Hash Church Season 12 Episode 18

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Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:01

Okay, here we go. Sorry about this. Time taking. Alright, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to Hash Church season 12, episode 18? Yeah. We're pumping them along here. Thanks for everyone for showing up today as you as you do on the regular. I appreciate that. I'm gonna set up a quick little shout out to our sponsors because we be without our sponsors. Alright.

SPEAKER_06 0:41

Alright, we're just gonna.

SPEAKER_05 0:46

I have nine. Oh, here we go. Here we go. We'll just shut that. We'll shut that. Okay, right. So I think I shut that off. Yeah, I had a bunch of no, I did not. This is crazy. I gotta find the YouTube. Ah, there's the other one. Hiding the ICU, YouTube. I see you. Shut you down. Bye-bye. All right, sorry, that was hard to listen to myself. We got a cool show for you today. I had zero planned, uh, and a bunch of stuff kind of fell together. So we'll see how that goes. Um, first and foremost, I want to shout out my my sponsors uh for being such awesome sponsors. Shout out to the press club. We'll start with these guys because uh, well, they're fucking awesome. You can elevate your solventless game at Hash Church with the Press Club's premium lineup of robin extraction essentials. Whoops. Proudly supporting our community through top-tier tools that make clean, potent concentrates of breeze. From their legendary rosin bags with proprietary pink stitch, that's how you know it's theirs, and zero blowout guarantee. That's killer, for unbeatable durability and yield to award-winning washbags, premium parchment paper, pre-press molds, and the innovative press club rosin press for precise heat and pressure control. Uh, whether you're crafting at home or scaling up their isoswab stations and collection plates, keep your setup spotless and efficient, all crafted with 100% food grade and dye-free nylon for contaminant-free results that preserve those precious terpenes and volatile organic compounds. You can join the press club in championing hash church by heading over to the pressclub.ca today and gear up for your next epic press. I would check out their spoon as well. I was using it the other day. I love the spoon, it's massive. I was actually not using it for bubble hash, I was using it um to scoop dry sift out. And so it worked really wonderful. Shout out to the press club. You guys are awesome. Uh, and they're right over my shoulder here all the time. So they're right there, even when they're not there, they're there. You know, you can elevate your session at Hash Church with Puffco's cutting edge lineup. Well, I'm gonna puff all of them today. I'll start with the innovative pivot. You know what? Maybe I will have my first rip today on the pivot. Um, a pocket-sized dab pen that delivers the full rig experience on the go, featuring a quick release 3D chamber for premium flavor and real-time temperature control with four heat presets and haptic feedback. Uh, you know, group reps, we'll dive into something a little bit bigger and more substantial, which is the Puffco Peak Pro. Um, powered by the revolutionary 3D XL bowl technology that offers almost 80% larger chamber for 2x more vapor, even heating from the sides to uh really blast out that uh material and get it into your lungs. An XL joystick for fuller loads with less reclaim and don't miss the new proxy, the modular portable powerhouse with four precision heat settings, fast 90-minute charging, boost mode for intense hits, and easy disassembly for seamless cleaning. Perfect, really, for any adventure. You can support Puffco's game-changing innovations by heading over to www.puffco.com or following uh Puffco at Puffco on Instagram today. Uh, well, where would we be without the bubble bags? We do stand out as the premier choice for water extraction. That's no surprise why. We are the original innovators. We set the standard for quality and performance. Crafted with durability in mind, our bags come with a lifetime warranty, ensuring you're covered for years of consistent use. Our team behind bubble bags takes pride in our pioneering legacy, backing every product with unwavering confidence and commitment to excellence, making us the trusted go-to for enthusiasts and professionals alike. Seeking top-tier hash extraction results, please check us out over at www.bubblebag.com. Everything's been slashed. I think we cut everything by about 50% some time ago. And if you use Hash Church 10, you can still get the discount. Um, I lost my photo for Grandmaster LED, which really sucks, but I want to shout those guys out as well. Uh, this uh company was founded by Thomas Gibson with one mission in mind: build the most advanced lighting systems possible for growers who demand true top shelf results with a deep understanding of plant biology, light intensity, spectrum control. Uh, really the whole nine yards. Um, where did I go there? Spectrum control. I totally went and looked somewhere else. Uh, you know, Grandmaster LEDs has become a trusted name for cultivators chasing elite quality. And these aren't just lights, the precision tool designed for those who care about terpene expression, resin production, structure, yield, and consistency. Every fixture is built with focus, purpose, and relentless dedication. That is Thomas to a T, uh, really to helping growers unlock their full potential of their genetics. And if your goal is to grow louder flour, froster resin and premium grade harvests. Grandmaster LED is built for the mission. On Hash Church, we salute companies pushing the craft forward, and Grandmaster LED is doing exactly that. You can head on over to Grandmaster LEDs.com or.ca, and you can use Hash Church 10 as a code to get a discount of 10%. So there we go. Shout it out the sponsors. Perfect time for Matthew the Sync Angel to pop into chat. How are you doing today, Matthew? Oh, he's not good. I'm doing well. Oh, you're quick. You're quick. I asked you a question, you were muted, and you had your camera off, and you're like, oh shit, click, click.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

Nice to see you, buddy. I was listening to your video, but I had paused it already, so it gave me a bit of a delay.

SPEAKER_05 6:23

Oh, okay. Yeah. I also, when I start the video, uh there's a delay, and then I start hearing myself talk. So today I literally had to find the hidden YouTube page that was open with the mic unmuted with my own voice, you know, on a five-second delay coming through my ear. So yeah, there's that. That's good to see it.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

Very disrupting. No, good to see you as well. What was the question? How am I doing?

SPEAKER_05 6:49

Yeah, yeah, just how you're doing. So Matthew and I are in a in a science group today that was set up. I believe, I believe my friend Stefan set that up. So I met Stefan in Switzerland back in 2001 or two, uh, and had an amazing adventure with him. Uh, and it wasn't until I met uh Ruben Valenveras uh over in Barcelona uh just a couple years ago now, uh, at the Spanibus, the last Spanibus that was ever going to be uh in Barcelona, unfortunately. And so he brought me into that group, and then I realized it was Stefan and all these other great people. So really cool uh to see you in that group. That's a solid group of science-based uh miscreants.

SPEAKER_03 7:33

Yeah, I've I've come to find that to be the case. It's awesome.

SPEAKER_05 7:37

Uh, it's nice to have these conversations going, you know. Um, I don't click on as many of the links, but when I see people like you in there pumping uh and actually posting something that's not just you know necessarily about sharing a link, which I think is a great way to open conversation, but I also like the idea of hearing people share specific because Stefan is the the link master, I think we could agree. Uh in I didn't even know you could find that many links on cannabis on a daily basis. It's insane.

SPEAKER_03 8:09

I mean, it used to be that we would say we have no no one's talking about it, so I guess I guess don't uh don't complain about a full plate, right? But uh at the same time, yeah, I do like to hear people's impressions about what what it is that they find interesting about said thing, certainly. Absolutely. So, how how have you been? It's been a while since last we spoke. I've been alright. The reason why I know Stefan is because one of the things I did recently was I went to EU, uh, and uh I traveled all up and down uh the Romania in Brashav and Sh be Cebu and uh Bucharest and all those other places, but and I checked out the mountains and Draculus Castle and um big old salt mine uh and and places like this. Very interesting. Um I met some uh uh some people even even uh competed in a small poker tournament in Bucharest and uh didn't didn't win, of course. Um and then um I went and I saw uh in Eindhoven, Netherlands, I went to the Inexo Acceleration Day, which is where I met Stefan. Okay, and and yeah, so I was seeing the no veg or extremely low veg plants, um, however those are articulated, and and and that whole thing. And I did you go meet Dom? I did meet. I've known Dominique, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:32

Yeah, great. But you that's where you were at, Dom's place?

SPEAKER_03 9:35

Yes, I was at his uh experimental greenhouse location where where he decided to have the event, which is pretty cool.

SPEAKER_05 9:41

Yeah, no, that's great. That is definitely a place that uh I'll be checking out uh in the uh in the future years for sure. He put the invite out to me last time I saw him. And uh I love what those guys are doing. I love the idea of having these very specific sort of you know, RD cannabis rooms for so many different things from feed validations to spectrums to you know all of it, like just IPM. There's so much important work that needs to be done. And I love the idea of having uh a you know a place or places like that in the future that uh are able to offer that to companies because I don't really think some cannabis companies understand like the the level of value that that can offer you, you know, where you're just like you know, you're doing the white papers, you're doing the scientific work before you decide to uh you know toss $10 million in and build this giant facility.

SPEAKER_03 10:36

Yeah, absolutely. Or like, you know, like the bit the bugbear for me is like resistance and like how you quantify that in plants, which we talked a lot about, I think, last time. But um, yeah, I just feel like it's um for one, we don't have all the information anyways, it's nascent, but also um, yeah, man, if you're gonna spend like a million dollars on seeds or or cuttings or whatever, you know, to get your your um your production. If someone says that they're resistant to something and then they're not, there's not even recourse for you, you just lose potentially, or you're just at or or if you're relying on it more than other factors, then that could be a big deal for people. And also for the home grower, too. You know, I see people they might uh feel like the plants they got were resistant to the reclaimed so some some way, and then they think, oh, it's my fault. I did bad uh when it was maybe the plant instead. So I don't like that either.

SPEAKER_05 11:31

Personally, absolutely, you know, there's all sorts of different ways that you can help growers, obviously, being an IPM and a bug specialist. Have you ever leaned into the idea of kind of fine helping like who would know better than the bug guy which cultivars are the most resistant to bugs? And I, you know, Skunkman Sam, and I'm I'm having a brain fart right now, but there's another word, it's not just about resistance, right? There's a there's an there's like in what context, you know, like you mean like the word like tolerance, yeah, like tolerance, like there's resistance and then, but it's not tolerance. There was another word that he brought up one day that was like, look, there's two ways of looking at IPM. You want to get plants that obviously aren't susceptibility, okay? Yeah, resistance and susceptibility, and how they aren't the same thing. And I just think like you could hold a real big value as you travel throughout and you find cultivars that have those, uh, in regards to powdery mildews or whatever different uh levels of bug infestations, that would be a high value for people who are building facilities and buying out, you know, ready to purchase their cultivars. You know, you're are you ever able to help when you with your consulting in that sort of sense, where obviously you have all this bug knowledge, but are you also tying it to the knowledge that you're gaining as you do more scientific cannabis work that, yeah, you know, I saw this plant and it just didn't seem to be affected in any way by such and such. Do you kind of are you starting to build that repertoire in your uh in your background?

SPEAKER_03 13:17

Yeah, a little bit. It's um because like in in because I worked in other crops too. So in that case, definitely in cannabis, there's a lot to be unpacked still, I feel like. And um you know, for for for another thing, like a big part of like resistance standards or susceptibility or tolerance, however, we sort of enunciate that, however we define these terms, like you know, a lot of these are always going to have some sort of resistance, uh, sorry, limitation, usually. Uh, sometimes you even have trade-offs, right? So, like in the cannabis space, you wouldn't necessarily want a plant that's resistant if it meant that it doesn't smell the way that you want it to, doesn't grow the way that you want it to. So a big part of it is pyramiding different kinds of resistance traits uh that are gonna be useful, but then also understanding where those limitations are, so then the other things that you can do besides sweet genetics is uh to sort of uh increase that advantage and support it. So, like maybe you have a plant that has a very special resistance gene, like the like the well, there's examples where like uh plants will lose a gene, uh like the MLO genes in uh cannabis and many other plants, and when they lose some of those genes, two things happen. One, powdery mildew cannot uh infect the plant under most circumstances, because it lacks if the plant lacks a response that's a predictable, reliable response to the movement of pressure on the plant cell that allows it to then like enter in and not have a problem. On the other hand, mycorrhizae and other beneficial fungi and bacteria can't interact and communicate with the plant either. So for scientists knew this for a long time and they were like, well, why didn't these genes uh you know, why didn't they get basically eked out? Because you know, they give susceptibility to powdery mildew and perhaps some other fungi too. The reason is because being able to uh beneficially, mutualistically interact with those fungi, those bacteria that are beneficial, outstripped the susceptibility to powdery mildew. So, like in a natural context, you have it's very complicated. Um it's really hard to be like simple, and uh people I think oversimplify this interaction quite a bit. There's also, of course, microbes that also simulate the immune system and things like that. So it's like um you give the plant lots of good nutrition, but like if it doesn't have like the weapons, it doesn't really matter. Does that make sense? You know, so there's all these different factors you have to consider.

SPEAKER_05 15:55

Well, it just reminds me of Terrence McKenna. How come the deeper in you go, the bigger it gets? And I think of the three-dimensional model, it must have been AI. I don't know if you guys saw it recently. It was you've seen the picture of the cell, and it's just like all these little dots everywhere and squigglies, and look, well, they created like a three-dimensional version of it moving, of a cell moving. And I I stared at it for about 30 minutes the other day, it absolutely blew my mind. It was the most psychedelic thing I've ever seen. And then it realized like, oh yeah, like everything is more complicated than we have any understanding of. And I'm quite certain, even with the level of science that we have and the level of intelligence that the human race has, I sometimes feel like we're still in kindergarten. I I maybe that's just a kind of a humble pie, like, yeah, we're always learning. But after staring at that cell, I thought, holy Christ, there's just no way we know even like one percent of what's going on.

SPEAKER_03 16:58

Just this morning, just this morning, I was reading a report that came out maybe a day ago where these this research group proposed that ribosomes, which are the things that make the proteins in your cells, um are maybe also an ancient symbiotic like endosymbiosis, like with mitochondria uh in eukaryotes. That perhaps this is also the case for ribosomes, which is also interesting to think about too. Um, I didn't read through all of it, so I can't really comment, and I'm not I'm not an evolutionary developmental biologist or any of that stuff, but it's fascinating stuff. I like to read about this kind of thing, and um and you know, on a on a basic level, you know, we as growers like you know, I think that like that kind of like deep esoterica might seem like it's not relevant, but it's actually very relevant, you know. Like in a in this deep dive powdery mildew presentation I'm working on for my YouTube channel, a little video essay about powdery mildew and where it comes from and how it works, I do go into its evolution a little bit to show that it's actually something that came from kind of beneficial soil fungi. And then it used those traits that we always, you know, say are really great, really amazing, allow the plants to have a good interaction and get nutrients, they then turn those to parasitism and become really successful. So don't be afraid or don't be surprised when maybe it's a little more difficult to deal with them. You know what I'm saying? Have a little respect.

SPEAKER_05 18:30

Yeah, have a little respect is as is right. That's absolutely insane. The double-edged sword, right? It's like, oh, we're gonna use all this to slice and dice, and then they flip the sword, it's like, oh shit, now we're over here cutting it all up. That didn't work in our favor quite as much as it did over here. That is interesting. Well, I'll look forward to seeing that powdery mildew uh presentation. I'm always uh I'm always interested to, you know, the first time I photographed powdery mildew, I was just in shock because I was like, okay, that's what powdery mildew looks like. Like, what the hell? Of course, I have to share it because whenever I talk about it, but this was the first image I ever photographed. It was 2008. It's a little blurry, but it gives you an idea. It lets you see how much thicker the trichomes are than the powdery mildew itself, and it lets you see the sort of like almost like exoskeleton insect type body that's just building these like sections almost like little worms. But the first time I saw it under a microscope, I was kind of like, ooh, like it just it didn't make me feel good, I'll tell you that much.

SPEAKER_03 19:44

And think like uh that colony is making all these spores and they're moving around, and you know, um, you know, one of the what I'll say, I'll tell you this. One myth about powdery mildew that's often talked about, and even myself, you know, used to say this as well is that they uh that they that relative humidity or airflow will solve the problem for you, low relative humidity. But the apparently powdery mildew cells are like 70% water, and most fungal cells are like 10% water, and I guess that lets them germinate under dry conditions. They're like out in the sun. Most fungi don't like to be in the sun, right? So, you know, they've they've got all these adapt adaptations. And if you will uh um allow it, if that's possible, I'll send a request here. I do have an example of what the ancestor or like the closest relative of powdery miljus look like for a comparison.

SPEAKER_05 20:44

All right, I feel like this could be like hilarious. Like you could just put up a picture of a person you don't like, and it could be like a kind of comedy skit, but all right, all right. I'm I'm trusting you, Matthew.

SPEAKER_03 20:54

I like to make a bit. That's true. You are right, and that's uh a good idea for later.

SPEAKER_05 20:58

Yeah, this is one of the ancestors of powdery mildew, and then you know, shows someone you don't like. He's the guy responsible for all of it. Yeah, David Spade's been doing it. Oh shit.

SPEAKER_03 21:09

Helio Tales overview Yeah, so Helotes uh Heli's is the uh the overarching order that powdery mildews belong to. A lot of the fungi look like this or this um or this. You know, they've got these cups, they got these webbed mycelium, and they break down wood, basically. And so they turned that into powdery mildew infecting living tissue. So they made this jump from dead material to trees like oaks and beech and birch, like 70 million, 100 million years ago. And then when daisies and herbaceous plants came in around 70 million years ago, 50 million years ago, they jumped. And then That they went gangbusters because they went from a host that lives a long time and doesn't grow very much very fast to a host that's growing, that's germinating, growing, and dying within a year. So evolution is more uh more of a big deal. The plants can also evolve countermeasures quicker, so the powdery mildew had to adapt, and that's why we deal with such a odious powdery mildew that can adapt so much.

SPEAKER_05 22:29

The cups remind me of the bird's nest fungus.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

Yes, very similar, isn't it?

SPEAKER_05 22:35

I wonder if there's a connectivity there in between like the fact that they're growing in almost the same way, except the bird's nest aren't furry like that. They don't have that extra yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:48

I think that well the cup, that cup um shape I think is like pretty ancient.

SPEAKER_05 22:52

Um I think so too.

SPEAKER_03 22:53

A lot of different I don't know if it's uh I don't know if it's a pleomorphy or what where it's like they all evolved it independently or they or there was like an ancestor with it, and then they either independently lost or gained, or that kind of stuff happens all the time. But Powdery Miller doesn't have any of that. They got they went they got rid of all of that. They didn't need rogue. They did go rogue, yes.

SPEAKER_05 23:17

You know, I've always been amazed, and I probably mentioned it maybe before when you were on the show, but I remember reading Paul Stametz talking about how mushrooms can literally be just growing near one another and like pull expressions from one another, like literally pull genetic expressions that they don't have without any evolution whatsoever. They just somehow get exposed to it in their morphogenetic resonance. I don't know what pathway that exists, but there has to be some sort of highway or pathway that that is able to happen. But imagine a mushroom growing next to another mushroom that and this mushroom maybe has the ability to squirt out a little acid and break down calcium into liquid, but the other mushroom doesn't have that ability, it can acquire that ability just from growing next to it. Now, I don't know if there's a if the if the hyphae and the and the and the and the the mycelium is interacting under the soil and communicating. I have no idea what it is, but it intrigues me and it truly just lets me know that uh, you know, if anything on this planet is alien, uh it's the fungi.

SPEAKER_03 24:24

Yeah, man, it's uh it's crazy. I know there's like bacteria and stuff that can take uh what's called e DNA or environmental DNA and then integrate that into their own genome. And that's how like that's why biofilms can be so problematic because you can get these maybe closely related or sometimes distantly related microbes and they kind of they can start to exude things, proliferate, absorb those, and then yeah, utilize those things. So it's really crazy with like anti-mic antibiotic resistance. Those uh resistant bacteria get into like the ocean and then they give those uh those segments of DNA to other bacteria, and that's a real thing that's already happened.

SPEAKER_05 25:09

Yeah, it's unbelievable. The science uh it's like this to me is the most exciting kind of science where you're just like figuring out pathways and mechanisms that these things utilize, and really as we're learning, because we don't know how old they are, how long they are, you could start studying something tomorrow that basically changed later in the afternoon, not like a thousand years or a million years. Like we there's no idea on the timestamp on some of these things because it's uh it's so fluid with with mycelium and fungi and bacteria.

SPEAKER_03 25:44

Pottery mildew does it intra seasonally. Um, you can get adaptations and specializations to various crops and even cultivars, and they can break resistances and resistant genes, their effect within like one season. It's been shown in other crops. That's why, you know, and the reason for this, if you want to go into why that's crazy, is that to get to where they were, powdery mildews lost a bunch of genes that regulate their genome. And to oversimplify it to make it an interesting story, they've got like 60% of all the genes in their body are for manipulating the plant. And when those barriers went away, they basically just started mutating all the time, moving around on the genome. And for us, that would kill us, but for them, it made it so that when they make like millions of spores, those genes that are a lemon, those interactions that don't work, they die off. The ones that do, however, well, they're successful, and then they iterate on that, they iterate on that, and each successful colony does this very quickly. So, yeah, isn't that crazy? So that's what we're contending with with powdery mildews, especially the ones in cannabis, which I'm sorry to say, we have some of the really hybrid prone and mutation prone, adaption prone, uh wide host species type species that we deal with.

SPEAKER_05 27:09

Well, think of how many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of small little laboratories, indoor growers have been growing powdery mildew and breeding powdery mildew and teaching it resistance. And instead of just, you know, I guess learning. And I've always been like, oh, you just need to set off a nuclear bomb in there and you'll be fine. Just uh, you know, bomb the whole thing. I mean, generally we would reserve that for the for the uh two-spotted spider mites there, but uh powdery mildew, I saw wreck uh wreak havoc on so many grower friends of mine. And there's always so, oh you just use the 8.3, oh you just do this, you just do that. There's always people that have sort of figured little things out that work for them, but with powdery mildew, my worry is much like drying hash, that the solution for drying hash in Colorado is not the solution for drying hash in Oregon. Um, and I'm guessing bugs are no different.

SPEAKER_03 28:07

Yes, I I feel this is the the truth. I feel like this is the the case for a lot of people, and so I it's really hard to be um it's hard to be broad and generalized when it comes to that kind of a thing. It's always context dependent. And also what are your goals too? You know, like uh, you know, obviously scale is a big part of that. Um, but like other things are really important to as well. Like, you know, maybe you don't want to use certain products, certainly noxious compounds shouldn't be used ever. But um, you know, it's all about like what you have access to. When I work with people in different countries, that's a big one too. It's like you can't just say, oh, get this product, like no, we can't get this here, or or there might be a supply issue, or or you might need to have alternatives, or that kind of a thing, too. So there's all the yeah, you can't cultivate yourself out of um like extrinsic, extraneous factors that are overwhelming. And having a ton of powdery mildew in your area that's all mutating all around, that kind of stuff might be the case for you, for example. Um, and you can't control that you have an ag plot of land right next to you with the you know with the host species rapidly changing for sure. Well said.

SPEAKER_05 29:21

Can you hear me change it? We can hear you. You sound perfect.

SPEAKER_02 29:25

Is there nothing?

SPEAKER_05 29:26

I had to mute you earlier because there's no echo now. Yeah, it was an echo, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 29:30

Ah, I got the headphones on. That works all the time, right?

SPEAKER_05 29:33

You know what? I'm the same boat, Mark. I just wear the headphones now. Yeah, it's not the funnest thing to do for four hours at a time, but holy look at these regulars just popping in like it's Sunday at 9 a.m. or something.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

Hey Matt, good to see you again. Good to always hear you. It's uh likewise. Yeah, uh reminiscent of uh couple conversations we've had. Uh and uh I don't know if you knew this, but you know, in a former life when I was working at a chemical company, we were working on wood preservatives, and you know, a big thing about a wood preservative, and we're not talking about Viagra people, get your mind out of the gutter here. Um is uh yeah, so that that green jungle juice that they squeeze into lumber, so you could use it for picnic tables and boat docks, and you know, um the biggest, you know, well, one of the issues is termites, but another big issue is fungi, fungi, fungi. And I think like wood, if you think about it, well, it grows on trees, right? Um so many, like one line this year. Uh right, it's like so it grows on trees. And think about it, if there was no wood decay fungi, all the all the forests uh would have like you know fallen trees over and nothing would degrade it. So it's a good thing we do have fungi that basically live off, you know, dead timber, right? Because that helps keep the forest clean, I guess. I don't know. I mean you could think about it just in terms of there's an available food source, right? And if it's wet enough and the spores are there, yeah, they're gonna take advantage of it. And you know, goddamn, you know, I mean, stam it says it all the time. They have their own fucking kingdom, right? I mean, it's like they're as diverse as like the animal kingdom, you know. Uh, you could have what little toads, you could have big elephants, you could have polar bears and dogs and us, and right. I mean, fungi are just as it's a standalone kingdom.

SPEAKER_05 31:42

There's no need to be able to do it. Yeah, it is, and it's a standalone kingdom. And the reason that is, is because it's the only there's the only thing we've ever found in space still living, trapped in cosmic radiation pressure, was spores. So spores can travel space, and broccoli can't, and frogs can't, and nothing else can, but fucking spores can continue.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

Oh tardigrades so tardigrades can't. There you go. Yeah, and and probably roaches too, right? Um, so they're working on it. What what we learned by like so we were particularly, Matthew, looking at like Basidiomyces and um uh trumadys versicolor, I think is another one. Okay, the turkey tails, yeah, yeah. Turkey tails, two kinds of of fun fungi attack would so if you if you just put like untreated lumber out in North America or anywhere really, in fact, in the tropics, it's worse. Yeah, eventually it basically succumbs to fungal attack, right? But what we found well what we found out, what we found out, which was super interesting, is that the initial attack is not by fungi, and it's no surprise, it's by bacteria, right? So bacteria kind of so when wood like so what we were doing is we were putting stakes in the ground in places like Florida in pretty swampy areas that if you put an untreated piece of wood in the ground, it's gone like a year later, either from termite pressure or from fungi. And we would basically send teams down to the jungle and they'd pull up these stakes, they were like paint stirrers, like this. So I gotta put a wook on a paint stir in case somebody starts acting wook-like, right? Yeah, we can take them on. So, yeah, we would put like paint stirrers, treat them with chemical, put them in the ground, and then go back like you know, like six months at a time, pull them up and look to see if the wood is rotting or whatnot. But what we found out, which was super interesting, is that there's a symbiotic relationship between pseudomonad type bacteria that actually initially infest the wood. And these bacteria are super primitive in that they exude cellulases, which start chopping up the cellulose, and then that rings the dinner bell for the fungi that come in after, you know, and yeah, so there's this symbiotic relationship and probably a chemical communication, chemical ecology network that they somehow communicate with each other because what we found is that if we put the right chemicals in the wood, we could knock out the bacteria, and guess what? The fungi can't come in. Also, the same thing with termites, which I thought was super interesting, is that termites have to, this is really interesting. Termites rely on a bacteria in their gut to re to to hydrolyze cellulose. So they chew cellulose, right? And they're chewing wood, right? But they need this bacteria in the gut. So if you target the bacteria in the gut, you could basically knock out the termite colony, right? So yeah, there's all kinds of ways of approaching these things, but it's interesting perhaps in cannabis, again, that there's some sort of symbiotic relationship between the good microbes, good bacteria, or good, you know, healthy components of a living soil that can basically stave off not only fungal, but also insect pressure, right? I mean, isn't the chemistry that goes on in the rhizosphere, so to speak, also controlling chemical cues that insects basically act on and can either draw insects to a plant or basically, you know, repel them from plants as well?

SPEAKER_03 35:56

Yeah, it is true. It's also true that um there are pathogens that um lots of pathogens, including powdery mildew and some of these necrotrophs, like Fusarium and other ones, that um they basically they co-opt microbes that we would normally consider beneficial. So again, like you know, it's it's like I I encounter a lot of you know uh different opinions about pests and what makes sense or doesn't make sense for um a particular you know uh outlook. Like, do you want to if you add microbes, you won't have pathogens, or if you have a a mulch layer, you won't get you know powdery mildew or certain other uh you know negative microbes like pathogens because you know it benefits the nutrient uptake, or if it benefits the plants like uh rhizosphere in some way that uh helps the good guys, but the good guys can also be the bad guys sometimes. There's a lot of contextual things that happen. And certainly, like in the case of powdery mildews, they used to be good guys, kind of. And then they you know, through association, lots of symbioses, mutualists, parasites, those can switch too. You know, you get parasites that become more mutualistic with their hosts sometimes over long and short evolutionary time periods. Um all of that stuff is at is in play. And I think that like, yeah, if you haven't, if you really, you know, if you oversimplify the biology, even if you're someone who's a very big fan of like implementing biology, uh, you can still make yourself vulnerable to issues.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

But certainly like you can't affect one system without somehow affecting the other. Like, there's like so the time course of evolution, especially with fungi, have learned how to take advantage of available food sources, energy sources, you know. You think about like even just evolution in general. I mean, the organisms that live down on those vents in the ocean that is spewing out hydrogen sulfide, right, which is rotten egg, right? And they figured out, oh, there's there's sulfur here. Let's see, what can we do? Like, how can we somehow, you know, use this as a food source? So if there's a food source on planet Earth, there's a fungi or a whole zoo of fungi that have figured out how to use it as a as a productive food source.

SPEAKER_03 38:30

For energy. Well, like, well, for powdery mildews, you know, as they became, and we don't have all the information about, you know, uh, you know, all the degrad all the grid graduations and all this sort of stuff, but by and large, you know, as these as pattery mildews became what they were now, what they are now today, uh, they lost a bunch of genes that regulated their genome, but also they lost genes that were related to taking up uh and processing metabolites and uh and organic matter that they had in their previous lifeside lifestyle, no longer became useful or helpful. There are bacteria and aphids that are the same way, you know, they were a free living E. coli, and then they became, you know, defense uh, you know, bacteria for them or other sorts of really important nutrient synthesizers or amino acid synthesizers for the host. Anyways, you know, and their genome got broken down in aphist, uh, and now they're like a symbiont. So in powdery mildews, they lost like the ability to assimilate certain kinds of phosphorus sources outside of living plant tissue phosphorus sources, uh sulfur sources, and other sorts of nutrients and breaking those down. They got they even lost some because they still need cellulase and other ones to break down cellulose, but they lost other cellulase type enzymes that break down other woody material because they don't use it. They're mostly on leaves, sometimes on stem material, sometimes on it depends a lot on the species we're talking about here, but in like the ones that most people deal with on like herbaceous vegetable crops, um, you know, they do they can also be on the flower too of certain plants or on the fruits as well. So they evolve, they evolved and they honed to only really use because the genes that were lost didn't really matter, right? So now they are very much honed to um manipulating the plant and getting their own resources to the detriment of those other lifestyle genes that were useful in the past. But there's a risk to this. I think you're familiar, Mark, with Muller's Ratchet. I'm not the idea that um basically as you tack on mutations, or if you become more mutable, if your genome becomes more prone to these mutations and stuff, then you know it's it could be it could give you some benefits, but over time there's this breakdown in your genetics and your genome, and it makes it, you know, it makes you very fragile, maybe adaption lame. You know, you become you kind of an evolutionary dead end can occur. Or like your ability to like regulate uh you know basic important processes could go out of whack. So there's like a there's a there's like a um idea that as this process continues, you get like what happens in aphids, where the bacteria that used to be a type of E. coli uh became um you know almost like integrated into the genome uh of the aphid, or at least it's passed on vertically and it lost all the genes that were important for um even synthesizing nutrients for itself, some of them. So it's kind of incredible incredible. Like there's no free lunch in physics, which I think is the point you were making, and I think it's eloquently put.

SPEAKER_02 41:41

Yeah. No free lunch in physics, that's good.

SPEAKER_03 41:44

Yeah, yeah. But that's true for plant defense too, you know. Like um, you know, there's weaknesses that the pests have, there's weaknesses that the plants have, and they've learned to exploit them. So, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that there's like, you know, uh three-handed handshakes and things like this that go a little bit indirect that we also have to consider. And those interactions, you're right, could be more efficient than um you know, going at it headlong. If you only have to get rid of the bacteria, you don't have to spray like a noxious insecticide, right? Um, for powdery mildew, maybe we can apply something that is well, sulfur is an example, but you can't use it in all cases. But like, you know, it's not probably probably not going to resist wettable sulfur anytime soon. At the same time, you know, there's like viruses, there's mycoviruses that naturally exist in the in the on the planet and apparently are very common, uh, according to some studies. And they make powdery mildews hypovirulent, and it makes them unable to colonize the plant surface or do it very, very poorly.

SPEAKER_02 42:48

Well, and and and you you gotta wonder, I mean, the other the other factor that that makes me think about like what you're talking about is then you throw humans into the equation, right? Yes, like yeah, exactly. It's like between like you know, cross-contaminate. I mean, we could be on one continent and a day later be on a completely different continent, right? And be cross-contaminating, you know, biomes, you know, by a jet plane, right? Uh you know, and and a perfect example of this that you'll you'll love too is the Fermosin termite is actually not native to North America. And actually, yeah, check this out, ATN. So when they brought surplus equipment back from the Southern Pacific after World War II, they brought a lot of equipment that that was uh crated up in wood back to Air Force bases and Navy bases along the southern United States. And they didn't realize, but there were Fermosen termites that had infested those crates, and that's what brought the Fermosen termite to say.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

uh Louisiana and you know like in and around uh you know the French quarter and in and around New Orleans uh they had a had had a huge formosin term and Formosans are are man they will eat through concrete to get the wood they are just the and they fly so they'll get up into your soffits and up into the uh you know the framing of your wood they're just uniquely they eat dead and living wood which is not usually the case right that's what makes them so like onerous uh that's a big part of it at least yeah so like the the the white subterranean termite that you usually see like down south as long as you have the right building envelope you know around where your wood is like they have these termite shields and then there's usually like baits that they put in and around the structures of homes to actually draw the termites in you know you could kind of keep your homes termite free but those formosins yeah were again I get the point of the discussion was brought to this continent by yeah you know by humans they are the carrier exactly and you can do everything right like what gets me is that you can do like you can like grow like if in this like way that you think is maybe superior or like with like really good rotations or like organically or regeneratively or or in all these different contexts and like you know that's really good for making sure that you are not yourself like kind of spreading the pest or like you have this like really competent defense that might not you know uh uh you know help along their selection pressures as much as possible and on the other hand you can have with you know what I often say in my presentations you know you've got the US has it somewhat too but Brazil China and India are three really big agricultural meccas that you know they spray so much of these compounds that other places say we shouldn't use and that we have laws against using but those chemicals are like a giant gym for those bugs those pests the same ones we deal with they get really good at what they do and then they come over here and then us who were playing the the right game doing the right thing wherever that might be on the earth well now you've got you know the plant crusher 9000 and those plant defenses that you know use those chemicals those proteins the the plant makes those things are you know the same gene resistance genes that work against like DDT in the case of like budworms are the same ones that are detoxifying these natural compounds too so it's not like they're different classes necessarily um you know they do the same thing and there's cross resistance now now the pest comes and is able to take care of the plant no problem so it's like communally globally we have to like we kind of all have to be on the same page and if we're not or we outsource it it's gonna come back to us you can't run you can't outrun it that way and some governments have also thought well it's okay as long as they do it over there as long they do the production over there but that's not true things things move around quicker than they did when the continents were together it's crazy to your point.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

Yeah I think like what one what I'm hearing here is and it's good to be here with you all um my time's gonna be short for a little bit but I'll be back um I hear like we the systems in which we all use right let's just use the word system because it it's a these are systems right and these systems around the world are slightly different from one another and you know I I've had to adapt like I I learned early broad mites were like a hell in high water for me. I had to learn a lot to to disrupt their cycle right uh that alone taught me a tremendous amount like I mean this is years I mean of of learning you know what I mean and I still consider that an ongoing thing you know and I I'm still like keep one eye open thinking about it about the grow you know um you know and then for instance you know you were talking about powder military and botriatus like we use QST713 we we have to I mean we're a regulated business like we can't you know can't not use these things and those that don't know what that is that's an OMIR listed biological fungicide fungicide um fungicidal bacteria uh bacillus subtilis strain so um it's um you know these are things that we have to build systems for um because we don't know and that's again why passing clones around is really dangerous you know because you're you just don't know um I tend to get things tested for eggs at medicinal genomics because even when you think something's cleaned you don't know you know like you could really just you don't know because you've used a system that's worked before um sometimes these things uh have flaws or you miss something or they had a the whatever you're fighting had a uh hatching a day earlier or a day later or you know what I mean there's something that goes goes along with this that breaks that system that you're you you're used to um it's frightening so those that are out there doing this at scale you know what I'm talking about so um you know and even down to a tent grower like you know I encourage you guys to to really develop a system for yourself whether it's sachets or you know whatever it might be building a relationship with that but I think you know everything that I'm hearing from from you Matthew is really amazing because it's it's the truth you know um across the board you know and we all have to kind of learn together because um there's so much you know and it's it's always evolving.

SPEAKER_03 49:54

That's what I think right it's all I don't know all the information either right but it is always evolving. So encouraging that like scholarly attitude I think is really important because also you know we didn't always do it very well in the past but I think more than ever and I mean certainly things are more complicated than ever but also I think the ability to simplify it uh has become more common. So it's a little bit more a lot of a lot of information is more accessible at least a little bit and uh I I see it when I talk to people or go to events and people are like you know people are coming to me uh you know oh I read about this thing about like you know aphid evolution or or how the physiology works or whatever and that's really great because like yeah I think that it gives you informed decisions it makes you it gives you the power to like look at a product even or a biological product or a or a chemistry or a or a whatever and you can be like oh is this relevant or oh maybe there's a way I can accentuate it and make it better you know for my use case you know there's all these really cool avenues of approach that um used to be you don't have the knowledge to live on the technological access but now people got 3D printers and people doing other kinds of cool things by themselves and I think that we'll see a lot of scale there's better products today than we ever had access to like Varinate is another amazing set of tools you know I I recommend for people out there.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

It's great for soft body you know IPM because it's not an oil it's you know it's it it's great. So um yeah there's a lot to share with one another to as I say grow better resin and and grow healthier environments for people to be in be in while they do it. Because it's very you know that's the other side of it is is do we really want to be around this in a in a room you know even sulfur like I I think sulfur is a wonder child right but I think it can be caustic it can be really you know get into your your nose and air pathways I hate sulfur.

SPEAKER_05 52:00

I I am I just I don't people are like I only spray it in veg I'm like have you microscopically photographed your plants in veg and noticed all the trichomes on the leaf surfaces no no I didn't realize that I didn't think they that the plant produced trichomes in at when it was so small I'm like it actually produces trichomes as a seedling seedlings have trichomes on the on the on the epicotal so it's very true I photographed it that's how I learned there was not there was no pictures on the internet I had to take these pictures myself and when I did it fucking blew my mind it was as simple as like one of the reasons I love macro photography is because it can open your mind in a way that maybe you know someone like you or Jeff Lowen fails or someone explaining it on a level it just goes right over their head. But then you show them the picture and you're like oh crazy that's what it looks like it's like yeah there's this sort of I felt with macro photography especially for cannabis the more I took pictures that had never really been posted on mass in public you could find some university uh photographs of an electron scan microscope you know from the 90s you know Yup Dumas from Holland had that there was uh a couple of guys doing the photography Jason King kind of came around but there was no real like for me I learned most of my in my macro world and and you know funny enough Matthew how I learned how to photograph cannabis is very much the opposite of how much the young younger generation is learning today they buy stacking units they buy rail systems where the camera can move a millimeter at a time they have a button where they're moving everything and I'm nothing against that like I was talking to Zoom Gardens in Massachusetts recently and the guy can take like 6000 shots or something in an afternoon he's just taking a thousand shots and stacking them together with a um with a program well I always I did the opposite I took single shots all of my macro photograph photographs that you'll see online are single shots and how I learned how to manipulate and control my depth of field and more importantly how I learned to not go into gardens and say well could you just cut that bud off and you could just cut that butt off and cut that I shot in rooms where the plants were still alive on the stock and I shot in rooms where I'd feel bad if I had to ask them to turn the the fan on off because I didn't want to leave a footprint while I was in the room but I, you know, I could get the fans turned off maybe for five 10 15 minutes at a time and how I learned how to take macro handheld photographs is by going down at six in the morning to my local beach there we have these two big wooden you know almost like uh uh just like uh power lines right big trees that have been stripped down but they were actually just um an entrance to our beach and I would go there and I'd put my camera on that and I'd see these little like weevils and I don't even know the names of them these fat little body they got the antennas amazing bug to learn how to manipulate and move your depth of field because it's moving it almost never stops moving. And you know it took me years to learn that another way to manipulate the depth of field with bugs is if you catch them and put them in the fridge or the freezer for a short period of time you can reduce their animation to the point where they're almost frozen. Now you don't want to freeze them and I'm not torturing and killing them but you you put them in for about a minute a minute and a half you pull them out you got about three or four minutes to photograph that bug before it starts you know moving around again. So bugs were a huge part of how I learned how to um take macro photographs by holding the camera in my hand and and the whole motion of you know just following it it's this tiny little bug um those were some of my funnest photography days by myself people would walk by and go what are you doing? I have this lens it's like this long you know I'm holding it right up against the tree it's like a millimeter away from from the tree and then you show the person the picture and they're like that's what's on the tree they're just like once you start macro photographing bugs you immediately learn where Hollywood came up with all of its aliens all of its monsters all of its you know the the the the faces that open up the jowls that have multiple the predator all of that comes from like praying mantis and and different bugs that that are very specifically fucking terrifying to be honest to see under a a very if they were our size yeah forget about it no forget about it if they were 60 pounds dude yeah if they had 60 pound praying mantises we'd all be dead yeah it'd be really bad I think it'd be really terrible yeah or jumping spiders you know that would be terrible that'd be worse than tiger well those are my friends I will be honest the Celicite jumping spider is probably my favorite insect they have personality they have warmth they have attention and awareness that other bugs that I photograph don't even fucking know I'm there. If you get into wasps and bees and the aggressive bugs they know you're there. A lot of the non-aggressive bugs that you don't exist to them they just you're just not you you they're not vibrating at a frequency that can even perceive you jumping images in most of these cases jumping spiders I swear to god recognizes when I smile like the way they turn their heads and they're the little the little motion of their bodies some of my favorite pictures uh have been um have been jumping spiders in fact one of my favorite photos I ever took in my life I remember I had one we were playing uh he was walking around and I was like oh I should put him on like a flower or something and take a picture of him so I I put him on a um that's not the one I put him on um uh candy lion and I photographed um oh damn it's not the right password I really hope I can find this password I'm very curious to hear it and see it yeah here we go I'm just getting into my Flickr account now so I should be able to do this it should I saw this like color wash across you as like oh it's gonna be a bright photo yeah it's a it's a really cool photo in the sense that I've taken better photos since um but this one was pretty cool in the sense that uh oh I like this a lot this fun little attention and and sorry this is actually not uh a a solicidae this is a different uh type um but definitely from that family these are all macro photographs I took that day and then here if you look up close into his eyes over above his mustache you can see the flower petals of the dandelion refracting in the image of inside his eyes so that was a cool one and then I I can never show these without showing my son grabbed this from outside it was just ice and that was the one that had the the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah I did not manipulate this photo at all my four year old son went outside he collected a bunch of ice off the deck and he said dad can you can you take a picture of the ice and I was like sure dude I'll take a picture I took the picture I didn't edit it for like a month I remember going back and looking at it going what the fuck I'm not religious by the way at all I'm not I don't look for things in my imagery that aren't there but I showed this image to like 20 people and they're all like I mean it definitely looks like a person in a robe holding a baby. No it does no I see that for sure I feel like I would see that in some like fantasy video game or something you know absolutely absolutely like some robed figure at least with that hexagonal you know uh framing so you must spend a lot of time on microscopes and in that world don't you feel that when you go into the bug or it really the macroscopic or the microscopic world that you are in a different world doesn't it teach you about perspective and perception and how if you change your perception you change your perspective and I never understood that as much as going into these little tiny worlds where these these little you know creatures exist.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:25

I think so we've we're met you know we uh we are we're born to natively see a certain resolution of the world so of course when we see a bigger or smaller resolution of that it does change things quite a bit I uh I also feel like uh I was gonna say something particular about that um yeah I mean like I feel I've always said that like the mythos about like fairies and like uh even like things like specters and things that are invisible perhaps or not always so visible invisible that's kind of how microbes are too you know when you think about it before people had an idea a very uh you know a crisp well-defined idea of like the microbiological world is what I'm trying to say here um you know we you know obviously we we benefited from these invisible creatures for a long time like with fermentation and making cheeses and other sorts of things like that and to me it's very it's like magical in the traditional sense of the world word really it really is um and and I think a lot of the metaphors from such stories about such creatures like Faye being mischievous uh possibly even dangerous you know because they'll they'll riddle you or they'll or they'll do things that are like um you know counter to what you would think would be the case I feel like it's an excellent metaphor for like you know pest management in my case but also just in looking at the world in general and how these how we interact with these organisms because it can be capricious um it cannot be always so reliable sometimes they're incredibly reliable or you or you can rely on them to be their way about things uh perhaps as well so I think it's very I think it's very useful as a perspective tool.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:14

Absolutely 100% well I think it's almost time for a morning dab for myself if I haven't not had a dab today I actually fly to Michigan today for my first trip ever to Michigan later on after hashtag I'll be heading down there and spending a bunch of time in like Monroe down at the lab I'll be spending time in Lansing and even Detroit so it's kind of uh yeah it'll be interesting to uh see what they got going on. I know they got crazy shit going on they got like the plague in their soil there. What is it but is it bothrytis or is it septoria?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:50

Septoria dude oh my god what is that yeah it's a big it's a big deal and uh as I got as I got through talking to somebody recently about um there you know it's really terrible it's a really difficult pest pathogen it's been in a lot of other crops there's all kinds of septoria kind of like everything I said about powdery mildew practically is true not like its evolution but like its capability its ability to hybridize a lot its ability to to move great distances and its ability to specialize on different kinds of hosts it's got that in spades um through different mechanisms and but what's worse is that whereas powdery mildew true to its symbiotic past you know it kind of only it can only really exist on living tissue septoria does not do this like botrytis or fusarium and some of these other necrotrophs um it it uh destroys the tissues and just keeps going and systemically uh you know uh colonizes the plant but what septorias do uniquely which makes it even worse than some of those others I mentioned is that they're really very they're much more capable subsisting on dead organic tissue and also old other hosts for that matter um in the soil in the substrate so the problem is that you might get rid of them on the crop or you might deal with them or endure them in some way um and then you think everything is fine but because they blew in already and they might even have been in your soil if you got new soil or something like this too they're there now. If they weren't there they're there now right there. So when you know when you put your next plants in it's like you're dealing with them on day one day zero in fact instead of before so there's this kind of so this can have like a double whammy where like the last crop you just had your exposure to them might have been um problematic but doable and now right afterwards you weren't expecting it now you have the rug pulled out of your off your uh under your feet right and that's kind of what what um trips people up quite a bit and then all the plants around if you're growing in a greenhouse or exposed the outdoors you know it's in your region now and there's not a lot of biocontrols for example that uh take it uh you know to the hills there's research from University of Kentucky where they looked at a bunch of really common biocontrols that they're very commonly used in cannabis and abroad this for for hemp technically but you know this is still this is how they do the research right and even the noxious compounds even the fungicides you wouldn't use in cannabis were not altogether particularly effective if you consider compared to control you know still like a 30 or 40 percent infection rate is still like not tenable for most crops right um so yeah so so I'm not here to say that I have the secret sauce and I have the the solution and the truth and you should just have to just buy my book or my process you know for $19.99 and you'll have no problems right on it what I'm trying to illustrate is that I don't know anyone who is legitimately doing quantitative You know, testing, which is really important here. I want to say people can make claims about whatever, but I have found a lot of people struggle with septoria. And I find that some people the best solution, the most feasible, practicable solution is actually sometimes to change your exposure to the septoria because it's so overwhelming. Yeah. And maybe there are resistant plants out there, and maybe there are other microbes out there that are going to be more useful or that we can find. But I have found like a lot of the trichodermas and the other ones that people are very familiar with, they're just not cutting it in a way that is economical for people who are growing. Well that's if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:40

I mean like I well go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:42

Yeah, I was saying in a vacuum, in a vacuum or a very controlled space, you could perhaps make it work. But what I'm saying is that people in the field where it matters are having lots of trouble. And I think that that's a really important thing. That's a really important distinction to make, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:06:57

I think it's a really important distinction. You know, I was partnered up with a group down in Michigan. They were outdoor growers, they had about 17 acres going. They were called roll ganics, they were all organic, doing regenerative as much as they could. The sub the Septoria was absolutely destroying them. And so the the the one year they were like, okay, well, the the the the farmers had basically figured, look, it's the rain, it's hitting the soil, and then it's bouncing up onto the plant, and that's how it is. That's the main pathway for like 95% of this shit. And so they did something they didn't want to do. They they covered the whole field in a in a plastic, and it took it took all of minutes before they posted that that Josh and Kelly from Dragonfly Earth Medicine were shaming them on Instagram. And I was like, guys, like, dude, like these guys are trying their hardest. Like, give them props for what they're doing right, not shame for what they're, you know, that because they're using, you know, he was like, Oh, the plastic, you know, you can't you should be using the plastic, which was funny because Josh sent me a video later. He's like, Well, I'm just close, I'm just closing my greenhouse right now. I'm like, oh, with what? He's like, Oh, my tarps. I'm like, what are your tarps made out of? Long pause. He's like, uh, metal, joking, because he knew. And he was like, well, but I use my tarps over and over again, and he's just using that as a one-time. I got where they were coming from, but they don't grow 17 acres. They you know what I mean? Like, they're growing a much smaller amount. It's the vacuum that you speak of. It's easy to come up with fixes in a smaller amount. Go plant it in a 20-acre crop. Now you're into something called agriculture. It's totally different from what we do on the side of a mountain or in our backyard. Now, this is like 17 acres. So they had a hugely successful year from doing that. They didn't want to do it, they didn't like the idea of it, but the plastic was so helpful, it kept the shit from bouncing. Obviously, they trimmed up, they lollipopped as high as they could as well, and they did some other things. These are hardcore farmers that are like, you know, hand putting bukashi by hand into 8,000 plants. Um it's it's a lot of work, you know what I mean? And these guys want to do it right, but not at the expense of losing an entire crop. So they made the choice, we're gonna do this. They ended up getting like 125,000 pounds of fresh frozen um from that, you know, doing that, whereas it was a fraction of that the year before because this damn Septoria just absolutely crushed them.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:31

You know, it's a it's a it's a very relatable story. And and you know, like that's so like your example here, these are like horticultural techniques, right? They aren't even considered like you know, the typical buzzwords of like using a microbial or or some sort of plant extract or something like this, you know. Um, it was by solarization, I think is part of it too, maybe. Uh, and also, yeah, like cutting off the ability for the septoria, because it's true that is a very common way for septorias and many other similar kinds of microbes to bounce up from the substrate into uh the foliage, like you know, like as a contrary to fork to powdery mildew, for example, you know, powdery mildews, ironically, despite their uh lineage being the way that it is, they don't really have an association with the soil, really. Maybe sometimes debris falls, and then in nature the seeds come back up, and then some of these sexual spores that are in this really uh indurated structure, they release, and then sometimes the spores get on the on the no on the young new plants for the next generation. But typically most pottery mildes we care about are asexual, and those spores don't hang around a long time. So, like there's a big difference. You can't use the same logic for one fungus that maybe has a lot of similar physiology to another thing. You have to learn the difference between their life cycles, their abilities, um, what are some of the plants, and there's tons of different septoria, possibly more than if I'm conservative here, maybe three or four species, you know, of septoria that can colonize cannabis, and maybe they have different abilities or um possibly even subtypes that are again specialized for cannabis in particular, and that that remains to be like articulated, but we see it in many other crops, so it wouldn't be surprising to me, especially since cannabis and septoria has been in North America, for example, for hundreds of years, right? That's enough time usually uh for these effects to occur.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:28

I often wonder like if the DEA had half a brain back in the day, if they were just like, we're gonna buy Promix, the company, we're just gonna infest it with mildews and spider mites and thrips, and then all the growers will come and buy it and uh we'll see how well they do. And I I you know I'm not a big conspiracy guy. I've heard the conspiracy that there's ticks that have been released out east, that there's an enormous amount of ticks that make you allergic to meat and all these other things. That just kind of blows by, but I thought, man, like I'll tell you, if you really wanted to eradicate a plant like cannabis, you've got to think they must have been doing some like bug and viral and bacteria work back in the day to they did.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:08

There's well there's document evidence well, there's document evidence of them at least considering it. But my understanding is that there's no real evidence, no real evidence of uh you know, of them actually implementing and and here's the reason. It's for the reason I just said about microbes being different and knowing what they do. So to their credit, there's examples where they looked at like certain fusarium um populations and like seeing like, could we release like a biocontrol, uh plant biocontrol for cannabis using some of these uh you know um pathogens? There's a myth about russet mites being used in this way, but those were that was for uh Russian star thistle. It was not for cannabis. There's russet mites are very species specific, so it wouldn't have worked for cannabis anyways. But people see russet mite, they see government release and they go, oh my god, you know, so but that's not the case. But for this, for these examples here that I'm talking about, um, the problem is that if you were to release it, like Fusarium, for example, that was specialized for this, it's so wildly evolutionarily um vagile that it will probably also screw up our other crops. So it just didn't make sense to use anything that would be capable, or at least that they had access to. This was like decades ago, though. Perhaps there's a more sophisticated solution potential, but um yeah, I think that the problem with using something like that is that it quickly gets out of hand, and there's entire departments, maybe less of them now, currently as I speak, but there were just certainly departments that were um used to like see like to murder board a plan like this and um and see like are there non-target organisms that'll be affected. So usually we're pretty good about that kind of thing uh lately, I would have to say. Um and we've even had some turnarounds for certain um pests using biocontrols and other nox non-noxious treatments, whereas some other ones we still uh spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year trying to uh nail a solution that's uh practical. Like for the spotted lantern fly that keeps spreading around um North America, mostly the US. Oh, you're muted.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:24

I was just saying how crazy it is, the relationship that humans have with bugs. We we have these like beetles. I don't know if they're pine, or it's in Manitoba, they're called pine beetles, and they just climb into the trees, and you can drive through the forest, and you'll just see huge swaths of trees that are like kindling, just basically dry they don't have a drop of moisture in them. These beetles burrow into them and consume these things, and you just gotta wonder like that what is the system? Is it to thin out the trees? Is it something we've accidentally done because we brought this fucking beetle from somewhere it never was able to travel on the back of an RV to another that's usually it?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:02

It's usually that, and then also well, like what could also happen is you, you know, like we have like where I live in California, and I grew up, you know, I think I mentioned this last hash hash church, but I was like in the Boy Scouts growing up. I went to Yosemite, I went up Half Dome as like a 12-year-old or 13-year-old. Um, you know, I went up Mount Whitney as like a 14-year-old. I I've always been an outdoorsy type person, hiker, and also a lot of places in California where we would have oak cover and pine trees and all this stuff. And it's incredibly sad to see um the devastation of the oak trees. And part of the problem is there's exotic beetles that destroy the trees and that kind of thing. But there's also the fact that like because some of these oaks have been allowed to propagate so much and so closely together, it kind of uh it kind of augments the effect of the beetle. And so, like in nature, probably there would be a thinning, like you're talking about a huge extirpation and like naturally, and then you kind of have this like tessellated, you know, developmental like regrowth afterwards. And you know, this is over hundreds, you know, over millions of years, oaks are very ancient. You know, you get these massive groups of oaks that are just everywhere, and then they kind of butt up against the other trees. But nowadays, you know, that's um there's pathways that the beetles can exploit without having anything to countermand them, and usually it would have just been space and time, and maybe some other factors, but now those those big factors are no longer in play. So, like you said, you know, it's totally not related to the pests, like these people who were growing with the tarp, you know, they're just using a a technique, you know, it's not not chemical, not biological, just a changing in the physics of what's going on. And the same thing is true here. That can be extremely important. Um, it's like an emergent property, you know. Uh you can't tell what a how a tidal wave happens by looking at a molecule of water, you know, you can't make those inferences uh at certain scales. And so more becomes complexity just by being more of itself. And I think that's a a really interesting concept to go under.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:22

What did you post there, Dr. Mark?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:24

Yeah, I put a uh paper that I found in chat. I mean, again, I think this is not unique to Japan, but this study was done in Japan on Septoria cannabicola.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:38

Cannabacola, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:41

Yeah, yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:43

So what is that? I mean, I I'm looking at this for the first time.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:46

So Oh yeah. So it's um here actually since you asked. Uh I have it here, right? Yes. So Septoria cannabicola is one of those species I was talking about earlier that colonizes cannabis. But there's other ones too, presumably. Um and they don't seem to be just synonymous with each other, they're actually separate species. How much that matters in the grand scheme of things, I think, uh sort of remains to be fully quantified, but usually different species that are like, I don't know, more than 99 or 98 or whatever the cutoff is in their similarity, like 95% uh similar genome or whatever. Usually there's some differences in what they're capable of, and maybe even are able to hybridize if they're truly the same species. Um but to your point, I have this example from that paper specifically here.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:50

Yeah, so if you look at table one, Matt, there's like a bunch of fungal species that they list there. And I I, you know, again, this is where I get lost in the details of exactly what they're trying to show us here. That all these all these are prevalent in cannabis, or that these can be prevail. So there's Septoria cannabis, which is its own you mean uh this table one here? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:17

Yeah, well you can see so you see, so in the so I I mean we're not.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:21

Maybe you could share share your screen. Yeah, Marcus, let him share his screen so he can show this.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:30

Can he not share his screen?

SPEAKER_03 1:19:32

Yeah, I can share.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:34

Yeah, you shared earlier.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:35

You asked me permission, which was great, because sometimes when I was gonna share my uh my presentation too, but let's look at this. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Since we're talking about here, here we have this.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:46

So welcome back, Etienne.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:49

Hey there. Um so yeah, this table and lists of isolates and reference sequences used in the study. So this is just from Jen Gen Bake. So they're just looking at these. You see, these are the species on this side, fungal species on the left, the locality they found them in, the host they found them on, the strain number that they were given, if given, and then these appear to be the uh genes, right? Yes, these are the excess. So these are like different, like these are like different like the um uh genetic information, like the ITS band and stuff that they use to like compare different like fungi in this case, for example. Like with battery mildew, you can't tell different species uh enough just by using like ITS. You have to use like different other genes too that are conserved.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:36

And those are hot links, right? Like do those link right to a gene database or something like that that tell you about the gene?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:43

It looks like they are NCBI links still. Yeah. If I check them, yeah. Uh, but you could certainly do you could certainly access them. That's what I'm talking about when it comes to like the ability to use this information uh for the individual is becoming more possible. Um there's like hiccups, and I don't I don't always use it or find it practical to do so, but there's people out there, researchers and stuff, that you know, I think that with uh certain mechanisms and and software programs, people can look at the mic. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:15

Well with a AI and generic algorithm, you could basically mine all kinds of information here. But I I guess he so is is the is the important thing to kind of take away is that so there's a couple different species that live on cannabis, right? Or those are just different locations?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:34

Well, these are different. Well, here, yeah, so to to answer exigently, you've got this example here, this is cannabis sativa, but this septoria, all these other septoria cannabis species, this is on cannabis, is on cannabis, these are all the same species, Septoria cannabis. But they're different, you see, they're different strains. You see. So they're different populations that were um so that's a strain of the fungus, not the cannabis, right? Yes. That's my understanding. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:06

Yeah, see, because you see how they have um because there is no such thing as a strain of cannabis.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:11

Yeah, there is no bingo. Sorry, maybe that's a dumb question. Yeah, get out of here, man.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:20

No dumb questions, especially from the only PhD in the room.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:24

Yeah, no, serious. Yeah, exactly. You uh you gotta you gotta really get it together here. No, but let me show you this. Let me show you this.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:31

Um Yeah, so maybe go to your presentation, which is probably more informative than that paper.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:36

No, no, no. It was a good paper. It was it's featured in this presentation, so you cut you got me to it. You uh you got to the quick of the good setup for exactly, exactly. So so uh here we go. So this is from a master IPM presentation I made a while ago. Um it's not available anywhere, and I'm re-orienting some of the slides, but like when I talked about Septoria recently in Missouri, for example, um I took some of these slides here. So there's so these are all so they're they belong to a group of fungi that are not necessarily related by lineage, but are related in what they do and how they how we as growers articulate them. So they're called leaf spot fungi because they make a spot in their leaves, right? So um I take it this is all outdoor. It's definitely something that I don't see often in indoor. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:35

That looks like Colombian outdoor plants.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:39

Yeah, exactly. Right. So so Septoria, if you've never seen for people who've never seen it before, um fucking flesh eater's disease for for plants. Yeah, basically, yeah, lechoniasis or like uh leper leper disorder, you know, leprosy. So you've got necrosis in the in the middle here. This is leaf tissue that was already used up and eaten, and you've got spore-producing structures that are in here, basically. And then as it expands outward in a radial way, you get this like chlorosis, and that is the fungus working currently, you know, and so this will become brown, the yellow will become brown, right? And um, you know, this is these are different examples of people who've got leaf spot fungi of different kinds. If I go back, you know, it's not just Septoria, it's alternaria. There's another group like Bipolaris and Circospora and Anthrachnos, which some people have heard of before, and a bunch of other ones, which I'm not going to name here. So, but these are all leaf spot fungi, and probably perhaps, you know, several of these, actually, all of these have been found in cannabis, uh different species of um, maybe only one species in different genera. These are all different groups of species. Um, but yeah, if that makes sense. So, like for example, this Septoria cannabis species that they found here, that they have here in this example from this report from Kentucky, you know, it's the brown lesion, yellow circle that I was talking about earlier. You mostly get it on the bottom uh of the leaves as it starts coming out from the substrate. From the splash back. From the splash, exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:18

Just climbing the plant and decimating it.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:21

That's what your friends were trying to avoid, too.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:24

Oh, trust me, I know. With like thousands of plants.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:29

And and so, like, for example, if you were trying to look at because people always ask me, well, what plants should I companion plant or not companion plant? Uh, what should I use? And um, you know, this is all speculative. I want to I want to be really responsible and and put myself away from the competition and other peers by saying, we don't all know the answers, you know, um, because we don't. But like if you were to look at Sortoria cannabis speculatively, and you were to look at species that are closely related to it, this is a like a phylogenetic tree, um, which basically means that they're looking at the relationship, the evolutionary pathway somewhat of different species and how they correlate with other relatives that are closely related. So you can see here in this sort of uh line graph that you've got Septoria can't possibly a different species altogether, which we could get into called neocannabina, but the taxonomy for Septoria is so uh chaotic that I I'm not I don't think anyone really knows right now if this is a different species or if it's the same species or something like this, because that stuff happens a lot. So getting away from all that stuff, um, you can see that Septoria cannabis is closely related to these other species here. This uh calindulae, this Violi Pellustris, you know, this Septoria Sigsbecky. Um, so those are Septorias of that that colonize uh calindula, which are marigolds.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:01

I think I think I found another joke for you while you're doing this. When you're reading through those crazy when you're reading through those crazy names and you're you're like calendula, viola, ad cocksuckeris.

unknown 1:27:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:15

It's like that uh is it like parks and recreation where the guy was like, I just um use rappers' names for my plants? Like, oh look at those ludicrouses, they're really blue and really nice.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:26

Yeah, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:28

Absolutely. Well, you know, uh scientists make some really so you think that's a joke, but you're actually hundreds of years old for it because um I challenge you to find what the Venus flytraps scientific name is and what it means. Um or orchids for that matter, uh, and what what their what their uh nomenclature refers to, and uh and how that has to do with uh Greek and ancient Roman society. You can just have fun with that one. But uh tell us about the Venus.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:00

This flytrap, wait a second. Okay. Okay. So what what's it deal with that?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:06

Well, it's a euphemism for something that's not YouTube appropriate. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:16

So yes, so that's where the the scientific name comes from. And for orchids, um, you know, it referred to Twitch it. Yes. It refers to the same reason why we say testament in uh in English, if you want to look at the etymology of that word.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:32

So, anyways, uh what another nickname for it is? The meadow clam.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:39

That's right. So calenduly marigolds, right? Maybe you don't grow those near a cannabis. Um uh and then this seags becia, this is uh St. Paul's wart. So like warts, wart, wart, wart, wart uh plants. If you have those around, if you're able to find what those are. Oh, Etienne, were you saying something? Oh, okay, sorry. You were muted, but I still I still paid attention.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:09

Um saying so when you said wart, I went at St. John's wart, you know, so yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:14

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so like, you know, so you know, these might be plants, these marigolds, these um, you know, these violets, you know, Viola is violet. So so if you have some of these plants nearby, you know, maybe be a little extra cautious or if they're in your on your property if you're a home grower or a commercial grower, you know, this might be, you know, this might be a vector point, speculatively. You know, I just wanted to say it that way.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:38

But like someone in cannabis is gonna see that as a gauntlet throwdown, they're gonna be like, I'm gonna start a greenhouse of marigolds next to my greenhouse of cannabis. Fuck Matthew and fuck Hash George.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:49

You know what? You know what? Add it, add to the scientific, you know, uh uh information and and make a study about it. That's how I will definitely support that 100%.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:00

You know, when I first when I went and when I first went to um Rubicon Organics, it's uh organic greenhouse grow here in Canada, and on either side of this greenhouse, right? They got like their five acres or whatever, and then there's five acres next to them on one side and five acres next to them on the other side, and it's raspberries and blueberries. And these are extremely sprayed crops, these are extremely like they get powdery mildew, they get all sorts of different things, and I just thought, wow, like that is kind of a crazy place to grow wheat, but they seem to pull it off. I don't see them spraying or or any of that. And oh, another scientist. It's a scientist kind of day here on Hash Church. How's it going, Jeff?

SPEAKER_04 1:30:48

Oh, good. Wait a minute, hang on a second. There you go.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:51

He did it, he pulled it off. We're just uh Matthew was just presenting on all things powdery mildew and bugs and septoria and uh just interesting. I don't know if you've ever met Matthew, the sink angel. He's the butt he's the bug guy. You guys know each other? Hello, Jeff.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:07

I'm a chemist. I don't think I have met you before.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:10

So we met we met so we met Jeff through Dr. Mark. Dr. Mark uh brought Jeff on to Asturch. And and I just met Jeff in person for the first time in Massachusetts, like walking around the corner.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:20

Or me and Mark Matt.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:21

I know, he's just standing there, just like looking at me, kind of the way I was looking at him. Like, dude, that guy looks like I know him.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:29

Yeah, yeah. I um really didn't expect to see you there. You really didn't.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:36

You were definitely surprised to see me. Yeah, you're like, why are you here? I'm like, it's a cannabis event, man. What do you mean? Like, this is my this is what I do.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:46

It's a long way from uh long way from Vancouver. But um hey, alright. So yeah, it's good to see you, Professor Mark. Good to see you, Etienne.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:54

Hey, good to see you. We'll see you in just a couple days, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:32:00

That's correct, yeah. That's correct. I will be an MJ Unpacked. I have been uh working hard on my preparations. The um the fabric arts are a harsh mistress, um, and I have been um preparing um some fresh pants for the event.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:19

Um for those of you who don't know, Jeff wears tie-dye pants.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:23

Oh, I know, trust me. Not just tie-dye pants.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:27

So I'm uh yeah, yeah. So I've uh I've I've handmade my batch. I made uh I I I tried to work in the the colors. This is challenging because um uh a lot of the like MJ unpacked media. Oh, that's great. A lot of the MJ unpacked media is um like purple and orange, which are difficult colors to use together.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:55

Are you making them yourself? Yeah, yeah. Listen, you should reach out to Forrest, who's a who was a regular on Hash Church. He he had a son with he's got a son who had epilepsy, still has epilepsy. Caladrias Network, Forrest is absolutely on on another level with his tie-dyeing. It is insane. Dude, I've been trying to get a tie-dye from this guy for like years, just for my son. I'm like, dude, yeah, the Wade Wade tie-dye, right? No, dude, the Wade Laughter tie-dye with Wade's face. I was just like, oh my god, dude, this is so good. So yeah, I will gladly link you up and maybe he can just uh you know a five-minute conversation, give you a couple of tips and tricks, and uh send you on your way. I feel like you can follow SOPs.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:46

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, well, that sounds fun. Right on.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:51

So, Jeff, Jeff, tell everybody about the panel that we're gonna have down in uh Atlantic City here.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:57

Oh yeah. Um, yeah, so uh we will uh we'll be having a uh a panel with the title Um Cannabinoid Synthesis from Safety Risks to Drug Discovery. I believe I've uh I I've I may have minorly butchered that. Um but uh uh um and I've been putting together the slides for it. I basically um uh this is gonna be fun for me because uh I really don't have to do that much. Um everyone else gave me slides, and then I'm just weaving them together into a slideshow, and um the whole panel is just gonna be um Professor Mark and uh um Dr. Chris Hidalla from Proverdi Labs. And um it's gonna be Tesfe Tesphasian now from Colorado or from Sunflower Wellness. Sunflower therapy wellness yeah am I right? Sunflower wellness?

SPEAKER_02 1:34:58

Yeah, he's he's uh subbing in for Wes, right? Subbing in for Wes, yeah, Wes Crusace was gonna come.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:04

Yeah, yeah. So I was I've been practicing this lineup with Wes uh Crusace in it from Colorado Chromatography and Sunflower uh Wellness is it?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:14

Yeah. Sunflower Wellness, that's right. All right, trying not to butcher names here. Um they now have a new company called Blackstone Therapeutics, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:35:22

Yeah, yeah. They got they got a Wes has a lot of companies, and I don't know, like I think some of his, you know, some of these other folks that work with him are affiliated with some of the companies, but not other like I was gonna get to ask him more about it while I was at MJ Unpacked, but um unfortunately he had a uh untimely family emergency and couldn't join us. So um we have Tesfe. Um and anyway, yeah, so um we'll start out talking about natural cannabinoids, and we'll just introduce like some chemistry concepts and like kind of the mirror images of the molecules, stuff like that. Um, and then we'll talk about uh the structural variation of cannabinoid molecules and what you can do and which structural modifications you need chemistry for, and what some of those results are, how how you get new functions out of cannabinoid molecules from uh chemistry. So um, and we'll talk about the risks, how hard it is to purify synthetic cannabinoids often, um, and uh some of the uh and and we'll even Mark Professor Mark is gonna get to show off um his trick for how to make completely pure delta 8 THC.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:33

In case you want to know, in case the world needs to know. If you guys want Delta 8 T.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:39

But you know, actually, the world does need like if you want to understand the if you want to understand the pharmacology of these molecules, this is a really hard thing about cannabinoids. Is um Well I guess the way pharmacology is done is understanding single molecules and then understanding their synergies one-on-one. And but with cannabinoids, man, the complexity of the mixtures is usually so high that it's very challenging.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:04

Is it the immersion properties we were talking about earlier? I'd made the point that like more is different, you know, like the physicist says. I forgot, I'm forgetting his name, I'm blinking on his name right now, but he's in my presentations. I always mention because you know you can't tell like how a tidal wave works or a creek works or how an ocean works from looking at like a teardrop or looking at a molecule of HCO or simply hydrogen and oxygen, right? You could figure that out more, changes it, right? So cannabinoids, obviously, right, you know, physiologically.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:36

Yeah, yeah, you're at a point where the mixture is complex enough that it can sometimes be challenging to interpret what's happening.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:49

Yeah, or what could happen.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:52

To compare experimental results between different studies because they have different batches and you don't know what impurities are there in each one, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:38:01

That's a really good point.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:02

Uh and comparing, you know, comparing anything clinical to the real world also. So uh you know, it just yeah. Cannabis is a tough one, man. It's not like yeah, it's not like they it's not like simple drugs.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:17

Can I ask some questions? Is it is anyone here familiar with C B D V? C B D V. Yeah. Yeah, right? Yeah, okay, because I read this, I read a study about uh C B D V being um uh so plants that had high C B D V in them that they studied versus those that did not, uh proportionally, they uh were less um good hosts for cannabis aphids, which was interesting to me. Um, especially since they're specialists, so they would you would think that and maybe they resist all the other cannabinoids, fine. Maybe this is a novel thing, you know, maybe it's more novel than the other cannabinoids. I don't know. But it was interesting because I was like, well, what would be and we have you here on, so it might be the best time to ask this question, which was like, is what you know, if you speculatively, I know there's one maybe not a lot of research on it, but like what are some maybe benefits of CBDV if it could ask such a you know you know newbile question? Or like maybe like what would be some cool things you like about the structure or the pharmacology if you know anything about that? Because it might be cool for other reasons.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:29

Yeah, yeah. So CBDV is a it's like a homologue of CBD. So um uh what that means is that uh there's a a tail part on the molecule that's a little shorter on the C B D V. Is that the varinic acid? Because I was asking that's it derives from a ver yes, what they call the varinic acid, yes. Uh so um, yeah, the CBDVA is uh yeah, right, C synthesized. Well, all right, yeah, I guess, yeah, yeah. So there'll be putatively um the C B D V com is coming from CBG V A, right? Which is synthesized from the virinic acid, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:15

So um I couldn't find very much about what the ver what the virinic nature of it is. Like also there's THCV, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:40:24

Yeah, so what does C B D Well I don't think we really know everything about the pharmacology of C B D yet, right? Like C B D V regulate it because it's so complicated, but also uh like one of the challenges is that again, like this is actually kind of in a way comes back to the same thing about why our knowledge is so limited. That uh like a lot of the studies done with CBD, right? Even many medical studies may have been done with C B D that was not 100% pure. And if there was small amounts of THC in it, that could have had a big result, a big impact on the results, um, without it being accounted for.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:04

So um I uh yeah, I feel like it's never accounted for in that sense because I remember when C B D really became a thing, and then people would get like C B D dominant flower, and they would call it CBD. Just like today, everyone's calling uh volatile organic compounds terps. It's like sure. Some of them, maybe the majority, but not all of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:28

Right, yeah, yeah. They they could be terpenes, terpenoids, or some of them derived from other synthetic pathways, right? Yeah, thyles and thiamins and esters. Yeah, right. Which yeah, so they could be in some cases totally different. So um anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:44

Would we expect a longer tail to make it maybe reside longer in a receptor potentially? That's about the extent of my biochemistry knowledge, so I'm really scraping the barrel here.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:54

I think actually, usually the size of that tail matters, right? Yeah, that does matter, but the structure activity relationship is generally that the binding constant, I guess generally speaking, the binding constant increases, so it actually binds with a longer tail longer the tail.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:12

Right. And um, but also and and something happens between C5. So like THC. THC is an at is a partial agonist at C B1, but THCV with the two carbon shorter side chain is an antagonist. So yeah, so you could change the pharmacology just based on the couple of carbons. Wow. Yeah, there can be a lot of people. C B D V is completely different because again, it's a you know, C B D and THC have very different pharmacology.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:45

Yeah, C B D and THC have extremely different shapes. So it is like the two like CBD is the most yeah, it it's it's a pretty exceptional cannabinoid, actually, compared to m many of the others, in terms of like uh the the sh like how kind of uh chunky it is, I would say, and also uh yeah well there's free rotation about those bars, right, Jeff? But it's gonna, yeah, but it's gonna it's gonna prefer to mostly sit in a state where it's like this, uh basically, with the two parts of the molecule are almost nice to each other. Oh, really? Whereas the THC molecule is allowed to lay way flatter. I mean it's not flat, but it's way flatter. I see. Um that changes like that changes a lot. And this and so the the funny thing about these cannabinoid receptors is that their mode of action is also not like the most simple like lock and key picture that we learn from our like introductory biochemistry course because it's not direct. Their the interaction is generally speaking directed by hydrophobic interactions, which are less locally specific than um the interactions of really polar functional groups, which tend to be very specific and directing. So each molecule, depending on how its structure hits the receptor a little differently and does something a little different to it. Like as Professor Mark is saying, like to the point where even the like the category of activity changes in some cases.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:27

I like how in chemistry truth is truth, and we don't get upset at the at the uh oh you're you're you're you're hydrophobic. How dare you treat water level like that? Yeah, it's not like it's not a belief system. This is just a thing that's occurring in nature. It's just well, hydrophobic, hydrophobic.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:47

There's a yin and then there's a yang there, right? Like one has to be there to counterbalance the other.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:53

And so like I think I've read that hydrophobicity is oh yeah, you can't.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:58

I was just gonna say C C B D, which isn't a CB1 binder, right? It's a negative allosteric inhibitor. Changes the activity of THC. So, like a full spectrum medicine that has both CBD and THC, the THC is gonna work different at the receptor. And I think the same uh pairing is true with CBDV and THCV. So C B D V, similar to CBD, hits the trip receptors, it hits RGRP55. And it's just it's so interesting because if you look at the the number of uh pharmacologist little relevant receptors that these things hit, the acids hit different than the decarboxylate. C B D hits different than than uh than than THC. And now what we know is that CBG, in fact, C BG A is very, very different than the THC and CBC. Or yeah, and then yeah, I've I ignored CBC in that discussion. But this again, Jeff, right? If the cannabis plant teaches us anything, it teaches us the activity is not a single active ingredient, which is used to what the FDA regulates, right? Single active ingredients in a matrix of whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:25

This is a fair challenge, right? Right. Multiple active ingredients each ingredient is also hitting multiple different receptors and systems, and often in ways that we don't completely understand yet.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:38

Yeah.

unknown 1:46:38

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:39

Because like these these biochemical pathways, I mean, they are so complicated. Like they like and they're also they're they're spectacularly redundant. They have feedback loops on feedback loops. A bunch of them don't really do much of anything most of the time, because other stuff compensates for them so much, like because and because there's so much redundancy, but then everyone, you know, they don't all have like designed and intended functions. Yeah, it's like to think, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:47:12

Earlier, well, earlier I was describing like um or vestigial. Yeah, well, well, as like, for example, like some of these pathogens have evolved, some of them have been were like good guys, basically, long story short. And they were they had certain abilities to communicate with the plant and exchange nutrients, but then they lost control of their ability to regulate, and then they became parasites over time because they found that they could just kind of well, this is just speculative, but they could just kind of extract the nutrients and didn't have to worry about the exchange part, and then that you know, over time that really radically changed how they interact with that physiology. That's kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:51

Well, if some yeah, if some you know, right, you can think of it as like if some in that population developed some paratis parasitic behaviors, and that helped them reproduce more. Right, exactly. That's it. That's ecological success. All they need is some tiny edge, and then they begin then now now they're a parasite, and now they're evolving better and better parasitism, right? But a good parasite that that that's successful doesn't kill its host too fast, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:48:22

Which is powdery mildew. It's through is rarely lethal to the plant. It's not great for us, it really messes with us, but it doesn't really kill.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:32

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:33

Not very well.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:34

I mean, so some of them, I mean, probably there were some individuals, there's some probably powdery mildews that will kill a plant right away, but they just don't ever reproduce, so you never see them.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:43

Yeah, or at least not as much, you know. Yeah, it's it's crazy stuff, but like, you know, over time their genes change, or or you get like bacteria. I was talking about uh there's uh yeah, the bacteria, some of the most um core bacteria in aphids that they need the aphids need to like break down the sugars in their body and give them the uh nutrients and synthesize nutrients that they lost the ability to synthesize. Um it was E. coli. It was an E. coli, it was closely related to E. coli. And then over time, as it became a symbiont, it basically like all the genes that weren't important that were important for its like free living form, those go away. And like you said about redundancies and genes, like some of them stayed, and Mueller's ratchet is cranking that, you know, cranking that change, but over time, you know, the genome it basically becomes like uh like endosymbiotic, like like mitochondria or something. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:36

It becomes like an organelle almost, right? Exactly, yeah, exactly. And they are intracellular, they are intracellular. And when you see the frequency with which stuff like that happens, like it's very fascinating to un to to appreciate like how like how how varied and diverse evolution is, the way that like yeah, species can in a way sometimes species can almost merge, right. Or they I mean they become very co-adapted. Um and there's so much potential locked up in there, and all those redundancies and vestigial traits and stuff like that, right? Those are all things that can become activated later, and you know that's why you see it's why you see rant, you know, all these. I mean, you just see so many patterns repeated again and again and again in nature.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:22

So true, so true. Yeah. That's very cool. Isn't it? Yeah, there's a lot of, I feel like there's a lot you can draw out of that. Not only just practically helpful to know, um, you know, uh in the grand scheme, but also metaphorically, I think there's a lot of interesting, you know. I don't like narrativization science. I'm I'm really against it. I try not to do that kind of thing because I don't want to introduce like a weird human bias or something and like what we understand, but it is kind of it can be kind of spiritually beautiful in a way to like look at how interconnected these things are and some of these the physics of some of these interactions and and to take some meaning out of it. Like for me, the idea that just by close association, an organism can go from one end of the spectrum, mutualism, to or perhaps the middle of the spectrum, just simple commensalism, to one or the other, and then switch between them, or even make versions of themselves in the case of microbes that are all along across the spectra, you know, that's all kind of cool. And it shows that like, yeah, the world is very complex and we can't just simplify it.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:30

Or at least not always. I mean not always, yes, yeah. The simplification that we that's what makes the simplifications that we can make so powerful. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:39

I think that's eloquently put, yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:51:41

It's also why I was like definitely nervous when politicians started saying you gotta trust the science. Oh I was like, whoa, just a second. I don't know much about science, but I'm pretty sure we're just not we don't trust anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:55

Science trusts the science.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:56

Yeah, we're still paying we're still paying the price for that. I think I feel like scientists in America are still paying the price for the politicization of science.

SPEAKER_05 1:52:06

It's terrible, dude. Absolutely terrible. It should be remaining neutral, it should have no I mean, I get it. Look, there's lobbying and there's money and there's dollars, and that's always going to try to affect things. And obviously, from a scientific standpoint, it's a lot better when you're funded and you have money and people are giving you money to do the work that you need to do. But holy fuck, is there a level of corruption that can be involved in that? Well, that we clearly all saw, right? We saw it. It was pretty, pretty much.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:38

I get worried about the, you know, there's a lot of commercial incentive now. Scientists are much more encouraged to um develop patents from their research and then spin off companies. And I think that can be great sometimes. I think it can be good to hustle. Um, I'm not totally anti-capitalist, but I have noticed how that can give us a bunch of half that sometimes that can give us half-baked ideas that get hurriedly deployed and they actually do harm to our society. I mean, I believe that we're partly like we're reaping the rewards of what people proposed to be an education boom because of new educational research and science, and they brought a bunch of screens and computers into classrooms. Definitely COVID helped, but there was also there was a there was a big research industry complex around it, also. There were lots and lots of grants to support education innovation, and so people came up with all these you know apps and screen things and stuff like that, and now our kids are dumb and they can't work in the real world.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:46

So unmute myself. I'll add to another part of that. So after I take this bong rep.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:00

Well, I'm in the education business.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:04

And uh you have a very big responsibility, Dr. Mark.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:08

I'm sending You gotta be one of the cool ones.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:11

You gotta fucking you know, get some to the young people.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:14

A week from today I won't be on Hash Church because I'll be attending uh commencement at St. Michael's College where I teach.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:22

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:23

You know, and I tell you what, guys, it is just as a professor, when you watch those kids go across that stage and get their diploma and know that you know you were part of the you know educational system that sent this student into the world. Those students are gonna remember me for the rest of their life. You know, and they're gonna remember we went Jeff knows this. I took two of my students to the ACS meeting this year, and man, I tell you, Jeff, that was just the biggest rush in the world, man. Just watching my students stand in front of their posters at the ACS meeting as Professor XYZ walks by, right? Oh, tell me about your poster, you know, tell tell me about your research, you know, and there I am watching from afar, you know. You know, and you know, I tell you, Mark, you know, you're right, and Jeff, you know, you're right in a way that we've raised this internet uh age kids who've have internet in their pocket, which is a really powerful tool. And all of these tools, AI, you know, I have to be able, as a professor, I have to be able to look at a lab report and understand, is it real or is it AI? Like, like, did they just go to fucking chat GPT and say, oh, here's here's the here's the lab report question, you know, how many moles of calcium chloride, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And just have some AI spit out answer. And I have to read, you know, the some of these questions are it's not just like a value, like 38.5. There's an essay question, right? Like one of the essay questions was um, why are we adding why are we adding uh uh hydrochloric acid to the solution of sodium benzoate? And you know, what we were doing is we were set separating, doing acid-base extraction, separating sodium benzoate, which is now water soluble. Now, when they add the acid, holy shit, this benzoic acid precipitates out, they isolate it by filtration. You know, I mean, it part of it is just like there's that aha moment of learning that again, as a professor, you like to be around the students and you like to be able to guide them into how do you solve problems in the world, you know? Certainly like learning all the elementary aspects of chemistry, physics, and math. Yeah, super, super important. But if you can't translate it into a career where, say, you're looking at, I don't know, if you're working at a grow and you're looking at feeding schedules, or if you're using AI, you know, I'm seeing AI being used, Marcus. You've probably seen this too in the grow, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:57:18

So people are looking at like we did a whole grow AI show just a couple episodes ago with SmartGrow, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:25

Right, with those guys. So uh I was visiting a grow just the other day, uh, and I looked at their system and yeah, they're using AI. I tell you, man, I mean, to me, it's like, yeah, there are these tools that exist today, but do you still need like just because you have a smartphone, smartphone plus dumb person is dumb output. You need smart person, smartphone. Smart person and smartphone could now be so I I guess what I mean to say is that it's a tool, right? And like any tool, you have to be able to use it in a productive way, but you still need to have the human element of input and creativity. So when I'm looking at like one of these lab reports and it's just cut and pasted right out of Chat GPT, you should see it, Jeff. I mean, again, we're like calculating moles, calculating, you know, yields and rates and stuff like that. You could easily program that out of AI. But if you get the wrong, like if you don't understand difference between first order rate constant and second order, and you build the AI model wrong, you're gonna get a wrong answer. So you still have to know enough chemistry going into using AI in order for you to use it productively in a way that it actually makes sense. I don't know, is that all making sense kind of like right? Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_04 1:59:00

I think also, I mean, you've gotta you gotta like people still need to be able to do stuff with their hands. Right? You gotta be able to figure stuff out sometimes, right? Like the real world's messy. So um Well you said. That was a lot of what I was seeing. That was a lot of see what I what I was seeing um towards the end of my time. I was teaching lots of labs, and I've seen students come in who can't turn a screw, you know, they can't like they they don't know what a Phillips head is. They uh they kind of and their hands are just soft and weak. I don't know. They just you know, it's like you you say, like, I mean, you know, they they say like I can't tighten this clamp anymore. You just go over. It's just like what?

SPEAKER_05 1:59:40

Listen, I saw I saw a side-by-side picture of what a man looked like like 40 or 50 or 60 years ago versus today, like like a 25-year-old man. And the 25-year-old man from like 50 years ago or whatever is ridiculous, dude. Like full crazy hairy chest, big density, big, just big, like full mustache, like it's testosterone. That's it. You put a lot of that shit in, you get manly men, you take it out.

SPEAKER_02 2:00:09

You just described me, Mark. I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:14

There you go. Well, they put a picture of a 25-year-old guy next to him, and he was like super skinny, didn't have a little bit of a berry on my chest, you know.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:26

There might be some other genetics at play. Absolutely. I I mean hearing, and I'm not like a not like a milk, you know, dairy supremacist or something, like some people I see out out there in the world, but like apparently there's like a I was reading about a correlation being really high with people who are taller, maybe larger built, um, and their consumption of milk, but not just their consumption of milk and milk products, but that they come from uh from peoples who you know are not lactose intolerant and have been doing that for a long time. So it's like the diet buildup over time plus the gene adaptations to that equal, you know, this. But you have to have both. You can't just like start drinking milk and you'll get like all the benefits, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:01:09

Like some right, some body types aren't gonna use it as well or 100%.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:15

Or other foods for that matter, right? Yeah, so well they're gonna get kidney stones, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:01:19

From all the calcium.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:21

Yeah, exactly. I was visiting, I was visiting my in-laws in Romania, and um uh they love to eat like milk products and like especially like you know, spoiled milk product yogurts and these sorts of things where there's a a controlled, you know, uh yielding of the of the dairy product to make something else. And uh I just couldn't handle it, man.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:45

Yeah, but when you go to this one area of s of old Soviet Georgia, there the life expectancy is well over a century mark, and one of the things they attribute it to is the yogurt and the cultures in the yogurt. There's one other area, it's really interesting, Matt, is um in Japan, where there's high consumption of green tea, and they believe it's the polyphenolics from green tea that's keeping people alive so much, right? So I don't know, man. I mean, I think I don't know, you know, a big piece is to do with your genetics.

SPEAKER_04 2:02:22

When you're studying populations of people like that, it's so complicated. Yeah, yeah. Everyone always likes to say it's this or that ingredient, but I'm always like, yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 2:02:32

Well, I was just gonna say, is it just this like it's it's I like that it's most likely this intense combination of everything, and sure the thing that's a part of it is a part of it, but it has to be everything. Yeah, because that's why that's why we grow plants. These are my C BDs. This is C BD. It's like that doesn't look like C BD isolate. No, no, it's my C BD cultivar. I'm like, right, but why would you just choose the one thing to call it? Like it's yeah, isn't it a variety of things? Yes. I think the human mind, if the most is a certain thing, we automatically call it that. That's what it is, right? That's why everything's terps because terpenes are in full percentages and thiols and these other compounds are in.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:22

The simplicity sometimes we do exhausting to list all of this. Yeah, I think I have word limits on my articles sometimes.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:31

Don't I know it?

SPEAKER_03 2:03:32

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:34

I think honestly, stuff like this is built for these analytical scientific minds that would otherwise, I mean, honestly, probably jump off a cliff if they didn't have the mental gymnastics to perform with the deep dive of the shit they were dumped jumping into. Could you imagine? Like, what the fuck would you guys do?

SPEAKER_03 2:03:53

Okay, I mean I like to think that I come from a long line of like the guys who knew all the berries and which ones you were supposed to and not supposed to eat. Yeah, dude. Pretty important in blood and and maybe other fluids. Talk about a valuable lesson.

SPEAKER_05 2:04:06

Hey, when someone dies, all right, write that take that one off the list. Uh Bob died.

SPEAKER_03 2:04:12

Thank you for your service.

SPEAKER_05 2:04:13

You know, you damn, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah. I am not sure if Mr. Smith is going to be making it in, but I did invite Ted Smith. He's got some pretty crazy shit going on with his compassion club in Vancouver. They're still harassing this guy. They've just been like uh so he wanted to come on and have a conversation about milligrams and limitations in Canada and why, although there's stores, there's still a reason for his club to exist, which is to offer uh a high dose, high milligram dose THC um to his um clientele, to his his patients. So uh he said he was gonna come in around 11, so we can continue our conversation. I just was kind of forewarning you guys that I'm going to leave. He he posted the other day saying if anyone has podcasts they can invite me onto, I'm trying to get this message out. Uh, and Ted's such a fucking good human being, like truly a good human being. He has been doing what he's been doing like for 30 plus years, nonstop, unrelenting, like just getting stomped. Like they they I think they sued him for two million dollars a couple years ago. Uh you know, they they probably arrested him 30 times at least, you know. He's probably gone through every bank and credit, um you know, type uh what do they call them? Unions, credit unions. They're like banks in Canada, but they're kind of below banks. Anyway, I'm sure he's gone through all of them. Kind of Etienne's story, but down here in Canada, and not you know, not that Ted's not um as effective as getting his message out as Etienne, but he has just been he's he he's he doesn't have the whole thing running the way Etienne does. Like he is there all the time, every day, doing that, so he can't really get away. But he's a great dude. Uh, and I hope he does come in and share with us about um you know his trials and tribulations. I thought it was a great segue to go from the bugs and pests into the pests and government. It's like different types of pests, and and then Jeff rolled in, and I was like, oh my god, he's gonna be able to speak to both sides of this. This is gonna be so good. So let's continue with our bugs, Matthew, and uh the science that we've been talking. But just know that when Ted comes in, uh, we're gonna shift because I may keep Hash Church three hours today. I'm trying to hit up Black Home for the last day that I'm gonna be able to hit it or second last day. Got friends up there, and it would be a breeze in s in 56 minutes if I could bounce out of here and go do that. So continue with the bugs. Chad if you're listening, come in when you when you when you feel it.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:56

Yeah, I mean, I would I mean like I like to make that joke a lot that there's like there I usually specialize in pests that uh are not bipedal. But for those kinds of pests, you have different solutions as well. And I think in a lot of ways, the same kind of outlook, be very holistic, have multiple options uh at your you know at your disposal. Um because they're also very sophisticated in what they can and can't tolerate. So yeah, I I'm down. Um let's see, let's see. Oh, I have two of these things. Oh well, here's a cool thing I'll I'll I'll immediately get into. Um since we were talking about Septoria beforehand, I I'll just mention that uh a really cool thing about the I guess in a way, uh a really important point is that um Septoria cannabis samples have been around for a long time in the USA. About 142 years ago, in 1882, 89, and 19 and 1891, we have samples of Septoria cannabis in Kentucky specifically. So my father is from Kentucky, and um, you know, people were growing hemp for all kinds of reasons and cannabis too and all that stuff, and you know, there's been a lot of time, you know, to make this point, there's been a lot of time in history where uh some of these pathogens are so common, we're just breaking the you know, barrier. We're just you know looking at the top of the ice cap to see, you know, what these relationships are like, but we might find that um it's a lot more integrated, the Septoria and the cannabis, than we previously thought. And so, you know, like we'll have to we have we'll probably have this spear and shield um dynamic, but then understanding exactly how pointy is the spear in the case of the pest and how you know how strong is the shield in the case of the cannabis, you know, um, I think that will be really helpful for growers to make informed decisions about what to breed or how to grow uh in their region and that kind of a thing. Um I wanted to talk I guess I was talking about these products that weren't working against Septoria, right? So like I don't want to just say that um you know that they don't work, and then it's like someone's like, oh well I bought this product and it works, you're a liar. You don't know what you're talking about, Matt. Well, I mean when we quantify it, when we s when we have university professors go and do research and look at not just uh uh cannabis uh Septori cannabis as we see here in this C figure, um, but other ones too, like Ritritus, like there was basically you know total germination. You know, uh I don't know you can't see this very well, but on the bottom of this graph here, we have all the different products. Um and then we have products that you shouldn't use in cannabis mostly. Um and yeah, not only did the mycelial growth, you know, still you know, 15% is still better than control, which is 30%, but not that much, right? Not a huge difference, maybe statistically significant in the in that way. But like if you're a grower, you know, that might not be enough, you know. Um if you know if you lose 30% of your crop or maybe more because it's 30% growth, if you only retard it halfway, you know, that just not might that just might not be enough, is my point I'm trying to make here. So these were the products that they used. And you can see that um a lot of these are you know like trichoderma aspirellum, you know, eulocladium, another biocontrol, uh bacillus subtilis, various ones, QST713, someone had mentioned that earlier, I think. Um uh bacillus amulolique, bacillus myquates, um, even extract regalia, you know, uh these are products, right? Regalia extracts from um Japanese knot wood, I believe is what it is. Um all of these. And the um and the amounts that they used and the rates that they used, uh, and the mode of action, you know, all this stuff. And they they weren't very effective. So I just want to make that point to people that like you might hear advertisements and claims that these biocontrols are working for Septoria, um, and maybe they do, but maybe they will for you, it's possible. But I think it's also possible that at certain scales or in other certain contexts, it just might not be worthy enough, potentially. You might just not have you know, it might be too much money, too much application, and you won't get the benefit that you need. Which if it's like you need something that will kill everything really quickly, you know, that might not be available currently, unfortunately. And um so we talked about Septoria Cannabis and uh there's also like other ones with similar names like Septoria Cannabicola from Japan here. This is the Miye Prefecture in Japan, and on the right we have a Copen Geiger climate map. So this is like how they articulate the different climates in Japan. If you didn't know, it gets pretty hot, pretty humid, um, especially in the summertime for the heat. Miei is in this like section right here. Um, and this is a man named Um what was his name? Oh, I can't see it because of the thing. Yeah, uh Mitsutaru Shirai. And he was uh uh classically changed a western trained pathologist, plant pathologist, one of the first in Japan. And here he is with some notes looking at some of these fungi. We might think in modernity um that like they didn't have really good ways to look at these fungi, but look at these, even with the microscopy from a long time ago, they were still able to like capture and write, and this is something in science that I kind of miss people who were like drawing their own figures. You had to have it was a craft to be a scientist, I think, in some ways. I'd be curious to get Mark or Jeff's impressions about some of this too, um, in comparison. Obviously, it's not the same thing, and I'm I'm I'm happy that we have the sophistication that we have, but you know, this was uh they called in Japan uh the Settoria, they called it uh Taimashiro Boshipyo or cannabis white star disease, which is kind of a poetic name. Um but yeah, these might be two totally different Septoria species in two totally different areas that have now uh, you know, kind of traveled across the globe. And they although they have similar capabilities, and so you can see here in the top left sort of similar symptoms, they aren't aren't totally identical. Um we're going to the botrite section, but uh yeah, so that was just my little spiel about that section of Septoria and um how it develops, and uh what are some of the considerations we might want to think about intellectually highbrow, strategic, 30,000-foot sort of way. You know, like I just want people to be informed, basically.

SPEAKER_05 2:13:44

Absolutely. Well, that was awesome, dude. And what, you know, I've just been since I announced that Ted was going to come on, what he'd be speaking on today, and how you were even like, oh, they're like the they're like the good bacterias, but then they take on these different, you know, like how what you were talking about powdery mildew. Powdery mildew is like good people who go into government and become a parasite. And that is who we are going to be talking about today. Right with with Ted Smith. It's so nice to see your face light up because you had a very serious look when you came on, furrowed brow. I know you as a smiler. I know you're going through the shit, bro. As always, I can't believe it again. But it was so nice to see you smile when I told you my little metaphor. We've had Matthew, who specializes in bugs and spores and all these microscopic sort of parasitical like things that attack and harm cannabis. And I was like, oh my God, we're gonna have Ted Smith come in and talk about the government version of those exact same things that are that are fucking with you know what you're trying to do in Victoria. So A, welcome. Great to see you, brother. Um, B, you know, people know who you are, but it's still give give a little lowdown, give a little five-minute cliff note on Ted Smith and what Ted Smith's been doing for the last 30 years in Victoria, and then let's get into our conversation. And thank you for that uh presentation, Matthew. That was awesome.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:10

Yeah, happy to help.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:13

Hey Matthew. Um hey, and thanks for for having me on the show like this on such short notice. Um but uh yeah, it's been a little hectic um lately. So uh yeah, backing up, um I uh I'm seven-generation farmer on both sides in Ontario and got a philosophy degree in university and struck out west uh 30 years ago to make the world a better place and and stumbled across a group called Hempology 101. And so I started to do you know different educational things, write a book, um, have meetings. I moved to Victoria, that the hempology was started in Vancouver.

SPEAKER_05 2:15:58

And uh Did you know that I was a part of Hempology?

SPEAKER_00 2:16:01

You were a part of the original group there?

SPEAKER_05 2:16:03

Not the original group, but I came in and was always like I supported and facilitated and made sure that I I learned as much as I could from them as well. So it's it's pretty cool to hear you say that.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:13

Yeah, yeah. I I I only went there for a couple months. It was January 95. I went to the the first ones there. I think it was Terrapin Station, was what Dana called her little apartment there on Hastings. Yeah, and uh yeah, so like I think it was like by April, I was like, this is awesome. I need to expand this in Victoria. You know, this big city wasn't really my thing, but the island was just you know perfect for me. I could see. So uh that's that's pretty neat. I know a lot of people had their roots there. Uh, you know, I met Dana Larson there and helped write the business directory in the first uh cannabis Canada when it was you know the Hemp and Marijuana newsletter, and you know, all those early, really amazing days were were really quite something.

SPEAKER_05 2:16:58

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:58

And so uh yeah, so I I came from that, got a van, moved to Victoria, got a pager and pamphlet. Oh, sorry, I I met a woman that made cookies and brownies and volunteered in the AIDS community. And so I saw firsthand what eating cannabis did for people that were literally dying. It should turn their lives around. Like smoking cannabis was good for people with AIDS. It slowed things down, it could make them handle some of the cocktails they were being being given at the time. Um, but if they ate cookies, they'd put weight back on, they'd feel like living again. It just it was uh you know dramatic. And so that's what inspired me with Dennis Perron and the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, you know, leading the way. Um, but literally, uh, you know, it was such a new thing that I I think I I pretty much made the first mandate for what is medical, you know, in terms of uh requiring a diagnosis from a doctor of a serious medical problem. And so requiring a diagnosis fit within the charter of rights and freedoms because when you have a serious medical ailment, you have the right to choose your course of medical treatment. So we've you know kind of built our ourselves around the charter in many ways, still do. And so uh yeah, so got uh the club going in January 1996. Um was still doing hemphology at the time. Actually, five years later, I got busted at 420 up at UVC, passing out joints, and then downtown I was giving out cookies and got busted with 420 cookies at a little protest I was doing, which just made the buyers club more popular. I got a storefront. We got raided four times in the storefront in 2002, 2003, beat every single charge of the buyers club. I got a couple convictions for giving pot cookies out and stuff, but nothing major. Um 2009, my bakery got raided um with Owen Smith.

SPEAKER_05 2:18:52

Uh that was a big one.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:54

Right? Fuck provided uh pictures in our trial for that of the tricombs, because we had to explain to the judge uh the importance of tricombs, and and you know, the the uh analogy that our expert witness used was you know, like having uh a maple tree uh, you know, be made illegal if a leaf falls out. Or if you take the the maple syrup out of the tree, uh essentially the government had said that the tree was legal, marijuana was legal when the marijuana regulations came in. Um but if you made an extract out of that, if you made hash out of that, um then you had produced a drug. Even what broke the judge was a little old lady on the stand describing making tea. That's right. And that when she took the tea bag out, all of a sudden the the remaining liquid was.

SPEAKER_05 2:19:43

She was facing 14 years.

SPEAKER_00 2:19:45

So uh at that point the judge realized the absurdity of it, and we won the Supreme Court of Canada unanimous decision, you know, made edibles and extracts legal for Canada, and really was the final straw on prohibition. Um, sadly, at the time, my my love Gail uh was dying of cancer. Uh, I'd met a patient along the way and and she testified in that trial and what watched it live online, but uh sadly uh not enough cannabis in the world could save her life. So uh when when she was dying and passed away, uh I I left for a while, even from the industry entirely. Uh legalization sort of happened anyway, and then uh um I went back to the club. And since legalization, we've been raided four times. Uh we were evicted from our last location um and face fines of uh it was 3.2 million plus interest now. Um and so uh now it seems like they're coming after my my girlfriend and I are home. Uh she was on the board of directors when we were fined. And uh the recent raid uh you know sort of two weeks ago, uh it seems now they're coming after our landlord. So um, yeah, it's been uh quite the uh uh long chain of events.

SPEAKER_05 2:21:02

Dude, you are dealing with the worst case of human septoria that you could possibly have encountered. And so luckily we have Matthew, the IPM. What's that?

SPEAKER_03 2:21:13

How long were you sitting on that one? You were like, like since yesterday, man.

SPEAKER_05 2:21:18

Come on, I have these all pre-gun.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:20

What an insult. Immediately, top of the lexicon for insults. You human septoria. Yeah, it sucks.

SPEAKER_05 2:21:28

So bad.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:29

I'm so sorry to hear about it.

SPEAKER_05 2:21:30

I would also mention, you know, when Ted mentioned his uh bakery being busted, that was really huge. Um, Canada had a medical marijuana law. Marijuana, M-A-R-I-U-A-N-A was defined as like the buds and the structures, and so nothing else was legal. And and it was the simple little old lady, kind of like, so this is legal. My cannabis is legal. I bought it at the store, I throw it in a teabag, it's still legal. I put it into the water, still kind of legal. I pull it out, I've now done an extraction, and I'm facing 14 years in prison. So, how uh when Ted says it ended up changing Canada wide, well, the judge was so brilliant, really. I I gotta give him like a like a standing ovation, because instead of going federal, he he said, I only have the power provincially initially, and that provincial power, what he did was he defined marijuana as all things marijuana. Anything that came from the marijuana plant could be marijuana. So if you had a limitation of like three pounds, it could be the seeds, the stock, the buds, the resin, the oil, the whatever, it's all just marijuana. And it was very soon after, because of that happening to Ted and them fighting it, BC, I don't know how short of a period of time was, but for the shortest period of time, we were the only ones that were allowed extracts. It was uh quite something.

SPEAKER_00 2:22:56

It was a fascinating uh decision that had a number of impacts in different levels. Um, one of the interesting uh things that happened was soon after we won the 2012 case, so the lower court decision that you're referring to, where it was like sort of BC only, where you know the rest of the country it was persuasive, but it it really you know wasn't uh law per se. Um, so right after that, I had the Canada Revenue Agency come after me for uncollected and unpaid taxes. We weren't doing GST or employee deductions to that point. And so uh it was pretty amazing when they they they done this like investigation into me to find all my hidden money and realized that I actually have no money. I put everything back into the place and uh take as little as I need to live. And they were shocked because at the time it was quite busy. Um, and when they came in, they were a little timid because they weren't sure you know how we would react. And I was happy. I'm like, wow, this is amazing. You're telling me that the police aren't gonna raid me anymore because I'm medical and that you just want your tax money now. I'm like, I'm turning this club into a nonprofit society and you're making this legit. And they're like, oh no, no, we're not making this legit. We're just collecting our taxes. And I'm like, no, no, the day that you're here to collect your taxes and I'm not being arrested anymore is the day it's getting legit. And so we went public with that in the newspapers. And in 2012, that was when the proliferation of dispensaries hit Vancouver and Victoria, when everyone realized there was a margin of safety to operate. And it got to the point where the cities of Victoria and Vancouver and a few others even created bylaws and and uh allowed licensing for these illegal stores. And that's when Harper was in charge. That's when he's pushing mandatory minimums. And despite that, there is this massive swell of civil disobedience that was, you know, across the country. Like Alberta was one of the few provinces, and maybe a couple in the prairies that didn't have open storefronts operating. But certainly Ontario, Quebec, the East Coast, there's more and more people every every month, it seems, openly operating and defying the law, and having municipalities and you know, people in positions of power turning a blind eye to it because they recognized that Health Canada's programs were fundamentally flawed by not allowing the alternatives that patients obviously needed. And so uh that impacted the medical community because they were forced to recognize that cannabis isn't just something that's smoked, because they could easily write it off when it was something that they thought was a smoked product, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, it can be made into creams, it can be made into suppositories, it can be made into all these other products that they hadn't even tried to wrap their head around. So it bust that community open as well. And really, it was heard around the world. Like we talk about how it affected Canada, and it did in a significant way, but you know, I've heard from people in Australia and certainly, you know, other places where you know this law in South America, you know, really, you know, was heard, and and these changes, you know, impacted far more than than just our little club, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_05 2:26:15

Unbelievable, super profound, absolutely like um reverberating out throughout the world. That was insane how many shops popped up. I feel like cannabis culture had eight of them just like in in Vancouver.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:30

Like well, I know, and and more in Ontario, even right? Like Ontario just exploded there. Yeah, pretty wild.

SPEAKER_05 2:26:38

It was really wild.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:39

That whole story is so funny because, like, I mean, when you smoke cannabis, you're also extracting the active ingredients.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:49

Good point.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:50

You could call it a flame extraction if you want, you know, paralysis, right?

SPEAKER_05 2:26:56

Right, it's full, it's full decarb and extraction. We're doing both.

SPEAKER_03 2:27:01

How efficient, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:27:03

And then uh because yeah, I'm not consuming the flour, right? I'm sucking in the smoke.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:09

Well, um, it was fascinating. In in the trial, um, our expert witness, Dr. Pate and Kurt Tucson, our lawyer, had an incredible exchange at one point because Kurt's a bit of a cannabis nut too. And uh the Dr. Pate described how when a joint is burning, the heater actually vaporizing vaporizes or decarboxylates and then vaporizes the the glands, you know, the trichomes, long before the the burning embers actually combust the plant material.

SPEAKER_07 2:27:43

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:44

And he was saying that as you inhale, you increase the temperatures, therefore hitting like all the different cannabinoids uh when you're you know changing the temperatures, as opposed to a vaporizer or something that has a very uh distinct temperature.

SPEAKER_03 2:28:04

And I think I've also read about how like certain um molecular weights of certain constituents in cannabis, like cannabinoids and some of the other metabolites, right? Like as you're in this particular you know, use case that you're demonstrating, you know, deftly, that uh they kind of like move differently over time as you inhale. You know, some of them are heavier, some of them are lighter. Is that not true?

SPEAKER_04 2:28:30

That's true, and that's exactly the way to think about it, is that some of the molecules are heavier, and so they tend to acute they tend to be enriched in the roach.

SPEAKER_03 2:28:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 2:28:41

Yeah, yeah, that's why I like their concentration in the in the initial flower.

SPEAKER_03 2:28:46

So you say that again, I talked over you.

SPEAKER_04 2:28:49

No, that's all right, yeah. So, you know, like if you if you look at the concentrations of all the compounds in the initial flower, then the roach is gonna be enriched in kind of like the heavier compounds. Uh yes. Respect to the earlier with the the previous one, and the and it's gonna be it's gonna have much less of the lighter compounds. That's a good but molecular weight is like a pretty good general, you know, it's not the only factor in but I mean it's pretty you it's pretty good for this.

SPEAKER_03 2:29:18

Well we're talking like in big numbers, right? It's like uh it's like uh uh you know, air is like water but less dense, right? It's still a fluid, you know, system, so to speak. And and I know a lot about that because the coolest thing about bugs, if for people who don't have an appreciation for insects, is that they're the first they're the first fliers. They're the first animals to have independent flight, and not you know, like they came from things in the ocean, right? That they were moving around in the ocean, and now they're in the air and they made wings. And so I think that's kind of it's kind of incredible that the things that were floating around in the dense air is now floating around in the less dense air, and you know, yeah, yeah, so kind of neat. But um, yeah, but yeah, like in great amounts, right? That's a lot of chemicals moving around and all that stuff. So ideal gas law, all that stuff, yeah. I know chemistry words too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:30:15

Yeah. So so Ted, bring us back to one of the main reasons we wanted to have this call. Because now obviously there's all sorts of, I wouldn't say there's all sorts of medical, but there's some access through different platforms for people on computers and stuff. I don't know of any actual medical stores other than clubs like yourselves. Um, but there's obviously lots of dispensaries. Um, but there's still a reason to have this conversation because one of the things the dispensaries can't really do, and I I agree with this because I have people all the time that reach out to me that are that are really sick, like stage four, you know, and they're just like, is there what you know? I'm just looking for hope. I always try to point them in the right direction without being like, Look, I'm not a doctor or whatever, but I can tell you things that I've helped others do that they seem to it it seem to help more help more than not. And so um where's I going with that? Oh, you need a large dose uh sometimes. You need a large dose. I'm not a big doser for me, like the five and the 10 milligram uh gummies that I can buy are are great at the stores. And in fact, now my daughter's buying me bags that have 10 uh 10 milligram gummies, which is a hundred, which is fine, but that is nowhere near what some people who find out they're sick too late. This is usually and I hope you guys are really on the preventative trip there, Ted. Like we try to get people to get to a point where if you're consuming smaller doses of cannabinoids while you're healthy, you may not get to a place where you have to eat like you know, like eight or nine hundred or a thousand milligrams in a day. Because that's terrifying. Like that, even when I the last person I gave it to was an elderly woman, and I was like, Look, I'm not a doctor, these are I here, here is a doctor, you know. I always give them like Dr. David Allen or some other person that I know that could potentially point them in a direction uh in a little safer manner than I do. But when people have lost all hope and they're in stage four and they're told to go home in palliative care and die, uh, they're willing to do pretty much anything. But eating a gram of oil for 60 days in a row has got to be like the Iron Man challenge of cannabis experiences. Like that is no fucking joke. There's a reason why the only people who fucking do that are terminally ill, and God bless them, especially the ones that come out of it on top. But let's talk about limitations in edibles in um Canada.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:42

Okay, well, um, when we won our court decision, it you know, it was a fantastic moment, but Health Canada came out with this uh limit of 10 milligrams per product, and so uh that was pre-legalization. So when legalization came in, uh they just sort of adopted the the same measurement, um, which is uh you know one that they've determined uh is enough for you know sort of a general healthy person to have an effect. Um not necessarily a strong effect, but certainly something that is is noticeable. Um however, you know, for a lot of patients in chronic pain um or patients fighting cancer, uh 10 milligrams uh doesn't cut it. Um and so uh that that limit was one that we we originally you know saw as as the next challenge. You know, we didn't know when or how, but we you know saw that that that needed to change uh for patients at least. Um and uh there was a review on the Cannabis Act a couple years ago, and they considered changing that limit uh for medical or recreational, and they decided that for the safety of the children they would not do so. Um, which is really ironic because there's a lot of other Really heavy hard drugs that could kill children, uh, that are available. And so uh they just uh decided um that uh in no form uh at all uh would cannabis be available in more than 10 milligrams.

SPEAKER_05 2:34:15

Just the definition of virtue signaling using children as a fucking shield while simultaneously prescribing the most deadly drugs on the planet. Often, if you know this about sickness, when you get really, really sick, and I I'm not I'm not gonna say exactly which disease they do this for. I believe Colton told stories of this very thing where they give you all the medicines that were designed for what you have, but none of that works. So they start throwing the kitchen sink at you. They're like, Well, let's give them some of the Parkinson's uh medications, let's uh try this drug that we use for uh you know restless leg syndrome. And they start and they they do this also to children. And I'm not judging them for doing anything it takes to keep children alive. That's not my like anyone that wants to care for people and children in my books, you're you're good. But the Hippocratic oath is to do no harm. Um, so it's strange, and it's what makes me not trust the the sometimes hospitals and and the sort of systems that operate that hospitals operate in regards to my health. I just feel like damn, like well, it's really it's weird, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:35:28

Like they're it doesn't add up. Like they're acting like you're like what they're acting like what you want to do is so crazy, and I mean what you want to in some of these doses are kind of crazy, right? But like it's no crazier than the other shit we do, right?

SPEAKER_05 2:35:43

How about I can go buy a vat of Jack Daniels to have enough to kill my whole family?

SPEAKER_04 2:35:48

Yeah, and people are doing people are doing lots of other totally crazy treatments at this stage, and so when everyone acts like, oh, you want to do this to kids though? Then it's like what yeah, yeah, no, it's it's it's a lot.

SPEAKER_05 2:36:02

So, yeah, speaking uh to the milligram limitations, obviously 10 milligrams is not enough for people in extreme pain, people that are like they're trying to replace like diluted and like oxies and fentanyl, like the hardest of the known painkiller drugs. Like, try to wrap your head around this. To me, these people fit into a category of what we should call some of the most vulnerable vulnerable people in our society. They're in pain all the time. It would seem like the least we could do is not get in the way of them reducing that, particularly under the guise and virtue signaling and protecting fucking children. That's bonkers, man.

SPEAKER_00 2:36:47

Well, this is why we're we're we're in a way shifting from the the medical argument to the harm reduction argument, because you know, a lot of our patients um are trying to avoid using prescription drugs that often are more harmful to them. And so uh, you know, uh the the doctors and medical community can argue uh about you know whether we can prove cannabis is is better medicine or not, but we can prove that it's less harmful than the other options that are available to people. And uh, you know, just as harm reduction alone, you know, uh cannabis should be like the number one tool in the toolbox for preventative uh medicines because it can be used at sort of all three stages of harm reduction. It can be used to prevent people from using opioid drugs and painkillers in the first place. And I've known people to have surgeries using cannabis edibles and suppositories and not take any opioids or few opioids uh to do to even have massive surgeries. Um it can also be used as a replacement for you know illegal drugs, uh more on the smoking end, but certainly combining smoking and eating high doses, uh, you know, a lot of people can stop using, you know, really you know heavy drugs uh also and uh switch to cannabis. And then also for people that are using methadone, um, you know, in a way that's just another substitute drug that the pharmaceutical industries are pumping into people. And you know, if you can switch them from methadone to cannabis, um then uh you know that's a a big healthy step away from you know things that are are not good for them.

SPEAKER_05 2:38:30

Hey, when you can get a pure extract and you can smoke that like a crackhead, that will get you higher than crack. And I know that from a crackhead who I helped get off crack by giving him a big ball of bubble, locking him in his apartment. He had the pipe. He said 80% of his crack addiction was doing this and lighting a lighter and seeing it flicker. He said that was at least 80% of it. And he literally said at the end of about seven days when he came out, he said, that shit was stronger than crack. I said, Well, yeah, you're not supposed to smoke it like crack, dude, but I'm glad it helped. I think an important factor on the edible conversation is that A, the only thing they could be upset about or worried about is a falsehood, which would be that people are gonna uh consume edibles and drive cars and crash and do these things. Very different from alcohol uh and opioids for that matter, is that when people get too high on cannabis, instead of lying about how safe they would be to drive, they actually don't want to drive. They're they're going to make their case for it and they're not going to drive. No one who gets too high on herb is going to be pressured into driving when they just don't really want to. Whereas when I was younger and I saw my friends getting drunk, they would fight you if you tried to take their keys away. Like not only were they going were they fine to drive, but they were willing to, you know, throw your friendship under the bus and and throw punches to prove to you how safe they were. Literally, so there's this delusion that's involved with some of these drugs that impair you that really make you convinced you're not impaired, almost uh, you know, like PCP when you forget that you've taken a drug, right? The disassociatives uh that you can take, where you you get so high, but then you immediately forget you took a drug. I don't like those kinds of drugs. Cannabis, on the other hand, you get super high, you're like, wow, I'm super high. I ate a bunch of cannabis, probably too high to drive. I learned this at a very young age when I was dealing weed out of my house back in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And people would, you know, smoke with me. And even back then, I was pretty bit of a heavyweight, you know, trying to find the good, good stuff and lucking out on an amazing mentor. And people would get so high that there were multiple times I left my house and they were, you know, sitting in their car, uh, unable to drive, just right out in front of the house kind of thing, and just be like, hey, you know, come come back in the house and just chill out by the fish tank for another half an hour and uh have a juice and you'll you'll be fine to go. And so that is the beauty about cannabis. You know, yes, will there be experiences? I'm sure there already have been, where someone's eaten a five or a 10, and probably in conjunction with alcohol and forgotten about it. Um, and that's gonna happen. But the bottom line is those shouldn't be used as excuses to keep higher doses because people who are eating higher doses that can't that that and don't get me wrong, I know people who could eat 500 milligrams and absolutely drive to work like no problem. They're affected by it completely different. But most people would not do such a thing, they would say, I am not doing this. In fact, they wouldn't even say anything because they'd be in a fucking coma. Uh, at least I would be on 500 milligrams. What about you, Ted? Are you a 500 mil? I'm like you, Marcus. You're like me, five, ten milligrams.

SPEAKER_03 2:41:45

Yeah, I can't I can't take a whole bunch of it. Uh, you know, I'm good with 10 or 15 megs. I can take more, but I usually don't need more of that. I'm that's my use case. But I'm like you, I I'm pretty sensitive to it. So that's been beneficial to me. Um, you know, even with tolerance and all that, anyways.

SPEAKER_05 2:42:01

Have have you ever hurt yourself badly and needed it? Because that's where you learn the lesson of how it can affect you there. Like if I really destroy myself, like when I break a collarbone, which is very, very like it's sore, it's like a rib. Every time you breathe, it throbs and moves. It's a floater, it's terrible. Anyway, the last time I broke it, I used edibles and I didn't get high. And I was eating like 30, 40, 50 milligrams, which is a lot for me. That's like a five to 10x on my dosage. And I did not get high, but what I did do is my my collarbone stopped throbbing and it felt amazing. And I thought, you know what? I don't think people can understand how deep the pain is. That's a bone. Imagine the pain that Wade was suffering from at the end of his life, or some of these cancer patients, or some of these people. What you think a 9.5 is, is like a 3.7 for some of these people. There are levels to pain like there are to everything. And with cannabis, you can just always go deeper and deeper and deeper. And what I've learned about cannabis is when you eat enough of it, it allows you to get into a deep enough sleep that you actually heal. Sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 2:43:14

Well, um, it is a very individual experience. Uh, we've learned that genetics play a big factor, uh, much like alcohol, right? There's certain peoples in the world uh that have a very low tolerance to alcohol, and other places where you know people sort of have a genetic disposition that they can drink a fair amount and still be relatively functional. Um, cannabis is is sort of the same. Um, and then there's also gut health. Um, I have a bacteria overgrowth in my stomach. Um, and cannabis is an antibacterial, which is great in some ways, but I can eat like a 500 milligram gummy, and most of that actually gets absorbed fighting the bacteria in my stomach, and and not a lot seems to get into my system. Plus, my tolerance seems high enough that yeah, I can uh eat a 500 milligram gummy, and uh some people might not even know I've done that.

SPEAKER_04 2:44:04

Some people's bodies don't really process edibles. Yeah, isn't that crazy?

SPEAKER_03 2:44:08

Because people are almost immune to them. I completely I agree. Like for me personally, I'll I'll just give you this.

SPEAKER_04 2:44:14

My contrast it's a like documented genetic trait, even it's like it was, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:44:20

Uh you know, like with Marcus talking about deep bone pain, like for me, I've had I've had um like cuts or like like straw, like really cuts into the like really large gashes uh or once. Um and then I've had like some uh uh bone pain before. Not nearly as bad as like uh hurting your collarbone the way you mentioned, but like for me, I have found that at least for me, and maybe it's just you haven't taken enough. I don't know. I usually if I take too much, I have uh the similar reaction people have when they drink too much. So it doesn't even get to that point for me. Um and I didn't find that it helps me with the with the pain. The sensation of the pain was still there. Maybe it was somewhat muted, but what it was what did change for me is that I think it was more tolerant up here. At least I feel like that's the experience I was I was having. If I were to characterize it, that it wouldn't that didn't necessarily go to the pain in the way that like a Vicodin would, or or at least here, I guess, is the what's happening. But you know what I'm trying to say, like it it seemed to um it just I think it worked on different it does work on different receptors and all that stuff, but to me it was mostly psychological the benefit um in those large pain points, um, at least for me. Maybe if I had other injuries or other interactions, it'd be different.

SPEAKER_05 2:45:37

Well, thank god we have a medicine like cannabis. I haven't taken pain pills in a very long time, and I've broken 17 bones in my life. So I've had I've been given those pain pills in the past. Uh, I'm too sensitive to it. And when you guys say genetic predisposition or whatever, like my theory is that it has to do with how fast or slow you metabolize in your liver, whatever else is going on, people who metabolize super slow with cannabinoids seemingly are unaffected. They eat like a thousand milligrams, nothing. If you hypermetabolize five milligrams and you and you feel all five right away instantly, like at peak, well, that's gonna feel a lot different than like siphoning out a 0.1 milligram every three minutes or every you know, every however long it is. But that's my theory. But that's kind of that's a big way.

SPEAKER_04 2:46:29

That's a that's a right way to think about it. That's one of the big factors. Yeah, yeah. There are there are people who are there are many different there's yeah, there are a few different steps of the um of the absorption and um like the the pharmacokinetics can depend on different things, or you can depend on that's why it can depend on what's in your stomach and stuff like that too. Um, because that'll also control how fast it gets into your bloodstream. But yeah, right. Then um there's the liver functionalization, um, especially like the most famous functionalization is THC to um hydroxy THC. Um, I'm that happens in the liver, I think, right? Um, it's gotta be believe so. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:47:11

Hydro 11 hydroxy metabolite does.

SPEAKER_04 2:47:14

Yeah, it's a it's an oxidation, so it must happen there.

SPEAKER_05 2:47:18

It's uh strong as fuckation, is what it is.

SPEAKER_03 2:47:21

Yeah, and some people don't have the CYP enzymes, certain ones, or or they have mutations uh you know that change that really change their sensitivity to the 11 hydroxy.

SPEAKER_05 2:47:32

I'll tell you, 11 hydroxy is the foundation of all brownie stories. Every brownie story you've ever heard that comes, that's and and we all have them. I swear to God, I really wish Brownie Mary would have written the Brownie Mary Brownie cannabis stories, you know, because oh my god, there's so many great cannabis, you know, like Breeder Steve's wedding, three people, all doctors going out on uh all going MDs all going out on stretchers. I feel like I'm flying, said the Jamaican woman on the stretcher as she was sent to the hospital for eating two brownies because she said she's they said, Would you like a brownie, ma'am? She said, I'm Jamaican, give me two, and can and and then proceeded to wolf down two of these brownies. Um, the only person at that wedding who didn't seem to have an interest in the brownies, I find out, is Steve's like uncle or step uncle, and was like uh a cop, a motorcycle cop. And one time Steve was staying at their house and he put a whole tray of brownies in their freezer. And this cop came home from work and proceeded to finish the entire tray of brownies. So he sat there while the brownies were served at Steve's wedding with the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, just waiting to see who was gonna go through what he went through. Because I'll tell you, no matter how old you are, no matter how experienced you are, I don't care if you've had psychedelic experiences, the first time you take a breakthrough dose of cannabis, it is so shockingly eye-opening and you are so shockingly present for all of it, you just can't escape it forever until it finally ends, hours later. Oh God bless the that that is what taught me how powerful cannabis was, to be honest. I swear to god, if I gave if I gave you enough and you actually metabolized regularly, not the slow, I think I think I could operate on a person with uh without giving them any anesthetic. That's why I love but it's a deep competitude. I went to butter is your anesthesiologists had like butter, they were just like sloop scooping butter down your belly.

SPEAKER_04 2:50:05

I don't know why, but man, like I don't know why, but what every time I make butter and then make bread baked goods out of it, you're right. Like, but the the butter itself, too, like you just get it on your hands because you're squeezing out like the the cloth with transdermal, right? And yeah, yeah, like butter is my favorite solvent for extracting cannabinoids.

SPEAKER_03 2:50:27

That's actually really interesting. Uh yeah, I was gonna say I had an experience like the closest I had to this experience so far, because I'm so fastidious about edibles, because I'm like you, Marcus. I do not want, you know, I had to be very careful. I went to the Living Soil Summit uh a few years ago at uh Green Life Productions, and they had the someone had made some like uh you know, cupcake maker or like uh baker had made these little cupcakes for everyone, and someone came out and they said, Oh, they're all one mig. I'm like, oh cool, you know, I'm always like careful though, and like everyone comes up there getting a bunch. So you know where the story's going. Uh I go and I take two, just two. One hundreds. And well, no, fortunately not, you know. But they were fit the but then someone comes back, no, no, no, they're 15 MIGs each. They're 15 MIGs each. So it's just enough that like I think if you just had if you wanted to have one or three MIGs, now you have you know 45 MIGs, right? Um, and so I had to I had to stare down a hot shower. I wouldn't get sick or anything, but I was like, all right, time to be here and present, like you're talking about.

SPEAKER_05 2:51:36

Yeah, man, that shit is no joke. Um, I'm gonna wrap it up in about 11 minutes. So I want Ted to uh and Ted's gonna you'll you'll be coming back on and we'll discuss this more, Ted. But I'd love to for you to a just let people know how they can uh you know get plugged into this and and follow what you're doing and what's going on and offer support in any way they can and just uh you know let people know how they can uh get in touch with you.

SPEAKER_00 2:52:02

Okay, thanks, buddy. Um yeah, I'm I'm just really kind of getting some wheels in motion for campaigning right now. And so uh tomorrow I'm having a meeting of a kind of social media uh committee that uh starting next week. I'm gonna have uh weekly online uh kind of Zoom meetings that anybody can join and participate in so I can communicate with as many people as possible on our social media campaign. Uh we need to be sort of hitting on all fronts right now if we you know want to get our message through about the necessity for storefront access and high dosage edibles. And so uh yeah, so we're doing that. We're we're engaged in a sort of email writing campaign to our premier David Eby. Um, what we want him to do is simply put a pause on enforcement actions until we've had a judicial review, because we're trying right now to you know finish our expert reports and everything to press uh forward to get a court date because we think the charter of rights uh should be what uh you know uh overrules or or you know uh everyone considers in this matter more than just what the regulatory laws are. So um yeah, we we just want the premier to to do a pause on that. So that's that's sort of the the the big goal here. Um in the meantime, I'm meeting with uh our mayor this week, and and hopefully uh we'll be getting some support from our city council. Um we've already gotten some support from the new leader of the BC Green Party, Emily Lohan. Uh, but uh any pressure within the Green Party to you know support us more broadly would be awesome as well. Um yeah, so uh yeah, doing all sorts of things. Um if people want to follow me, I guess uh I'm on Instagram and Facebook uh and LinkedIn or my main social media forums that I'm using.

SPEAKER_05 2:54:02

We'll put all those links in the description. If you can send me in Facebook Messenger all your details, everything from the L Ebbie thing, everything that you're doing. I'll just copy and paste it right into the description of the video, and then everything you just finished saying now will all be available for clicking or supporting. And listen, you guys, we always talk about this. Etienne is very he's like, you gotta have action, like get up off your ass and do something. Well, Ted's offering you some actionable items, they're not that big of a deal. Share the social media stuff first and foremost. Go and follow him. I would expect at least you know the two or three hundred people that are watching right now that you could do that. It's not that big of a deal on your end, but it's a really big deal on his end and on our end. So uh yeah, show your support, do what you can. I know people are always asking for support, and then you just ignore them, but don't ignore this. Like, Ted is doing the good work. Uh, we need to kind of get behind him and support what he's doing. Um, it's not unreasonable what he's asking for. He has a deep understanding. They've already followed so many things that he's pushed them into corners to do. You'd think at this point in time they feel like wow, we shouldn't let this guy make us look like total idiots again. Maybe just thinking about, you know, throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks, we could try listening just for once or whatever. Don't have to, I guess, but might be better than looking like a bunch of uh it just makes you look petty and small. What is the possible reason? I get it. You have some strange political belief system that you're doing the good work and you're protecting children. In the end, you're actually harming children and vulnerable people on a level that is like shameful. To the to the uh the the human septoria, the bipedals, the ones you know the ones we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 2:55:52

Thank you so much for having me on the show here, Marcus.

SPEAKER_05 2:55:55

Yeah, thank you, Ted, and thank you, uh Matthew and Jeff for popping in, and Dr. Mark and um Colin, who was in here earlier. Um I've got I'm gonna be traveling for the next couple of weeks, but uh try and get Ted back in maybe towards the last hour so he can kind of if he has anything more prepared, we can kind of go in on that particularly actionable items that uh people can help out with. Um what else? What else? I think I'm gonna go to Black Home right now. I think I'm going to jump in my car. How crazy is this? I fly to Michigan today and it's 12 o'clock p.m. It's a later flight, but I'm like, maybe I'll just go to Whistler for the day and do some snowboarding and enjoy time with my wife. Don't forget to feed your soul. Uh, it is the thing that keeps us all going, whether you believe it or not. If you feel depressed or sad or empty, you're probably filling the wrong hole, uh, the black hole that is that can never be filled. Don't fill that one. Uh, one more thing, cannabis is amazing at getting us to find the right thing to fill, uh, which is your soul. Uh, enjoy life, enjoy music, enjoy food, enjoy friends, enjoy family. Thank you all for watching. Honestly, like I just can't express my gratitude and gratefulness for a the panelists that come on Sunday after Sunday. Uh, the people who come and watch um our sponsors, you know, Puffco and the press club and Grandmaster and Bubble Bags. Thank you, thank you, thank you, is all I can say. Be more grateful and you'll feel grateful. Be more critical, uh, and you'll feel pretty critical and pretty much awesome.

SPEAKER_03 2:57:36

That's the truth.

SPEAKER_05 2:57:38

Pretty cool and awesome. All right. Love you guys all. Much love. Have a great rest of your day. May the full mount bless your bowl sooner than later. Peace.

SPEAKER_04 2:57:48

Have a great one. Much love. Thanks. Great seeing everybody.

SPEAKER_05 2:57:52

Appreciate you guys.