labor instead of with him in Nepal.

1:12:51BubblemanAnd that's how he got in touch with me. Karma, he reached out to me and said, hey, do you need a manufacturer? And I said, absolutely. He's been my manufacturer for 26 years. That's epic.

1:13:01SpeakerThat's an amazing relationship.

1:13:03BubblemanYeah, and Eldon was amazing too, you know? Eldon was supposed to get 5% of sales from that product and never received a dollar. So that is pretty shitty.

1:13:12SpeakerI guess my first exposure to using bags was my pollinator bags, then my bubble bags, and then... Isolator. Yeah, and it's just so funny. I mean, in Europe, everyone just calls it isolator.

1:13:22BubblemanWell, it's the isolator bags, and that's what Mark does. He was sitting looking at the machine, Reinhardt's machine. You know, I spent five years and about $200,000 learning all of this. I did massive investigations worldwide on this. This wasn't just like some internet story. I hired... Hi, and lawyers, McCartney, Tetro, their pharmaceutical lawyers. They liked my case because it was so small. All of their other cases were multibillion dollar cases.

1:13:48BubblemanSo I hired these guys and I said, whatever the like, listen, I'll tell you, I'll be honest. Had I found out that Mila was the originator. I would have paid her, but it was Reinhart. All of the bags came from Reinhart's ice cold extractor. And I found that out through a very costly, you know, that no one else was willing to do. And at the end of it, I paid Reinhart, Jason from Payload Bags paid Reinhart, and Lucy from Triple X paid Reinhart.

1:14:17BubblemanThe only person who didn't pay Reinhart Thank you for joining us.

1:14:43BubblemanEveryone wants to rewrite the history and no one wants to tell the truth. And this is, you know, the problem with this cannabis industry that it's so easy to rewrite the truth and then have other people speak said untruth. Well, there's too many truths. There's so many truths, dude. It's unbelievable. And I don't pretend to know all of them. I've really, you know, it wasn't easy for me to pay Reinhardt six figures.

1:15:09BubblemanI wasn't stoked on that, but I did it because it was the right thing to do. And I can be honest, if that pathway led to Mila being the hash queen, she invented the bag, she did it all, I would have paid her. I had no problem. I told my lawyers, whatever I learn, I will not hide. It is the truth. And this is what I really think.

1:15:30BubblemanWe are at our strongest in this world when we are the most authentic. And if you change your story, You are no longer authentic. And people can smell that and they can taste it. And it's just not an ideal situation. And so in our industry where it's just an absolute shit show with people rewriting their histories and, oh, I'm the pope, actually, I created holy water. Like, you must realize that that's me.

1:15:56BubblemanIt's like, no, it's this other dude who's hiding, who doesn't want the credit, who's actually doing the work and making the mistakes and coming up with the revelations. And so Reinhardt sat on that couch. He looked at that machine and he said to five to five gallon bag shaped to five gallon bucket shaped bags. In a five gallon bucket and you've got the same thing. That's all he said.

1:16:17BubblemanIt was like a 30 second blurb. And I knew Eldon. So I knew Eldon well. And in fact, I would gift Eldon tickets to Legends of Hash when nobody was gifted a ticket. Everyone paid for their ticket for Legends of Hash in the, you know, for the first 15 years. Like Skunk Man Sam bought his ticket. Rob Clark bought his ticket. Nobody was above the law and got a free ticket.

1:16:41BubblemanEldon, I always bought Eldon's ticket up until he passed away and our rest in peace to Eldon as well. And shout out to Mark Rose for being a huge part of the isolator and bubble bag history. He manufactured both the bags. He named the bags. He was a huge part of coming up with the new screen sizes with me. And it's an interesting thing because when I went to Amsterdam and I met Mark because Mark was on the outs with Mila and Mila is, she is secure in Amsterdam.

1:17:08BubblemanPeople love Mila in Amsterdam. She's a, she's, She's part of that city. She's a huge part of the cannabis culture. She's extremely loved. And so Mark was very much on the outside of that. And when I went to Amsterdam, every single person I talked to would give me the Mila. They'd say, oh, that guy's a piece of shit. Don't ever work with him. He's a nightmare. Well, we sold millions and millions of dollars worth of bubble bags together.

1:17:34BubblemanAnd I also had the same name for the probably the first 15 years in Amsterdam. It was, oh, he's a thief. He's a rip off artist. He stole from. I lived with that for 15 fucking years and it wasn't true. So you can imagine that I'm a little bit sensitive to it when I hear anyone bring her up and say things that aren't exact. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:18:15BubblemanBe the inventor to be the be all end all. I think we're all parts of a ladder and we build this beautiful ladder for our community to climb. And being a rung in that ladder is all that we need to be. You don't need to be 10 rungs. You don't need to be the whole ladder. Just contributing. Mark, you had your hand up for a while. It was about terpenes and volatiles.

1:18:38BubblemanI'm sure it's chemistry. Give us a go. How are you doing, Dr. Mark?

1:18:42SpeakerHey, how's everyone doing? Eric, good to see you again, buddy. Good to see you too, as always. I love it. Yeah, it's been a minute. So Eric and I crossed paths in that year of 2014 out at the Santa Rosa Cup. Oh, the Emerald Cup? Yeah. That was the High Times Cup, but it was in the center. Oh, it was the High Times. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:19:07SpeakerI was... Yeah. Yeah, and so wasn't that the one where Brendan... Yeah, the Skittles Cup. Yeah. No, so Davalicious. So if I remember correctly, the story is that he added... Thank you. Thank you.

1:19:55SpeakerYou know, it was just super interesting because, yeah, that was right around the time. I think you were you were better by then, right? Yeah, I was better. So that was so, yeah, because I burned myself in the beginning of 2013. So by 2014, I was better, especially by that one. That one was interesting because there was like that panel that they just like Rez went up and started talking about the jar of holy water up there.

1:20:19SpeakerExactly. Yeah. We're all talking about that. And I was like, wow, this is like, this is amazing. This is all happening so fast. Back then we had all the like CEOs and people with like money that never smoked any weed ever. Yeah. There was the CEO cup. Right. All these like a thousand million dollar handshakes. And just all these promises. You know, it was a really exciting time.

1:20:42SpeakerBut I do remember also, like, I was really hyping the Skittles that year because I had met both of them, like, in the parking lot of Steep Hill. And they were like, yeah, we're branding this Skittles strain. I was like, yeah, I got this thing called Holy Water. I'll show you guys. They're like, whoa, we've never seen anything like that. And I smelled their weed. I was like, what is this?

1:21:04SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:21:29SpeakerIt looked terrible. And I was just like, that's the one, that's the one. And I was just hyping it so big because I was just, you know, when something new comes along that doesn't smell like anything, you know, Skittles was that. It's just one of those like, holy shit, what is this? It looks terrible, but it's probably the best thing I've ever seen. Like one of my favorite things.

1:21:47SpeakerAnd I know people now have gotten, you know, it gets, people get, it's in everything. People get tired of things. I get all that. It was like that with Trainwreck back in California in the day, you know, but I love Skittles. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you throwing it back to the crew too. So Dr. Dan and Pinsky and Noel. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if you remember, but basically Pinsky told me So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

1:22:44SpeakerYes. Where we met. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I knew Jenny from Fish Store, right? And you and Jenny were an item at the time, maybe? Were you or no? Okay. That's right. But I wandered over to Elite Cannabis' booth. So I met Dave Bonvillain for the first time. You know Dave, right? And that whole crew. And they had a display of Chemdog glass, right? And I was like, wait, who are these guys repping Chemdog?

1:23:19SpeakerI know, Greg, wait a second. So I took a photo of their glass display and sent it over to G. And in between me getting confirmation back from G that these guys are legit and that's totally his stuff and they're repping him, One of the guys from Elite came around. He's like, hey, what's going on? Are you interested in this class? I was like, wait a second.

1:23:43SpeakerIs this Chemdog? And the guy started questioning me and got kind of like a little shitty with me, but then G's like, no, those are my boys. They're all good. He gets a little bit of that money. And this is after he got in trouble. But throw it back to, so like when we started testing, I mean, first of all, like I remember I had tested some stuff that I got from Kind Bill.

1:24:10SpeakerAnd I think what Kind Bill always recognizes that, yeah, there's a whole lot more terpenes you get out of fresh frozen extraction. Right. Thank you for joining us.

1:24:34SpeakerAll profile or every different strain has got a different solubility characteristic where certain strains are going to have a higher solubility limit for the THCA. So you're going to get a nice holy water. You're going to get really a liquid extract versus something that's going to start sugaring out or you're going to start seeing diamonds forming. So back in the day, I mean, we didn't really have Thank you so much for joining us.

1:25:27SpeakerIf you let that oil age, you're going to start seeing diamonds form. Well, so my process from the beginning was so a lot of people thought I was just doing a thing where I was just taking basically like the mother liquid before there's anything, you know, straight from the extractor and then doing like the jar tech where a crash in the jar, you just do a pour off.

1:25:47SpeakerBut what I was doing was I was taking the liquid before I purged all the butane out of it. And I bought these stainless steel buckets from Bed Bath & Beyond. And I would put the liquid in there and I'd put it on dry ice overnight. And so what I was always doing was I was always cold crashing all the THCA out no matter what. So I never really did just a thing where it would just be The, the oil, because I always separate it out.

1:26:16SpeakerNow, what I had noticed is depending on the solubility of how much butane and propane I had left in that mixture would be directly, would, you know, be how, how much THCA I got out of it. Yeah. Or else, and then I would take the liquid part of it and then I would, you know, put that in a day of cold also, or, you know, on the dry ice and that would get the wax out.

1:26:40SpeakerSo that'd be like my de-waxing phase. And then that's really thin. So some, the really high terpene ones are, so my liquid phase of that, after I pull out the THCA, some are thicker and some are thinner. And that is definitely a terpene thing because we have a strain up here right now. We have a couple of them, but one is our Blackberry Trainwreck. And we have a lavender train wreck because up in the Pacific Northwest, there's a lot of old school strains, which is like a lot of fun for me coming from the Bay.

1:27:10SpeakerYou know, we had all this new stuff, which is also really quite a lot of fun. But it was cool to come up here and see some of the stuff that I grew up with, like in high school. You know, and seeing like the train wrecks and like the super, the skunks, uh, Afghanis and things like that. And so, uh, started seeing stuff like that, but yeah, is there definitely some stuff is just thicker and it does, it'll either take longer or shorter because it's either, you know, more or less thin because of the solubility of the terpenes in there.

1:27:37SpeakerSo it's definitely how it crashed out. The physics of the situation is that if you winterize at those temperatures down below whatever, at dry ice temperatures, which is like negative 150 or something like that, right? So if you winterize down there, now when that oil goes up to room temperature, it has no problem solubilizing oil. All that, all that THC. And so, so Pinsky had brought me a sample and we ran NMR of it.

1:28:09SpeakerAnd what we found was that, yeah, it was about 65%.

1:28:14SpeakerT8CA. Yeah, that makes sense. And so the question was, well, what's everything else, right? And it's like, holy shit, there's all this fucking terpenes in there. It's like, yeah. 35, 45% terpenes. Yeah. This thing was coming back with the holy water, depending on the strain. But yeah, that's getting... So what was your threshold for solvent remaining in the mix? Because I guess that was always a concern.

1:28:45SpeakerWell, in the very, very beginning... So until we did testing, we didn't know. And so I did it visually. So I'd had a... You know, I'd had just one of those vacuum chambers that's like a five gallon, you know, stainless steel bucket thing with the clear lid. And I had like two sous vides. And what I would do is I would just put it on parchment on the bottom and I would pull a vacuum and then I would have two different heats of water in the sous vides and I would dip it in the water under vacuum.

1:29:13SpeakerAnd then I'd be able to see all of the larger misformed bubbles, which were the butane bubbles. Yes. I would wait till all those were gone and I would do it until it became just the CO2 bubbles. And so that's how I visually did it at first is I would just, you know, and it would took me a long time, but I would dip it and then I'd let it sit.

1:29:30SpeakerSo the CO2 bubbles were smaller in size. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So if you like decarb rosin for pens or anything, really, it's like you start seeing it almost looks like a soda, like a 7-Up or bubbles like that. Whereas the butane bubbles would come out much bigger. And like kind of size, like different sizes. And so that's, I would visually do it like that.

1:29:53SpeakerAnd that would be like a taste testing. So I would just try it at different phases or see, smell it. And I was, I was a guinea pig. Hopefully, you know, we'll see, you know. You taste relatively non-toxic. I mean, the threshold in a lot of states is like 5,000 ppm. Yeah, but even if you were way up above that, you're really, I mean, you might taste it.

1:30:17SpeakerYou might start to taste it, but you're really not going to. Well, our very first test was like, Thank you for joining us today.

1:30:48SpeakerEric, look at this. Yeah. Remember this? I still have that banner at the show. Oh, yeah. Like licking the plant. Totally. So that's the reason Rez had the seedless guy make that for us because at the time, yeah, that's the first one. Like licking the plant. Yeah. And I got to give some credit to Rez on the idea on this. He's like, we'll just, you know, he pops off ideas so quick.

1:31:13SpeakerYou know, he's with DNA Genetics now, but he's just one of those people who's just really good at marketing ideas. And I love that you have that. Isn't that cool? I not only have it, I have it handy so I can pull it out. On demand.

1:31:30BubblemanOn demand. I'm stepping out to go to the airport, guys, but Etienne is going to co-host the show, so just continue on, and I've already been in touch with TJ, and I'll come in on my phone and try and be a part of the show as much as possible. Thank you, Marcus.

1:31:43SpeakerThank you very much. We'll see you soon, everybody.

1:31:45BubblemanTravel well.

1:31:48SpeakerSo Eric, at that time, at that time, there was really nothing that tasted like holy water, right? I mean, it was really a unique product in the marketplace, right? Like there was really nothing that even came close. Yeah, there was nobody else doing that, yeah. Like I had yet to have any, except for the people that I had shown, you know, because there was some, there was spoiled patients.

1:32:11SpeakerI showed them how to do it. Um, cause I just, I love them, you know, as people, you know, raw shout out to Rob, who is one of my favorite people. He lived down the street from Rob. So when I was, when I was going through all of this, you know, and I was doing a lot of it in Noel's backyard, uh, up in Sonoma, um, You know, and basically Rob, I was just kind of talking to about it as I went, because it's just, I would go to his house.

1:32:36SpeakerHe would always have these younger kids there and they'd bring all their glass. They'd have these big parties with like 20, $30,000 glass pieces where I'm like, I'm like, don't hand me a thing. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:33:14SpeakerYou know, and then I kind of split off with with Nectars and to do the holy water thing. So Nectars called it Terp Juice after that. And OK, it was that cat called the other one. Is that who the other one was? Oh, you know, I'm like, well, there was there was no other one was in Colorado, right? Yeah, I'm not sure. So he wasn't connected with me, I don't think.

1:33:39SpeakerUnless that's at least not that it's like hitting my brain, but it's kind of is because there's there's also a doctor who did extraction who was also. Yeah. Dr. Dan, right? Yeah. Dr. Dan, who I who I showed because he was he was always after me like he's he has a Ph.D. in biology. And I was just really smart guy, but couldn't figure out how to do it.

1:34:01SpeakerIt would drive him crazy. So we were all going into business together. So finally, you know, I was like, this is about two weeks before I left Nectars. I showed him how to do it because I was just like, OK, we're going into business together. Like, I'll finally do this because it was very strict back then. I wasn't trying to show anyone. But I was like, OK, we're going to have our same company.

1:34:19SpeakerSo I did that. And then I ended up leaving two weeks later over just some personal stuff. And then I kind of wanted to do Holy Water, which I had started, which, you know, I unfortunately am not with anymore. But they yeah, this is a crazy business. But but yeah, so basically, like I know the doctor, he went out and had claimed that he Invented it, did all this stuff and just one of those like situations.

1:34:44SpeakerAnd then he was just kind of like on the internet. He was just kind of like talked down to a lot of people, you know, and this is where it's like, there's no need to, you can be smart. You could be, you could be the smartest person in the world, but do you need to put people down if they aren't coming up with the right way to say things to you or like the, you know what I mean?

1:35:05SpeakerCause not everybody's the same when it comes to how they communicate. So it's just like, I don't think you should be like, You know, propping yourself up so much by putting other people down and calling. I think he was better that so many other people were kind of like, well, they were like, yeah, because they were learning the technology, bringing products to market. And I think he felt like he was sort of left behind or something.

1:35:26SpeakerYeah, totally. Maybe because he was doing some interesting stuff. I just think that he was just one of those. It's hard to stay relevant and popular if you're putting everybody down all the time online. Yeah, you know, that's kind of how I look at it. It's like and then for me, it's just like I just didn't go out and talk about stuff. I mean, this is like I don't ever talk about any of this stuff, you know, especially online.

1:35:46SpeakerSo this is interesting for me. I've actually wanted to say some of these things because I don't ever. And there is a history there. And, you know, I saw Noel, he just did a podcast. Where is he now? He's in New Jersey. He's doing the kind of the same thing I do in a lab in New Jersey. And he's doing well now. And but he just did this whole podcast.

1:36:11SpeakerThere was there was really good on how it is at the It's the Growers Network. I forget what it is, but it's something really good. I'll put a link up. Actually, there's a link in my Instagram, the word on the street. But it's the whole history of the headband and like the Dizzle. And he had Ben from the C Collective on there. And because those were like the guys doing all the Chemdog stuff.

1:36:32SpeakerAnd Noel was how I first got Sour Diesel. Ben and Crispy. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. But they ended up breaking up, right? They did. They did. Right. His nephew actually was the product manager for cookies and how my company up here that I'm with is does the cookies and stuff because he came up here he's like oh my god you're holy water because he was he got there split and he was smoking it when he was like 13 and he was like one of like eight people at that time that were smoking it and he was just blown away he's like oh my god I was like whoa this is crazy I can't believe that you even know who I am first of all And then it's this, and it kind of got us the cookies brand at the time.

1:37:09SpeakerIt's one of those funny, like full circle moments where I was like, wow. But yeah, those guys ended up splitting up. But Ben was always, you know, he was the best grower I ever knew. I mean, he was so good at the curing everything, but they just dropped so much knowledge on like where the headband came from, that original 56 day headband. And the story behind that is really interesting.

1:37:29SpeakerBut I got to run all that stuff in the beginning because I was like the California guy that Noel kind of met And I was going down to L.A. and I knew all the Kush guys down there. And so I was bringing the Kush back up to the bay because there was no real OG Kush up in the bay. And so I was bringing the diesel down to L.A., which because there wasn't a lot of diesel down there that I knew of.

1:37:48SpeakerI'm bringing the Kush back up to the bay and I was spending half my life in L.A., half my life in the bay for like three, four years. That was a really fun time. Best, best, best herb ever. I mean, I've never that little period in between that was like. Oh man, 2002 to 2006, you know, that period of like Sour Diesel and Kush's were so good.

1:38:10SpeakerAnd then the cookies kind of came out in 2008. And kind of upped up things and at least have things that were different. Now they got to run some of the first Sherbinsky, that's Sherbert. Just being around for all of these beginnings of these things, I was just like such a lucky person, you know, to be around during that time because I was a little younger than a lot of those guys, you know, but I was kind of just helping them get rid of everything.

1:38:33SpeakerAnd just having a really, really, really good time doing it and being able to make the extracts. And that's where Holy Water kind of came from was those strains. So I would have like the headband and the sour diesels and like the chem and all of this like stuff I would do whatever for now, you know, I would do a lot for those some of that now.

1:38:53SpeakerEric, what are you what are you doing now? How do you feel like it's evolved since when you were doing Holy Water and now? Do you feel like you've really pushed the tech further than what you did? Yeah, I've done some interesting stuff as far as. Like that was next level, that clear, that was next level. Yeah, so that's what I was going to bring up, I guess, was so because so now we actually just have an R&D department that I am now just the head of the R&D department of where I'm at, which I love because that's my favorite part of it.

1:39:25SpeakerAnd so I got to mess around this last year with this machine and It was just it was called the tandem machine. And there's only there's only one in four different states. He was just doing one per state. And basically, it was for making getting terpenes from he made it is basically kind of like a heated tumbler to evaporate terpenes. And then he had this whole, you know, interface that I think it was a guy from like Nvidia or something had programd to be able to do like kind of, you know, get all the terpenes from evaporated weed.

1:40:00SpeakerAnd we started doing live in there and I was able to pull out jars of just straight terpenes, like clear water terpenes. There was not steam extracted. It was not. So basically we were not using a solvent in any way to get these terpenes. And so it was like solventless solvent terpenes or whatever. So there was something where I was able to kind of mess around with, oh, can I mix this with solventless stuff?

1:40:24SpeakerSince it's just coming from the plant evaporated. So I was able to kind of make a whole bunch of new interesting products with that. So that's been a fun thing to be messing around with. That and then obviously the resonator stuff that I've been able to do. But as far as, you know, when I first started with the holy water, we had yet to even think about making carts with it, like melting down that THCA and mixing it back in.

1:40:50SpeakerAnd so I went to that chalice cup, the first chalice cup that Dougie did. There was only like 150 people at that one or whatever. And we got an STS-9, you know, Soundtribe to play that night. And we were all we were there. That was what, you know, one of my first like holy water ones. Noel was down there with Nectars. And it was is quite a lot of fun.

1:41:12SpeakerBut that's where I met Baroni. That's where I met. Yeah, Chris. And that was the very first time I'd ever heard of or seen The Clear. I didn't know about Distillid. That was the very first time. And it was one of the first, you know, that was still in 2014, I think. So it was the beginning of Holy Water. It might have been the year after, I forget.

1:41:30SpeakerBut I was like, you know, in the beginning. And so he gave me a jar of his clear and I gave him a jar of my holy water. And then we did a mixed jar. I still have a picture of it. And that was the first time distillate had ever been mixed with a terp fraction, the holy water. And that was the very that was the beginning of something big there.

1:41:50SpeakerWe didn't even know it yet. And but we called that the Holy Grail at the time. And it's funny because it ended up being something that I still work with today. That's what we do. We melt down THCA. We mix in really clean, the terp fraction, the holy water, whatever you want to call it, the terp juice, like a lot of different names, you know, the HTE, whatever.

1:42:12SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:42:41SpeakerSo it took a long time for me to nail down things that had to do with color or things that had to do with some of the thickness. You know, it's been a lifelong learning thing for me.

1:42:51Etienne FontanAdvances in technologies also pushed you in that direction, right? Absolutely. Or challenged you, right, to then pull your craft. Yes.

1:42:59SpeakerYeah, like the, so the first closed loop that I made, I, because I was doing, I used to, so I started, I changed it to it going, so my closed loop was like a pony keg that had quick connect things on the side, and then it just had the stainless steel tube up the middle, and it was running by a pump, and so I would pump, you know, distill, you know, I'd crack cans and distill the cans into a tank.

1:43:22SpeakerOr not, I would not distill it. Yeah, the can cracker. Yeah, the can cracker. And then you have to distill it after. And then you saw some of this stuff. I was doing this in the little lab that we had. And because we'd switched to, and so this closed loop, I had to have it, I went to Teflon bags. So I was using these PTFE bags that were for the butane.

1:43:48SpeakerBecause I found a company that does chemical specialized stuff. And so I made this clothes loop and I was trying to get, there was no heated jacket or anything like that. So what I did is I got, you know, those ice pack sheets that are gels, like gels that are squares. I got a bunch of those and heated them up in hot water and I put them at the bottom of the clothes loop and I put...

1:44:10SpeakerThank you so much for watching.

1:44:26SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:44:53SpeakerBut yeah, there's a lot of different ways I've done things throughout the years that have changed with the different ways of purging. Vacuum purging was, you know, that changed the game, made things a lot easier. Oh yeah, that was actually a game changer for me, Eric. My biggest thing with March, I bought one of the first AIs. I had like serial number seven or one, but I had, that's what changed my career.

1:45:16SpeakerYeah, I had one of those ones as well, yeah. It let me get under 100 ppm. That was back in the day when I was only making shatter. We weren't going for the holy water. We wanted a homogenous state with everything in as a full spectrum. That was just stable, room stable. And still my preferred form of solvent as far as rosin. Everyone prefers the cured. It's easier texture.

1:45:36SpeakerI get it. Right. But just as far as something that's cleaner and harder to fake. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:46:08SpeakerI think I just get bored easily, or it's maybe ADHD, whatever you want to call it. It's a little bit of all that, I think. Actually, I've got a good tech question for you. Sure. Okay, so pens, right? We're talking about the Holy Grail. Would you rather homogenize your formulations with a mag sugar or a centrifuge? Or neither? I mean, I... I like the centrifuges, honestly, the ones that are a little offset.

1:46:32SpeakerI just, for just how easy they are, you know, and for them to have a temperature control. It's like, I like the ones, like we have one that's not offset, but is, so I first found those offset ones when I did a consultation in Puerto Rico, they had one. And I was like, oh, wow, you could even just put the you could have like a hard THCA melt and just put the holy water on top of that and spin it.

1:46:57SpeakerAnd you got it like it's crazy. Like you don't even have to use heat to do that. I mean, and then you can make batters so easily. Everything to me at this point is about. You know, trying not to use heat, if possible. I'd rather do time than heat. It depends, though. Sometimes quick, you know, but then time can be the enemy and you want to use heat.

1:47:17SpeakerYeah, yeah. And it really depends on so many different, you know, temperature, you know, oxygen, all the different stuff. I tend to right now, since I don't have one of the off kilter centrifuges, I just manually make the batters, you know. I do the percentage I want. I mix the sauce in with the pure THCA and then just over a period of multiple days, just let it naturally melt in as I stir it, you know, and I take my time with it.

1:47:45SpeakerYou know, but I, yeah, that's, I prefer the centrifuge, I think, just because it's so easy. And to be able just to do it quick like that is nice, but it's not necessary. It's not necessary, but it's a good thing to have in a lab. In fact, after this episode, I'm going to talk them into buying me one. We had this whole conversation. I mean, it's obviously the best thing to get.

1:48:07SpeakerI might as well go for a bladeless. I mean, I've been playing a little bit with the bladeless ones for purging a lot. I've heard work tremendous because you can achieve, I mean, just basically zero PPM or PPB, whatever your testing is. Without as much heat, right? You can get to the same result and it's quicker and they have ones now. I mean, there's so many companies in California that have been liquidating their equipment, whatever.

1:48:28SpeakerI'm sure you guys can find one up there for a solid price. Definitely, definitely. Yeah, that's cool. I'm always, always down to right now. I'm looking for like a cold crash because right now I'm doing some stuff, trying to get some stuff down for Europe because they can't use butane out there. So it's got to be like... You were telling me this, like a pentane wash after doing a biomass reduction with a resonator.

1:48:50SpeakerI'm trying to do some stuff with that right now. That's kind of some of the R&D stuff. I'm still trying to do a thing where I can do a holy water like that with pentane, but that's a lot harder to do. You're a sicko. I know, I'm doing... But I've done... The testing I've done has come back and it's at zero ppm. So I'm real strict when it comes to...

1:49:08SpeakerEspecially if it's a pentane thing, it's got to be zero. I don't want any... And so, you know, and it doesn't work as well for terpenes, but it's still can make a really nice product. So we'll see. It's fun. The idea of teaching a new continent. So without hexane, because that's got a high boiling point too. Hexane also, I just, I don't know if that's something that's on their list.

1:49:31SpeakerThis is something that's new for me and I'm not even involved on like the business side of it or I'm more just like they're asking me questions. I'm doing some experiments right now. Hexane's a neurotoxin, though, so even... Yeah, it's hard to stay away, right? Hexane is one of those, like, really intensely bad for you. Yeah. So that's why I've never really...

1:49:55SpeakerThank you. Thank you.

1:50:21Speakeryeah they're they're like not that's just starting when i was in rotterdam i only found one place that had a cart and it was a rosin cart and uh because like how our company uh one of the owners of our company is alex who owns active um you know the the avd uh that actually has some of their actually have some of their new stuff you want to grab if you're allowed to talk about who you're working for and the companies you're making cartridges for Yeah, yeah, that's like, well, that thing is like ABD, they're, I think, the best around.

1:50:51SpeakerAnd they got that new singular thing coming out where it's like, so I said, I actually have one around here somewhere. Thank you for watching.

1:51:23SpeakerIt's crazy that the cart thing was a big, big thing that, you know, we do a lot of carts. We, you know, we produce up here like 50 kilos a week, you know, as far as just between rosin, BHO and distillate and everything we do. So it's been fun to be able to do something in a big scale and kind of set up different departments and how they work and then have those things running smoothly now and now getting to do just kind of the R&D stuff.

1:51:48SpeakerWhich is like the most fun thing. Yeah, by far the best. Yeah, it is the best part. It's frustrating sometimes, but that's part of it. It doesn't always work. So you're kind of on the hook sometimes. If you spend a lot of time on something and eventually it's not something that can work, it's not as good of a feeling as when it does. But it's part of it.

1:52:09SpeakerSo, you know, I'm always down to try. And if they let me, they give me enough space to do it, then I can. And that's what's cool about where I'm at, which I want to shout out Sun Grown, Leafworks, Full Spec. Those are our, that's my company and our brands up here, you know, and shout out my whole crew, because honestly, it takes a huge team of people to do everything, as you guys all know.

1:52:30Etienne FontanHow do they find you? How do they find your company? Drop your date so everybody knows.

1:52:36SpeakerSo I was doing I was with Holy Water down in California before I split with them and I was doing a consultation. So Alex met who has Holy Water now, Mike. and met him and they knew each other and so they're like oh holy water we know about you guys and had heard of you and uh so i went up to do a consultation and they're like oh so like you're holy water because uh they told me that mike had told them that he was the guy anyway different story whatever and uh so they're like yeah you definitely know what you're talking about like and And I was like, okay, well, I'm going to do this consultation.

1:53:15SpeakerI helped them get the Busy Bee machine that they got. I was helping Boris kind of figure out what it is we needed. And that was their very first really big one, like the multi-rack one. And then eventually I decided to just move up here because I grew up in California and it just wasn't going so well down there and I needed a change. And they offered it.

1:53:38SpeakerAnd they're like, what do you need? They gave me a car, a place to live, a job where I got to help. They were just doing CO2 at the time. So I was able to do what you love all day. Just literally sit there and do what you have a felony for. Which is the best thing ever. So and believe me that the irony of that is not lost on me and how fortunate I've been in my life to have not only be able to do this after a felony, but also still be alive after blowing myself up all for the same thing and to be able to be on a podcast right now talking to you guys about all of it.

1:54:11SpeakerYou know that no matter how things are going on in my life, I can always remember that and be like, I am very, very fortunate. And, you know, and it's quite a story and quite a ride. But yeah, that's kind of how I ended up up here because we're in Wenatchee, Washington, which is about an hour north of the gorge. I don't know if you get any music fans out there, but the Gorge is the best ever.

1:54:36SpeakerAnd it's actually the first place I saw fish in 97. I saw them there. I saw them the first time I saw them out of California. Eric, you always have such a way to bring everything back to fish. I do. My first show was Shoreline 95, the first chess game show. And after that, I was hooked. And so once I graduated high school that summer, I went up to the Gorge.

1:54:56SpeakerAnd so it's been a very special place for me. And now I live an hour away from there. And the last time they played was in 2021 there. And I saw that. And they just haven't been back since. I'm like, God, I live an hour away. Come on. I'm putting this out there right now. Maybe they're listening right now. Play the Gorge. So... But anyway, sorry, that's tangent.

1:55:18Etienne FontanWell, how do people find you on social media?

1:55:22SpeakerI'm the ward underscore on the street. And so I had the Holy Water 710 one, but that no longer is mine. And so now I'm the ward on the street. And so please, yeah, check it out. It's kind of just my personal one, but I'm putting more content on there, especially after this, I'll start doing some stuff. You can start seeing, you can see that jar of clear turps that I made with that machine is on there.

1:55:44SpeakerA bunch of different stuff, you know, a lot of my R&D stuff and things like that. A lot of the promotional stuff that TJ uses, I gave him pictures of all of my stuff. So a lot of the product from that are from pictures of things I've done. And so I have like a big collection. I'll start putting more content out there. Now that I think about it, I should probably get on that.

1:56:05SpeakerYou guys have been, you know, covering a lot of ground about, you know, extraction and, you know, it gets technical, you know, you know, one of the things that I wanted to really showcase and talk about, which is the flower, you know, that's such the other side of the industry. So many of us are, you know, getting so, you know, the art history of making extracts, you know, there's, You know so many different pathways to get different results and they're becoming more standardized and you know you guys are definitely you know legends and pioneers and um you know continuing to innovate I think is kind of part of what really was driving you know the story we were wanting to tell and I think Eric elaborating on his extensive knowledge and being able to use you know tools in his arsenal You know, like what the resonator does, you know, that cryo sift is something that we started talking about, like just two minute nitro sift.

1:56:59SpeakerYou know, everything that Marcus is talking about with, you know, looking at those heads underneath the scope, you know, from dry sift. Well, as soon as you're going into a cryogenic application and you're working about live material, the rules change, the cold chain. You know, that's what we were going to kind of get into. And I think when you start talking about the cold chain, Thank you for watching.

1:57:38SpeakerYou know, there's more access than there's ever been, you know, but there's also more demand that's coming from, you know, variety. And I think that's what's amazing about the innovation that I'm seeing happen from those who we work with, you know, real pioneers in the industry, you know, like Harrison and like Eric. You know, Harrison's work is demonstrated on his IG pretty, you know, he had a pretty incredible page until they, you know, dropped him.

1:58:05SpeakerBut, you know, You know, I'd like to have maybe Harrison talk some about his because when I look at, you know, the way I approach the industry, I mean, of course, there's many different types of of I mean, there's a pathway. One guy doesn't even want to talk about solventless or butane or hydrocarbon. They just want to talk about flour. Another guy wants to only, oh, we need to expand our solventless division.

1:58:32SpeakerSome are in the building stage where they're not fully integrated or they don't have a hydrocarbon or type 7 in California. Are they doing ethanol? And so when you kind of start breaking apart Like every direction that you can go from just the baseline of biomass. If you just think about it from that, you know, the, the mindset of what's biomass and where does it start? You know, it starts in the field.

1:58:57SpeakerYou have a live plant, you know, from the point of harvest, that's really where, you know, all this conversation is built around, you know, of course the lineage and the way that the product is grown. I mean, we all know that, you know, quality in quality out, right. And but when we're really what we're doing here is we're passing the baton from the point where everything that we're talking about in extraction is just as deep on the other side when it comes to cultivating from every decision to the seed, to the soil, to the nutrient, to the placement of the sun.

1:59:30SpeakerEvery dynamic, you know, you know, it's not easy. There's you can put everything into it. I mean, sometimes it just grows itself. You know, an attraction happens in that same complex environment. And so when I'm thinking about biomass, and I think that's like part of what is important for just the scope of this whole conversation is just to say, you know, what is it that you need to accomplish, you know, when you're thinking about it from a perspective of I'm taking a skew to market.

1:59:58SpeakerAnd so what is the market demand? And depending on what the market demand is, it's going to drive the decision. And so I think that's what's just important. You know, amazing about what we're seeing in the industry and some of the problems that we're able to solve is we're able to identify them. And then from post-harvest to the part where it's packaged and on a shelf, we're able to be a part of that solution.

2:00:20SpeakerAnd doing something as simple to the industry with like a two-minute nitro sift with live material, And I think it's, it's wild to understand how complex

2:00:43SpeakerAaron Wiggins, Chiropractic Surgery Center, Chiropractic Surgery Center, Chiropractic Surgery Center,

2:01:03SpeakerYou know, I mean, a lot of it can be called bro science because that's how it's all, you know, really come from is trial and error, you know, anecdotal, you know, but anecdotal has saved millions of lives. So, you know, you can't discredit, you know, what that means. So in the meantime, we're all out here pioneering. We're all out here still knocking doors down, innovating. You know, aside from something like a two-minute nitro sift, part of the reason we're even in the space of freeze drying, which is a relationship to a live sift, because you do need, you know, the elements that are associated with sublimation and lyophilization to remove the water, to actually stabilize the product and preserve all of its greatness.

2:01:48SpeakerBut that's something that's kind of revolutionary because nobody else is doing it. I mean, I'm paying attention and I see a lot going on out there and we're always trying to maximize what we're up to. But that is something in itself when you start talking about why am I even doing that? And I'll leave it at this because I want you guys to, you know, probe. I want to open up some minds here because aside from something that's even innovating in new territory, sift to hydrocarbon, Eric's really, you know, really talking about, you know, sift to rosin is something that, you know, Harrison, you know, can really, you know, speak to, you know, when we talk about a two minute nitro sift that came from cryo trim.

2:02:31SpeakerIt's the live trimming part that's fascinating because it leads to free smokable freeze dried flowers, which on some levels is like the new frontier. You know, when you're able to take fresh frozen material, which traditionally is relocated to two primary directions, you have hydrocarbon extraction or you have fresh frozen or ice water extraction. You know, that's it. You know, pick your path and then the decisions driven by which one's yielding the most because it warrants the labor costs associated to extract the material.

2:03:05SpeakerYou know, sometimes you're like, ah, this isn't even worth extracting. So then they kick it down to ethanol. Right. So when we're able to take a flower and even with intention for us, we've been able to make use of something that somebody might discard for that reason. It's beautiful looking flower. It didn't quite get the yield they're looking for. Well, I can take fresh frozen flower and bring it back to life and put it, make it a smokable flower.

2:03:29SpeakerThank you for watching.

2:03:50SpeakerI can put it into the resonator for a cryotrim process where we're just using the CO2 or the nitrogen as a freezing agent to get that exterior leaf just brittle enough to fracture and fall from the flower. And when you look at the result of the trim, when you look at the bud, You know, you wouldn't believe that a pair of scissors hadn't touched it. It's sometimes it's seeing is believing.

2:04:10SpeakerAnd that's why, you know, we get out there and try to really show what we're up to. But when you do that with a live flower, it changes the game. Right now, I have to keep the cold chain. And that's what led us down the pathway of freeze drying, right? That's what led us down the pathway to figure out how to solve the problem of what an amazing trim job, cryo trim does with the fresh frozen flower or a live flower.

2:04:32SpeakerAnd then as soon as you take that, put it into a freeze dryer, 24 hours later, I mean, look, it's not as simple. I mean, we've made it popcorn button simple, but it didn't start out that way. You know, the journey was long. And I think that that's a big part of what's crazy is because like, even when here I am peeling back layers and I'm ready to launch into, you know, talking about freeze dried flour, but it's like remiss of me to not pause and then back up to where I was just speaking about the cryo trim.

2:05:00SpeakerBecause when you're using the resonator to trim, There's no blades or scissors. It's bladeless. So all of the leaf, the sugar leaf fractures and falls into the bottom of the chamber. That's uncut. So when you look at that trim under a microscope, there's no scissors or blades have touched it. There's no plant particulate all mixed throughout. You know, it's clean trim. It's whole body trim. It's sought after by extractors.

2:05:22SpeakerIt makes for better end product. So when I'm literally taking the cryo trim, the resulting sugar leaf, And then changing my mesh screen, putting a different micron screen on, the desired micron for obviously whatever the application. And I'm going to get a two-minute sift of that same material, just my sugar leaf. And in two minutes, I got cream. I just put it yesterday, dropping some original material.

2:05:51SpeakerWe have to have fun with it. But that really, I mean, that's new. We've been doing it for a minute, but to be able to demonstrate it At scale where it's repeatable, right? That's something that's really incredible. You know, we're just, you know, being a part of something that says, hey, pay attention over here, guys. This is amazing. And really, when it comes down to it for me, I'll just now lean back in just a little bit.

2:06:13SpeakerI was trying to showcase a little earlier. So like some of that sugar leaf, like this is a sweet tooth. This is a freeze dried flower. And this is also cryo trimmed. So no scissors or blades have touched this material. You know, you can see that this is full sun outdoor, you know? Wow, that does a great job, for sure. And when you're, this is out of a...

2:06:36SpeakerI got a cotton mouth just looking at that. This is pre-dried. So this was fresh frozen flour, right? And that's all we did is crowd trim it. We put it into our pre-dryer with our recipe. And, you know, the list goes on, right? The nature of, and this is the glitter bomb. Nice. Yeah, I heard that strain. I haven't tried that strain. I heard that one's really good.

2:06:59SpeakerOh, man, the nose on this thing is wow. You know, it's just for us, what's so fun is figuring out how to, you know, take, you know, freeze dried smokable flour to the market is something that's, it's a new frontier. We're embracing it as freeze dried. We've been dancing around it, trying to call it, you know, live drive because it's technically accurate, as opposed to all these other weird nomenclatures that are being attempted or adopted.

2:07:30SpeakerBut we're at the point now where, you know, we're just excited to be able to give the world the same experience that we've been having in our own backyard. You know, my wife and I, of course, with her adoring support, we've been able to, you know, we have, we're in Northern California, we're able to grow. We have raised beds, you know, so we smoke what we grow.

2:07:51SpeakerSo we're really particular about what we, you know, how we take care of our plants and how we harvest them. And in the beginning, You know, we did, we used to mess them. I had the material to throw in the freeze dryer and, you know, we really value our product. And, um, it, I would mess a lot up, you know, it didn't all just come easy. Um, you know, the trimming part we had figured out, it was how do you freeze dry this stuff?

2:08:17SpeakerAnd, um, it took a minute, you know, there was. The first two years, we still had a dry room and our old, the old grow room, cause we started growing outdoor. And we were drying most of it out there and he was freezing some of it. And we slowly over the course of two years converted And I finally let him, they nailed it. They reeled it in and I let them freeze dry the entire crop or freeze in which to be freeze dried the entire crop.

2:08:44SpeakerSo yeah, when I got, you know, getting the permission to actually like take your whole thing and freeze, freeze it all. And then it was, it was kind of, that was it. You know, we, then we just been continuing to pursue, you know, being as best as we can at what we do, what we put our minds to. And, and it's something that's exciting because, you know,

2:09:09SpeakerYou know, I guess what I would love to see happen is in the future, you know, more live dried or which, you know, free dried flour is adopted in the industry because I like the shift that it makes. It puts the power back in the hands of the grower where they can sit on preserved amounts of flour that they've grown frozen. You know, in like a cryo type freezer, you know, something extremely cold.

2:09:37SpeakerAnd then they can utilize their freeze dryer to dry that as it's purchased in a sense. So if you're a smaller ornate farm and somebody's like, oh, I want to pound your cookies. Well, that's great. I'll have it to you in 48 hours. They pull it out, dry it for them. And it's as fresh as, you know, day one. And, you know, it gives them the power back because they get the highest value.

2:10:03SpeakerThey don't have to get rid of it really quickly because it's fading. You know, we've been sitting on this for two months. So, yeah, I really would love to see the shift in that over time and how that's going to play out in the industry. That's called market adoption, my friend. TJ, I got a question if I could. And this has to do with, you know, again, the science of what you're doing.

2:10:29SpeakerYou know, the advent of frozen foods really came about when Clarence Birdseye, I think that's his name, right? Figured out the flash freezing process because what he found out was the rate at which you freeze something has a lot to do of the material after it's not frozen. So I guess like with fish. That's a great question. With fish in particular, I guess what happens is, so we were talking about water activity and unbound water.

2:11:05SpeakerUnbound water will freeze and make ice crystals. And when that happens in a fleshy product like fish or meat or something like that, what happens is it really busts up the cell structure. So you could freeze like a piece of meat or a piece of fish or anything. But when you go to reconstitute it, now that breaking up of the cellular structure really has an impact. I guess with fish it makes it taste rubbery, same thing with meat.

2:11:36SpeakerSo I guess in general the question I have, a couple questions. What dawned on me, again, when you're lyophilizing, you're not just freezing, but you're pulling vacuums. So I was interested if you've ever looked at the cold traps of those vacuums, do you get any terpene fractions? I guess the other thing I'd just follow up on saying it, do you look underneath the microscope to see... Does the structure of the trichome or the plant really change when you take it through this process?

2:12:11SpeakerWhat morphological changes do you see? Can you tell under the microscope that this stuff has been freeze dried or not? You nailed a lot of great questions, man, and I got you. I'm a fucking chemist, man. Ask ATN. I ask when people are supposed to ask me questions, I ask them questions back. No, look, I'm also, you know, not, you know, traditionally schooled. I'm not a scientist.

2:12:41SpeakerSo, you know, when I put that out there, what this comes from for me is practical application. From, you know, just desire, you know, hard knocks, you know, going after it. So, you know, I bring what I know and I keep an open mind. Always a student first, right? But the reality to the relationship, is what I'm trying to say, to the size of the ice crystal is directly proportionate to the freeze rate.

2:13:01SpeakerSo the faster the freeze, the smaller the ice crystal. The longer the freeze, the larger the ice crystal. A smaller ice crystal by every means, which is a benefit of a flash freeze, is going to equate to a... So, you know, now there's techniques that people know when it comes to post-harvest where you have, you know, say two trailers, one of them's pre-frozen. So everything you do overnight goes immediately in one.

2:13:38SpeakerAnd then you can close it in another, right? And that's where you're minimizing that thermal shock, right? Because that starts playing a role, especially like over long term and like a connex opening and closing. Even if you had the best freeze rate from the beginning, you know, there's a natural decline over time of that ice crystal as it opens and closes. So even optimal storage, you know, does play a role in degradation.

2:14:02SpeakerBut I candidly I haven't seen something to me that's been so obvious in terms of because the ice crystal relationship as a smoker, because I usually smoke it before that's a problem. But I would say that it would be more susceptible to its environment because it's more sensitive. Right. So, you know, you guys talk about cold storage, right? You know, cold chain, like even, you know, the extractors who smoke the best of have a dab fridge, right?

2:14:31SpeakerBecause, you know, there might be a longer term experience where we are optimizing. Look, I smoke my freeze dry to have it sitting out for a month, two months at a time in a turkey bag, in a jar. And, you know. Tastes good. It's a normal experience for me. So it's but if you want to talk about six months to a year, you know, those things start to matter.

2:14:50SpeakerRight. Depending on long term storage. All right. And then you kind of pivoted into like looking under a scope. Right. So we and also looking in the trap. I'm interested. A good question regarding terpenes. So there can be terpenes inside of the ice that's captured in the water. Right. Those are there are methods of recapturing that. They're public. They're out there. People talk about them. It's a lot to go through.

2:15:15SpeakerFor me, a negative with that would be I'd have to allow the freezer to naturally defrost and not heat, which is a commitment of time. Is that commitment of time with my equipment down justifying me going after terpenes captured in that manner? I say no. It could matter. I have a way to do that that's easy. Yeah. Thank you for watching.

2:15:59SpeakerI use very little amount of time when we do that. Show them how the sausage is made, bro. Well, I don't always do it. I'm just saying for people out there who don't want to spend as much time. Yes, we do. About the question, the process, and you were talking about mitigating cellular structure damage. And so what we have done is the recipe in the TCI High Life Edition machines is...

2:16:29SpeakerStrategically designed to never exceed the maximum temperature to start really pulling off a lot of those monoterpenes and you're also instead of a stagnant vapor pressure regulation where you know we're just choosing a specific vapor pressure to follow we're actually tracing it scientifically at every temperature through the process so it is it's the most scientific recipe we can find That does not do cellular structure damage because once you pass a certain power output threshold, that certain numeric number, you're no longer in your sublimation, you're vaporizing that water out instead.

2:17:17SpeakerSo you're Getting into a point where you're forcing it out too quickly. So we've mitigated that and it's all very finely tuned to produce the least cellular structure damage possible. So that's really the difference in like, you know, trying to do like your average home freeze dryer and then buy a vapor pressure controller and make this all work. You know, we have a very high precision, high precision bleed valve that tracks right along with the machine.

2:17:49SpeakerSo it's done in three ways. We control the maximum temperature, we control the vapor pressure at all times, and we control the actual sublimation output at all times during the run. So under, under a microscope, can you see like morphological damage to plant tissue if it's done improperly? No, no, that's, um, I'll go back to what Colt was just saying, but, um, dude, that's the first thing we do is stick it under a scope.

2:18:20SpeakerAnd, um, it's not just about post, um, for us, it's not just about post lyophilization, it's about post cryotrim. So for when I'm only able to show the bud under the scope after both processes where the trichomes are perfectly intact. So no, there's no damage to the trichomes. They're full body intact. In fact, they're preserved. And that's what's amazing to most people that they don't understand is how is it when you're freezing the plant?

2:18:45SpeakerNow we do a controlled freeze. You know, we're not trying to go We go ice cream temperature like zero to 30 degrees when we're trimming. But as I understand it, it's like the elasticity of the trichome stays intact. It's only the bract of the sugar leaf that's breaking off. So, I'm always taking, you know, aside from the COAs, which are going to tell their own story, right, then you go to the scope.

2:19:29SpeakerAnd the scope is going to tell you the truth. And so on both live and dry trimming, we're definitely not damaging our trichomes by any observation. And that also goes for once we put it under vacuum for a sublimation process, which is lyophilization, right? That sublimation under vacuum is lyophilization, just for those out there. And lyophilization is just kind of the fancy term for freeze drying. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:20:14SpeakerJust to make sure everybody understands what we're talking about. All right. And so the scopes definitely demonstrate that the trichomes are perfectly intact. And then, you know, also the tests. So when we do COAs, you know, we see like less than 1% loss from hand trimming versus our prior trimming. And so across the board, even that, and with freeze drying, we see higher terpene levels, which, so yeah, there's always going to be a little bit, like we're trying to do the best we can with like everything Colt was describing to like maximize mitigating terpene loss.

2:20:49SpeakerLike freeze drying already does it better than traditional hang drying. Like the results are in, there's no question. The COAs tell us that. Um, now how much more can we improve upon that? That's kind of what the next task is at hand. And we've finally given ourselves the equipment and the programming to do so.

2:21:09SpeakerWe were, I was also going to talk about like, uh, so our hash drying machines don't currently utilize vapor pressure control because nobody is utilizing that for freeze drying hash. But in the near future, we would like to do some testing and COAs with some custom recipes with vapor pressure control to see if we actually do get better terpene preservation when drying ash as well. And if it's more than negligible, You know, then we can incorporate that into, you know, a very specific hash drying recipe that, you know, you get a higher yield.

2:21:50SpeakerSo if it's going to extract, you know, even if it's that one or 2%, it all adds up in the end. So I'm down to do some of the R and D if you need, I want to get one of those. Yeah. Yeah.

2:22:11SpeakerHow many stages can you put on the recipe? 72. So we have designed a 80-point recipe where it is by the temperature. It's an automated recipe with the vapor pressure control integrated to the run. But there is a... A manual mode on the machine that allows you to do 10 entry points for time, temperature, and pressure. So you could potentially- 10 entry points where I can change the millitore.

2:22:51SpeakerYep, you can decipher the time, the temperature, and the mTOR for that duration, and you can fill out a small, like, 30-point log, essentially, and design your own custom run if you would like to for experiments of that nature. Like scientific programmability. Yes, yep.

2:23:19SpeakerWhat we're doing, man, is we're talking about process and we're trying to make this like accessible. You know, I mean, these huge commercial units that, you know, have a cost of entry, you know, 300 plus thousand dollars. And you got to spend six figures for some pieces of equipment, you know, up to a million dollars. Like, unless you're, you know, an MSO or a major corporation, it's really looking to You know, scale out your build.

2:23:45SpeakerAnd even those, you know, have budgetary limitations, you know, spatial limitations. So, you know, there's, it's about timing for anybody and knowledge. And so this is like a pathway where, you know, inevitably, you know, folks will really start seeing some of the benefits of that. You know, the things that we're trying to like showcase, you know, that it all stems from us just wanting folks to have the same experience that we have every day.

2:24:11SpeakerOne of the craziest benefits We've been puffing on these joints the whole series. How much have you guys heard us cough?

2:24:31SpeakerIt's chill on the throat. It's better on the throat. I like that about it. I have freeze-dried stuff here too. And it also seems to me that it seems to stay better longer, like not in a cool temperature. Like I'll have some in a jar, you know, that I'll like forget about that I've had for like six months. And compared to a jar that I have of anything else for that amount of time, it'll be remarkably the same.

2:24:54SpeakerI mean, it does have a little bit of a change because it does cure, but it does seem to have like a little bit of a better shelf life to it. Well, and it retains its shape and its size, its color. Yeah. So, I mean, it looks like it did the day you cut it down. The reality is that when you're doing freeze-dried flour, you're getting better cellular structure retention in your end product than you are with your hang dry, with all of the potential oxidation and, you know, the deformation of that flour material.

2:25:28SpeakerThank you for watching.

2:25:43SpeakerDefinitely seems to be the case because I have found stuff that I'm like, oh, yeah, I forgot I had this at this strain called the soap, which was like animal mints, cush mints, one of my favorites that I just forgot about that I had in a backpack somewhere. And it was freeze dried and it was still so good. And it was like like six or something like that.

2:26:02SpeakerWell, untouched, no light. But it was good.

2:26:11SpeakerHey, when we were talking about bound and unbound water before, I also had a thought to share. And I don't know if this is what you guys have observed, but this is one of the biggest variables for... Thank you for joining us today.

2:26:56SpeakerThank you. Thank you.

2:27:23SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:27:44SpeakerThank you for watching.

2:28:02SpeakerAnd this gets to the bottom of how labs can cheat and give higher THC numbers. So what if they dry the herb out a lot, right? And again, like if they're drying it in the water activity measurement, you're basically doing just that, right? But when you lose water, what we know is that you lose terpenes. And in fact, in some cases, some of these labs dry the material At such a temperature that they actually start decarboxylating too as well.

2:28:36SpeakerAnd all those are going to drive up your THC numbers, right? So these are ways that labs... Well, it's going to convert the THC A number to delta 9 as it oxidizes. That's right. So it's going to convert... Thank you for joining us.

2:29:12SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:29:39SpeakerOne testing lab to another testing lab, even if they're both ISO certified, is that they don't necessarily have the same process for determined potency, taking into account the amount of moisture, as you recognize, the amount of not total water. So it's not bone dry cannabis, but it's just everything that corrects for the unbound water. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:30:29SpeakerSo then you go into, you know, how you just said there's even different standards at labs. Like in California, like you have to have a certain percentage of moisture to even allow for testing. Otherwise, it's, you know, they won't test because they want a water activity in there in order to validate the test, because otherwise it's testing higher. Now, I know for us with Freestride, we actually do kind of like a targeted moisture removal.

2:30:55SpeakerSo that when our goal isn't to actually remove all of the water, you know, when we pack it, when you pack it something, you want it to be below like eight to nine percent threshold because that's where like biologics start taking place is above that, you know, relative humidity, which I know is different to water activity. And the nature of us, like you found there was that sweet spot because, you know, if you over dry the product, you know, it's definitely like it's, you know, it's like, Yeah, it's, yeah, crunchy.

2:31:26SpeakerYou know, and that's not what we want. I mean, we have a zero shrinkage, you know, because when it sublimates, right, it doesn't contract like it would with traditional, like when it's, when it's just doing traditional hang drying with the operation, you've got contraction of the flower, whereas with sublimation, like the bud stays the same, exact same size, just water just goes away. You know, but we don't want to overdo it.

2:31:51SpeakerAnd that's why we do control, All right. You know, that's how we use the recipes that we do so we can make sure that we're getting, you know, it's the same way, you know, that your steak is ready on the grill or your tri-tip, you know, understanding that relationship. And so for us, that's really the practice. And then I know that water activity, you know, for us is, you know, it's we're not really targeting like funny how nobody measures water activity, but its relationship to what you're smoking, you know, at the end of the day, When we're packaging a flower, that's what our primary concern is.

2:32:29SpeakerWe think about, you know, the humidity of the plant before we start manhandling it because we don't want it too dry. We want to retain the flower and we think about not being it too wet before it goes into a jar so we don't have a negative effect. Yeah. Thank you for watching.

2:33:03SpeakerAnd might just ruin the last three hours of shit you had on the lyophilizer. You know, we found this true. Again, a lot of biological materials are naturally what are called hygroscopic means that it'll actually desiccate, desiccate the air around it, right? So a lot of, you know, cellulose, wood for wood. I was on a project where we were basically, we had to know the moisture content in wood.

2:33:30SpeakerWe have to be able to control the moisture content in wood because we were carrying out, we were trying to create environmentally friendly wood preservatives. And in order to do the evaluation of those wood preservatives, right, which are basically fungicides and biocides that you put in the wood, right, so it'll last outside as opposed to rot after a year. We had to control the moisture content in wood.

2:33:55SpeakerAnd what we found is that, again, like even if you condition the wood for like a week in a humidity chamber to a certain level of humidity, as soon as you brought that wood out, it did whatever the environment was around it. You know, it's just, yeah. We've done that like with our freeze dry look intentionally man look when I travel I holler like I've been doing this for a few years now brother right and so of course I go to Hawaii and when I came from California it was this texture when I get to Hawaii and open my bag yeah man it takes on the moisture well now instead of being able to hand mill it I needed a grinder right yeah Yeah, exactly.

2:34:34SpeakerEnd of the day. So, yeah, it's absolutely. So it's just the nature of understanding that relationship. And for us, if I'm going to package a product, I'm going to have a different target. I might consider putting, you know, a moisture pack in a bag or, you know, the right degree of, right. So there's a, I mean, you've got to sometimes use the tools, Taylor too, you know, and that's like with any, um, You know, any, any product, you know, any pathway.

2:34:58SpeakerSo, you know, we're still, you know, students and learning about it, you know, but it's funny, you were talking about testing earlier. And I think it's really one of the most incredible things about what we're doing with Freeshare Flower is the THCA hasn't actually decarbed yet because of the nature of lyophilization. So it's technically, you know, a flower. I mean, when you see results, like all our test results are coming in at under 0.3 on the D9.

2:35:23SpeakerRight. So the A hasn't decarbed until you're firing it up, which is a pretty unique prospect for the end result. I think it's part of how it's preserving it. But that's something that's not a loophole. It's not something that, you know, when the lab's testing, we have to dry our flour to test it. So we're not like testing fresh frozen. You know, this is post freeze dry.

2:35:43SpeakerAnd we just we're seeing higher cannabinoid levels, higher terpene levels. And the A is still there. It hasn't decarbed. So that's what the COA is reflecting every time we're putting it out there. That's cool. That's cool. And it's not intuitively obvious. It's like you have to try that shit and figure out how to dial that in before you can say that it works. That's like counterintuitive, right?

2:36:10SpeakerIt is. It is almost counterintuitive because, you know, just the example of like the grape versus the raisin, right? So if you're considering a trichome like a grape, right? While the grape is alive, yes, it has water in it, it's functioning, its biochemical processes are happening. As soon as you harvest the grape, yeah, any grower of grapes will tell you it's going to start degrading from that point forward.

2:36:36SpeakerWhen you completely dry the grape and now you have against just the raisin, just as a perturbed example, yeah, you've completely changed the overall what I call morphology, which is the shape, of the the cells certainly like as the biological processes happen when the thing is alive and it requires water as soon as it's harvested no longer requires water so now water again it's a ticking time bomb because if you don't dry it out and you get mold or bacterial contamination that could easily just become bacteria food but there are nutrients found in raisins that are not um found in raisins So in dried fruit rather, you know.

2:37:20SpeakerIn dried fruit, yes. Well, that's part of the aging process, right? So things are sort of, as they desiccate, they dry and age. The literature that's out there just on terpene loss on dry room, or just drying of cannabis, is that you could lose up to 20% of your terpene loads Thank you for watching.

2:38:07SpeakerYou know, that's where the value is. That's where your genetics and your living soil and all your cultivation is feeding into trying to boost that oil yield. And I think one of the things we talked about this a bunch on Hash Church, one of the things that THC content is relevant to is trichome density, right? So the higher your trichome density, the higher your THC number is going to be.

2:38:31SpeakerAnd that's, again, very important in commerce, especially if you're looking to... Wholesale buy or sell trim or flower for extraction. I mean, you definitely need to know how much THC content is in there so you can predict how much product you're going to get when you extract. Well, even as a cultivator, Mark, you bring up a great point because as my breeding projects or everything, the main goal is tracking density.

2:39:00SpeakerI call my company hash engineered genetics. That's literally the point. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:39:30SpeakerI just find that to be, I don't know, the most fun part of breeding is seeing all those different personalities, all those different unique profiles that only exist in the cannabis plant. Very few other plants have this broad diversity of volatile aromatic compounds you can find. It's abysmal and crazy how many are just in this one genetic, right? Or rather this one plant. Because the various genetics, all these different phenos are just crazy to see.

2:39:58SpeakerAnd then, I mean, beyond that, Finding the best way to extract them. That's also the secondary part of the most fun, whether you go volatile or solventless or whatever your choice, you could do liquid nitro and then you can pick whatever direction you want. Right. Especially if it's fresh row. Yeah. Talk about liquid. Talk about liquid nitrogen for a second. You know, I was thinking about that earlier when when we were talking to Eric about Baroni, because the thing that that Chris had always come to me with is, oh, you know, liquid nitrogen.

2:40:28SpeakerThat's it. Game over. There's not going to be any more extraction. Liquid nitrogen is going to do it all. It can.

2:40:48SpeakerYou know, liquid nitrogen certainly does make the the the the the top of the trichome brittle or that the connection between the top of the stock. Yes. Right. And it doesn't rupture it. It just allows us to dislodge it in a really unique way. It's an effect of liquid nitrogen. I forgot what it's called. But when something gets fully encapsulated with the liquid nitrogen. It has almost a protective layer.

2:41:18SpeakerI forgot what it's called in chemistry. The Vanderwall effect or whatever, right? Thank you. Yes, exactly that. And that's what protects the head. It's crazy when you see it under a scope. Yeah, that's cool. Well, doesn't it freeze fracture the plant material itself so you end up getting a lot of contaminant? Yes, but that's the finesse. That's the artistry. That's understanding your agitation, time, parameters like anything else.

2:41:41SpeakerYeah. So how come it hasn't taken off? It's expensive and most people don't have the right tooling, right? So then, you know, have two, three years of R&D with the Resonator boys and now you'll be like, oh, okay, yeah, I can see how this would work really well. So can you use liquid nitrogen in a resonator? Yeah, that's what I use. Absolutely. That's the one that Eric, yeah.

2:42:05SpeakerEric has the first one. Yeah, because I was just, it's just the use a lot less and gets colder quicker because it's so cold. So it's like the interface that they made on the resonator is amazing, you know, and they have an actuator that shuts it on and off. Thank you for watching.

2:42:46SpeakerThank you for watching.

2:43:05SpeakerAnd that works for dry trim. And I go like, you know, negative 150. And what kind of yields do you get? Do you get a comparable yield to what you would get in a solvent extraction? Yeah. So like we, so we were doing most of the solventless stuff last year. We were getting within a half a percent of what we would do in the solvents, but we were doing four times as much.

2:43:26SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:43:46SpeakerAnd and honestly, we would still be able to if I was if it wasn't a time thing, I would spend more time getting those last little bits of percentage, which we tried to get in the beginning. But it would take as much time to get that last like half percent. So how much how much liquid nitrogen do you consume in like a run? We use, so our doers are, they're like about 290 pounds worth of liquid nitrogen.

2:44:10SpeakerOkay, so it's the big doer on the wheel. The skinnier ones, the skinnier tall ones. Skinnier tall ones. And I go by weight just because that's what I remember right now, but it is by liters, I think. So basically, 230 liters are on wheels. Yeah, yeah, okay, so it's the skinnier ones that are not on wheels, yeah. And so basically, we'll go through, in an eight-hour shift, if we're doing dry, like trim or something like that, we'll use one of those in two eight-hour shifts.

2:44:38SpeakerThank you for joining us. We'll see you next time.

2:44:56SpeakerBecause you got to get it back to that cold point. They have a jacketed, it's a jacketed vessel. So if you really want to keep it cold, you can actually use some of the CO2 or nitrogen or whatever you want to use to get it cold on the bottom and it stays cold. And they actually end up using less solvent that way, but it uses a little bit of solvent to do that.

2:45:17SpeakerSo it's almost kind of negligible on that. It is nice to be able to keep it cold. It also helps if you want to tumble it in ice water. Thank you for watching.

2:45:42SpeakerEric, just to clarify for Mark, what you're talking about right now, as far as just how much liquid nitro you would go through with those doers, that's for doing a biomass reduction, not doing like different fractions, not you're pulling off the tip. Yeah. So what we'll use, you know, we don't, so we'll do it for like BHO purposes. And so it doesn't have to be perfect. So as far as it's almost good to have some plant material in there sometimes.

2:46:10SpeakerJust for the sponginess. Yeah, then you don't need the pro pack. There's no cherry, right? Fluffs it up a little bit. So, so you're right. You're right. You know, using it for that is a little different. We'll do like five minute runs, you know, five minute and five pounds of trim. But when we do live resin, you know, I do 20 minute runs and we do, I think it's like 15 pounds.

2:46:32SpeakerLet me speak on that, Eric. So, you know, Mark, we actually went pretty deep and we like, that's the reason Eric's here. You know, like he's, he's, He's been willing to pull up his, you know, sleeves and get into the sandbox with us and play, you know, and mess up with R&D, you know, like, oh, this didn't work. Oh, that was silly. Like, why didn't that work?

2:46:51SpeakerAnd like, you know, really get, you know, into it. And like I said, he, you know, he took the plunge with us. And actually, like we, we had the very first XLS probe, which was our stainless unit. Prior to stainless, we were relegated to CO2. It's a different beast than nitrogen. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:47:24SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:47:45SpeakerWe did, and we would run it for five minutes, stock, collect, same material, rinse, repeat, up to a 30-minute cycle, and record all the data, including the testing behind it, so we could validate at what point was the actual sweet spot. We found in that 15-minute area, we got the majority of it. Right. But that last five minutes, that five to 15 to 20 was actually worth going after.

2:48:14SpeakerBut that 20 to 25 became a little less desirable. And now you're talking about a time of what's your throughput ratio? A lot of math. Yeah, but we were able to go on there for sure. We identify and not on a like anecdotal, you know, conclusion. We like said, here's five different strains. And so the data could be conclusive when we said, hey, this is what's happening.

2:48:36SpeakerAnd so therefore we could kind of have, you know, obviously an SOP of sorts. You know, there's always going to be a variance with bio by any measure. And, you know, there's, you know, ways by putting more time into it. But you're right because you said it earlier. But the longer you spend, I could spend something for an hour and be like, oh, I got a 50% yield, you know, but look at it under a scope, you know, or as Marcus implied earlier, or don't, right?

2:49:01SpeakerPlease don't.

2:49:05SpeakerBecause it's really just, it's contaminant at that point. At some point, scale tips, you know, you get the sweet spot is what we're going for, right? You know, it's that last mile, you know, save that for ethanol. You know, like for us, it's really simple. That's a great way to do it. Just do the first little bit for solventless stuff and then keep it rolling for anything else.

2:49:26SpeakerYou know, that way you got two things happening. You know, that that that's why I love the I mean, I really that is why I'm here. It's a great tool in the quiver. It is a great tool. It is a great tool. And it's just the versatility of it. You know, that's why, you know, that's when I started working with them, you know, in 2016.

2:49:44Etienne FontanExplain why is it versatile to the viewer? OK, you know why it's versatile, but why is it?

2:49:51SpeakerOK, so you can get to any goal you need to with one tool and you don't have to go invest in all these other ancillary products. That's really, you know, and it's an it's easy for a starter level, right? Like someone needs to learn how to make whatever. It doesn't matter if it's in the solventless realm or if it's in the solvent realm and they're trying to do the biomass reduction.

2:50:12SpeakerWe need these for proof of concept. Before I go sell someone on the expensive, I'm like, here, let me show you how well it works. You like it, you buy it. If you don't, don't worry. But so far, that's been tried, tested and true for us because it works really well. Otherwise, it'd be hard for me to do my job. Right. And it's not expensive. So it doesn't scare every consumer.

2:50:34SpeakerA lot of things right now in cannabis, they're inflated because they're cannabis related. Right. The cannabis adjacent products are people who just took some type of tech from any other industry. Right. It doesn't matter. And we incorporate them. Now, how well they're implemented and how well they're executed. Now, that's the key. Right. So this one is easily implemented and the execution speaks for itself when you see the final product.

2:50:57SpeakerLike I said, depending on the goal, the SKU, what do you need for your catalog? We'll get you there. This is just one of the good tools in the quiver that I would, you know, happily invest in depending on what that project needs to do, right? That's when TJ keeps seeing solution. That's the goal. Like, what is the solution? We'll get you there. This is just one of those good things to have in my toolbox that I like because it works super well for me.

2:51:20SpeakerNow I've seen all these things. I'm designing closed loops. I have my own water extraction systems. Some stuff's proprietary, some's not. But regardless, I will use this and that's not proprietary, right? Because it's Easy for new consumers to dive in with this product, especially if they're in all these different emerging markets and they want to play with some fire. Or depending on the starting material, they can make something that's still a little bit more digestible, a little cheaper, right?

2:51:47SpeakerLike whatever they need to make. That's the finesse. It's the different recipes. It's all the programmability and everything else. You can program all that stuff in. So once you get it down to like what it is that you want to do, you can program that in and call it whatever you want. And then as you're training someone or you're having someone come in, all they have to do is know which thing to press.

2:52:08SpeakerYou know, and then they just you can just have it be for this amount of time, this temperature, whatever. So I think that the software part of it is a big part of it, at least on the XLS. I know that that's one of the one of the things I like about it. You know, you do how many rotations and how fast you want it to rotate.

2:52:26SpeakerThere are so many variables. um but yeah as far as like uh different things you can use in a lab i guess i say the diversity part of it because it does it does make a lot of different skews the fact that you can use it for solvent products and you can still do it for solventless just that alone it makes it to where you can turn it into almost any type of product and you can get that initial extraction Thank you for joining us.

2:53:21SpeakerSo like, let's start there. Let's start there and work backwards economically. Start with the cultivar, study agronomy for like five years and have a perfectly well balanced soil. And then the best cultivar in the best terroir. Let's go to region. I like Mendocino. I live in Redwood Valley. Once we got that amazing starting material, which is the key, doesn't matter what industry, right? Then we can go to the next step, which is extraction, right?

2:53:47SpeakerSo let's do solventless. All right. I would do either the liquid nitro or the CO2. You can get there either way. Or you can do bubble. Water is great. It's so nice to gently massage. And you can do that in a resonator too. I like water. It's the best agent for cleaning dirt. Right? Now, you want to be a nice laundry man? You want to clean the dirt off your weed?

2:54:13SpeakerThank you for joining us today.

2:54:43SpeakerI would just choose a cultivar specifically that you know isn't going to hit high numbers of THC specifically because that's the cannabinoid you're talking about, right? Yeah. It would have to maybe not be just heads. Right. And then too, yeah, you could just knock it a little harder, heavy agitation, put some more stock in there, fluff it up, and that would bring it down. If it were just heads, it would be over 65%.

2:55:06SpeakerYeah, depending on the strain it could be. I mean, it could be 99% heads and 65% if it was the right strain. So that's not, that's kind of where I started with cultivar because it's the most important piece of the recipe and it always is. And then you can move into the next step. But you can always do post-processing like what Eric's talking about. Hit it harder.

2:55:27SpeakerAnd now we fluffed it up. We took that percentage down, even if it was 99% head and 75%. Right. Let's just fluff it with some stock. Let's bring that down by proportionally. You said 10% less THC. I don't know what that would convert to. But now we're going into something a little bit heavier as far as a math problem. That depends on that cultivar once again and the different spectrum of cannabinoids it contains.

2:55:52SpeakerIt's funny working towards the diluting strength side of things. Yeah, it's the weirdest. It's so backwards. That's something we usually are doing. Well, that's a big limitation for hash makers in this state because they basically have to hope that they get a nice pull of terps that's basically going to dumb down that extract so they can get a compliant number. I think, Eric, it's weird because I think they give you like We'll be right back.

2:56:41SpeakerWe only get six in California, so I thought that was interesting. They can go twice as many plants as us. Ours are probably 10 times bigger, but that's a whole different question. Yeah, I mean, I got a couple patio plants. I'm not a big, you know, yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. But I think, you know, the biggest issue up here is that, you know, most people, I mean, it's kind of like we're the Humboldt of the East, right?

2:57:04SpeakerThere's a huge legacy of growers and Maine is the same way. You know, there's just there's been people. I have a bunch of homies in Maine tearing it up. I know. Yeah. Maine is a great state. Crushing their full term. I think the question always is, is like, if they get a good yield under hash, is it going to be compliant or are they going to have to dumb it down with some other terpene fraction in order to hit that 65% number?

2:57:34SpeakerIf anything, they'll get a better yield with their hash if they're going to. Yeah, they're trying to dilute it, right? Because let's say they were going to get a good yield with a higher refinement. Now you're talking about a lesser refinement, which means just a higher yield, right? Because you're including more of the sticks as TJ was trying to talk about sticks and marbles, right? Like, We're talking about more stocks.

2:57:54SpeakerWell, I mean, that's kind of what the, what's kind of cool about the resonator, right, is understanding that we can kind of do a targeted, you know, approach. So if, you know, you have a product and, you know, you're running it with the standard practice to get the best result, you know, look, you're not, until you go to like rosin level, like, or full head, like, Thank you for joining us.

2:58:27SpeakerKeith. Right. And then to the next level of extract, you know, then the finer you get, the higher you get to the 90 plus scale. Like that's kind of how the rule of thumb. Right. Of course, it's I'm trying to be very general because everything is just so different. But you get you at the end of the day, my target would be like, hey, look, if you're trying to make a SIFT product, a live SIFT.

2:58:48SpeakerAnd I would run it. I test it. And if it was above your 65 or variance up to 70 percent, then, you know, OK, well, let's spend it longer. Let's add five minutes. Let's get, you know, 10 minutes to our process. You're going to sacrifice some of the You know, the color, because you're introducing, you know, other, you know, smaller tails into the product, right? Instead of having it cleaned up as you can get it.

2:59:12SpeakerI mean, that's why stuff like static is so popular right now is because it's that, you know, but even static, you know, with a machine, you're only getting to that 90 percentage, you know, it'd really get up to, you know, 99, you got to break out the gloves, you know, so how far do you want to go? You know, and for every hash maker, there's a different tier, you know, for production mindsets, you know, sometimes it's not, it doesn't, you know, you know, I'm entering into a cup.

2:59:40SpeakerYou know, I'm going to try to present a 99 product, but if I'm in a market that says, hey, you can't have something that's over 65, well, you're kind of relegated to provide the best product you can. So you're going to have to find a way to dilute it or a way to tailor to getting the best you can out of the product you can present. And that's something that we can do.

2:59:57SpeakerIt's just targeted precision trichome collection. So you just dial in the recipe a little to say, hey, this is what we're dealing with. So, I mean, at least there's a pathway to a solution for you to make the best of the bad situation. Mark, I think I have a really good answer for you too, right? Like using a resonator or bags or whatever you want to do.

3:00:16SpeakerYou know, Mila has the word isolator, right? All right, cool. Well, let's just broaden our isolation, have a broader spectrum. So instead of just doing your 90s or your 90-120 or your 70-120, let's just bring it bigger. Let's just do 25-159. All right, nice broad spectrum.

3:00:31SpeakerThat's still a great representation of the strain, great representation of the product. In fact, it's a better representation if you ask me in some ways because you're seeing everything. Yeah, correct. It's kind of like with a BHO, you see a full spectrum and that's not doing fractions. That's just doing one broad full spectrum. Right. But still full melt. It depends on the type of head. Right. And now you're talking back to the cultivar, how it's grown and all the other good juice.

3:00:59SpeakerYeah. And the terroir. And then people forget the fucking vintage. I can't stress this enough for education. The year I grew candied oranges in 21 was not the same as my 23 or my 25, right? Now we're getting the same strains in different years and the same exact terroir and you get to see such different representations. Now, assuming you're cutting at the same level of trichomaturity, you're still getting these awesome representations, but they're not always equal.

3:01:28SpeakerSome years are better. It's the same as wine. And I want more people to start pushing the vintage just because they can, you know, obviously smoke your hash fresh, right? I'm kind of weird and so is Eric. We hold on to stuff. We like to go put it in the vault. Yeah, and I'll bring stuff out. When I was 21 or 22, Frenchie made me smoke some hash.

3:01:50SpeakerI was 25 years old. I was like, wait, this is three years older than me? What? He gave me some. I held on to it. That shit's now 35 years old because that was like 10 years ago. And I have that put away for vaulting just because like I want to see what happens with proper storage, vac sealed, all the things. There's not enough market research on that storage, what happens to the product, and how it evolves over time.

3:02:13SpeakerIt's really important to stress that like I've been doing more with just pulling the air out. And I can't tell you even that doesn't matter what kind of product. If you remove the oxygen, it's going to store better. This is 10 years old. You know, you know, I mean, so yeah, picture technically. Hold on. Yeah. I just spotlighted the market. Show that again. I like it when it's really old like that.

3:02:41SpeakerHonestly, it gives you the crazy stony high. Yeah, the CBN, and then it's like hashing in flavors. It's a totally different experience. If Marcus were still on, Marcus would show his ATN. I'm here. I'm just an American now. Oh, you're an American. Yeah, so I don't have anything to share. You don't have your old chunk of hash. Tell me how you really feel. Well, no, I can't take things over the border.

3:03:09SpeakerI follow the rules, my friend. Let me tell you. I am so appreciative.

3:03:15BubblemanNo, America has amazing... Listen, I'm a huge America fan. I haven't gone for 30 years. My last two trips, I love America.

3:03:22SpeakerI'm a huge American proponent. And it's funny because when I say to people, I love America, they're like, oh, you can't say that. I'm like, well, I'm saying it. I love America. And I love Americans. Sorry. Well... We love you back. We love you back. Much love, guys.

3:03:41BubblemanI'm mostly going to listen because I'm walking around the duty free here, but great conversation. Love the sound of the old hash. I remember when I first met the fat man, a.k.a.

3:03:50SpeakerMichael Rich, who was the gentleman who kind of put Dave Watson and Rob Clark and David Pade and kind of created the Horta Farm vibe. He was a big part of creating Horta Farm. He was, you know, he's a connector.

3:04:02BubblemanAnd when I first met him, It must have been in 2000 and something. I think around 2005 or 2006, the hash he had was 16 years old at that time. And that was full melt dry sift that Sam made with Static Tech. And so I smoked that shit all the way up until I think it was around its 30th birthday. So I know what you're saying, dude.

3:04:24BubblemanAnd this wasn't like a traditional pressed hash. This was like... Intact glandular trichome heads that were 30 years old. Yeah, that's insane.

3:04:33SpeakerLike the first time I'd seen like proper sift was from Sub. And Sub called it Sub Sift. He would have his subwoofer stacked different things on top of it. It would play death metal and have his headiest material on top. And then whatever he collected on the bottom, those were the heads. And he had, you know, a few screens, depends on which mics, but like it came out beautiful.

3:04:53SpeakerAnd that was him just showing us some hilariously awesome resin back in the day. A true bubble ambassador. I have nothing but love for Subcool. He was a wonderful, amazing friend. And so many people talk shit to him about me. An amazing resin breeder. A great resin breeder. No one can ever deny it. Everything from that guy that I put into my pipe, or into my bag, sorry, turned into full melt.

3:05:17SpeakerIt was just like every single one. You just couldn't, you know, he's such a dynamic, wild maniac of a dude. Just a total fucking redneck maniac. And I loved him. I miss him. Yeah, I was really grateful to learn from him and that whole crew. And then also Django from MTG, or MT, oh yeah, MTG, at the Orange Cream School. That whole little circuit was where I got groomed and got to have some of the best exposure of my life.

3:05:41SpeakerDude, rest in peace to Django as well. Holy shit, everyone's dying, man.

3:05:46BubblemanYeah, it's weird for me, dude. I'm the young one here. Well, you better pick up the baton there because we'll all be gone soon and it'll be just you and the youth, so. We're trying.

3:05:55SpeakerOh, you're doing a good job.

3:06:00SpeakerWell, shoot, man. You know, I think I'm glad you're here, Marcus, because I'll share this, you know, kind of vision that I have with you on the back of what we were just talking about with aging hash, right? And just what a study and an art it is. You know, I haven't yet to, you know, Mark, we were talking about the freeze rate earlier and, you know, the size of the trichome head and the relationship to longevity, you know, so for me, the jury's out in time, but I could tell you.

3:06:24SpeakerThere's this massage place. I've freeze dried up to four years inside of a deep freezer so far and pulled it out. And, you know, I've done like a one, two, three, four year test and, you know, got one going on year five now. And man, honestly, I've been impressed every time. Right. And so it's just I don't know how far I can take it, but it's pretty, pretty amazing to be able to see that we can push it that far.

3:06:48SpeakerBut the vision isn't, you know, that it's imagine a future where, you know, you go to like a dinner where there's a tower of wine and you get a pick. You know, whatever vintage, you know, imagine ordering in advance the certain, the 1996 Jack Herrera, you know, that was, you know, born or whatever strain from this era, some special, you know, specific flower because we could freeze it indefinitely and then...

3:07:15SpeakerOn command, you know, order it at your table and you got an ounce of your favorite, you know, Hindu Kush sitting there. That'd be great. We're trying to do that for breeding, TJ. Like my buddy Higher Ground, John, right? The Starburst 36 creator. I help do a bunch of the hunting. He's an old friend. He owned that CCTA club where I started. When he breeds, he'll tall it like his 97 Sour D onto whatever.

3:07:40SpeakerBut he tries to show the lineage and vintage of that cut when and where he got it. In relation to what the scene actually was and where, like, why it's performing a certain way, right? Like, my favorite strain all the time still is the KC-36 from KC Drinks. And that was just like this legendary phenom. We had our little circuit. It's like, put me on my quest.

3:08:03SpeakerI'm like, I'm going to find this flavor. This isn't weed. This is like a tropical basket of fruit, strawberry jam goodness. Like, what in the hell? This is cannabis? Are you sure? But are you sure? Good seed stock and good long-term, you know, shelf storage, like the lineage, like in the freeze drying. It's kind of interesting to think where that could go, man.

3:08:29SpeakerRight. Yeah. Well, I know that like freezing. I know that that's what Ben was doing for, you know, he was freezing all his stuff and he pulled stuff out. There was like two years old. Oh, yeah. ICC band, bro. He was one of the first guys to fucking. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love him. He showed me him storing flour changed my fucking reality. It's so good. It's so good.

3:08:52SpeakerAnd and, you know, he he had given me some. There was I think it was the Thin Mints, which I don't remember him winning a cup. There was at the Cow Palace that year. I think that was like 15 or 16. All the weed or something probably. Yes, something like that. But yeah, so good, you know, and that was a method he uses for that. And it just really gets better, but you got to freeze it at the right time.

3:09:15SpeakerYou don't want to, you know, definitely don't put it in there too early or too late because you're just freezing. When we talk about moisture content, he had that hearing tech. Perfectly dialed. And then he would lock it in at that state. The artist hearing is so underappreciated. It's the thing that takes it to the next level, for sure. It's like the heady, heady shit is the shit that's cured best.

3:09:37SpeakerSo if we can convince those guys to freeze dry their flower, it's game over, because they're going to help us with this fucking tuning.

3:09:44Etienne FontanWell, it's stabilized and maintained, right? So, you know, that's the art in it, right? Stabilizing it so it can last that couple of years or longer.

3:10:06SpeakerSomeone's microphone is reverberating. We'll have to just everyone mute their mics while the person's talking and it'll go away.

3:10:17SpeakerThat's you, Colt. You're the last one up.

3:10:26SpeakerMaybe it's his connection. Is that Colt who's trying to talk? Nope, it's me. I think so. Yeah, it was cutting out there.

3:10:40SpeakerYou got an app now? He's... I'm not sure. I thought we just lost someone. This is so weird doing hash church at the airport. Where are you, Marcus? I'm in the Vancouver International Airport. I guess I'm in America because I just went through customs, even though it's here in Canada. It's kind of like, yeah, well, no, it's awesome though, dude, because, you know, when you clear customs in your own country from another country, if there's a problem, they just send you home.

3:11:10SpeakerThey send you home because you're in Canada. But if you go to the border,

3:11:16SpeakerAnd there's a problem. They do not send you home and you can spend days or hours or weeks in the custody. So it's kind of like when I decided to come to Canada, I thought, you know what? Or to the US, I was like, I'm just going to for the start, just do Canadian American customs like at the airport. So, yeah, you do go through Canadian or US customs.

3:11:37SpeakerAnd man, it's so different from when I was younger. They're just so nice and chill. It's weird to not be the guy they're looking for. That means that they got you right where they want you, bro. They definitely harassed this Mexican dude that was right in front of me, let me tell you. Yeah, shocker there.

3:12:00SpeakerSo there it is. The world right now is something that, you know, we're pretty fortunate to all be like among our peers, you know, innovating and pursuing our dreams. There's a lot of people a lot less fortunate right now, man. So, I mean, thanks for taking the church today. Yeah. Dude, you guys are awesome, man. This is an amazing episode that I'm going to go back myself and probably watch a couple of times.

3:12:24SpeakerThere's not enough real people. You know, there's people doing all sorts of different things, but you really kind of created a niche lane for yourself in a sense that, you know, I don't see a ton of other people freeze drying flour or focusing on, you know, I met the date. I mentioned David once from Canitrol and he's also a world of knowledge. He's going down his own rabbit hole.

3:12:45SpeakerHe's into cure rooms and cure things. Thank you for joining us.

3:13:07SpeakerYeah, that's wonderful. Thank you, ATN, for holding it down as well. I hope you guys continue to go for a little while. I'm going to sit in the background and listen for a little bit. I'm sure ATN has more incredible questions. And yeah, sorry for interrupting, but I was just so excited. Every time I get into the country, I ask... It's for whatever reason, the Canadian Federal Police, which are the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, when you walk through U.S. Customs, as you leave the door, they have a desk there.

3:13:35SpeakerAnd so I guess they help Customs do searches and stuff for the Canadian whatever. And every time I ask the Canadians, Mounties, I'm like, can I take a selfie here with the welcome to the United States thing in the background? So I just got my third one in three months, so... You guys can't imagine how absolutely grateful I am to be able to travel to the US.

3:13:56SpeakerYou just cannot imagine how important that is to me to be able to come and see you guys in person and visit the labs and do all the work. I just, I can't, I can't say it enough. I'm so fucking stoked and blessed. Yeah, we love to come to Canada and have the same experience. 25 years ago now, TJ and I got caught up in the United States and the state of Utah where I was charged for one gram of cannabis and Travis was charged for some pipes, some paraphernalia that we had.

3:14:32SpeakerAnd so when we tried to enter Canada in, what, 2004, they said, absolutely not. But they hung on to us for a little while. Oh, I bet. I had a pressed cannabis leaf in a journal or a Cahill Gibran book, rather. And they sat and looked and looked and looked, trying to find something to charge us with for that one leaf. Oh, yeah. They've tried. Yeah. And they actually took me in the back.

3:15:02SpeakerI was strip searched. I had dogs all around us. It was traumatizing. Yeah, it's scary. So scary. You know it doesn't mess around. So unnecessary as well, really, when you think about it. All you need is... You just need a waiver. You guys can get in with a waiver. Yeah, that's cool. That's good to know. Also, don't have a speeding ticket. The less physical evidence in general is better.

3:15:34SpeakerYeah, I had a buddy turned away for that. I was with him and he said, do you have any warrants or anything in your country? And no, no, we're going to be. He searched us, of course. And he had like the yellow slip of a speeding ticket in his bag. And they were like, nope, they turned us all right around. That was it. Yeah, so the waiver is interesting because what it is is it's permission from Homeland Security to enter the country.

3:15:58SpeakerAnd it doesn't mean that the border guard can't be like, you know what, something's up here. I don't like the way this feels. I'm going to you can still be denied with a waiver. But generally, It's Homeland Security pre-approving you, doing the border controls job, and all they have to do is suss you out for 30 seconds and be like, you've already been pre-approved by Homeland Security.

3:16:18SpeakerAnd they did it for me under the name of my company, Bubble Man Brand. And they added that I can do business or pleasure on my waiver. It says business or pleasure. So I can't get caught up in the, are you doing business? And then you say yes, and then they deny you for life. I have that on my waiver. Nice. Yeah, I don't know how they did it.

3:16:37SpeakerI honestly have no idea. The person with Homeland Security in Virginia must have just been like, oh, what's this? Bubble Man brand? Yep. Like a fun guy. We'll just give that guy permission. So get a waiver before going to Shambhala Music Festival. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. If you want, if you want to go to Shambhala, yeah, you're going to, you're going to want to get a waiver.

3:16:55SpeakerIf you have nine years old and his dad, his dad used the bubble bags, bro. So he turned into the agent with the stamp that worked out for you. Well, do you guys need more resin technicians? Bubble man? Always. We always need more resin technicians. This official not engineers is what we're looking for. Okay, well, I'm in France. I'm technically a resin technician. Dude, France is not friendly to jar herbs.

3:17:27SpeakerNo, I'm realizing that, but I still found some good flour at a CBD shop because I fucking, you know, did the thing, found it. But you know what? It's still interesting to see the dynamic here. There's resin. There's flour. They have it. It's better than it was 10 years ago. Well, France has always been a destination for hashish from Morocco and other countries. It's a major destination.

3:17:50SpeakerThey're large consumers. Yeah, any country that you can't have it generally is like, yeah, we want it. You've got some of the best stuff. Most underground good shit. Yeah, exactly.

3:18:07Etienne FontanAll right, TJ, I got a question. So, TJ, what's the difference do you consistently see in live dried flour versus your, you know, traditionally dried cured, you know, especially after 30, 60 days in the jar, you know, compared to your, you know, your freeze dried? Well, the number one...

3:18:32SpeakerYeah, textures, the obvious first thing. Well, from the eye perspective, it's about, you know, it's bigger, right? And it's greener because it hasn't. And then even from a jar perspective, from smell, you know, it's terpy, it's like smacks, right? Because it preserves more terpenes. But when you start to touch it, like, look, it can be overdried if it's not done correctly, and then it's going to really fall apart.

3:18:57SpeakerYou know, be kind of like styrofoam-y, right? And if it's, you know, pulled out too early, it could be wet, spongy. So there is definitely a technique to get it to come out at the right moisture level so that it's kind of that sweet spot, but it's still different. So even when we get it right, because we know what we're doing, you, all right, now you have it done correctly and you have a traditionally dried and cured versus, you know, live dried, you know, you know, we, The live-dried jar is empty.

3:19:25SpeakerThat's the one that we keep coming back for. You can hand mill the flour, per se, much easier than you can with trad. Unless it's over-dried, then it crumbles with your fingers. You know, but generally speaking, you know, folks are getting grinders. You know, we we prefer like a mill type style grinder. We like those these days with like flour mills, like the flour mills, because they're, you know, for us, we're just really not a fan of the blade.

3:19:53SpeakerYou know, we're trying to cut things up. And so from all the way down, like we go through all the trouble to, you know, preserve all the trichomes and then you stick it in a grinder. You know, it's like, okay, you know, there's a certain argument to be made that's like, sure, I'm smoking it right now. But at the same time, you know, if you smell in it, it's off gassing.

3:20:13SpeakerAnd so those turks are still volatizing. I like the detail of that. That's good. We're going to do it. Do it all the way. You know, so what's the difference, man? Really, the difference is like aside from texture and, you know, that's probably the most fundamental thing from a legacy mindset. That's hard to get over because you're, you know, but there's a lot of benefits once you get past like this is different, right?

3:20:36SpeakerAnd you get into this, okay, well, what, you know, how's the experience? You know, the experience is what's probably... You know, it's, you know, look, it's, it's the same cannabis. We're not activating a different cannabinoid that didn't already exist. You know, sure. It's, you know, generally speaking, we're seeing like as much as 15% more potent, right? So, I mean, that translates because we're all going for as much, you know, potency as we can, you know, but we get a wider spectrum, right?

3:21:03SpeakerAnd the full spectrum experience translates from like the entourage effect, you know, You know, it's also unique because when are you decarboxylating flour as you literally light it up? So that's a new experience, you know, and it's, you know, sought after by, you know, folks that, you know, from us that we share it with. They all come back because they're not, they're not coughing. You know, smooth smoke experience.

3:21:27SpeakerThat's what everybody said. Oh, it's so smooth. If they say nothing else, we're like, yeah, that was really smooth. You know, and they, when somebody has an opportunity to have enough, they generally are coming back and saying, I want more of that. Aaron Ward, Family members that have like say asthmatic, you know, um, you know, tendencies like they, you know, need an inhaler pretty frequently. Um, when they, but they'd like to smoke, we're not making any claims.

3:21:52SpeakerThis is for entertainment purposes only because I'm, I'm like that. I have, I have asthma problems and like smoking it when it's freeze dried is, is a little bit easier on my throat and my lungs. But, you know, it's just something that is a noticeable thing, especially if you smoke a lot. It takes that out a little bit because my throat always gets a little bit like horse, just something that just naturally happens to me.

3:22:13SpeakerSo it is something that is noticeable if you're sensitive. In my experience, I can speak for myself for sure on that. I mean, that's like, so when you get past like all that, right? I mean, I don't know. I mean, from a high level, you know, it's like, don't take our word for it. I mean, look, we won first place at the Emerald Cup with our freeze-dried flower.

3:22:31SpeakerYou know, there was, you know, it's an esteemed panel of judges, you know. Shout out Emerald Cup. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, shout out Tim Blake, man. You know what? I love that guy. I see him all the time just speaking his truth, and I just see people just belittling and making fun of him for the shit that he believes in, the things that he posts, and he's such an authentic and awesome human being.

3:22:52SpeakerYou've got to shout out the Emerald Cup, dude. Holy shit. Yeah, I'm grateful. That was like the highlight of my career. From 15 to 18, I was their sovereign list director and the youngest judge on the panel, so it was like so much fun. It was like living a dream for a little bit, you know? Yeah, I love the Emerald Cup. Yeah.

3:23:07Etienne FontanYeah, I was a judge for eight years, man. I miss it. I wish, I hope he's able to get it back and it can come back because it's one of the most authentic because each year as we were judging, we built the The, you know, we consistently built each year off of the judging, how to improve it, how to make it better. Each section, each, you know, everybody, you know, was authentic in their contribution to make it as transparent because it was by the people for the people.

3:23:41Etienne FontanAnd that I think registered and rings through all of our souls. And thank you, Tim Blake, for that.

3:23:48SpeakerYes, yes. That's awesome. I have never been to the Emerald Cup. Can you imagine? How about this? Let me blow your guys' mind. I've never been to California. What? Oh, wow. Well, whenever you do decide, can we fix that? Take you to some cool farms and food. Oh, yeah, dude. Trust me. All the things. It has got the best food. 100%. Food there is insane. Well, you guys, I got to say.

3:24:09SpeakerI got to say. Go ahead. It's also like the fourth biggest economy, man. The Emerald Cup obviously originated up in Mendocino, you know, Humboldt region, right? But also the cup itself when it started happening frequently was down here in Sonoma County at Santa Rosa Fairgrounds. And that's where we live. Resonator's base right here in Sonoma County out of Santa Rosa. So of course, you know, in our backyard, we were representing And very grateful for Tim Blake and the crew.

3:24:36SpeakerAnd, you know, watching what's happening to this industry as it consolidates into, you know, conglomerates and MSOs, right? There's still a culture. That's what got us all here. And that's what's going to keep this thing going. And these are the types of conversations that are, you know, still part of what is us actually pushing this industry. And Blake was a big part of that. And I think they're still reformatting and they're going to find their own footing, you know, for us.

3:25:00SpeakerYou know, our award with them was in 2023, the last one that they were still, that panel you were talking about, man, like, yes, they just kept raising their game. And I think that's probably one of the biggest resources and assets that they still have is what they created in their award and panel system. And I think that I see a pathway where they figured that out.

3:25:19SpeakerThey don't need all the extra baggage of the event itself. They could still, you know, do something incredible. And I think that there's room for that in a return. And where the culture grows is kind of going to be a part of where we are all participating and where we take it. So word up. Big ups to Tim for sure. Thanks for saying that, Marcus. Yeah, well, dude, come on.

3:25:38SpeakerHe's just a good dude. He's doing good things and bringing so many people together. You can't imagine how hard it was for me to watch the Emerald Cup happen every year. All my friends' photos and videos. And, you know, of course, I'm so happy for them. And I'm so excited that the Dragonfly Earth Medicine are setting up the TP. And, you know, I'm excited about all of it.

3:25:56SpeakerAnd, you know, on the side, I'm crying in the corner because I don't get to be a part of it. I don't get to come. I don't get to be a part of it. But that's okay. You know, I can now... Make my way. I mean, I'm on my way to Denver. I'm going to have an epic trip there for the next week. I can't even like shout out to Denver.

3:26:14SpeakerThat is such a cool city. So is Boulder. Both those cities are so cool. So many great people. And I'll be in Cali sooner than later for sure. Maybe we'll do a proper California Legends of Hash.

3:26:28Etienne FontanThere we go. That would be. I haven't been to it yet. That would be during Robtober. Right, because that's when Rob comes to California is in October.

3:26:37SpeakerYes. Don't do it in Robtober. Please do Croptober. Like, leave that alone. For the farmers, just, like, give us a month to cut down and get it in freezers and, like, do a little processing. A little bit.

3:26:49Etienne FontanI can't, Rob chooses to come when Rob, Rob comes to, chooses when he comes. I can't say no to the master. I, I agree with you. However, he wants to see the plant still on before you harvest them. So that's why he comes.

3:27:01SpeakerThen come in September and tell him to hang out.

3:27:06Etienne FontanYou tell him, Jesus, he'd always convince that man of anything. Christ. I'll try.

3:27:11SpeakerNo, it's just every competition that pushed in October or like November, I'm like, guys, like this makes no sense for the guys actually working in the fucking field. You got to let us finish and then we'll bring you our best. Like Tim even stressed that and it was like hard as hell to get into the cup. Like that timing was just so, so perfect. But like, Give it January?

3:27:32SpeakerPerfect.

3:27:32Etienne FontanIf you want to do a competition in January, that would be like... Well, that's, I think, sort of the success of the California State Fair, right, is because it's now into the spring for the competition. I wish it were closer to January, but it has to be closer to June because of how the California State Fair is, you know, but I wish it were as transparent and as open and...

3:27:56Etienne FontanAs the Emerald Cup was, however, the Buddist people who created it right from the Emerald Cup, you know, judges situation, right, is basically an accumulation of that, are now actually judging at the State Fair as well. So, you know, which is like Caleb and, you know, others who are, you know, on our panel and pop in and through. So no competition has really nailed it. Perfectly yet, because even it was striving for it, right?

3:28:28Etienne FontanIt was always striving to improve itself. And that's what I appreciate. Go ahead, Harrison.

3:28:34SpeakerMy buddies just did one in Hopland. They're originally they're guys from Maine. Awesome farmers and just true, you know, Land keepers, agronomists, resin lovers, breeders, all the things. His company's Hidden Forest Farm. He did something called the Culture Cup in Maine.

3:28:55Etienne FontanI was there in Hoplin. Caleb and I went up and my friend Mike. It was amazing.

3:29:02SpeakerI thought they did a great job. I synced them with my buddy who had the venue. And I was like, here, you guys do the thing. And I ended up really enjoying it because I got to see a lot of old friends. It was a good community gathering, you know. And some unreal products.

3:29:17Etienne FontanExactly. Well, on top of that, these were all non-legal producers. So these are all passionate people who really care about everything from the farming to the finished product, right? Because you can't polish a turd, right? You have to have amazing flour to have amazing concentrates, right? You know, you can you can do what you can. However, it really starts with that amazing product. And that's what you saw there across the board is a lot of product because of the standards that are kept out of the legal market.

3:29:47Etienne FontanRight. Because I own Berkeley Patient Group. So I look from the legal market perspective and we have failed epically and fell on our face in that resolve. Whereas it heartens you to go to VPG all the time.

3:30:00SpeakerI love your spot.

3:30:01Etienne FontanI know, but I still feel like, you know, culture wise, you know, we all could have done better. And I appreciate the shout out and the love. And, you know, the reality is, is The Culture Cup there, exactly what it was, it was representing the culture as it is, as it should be, that a lot of competitions, you know, the High Times Cannabis Cup was never able to live up to, right?

3:30:28Etienne FontanYou know what I'm saying? And I hope to see more competitions like the Culture Cup because it's, was by the people for the people and you could see it there there was an unpretentiousness there and just everybody rallying around each other which is a camaraderie we used to have in the early aughts right when we're all just fucking risking our asses doing whatever we could to you know keep our heads above water But it all, you know, you're all pioneers now because of what we were all collectively able to get away with.

3:31:01Etienne FontanAnd what you also did is you push the technology, but you also embrace that new technology and then push those boundaries and continue to push those boundaries. And you competed against each other. And these competitions were necessary because it helped elevate each other to see who was doing what in a way That, you know, because people are like, well, why the fuck you guys, you know, you're yourself jerking off with all that, you know, to a certain extent.

3:31:29Etienne FontanYeah, it was. But there is a whole other reality of people pushing people. And that's what I saw at the Culture Cup is friends pushing friends the old school way, how we used to do it.

3:31:41SpeakerYeah, that's the way. That's the best way. And check out this jar. Oh, check out this jar. That's the best. And then like three tables, 70 jars of 65 jars. You're like, oh my God. A lot of checking out jars.

3:31:57Etienne FontanAll the jar checks, right? You know, that's what, yeah. Marcus needs to, when he comes, is, you know, set up the jar check, you know, because that's the new, you know, here's my bottle of wine. Well, here's the jar check, right?

3:32:09SpeakerI'm not going to lie. Jolly's jar check thing is pretty fucking cool.

3:32:12Etienne FontanBrilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

3:32:14SpeakerI can't even deny it. I'm like, shit, that's fire. Everyone bring me your best. I'm the guy. Let me see your fucking best, best work. I'll tell you if it's good or not.

3:32:46SpeakerAnd, you know, there's a reason we kind of started calling it live dried, because we know that the industry likes live, right? We're actually just fully embracing freeze dried, as I said earlier now, right? Like live flour is the skew on the shelf. What's live flour? Well, it's pretty obvious. You know, but the key part of understanding that it doesn't cure in the freeze dryer. It cures, like that's post process.

3:33:07SpeakerThat's post the freeze dryer. There's a pre and a post freeze dryer process. Pre is the cryotrim. The post is the way that we, you know, actually manage Thank you for joining us today.

3:33:35SpeakerYou know, those enzymes are still completely active. They just dormant when they're under vacuum. So when you break back, they, you know, with the atmosphere, you know, the oxygen and the moisture in the atmosphere, they activate and they go to work. And they eat those aldehydes and those chlorophylls and they do their thing. And that happens over like, you know, we give it overnight. You know, they say four to eight hours is when it's, you know, because when we first pull something out of the freezer, you're going to smell it, but it's going to really start to get rich over that, you know.

3:34:07SpeakerSo we actually, you know, have a process where we You know, leave it on, you know, unbagged. We don't want to just tuck it away because it doesn't breathe. It has to breathe to allow that water activity to actually, you know, that's what allows it to cure. Because without that water activity, you know, people, most people overdry it, right? And by overdrying it, then those enzymes, well, they go dormant when you fill it out without water activity to allow it to cure.

3:34:35SpeakerAnd so that, you know, 48-hour cure process is kind of important. Take it out of the freeze dryer before you can really stabilize a product so you can actually target, you know, 8%, 9%, put it in a jar. So you just still got to be cognizant of, you know, like if it was easy, everybody's doing it, but we've definitely figured out how to optimize the process. So walk me through this, TJ.

3:34:59SpeakerYou've been obviously smoking joints for a long time. I didn't smoke joints for the last 28 years at all. I just started smoking joints again about three months ago for the first time in 28 years. I'm mostly sticking to narrow leaf drug cultivars, exotic hazes and whatnot. But from a smoker's perspective, when you're talking to someone who's never smoked this before, what are the real differences you feel When you pick up a joint that's been properly cured and freeze dried versus, you know, someone that maybe, you know, did it with some, you know, not quite as much technology and maybe didn't do the best job of it.

3:35:34SpeakerIt's just, is it a smoothness? That's it. You know, we've said, I've been hammering on it because when I give herb to people, I get reports back across the board. That's the first thing they say, smooth. And flavor profile, you take, I'm freeze dried that somebody wasn't controlling that vacuum pressure. They just let that. That's going to taste like cake. It's going to smell like cake. Right.

3:36:00SpeakerI mean, Every once in a while, of course, we get it wrong. And, you know, in the past, like I said, we didn't let all of our, you know, six legal plants get freeze dried before, you know, and we, I insisted we keep some crab dried because I was nervous that they didn't know how to do it properly because every once in a while it did come out smelling like hay.

3:36:23SpeakerYeah, this isn't it, guys. We kind of just missed the mark on this. And they always knew what they did wrong. They went back or figured it out and fixed it, you know? Interesting. Edward's bleeder valve at first, where he had to be out there every 15 minutes squeaking that thing. I wonder about the smoothness, because I think of... Extracts, solventless extracts, in particular water hash, and how when we freeze dry those, we seem to be preserving a lot of these different types of terpenes, monos in particular, that are like a little harsher on the throat.

3:36:56SpeakerBut it seems like the young folks love that. They wanted to grab them by the nuts. They want to cough. They want to... When I was making cured dry sift, like full melt static sift like 10, 15 years ago, I remember smoking a bowl of it with Tony from Sagamarta over at Hank's Place in the Leidseplein there, the bulldog guy. He had an apartment in the Leidseplein and I saw Tony there and I smoked this bowl with him and he blew it out.

3:37:21SpeakerYou know, Tony's like my age, he's in his 50s and He was just like, dude, that was so smooth. What was that? I'm like, oh, it was some sweet skunk, you know, cured for months before it was extracted dry. And then I, you know, static sifted it into heads and then cured for another six months. And now it's, you know, what it is. So it had all the flavor.

3:37:41SpeakerIt had all... But you're freeze drying with the flowers. So I would assume that you're preserving those monoterpenes, yet you're ending up with a smoother instead of a more caustic. And I wonder what the science says about that. I think there, I wish that our partner Rustin, who's very camera shy and not participating. He can come in like Skunk Man Sam with a stuffed animal next time.

3:38:05SpeakerYeah, that's what he should do. That's what we'll tell him. Yeah, of course. I think he said that those convert into the good terpenes. That's what I was saying about like good terpenes and the bad terpenes earlier. So like esterification, like where the terpenes translate and change molecularly, I think it's called esterification. Dr. Mark could obviously correct me as he will if I get it wrong because he's a stickler for the chemistry, as he should be.

3:38:29SpeakerYeah. Is that what it is? I am. Asterification is the reaction of acids and alcohols to make esters. I'm not really sure that that's happening, but I think what happens on the cure is there is oxidation that could affect the flavor or the essence of the cannabis. And I think there are some terpenes that are susceptible to oxidation. And they'll form other terpenoid type molecules. And then, of course, you have the smoking of it, which I believe when you're burning it, you do get esterification.

3:39:09SpeakerYou get this translation of like, so I've always thought, and Sam used to hint at it, that like what we're smoking and what we're monitoring or identifying prior to what we're smoking aren't always and probably often aren't the same things. Yeah, well, we'd be naive to think that somehow smoking it isn't going to cause some change in chemical composition, right? Sure. Yeah, makes sense. And I'm watching you guys all puff, watching you guys all smoke joints right now.

3:39:41SpeakerMarcus, remember what... We're not muted and we're not confident, you know. But like you were saying, some people want that tingle. They actually want like a histamine reaction when they smoke, that like tingle in their nose and a little sneezing. You know, but I don't think that chronic sinusitis needs to be part of the cannabis. It's definitely an age thing. You get older and you're like, I need to cure this out.

3:40:06SpeakerYeah, exactly. I'm with you on that one, Harrison. Highest quality hash oil. It's definitely the best. Oh, you know, regarding sunflower, it's, it's, look, I have, I have access to the great, great hands down, right? Everywhere I go, it's every, you know, it's one of the best I've ever seen. And, you know, we kind of call among ourselves, you know, we refer to traditional as trad, right?

3:40:29SpeakerAnd our stuff is live, right? Just when we're talking about it. Oh yeah, that's trad. You know, when I hit a, I'm like, that's a trad joint because I instantly can feel it on my throat, right? And this is like the best, you know, it's just, I'm not weed snob. I'll still smoke the whole joint, but I'll later, you know, feel it like, I'm like, hmm. You know, and it's just, that's just not the experience for us.

3:40:50SpeakerAnd that's probably one of the...

3:40:54SpeakerAnd it definitely, I don't know, is it, you know, is it something to do with the fact that it hasn't decarbed yet, that it's a, right, a flower technically, right? And then the CBDs, like their conversion, right, to the CBDs, like, is there a relationship there that you might, you know, speculate on that would suggest, you know, why upon combustion it's, DeCarb is happening. Is this their experience?

3:41:19SpeakerYou know, I mean. How big did the farm bill play a part in your company knowing that you could produce flour that was THCA instead of THC? Well, what's funny is most people are playing outside the lines. They're coloring outside the lines still, right? Well, of course. There are tricks. I think if the, you know, if the world was to catch on to what we're able to actually do, they'd probably take advantage of it, you know, and that's their prerogative because like if you actually test our flower, it's legitimately, you know, farm bill friendly.

3:41:51SpeakerAnd that's something to probably wrap your mind around. California does the conversion differently, so they're still following the... Yeah, when you do the actual conversion and you apply it, you know, but they're just put jurisdiction and I mean, whatever. There's a lot of cowboys out there. Yeah. Unfortunately, the DEA, if they do seizure stuff, they use decarboxylated tests, right? They'll use GC and that's it. You know, high THC cannabis is marijuana.

3:42:21SpeakerI wonder how often when you introduce the DEA into a conversation it starts with unfortunately. Yeah. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, the DEA.

3:42:35Etienne FontanYeah, no, you should turn it the other way. Who says fortunately the DEA? Yeah.

3:42:40SpeakerWhat is that? Frickets.

3:42:46SpeakerOh, my God. I don't know. Do you have any speculation around the reason why it might translate to a smoother smoke, you know, based off of some of the discussion we're having? I think it just has to do with the age of the flower, right? You think there's just sort of like a... You know, whenever they try to artificially set expiration dates on cannabis flower, they'll say, oh, it's good for a year, right?

3:43:13SpeakerWithout any testing whatsoever, right? Knowing that, you know, a year on the shelf in Denver, like Marcus was saying, it's so dry. It's basically an arid desert in Denver versus New Jersey or somewhere out here on the East Coast or even just in Seattle, right? But I think it has a lot to do. So it's interesting, Marcus, you remember this, this conversation is skunk man. Sam was telling us the difference between just drying and drying and curing.

3:43:44SpeakerRight. And so I guess with skunk number one in particular, it was Something that even when he took it to dryness and would try smoking it, he would get irritation in the back of his throat, where if he took stuff that was six months cured, then it was really super smooth. And it's not like the chemical content is changing too much in that cure. But I think, again, some of the maybe the monoterpenes are reacting to either Thank you for joining us.

3:44:42SpeakerAnd that's light initiated. That's light initiated. So if you're curing is like burping and letting air in now, the infiltration of oxygen. And again, you've already wholesaled all the water out. So now the question is, is, you know, what is that air going to do now that the material has been dried? Yeah, there could be all kinds of ingression of oxygen that can... So like in most cases, like myrcene, for example, is a terpene, right?

3:45:15SpeakerIt's just an oligomer of isoprene. But what will happen is as myrcene degrades, it could be oxygenated. So if you look at the structure of linalool, right, which is the... uh the terpenoid that's responsible for the flower floral scent in lavender and lilacs right so if you look at that it's a mercine molecule with an oxygen on the end of it so it's like okay so if mercine hangs around long enough can it oxidize to make linalool maybe perhaps and if you smell linalool Thank you for joining us.

3:46:18SpeakerIt's about the imperceivable. These dialogues we're having, Eric, are about the imperceivable. And I'm not saying it's impossible to perceive them, and there's equipment that can, but most people aren't perceiving or recording or identifying them. And we've had these conversations with the abstract guys on long-chain sulfur compounds. Go ahead.

3:46:36Etienne FontanWho ages, right? In the sense of who really, except the grower, the nerds, the view like us, actually saves and ages it, right? The guy who can't empty his vault. Well, we learned, I mean, we used to think, and this goes to kind of you, TJ, in the sense of, You know, we used to think, you know, by aging that cannabis over a percent of the time, I'm talking the flower, I'm not talking the hashish, is that the chlorophyll kind of leaches out, right?

3:47:02Etienne FontanBut, and so we used to think that was making it smoother, but due to your freeze drying, that seems to be a different understanding of the science because we used to think that it was the chlorophyll that was making us cough, right? Whereas that chlorophyll is still in there, it's still freeze dried, but... There's something else happening.

3:47:22SpeakerSo it's oxidized. It's oxidized. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the oxidation of chlorophyll is also going to give you the change in color. So like if you when you harvest and you get that true emerald green color that cannabis is when you start to oxidize and yeah, it's brown. Exactly. Which has got less jar appeal. Right. But It's interesting too because like with granddaddy and some of these purple strains and everything, the loss of emerald green isn't too much of an issue, right?

3:48:00SpeakerNo, people right now prefer the anthocyanins for some reason. There's this massive hype around candy and lemon cherry and all these purple strains. I can tell you. Is that just a fad? Like a bag of wrapper weed? I don't know. Purple in there? That's what they want. Yeah. That's the fact. I grew up with the GDP. Ken Estes was the guy who basically taught me how to breed after Subcool.

3:48:23SpeakerAnd I got to work with the whole GDP crew, the Bay 11, all the other fun projects he did, the Candyland, this and that. Which were like in the Bay Area, in the North Bay. That was the purple. Before cookies, before any of these, that was the purple of it. There was like, you know, the original Urkel. The Mendo Perps, the true Mendo Perps, right? That one was the first well-branded one, I'd say.

3:48:46SpeakerWell-marketed. But for commercial jar appeal, and maybe ATN, you could speak to this since you run the dispensary, for commercial jar appeal, isn't the emerald green kind of like the bee's knees, right?

3:49:00Etienne FontanWell, the educated California consumer really got sold on indoor California because that's what we were using early on to push and to lower the prices, right? So we were all growing salt-based solutions in, you know, 4x800, you know, Plus plants in a four by eight area. You know what I'm saying? And so we're pushing in the price. And for some reason, high times push that perception that, oh, indoor is sexier than outdoor, right?

3:49:30Etienne FontanSo whereas the really educated consumer From California that grew up around cannabis was like, yeah, I want to look at your outdoor and I want to see the different ranges that you have because there's something there that they can't get that they can't replicate in, but we could not replicate in all these little hidden growth spaces that we were doing everything. You know what I'm saying? So we kind of convinced the...

3:49:58Etienne FontanThe consumer and High Times sold everybody on a salt solution reality that has made the, and of course, what did they do? They always had the High Times Centerfold, which was representative of what they thought you should be seeing, which when you actually are in Northern California and going around to these farms in the November and December and you're tasting all the These amazing, including cannabis that's beyond purple.

3:50:30Etienne FontanIt's literally black. You know what I'm saying? It is absolutely black. I was given, back in 93, when I was with Cann, I was given the jar up at the Mateel Center. Somebody was like, hey, thank you for what you're doing for legalization. And I opened it up and it was as black as licorice. And that was the most, some of the most amazing, you know, outdoor slash greenhouse that anybody At the time I had ever had, but I had never seen We had anthrocynins so much in a cannabis and it was in an outdoor and, you know, greenhouse varietal.

3:51:02Etienne FontanIt wasn't in a, you know, an indoor. And of course we saw, you know, granddaddy perps, you know, Mark, Ken Estes, right? You know, he was definitely pushing. So that was really a lot of what we had access to besides the time of year that the stuff would come down from, you know, Mendo, Humboldt, Trinity, whereas It really, then you started, right, you started to see people in the aughts try to use, you know, purple dyes.

3:51:30Etienne FontanThey were actually using food coloring in their water to make their cannabis purple.

3:51:34SpeakerBlueberries.

3:51:37Etienne FontanAll that shenanigans that people were trying to, you know, really try to sell a stigma and, you know, It was, you know, fascinating to watch people try to manipulate the market, but also the market be able to see through its manipulation, right? Because the educated consumer is like, nah, this doesn't cut the fucking mustard. This is all fake. This isn't the real deal, right? Y'all helped push that, Harrison.

3:52:03Etienne FontanY'all made that reality by pushing Holy Water and all these other access points that were not a conception in our minds. You brought them to the patients so that they saw these new ingestions and ingestion methods, right? And I actually got to try Holy Water due to the Emerald Cup there in your cart form, right?

3:52:25SpeakerOh, that was the one that we won. That was the last time I made Holy Water for Holy Water. And that was the one we won for the last year that the Resonator won too.

3:52:35Etienne FontanYeah, and it was epic.

3:52:36SpeakerI voted for it because it was like... That's my last technical holy water that I made for a company. Yeah, so you know... I was like, ah, I was so happy. So yeah.

3:52:47Etienne FontanSo it's sad that you're no longer attached to it because you definitely made it legendary for sure. So thank you for that art.

3:52:54SpeakerYeah, thank you very much. Thank you for reviewing it for the consumers in Washington, Eric. Eric's a big advocate in accessibility, as am I. It's the most important thing.

3:53:06Etienne FontanYou've made it accessible, and that's where we, the patients, and the public are thankful, because you could have hidden it. We've watched people do that. We've watched people limit it, but you've made it completely available, and for that, forever humbled and honored.

3:53:23SpeakerOne more time. Lick the plant. Lick the plant. I'm going to drive over the border one day soon and come see you, Eric. Yeah, please. I mean, I'm like three and a half hours from the border. Wenatchee, it's like close. Central Washington, there's not really, you know, like I said, there's kind of the middle. It's like Orchardland. It's beautiful, though. My buddy Logan's down there in Wenatchee.

3:53:45SpeakerYeah, he's here. He's in Wenatchee. Yeah, that's where you are? Yeah, that's where I am. Oh, dude, so I'm coming to Wenatchee. Yeah, please. Yeah, that'll be great. I would love that. That's what's up. Not too many people coming through here, you know, so like. You should get some bratwurst on the way, bro. Buy Leavenworth and get the bratwurst. Yeah, yeah, totally. The German town. Yeah. Go get some pretzels and mustard and sauerkraut.

3:54:11SpeakerThat's hilarious, dude. Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, that would be amazing. I would love that. Welcome anytime. Absolutely. Yeah, wonderful. No, that's so good. We'll have to get one of those waivers and come up there. Yes. It'll take you less than a year. Just for pleasure. I wonder if they're okay with that. So the thing with your waiver is, and I'll give you a little clue, you don't need an American waiver lawyer.

3:54:35SpeakerYou need a Canadian one. Oh, okay. Yeah. So my lawyer, for instance, shout out to Len Saunders. He's my American immigrations lawyer. And he's got, he got me my, so I can ask him if he knows any good ones on the Canadian side. Because that's step one, getting the good lawyer. And then it's, you know, when you, when you do it by yourself, it costs about 700 US.

3:54:58SpeakerWhen you hire a lawyer, it costs like four grand. Oh, wow. Okay. So it's worth looking into. Well, it's worth getting the lawyer to do for you because if you do it yourself and you make a mistake, you won't know you made a mistake for 11 months when they send you your thing back and say you're not in. But your lawyer would know you made a mistake the second he saw it.

3:55:18SpeakerSo that's really what you... Thank you so much for joining us.

3:55:49SpeakerYeah, stoked, stoked to be able to go to different countries. It's always fun. Traveling is the thing we used to do that, you know, used to be what would put us away. You know, we now don't look over our shoulder for and we get in an environment where, you know, we have this regulation. I mean, that's one of the best things that's come out of, you know, it's crippling the industry while watching it, you know, consolidate the way that it is.

3:56:17SpeakerBut, you know, there's still, you know, obvious to us, like, do any of you guys in this room, you know, have any fear of the thing that, you know, this industry, you know, crumbling underneath here? Do you see us continuing to lift it? Thank you so much for joining us.

3:56:52Etienne FontanWe built this from nothing. Look what you've created along the way. And that kind of leads me into Eric, TJ, and Harrison. Since you're our guests today, I'd like you all to each answer this. Looking at where you started versus today, right? Let's go to the historical perspective as we close out the day. What are you most proud of? The patents, the awards, the operator outcomes, or changing how people think about post-harvest entirely.

3:57:22Etienne FontanAnd what's the next unfair advantage you're building toward?

3:57:29SpeakerI can answer that. That's easy. All right, you can go first. Out of everything, the journey. It's been a dream. I got to pursue passion. Most people aren't that blessed in this life. And like just doing that, I had to do a lot of things that I wasn't ready for and I had to get comfortable with and learned so much about so many different industries and aspects just as being an inquisitive creature, I got to keep learning and I still get to.

3:57:57SpeakerI'm a forever student. You know, that in itself is a blessing. So the fact that I get to do something passionate and check off all those boxes, it's pretty unreal. And then the accolades, everything else that came with it, sure. Those are just like epic cherished memories. All the friends, all the people, and then the places it took me and it will continue to, right? But just where it's at now, honestly, I thought we were getting closer to federal.

3:58:23SpeakerAnd we are with the farm bill. It was just a way to change perspective and propaganda and all these things. So it was just a stepping stone in a different way. Did I like it? No, but it was instrumental in a weird way. So I'm excited to see federalization in the U.S. and for us to finally join the international market because to see what Canada is doing, Thailand, Germany, everyone else coming online, it's pretty incredible to see where it is versus where it started when I got in.

3:58:53SpeakerAnd that's, you know, the least amount of time compared to you guys.

3:59:00SpeakerI'll jump in, man. You know, Harrison, thank you. Well said. You know, I mean, I think he kind of accentuates the same. I think I got the easy, low-hanging fruit answer, right? You know, I happened to turn 50 recently this year, you know, in January. And my wife, you know, my wonderful wife, but together we did this not-so-surprised party. And I was real fortunate to have, you know, a lot of people show up and support me.

3:59:25SpeakerI felt the love and support of my local community around me. And that meant the world to me, aside from my friends and my family directly, right? It was pretty powerful. And I think, you know, she was joking the other day when she was thinking about doing something special that was just proved to not be as practical as the idea. And I was like, well, I want to hear about it.

3:59:45SpeakerAnd she was like, you know, like your 50 favorite things, right? Kind of thing, one for each year kind of thing. And I thought that was really cute. And I started thinking about it. I was like, I don't know if I actually have 50 favorite things. So that'd be a hard order to fill. But when I thought about it, there was like 50 of my friends at least at this party.

4:00:04SpeakerAnd that was my favorite thing. So in terms of this industry, these conversations with my peers, being able to innovate, take something that's just an idea. For me, the dream has always been

4:00:21SpeakerI had a vision about what the resonator could be because of my experience and my personal touch with it. And so I got to pursue this thing, to go after it, to take this idea, bring it to reality, to stub my toes along the way, to engage with my friends and family and have honest, intelligent discussions to keep leveling up, just always level up. There's always room for more.

4:00:46SpeakerAnd so to be able to execute on that level and bring something to life and find the right partners to engineer something and develop something Thank you for joining us today.

4:01:19SpeakerYou know, screens are made in California, you know, our motors are made in Michigan. So that's an important thing to me as a manufacturer, right? Because my relationship goes with my vendors, my other partners that I use when we're putting all the pieces together, you know, the welders down the street that, you know, I go and talk to when we're, you know, scheming up ideas, right? And to be able to like have taken all that and then not only you get past it, it's so much more than the, As an OEM, there's a whole manufacturing thought process to fulfillment.

4:01:52SpeakerAnd then there's customer service. And then there's validation, you know, what you're doing by your community and your peers. And so it really just takes a village and it takes time. You know, I'm still in the building stage. I feel like I'm just starting. You know, we're understanding what we're doing now better than we've ever understood before. And where does this go? It goes to a place where we're going to do this at scale and help those along the way that You know, want to get behind us.

4:02:19SpeakerYou know, everybody takes the well-traveled easy road. You know, it's the path of least resistance. We're out here in the jungle with the machete chopping our own way. And we're like, come with us. You know, we got we know the way we got. I promise it's going to be good when we get there. You know, and we're in the middle of that journey and we're already sent scouts.

4:02:39SpeakerLike we know where we're going, right? There's no, it's not unclear what the destination is. Now it's just a process of market adoption and getting there. And, you know, we talk about the words tech, you know, and it's funny because that is real, you know, and for me, it's not really a position of, I think it's really important for us to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that we're doing what we can

4:03:22SpeakerYou know, from, you know, patent protection, that was a part of what allowed me to really dig deep and pursue this journey and give it everything that I have. You know, that's a career. That's a 20 plus year commitment from my side of the fence to my community and to those who have developed this, you know, Within this community that I'm not going anywhere and we're going to continue to work together to like achieve our dreams together.

4:03:46SpeakerSo I'm just a part of that journey. I am in the middle of it and I see, you know, pathways where we're going to be doing this at scale and acres. So, you know, let's just all team up and keep elevating and keep pioneering. Dude, holy shit. You're 50 years old. No, I'm just joking. Congratulations, dude. I'm 53 this month. This month I turned 53 at the end of the month, March 31st.

4:04:11SpeakerNice. Right on. There we go. So I guess I'll jump in with the thing. I'm just glad that I've been able to... Put my mind towards something where I saw fruit, you know, where I did a lot of experimenting and things and a lot of things happened in the middle of that. They could have taken me out that didn't. So I'm just glad to be here still and be able to do the things that I'm doing now.

4:04:37SpeakerAnd still experimenting and still the R&D part of things and the trying to come up with new ideas has just been something I do anyway. So to be able to turn that into a career has been very rewarding for me. It's been up and down as far as it's never boring and it is very, my life has been very... All over the place, but exciting and there's a lot to it.

4:05:05SpeakerAnd then as far as just things for trying to level up, it's just kind of this year focusing a little bit on health and just my inner, my inner self and just trying to work on some of that stuff and doing some of the meditation stuff I've been doing lately. Things like that, because I feel like if I make myself, help myself be a better person, that just helps everybody.

4:05:28SpeakerSo I'm trying for that this year. That's kind of my goal. I've been working on that. So that's where I've been at. And so that's kind of what, how I feel about it. And I'm already in the process of that. I'm already seeing results. I love being able to be public about some of this stuff. I don't usually ever do this. Like the first one I did of this was the last Ash Church that I did was the BHL one.

4:05:51SpeakerI was very nervous and didn't talk as much. Oh, you did a great job. Pretty comfortable in this one because this was with my friends and the people who I've known for so long. And it's really nice to be able to talk about some of the history of the things that have happened in my life. I've had a lot of really happy things, a lot of things that have kind of traumatic.

4:06:09SpeakerAnd so being able to talk about those things with people who understand and with a wider audience and to be able to tell the history of things like that is really a joy to be able to do. Beautiful. Well said, man. Well, listen, it was absolutely wonderful to have all of you guys. I'm going to pause my mic because there's a final boarding call for Air Canada.

4:06:28SpeakerSo give me one minute and I'll wrap it up. Well, hey guys, while we're waiting for him to come back, you know, I mentioned a lot about my, you know, vendors and, you know, externalities and partnerships and my peers, but it was remiss of me not to like directly mention my team. The internal team that I work with, you know, my partner, Russell, who was not here with us today, you know, maybe we'll do a part two with Marcus because, man, we can get granular.

4:06:56SpeakerRight. It feels like we still just touched the surface. But to my team and to my wife, you know, Stephanie, she's actually an amazing businesswoman and part of this organization behind the scenes, really making things happen. You know, it takes a village, you guys. And every one of you guys who's having any success out there knows you have to be able to rely on your people. And sometimes, you know, that means consolidating even your crew.

4:07:18SpeakerRight. So even if, you know, those of you out there who have fallen to the nature of, you know, just trying to make it, You know, we're, they're still trying to come back, man. And we're always going to be here working together, better together, man. So just I'll hold space, you know, in every capacity that I can. And thank you guys for just doing the same for us.

4:07:38SpeakerMarcus for, you know, bringing us, man. We really appreciate you showcasing what we're up to and, you know, allowing us to participate in your amazing platform and what you've done for the industry, man, because you're a legend. Thank you, brother. I appreciate that. I could not have done it without my amazing wife, who's actually hiding behind the other wizard there. She's on the screen right now. She's going to shut us down and take us out.

4:08:02SpeakerI'm at the airport. She's at my house. So shout out to my amazing wife, Charlene, who has made everything possible from bubble bags to everything that I do. I could not do without the support of her. It just wouldn't even come close. So shout out Thank you so much for being here.

4:08:36SpeakerEveryone else, the wives and the children and everyone that it makes this a family and a community, right? We couldn't do it without everyone. And I just did a hash church from the Vancouver International Airport. So, I mean, we're talking about not wanting to talk about shit. I'm in like America right now doing hash church at the Vancouver International Airport. So, thank you all for showing up.

4:08:57SpeakerWalking the streets of Paris. I feel it. That's awesome. Thank you, Etienne, for co-hosting today. No problem.

4:09:06Etienne FontanI want to also shout out Puffco because Puffco is sponsoring our VAC trip to the UN. So we're off to the UN this week to work on the bigger picture. So I want to thank them. And Jolly Roger will be asking one of the questions at the UN. So I'll keep you posted, Bubble Man. I need to get those videos. And then, yeah, we're taking Monica and Forrest to the UN this week.

4:09:33Etienne FontanSo it's going to be an amazing next couple of weeks, people. So we'll keep you posted. I probably won't be on because we're dealing UN stuff next week. But we'll keep you posted.

4:09:42SpeakerGreat work, ATN. Yeah, definitely. That's amazing. Awesome, brother. If you can, sweetie, you can take us out. You can shut down the recording and shut off the YouTube. And thank you everyone for watching. Thanks.