Episode 50 ft Ryan Lee of Chimera Genetics - 16/11/20

Hello and welcome to the next episode of the Pot, a cannabis podcast for budding enthusiasts. This episode, as always, was brought to you by our amazing sponsors, Seeds. Here now your number one place to get seeds. Guarantee on germination and satisfaction. Why would you go anywhere else? They got all the best breeders in the game. Check them out if you want to grow some of that fire for yourself. Likewise, Coppet Biological Systems. They got everything to keep the garden happy, healthy and pumping out that killer. Whether it's beneficial, bugs, microbes or feeds, they one stop shop. Likewise. Huge shout out to the Patreon gang. You guys are the lifeblood of the show, helping to make episodes happen. If you want access to exclusive content, early access to episodes and more, go check out patreon.com forward slash the podcast. This week we are thrilled to be joined by the genetic maestro himself, Chimera, to talk about all things cannabis, science and so much more. I hope you're ready for a big one, guys. This is going to be a three parter, the first one ever.

Let's get into it.

Alrighty, so a big thank you and welcome to the genetic maestro himself, Ryan of Chimera Genetics. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.

It's my pleasure, Heavenly. Thank you for having me here.

Not a problem. So the first question we like to ask guests these days is what are you currently been smoking on?

You know, I'm actually, I'm not really smoking a lot of flower these days. The last couple years I've really been focused on vaping concentrates, not even really dabbing them on a hot nail, either just with a torch or you know, a lower temp kind of vape device, I find it's a lot easier on my lungs. And you know, as we start getting up on in age, it, you know, I, I kind of, when I want to hang out with friends at conferences and stuff. We used to do that back in the day, the Emerald cup or whatever we do. There's a lot of really, really heavy smoking that goes on and I just find that it doesn't, it doesn't really go well, too well with my lungs. I'd rather do a smaller inhalation of something much, much stronger and more flavorful. So I've kind of been staying away from the flower, to be perfectly frank. So just really smoking on fresh live rosin and really nice fresh dabs that kind of are popping around in the community these days here.

Yeah, I can certainly relate to that sentiment. Having recently put down the bong and Picked up the vape myself. I guess my question is, do you feel like there are any specific cultivars which really lend themselves to being smoked through a vape in concentrate form?

I think they all do. You know, a really good live rosin or a live resin kind of extract is really just the essence of the plant and the thc. So you're removing all that, you know, that leaf material that really is not adding anything of health to your lungs. And it's certainly not anything adding anything to the experience of the smoke or of the consumption. So I really think that that kind of direction, whether it's a high quality CO2 or whatever the extraction method is, as long as you remove all the, the solvents. And even better, if you're using solvent less techniques, you're really just getting the part of the plant that, you know, is, really is, is what we want. Right. And it's just an evolution from, from, you know, started off as hashish and then we all kind of got into the bubble hash and the, and the dry sis. But these extract, you know, probably they use heat and pressure to pull the essential compounds out of that kind of more natural matrix of the resin. And if it's processed and cared for carefully, you end up with a product that in my opinion is a lot healthier to smoke than sucking on half gram joints all day.

Yeah, certainly, I think the amount of tar consumed is astronomically different. Right. So for that reason alone, I'm on board. In past episodes, we've had breeders talk about this idea of breeding for the end goal of making concentrates. And sometimes they would reference, you know, big gland heads, things like that. Would you ever consider something like that or do you just think like a good strain will translate to good concentrates and you don't need to specifically set out to do that?

Yeah, good cultivar should definitely. I mean, if it's grown well, that's what you're trying to do is bring out that peak essential oil expression. And I think that any kind of variety is really good for that. There's definitely something going on with the size of the resin gland and either the ratio of the thickness of the gland to the internal diameter, the, you know, the internal diameter, essentially. So think of it like a, we call it a waxy pillow. So like the pillowcase is made of something that is somewhat fibrous or waxy material. It's got, you know, there's actually no drug content in the, in the structure of the trichome itself, but the inside of that pillow is where all the essential oils are produced in the plant and certainly where the cannabinoids are produced as well. And. Yeah. So really being able to like take those compounds out or the oil that is in those compounds, which is really what I call what I consider the essence of the plant. Yeah. I'm not so sure that we really do understand whether there's a specific gland size or maybe when the glands get to a certain size that the membrane that surrounds that waxy pillow gets thicker so it can hold in the contents. Like I said, that's made from material that is not really what we're after as consumers. It's just kind of in the way I think really a good extract is about removing the things that we want from the things that we don't want without changing the chemical profile of the plant. And that way any extract really will let, or any good quality extract will let the plant shine in its best form. Right. And we like them all. It's expensive to do with a tire, a haze or something. Like the lime and pine that I was using for a while, they make incredible extracts, but the return is not very good. So as a breeding goal, really, it's just about producing biomass with enough what we call oil content so that they can shine in extracts.

Sure. And I mean a great point you just touched on there about Haze and some of these smaller yielding sativa varieties, making it a hard sort of argument for the return on investment. I remember in an episode with DJ Short, he discussed how some of these varieties have like a higher proportion of the sister lithic trichomes that don't have that kind of pillowcase that we've been referencing. Would you think that there is still a lot of room to make concentrates? Because I think DJ said that, you know, they tend to secrete the oils onto the surface of the plant. Do you think that you could still get a good return from that, given that the oil's there somewhere? It's just maybe not in the trichome head. Or do you think the trichome head is really fundamentally necessary to get that good concentrate?

Yeah. So I don't like creating drama with people. But he's actually not correct to say that systolithic hairs are non glandular. So they actually don't really produce an oil that's extractable or that is secreted by the structure. It's really like a long, thin, kind of pointy thing. If you look at a resin gland under some kind of microscopic picture and there's all sorts of them on the net, you Know, Bubble man is got a lot of great, great ones if you follow him on Instagram. But you can kind of see that the actual structure, it's really about what's inside that glandular head. And there's shorter, you know, gland. There's also. There's a few different types of glands on the plant. There's these non, you know, non capitate glands, and there's the bulbous glands that sit on. On the leaf. Like you were saying, they're kind of more down towards. They don't really have a. I kind of think of it like a golf ball on a tee that sticks into the, into the leaf surface. So they don't really have the tea part. It's just like kind of a little gland on the, on the ground. But I'm not sure that those are really too important in the overall processing, you know, in the overall space. There is some definite differences in chemistry, but I think with our current extraction methods, unless you're actually physically separating those gland heads by size, we're really just going in with either heat or pressure or a solvent to pull those things out. Right. So you're gonna, for the most part, you're gonna get it all anyway.

Yeah, sure. So a question I'm very interested in, but one that's kind of hard to talk to people without a scientific background. So I've been waiting for you to come on so you could give me your opinion. I remember in that same chat with dj, we were talking about, like, the biochemical nature of, like, what makes you feel a strain as a sativa versus an indica. And it's obviously still a bit of a cloudy area where we don't really have it down pat. But something which always comes to my mind is that even if you take a really racy sativa and make a concentrate, it doesn't tend to have that same racy effect. Like, you might still perceive it as a bit sativa, but it's certainly mellowed out. What's your thoughts on this? And do you think that it maybe indicates that there's something in the plant matter which isn't being extracted, which contributes to the perceptual feel of a certain strain?

Yeah, there's a few things that we should probably touch on that. Let's come back to the indica sativa thing and just talk about the chemistry thing for a moment. And actually, we can use Dan as a great example. Dj, he had all these great varieties, but his whole thing has always been, you know, he. He came from a time period where we weren't breeding using a lab. Right. We were. We were always selecting plants based on how they make you feel, not how much THC there is in the plant. Okay. And so when I was doing some work down in the States and, you know, I collected a whole bunch of Dan stuff, both in clone and from seed, and we grew a fair amount of it. And the. The one thing that I noticed in general was that the plants were actually relatively low thc. They were in most of them, not all of them, but the vast majority of them fell kind of in the 8 to 12 to 13% range, which is pretty low for the market average these days, at least in North America and California specifically. I've also noticed this with other. If you listen to experiences of people that take sesame, which is a synthetic thc, it's actually not a synthetic thc, in a peanut oil matrix, kind of a jelly, you know, a jelly type pill capsule. And if you take those things or you ask the patients that are using them what they feel, and they always say that they get really tired. And I've kind of noticed after having access to the lab and playing with a lot of these different varieties and smoking them and also having the ability to run them through to understand their cannabinoid profile is that when you start turning the THC way up, you really do get that lethargic property. And I think that what a lot of people sometimes confuse for the effects of Myrcene is actually a result of a high THC concentration. Whereas Dan was always selecting for plants based on their, again, how they made him feel, not on the basis of a lab report. And so I think that there's something to that ceilingless high, that really clarity that you get from smoking. What you're referring to as the sativas, I call them equatorials, those more equatorial plants that they were not really bred for high cannabinoid content. They're really in that lighter, what I would call the lighter class of Cannabis. And I'm mid-40s, so I'm going to say younger generation, but, you know, obviously we're now not the younger generation anymore. But I think in regards to the folks that were smoking a lot during the 60s and 70s and early 80s and working back then, you know, those types of headspace, you hear it all the time, where these older hippie elders from our community say, you know, today's cannabis is too strong, and we don't have those unique headspaces that you used to be able to get from the Acapulco Golds and the Hawaiians and the Thais. And I have a theory, and I haven't confirmed this 100%, obviously, but my theory is that a lot of those headspaces that you could get back then were because the cannabis actually wasn't stronger than even 15% cannabis, right? In Canada. I'm in Canada. And now we have this national legalization system and the provincial distributors that buy the cannabis from the growers, they really don't want to even look at anything less than 20%, which is crazy, because, I mean, if you transfer that analogy over to the alcohol industry, that would wipe out most of the wines and all of the beers and the ciders and all that kind of stuff, and really push into the spirit world, the whiskeys and the gins and the vodkas, all that kind of stuff. And I think that having a regulatory system where that encourages us to just start chasing high THC numbers is actually not a great way to be producing cannabis, because, again, we're not considering the way that these plants make people feel. The younger generation, that's all they've grown up with. A lot of these kids start with dabs and stuff, so you get a lot more thc, they get a lot of larger dose of thc. And it's again, like I said, that's my personal belief, that that's actually one of the things that's leading to this, what I call thc, lethargy, right? We try to, in the community, we try to say, oh, terpinoline or limonene or pinene. They make you up, they give you an up perspective. But. And then mercine brings you down. But. But the truth is that we actually haven't done those type of studies yet to be able to say that conclusively and legally. In most countries, you can't do that kind of study. For example, in Canada, the licensed producers here, they need a special license to consume the cannabis that they're producing on site, right? If they want to. If a grower wants to smoke his own weed and they don't have that license, they have to sell it to the liquor distribution board and it goes out to the distributor, to the. The retailer, and then they have to go and buy their cannabis retail before they can even try it. That's kind of bizarre, right? Like, imagine you're a vintner or a master brewer and you couldn't taste your wine or your beer during the production process. It's kind of. It's kind of insane, but that's what we've ended up with. In the regulatory system. So being in this legal system has really forced people to start saying, okay, we can't smoke the plants. So what we're going to do is send them all to a laboratory and then pick the one with the highest th. Well, imagine you did that for whiskey or wine, right? You don't go into the wine store and say, okay, I need a nice syrah with the highest alcohol content. It's just not the way that we consume those products. And so it's kind of weird that that has been the way that we're now marketing and advertising cannabis.

Yeah. Wow. What a phenomenal explanation right there. You raise such a brilliant analogy in regards to the high alcohol content. And something which has been brought up in prior episodes is this idea of, should cannabis be treated just like tomatoes? Should it be treated like alcohol? I guess it is a bit of a sort of complex question. Where do you sit on that one? What do you think should be the general regulatory framework around cannabis, or does it need its own new one?

I think we have to take pieces of all the different regulatory systems. I'm of the opinion that cannabis is a drug. It's a psychoactive substance, and that doesn't mean that it's dangerous, but it does mean that we don't want to be. I was in high school and I was smoking cannabis, But I think if I was designing a regulatory system as an adult, that I would probably say, yeah, like kids under. Well, I don't really want to set the age because it would probably be younger than most, But I think that there's probably enough scientific data to say, hey, yeah, actually, we shouldn't provide high THC cannabis to kids under 18. And not that I necessarily agree with that as a personal ethic, but I. Because I don't believe that it's as dangerous as it's made to seem. But part of using psychoactive substances in any culture is a taught experience, right? That's cultural information that's passed down from the elders to the younger generation. And I think that people need to be of a certain age to really appreciate how to truly start using these substances properly. You know, when I was, like, 13 and 14 and sitting around the table at Christmas dinner, you know, the kids in my family, my brother and I, we were allowed to have a very small glass of wine. You know, all the parents were having it. And it's kind of one of those things as kids. It's like, why don't we. Why don't we get to have a little taste, too? And I Don't think there's anything dangerous of letting children have. Let's not say children, but young teens have a small taste of wine in the context of a family celebration at the dinner table. Do I want that child then going and taking a bottle of wine and hanging out with his friends? Probably not. Right. Even though, you know, obviously most teens do that, they try to get beer or alcohol for the weekend. I think again, as an adult, if I were designing a system for that, I probably wouldn't create a situation where it was easy for them to get access.

Yeah, look, I wholeheartedly agree with you, and nothing new here being said, but the studies pretty conclusively show that a lot of European countries that follow the sort of style of introducing small amounts of alcohol in family settings. It's shown to be beneficial because you're kind of normalizing it, right?

Yeah. Well, you can't. I mean, if you want young adults to make responsible choices, you have to respect them and treat them as intelligent enough to make their own choice. Right. And part of that is giving them the tools so that when they do encounter these substances on their own later in life, that they know how to interact with them, you know, reasonably. And that's kind of what I think are my mom's, you know, her idea was. Was behind letting us have small things about it is, again, it's cultural knowledge. It's part of teaching people how to interact with these substances, substances in a responsible way. And I think this is, don't, you know, this just say no, all drugs are bad approach. I mean, it obviously doesn't work. And I think it sets up children to believe, you know, because again, you hear, drugs are bad, drugs are bad, don't touch cannabis, it's bad, too. And then when people try cannabis, they realize that it's not what the elders told them it was. Right. And then now you've created a situation where the younger generation doesn't trust the people that are trying to teach them life lessons on how to, you know, how to go about interacting with these substances through life. So my personal opinion is to just be responsible and educated and arm the kids with as much information so that they can then go on and make responsible choices. Right?

Yeah, 100%. I am one of the biggest advocates you'll find of, like, harm reduction. And I think that it's totally in line with that sort of philosophy. A question which kind of stems off that a little bit, which I have been pondering myself, especially since picking up the vape as my preferred ingestion Method is that I do wonder if as you reference, you know, a lot of the younger generation, they, they might have started out on dabs. And I feel like the question needs to be asked if that sort of excessive saturation of the THC receptors could have some deleterious effect just in terms of maybe even just your own ability to enjoy the plant. I know that at periods of time when I've been smoking particularly heavy, you can kind of notice like you're not getting as high. What's your thoughts on that? Do you think that some amount of self restraint actually could lead to a more long term enjoyment of the plant and the concentrates in general?

Yeah, absolutely. And we know this with opioid receptors, and it's showing true as well with cannabinoid receptors is that when you drive one of these neurochemical systems with an excess of the ligand or the molecule that is binding to these receptors, that the receptors do something called, they undergo a process called downregulation where they actually become fewer receptors. And that's kind of like a way to balance for, you know, the cells want to maintain that level of signal that is being passed from the presynaptic nerve to the postsynaptic nerve where the receptor is located. Right. So essentially we have a natural or endogenous signal. You know, you can assign it any kind of value you want, call it 100. That goes from the presynaptic nerve to the post synaptic nerve terminal. And when we. When your body has a natural level of endogenous opioids that exist and work in that system. And so when we smoke cannabis, what we're doing is we're driving that system harder. We're putting in a molecule that mimics the endogenous ligand and that essentially overdrives the system. So now we're giving the receptors a much greater signal than they're used to. And so for them to compensate, what they do is they downregulate the number of receptors and it kind of brings the amount of signal going from the previous nerve to the post nerve down into the similar type of line. And when we then pull away that exogenous signal, we stop smoking cannabis. Your body is now compensated. So you're actually now getting too little signal. And that's a case of, you know, that's what we call withdrawal really. Right. So yeah, I think that it's probably, it's probably, you know, in terms of using cannabis and being cannabis user, tolerance breaks are really good for you. People obviously need these compounds for using, for Medicine. But I don't think any of these, you know, I'm going to call them, quote, sacred plants or medicinal plants. I don't think it's a great idea to be using them all the time. Right. There's, there's something to be said for taking breaks and having moments of clarity. And you know, if you do that, you take a couple of weeks off of consuming cannabis, you will find, just like you said, that when you go back to it, the same amount that you were using two weeks ago has a much greater effect. So that's one thing on that topic. Another thing that's kind of interesting on the topic that I don't think any markets have really truly embraced yet is the type 2 cannabis. So cannabis that has a balance of CBD and thc, of, you know, most people know the variety canatonic from resin seeds in Spain. And that's a type 2 plant. And the thing that makes type 2 plants different from the high THC plants is that they produce about 50% of their total cannabinoid fraction as CBD rather than THC. There's just the beginnings of scientific research that are being done in the neuroscience community and the health community that show that having that little bit of a CBD buffer in your experience actually might provide some safety against the things that you were talking about over driving your system with massive amounts of dabs all the time. There might even be a safety aspect to having CBD in the context again of what we were talking about before with children or kids under 20. Maybe the solution is to have them only have access to type 2 cannabis. They don't get to have access of the really truly potent stuff until they turn 18 or 20. I don't know how you would go about enforcing that, but it's something to consider. I think that that whole area of the CBD buffer is something that really hasn't been explored very much by the community and I think it has a potential for use.

Yeah, of course, of course. And I think a topic in general which we're kind of skirting around touching on a little bit is something which a lot of people really don't want to acknowledge is that there can be like sort of downsides or excessive use of cannabis. And I think a lot of people are really just so invested in this idea of cannabis is 100% safe, it's non harmful. And I always have a bit of a problem with that because it's like there's many cases of like people smoking cannabis and then unfortunately running in front of a car, like not on purpose but like, I just find it hard to stomach when people just raise it. Like there's no possible downsides to it. Kids, I, I started smoking 12 years old, it should be fine. And as you said, like it is worth considering if that's actually a realistically true statement because your kind of experience as a child doesn't represent everyone's and it's, it is worth considering what's best for a 12 year old, a 15 year old, an 18 year old. So yeah, I really like that sentiment you expressed right there.

Yeah, well, just like there's different types of cannabis, I think people need to be aware that, you know, human, our individual neurochemical makeup is different from person to person. And so it's not only necessarily about the chemistry of the plant. There's variability in the chem, in the neurochemistry of the population and we really don't know. You know, I have a lot of friends and they're just like, cannabis isn't for me. Or I had friends that were in, you know, I was in high school with, and I used to smoke with them and then they got a little bit older and they, they tell me, you know, I just, I just realized it wasn't good for me, it wasn't making me feel healthy, mentally stable. I, I knew another lovely little, not a lovely little girl, but a lovely girl and she was in her early 30s and when I met her she was smoking fair bit of cannabis and she got right into it and I watched her go through a mental spiral like I've never seen on anyone. And you know, to the point that she thought that there was people in the, in, in the light switches and the, you know, the electrical outlets. And then, you know, she was putting like tinfoil on top of light fixtures and stuff. It was really bizarre behavior. But she definitely wasn't using any other drug and the cannabis wasn't helping her. So to have this and I actually substituted her cannabis. I took all our cannabis away from her, gave her a bunch of cbd, cannabis that had no THC in it and it seemed to help a little bit. But at that point in time I think again she had overdriven her endocannabinoid system so hard that just with her particular neurochemistry it didn't work for her. So anybody that says all cannabis is medicine and you know, it's, no matter how you use it, it's medical. That to me is just not true because I've seen it, right? I've seen it happen. And it's well documented in the scientific literature, in the medical literature that there is a small subset of people and we don't know whether it's their genetics or their neurochemistry, but whatever it is, cannabis doesn't interact well with them. And when you're looking at creating a regulated market or a system as a government official, you have to be thinking about the lowest common denominator. Right. You have to make your safety barriers safe for everybody, not just the top 90%. Right. It's not okay just if 10% people suffer from using a product. So yeah, being aware of the different types of cannabis I think is important. But also this idea that all cannabis use is harmless is probably not. I don't think that's a really responsible way to think about it.

So just to jump back to the concentrates topic we were discussing a moment ago, something which has always been an interest to me is that someone. I can't remember who it was, unfortunately. But they pointed out to me that a lot of the technology and especially the techniques used in extraction processing these days are actually very old school technology. Like there's patents going back to the 1920s and 30s which outline a lot of the methods currently being used and sort of presented as like the cutting edge. I figured you'd be better to ask than anyone, have you seen any genuine new advances in extraction or do you feel like it's true to what I said where it is all kind of rehashed old technology?

Yeah, I mean, although we've had a lot of really great chemists in the world, phytochemists in the world for 150 years at least. And it's kind of one of those stories where there's nothing new under the sun. Right. Maybe people are modifying old techniques. But yeah, this is all like even distillation for THC or fractional distillation, or for example the butane extracts, those type of alkane carbohydrate or those alkane extractions, they all really have their roots in other industries and maybe people are changing things a little bit temperature, all that kind of stuff to optimize it. But I think for the most part it's not, most of it's not that new, it's just new to cannabis because cannabis is because of prohibition, it's been left out of so many different systems. A lot of people just couldn't touch the plant. Right. You know, 30 years ago you had to be pretty rebellious to actually be braving the penalties. And it just, it Kept a lot of people that can teach the cannabis community different techniques or sets of knowledge. It just kept them away. So, at least in Canada, now we're starting to integrate all that. You know, we're able to collaborate with people in existing industries and tap into all that, that knowledge base that they have. Right. Because again, cannabis is just another plant. It's a different plant. But, you know, we can use all the same kind of science that we use on all the other plants in the world.

Yeah, 100%. And I mean, in line with that idea, I think I was reading an article written by a CBD extractor who was trying to figure out why they were getting such high returns on their CBD extractions. And what they hypothesized was that some of the terpenes you find in CBD cultivars, the type 2 cultivars, may actually be acting as kind of like almost an industrial solvent in the process and helping to extract more things through that solvent being present. Have you heard anything about this? And if that were to be true, do you think that might indicate that breeding for certain terpene predominance could be, like, a good idea? If your main goal is extraction.

I don't know if they would aid in extraction. You can definitely optimize cultivars through breeding for extract extraction. That was one of the things that we did when I was down in California is we were. We were not only looking at the terpene profiles of plants, but actually measuring their overall terpene output. We were kind of one of the first groups to do that. And, you know, we were finding plants. We had a. We called the, you know, our friends at SC Labs called it the schwag flag. But we typically would eliminate any plant that was under 1% total terpene content if it didn't have, you know, 10 milligrams of terpenes per gram that was out. It just didn't make the list unless it had some other characteristic that was so unique about the plant. You know, for example, we came across a THCV plant that we kept, because that's a really rare cannabinoid. But the terpene profile on the plant sucked. It was horrible. It smelled like hemp, and it wasn't. It wasn't oily. It was just not really tasty to consume. And so that became one of our lower limits. And through time, we would raise that number, you know, one and a half, 2% of terpene content. And anything below that, we wouldn't keep, because the idea was to be making these plants produce as much, not only the right complement of terpene, the right set of terpenes, but also we wanted to have them produce more terpenes, right? And there's definitely a whole lot of world there where we can be taking. Because it might be. For example, we're talking about making dabs, and you want to have a full. I'm going to call. I hate the word, but I'm going to use it anyway. These full terpene extract plants you might want to have end up with a dab or with your concentrate that is really high in terpenes. But say it only has 40% total cannabinoids, right? As opposed to a lot of terpenes and 80% total cannabinoids. And I'm sure most of the community is probably listening to me say those things right now and thinking, well, that's not what I want. But again, getting back to this discussion where we were talking about how things make you feel, there definitely is going to be a whole subset of the population that for them, you know, they're not. They don't want to drink whiskey, they want to drink wine, right? They want to. They want to vape on a pen all night, not have one puff and be comatose. And this is something that I hear from a lot of, you know, the older hippies that I'm in touch with in the community. You know, it's kind of. It's. It's kind of funny when you say it that way, but it's like, you know, it's like, oh, you kids today, your music is too loud. It's like, oh, you kids today, your weed is just too strong. But it's true for them, right? You know, I bring over an OG Kush to a party at like, you know, a family member said, an older family member's house, and pass it around the campfire and they're out, right? They're staring at the wall for the next three hours. And they don't just. They don't want that. Rick, why would you want that? That's not fun, right? I mean, for, you know, for every occasional kind of thing. But that's just. To them, that's not what cannabis was, right? Cannabis was something that they could sit around the campfire and smoke all night and enjoy the flavor of their dube, right? So there's something to be said about breeding plants that have lots of flavor and they don't punch you in the face when you smoke them, right? It may not be for you it may not be for everybody, but I think that we have to start thinking about making cannabis more accessible to other people. And how can we do that? Right. What are the things we need to do that? Is it using these type 2 varieties with a little bit of CBD in them? You know, maybe even. Even in Switzerland, you know, I don't know if you've heard about the CBD markets. They're now selling CBD cigarettes and grocery stores in Switzerland. And they're type 3 plants which have, you know, lots of CBD and almost no THC in them. They're, they're, they're effectively hemp. But if you can make hemp taste like an OG Kush, or you can make it taste like a really flavorful haze or something really nice that' it's nice for people to consume again, it might not be what most of the people listening to this podcast want, but if we can create a whole nother segment of the population that are embracing cannabis and benefiting from cannabis, I think that that's great and they don't need to be high. I think it's just great that we can have more people having a relationship with this fantastic plant.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. And I think it is one of those things where when you are an everyday smoker just puffing away on your OG Kush, it does seem like a very foreign idea. And I am a little bit guilty of falling into that trap you mentioned of, you know, old people wanting the less strong weed and just kind of being a bit perplexed at the idea. But nowadays I find myself in that same position, and I've got this newfound appreciation for the orange strains, which maybe classically aren't considered as strong, but, boy, is the flavor nice.

Yeah. Yeah. And the truth is we can bring. Breed those things to. To be high thc. We can breed them to be a mixed ratio of CBT to thc, and we can also breed those same flavors to be in the CBD plants. Right. That's just a matter of. Of making the right crosses and selections. And one of the things I love about cannabis is the diversity that it brings as a plant. And, you know, who am I to say now only these ones are the ones that we're going to use. I kind of see my job as a breeder is to make all the different types available, and then the doctors and the stoners and, you know, everybody's going to figure out what works for them, the patients, but at least they have the opportunity to do that when we can Provide this broad selection of chemotypes. You know, not everybody needs the THC stuff. That's great. If you'd like the THC stuff. I like the THC stuff. I mean that's kind of where that's kind of my go to. I'm not saying don't use high THC cannabis, but I'm just saying if we can have more people have a relationship with cannabis because we make them tasty cultivars of high cbd, low thc, you know, flour, that's to me, that's a win.

Yeah, no, I wholeheartedly agree. So just to jump back to kind of some terpene talk for just a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you feel that it's becoming a more common trend that people are adding terpenes either to concentrates, maybe even trying to infuse flour that is maybe a bit less than ideal in its terpene content. With external terpenes, do you feel like this is deleterious advantageous and do you feel like there's any benefit? Because there's a lot of discussion around, oh, it's non cannabis derived terpenes and that's inferior to cannabis derived terpenes. But the, the inner chemist in me thinks mercenze, mercine man, like, you know, what's your thoughts?

Yeah, same. I'll just bring it back to water. I mean, you can make, you know, you can make water in a lab by combining hydrogen and oxygen, or you can take sewer water and distill out pure water. Right. Which one would you rather drink? The truth is if you purify them both, they're both just water. Right? It's the same thing no matter what the source is. So to me, water is water is water. It's what's it contaminated with? And that's the question. There's two questions. A, is it contaminated? Okay, so we're getting myrcene from a different plant. That's fine. Are we co extracting anything else with the myrcene? So what are the contaminants in that, that bottle of myrcene that you're buying to dump on your flower or add to your concentrates? That's the question. So what's the contaminant? What's the levels of those contaminants and what's the health consequences of those contaminants? Because plants make compounds that are poisonous to humans. That's what they do. They try to defend themselves from us and from any plant that's a herbivorous someone that's an animal that's attacking a plant. So these defense compounds can actually be bad for you. So maybe we're going into some, I'll call it some weird lemongrass or something like that to try and find some terpenes to put into our cannabis. The potential is there that if there were a secondary metabolite produced by the plant that was poisonous to humans that we co extract it and now that's in with the myrcene, right? And then that myrcene enters, or that contaminated myrcene enters the supply chain. Well, that could be a problem. The other thing that could be a problem is when we, when we consume cannabis, there's natural physiological levels of these chemicals that the plant can produce. And the last 30, 40 years of science seems to show that there's no deleterious effect on human health by using those. But it could be if we start making, you know, it might, you know, a lot of these, these limonene, limonene, terpinolene, pinene, a lot of these terpenes. As you were saying earlier, they're solvents, right? They, they can dissolve cannabinoids, but they can actually also dissolve like certain types of plastic or rubber. You know, Sam Skunk man was telling me a story about they had this haze plant that they used to harvest in California, I believe it was, and they had these rubber rings that sat on the top of the jars and they would close off and the rubber would seal in the jar. But if you left them in there for three or four months, the terps would actually dissolve away the rubber. So there's a potential issue with all these plastics that we're using to hold cannabis, especially the cheaper stuff. And again, in a non regulated market, nobody's paying attention to these things and they could have potential health consequences. For example, if you're making high terp dabs and you're putting them in these plastic containers, you can actually see sometimes when you clean out the container that the plastic has started to melt. And did that plastic then melt into the dabs? Right. Are you now consuming these things? So there's a lot of health issues that I think we have to really keep at the forefront of our planning as we go about creating regulated markets all over the world. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it, but it just means that we should have some kind of thought and really careful due diligence before just doing whatever we want. As if the way that we have done things in the black market have been the right way to do things. We've done them out of necessity, typically for the past 50 years. But it we might learn, and we are learning with some of the chemicals that we spray on the plant, that these things stick around. Right. The story used to be, oh, if you're in veg, don't worry about it, you can spray on the plant. That's not going to end up in the flower. But shit, we started doing the testing and it's like, you know what, it all ends up in the flower, right? So a lot of the practices that we've had in black markets, they're not going to be the practices that we use in regulated markets. And that's okay, right? It's all about advancing our understanding and creating a safe industry where people can use cannabis in as you know, like you said, from a harm reduction point of view, it's as safe, as safe as it can be.

Yep, yep. Words of wisdom right there. And I think, you know, you touch on a brilliant point that we've come a long way since the days of mycobutrinal and butane soup. But, but I guess a topic which stems from that and what you just discussed is there's a lot of current discussion and maybe even a bit of necessary discussion around vape pens, particularly the ones that come from say, China or other areas of the world where the manufacturing standards are maybe a little less than what they are in other Western countries. Do you think that because of this issue and the necessity for there to be high quality, assurance of quality that basically we will see the falling off of that? Or do you think that China and maybe even African produced products will eventually creep into the market over time and become the new dominant force at play?

I think China is the dominant force at play in all the vape technology that we have. At least in North America, most of that stuff's not produced and actually, I don't know any of it that's actually produced in North America. It all comes from China. And I've got friends and relationships with people in some of these large Canadian, multi billion dollar companies and I know through speaking with them about the issues that they've had in doing the due diligence. If you're a big massive company and you're going to put vape pens onto the market, we've got, call it 35 million people here in Canada, it's a little more, but call out a market of, you know, call it 5 to 10 million users, that's a lot of supp, that's a lot of Hardware that you need to ensure that you're not going to run out, that you have a supply and being able to do the due diligence on the safety of those products coming from China. I mean, you know, if you're ordering 500,000 vape pens or a million vape pens, you buy them from one company and then they're like, they're like, we can't actually produce those all ourselves. And they go and they outsource them to another company, right? So you have to be doing all this batch testing because again, if you're putting a product onto the market, it's your ass, right? It's your responsibility to make sure that it's safe. If it comes back and it's not safe, it's your shareholders that are going to suffer, not China. So they have to do these really deep dives into the, you know, upstream to the manufacturers. They go over there, they check their metals, they check the solders that they're putting that they're using to fuse the parts together, to wire the, you know, the pens and everything. So you're really, again, all these things. Cannabis has been left out of all these systems for so long because it's a black market and people could just do whatever they want. And you know, I remember being, you know, in my younger years and it's like if you couldn't score and finally you, you got something, you were stoked, right? Just because you got something, you were able to, you're able to, to find your weed. I wasn't a beer drinker or anything, so when I was in high school and university, I didn't really consume alcohol. Cannabis was my thing. And so if I ever didn't have cannabis and you had to go and buy, you're on the street looking for something and it was just supply and demand, it was what was available. And if you could find something, then you were satisfied. But that's probably not a very good way to go about doing things, right? Like if you're, if you're looking for steak, you're not just going to pick up any old meat that's lying on the, on the supermarket floor or on the road, right? You want to be buying high quality products where you know where they come from and you know that they've been made with respect and treated with respect and the plants have not been sprayed with pesticides, right? You don't want to consume all that kind of stuff. It's just not good for you. And inevitably in a black market, you do see a ton of That, I mean, in California we did some studies and vast, vast amounts of the cannabis that's on the market is like you said, it's got microbutanil in it or it's got mold on it, or it's got a bacteria growing on it. And that's not all right in the legal food production systems when there's. We had one couple of weeks ago, onions were coming up from the states, red onions, and they had salmonella on them. So a legal market, we have recall systems to recall all that product and make sure that it doesn't get into the hands of people. And when it does get into the hands of people, it's on the news. So everybody knows, hey, don't eat your onions, right, Take them off the menu because people are going to get sick. And black market cannabis systems don't have those safeguards and we need them. Right. A lot of growers are, you know, they get week five, week four even, all of a sudden they get a big spider mite infestation that's going to kill the crop. And they got two choices, you kill the crop and start again or you spray it with someone godly chemical and cross your fingers and that way you can pay your mortgage. Unfortunately, you know, paying the mortgage is, it's one of the major excuses for many, many evils in the world today. People are just doing it because they're trying to get by. And so you can understand why it happens. There's not a lot of honor in putting those products in the market. But again, when people are desperate for money or just paying the bill or just trying to get by or feed their families, they often make choices that aren't in the best interests of the people that are going to be consuming their plants. And really. And again, in black market systems, they don't know the people that consuming their weed, they sell it to a guy and it gets shipped or it gets sold to a bunch of people they don't know. And so there are a certain amount of people that will just spray it and not care about the consequences downstream. So regulated systems, there are a lot of good things about them. It's a pain in the ass to work in them, but it's kind of the right thing to do.

Yeah, of course. And I think that a lot of the frustration that comes from the growers end in engaging in these systems is an idea you touched on earlier in that because historically they've never had to really pay attention to quality control, quality assurance. It now seems like this big boogeyman when in reality it's a part of every established industry in the world. And I think that if we do want to end up being like a wine industry or, or some sort of terroir based industry, then there has to be a certain acceptance that these are just the necessary scaffolds that need to be put in place.

Yeah. And it's about pride in your product. Right. I know there's people that just make products because they just want to sell them, make some money, but those aren't the products that I want to consume. Right. I like products that are made by artisans or that are, you know, grown by a farmer with pride for what he's making. Same with wine, but same with vegetables too, and meats. It's the same thing. When people, they understand the art and the science of their chosen field, they take pride in the work that they're doing. And I don't know how you could be proud of putting cannabis on the market that you knew had a pesticide or a fungicide sprayed on it.

Yeah, of course. So onto a little bit of a somewhat controversial topic, but it's one I do feel really personally invested in. Tobacco and cannabis. Given we've discussed how we should be doing everything we can to kind of minimize the potential harmful compounds that are within cannabis. Pesticides, heavy metals from vape cuts. Do you feel like there should be somewhat of an active effort to discourage the use of tobacco in conjunction with cannabis, like what we see around general tobacco use, or do you think it's just an each to their own sort of thing?

No, I think that we should actively tell people not to put tobacco in their cannabis. It's insane. I mean, tobacco is a bronchial constrictor.

Right.

If you smoke tobacco, your lungs close on you automatically. When you smoke cannabis, your lungs open up. It's a bronchio dilator. And so when you mix the two, the health minister in Canada, I think it was like about 20 years ago, it might even been 25 years ago. I remember her coming out and saying, we're really not too, too concerned about people consuming cannabis. What we're concerned about is the mixing the two together. Because again, the cannabis opens up your lungs and it allows all those really bad things that are put on into tobacco and those chemicals that are a result of tobacco combustion. We don't need to be breathing that in. It doesn't add to the experience. And it's, again, it's a cultural thing. I think it ties back to the use of tobacco and hookahs. It became the norm in Spain. Before the cannabis culture really got going in Spain, kind of in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was a hash consuming country. And so they would get hash from Morocco and they'd mix it with tobacco and they'd smoke it that way and that became the norm. Same with Italy. Both countries are really quite accepting of tobacco. It's just a cultural norm. And even in Holland, right, Like, I don't know if you've ever been to Amsterdam, but if you go to a coffee shop in Amsterdam, you'll see a Dutch guy come in from the end of his work day and he'll sit down and ask for a half gram or a gram of hash from the dealer and they'll take out a full cigarette and have one of these long jumbo sized papers and they break the entire cigarette out and they might take, you know, a tenth of a gram or two tenths of a gram and break up the hash into that, and then they roll that in their entire cigarette and smoke the whole thing to themselves. Well, that's the taste of that alone would be enough for me to say, just don't do it. But from a health perspective, I think that it really makes the worst things about the tobacco more harmful, right? So from a harm reduction perspective, don't smoke tobacco with your cannabis. From a taste perspective, Jesus, please don't smoke tobacco. Cannabis, right? And listen, I grew up in Ottawa, which is very close to Montreal, which is a port city kind of on the eastern side of Canada. And so we would have a lot of hashish that would come in through the Montreal port, you know, being like two or two and a half hours away. That was the predominant form of cannabis that was available when I was younger, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that we started seeing some cannabis flowers. Back then, whether it was the police or the genetics that were available to be grown outside, or the availability, you know, the lack of supply, all of these things together created the situation where we just didn't have cannabis flowers. It was, we were hash smokers and I lived right on the border of Quebec, which is the French speaking part of Canada. And they have a lot of ties back to France, of course, culturally. And again in France, it's in between Spain and Italy. They're also hash smokers and great tobacco smokers. It's part of the culture. So I believe as our, you know, I came to a point where I was like, I'm going to try not smoking with tobacco. I was buying cigarettes just to have tobacco to be. To mix in with my joints. And, you know, I got to the point where I was like, forget this. I'm just going to start smoking with cannabis. And I remember I was in a music band at the time, and some of my friends that were in the band, they were like, like, oh, we can't. It's too harsh when you smoke it without. It's too harsh. And it feels that way for about the first two weeks. But after you get accustomed to smoking without cannabis, you actually change the way that you smoke. You draw the air differently in. I think rather than taking these long draws on the joint, you take smaller draws with larger breaths of air at the same time. So you're kind of titrating down the smoke and you get to the point where it tastes so much better. You wouldn't go back if you had to. And when someone passes you a joint, like if I'm, you know, if I'm out at a party, Sam, on the east side of Canada, again, smoking with tobacco is a lot more prominent than it is on the west coast. And so if you're at a party, someone passes you a joint and you have a taste of it, you know, you get it halfway down your throat and your lungs immediately slam shut because they just don't want that tobacco smoke in there. So I'm really against it. I'm really against tobacco as a whole. I think I've seen the damage it does to people, and I just don't think it's a good thing to be consuming if you don't have to. And you certainly don't need to be consuming it with cannabis. And it's kind of like putting orange juice in a fine wine. Yeah.

Wow. So many things you just said, which I just so heavily relate to. You know, I think I just agree with everything you said. And as someone who's never smoked a cigarette in my life, but at one point was addicted to tobacco purely through smoking it with weed. I think that I can agree with you that. That after you get through that first two weeks, you're like, wow, this is such a better world to be in. But I'd love to just quickly jump back to something you touched on, because we did have one of the friends of the show die will submit a question which relates perfectly to the hash sort of comment you made. And he was wondering, what's your thoughts on the old school Moroccan imported hash? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Where do you stand?

It's kind of like everything in the cannabis world. I Mean, I love it for what it is. I've been to Morocco a couple of times now. I've traveled there a little bit on my own, and I actually went with Rob Clark and we had a little trip and went and saw some growers that we knew down there and really got to see all about the culture. It's a great thing to see. I think from when I went the last time, I had already been working in these regulated models. So when I started going back and seeing the way that things were done on such a massive scale, there's a lot of gross things that are, you know, there's no real hijust no real sense of hygiene in the process or in the cultivation. It's just not really thought of. And we've seen through some of the studies that have been done even in Dutch coffee shops that, for example, if you're trimming your weed and someone goes off to the washroom, doesn't wash their hands after they use the washroom, you can get E. Coli on the flowers. That's pretty gross. And it's completely avoidable. Right? This is the other thing. And so these systems, they don't have any of these safety protocols. They don't have standard operating procedures, they don't have protocols for maintaining the quality of the flower. From a consumer safety perspective. The other thing about it is the market has changed. So even when the first time I went, which is, I think it was 2011, it might even have been a little before then, but around that time they were going through a transition where the Moroccans had started adopting advanced agricultural techniques. So, for example, they were growing feminized seeds from Holland. But rather than just scatter seed, I mean, the way they used to do it, they'd harvest all the seeds at the end of the year. When you're harvesting acres of cannabis, it's seeded like Moroccan is. You separate the resins from the plant through screening or this batter beating technique, which I don't know if you've seen online, but people can Google it and you can look on YouTube. They essentially put it in a bag and then they beat the bag with sticks, and the sticks knock the resin glands off the flower and then they collect the resin glands. So there's no real safety consideration in doing that. It's just kind of done because for them, they all know that it's black market. But the truth is, if you're up in Morocco, up in the Rif Mountains, and you have land, you're paying for your house and your way of life and everything with cannabis, if you go up there and you drive around, you'll see driving through the Riff, the biggest houses, they're all surrounded by cannabis fields. This is what the point was, is that they're bringing in these feminized seeds. And now they lay drip emitters down and they plant the feminized seeds on drip lines. Whereas what they used to do is harvest all the seeds. After they'd beat the resin glands off the hash, they'd collect the seeds and then the next year they would actually just walk around the property with bags of seeds and scatter seed them by just tossing out handfuls of seed. So you get a lot of. It's kind of grown a little bit more like hemp than they do drug cannabis. You get a lot more plants per square foot. They grow very tall and thin with top colas and not a lot of side branching. And that was kind of the traditional method of production for farmers in Morocco. Now if you go down and you go up into the Rift, you'll see they've got these like, you know, they've dug into the side of these mountains, like pretty much Olympic swimming pool sized pools to hold the water. So when it rains in the winter, they collect all that water and they line them with big plastics, big plastic or rubber mats, and that holds all the water in. So they have these huge reservoirs from which to feed their plants. And they take that water and they pump it out and they inject chemical nutrients from. A lot of it comes from Holland, but, you know, it's that same kind of chemical fertilizers that everybody else in the blue crystals kind of thing. Because the places that they're growing in Morocco, it's not even really soil. It's more rock and dust than any kind of organic material in the soil. And so they really just turn it into a massive hydroponic bed, right? With the drippers providing all the nutrients that the plant needs. And again, growing feminized seeds by the 10, 20, 30 acre plot. So not a lot of love given to the plants. It's all about bulk. They don't understand the concept of. Howard Marks, funnily enough, went through the same thing in Morocco when he was there. He was asking for, I don't want as much hash, I just want better quality. And they just didn't understand that. It was like, we'll just make more. No, we don't want more. We actually want less of the stuff that we don't want in there. Do I think that those things will be available as they are in the new market? No, they won't. Right. Because it's probably not, it's probably not the best way of doing thing doing things. Can you take those production practices and make them applicable or safe to do in a regulated market? Absolutely. You can make products like the Brock and hashes and some people will love those things. But again, just transferring over the way that it's always been done into a regulated market. I just don't see it happening.

In line with what you just mentioned is what's your opinion on people going to these sort of landrace or indigenous areas and trading modern feminized genetics for the cultivars like notably strain hunters and Aryan have done that a lot and they cop a lot of flak for it. Do you think that's deserved or do you think it's not as harmful as people might make out?

Well, I think there's two things to realize. Like for example, Morocco, cannabis wasn't grown in Morocco until like 1300 years ago. So they were brought, those populations were brought there. Really what they were growing even till a couple of hundred years ago or even 150 years ago. Maybe it wasn't even that long. It could have been less. It was actually really a hemp variety. Right. They weren't really potent cannabis and that's why they made it into hashish, because it concentrated it enough that you'd get high. But the Moroccans, that's not how that they would consume their cannabis. And to this day they still don't consume the resin glands. They mix flower tops with little bits of tobacco and that's how they smoke it. It's not used the way we smoke it to consume the same concentration of the drug. They kind of again, like maybe like DJs ways, they were using a less amount of the drug and just to get a slight effect. And that was the, that was the really the purpose for them. Truthfully, the DEA has gone around the world. I mean, they've spent the last, you know, maybe not the last 20 years, but certainly the 20 years before that going around the world and paying the Thai government and paying the Indian government and paying the Afghanistani government to go out and conduct anti cannabis raids. Right? Go, go and have these programs to go out and cut the fields down. In fact, at one point in time it was the un, the, the UN Office of Drug Control, it was their policy to actually make cannabis extinct. Like that was one of the UN's world goals, was to make cannabis extinct, right? That's insane. Like imagine the UN's having one of their mandates to make a species go insect, it's extinct. It's just bizarre. But it was all ideologically driven, right? So I think the truth is, is that most of the cannabis that's been grown and those land, what people call land race populations and the cultures that grew those land races. For example, the Thai culture that grew the, the really fine Thai sticks, that's gone, like, those things just don't really exist anymore. They might have like little dots of them around the country in very small spots, but it's not a cultural phenomenon like it used to be. It's not a way of life. And so the lessons that they had to teach, the cultural practices they had to teach those ways are probably gone. The genetics, at least the diversity is mostly gone. And from a farming point of view, I mean, if you're a farmer in Thailand or India or the Congo, you know, you're talking about the strain hunters. If you're a farmer in those places, you want the best product that you're going to grow. If somebody has a variety of corn that yields 10 times as much, and that means that you can have 10 times as much profit or return from your crop or 10 times as much food to feed your family, you're going to do it. Because these folks probably don't understand the, the intricacies of protecting the global diversity of cannabis. And that's kind of the way we are in most of these species, with most species now, is that these centers of origin, as we call them, or centers of diversity of most crop species are gone or they're threatened all around the world just because of human activity. And so at this point in time, we really rely on what we call ex situ, or collections that are taken and kept out of the place where they were produced because the environment's changing and these ecosystems are threatened. And that's what we do. Unfortunately, the point that we have to do that now is that we just have to collect these things as they are and try to preserve the diversity. And I think that if we're trying to blame Ariane or blame anybody for going and polluting these germplasm, these genetic pools, the truth is those genetic pools are mostly depleted anyway. And those farmers have, you know, I think it's kind of hard to argue that those farmers don't have every right that all the local cannabis, or, you know, all our domestic cannabis growers, to produce the newest, most commercially viable plants. That's what farmers want to do. They want to stay competitive.

Right? Yeah. And I think that if you look at it on a human level, you can totally relate to the point you made about people are trying to feed their families. It's not all this grand oversight driven sort of actions taking place. An idea that one of our past guests, Irizen, brought up, and he's a lovely guy from India who's done some land race expeditions and preservation efforts of his own. He raised this interesting idea, which I think makes a lot of sense to me in that he said, as you pointed out, these, these cultivars are disappearing on their own for various reasons. It's not like strain hunters is the sole reason for that. But he raised this idea of like, if you do have these seeds, it's kind of your due diligence to try to get them out there and not just sit on the stock forever and like, sort of hoard it in a way. Do you feel like that's an idea you can get down with?

Well, yeah. I mean, and that's kind of, you know, it's interesting because again, we have systems in the world for regulating the use of plants. Or, you know, for example, UPOV kind of oversees the naming and describing of what is a different plant type. And they award, you know, rights to the, the plant breeders for, you know, you breed a new apple, for example, you, you get the commercial rights to produce that apple. But one of the things that comes up with that is that, yeah, you get the 20 years of commercial rights to grow that apple and profit from it exclusively. But the trade off is that you have to make that apple tree available to other plant breeders. And the idea behind that is that plant genetic resources are really a global. I'm going to call them, I'm going to say it's a human right to use them. But I think that humans kind of, we put ourselves first on the planet a little too much. But the truth is that everybody on the planet has the right to access different types of germplasm. If you protect, if you invent a new plant and you want to get intellectual property rights on it, that's one thing. But really, that's fine to get the commercial rights to benefit from that exclusively. But. But we also do have a duty to maintain these plants and plant species and plant populations in a way where they're more accessible to everybody. And again, call it an echo of prohibition. I call it echoes of prohibition being the things that we're still doing wrong because we learned to do them through prohibition. One of the echoes of prohibition is, oh, if you want, but if you want the seed that I have, then you have to pay me for it. And it's kind of just the way it is. So I have all these populations, and the idea is to eventually get them all out and share them all in some regard. But it took a lot of work to collect these things, and I don't want to pass them on to someone that doesn't know how to preserve them properly. Because the idea, again, is that we're really custodious of the cannabis gene pool. It's not ours. It doesn't. No plant breeder owns all the cannabis that they have. It's just that you're a custodian for it for the future generations of people that are going to use it. And I think that that's a really important attitude to have when going about cannabis preservation work is that, no, it's not your Acapulco gold or your Mexican variety or your Indian variety. It's like these, you know, these seeds have cultural heritage attached to them, and there's history and people that preserve them for us. Right? In fact, there's, you know, there's something called the cbd, which is funnily enough, it's the cbd. It's the. What is it? Again, I'm having a mind, mind moment here where I'm not recognizing what it is, but essentially it's like a. A program of biological diversity, an agreement of biological diversity between all these plants or all these countries to protect the diversity. Because what's typically happened is Western countries have gone to these poorer third World countries looking for plants to collect and take back and turn them into a pharmaceutical product, right? Where the culture that maintained that plant or discovered that plant, they don't have any benefit from them, they don't earn any benefit from them. So there's something called the Nagoya Protocol, and people can, again, Google that. But the Nagoya Protocol essentially says for all the signatory countries that if you're a Spanish company or you're a Dutch company, they're both signatories, you can't just go down to Africa and start pilfering seeds, right, and then taking them back and profiting them. And in that sense, you know, it could well be that Ariane is actually violating that protocol, that protocol, that agreement that his government has signed to where if you're going to go down and exploit that genetic diversity or that cultural diversity, that genetic diversity that's produced by the culture, that they're entitled to some of the profits, and it just stops the more advanced countries of the world or the more developed countries of the world from going around and exploiting the folks that aren't quite as developed yet?

Yeah, definitely. And I think history has shown that a lot of the less developed countries have sadly copped the short end of the stick without these sort of regulations in place. So. So hopefully our buddy Aryan hasn't violated any laws in that regard. A question I'd just love to run by you before we jump back to the beginning, so to speak, is on the topic of indigenous landraces. One of the really good questions we got from one of our listeners was they were interested in knowing, you know, in line with Irizen, a former guest of ours, having done some land race expeditions and he did hint that there are still some indigenous stuff out there. It's obviously just near and far when you come across it. Are there any indigenous cultivars or landrace strains that in your mind you would really love to work with if you had the chance?

Yeah, I think it would be really nice to be able to go back to those varieties of yesterday with the technologies of today and start doing some real exploring using science. I've got little collections of, of relatively exotic things in the collection. I've got some ties and, you know, some Mexicans, the highland Mexican and some other, you know, all different Colombians and all these different things. The truth is, is when you start exploring land race population, there's a lot of dogs, right? There's a lot of plants that are way, way substandard in there for whatever reason. And so honestly, it's kind of a hassle to be working with land race populations. Even if you're breeding modern day corn, you don't go back to the varieties that were collected out of the wild, you know, the Teosantes of the world, because you're losing all that genetic progress that you've created, right? The breeders of the world that have ushered, it, ushered cannabis to us in the state that it's in today. Yeah, they've made a lot of mistakes because again, they're typically not professionally trained scientific plant breeders like the rest of the world's crops.

Right.

The cannabis world is kind of funny. It's like plant breeders are celebrities and I don't know any celebrity wheat breeders or corn breeders. Right. It's just not that kind of thing. They're kind of bred by like big time nerds, you know, which is great, but it's just kind of the way it is. So we try to work with, we go back to those, what you call land race populations or those more Wild populations. Typically in a plant breeding project, when you're looking for a trait that has been lost over time. For example, corn in the United States went through this vast bottlenecking process because they were trying to make these high yielding sweet corn varieties. And they did. They created these incredibly bulletproof sweet corn varieties that were high yielding and, you know, you'd produce 50 times the amount of corn per acre is that you would if you're using a variety, say from 20, 30 years ago. But one of the things that they learned, they realized is that the plant, the plants became susceptible to pests in the soil. So the roots would be attacked and the roots essentially they had lost these compounds that would protect them. So one of those compounds was beta caryophyllene, which is one of the major sesquiterpenes that's produced by cannabis. It's in all the Kush varieties, Og Bubba, all that kind of stuff is high in Mercer and high in beta caryophyllene. And beta caryophylline makes the roots unpalatable to certain aphids. Right? Well, they accidentally bred it out because they were so focused on the big sweet corn that the other traits that they weren't really paying attention to, a lot of them got lost along the way. And so they had to actually, when they realized, hey, all the modern corn doesn't produce beta caryophylline in the roots, they now had to go bait way back in time in their breeding programs to find plants that had those to try and reintroduce that trait back into the population. And so I think for me, that that's really where the major benefits are going to come from. Those landrace lines. Yeah, you're probably getting some interesting headspaces again because the plants are in the like 8 to 10% THC range, not the 20 plus THC range. And maybe some of them have unique or interesting terpene profiles. But funnily enough, most of that stuff has actually been preserved pretty well because growers and smokers have always liked the interesting smelling plants. Right. And there's always been one grower that's, you know, he was like, I really like this type of smell. And in that pursuit, he's managed to breed for the predominance of one terpene over another. Right. And so right now we actually have an incredible amount of, of genetic diversity and flavor, whereas the plant is probably most going to be able to be, to be improved in terms of things like disease resistance and pest resistance. Right. Resistance to powdery mildew, botrytis Yada, yada, yada, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And there's many subjects we'll touch on in the near future of this chat, especially preserving old school skunk. That's something I want to talk about with you for sure. But before we do that, let's go back to the start. What was your first experience with cannabis?

Well, it was hash. Someone had brought some hash to a party and it was, you know, it was rolled in a, in a joint with some tobacco and I think I felt a little high. I remember we smoked it and we went outside for a walk. And I remember feeling weird on this walk as we went from one party to another. But it wasn't really that of a profound experience. I kind of came away from the whole thing thinking, well, that wasn't really a big deal. And then it became something that we did. You know, I'd go to my friend Costa's house on weekends and his older brother would get us the hash and we would sit around and listen to Led Zeppelin and smoke hash jointly. So it wasn't really about the diversity and the flavors for me then I remember then I'd met another girl in school, just a friend of mine, and her older brother was a dealer. And she said, you smoke cannabis? I should introduce you to my brother because he's got really good stuff. This kid became my connection and he had all this exotic stuff that I'd never seen before. He had the purple weed that I'd never seen for the first time and you know, Manali finger sticks and these like kind of surfboard looking flat plate hashes that were imported. For whatever reason, through his connections, he just happened to have all this kind of diversity. First time I saw really nice indoor weed, the first time I saw like a cherry oil, you know, all these kind of things. And so when I met this guy, he really opened my eyes and he was actually quite instrumental in my future cannabis use because a couple of years in knowing him, he had a couple of guys break into his house in the middle of the night with a shotgun and they took all of his weed and all of his money and they kidnapped his roommate and left his roommate 100 kilometers outside of town on the side of a road at a cross streets in his underwear. And that was enough for my friend's older brother to be like, I want nothing to do with this business anymore. I'm out. Which really sucked because I had learned to have this appreciation for all the diversity that he had and showed me. And then I was forced to Go back on the street to try and find things of significant quality like he had. He always had the quality. And I Learned within about 8 months or 12 months that most other dealers didn't care about buying them. You got to imagine for any product there's a wholesale market and the wholesale market has a variation in price. Yeah, you can pay for the really expensive stuff, but a lot of the dealers, or at least the ones that I knew, they all wanted to buy the lower price stuff because they could make a higher margin on it. And that was really contrary to my goal, right, which was to have the really nice, the really nice flowers. And that was kind of right before I entered university and, and was getting out on my own. And at that point in time it was like, well, you know what? I know that these things exist. They have to be that you can clearly produce them. The channels that I have are clearly not interested in bringing those things to me. So I'm just going to start growing. And so I went out and I bought every grow book that I could find and some seeds and I read them all cover to cover like, you know, way too many times. And that was the beginning of this, what's become an obsessive, insane pursuit I think, you know, for over the past 30 years. I think the first 15 or 20 of them, most of the people that I knew thought that I was insane, right? It's like, why are you spending all of your time focusing on all this weed? It's really, you know, I could have done a lot of different things, I think, in my life. For a lot of people to see me focusing all that attention on cannabis, I think they thought was a waste of my potential. Then funnily enough, the world turned around and they all realized that I wasn't insane. I was just ahead of my time. Now that we have a legal industry, I'm able to, you know, positively influence the industry through this massive gene collection that I've got, which has always been what I've been interested in doing. You know, I mean, I got. When this system developed in Canada, all the pubcos went. I was offered millions of dollars for my seed collection. And you know, when someone offers you multiple millions of dollars, you have to seriously think about, you know, why you're doing what you're doing. You know, do you take the big payout and then just go and live a comfortable life? But the truth was, is that that's never why I collected. I didn't do all the work collecting all these seeds because I had hoped that one day that there would be a payout. Right. I did it because I loved it and I enjoyed what I was doing. And so I turned all these offers down because it became about, no, I'm not looking for a buyout. I'm looking for a home, for a place where I can actually get a farm and some nice greenhouses and actually take all this hard work that I've put into collecting all these things and start bringing them back to the world. Like you said, how do you get these things out and share them with the world? And so the new world is really about dealing with the regulatory challenges to make that happen. How do you sell seeds internationally, legally? How do you do all this stuff? Right, because we have to. When you start working in a regulated system, you can't live in both worlds. You can't be one foot in the black market and one foot in the legal world. It just doesn't work. So, yeah, it's really about the work and not the money. It was a good lesson to learn. It was a good thing to kind of be faced with and come to the realization that, no, you know what? I don't do this for the money. I do it because I love it.

Yeah, I so much vibe with that message because so often a lot of the decisions that get made that lead to deleterious outcomes in cannabis are done because people are looking, looking to make money. And as kind of as much as it might irritate some people, I always kind of say, like, it's worth considering having a day job so that you don't have to grow a certain cultivar because you need to pay the rent with the yield. You know what I mean? Like, it gives you that freedom to be able to pursue your passions and not like the bottom dollar.

Yeah. It becomes about, again, the artistry or the. That artisanal aspect of whatever your art is, whether it's playing and making guitars or, you know, raising and curing pork or vegetables or cheese or whatever. It's all, you know, there's some people that are doing it for money and the commercial aspect for it, and then there's some people doing it just to make the finest product. Right. Because that's what they enjoy doing. They like having the finest cheese in the world or the finest wine in the world. World. And I think that there's a. You know, a lot of people say, oh, it's like, oh, you're a scientist, you breed weed. From a scientific perspective, it's like, yeah, well, true enough, but I'm also an artist, right? It's like you can. If you're an artist, you can use science as a tool in your toolbox. Right. It's like just like a specific type of. Type of paint or a specific paintbrush. Right. Just because you're using science, it doesn't mean that you can't do the art aspect of it as well. Right. So to me, it's a fusion of those two. Yeah. The science is just a set of tools that help you execute your art.

Yeah. I wholeheartedly agree. So if we kind of touch on that same theme. What was your first grow like? I find the viewers are always extremely interested in hearing, you know, like, do you remember the first strain you ever grew and the sort of technology was it like. Like, sort of all MacGyvered together? Give us a little rundown if you can remember.

Yeah. So it wasn't. It wasn't a known or a named seed lot. It was. You're probably noticing. I don't use the word strain, and we can touch on that after. But, yeah, it wasn't a known variety. It wasn't a labeled variety. It was seeds that I got out of some bud. I was young. I was, like, too young to be growing weed that way. I'd heard stories of family members that had grown weed in the past, and I just kind of grabbed some seeds, and I was like, I started them and I told my parents, and they were, you know, one of my parents were separated at that point in time. They didn't live together any longer. So, you know, I said to my mom, I said, yeah, I'm going to grow some plants. And I think that really what happened is she was like, yeah, okay, sure. Thinking that I would completely fail. Of course, you know, I was. I was still in high school. Like, I was, you know, I think I was 14 or 15 at the time. My mom was going to be rolling.