 Welcome to Breeders Syndicate, the only cannabis show breaking down the myths and history in cannabis. I'm Matthew, seed maker for over a decade and a half, and this is my journey into finding my truth in this wild world of cannabis. I invite you to join me and the Canaluminati by strapping into the passenger seat. But be warned, it's not always pretty. With the invasion of corporate culture into cannabis, it's getting even more muddy. Which is why I've made it my mission to have a permanent record before all of the history is lost and buried under a pile of... cookies. We're the traditional market. The Syndicate is a collection of seed makers that want to push back against all of the smoking mirrors. In doing so, we will continue to ruffle the feathers of those who oppose. And my personal mission has become much bigger than myself. Welcome to the cannabis underground. This is the Revolution. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Breeders Syndicate. I'm Matthew Riot, here with my co-host, Thousand Fold, and today we're going to be discussing something that... It's one of the most important topics in cannabis. Not just breeding, but it's an integral part of breeding, which is the name game. How does it work? What are its implications? What are some variables that go into selecting? And how does that affect the outcome of the final flower? Medically or otherwise? So yeah, this is something I'm super passionate about. And we've been kind of talking about it a little bit. And I felt like as an overall arching theme for this season, one of the things I wanted to drive home was reaching the end user of flower. Because it's not something that we deal with a lot. They're not our main... What would you call that? The people watching our show. They're not our main demographic. The end user of the flower. A lot of times the people watching our show are seed makers or people interested specifically in genetics and breeding. But this season, I really want to tap into them. Because in the end, they are the people that need to know. They are the consumers. And they need to understand what they're putting in their body. And I think this is one of the few ways that we can do it. So with that, Thousand? Yeah, I think the only things I'll add are... This sort of does apply to seeds as well. And it sort of does apply to clones as well to a degree in terms of like the broader market. So I think in a way we will be covering... We'll touch on all of those things, I think. And if we don't get enough time, we'll return to this. Because this is, yeah, like Matt said, one of the core issues that we want to highlight. I don't know if there's much else for me to say. I think Matt, you wanted to start with, from a breeder's point of view, initially, what goes into naming something? So when I started thinking about the whole topic and how we could cover it maybe, or if it was even worth talking about, I wanted to start from a seed maker's perspective or a breeder's perspective during my early days. So we're talking, you know, 2006 to 2012, right around in that era. Actually probably 2006, 2010, and then before, like obviously before I came in, this is relevant. But this is just from my experience, how it went. Different breeders had different methods for coming up with names. A lot of those, it started early on, whether it was from Neville, you know, saying, wow, that bud is awful large yielding, that is a big bud. Or, wow, that one smells skunky, that's skunk, you know. You would pick things, whether it was the scent, the look, any number of things like that. But really obvious visual cues, scent cues, stuff like that when you were picking names. Sometimes it wasn't like that in the case of something like AK-47, you know. But generally speaking, they were pretty easy to assess, like names were individual. You knew if it was Bubbleberry, it was going to be, say, Grimath is Bubbleberry generally speaking, right, before the white labeling came on and all the shit shows started. Let's see, there's also the combinations of when you combine strains, like when we started doing hybrids, you know, let's say you have a blueberry and a bubblegum, you combine them and now you have Bubbleberry. Or we have, let's say, Girl Scout Cookies and Blueberry, now you have Cookieberry. Or, you know, the white cut, Cross for Fire Oji, now you have White Fire Oji. These were just really simple ways to do it, like there wasn't a lot of creativity in it, but it helped define what you were going to get. And because of the name you knew, okay, it's going to be like the white, it's going to be like the fire, we're going to see, you know, progeny somewhere in between the two and it's kind of how it went. Let's see. There was also, I think, the fact of the different scale, the number of people who were in the industry back then, as compared to now you were saying, like back then conceivably you could quite easily search for the name that you want to use and feel like you have kind of done a little bit of due diligence. I think you wanted to talk about, like, what due diligence really meant back then. Yeah, that's right. So it was a lot easier to step on toes. That's kind of the word we always use, or to avoid it, because there weren't a whole lot of us. People looking in nowadays, look at history and they see tens of thousands of breeders and strains and all these names. But back then there wasn't a whole shitload of people making seeds. There really wasn't. So it was really easy for people to communicate with each other, though not everybody did communicate back. Some people obviously were less communicative than others. But there was also very few reference sites. I mean, we knew the forums. We knew where we could search and look for names to see if it had been used. It was a lot easier to figure that stuff out. Granted, it wasn't surefire, but it was pretty good. It was pretty easy to see if a name had been used. And if you're going to step on toes, and if so, what toes you were going to step on? We just considered it due diligence. It was polite. You know, if someone was around before you and had chosen the name before you, it wasn't polite to then take that name, use what time, marketing, money they had put into branding the strain, and then take it for yourself and then try to bump off it. And it's like that in any commodity, any industry, names are meant to identify. And it was easier to do due diligence. But nowadays I think is where we're heading, right? And it's not looking so good. It's not looking so easy. What are some examples to you of names that just don't really mean either what they say or they just don't really mean anything at all? And I know you had a couple of examples. So like recently doing the reviews that we've been doing on our show, and I'll talk about it some more later, because it very much ties into the whole theme of this season. I've run into some really confusing stuff. And for those that don't know real quickly, I've avoided the modern market as far as like what's being pushed or hyped in collectives and dispensaries, what, you know, the hype flower boys and the heady boys are smoking. I have no clue. I have zero clue. Didn't care. I knew what I liked. And it just, I saw it as all the same stuff. However, I've been trying to dive into it so I can have an actual educated perspective on it and not just speak from the hip. And I've been encountering a lot of these major clashes in eras, in generations on how we name stuff. Like, for example, I saw blue sushi and I was like, okay, I don't know what sushi is, right? I've never heard that one, but blue. That tells me it's going to be a blueberry hybrid probably smell blueberry. That sounds legit. Like that's because I like blueberry. That's when I see blue. That's what I go for. I like things with that scent, that smell, that high. And I look it up and it's like some weddings, ghettles. There's no blue in it. I was so confused. I did not get it. How do you come up with blue sushi? Like, and that's aside from the fact of what sushi is. Who knows, you know, but the, the, the one thing in there that does speak to its lineage is just the Z, right? That's it. That's it. Yeah. If the Z is in there so you know, it might have some ghettles in it. Maybe if you're lucky, though, I, you know, I mean, like nowadays, I don't even know that that means much. The Z might be more popular than the actual strain ghettles now in strain name. So, you know, I, I would bet that there's a lot of stuff out there was Z in it that don't have Z in it, you know, in the actual strain. It's crazy. But yeah, I think that's definitely worth highlighting as well. We're like just using the letter Z is now like adding, adding something to your name. It adds, it adds context. It adds, it adds content, implied context that may not be there. Yeah. But it's implied. Yeah, for sure. But it's also based on the breeders or whatever seed makers knowledge that people are looking for that in that signifier. People want that Z. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, a lot of this I started seeing with like animal cookies and Girl Scout cookies. That was like the first notable examples to me. I mean, granted, there were blueberries out there that were nothing blue or related, but that was just people, I think, just really confused on what they had. But like when we got to Girl Scout cookies and animal cookies, I was fully expecting these things to smell and taste like sweet cookies. And they just don't like people say, Oh, it's doughy. You know, like maybe to them, but like doughy is not sweet cookies. Like it is not an animal cracker. Like these are very far from it, you know, wedding cake. Kind of doughy. Kind of creamy. Is it like, does it smell like sweet birthday cake or wedding cake? No, not at all. Does it taste like it? Oh, yeah. I mean, before this, would anyone have been like, Yeah, I want some dough turps. I guess that I've never, I would have never thought I've never heard that, you know, like, you'd be like, Oh, you got that pine. You got that, that that kush. You know, but I've never, I can't wait to smoke that dough. I've never had that. No, doughy just sounds to me like something went wrong. To me, what doughy implied was a bad, like a bad expression from OG Kush or triangle and a hybrid. That's where usually run into like the bad expression, triangle and OG Kush or the doughiness, which is bad expression or like bad processing, right? Like, yeah, yeah. But I mean, when I say bad expression, it's obviously preference too, because it's not what I prefer. Like, I prefer like very specific ends of OG Kush. And when I hit that realm, I'm like, Oh, this is the common boofy end. So let's move the other direction. But someone found that as a very, as their keeper and apparently it resonated with the world. So that, you know, that is just my opinion. But I mean, then we have things like gushers. Jalati cheetah piss, just whatever name they can throw on shit that implies so much. Like I was seeing leechy taro bun like there's these aren't in cannabis. I'm sorry. And I don't know if it's psychosomatism that makes people think that this is what they're going to experience and then therefore experience it like suggestion. Or does the modern market not care if the name resembles what the expectations are setting? And is it because I'm old and been in a long time that I have those expectations? I don't know. Maybe that's something you can comment on 1000 because you're from a different era. I mean, from a cynical point of view, it's unsurprising. Like you said previously, you could rely on names actually corresponding with some quality of the plant or some quality of some some aspect of its lineage. But increasingly, as the names themselves have started to, you know, have their own kind of like cloud games. Yeah. People just focus on engineering names and the names themselves become, you know, what people make the decisions based on. I don't think I'm adding anything new. But yeah, that's just, I mean, like from your perspective, like when you came in and you started smoking a lot and buying strange, you know what I mean? Did you have expectations that maybe the skittles would actually taste like skittles? I mean, that that first of all depends on me knowing what skittles even is, right? I remember. Not really. Or I mean, I'm sure I put it this way. I'm sure it is. Right. But because of the way the market works here, it's not like we all we all have access to the same information or it's like a unified scene in any way. It's it's still really like fragmented here. You know, people are just like skittles. Yeah. The skittles candy for sure. You don't have skittles candy. No, we do. We do. Okay. I guess I just mean, I guess I just mean that like the quote unquote community or quote unquote industry here isn't unified enough to kind of have a sense of like what these things actually mean. There isn't like a generally accepted sense of anything. But from your perspective, your personal perspective, having like, having since you have the candy skittles there, right? Like you had, did you have that as a kid? Yeah. Yeah. So if you're asking like, you know, if I see the name skittles, would I immediately make that association? Yeah, of course I would. Did you I mean, did you have the expectation when you first started skittles the strain? Yeah. Like it's probably going to be at least, you know, somewhere in that realm. Yeah. I mean, I can. I've got a good anecdote for this, which is that the first pack of seeds I ever bought was called gorilla skittles. And it was from Barney's. Right. Yeah. And I'll be honest with you, when I when I chose it, it was completely arbitrary. I was just, I was so overwhelmed by the names that were on those websites that I just picked a name that sounded something that just stood out or seemed even more bizarre than the other names. And at the time I had very little appreciation for the history or what any of those things actually meant. Sure. You know, what you get are photographs, whatever they've written and what whatever other people say about it. Right. Yeah. You know, I definitely have more to say about later as well. But yeah, in terms of my initial experiences looking at these, you know, looking at these products. Yeah. It was overwhelming. It seemed arbitrary. And yeah, I don't know. Everyone watching this right now in the comments below. Add in your thoughts like I'm real interested to see one. What was everyone's first seed purchase and what year have that in also what were your expectations when buying this and what did you what went into your purchase? Was it the grams per square meter pictures, name, reputation of string? So yeah, in the comments below, if you can, if you can tell us what you think I'd love to know. Let's see. So we have the seed buying perspective, a seed buyers perspective kind of talked about that a little bit. We talked about how we choose names. Let's see, where are we at? I mean, I'll just, I'll say a bit more on seed buying. I think if you, if you're new and you look at a seed bank website and look at the names, you, you won't have a sense of like what's important slash popular yet. So you won't, you won't necessarily know what chem dog means or what sure. Orgy Kush means or what gorilla glue means or Skittles yet. And then in the absence of having any context historically, you do then gravitate towards brand names that you are familiar with or or strong associations like you were talking about that. And that's where the game, you know, that's where it gets, it gets crazy because all you have is, you know, in terms of you looking at these things, all the information that you get is like, yeah, photographs, whatever arbitrary information they've decided to include whatever kind of thin branding they've developed around these products. And maybe some like social media interactions that you get to see. Yeah, I mean, at this point, it's kind of like, this is why, like a lot of people ask me why I got into this when did I get into this industry? It was because I realized like, kind of, once I started seeing all this stuff, going through the logic of seed buying, I was spending my money on seeds. I'd already taken a big dive at one point on a massive purchase from Amsterdam on a bunch of Dutch companies. And I realized at one point, all I have is info from these people. I need to know who the people are giving me this info and are they reliable? That was the point of where I realized I need to see who these people are. Like, are they good researchers? Are they passing on reliable info? Is this something they're making up? Are they the type of person who would make something up? Do they have a history of this? You know, that's when that all became really important. And that's when I started my journey and when I started asking like, at this point between grower to buyer, is there any chance someone would have a motive to change the name on what they purchased as a clone or a seed to meet market demand? How likely is that to occur? And how often do we think that is occurring? You know, that's when all those questions came and started swelling to me. Okay, maybe this is a good point for me to introduce a little analogy. And this is actually something, it's an article written by a writer-journalist called Ginny O'Dell. And it's called There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch. And I won't go into too much detail. But I would say that the piece itself is an amazing read for those of you who are interested. But I'll give you a little rundown on like what she discovered and what this is all about. So I don't know exactly where she picks up this lead, right? But she basically finds online that there are a couple of stores advertising this very generic looking watch. It's kind of just imagine like a vaguely modern minimalist looking watch that like, you know, is not very offensive but is also not super distinctive. And she starts looking around and she starts finding the exact same watch being sold by all these different e-commerce stores online. The way it's being sold is one of two ways. One, they say for a limited time only, you get this watch for free, you just need to pay for shipping. Okay, that's one side of it. The other side of it is they just say, okay, it was $50, it's marked down to $10. Pretty classic schemes. Yeah. And if you go on onto these shops, you know, it'll have these fake tickers that are like, oh look, like people are buying it like live right now. Yeah. You can see like the numbers dropping. Yeah. And it's like, you better, you better get it. Right. You better get it. And so she starts looking around a bit more. She starts examining the shop itself. And she notices a couple of things. One, when she looks at the photographs of the shop and all that. She does some reverse image searches and she finds that the branding for the store itself is all fake. Like the photographs, like for example, this store is meant to be based in like a hip part of San Francisco. Yeah. And they're photographs of like an actual physical shop. Sure. She does a reverse image search and like that shop, that photograph actually belongs to some other shop. Of course. No relation, right? Yeah. And she looks into like the address and it's not a real address. She looks into the writing that they have on the about page and it's been ripped from like, I don't know, like the San Francisco, like city council website. I don't know. Sure. So all the branding information around the store itself is all fake. So that's one level. All the photographs are fake. Okay. She goes deeper. She starts trying to find out how many stores actually sell the same generic looking watch. And she finds a whole bunch of them. They're apparently in all these hip cities, Madrid, London, Paris, and they're all selling the same thing. They call them different names and the branding's changed, but they're the same watch. Okay. So then she goes even deeper. She tries to find out where the watches even come from, right? And quite quickly she gets to like Alibaba and these like Chinese wholesalers slash manufacturers. Now the crazy part here is that she can never find who actually has been manufacturing these. She finds a network of quote unquote suppliers that are listed as like manufacturers slash wholesalers. And so it's just this crazy human centipede of like drop shipping. Yeah. No. For those of you who don't know, right? Drop shipping is when the shop never actually touches or handles any of the goods. They can order from a customer and they simply send their order to the warehouse. The fulfillment place. Yeah. Yeah. Whether that place is where they actually make it. Or where they actually fulfill it. That it may be another intermediary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's basically this, you can already see the possibility of there being like a whole chain of drop shippers. You know, like this person's drop shipping, but the person that who they're buying it from is also drop shipping and who they're buying from is also drop shipping. And so it's just this like endless, endless chain of like fake goods and no accountability and no actual origin. Yeah. And I don't know, I think that like the analogies between something like that and cannabis. I think there's a lot of crossover. You know, the other day, a bunch of us watched a documentary called telemarketers and it was on HBO. This guy, Patrick J. Pespas and his friends did a, it started off that they were just like junkies or one was a junkie and one was like a young kid at a telemarketing job. And they were just filming how wild it was at their job where they were getting paid to pretend to be policemen calling for the policemen's balls to sing if you would donate to officers such and such. And it was a similar idea to me. And I saw it very so many parallels to our cannabis community because between that phone and and that the actual like dude using heroin on the other line. The perception to the person on the other end of the line is that this is, you know, officer Joe McDonald. You know what I mean? Like it's perception is everything, absolutely everything. And when there's a barrier there, there is some level of faith that has to go into this. Yeah. And I've always felt like if you can mitigate faith, the more you can mitigate faith and and get to actual hard data, the better off you are. Okay, I'm glad you said that. Okay, because just just growing on that watch analogy for a bit more. Sure. One of the other observations she made was how it was being validated online. And so these these quote unquote shops, they would have Instagram accounts with a whole bunch of followers. Okay, their followers were what she called quote unquote aspirational influencers people who might didn't have like they maybe had like around 1000 followers each so they're not big yet but they have they do have some visibility. And what happens is that there's a kind of mutualism kind of symbiosis that happens between this fake shop and these quote unquote influences where the fake shop gives these influences more exposure and the influences also give the fake shop exposure and they validate each other. Yep. The cosine. Yeah. And going back to what you're saying about perception. Well, it's probably a product of the internet right now anyone can have. You can basically magic a brand out of nothing because you no longer need premises. You no longer need like all these like traditional infrastructure, you know, for business. And so you can play all these games online because now you're just playing almost like a pure information game. And you can use to manipulate the information space. That's information warfare psyops. Yeah, it's in every step of the way it is. I mean realistically, it sounds extreme but it really is and it's a confidence game. When I talk about co-signing a lot. I talk a lot of people ask me why I don't have certain readers interviewed on this show. And I try to, you know, every once in a while I have someone explain it to them. But realistically, when I have when I bring people on the show, I try to account for not just who they are right now and what they're presenting to me right now. I also am trying to predict whether these people are always going to continue to operate in this manner and be good people because you know how complicated life can get and you know someone suddenly loses everything. Sometimes you can be moral fluid and and the things they wouldn't do before for money now become a viable option. We just watched her whole cannabis market tanks. So when I choose what breeders to bring on, it's normally people that I am. I'm very very long acquainted with and that I'm willing to in a sense co-sign a bit because I'm willing to say like, if I bring them on and have a serious heart to heart conversation with them, people will have the perception that not only we are friends, but that I believe everything they're saying. And because I know that perception is there, I do not want to bring on people that I don't necessarily believe or trust and then leave it up to the people watching to figure that out because you know, we're just presenting something. I can't live with that. And when people ask me about certain breeders, it's not even necessarily that I think they're bad breeders and haven't had them on. It's just because I don't know them well enough to put my own, my own co-sign on the line, if that makes sense, but it's not necessarily speaking out against people if they're not on. It's just that safety measure and that safety measure is there because of perception. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really good point. And, you know, just to, I think just to really, really draw the point home, right? A fake watch is actually easier to verify than, say, seats, right? Oh yeah. You get the fake watch, you look at it, it's in your hand, does it work? What's its quality like? You can see it. It looks like it's supposed to? Is it? Yeah, it looks like it's supposed to. So at least if you bought a fake watch, you know whether or not you're being scammed. Right? But I did want to say, right, the point being, the major point being cannabis specifically is even more ripe for exploitation, right? And you were talking about flower before Matt. Yeah. But imagine you're buying seeds, right? And you and I talked about this a bit before the recording, but I think this is the point I was trying to make. The seeds themselves are a promise of plants. Okay. They, they, you know, we've talked about genetic variability before, odds, probability, all that, that comes into play, right? The plants are a promise of flower. And the end result of all of that is processed flower. So you have yet another stage. So from, from the beginning point of seeds to the end point of consumable flower, you actually have multiple leaps to make. And it's a long time. And it's time. And so what you get in a chain of leaps like that or chain of promises like that is deniability. Yeah. You know, you have both, you can both play in this realm of plausibility and deniability. If someone wasn't happy with what you, what they got, you could say, oh, but it could have been, you could have just messed up at any of these points. Absolutely. And that's a way to deny like your responsibility as the breeder or seed maker, right? Absolutely. But even if you're, even if you're a legitimate breeder or seed maker, like this, this sucks for you as well, because if someone comes to you and says, hey, I didn't get what I thought I was going to get. You have to now troubleshoot and try to figure out at which stage something could have gone wrong. Absolutely. I imagine it must be so crazy to have some of these troubleshooting conversations with people as someone who actually does care and is trying to make sure that like people are getting what you promise. You know what, honestly, for me, it's been very, I'm constantly the bearer of bad news. And I've kind of just come to live with that, you know, like whether it's new people in our discord, asking questions about some like Barney's farm or whoever, you know, like I'm just going to have to open some doors that they haven't heard yet, you know. And when it comes to stuff like that, because like, you know, there are a few of us who actually like test our lines know what we're working with and run them out. I don't run into a whole lot of people having issues with what I'm telling them the lines going to be like, not being like in the end, even if it's badly grown. Usually there's some representation there to where people are like, okay, I fucked up. But the problem comes if you're using seed banks, because now you've got a middle man in between. Now let's say they get seeds and these seeds didn't pop. Well, if you're selling them direct and you know the seeds are still popping for other customers, you have them there with you and you can pop them there. Yet they're not having them pop there. You have to then think, okay, how are they storing them at the seed bank? Was there any problem with them getting cooked on the way in the mail between point A to point B or point B to point C? How did they pop them? What methods are they using? Did they wash their fucking hands like any number of things? So yeah, that's usually where trickiness comes into play is seed banks for me. Yeah, yeah. And okay, no, that's a really good insight as well, because I did want to hear a bit about you. Yeah, that makes sense. But okay, even if we move to flower, right, flower as a product instead of seeds. So there we can say, okay, the chain's been shortened. It's not like the person has to grow it out and see what happens. It's like the flower is the flower. But even then, right, how we judge flower is extremely subjective. So you pointed out before that how you judge smell, how you judge effects, it's not like those are firm universal objective things. Correct. And even with flower, you still run into all of this subjective uncertainty and, you know, you come up against the limits of your judgment, you come up against the limits of what you can communicate to each other. Yeah. And, and it also, again, it depends on education to another one of the review things that I've been doing is something we're starting to call legit or not. I just have no better name for it. Sorry guys. But it was from my point of view, as I started looking into some of the new hype market, you know, looking into these new names and trying these strains out seeing if they are anything like they're claiming to be your their lineages, etc. I've also been kind of interested in seeing if any of the old clones that we have kept all these years and then I know flower of real well, if I can go into the modern collective dispensary market. I'm not on a menu pick it out and reliably get it. But what's the percentage, you know, in what city, like, all these are data points to me and I'm fascinated by it. One of those recent ones I did was something called Louis the 13th og Kush. I did a review on it and you can see that on our channel. And it was, you know, I did review it was at least it was a very was an og Kush. The grow was decent of it the handling of it was absolutely horrible. If I was an owner of a company I would never put weed that looked like that in bags and sell it like no way in hell. But because it was better than the other og pushes I bought which it was a terrible margin of it was bad. It's bleak out there. I got a second one. And I got it for a few reasons one my chick really likes og Kush and that was the closest one there was and she's like I want that one that one's helping me right now so it's ugly but all right whatever. So we got it. And quickly to illustrate real quick I'm going to pop these up on the screen so that there is some kind of. So you guys can have some kind of idea of what I'm talking about here where is so here. Can you see it is it showing up. Yep. Okay, good. Yep, we could. So here we have the first batch. It's not particularly wonderful looking as you can tell it's it's dark green it's been handled the oils are smashed it's not. I mean come on you don't put this in a package but it was actually decent to smoke oddly enough because you know looks aren't necessarily everything. Here's the second batch that I got now as you can tell. This is not the same but this is not even the same structure this looks like a gg for hybrid to me I would say and from the smell of it it was kind of very guerrilla glue. So at this point my lady I run into the problem that I that I was initially trying to figure out for people. My lady liked the other Louis because it helped her headache at the time. And I got a second bag one week not even a week I think it was three days from the last one and same name same batch. That's what shows up. And it's nothing like the first one from the same batch same bag same company same delivery service everything. So at this point I'm like okay now we see how they're going to handle this because I wonder how often this comes up that someone's like hey you didn't give me the you didn't give me real Louis the 13th oh gee. I doubt that ever happens like where people like an identified strainer like this isn't it you know like does that happen. I don't think so. Yeah I'd be curious about that too. I hit him up is just you know just any random dude. And I hit up the delivery service and actually they were fast to respond. And they were like okay well I need to contact the owner of this company and I'll let him know that there was an issue. So the owner of that company and you know I'll leave them nameless for now but you can see it in the review. He wrote me back. And he said hi this is blank from our friends at blank told us that you were unhappy with a flower purchase and I'm so sorry to hear that. I have told them that we will totally have them switch out the King Louis flower bag and you can pick any of the other flavors. We did a different cut of King Louis oh gee this time around because we always package fresh order. We have about five different in-house growers that we rotate flavors with based on harvest. Where is it so we can keep the same flavors in rotation and guarantee freshness. It's definitely an OG but not the same cut as before. Sorry for the inconvenience we always aim to please our patients it would never want you to walk away unsatisfied. Hope you have a great rest of your day and and they have been notified with the deliveries to switch it out for you. So I said make sense then I appreciate the response on why medicine can't be relied on to be consistent. I was wondering why that would be so vastly different as a seed maker that's an aspect I look at. I forget from the commercial cultivation side how that goes multiple growers pushing to one spot etc. And the reason I said this is because I wanted him to admit yeah I'm just a marketing guy. I'm pushing other people that are actually growers flower. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about but he doubled down. He said as you know with breeding different phenotypes come out expressed differently. We try to be as consistent as possible but there being so many phenotypes of classic strains. Some growers prefer to stick with certain phenos that respond better to their formula or their growing style. Thank you for being understanding and sorry about the confusion. We would never want patients to think that we are doing a bait and switch. That was that. I did thank him and say no I'm not interested in a replacement. That's not why I did this and I never got the replacement because I just wasn't interested in see if you'd actually follow through with that. But I was interested in his response since Luio G is a cut a clone only not a seed line there are not multiple phenotypes of it. It can't express differently but it would not turn from OG cushion to berry and gorilla group. That's just yeah to me that's just some very slippery rhetoric. And it's similar to what I was saying. It was similar to what I was saying to you about like. If you're like a scammy seed dealer seed maker. You can just pretend that like oh it's because you messed up in this point of the process with this or that this one is kind of like. I guess praying. He tried to use breeder speak on me. He's like well yeah but you know type in variation. Yeah but also like praying on like ignorance not your ignorance. Oh yeah that makes sense like to say you can't just say it's a clone but also it's not a clone it's actually a bunch of different. Yeah none of it made any sense. So like how can you say he did not bait and switch knowing that that's not Louis the 13th OG. It's like literally what he said specifically it's a different cut of OG. So why would you put it in a bag when the end goal on your packaging says that this is medical. And that to me is like the one factor that kills me because the only reason that we have ever been able in California to be able to grow this plant with any kind of like safety or safeguard or any safety in our hearts is because the medical community generally ill patients cancer patients people like that pushing super hard to make this available and it was all done off their backs and at this point they can't even go and get reliable medicine from these places at a reasonable price that's done you know so to me it's just like a. So many things have gone so wrong but it's being carried as being done right everywhere and people don't even know that there are issues going on. They don't even know that there are questions to ask they don't know about these variables there's a lot of assumptions along the way. And if there's anything that I if I can twist anything in my whole career it would be to flip that on its head and make people see it for what it is. Now that we the guy himself has given us an insight into what his game is actually like. I wanted to bring it back to seeds for a moment again. Even though we've talked about this many times but the obvious analogy I was drawing with the watch the whole watch thing right is that in some situations these seeds are being wholesale white labeled by some seamless source somewhere. People are getting a hold of these seeds rebranding them repackaging them remarketing them or so not remarketing but marketing them. And remarketing in many cases yeah remarketing absolutely because a lot of times when they're buying the bulk seeds from a bulk seller they're not buying the strain that they're selling they're buying maybe maybe resembles the strain they're selling and sometimes in many cases in many companies maybe not. I mean you know like maybe not if you ever seen Acapulco gold flower you know 10 weeks look like that all dense no 6070 days close enough. I mean just one of many examples you know like things that people can easily point to and be like okay purple punch we know a purple punch looks like it has a very specific look and a resin profile. Yeah that's not it. That's not it. And like, it's just not and like but they still list here genetics granddaddy purple Larry oh gee so they're giving the genetics from from. It'll come back to me. Can we spend a bit of time here can you go and look at. Yeah oh yeah let's do that I think I the more I thought about it when we when you mentioned I was like do we need to pull this up because because they are funny dude the biggest offenders in my opinion of this let's see where's their chem dog they do not have it. Do they have a search. Let's see yeah they let's see let's just do the search for the adish mood. Let's see what their search shows for chem dog where is it. Search can't I should I pay DAWG that's probably the best bet. Probably. Oh wow none. No just just go chem and see what happens. Yeah that's a good idea. Yeah. All right what do we have we have chem dog from blim burn oh my god look at this thing. narrow leafed. Nice and genetics clone of chem 91. What. Look at this. Look the seeds. Yeah blim burn seeds so there's one chem dog you have a shot at here's blimbered's Ken for which you couldn't tell anything from this is just way too early but yeah no definitely not. Chem for American genetics. Oh my Jesus Christ. Can we go to Barney's actually I know you I know there's Barney's on here but can you go to the actual Barney's website. Oh yeah. Is it still showing the search page. Is it on that same page. It's on the same page you were on before. Okay yeah hold on a second I might have to switch things real quick. Stop screen present share screen and where's Barney's. No. There it is. Sure. Here we go. There we go. Good old Barney's. All right let's go chem again let's go let's just do a little chem survey here. I don't know. This is going to be real fun. That's all. Okay Kim try that again. Oh there's no chem here on Barney's farm. It's a chem closest you're going to get is like GMO. Okay. Maybe some that picture actually looks like GMO which is funny. So I think that they're probably like using a GMO hybrid for the picture. What's another really recognizable one. What about the OG or something. Oh yeah. OG Kush is super recognized. See if Barney's farm ever got themselves a real live OG Kush. At least in pictures we can see. Let's see. Bubba Kush see all results. Bubba is another easy one. Let's see. OG Kush auto. It actually looks like an OG Kush plant in the picture too but it looks like a boofy ass OG Kush but yeah. You can see the shape that football shape. Yeah. You also see that in day record too that similar shape of the bud. Very heavy and prominent in day record except day record has a more chem 91 bud bud type and like has that leaf cannibalism stuff. Yeah. Whenever I talk about football shapes on OG that's what I mean that. So I just wanted to interject and say that like in cannabis it's not quite as extreme yet I believe as the watch story that I told like as far as I know no one's doing drop shipping yet. But it's probably not far away the way. Oh it's very it's going to happen soon. So the main thing that was going on for a long time was in the 2000s a company in Spain started and they were supplying Barney's farm. Greenhouse seeds. Sensi Nirvana and several others. All the main ones that they were they were supplying it was one company with a list of like wow them and I seeds that they could choose from there and obviously when this started to make them millions of dollars really fast other companies popped up that were bigger and came and that's when them popped up and almost anything you buy from Barney's farm. Any of these guys has come from the past 15 years. All of it was supplied by them. So yeah who knows what you get in the end they don't really care that was as close to drop shipping as it got. But at some point they got lit up. And what was funny was not fun if none of it's funny when people get lit up like that. But the odd part about it was when. Got hit by the Spanish Spanish authorities their site went down or not site went down they put a warning up on their site about it saying like oh you know this has been. Taken offline the identical message was up on. Site because they're the same company. A lot of people don't know that and it's a Spanish company. You know there's there are good decent people were. They own it but like are they breeding maybe one might make some seeds every now and then but do they is that the seeds they're selling now that's where it gets hairy. You know like are they doing their own projects and breeding and into weed probably. Is that what they're selling is that the majority of seeds are selling. And as much as I like the guys that's that's that's the honest truth on that. And they know it. Yeah in that in the watch thing I think I mentioned that like she basically. Came to the conclusion that a whole bunch of these different shops were actually just run by the same person. And they just each of them had different branding. But it was the same same person running all of it. And it's getting from the same way house. Yeah. And you know in the U.S. it's starting to happen. We're seeing these big old seed makers pop up in like Salinas Santa Barbara doing these massive FEM pollinations outdoors and selling these as FEM seeds for cookies or for that's where all those seeds come from for doesn't. They're all just FEM boofy outdoor produced and these guys are these reps of this company are nowhere near this shit dude. They know the seeds don't touch their fucking hands. They aren't selecting one big smoke and mirrors campaign. And like you know like I see the comments with people right people get pissed at me all the time because they say I have nothing nice to say about other breeders but I don't think I'm talking about other breeders. I think I'm talking about people that sell seeds. When I talk about other breeders I speak with admiration and respect because it's it's hard. It's the heart. We should just we may as well just start calling these people drop shippers. Yeah. Realistically drop shippers they are it. That's it marketing drop shippers. And I did want you to look at one more website because this one has some personal significance to me. Okay. I posted it in the in the chat in our chat here. I don't know if you can pull it up but I'll give a bit of context. So before I found the syndicate I was on a forum. I'm not going to name the forum. Okay. But this forum was hooked up to this website. Oh no. Look at this website dude. It looks like it's made by box for box. These are all the Barney farm pictures. They're old pictures. I recognize them. But look at the aesthetic of the website too. Like oh yeah. It doesn't look like it's it's for humans or that it was by humans. No. It looks like the most generic. And so this forum that I was on was basically trying to funnel these white label seeds down their forum members' throats. And you know this was like a major sponsor saying hey you can get like cookie as ones from weed seeds express. Oh no. Oh Chiquita Banana. A mild strain. Cool. Everyone was growing these seeds and everyone was so happy about it. I just. But that's it right? Like no one that has experience was going to be going buying these and spending their money here. So the only people they were going to be getting are people that are new that are so happy that they've gotten through their first run of something they can smoke regardless of quality because they're new like that it's going to work. It's always going to work. It's praying on people. And look at that dude. Look at that. I mean the other thing I think that freaks me out is that this is this website is just one example of like thousands. Just as generic and as faceless as this. Look what they did to green crack. Look at this ugly-ass picture they chose for green crack. Jesus. Did they get OG Kush right? They didn't even put a picture of OG Kush under OG Kush bro. But that goes to show you like the people that are putting these strains together and these sites together they don't even know enough to use a picture of OG Kush. They don't know what OG Kush looks like. And that's to me like that's one of those keys it's like well dude if your breeder doesn't know what OG Kush looks like probably shouldn't be buying seeds from them. But if this is being shoved down your throat at some f*****g forums you know why wouldn't this be the forum says that's what people use right they got peanut butter breath after all. Oh yeah there's another one Amsterdam marijuana seeds is that another one? Bro there's so many man like yeah this is the one in generic seed bank lame you can think of probably exists. I think it was this one it was the one that's been around like forever and has never f***** off. Amsterdam marijuana seeds these guys. Girl Scout cookies extreme. We kind of see the tab I think. Oh that's why. Google yeah that's why let's see. But this is the one like whenever I hear people talk about like their their first experiences usually for some reason they end up at Amsterdam marijuana seeds and see if this is the one yeah hey look at that these horrible horrible plants I wouldn't want to grow that. Yeah the website says generic as the last one as well. Yeah it's the same kind of s**t then yeah. I want people to have better than this I do and I don't want this to be the first place that they go and get ripped off you know like people's first seed buying experience shouldn't be getting ripped off it sucks because it's a data. We almost treat it now like it's the norm like if you just start you're going to get ripped off and then hopefully you learn and then you stop getting ripped off that's like the norm it's sad because it is the norm like we see when people come to our our discord now like that's the first thing we hear is bro you don't know how many times I got ripped off before I got here oh my god look at the plant on the screen bro look at this look how taco those leaves are more plant. Oh dear no hope no hope for any of them was there anything like you go first no no go ahead I was just going to say like I think you also did want to talk more about collectives as middlemen within the context of flower but we can also keep bagging on these these websites I could do this endlessly bro like I'm going to have to be its own section on the show one day because it's just like you can go through these sites and literally help people like give them sets of logic to use like as I'm breaking down this specific strain on this page I can explain why all the things that I look at that are our key factors to me and why this is fake like what would trigger this for me as a person who's been in this business a long time why would I know to look at that and see it's fake and I think that would that might be an important tool for people but I don't know I think a lot of people just want their hand held and ask I use it fake or not and at that point again you're relying on the faith of someone whether it's me or someone else you're asking someone else and it's always better to have the logic tools in your in your box so you're not getting my agenda you're not getting anyone's agenda I think we want to get towards that that that process of thinking towards the end I think you did set out some points about it that's right but how about we return to flower land for a bit because you did want to talk about our were flower land you didn't want to talk about collectives and the kind of role that they've had as middlemen within flower like the context of flower okay so with it I think this works out with the yeah with the burgeoning of the gray the gray quasi-legal scene we started seeing collectives with menus of options and we saw more growers starting to feel more availability and less knowledge about the actual crops so the menus have grown substantially it's just a long list of names to a lot of people and it wasn't just the way it always was like at the beginning of california collectives I remember it was like sensey star big bud there was like seven or eight we could get urban poison, blueberry a few more white widow white rhino but that's generally what you would expect it wasn't a large menu thrown at your face and now we have a middleman between the grower the person growing the crops and popping the seeds possibly even popping the seeds because sometimes the grower isn't even the person who pops the seeds or sources the clones and then we have another middleman in between the flower and the end user so that's a whole other variable and let's see each collective dispensary is working with many growers as the person talked about in that text they said specifically we are working with many growers and we filter it into one spot being the mylar packaging place where they stamp their label they stamp the strain name on it all that stuff many growers one spot all who have individuals agenda individual agendas to move weed from their pockets to the collective at the highest price point possible so the collective intern is also wanting to make points on their packages so they also have an agenda to maximize the name value to move from the pockets to the retail customers pockets with name value and hike and social media instagram twitter snapchat the invention of snapchat I mean names have gone and become far more important in the sale than anything except for pictures and pictures are not worth a thousand words anymore with the invention of AI pictures the invention of just you know like people just taking each other's pictures yeah just say yeah it's just not it doesn't tell the tale anymore let's see what else we got it's just there are so many agendas for maximizing value and getting points off a package and that's the term that we use in cannabis and it's used in many other areas you know but like there's points on a package there's a finite number let's say the total number of amount you can get off this package is 3000 denero I don't know and I don't want to get flagged for something and and everybody's trying to get their piece out of that 3000 so there's a finite number of percentages you know and everybody's trying to maximize their value out of this so at some point they start adding on what's it called fake value they're putting it they're adding on fake value so now it's not just 3000 let's add a different name to it now it's got 4000 a pound now this is more interesting to all of us along the way right but what if we change a picture too 5000 a pound so there's all these different agendas along the way and each person is trying to maximize value at each turn and it's just a lot of human error who don't necessarily have any reason to have the history in mind or research in mind like none of that comes into play when it comes to the wallet just to be really bold here you mean like someone's growing something but then they're like oh it's not selling we're just going to call it gelato instead yes and then raise the price kind of thing or at least then be able to move it so we can move this at 3000 a pound to gelato or let's say we can move this 3000 a pound to screen crack well there's only 3000 to spread between us so gelato is kind of a hot name let's move it to that well now there's 4000 a pound now we call it gelato we can move to 4000 a pound now things are looking up everybody's morals become more fluid at that point right history research now that makes any sense the end user not having their headache or not growing up at the end of the day because there's a lot less importance yeah not important just not relevant whatsoever it never gets taken into account I was going to extend what you were saying earlier as well about how okay now we're saying the names don't really mean enough the pictures don't mean enough even what they're writing about what they're selling doesn't mean enough and then it's like I think what next people the next thing that people go to is uh who's repping them on social media yeah for example it's a big one and like the watch thing right I kind of pointed out that like even if people aren't actually happy with what they've got there's a symbiotic relationship that could be at play where the growers or the consumers of the flower have an incentive to still share the product if they want exposure themselves from the place they're either buying the seeds or flower from and so they then now have like their own entrenched agenda regardless of the quality of the seeds or flower because now they can be promoted if they are promoting this thing they themselves can get like you know clout out of it conceivably well I mean that's to me how the whole and that whole industry was built it was a bunch of co-signs off of shitty strains not one breeder in the mix in my opinion um it was people with big social media accounts you know like it started off to me like just for example with the example with why yeast wonderful wonderful dude made seeds did real selections made real crosses and he had a marketing guy then that marketing guy was a better talker behind the scenes not necessarily like physically a talker that guy can't talk for shit but he was a better liar schmoozer and so while the man doing the work was making these pretty decent looking strains the person that was doing the deals on the back end was moving up the food chain and the marketing guy became the breeder by snaking his own breeder out and then figuring out that you can buy bulk seeds and sell them that's how that worked and the thing that killed me was that every time I saw someone supporting that specific company after this it happened to me it was like you are spending money against breeders you're spending money against breeding because what you're telling the whole community and by doing this is that we prop up guys that are marketers that put breeders out and that sell us bullshit and sell us lies that's what we prop up that's what we're about so that's how I looked at it from my perspective and obviously that's not that's not realistic obviously people didn't know all the backstory but it also comes down to the point of like who's going to tell the backstory who wants to take all that heat for telling the backstory who wants to be the person telling everyone at every angle that you know Santa's dead he's not a fun position to be in you know like I always said I always used to tell people I get mad and say do your research do your research figure it out and then at one point I realized there's nowhere for people to go do research anymore on these people yeah just not okay so I think we're getting towards what we might want to recommend to people as like a process or you know at least generally to go through if you are unsure about a product but I think also maybe I just do a little summary of what of kind of like the conditions that we've the sub optimal conditions that we've outlined in terms of the flower and seed markets yeah so again we're just pointing it out in the seed market and the flower market there's a whole supply chain potentially of different actors who each have different agendas at different stages of the chain there is the possibility of like what are they going to say if you're a grower like I mentioned and we're talking about growing seeds your ability to kind of like properly vet what you're growing is really difficult just due to the nature of the plant and the complexity of all the different stages that the plant and the flower have to go through there is there is the issue of like provenance there's one other issue too and you kind of gesture to it but it is the fact that there is a good you know eight months to a year period before you see the actual flower from the seeds and during that time it's eight to eight months to a year if you pop it right away that you've gone from the purchase like do you even talk to that breeder anymore like you know what I mean like will they have any communication with you at that point does it matter all that is that piss you off anymore you're so far removed from the purchase it's really worth the effort to go you know what I mean so there's a lot of factors that come into play about why this scam works essentially yeah many basically many what's a good term for this there are many gaps between yeah they just like so many gaps in these chains and like chains of production and supply that uncertainty and dishonesty can enter and I think that those gaps are really that well known like outside of our discord and our friends and our friend group and some seed makers like most people don't know that you know this company is not making their own seeds most people don't know that this breeder doesn't even grow this breeder doesn't even smoke let alone grow you know like they don't know any of that stuff but it exists it does exist okay so I think at this point people listening in who are learning or hearing about this for the first time might start feeling really how would I put it really disillusioned yes about the whole thing which is a fair feeling like it is disillusioning it is really depressing but I also think that we do want to say that you can do something about it right yeah absolutely you don't know maybe we can start yeah maybe we can start digging into the possible ways that you can try to verify that what you've bought whether it's flower or seeds is legitimate okay um I'm actually interested to hear from your point of view what you've learned up till this point where you would start right now like let's say um you wanted to buy something that had basically some kind of skunky undertone where would you start to research because that's a really that's where a lot of people start it's exceptionally hard to research skunky anything because there are so many con artists running around with that man I yeah I don't know if I could in need you're smart dude you can answer this definitely I think with the knowledge that I have now number one I think I know a bit better which which clones or lines to look at or at least which names to look for to begin with you know even if I didn't have skunk you know in mind or super skunk in mind I think I would know okay let's start sniffing around Kim let's look around diesel let's look around diesel sure I can look for super skunk as well I mean so there's there's kind of like me knowing that smart basically like some strain history yeah that's one aspect of it the second aspect is now knowing networks of people and knowing the people who are involved given the history that's the next place I would look you get to the point where you were studying the history though because I mean sure sure sure so I think the first thing was like me trawling through all these bullshit you know white label seed sites and at least starting to get to what the big name seemed to be that was like pre pre learning right pre yeah Brita syndicate that's just picking up data yeah that one's more about like analyzing frequencies of names right and then being like okay oh G Kush is clearly a big name Kim dog clearly a big name like that kind of thing that's how I started and then I think it wasn't long after that I started getting into people's reviews like strain reviews on YouTube now now you know stuff like what you're doing now but way worse yeah yeah okay because even in there I was like this is so variable and it just sounds like complete rubbish like so many of them and I think that's when I started to get towards more like long form media like conversations with breeders conversations with growers and eventually found my way to breeders syndicate but it was around that point that basically started getting interested in what the oral histories were what what made you decide to like kind of settle a breeder syndicate because that is I mean most people you know that this these guys suck too you know what I mean like I can generalize here I think that a breeders syndicate you could actually try to trace lines and I don't mean lines of like in terms of like seed lines I just mean like lines of like logic yeah and actually get somewhere like you could actually find a person and actually ask them things and they would they would tell you things whereas like I when you look elsewhere you just come up to you just get dead ends right it was like the it was like the journalist looking for the source of the watches you would just it would just be this endless like uh yeah there's no way you could have surfaces there's no way you could have gotten to the end of the day unless you have like connections and connections into the seed bank there's no way there's nothing saying anywhere like these seeds are actually made by you know yeah interesting so the the other way I looked at it was is the person making these seeds one like like did have they published anything about what they've done had they told any stories about their process have they said have they documented in any form like either provenance or process you know either one yeah and often even that criteria people fail yeah and then the third thing if and if not that can I even identify a person in this whole thing is that are they even individual names being mentioned or is it just a faceless organization and most of the entities faceless yeah it's an entity so again let me I'll recap okay it's like um one is there a line of uh thought or logic I can trace two is there any mention of provenance or history three is there any mention of a breeding process or seed making process and four are these people even people that I can identify yeah that's a big one and so that is like outside of having access to something like breeder syndicate I think that's a that's something that you can follow whether or not you have access to people like Matt yeah but I'm curious now Matt what about your opinion on like uh trying to verify something you're thinking about buying or company that you are interested in or that is so hard for me that's so hard for me because I'm so biased now like and I have to I have to think about this a lot because when people ask me about someone I don't want to if I don't like the human it's different than not liking or them not being decent at their job if that makes sense because there are people that like I don't get along with that are pretty good at fucking making seeds and are legitimate and not liars we just don't get a law you know um so that parts that part's been really hard for me to divide because usually if I don't like someone I don't support them period um yeah I mean I think one thing that I can probably guess is really important for you is just be more to have a conversation with the person who at least seems to be the responsible person um like if you're not happy with seeds I imagine for you the important thing is to talk to the seed maker and see what they have to say to like with their flower yeah I want them to be smarter than me at this and not to say they gotta be genius I'm not genius at all I think I'm very basic at it there's people that you know can speak circles around me all day when it comes to breeding but I not even necessarily smart I mean just be able to communicate basic basic shit like I can because I'm basic and if they communicate with me basically then it's great um I was taught I told you yesterday um I had a conversation with uh the RS 11 guy yeah you totally could talk speak on any level about breeding why he selected what he did how many he did what he was doing at the time you know like all the things around it the things that like when you actually put the time in and and put in you know yours to breeding like you start at least with me and a lot of my friends we start referring to things in our past by what we were growing at that time like that's how we measure the time in our life is based on what our cycles of growing were because it's just the one constant in our lives and when you start talking people talk like that then you know it's very legitimately they're they're being growing their being because it it becomes their basis for time in life you know so that's one of those things I look for and I notice that yesterday and he's he's a totally different type of um breeder in that he uses you know more modern lines he's doing modern work and uh but we're still able to communicate on that level and I thought it was pretty cool because it's been a long time since I've met a newer person that I do that yeah and I think this is part of your larger point of actually just getting to know these people get to know the people you're buying stuff from this is this was this conversation wasn't even about like necessarily for the show at first like it was it was because I it all started out when I started seeing guava the name guava pop up everywhere oh yeah that's right I forgot about that yeah during my era guava usually meant star-dog like it was it was star-dog guava cut was in it and they called it guava something or it was like a mango smelling plant okay so I started going on some a hunt trying to figure out what guava was because I kept seeing in everything including the RS 11 the pink guava so that's what kind of sent me on that trail and to this day like some people say it's gelato something some people say it's sure of something I have no clue but all I know is it's not guava at all but um I am interested to try the pink guava now though after hearing uh Dio explain it that sounds cool but um yeah after trying a bunch of different strawberry guava pineapple guava pineapple being pineapple strawberry or guava it was a trip it's a trip and that was kind of what even got me thinking down this process was why why this meant something else to me this guava means something totally different to a whole generation of breeders why does it mean this now and what did it mean now and that's where it kind of started you know this little journey this show uh initiating conversations with like Clearwater genetics he was one of the people I went in actually went into his discord to do research on guava because I knew that our discord probably wouldn't be a good place to do research on modern strains you know like I'm not someone you can ask about modern strains and I don't know a lot of people in there that are like that's their thing but I noticed Clearwater genetics had used it in a bunch of stuff so I figured I'd go in his discord and ask and yeah he said gelato something very polite guy so you know that was one step I took and just trying to research it's one data point one person using the line's perspective I don't know how experienced a breeding or history or any of that he is at research but it's at least a data point that I can take and say okay this breeder you know A said this breeder B said this, breeder C said this this person has been around this long research more reliable therefore this one is probably most likely to answer that's how I kind of break down my data and that was how I went about it with guava yeah and I'll add that that's a really good point as well being able to have multiple multiple perspectives on the same thing that you can help to use verify that one thing whether it's like yeah I mean obviously there are limits to that too like I pointed out you know that example of like social media influencers and these fake stores you know being in like the double cosine so you do have to be careful of that still but I think having multiple perspectives where you can sort of discern that there aren't the same agendas in operation across those perspectives definitely tell you something it's not necessarily enough to confirm everything but it clearly definitely helps a lot yeah I mean it's like with a map when you triangulate points or like in a story you know if you have two people that are unknown to each other telling two very unique statement or two very similar statements with very unique points like that stands out stuff like that stands out quite a bit and gives more relevancy I think usually not always but usually because really I mean I've been scared to use these terms but we are actually addressing a much larger issue that you know the world is still dealing with which is what they call like a post truth world where we have to face the uncertainty of information almost now as a mundane issue and a pervasive issue and you know it's sad though because I just don't know that this wasn't always the case you know I just think it's become in people's faces but yeah I think it's always been the case even with our most popular most famous book ever you know it's just like it's never been the case of where everything is as presented I think that we can still point to reasons why it's been accelerated though or galvanized like obviously the internet being able to have like e-commerce you know like virtual shops social media obviously specifically as well credit we mentioned the credit sure reddit did you mean? credit like digital currency the fact that you don't have to have hard currency exchange hand to hand yeah big one I have another big one the cannabis itself like I pointed out it being first of all a very complex process of production but also a very complex process of like judgment yeah and so all of those things compound like to produce this like very unstable information space yeah definitely yeah but sorry we were kind of like getting into a more prescriptive mode of like trying to give people suggestions on how they actually verify information and I think the last thing we pointed out was like you said multiple perspectives different different agendas looking for triangulation but what about something like community met like what do you think about so coming back to the breeder syndicate right like how important is it do you think to have a community of people who are like all basically looking for the truth it again it's like I really truly feel and I'm sure any parent of any group that they build fills this way that it is such an anomaly because it exists in a vacuum of tons of forums that have existed online since the beginning of Canada seeds being sold online and I have never seen a place that works like ours ever there's never been one I don't care there's no not even a close comparison by any stretch the imagination almost every single forum typically and I don't remember any seed bank owners that I ever liked or got along with that I thought wow these are really good dudes brand forums not one not one and a lot of times it was very us or them our way or the highway if one of our breeders doesn't like you you're dead to us you know type thing so while those information spaces are important community is obviously important when you can do it right but it can also be so just this bully mentality and just stupidity and just in itself be its own mark pool like pool of marks to scam and it's yeah it's scary because you can put yourself in almost like a cult situation and some of these forums with the way it turned out just shift shoveling your money every time someone does a drop because the forum owner says it's legit bam bam bam and like I was thinking double cosines going on yeah I was chatting with Shawnee about one of these forums and I had it popped into mind that these are almost like little like feudal systems where you have like the lord you know the forum owner the sponsors and then kind of like the like the peasants the people who are like forced almost forced to grow you know what they're being told to grow and getting otherwise like banned if you don't you know you don't apply yeah it's tough too because even with our discord there's always going to be a kind of attitude or theme right that goes along with it and ours is typically been like keeping scammers out of our community with that said there are people that maybe we know to us we have the knowledge that are scammers but other people don't and they come in thinking that these are good people and come in promoting scammers agenda and get pushed out real fast from our group you know and to that person's perspective they may be looking at it like we're just as bad as all these other forums because obviously we have an agenda we're not letting them push the agenda for this particular person so it a lot of it is perspective too you know like I just happened to know I came in a long time ago and happened to know a lot of these people really intimately in person it's not just business to business back then there were so few of us that a lot of us knew each other person to person we dealt with each other at conventions emerald cups all that stuff some of us were good friends over years time some of us were just acquaintances over years time but got to know each other pretty well you know so it's not just business to business when I comment on a lot of people and like I was saying earlier when you're talking about like growing career stuff and when I was talking about good person versus good genetics for me it's sometimes it can be so hard because I'm so biased by being so in the middle of the social scenario of breeding and seed making of course it doesn't help me for bias you know what I mean but I do as much as I can I try to be transparent and keep perspective on that for people when I talk about a breeder and not liking them if it's someone that I like their actual gear I'll point it out you know like I try to be cognizant of what I'm saying when I'm saying it how I say it because I know some people take that to heart you know I'll also add that like I think having a strong community that you can largely trust embodies a lot of what embodies a lot of the process already of what we were kind of recommending before like in a community you have the opportunity to get multiple perspectives you get to have extended conversations and why I say extended like as a key part of this is that over time when you're talking to the same people you start to discern patterns you start to be able to know whether what they say is consistent reliable and so you have having these sustained interactions with multiple people who all have different genders and different you know growing situations and contexts it's much easier to come to you know more reliable truths let's say because we don't want to say that like you can either you get perfect information or you get false information it's always going to be somewhere in between you know like truth unfortunately no longer is an absolute thing it's not like true or false it's almost like we now have degrees of truth yes and degrees of strength of truth and so if there's a piece of information that again is verified by multiple people and again you know they don't have a shared agenda we can probably say that that is a more reliable truth than one that is maybe spoken by one person who has an obvious agenda right I think this is an obvious example yeah and so a community again helps you definitely kind of like speeds up any of these processes of verifying information absolutely you know thinking about it like when you brought up community my first instinct is to like push back from that because it would be very easy to be like yeah no our discord is the way it would be very easy to do that but at the same time I'm also very big about like in communities there can't be pedestals and I think that's something else people really need to take into account even in our own discord like I try to make try to be very human there like people know I'm just a fuck up like everyone else and I always fuck up so I think that's important part of the community too is that it's a community not a oligarchy or something weird you know like a dictatorship it's very important and know the difference between that and know what you're in the middle of and always keep a very good perspective around you with who you're surrounding yourself with more importantly I was going to point out and I think this could almost be his own episode but I kind of wanted to point out what I think are symptoms of the not very good community i.e. like a lot of the discord that I have seen like so in Brita syndica again what I was trying to draw your attention to was having sustained extended conversations with the same people now what you find in most other discords is that there is communication but it's often really fragmented like you don't really have the same people participating all the time you have kind of random one-off interactions with random people and there's just no continuity and I think so if you get validation in that kind of context I'd be much less willing to trust the information there because you just don't have again aid the duration of interactions the kind of like extended repeated interactions and therefore you can't it's very hard to verify what you're hearing from them you know yeah I've just been recently learning about the discords that exist as clone gathering stations have you heard about these places like that sell clones yeah I'm new to that that was very new to me and one of the guys that's a moderator in a few of these and I were having a conversation really smart nice dude he seems like he's genuinely interested in collecting clones for the purpose of getting data points to experience them learn them you know things like that there's no reason to get into collecting clones I totally admire that it's why I got into it it's why a lot of people do and I cannot shit on that at all I don't shit on clone collecting whatsoever even though I don't necessarily do it anymore but like these clone collecting places what I'm learning is that the people in these don't understand that the people holding these old clones don't interact with groups that hold clones because that's not how it was ever these were things that were gifted and shared and gifted and when someone takes a gift or something that you're sharing with them like that's in your circle and like a familial type thing and sell it they're usually it's made out like they're cut off from the group that's how things go over time and it's not a hoarding thing it's just a completely different mentality on how groups are built how apprenticeship like how apprenticeship works friendships are built how trust is built over time because a lot of times if you're learning someone you share a clone with them they don't ever fuck you on that clone they never pass it out or any of that you can trust them with a little more and that's how trust and love and friendships are built over time so that's what a lot of these people are missing in these cut organizations and don't get that the people that actually own the cuts with the provenance and the good provenance that they want aren't going to be interacting with the groups who have left these cuts out in the community so when they're spending these several hundred dollars thousands and sometimes on these clones that they're hoping are real and aren't and they're wondering why this happens it's because they're completely missing a point I think clone trading is great I just gave clones to people because I didn't really know about that in the end I gave away all of my clones and realized that I can pop seeds and find whatever I got out of that mindset but I get it and I think some of it is because I have those data points now and they're in my brain and they'll be there forever and everybody I think if you're going to take green seriously needs some of those data points but know how to get to that point and if you're in one of those groups and you're seeing that go down kind of have some spidey senses go off a little bit of when it comes to the provenance part because these guys don't have access to that they don't have access to a lot of what they're claiming to and if they do have some of these clones they probably got it in shady ways and it's going to lead to bad provenance and you're going to get stuck in a wall where like you're going to be like well how can I prove that this is what you're telling me and that I paid all this money for well you know it looks like it the best we can do so keep all that in mind I also want to speak to a bit of a like I don't know if paradox is the right word with clones but I know that one of the messages that you had for this season was about trying to escape this like clone fetishization right? elite clone fetishization and so on the one hand it's like yeah you know God is dead kind of vibe you know and we're all like past that we're like clones are dead but also long-lived clones because given how poor the information game is sometimes if you have a verified clone it is one of the few um reliable data points that you have like it's an index it's kind of like what you were saying so it's they're a bit of a gift curse like I know this is its own topic like you know clones versus seeds and all that and I'm sure we'll get to that probably in another episode now yeah but they are still extremely important but they are also the cause of a lot of terrible bullshit it really I mean because at the end of the day clones are just one or two you know groups selection that they feel represents what they were going for best or that they think the market will like best but at the end of the day that's you know like who is doing the selecting how how researched are they how well versed are they how experienced are they do they do they smoke weed even that's again do they smoke fucking weed even a lot of these guys don't how are they doing their selecting you know do they have experienced smoking weed a lot of these guys never even have they have no interest in it you know it's just another commodity but yeah no I clones are very hard it's a hard because there are good data points to be gotten from you know like I recommend people run cheese and stuff like that so that they have that data point for skunk one or sour but it's worth saying obviously and this is going to be obvious thing to say but the same the same problems that affect your ability to discern authenticity in flower and seeds obviously affects clone sales as well so absolutely absolutely and there are you know like the one great thing about cannabis being a very modern like our scene being very modern is that a lot of these guys that did the selections some of those guys still have those cuts in their hand never lost them and that's like with art if you were going to an artist for a painting you'd want to go to the first the person who did it the most reliable person go to the source and yeah I mean cannabis is young enough to where a lot of clones can still be gotten that way you know yeah I actually think what actually this is I think this is an important anecdote from my personal journey sure I think early on I had given up all I think I'd given up on the possibility of actually talking to someone who was who had any relationship to these clones at all I basically just thought it wasn't possible yeah like everything that I saw on the internet I was just like nothing feels like I can actually connect to the real people behind all of this it actually felt yeah but it didn't also take that long to find some people like and be like oh wow there are real people behind some of these things and yeah eventually you can find them I think with the craziest part about all the whole clone collecting scene is is if you really break it down like you get really good at figuring out who who has done the best research who is the most fastidious about pronouns about keeping their plants healthy how long they've been kept alive keeping tags right there's like four maybe people that have this large collection of all these clones throughout our community that are keeping them that are reliable for all their clones because they're just consistent like four four people and that's out of our whole world of cannabis four that I can count and in all of my research and I'm not one of them so four you know yeah like that's that's scary that should be scary and very and people are going to say that that's not realistic but it's true it is a thousand percent true there's four people and we're lucky to have them very yeah that's crazy to think about yeah all the breeders all the seed makers out there tens of thousands there's four four people mind blowing I wanted to zoom out a bit and just think about like I think like Matt mentioned and we've probably mentioned now multiple times like one of the pivots that we're making this season is to help encourage people to to think about what they are buying and whether or not what they are buying is legit and how they can know whether something that they're buying is legit and then the other major thing is this whole tension with clones and I think obviously we touched on the former that that's this whole episode but I think we'll probably come back to like seeds versus clones like another time yeah that's fine I think yeah I think that could be a full episode itself yeah it's a huge thing in of itself because like that for that later topic you know a lot of people who don't like this show what they like to say is you're kind of just ruining our fun does history actually matter that much when I can still find good shit and it's kind of a fair point I think it's sort of a fair criticism but we probably need to evaluate what the trade-offs actually are so they're obviously going to be trade-offs with people who are very fastidious about provenance and they're going to be trade-offs with people who don't care at all and just looking for quote unquote fire I think both lines of thinking are actually sort of legit and I think we could cover that in another time sure and think about what the pros and cons are yeah but man man I don't know we've said quite a lot this is quite a dense episode and I also feel like I have repeated myself a lot but no just to make sure that like we really really drill these points home because I think what man I also discovering is that so many people somehow still don't notice yeah it never ceases to amaze me it never ceases to amaze me a few things yeah one so one at how many of the scammers that continue to scam over the years that always blows my mind because it's the same people but they had it figured out early on that like there's a cycle of new growers always coming in as long as they could nail those new people they have a constant influx of customers so that's one of the main things the other thing that always blew my mind was constantly having to explain to people that there are bulk seed makers and they supply most of the market that part that part I always think is gonna like be some day be like common knowledge because it's like that in a lot of industries but for some reason in cannabis it's just like not known still no matter how many times it said or integrated I think we did a whole show on it too like the worst kept secret of our business you know yeah it's still not that well known yep absolutely absolutely and like with the watch analogy if you broaden like this inquiry towards like various forms of commerce online you will see the same patterns playing out it's just that cannabis like for reasons I've mentioned multiple times just is like even more susceptible to these scams and like exploitation than other products sure great market means that there's no like real legal recompense so it's gonna draw in a lot of people whose only intention is to scam because they know that they can legally get away with it and most people like especially like white collar criminals that's what they live for you know they're that's their scam that's what they do and being in a gray market just kind of opens it up to people like that that we're too scared to grow but they can kind of fuck around in this realm they'll get in there and that's why it does it and let me just black hat for a moment and just explain like I'll unpack this okay you want to start your own brand it's so easy to set up something on Shopify go steal a bunch of pictures from someone else go steal a bunch of writing from someone else or use chat GPT to invent some story for your company go buy some bulk seeds that are really cheap from some random place set up an instagram account and you're you're you're Gucci like you could do this like a day or two easy easy and if you're smart like you can definitely trick people and obviously I'm not saying this to encourage you to do it but just showing you how easy it actually is yeah the one thing it's scary the one thing that sucks though is that I'm not going anywhere everybody got to get it past me and that sucks because it doesn't happen very often and we obviously outlined some of the steps that we think you could take in your own in your own searches but yeah I'd also be interested to hear like if other people have other ideas for how you you know how you can best verify any piece of information you know within cannabis I'd love to hear more suggestions yeah I'd also like to hear from more from the people that really hate what I have to say like if you think that my advice was kind of shitty like what are the steps you use to do it better like you know because maybe people are doing it better than my advice and maybe I could be giving better advice on it so leave the comments below I'd love to hear it yeah because ultimately you know it's a very complex again subjective thing judgment is subjective you know evaluating these things is really subjective so I think we want to just like generate more of this conversation and provoke more of this thinking because that's that's what's important it's not necessarily about like making specific points it's about ensuring that everyone is on this well more people are on this journey of actually trying to figure this out yeah exactly I don't actually want to say that no I just totally hit that on accident I was like I was like oh I did that I'm gonna ramble yeah and otherwise I think that's more that's what I have to say otherwise I'm just gonna keep repeating myself over and over again yeah and the same like you know there are avenues to be able to do the research I highly suggest like don't even just use breeder syndicate like go pick up marijuana botany go pick cannabis ethnobotany and evolution from Merlin and Clark learn that and that will give you everything you need to know if you really truly understand those books that will give you everything you need to know to start breaking down at least breeder speed when people like you know for instance this person that I wrote earlier that said oh well you know there are phenotypes that you can you can counter that real fast and you'll know what what is ball shit within what is I highly recommend just start there yeah and also like the more diverse your sources of information the better an idea you'll get of what is consistent across those different sources of information like going back to what Matt was saying about triangulate like triangulating something you know if you read a whole bunch of ticks you see some of the same concepts recur that probably makes it a higher likelihood that that is reliable yeah and the one other thing I'll add is philos is not reliable data and I should have said that somewhere in the beginning because people are still using that as reliable data you know what it's fine because we're gonna have an episode on the codex where all of this will be brought into question again because it is something that people use as data points and I just remember like most people again don't know the whole story behind that and how it all broke down and why they closed up genetic shock etc testing for the codex episode we can talk about leafy strain lee philos seed finder we can go over all those things yeah that'll be time to cover that yeah all right so anything else you want to get in nah man yeah I don't want to repeat myself again you weren't reviewing something for this long were you no no no reviews this time yeah no it was just the lewy thing I wanted to cover basically but other than that you know we have we had our new high on loans from drop over on rightseeds.com with the Appalachia the green crack BX we had chem dog DBX and some of those are gonna be restocked soon yeah PAC have some new feminized Santa Cruz blue dream legitimate blue dream crosses coming out soon I know some of those are popping up on our Patreon 50 tier as far as like testers going out there and stuff so there's all kinds of fun stuff going on Pico's getting a bunch of badass new modern thin stuff in the patreon packs as well so thanks to Pico pandas helped out everybody's helping out with the patreon packs now it's getting real exciting over there in the 50 tier and I think that's it just keep your eyes just do further reviews I'm gonna be doing more of the legit or not and just regular regular flower reviews on modern strains so I can actually break down and tell you what someone who's smoked weed for a long time and has a lot of experience with a lot of different strains how I sense these strains what I get from it the high the scent all that stuff so hopefully that helps out somewhere I think we actually got a new idea for legit or not as well as in like another form of that same series could also be you reviewing seed banks right oh yes so I think that would be fun and even if it's like whether it's going by like today we're going to do Barney's farm or the alternative being like let's look at all the different teams quote-unquote that are being sold across these different aspects I think there are lots of possibilities for us for those episodes yeah so if you hear that you like that idea leave a comment below and let us know you like that idea too because if I see a bunch of you like that I'll get I'll get on it and see what we can figure out because I think it'd be very enlightening for some people hopefully anyway yeah right cheese calm go by our spray and I spray for making all your own feminized seeds at home it is easy enough for you to do at home it's not too hard the spray is ready made you just mix it mixing instructions come with it shake it up spray that's it and for me thank you everyone here at breeder syndicate thank you and we love you thousand thank you for your time thank you very much cheers everyone want to sit at the table with the syndicate check out our patreon and our link tree or description below our merch site is officially live we have all sorts of shirts hoodies and goodies to sort you out and shipping is super fast and most importantly the quality is top notch I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose so please check it out syndicategear.com we also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old strain history together 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