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I'm your host Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homey not so dog, Breeder and Grower from Mendicino, to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start writing some wrongs. Welcome to the Underground. One of the hard parts is people desperately want to hear real stuff, and then you're trying to figure out like, well, what's not going to cause too much controversy? What's going to piss people off? But I just have gotten to the point where I just say the truth is I know it. And if you want to, you know, converse or argue with me politely about it, that's fine. And I'm even willing to be convinced, you know? I got a wife and four daughters, so I hear that I'm wrong a lot. One thing that we didn't talk about either that we could talk about at some point, and I don't know if it ties into something. You don't want to talk about magic, but like, what made you after like three or four years of successful growing in those canyons stop? You know, because like a lot of times, like in Mendo where I'm at, like people get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until, you know, something stops them. You know, like whether it's whether it's they get wealthy enough that they just decide to go on and do something else or they get pinched or they get divorced and something blows up in their life or whatever. And there was stuff too when you were talking about going and visiting the cartels where I had like all kinds of questions, but I was like, man, I don't know, that's a delicate one to walk, you know? So, you know, but yeah, it because I've had a bunch of friends up here that, you know, they get one property, they get two properties, they get bigger, they go bigger, this happens, that happens. And all of a sudden, something changes and that part of their life is done for a bit in that those spots they left, you know, because the neighbor got pissed off or the law enforcement came in or something weird happened and all of a sudden all that infrastructure and all that time and effort. And then some people just, you know, they just cashed out and were happy and went on and did something different, you know, like it fueled some next part of their life or something, you know? Well, after the last year in the Magic Canyon and making a good amount of money that year, I bought a ranch that was way beyond my means and my concept was that after one year, before one year, before the next payment came to, I would sell a piece of it. And it was an amazing place, had a year-round river stream going through it, like five miles of dead-end road that it was at the end of it, down in a canyon of its own along the Moguian Rim. It was incredible, not far from Zane Gray country. And I wasn't able to sell a piece and I lost the whole thing. So it was like, oh no, and that's when I more or less got into the Mexican import instead because my friend that I, the truck driver, helicopter pilot pilot pilot, anything that moved, he could drive it, fly it, whatever. He plugged us into that whole area in Mexico. And interestingly enough, the strip that we used was you would drive by it to get to this ranch. It was six miles beyond. And so it was in the same basic zone and area. It was easy for me to study and go investigate and look at it. So we used it three times for weed and then they started wanting to do the other, the white marching powder, the disco powder. And we weren't interested and I lost touch with him and I read about it in the news more or less later because I wasn't in that area anymore. I didn't have that ranch. So ranch cost a half a million and I put 50,000 down and lost it. So I decided to get into something else that was a little easier, seemed easier and it was, it was for a few years really quite nice. And when he, when we walked away from him, we simultaneously through another friend met a guy in Tucson area who would front us anywhere from 175 to 250 pounds of Mexican Cinemia. And that's what we started sending to the Rastafarians and in Brooklyn. And that was the, that was the best of all because we can never send them enough, whatever we could send them because the sources from Jamaica were very difficult at that point in the early 80s. They had, you know, it wasn't like the early days and they were using Jamaica as a bounce from Columbia at that point for cocaine. So the, the pilots and people who came in there were not interested in flying some weed from Jamaica up to the US and Florida was hot, you know, I mean, anything coming into Florida or that direction was pretty much in trouble by the early 80s or late or mid 80s. But one, one thing I've definitely known about, about cannabis people is if you consider like weed a casino, you could, you could make the score of your life and you wake up and you're like, I should take all my money and put it all into chips and go back at it. You know, it's like, it's very, very common with weed people where you're like, this was the most successful year of my life. I'm going to throw it all on table again. I'm all in. Let's go. You know, yeah, and that works until it doesn't, you know, yeah, yeah, very common in that regard that risk risk taking is definitely part of the game for sure. I also don't think humans are very good at realizing that like this could be the best five years of my life. They think, well, this is my new floor. And only it's, I'm on the way up from here. Now, like this could be, this could be a high point and I could be, I could be downward sloping it pretty fast in the next couple. I just think that's part of human nature. We always think that like, okay, this is my new floor. And in some instances, you look back and you're like, wow, that was like really a golden era for me. Like things were great. You know, and I didn't, I didn't appreciate it quite as much as I should have at the time that these, but that's like youth, right? Like youth, you know, youth, you have all this exuberance and very little experience. You know, but in some times, you know, that's what, you know, youth, youth makes you do a bunch of shit that an older person would be too conservative to do. And you're young and dumb and you're just like, well, let's go for it. This will be great. You know, so you guys ready to, ready to light the fuse on this thing? Yeah, let's do it. In the first episode, we briefly touched on your introduction to cannabis, your first time getting high, your first time, kind of the strains that you were seeing around that time, I believe they were a lot of Colombians, right? Yeah, that was the majority of what we smoked. This was bought off the street, you know, high school kids. Okay. And from there, let's talk a little bit more into the, how you got into a more serious side of cannabis, where you started getting, not just into, you know, collecting a seed here or there from this thing, but kind of breeding and being more serious about collecting. Yeah. Well, you know, my first, like we talked about in the first episode, I think my first time trying to pop seeds didn't end too well. Came back the next year, which I believe would have been 1980. And that year we had, I had a great place to grow with a couple of buddies of mine. We had a collection of what turned out to be killer seeds. We had great success. By that time I'd had a lot of time to research and read about, you know, research growing and prepare for the season. And basically I started right off doing hydroponics outdoors in five gallon buckets with a medium, which was peat moss, bagged cow shit, pearlite and vermiculite using eco-grow, dry hydroponic nutrients. Where'd you get the recipe for that? You know, high times was, whatever high times was selling, that's one thing they're really good at at selling, right? Yeah. The advertisements back then, it was basically between Dynagrow and Eco-Grow. And Dynagrow was the slicker looking ads. I don't know why I picked Eco-Grow really, but it was a two part mix of granular stuff. And, you know, I remember mixing up my soil mix in the backyard of my parents' house on a big plastic sheet, you know, breaking down everything and just kind of lifting up one side and another to make it roll and tumble and mix. You know, somewhere in the house my parents were probably watching me thinking, what the hell are we going to do about this kid, you know? I'm sure. But, you know, they never stopped me. I think they were just kind of marveling it, you know, the daringness of the whole thing and I don't know. Yeah. So, yeah, that season we had a Mexican, we had that Maui that I told you about. We had a redbud, what I call redbud, but this was one of those rare times when you kind of leapfrog that the dude that you've been buying weed from for a year or so and you've gotten to know suddenly lets you in on something at a higher level, you know. In this case, the dude needed somebody to drive him to pick up a load and I guess all of his usual people weren't available or maybe he just needed somebody that was disposable. I was under 18, so, you know, if we got busted, you know, probably nothing was going to happen to me too bad. But he had a 1979 Smoky in the Bandit Black Trans Am. The, you know, the 400 cubic inch big block in there with the golden eagle on the hood and this guy let me drive his car. Down these gravel roads into the country, you know, it's just nothing but farms. And I was like, are there weed people out here? But, you know, we went down this kind of this gravel road along the fence, along the fence line and there was a farmhouse at the end of the road. And the guy, the guy said, okay, here, let's change you drive now. You're going to drop me off. You're going to come back here and you're going to wait, you're going to wait 15 minutes and then turn around, come back and pick me up. So, okay, you know, I can follow those directions. I mean, driving this car was just dream come true, you know, amazing ride. Oh, I bet. But, you know, I followed instructions, came back a little while later, scared, but, you know, excited. And we went back, you know, he came in through something in the back and off we went. It turned out it was the, you know, it was what we called red bud back then. But it could have been Colombian red. It could have been Panama red. I'll never really know. But these things, these buds were fresh. Like I was used to getting stuff that was pressed into bricks by a hydraulic press, you know, that by the time you got it and broke apart, you know, went through a quarter pound. They were like chips. Yeah. Very dense, you know, seeds smashed and, you know, the leaves and flowers and stems all pressed together into kind of a, when you broke it apart, you couldn't really tell what it was. But this stuff, it was loose. It was uncompressed. And every single bud in the bags was like the tip of your finger about inch and a quarter, inch and a half long. Spongy. And it was dark, dark red, like blood that had dried, but, you know, like a scab almost color. Wow. Yeah. And it was sticky, right? So they were roundish, like the tip of your finger, like I said, dark, dark red. And man, this stuff, when you smoked it, you know, the effect was very sedative. It was like, it was hashy. And the taste was, you know, dark, like dark wood and hash. And just, just fantastic, you know, it was like, like you would imagine if you could smoke ebony, probably wouldn't recommend that, you know, for kids. But if you could, you know, had that dark wood, like, like, like some sort of charred oak barrel that was used for bourbon or something, you know. Like mahogany. Yeah, mahogany, exactly. It looked like it had tasted like it. Is it fermented at all, do you think? No, no. I mean, it was, it was like fresh. There was no moldy, no sort of funk to it at all. Yeah, it was. This shit had been, had been allowed to mature past peak on the plant in a place where weather wasn't, wasn't, wasn't destroying the plants at the end of harvest time. Interesting. So, and it must have been, yeah, it was gorgeous stuff. So we had that, I found seeds in that he gave me, he gave me like a half ounce for being his wheel man, which I was like, man, I want to do that every week. You know, I mean, I never, never got the chance to do that again for him. But you know, it was, and I had, we had that plan. I grew a few from those seeds. I had a Mexican. I had. So I guess if it was, I was 17. 17, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And so I had like a collection of these different things that we would all kill for today. Oh, yeah. All growing up. Like that's that you don't even really see pictures of that anymore in magazines or anything like that. Nobody, not that I can think of. Yeah. That sounds beautiful. Well, that farmhouse that we went to, you know, that's kind of the way stuff. I'm pretty sure it was some sort of biker house. And, you know, I'd been, I went to a couple of places that were either biker places or actually famous people places that I'm not going to, I can't really say because it'll give away too much info about, you know, who and where, where I was at. But, you know, it's funny, you know, like rock and roll group type thing, that also is associated with Southern Rock bands that. They smoked a lot of fucking weed in the Southern Rock bands. Yeah. So, yeah, that season started off great. You know, I got them up to about, about six, seven feet tall and a huge storm came blowing through. And that Redbud plant, which I don't know, you've got a picture of it actually. I don't know if you can put that up or not. But one of the things that was unique about it, first of all, the weeds were very wide for, you know, what we call a sativa. You know, highly, highly serrated. And one of the distinctive things about that plant was that the nodes on the plant were zigzag, you know. Yeah. You know, instead of the axles where the petioles come off the stem being symmetrical and coming off in pairs of two, you know. Yeah. It started zigzagging very early on. And, you know, that leads to a structure on the plant where the flowers kind of stack offset from each other when it goes into flower and they fill in all the gaps. But I see that sometimes with ohays today. Yeah. It's kind of zigzag, you know, branching pattern. You know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. So the storm hits and it breaks that plant over right at the base. And of course today I'd be like, well, okay, let's just make one big, big giant clone at this thing. It would have been a hundred clones off of that plant, you know. But me and my teenage partners were just like, oh no. It's dead, Jim. You know, so we were all, we lost that one. But we moved all these plants through the woods, five gallon, you know, seven foot tall in five gallon buckets through the woods a couple of hundred yards to a better spot. I think we were afraid for some security scare at the same time. So the tide plant went, you know, to the new spot. The Hawaiian, the Maui went to the new spot. The Mexican went to the new spot. And yeah. And so everything else we grew to finish. There were two of the tide plants. And there's a picture of that, one of the ties. And this, the picture there is what wound up being the purple tie that we grew. Okay. So, you know, from an appearance standpoint, people are really, you'll hear a lot of people talking with great certainty about, you know, how the tide plants have, you know, wide, highly serrated leaves. And that's often described as being the alligator tail. Right. And that's true. And then there's also tide plants, which are, you know, have extremely narrow leaves and, and have a completely different kind of serration and other distinctive leaf traits, which I don't really like to talk about because it's kind of my clue to know whether somebody has the real thing or not. But, you know, we stuff like that's important to keep back. And people don't realize that. Like there's certain traits in, in certain lines that like, you don't really want to say openly because of people who, you know, manipulate shit like that. So yeah, totally. You know, when they do, when they do, when they release information about like, this isn't my wheelhouse, it's more mats, but when they release information about like murders and stuff like that. And they're looking for, they're looking for help. They actually put in details sometimes that are slightly not correct so that they can weed through the hundreds of tips that they get when people are like, oh yeah, this, this, this and this. And they're like, oh no, that was actually part of the fake bit we put out, you know. Because yeah, people will, as soon as you say it, people will find it and they'll have stories about it. So it's a real, it's an interesting part of like talking about history or whatever it is. Are those kind of little keys? Have you seen any good examples of a broadleaf tie before? Like a true, like in its, in its, in nature, not just someone saying this is a tie, like an actual broadleaf tie. Absolutely. In the book by Lawrence Cherniak. Yes. Great books of cannabis. Yep. You know, all I know is I bought the, the first version of great books of cannabis, like just like volume one, whatever that was. And back in, you know, early 80s. And in that book, there's a picture of, of a patch of tieweed growing under some sort of canopy in the woods. And they all have that, that wideleaf, beautiful, beautiful plants. But they're definitely wideleaf, you know. And so the tie that I was growing came from sticks that one of my partners, older brother, brought back home in a tie, in some tie stick. He got at University of Colorado, Denver, Boulder, wherever the hell he was going. And it was Christmas time and he came back home to be with his parents and my, my buddy found his stash on a tray under his bed and stole the seeds and we grew them. We got to smoke a little bit, it was pretty stingy with the stuff he had stolen. I'm sure, I'm sure that's funny. Yeah. It was more narrow leaf, the stuff that you guys grew? Yeah, yeah. And you know, like back to that point, you know, about the information about distinctive traits that, you know, releasing it, and not so when I were talking about it the other day and it's like, you know, as much as I want to share everything that I know, what my fear is that things that you don't, I've never heard anybody else talking about on forums that are, you know, unique tie traits that, you know, were very distinctive for me back then. You know, I'm just afraid that if I say it, then the next thing you know, there's going to be, you know, 10 guys on Instagram selling old school tie heirlooms and they're just going to have this bullet points of whatever I say here, you know. This is what it is. It's a legitimate fear, you know. And, you know, I, we definitely talk about that quite a bit. In fact, it's one of the things that like, the entire second generation of like, of like Amsterdam breeders just decided to be absolutely completely vague with lineage because they got so tired of competitors stealing the exact ad copy and being like, well, it's this, you know. And they got very secretive on what it was and where it came from and how to this and how to that. And so we, we see it now on IG even with certain names and strains and different things. So it's, it's kind of a catch 22. It's like you want to get the information out there, but it also feeds people that want to fake stuff. Yeah, it definitely does. And if you say it on this show, I can almost guarantee that someone will have it up tomorrow for sale somehow in there. Like you said, like little bullet points, it happens. But, you know, the other side of it, and, you know, this is what we were talking about the other day is that it's like, well, you know, Thailand is just reopened, you know, from, for legal, legal production. And, you know, even, even over there, I mean, there's just so much happening right now that maybe if, you know, the information that I have might be useful to somebody, the next thing, you know, better selections are made and the stuff actually does become available. I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a conflict and I'm just going to hold back on some of those details right now. But, you know, that, that particular, we grew two of those type plants. One was green and flower, the other was purple. And the purple one was just amazing. You know what, I'll just, I'll go ahead and talk about the effects of Thai versus, you know, as opposed to, you know, selection, things that would be, help people earlier on. But, you know, the effects of it, I sat down, I got in trouble in high school a lot, right? Mostly because, because I didn't give a crap about the school and I would come in every morning and, you know, get, get really high before school, walk in, and then, you know, just kind of chill there until lunchtime. After lunchtime, the buzz was wearing off. I'd come back and, and fall asleep in the next class right afterwards. And anyway, you know, all I really cared about was weed. I'd fallen in love with this plant. It was my first great love. And, and that's never really ended. But, you know, I, I would sit there and I'd gotten trouble for like whatever absences or whatever and get, get in school suspension. And of course that was a challenge to get really, really high because you're sitting there in, in a classroom with a bunch of other delinquents and, you know, you're forced to sit there and be silent, right? And you're supposed to, you're supposed to be doing school work, but I was already not doing that. So, you know, that wasn't going to change. So I basically would sit there and I started writing, describing inspired by R, right? I would sit down and describe the effects of the high that I was experiencing. And I was describing the effect of the tie and I wrote like a page and a half of it. And I still remember it, even though this other kid that was in class liked what I'd written so much that he asked if he could keep it. So I don't have it anymore, but I still remember it. And basically, you know, the, the effects of the tie were very different from Colombian of the day or Mexican or even, you know, what we, you know, what we know today is, is the haze high. And that it was, it was totally introspective, right? You know, haze and Colombians can make you feel connected with things around you. Sure. But the tie weed was totally introspective. Instead of being connected with things around you, other people, nature, whatever, it was all in the head and it was all, and it felt like waves, right? Where, and your thoughts were kind of going from, you know, smoothly connecting from one thought to another kind of, you know, ebbing and flowing as, as, as you, as you kind of go through these musings of different things inside your head. And it was in that way very, very different from, from, from the Colombian that we, you know, it was our normal thing. Would you, would you say that it would lead you closer to paranoia because it was so introspective like an ego crusher or would you say it was more freeing? It was, it was luxurious. It was, it was smooth, like, like a tide, you know, coming and going. It was not, it didn't have that, that electrically charged anxiety that you can feel sometimes with, with, you know, a particular, particular phenose of haze. It was, it was very much kind of, you know, had a bit of a dreamy aspect, but you were very, very awake. Would you associate the clear headed high that you described with Tai? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I've never had the same experience with anything else. You know, haze is very different, you know, it's, it's very, very different. That leads me to a thought. Maybe Raho, you and, and, and Maja could talk like, when you guys were all consuming this stuff, you know, basically pure and like not, not all mixed together like we got it way later or like hints of it. What, you know, we just touched on it a little bit, but like what were the big differences you noticed between like, say smoking pure Mexican, pure Thai and pure Colombian. You kind of just talked about that a little bit in terms of Thai versus Colombian, but what, you know, you know, were there other distinct differences you guys noticed in the highs? Did you have preferences of what you really liked one versus the other? Was it consistent or did it just vary from plant to plant of it? Let me, Maja, let me just keep going on this for just a second because I don't have much to say about Mexican. It was kind of a rare, rare thing where we were. And, you know, when it showed up, it was unique. But, you know, it didn't have the sedative kind of knock it, knock down power of the Colombian. It was light, uplifting, tasted great, energetic, but, you know, it didn't have the depth of effect. It seemed a little superficial to me. And this was very limited experience that I had with it. So, you know, I'm just not an expert on Mexicans. I grew it, grew some of the seeds from it. They matured way early compared to the Colombians. So much so that I actually let the stuff go over mature, past peak, you know, resin development. And, you know, I'm pretty sure that I lost some potency off letting it go too long. But, you know, the tie was just special. It was so special that, you know, I only sold like one bag of it. The guy that I sold it to, you know, wanted more immediately. And I guarantee if we could find him right now, he would still tell you that he remembered that smoke. And it was probably maybe the best weed he'd ever smoked in his life. You know, I mean, it was that unique. You know, the Colombian were lucky today because we have so much good example, you know, so much of what was available in the Colombian, you know, in the breadth of Colombian weed back in the day. It's been captured somewhere in the haze genome. And accessible through anybody who's wanting to put in the work. That's it for me. Where do you got Mad Jag? As far as your high experiences between Thai, Mexican, Hawaiian even, things that have acclimated to Hawaii, Columbia? Well, I would say that Rahu, he summarized it pretty well. Colombians, when they showed up, they were just so overwhelming. Some of them were so overwhelming couch lock that you hear stories and my friend from Columbia had this weed that was truly wacky weed. I don't know who first wrote about that. I think it was R who discussed it having gotten some kind of city. And people, you know, would fall down stairs. They would throw up. Their sense of balance would go off so bad that they would, you know, fall down. And Mexican was not like that. Mexican was more, all the ones I smoked, even the ones that were really strong, were still like social and uplifting. I didn't smoke like my friends who, you know, would roll hash joints all day and smoke them. They had a different level of, well, they needed testers like myself that would smoke once in quite a day. Yeah. So I don't know. Some of those early Colombian Mexicans that my friend who was the dealer in Tempe were just outstanding. And when people tried them, you were talking about green weed earlier, Rahu was, or maybe it was not so. But, you know, once they saw it and tried it, it was, they didn't care the color. But most people were used to the compressed brick weed, brown weeds, and even lots of seeds. But this, once it switched over to the seedless since the Mia coming over from Mexico, Michoacan, particularly, Oaxacan and Guerrero, those three zones were, each one was different. The smoke was different, but they were all uplifting. Not that they couldn't paralyze you because sativas can get on the racy side. And I know what you're talking about, the paranoia. I don't know if I was paranoid or just actually knew someone was after me, you know? That's how they talk about food. I went through that, I went through that a few times with smoking. Tie weed, I don't remember. I, it was a small window of period that I even saw tie weed on the market or people selling it, like 69 to maybe 74. And that was it. Never saw it again myself. I heard stories about it and never saw it. And it was, it was ahead of all the other sativas when it hit. There's, there's a bunch of articles in old high times that are rights about, and it's talking about like the disappearance. You can almost like document like the years, the disappearance of Colombian for a little bit, the disappearance of tie for a while, the resurgence of it. It's so fascinating. There's so much that you can learn just by reading just his articles and high times during those years. Have you, I'm taking the time to scan those articles and we could compile just an R book. I did. I have every single one. Yeah. From when did he stop? I think 84, 85 is the last stuff I see from R. Yeah. And I think about 85 he bounced from high times. And then continued his career writing about Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler and Nazis. And he had a lot of very extreme opinions, political opinions, but not, not necessarily like he, he wasn't an extremist by any stretch of the imagination, but he quit writing about weed. And he's still very well known. I would love to hear from him sometimes since he's still with us on this side of the shadow realm, you know, we'll see. One thing I think is curious. I heard it from both Raho and Majag is that because in modern times, so I want to follow up on it just real quick. In modern times, we kind of consider sativa to be, you know, thin, leafed, uplifting paranoia, trippy. It has these various effects, but you guys were both mentioning that there was some pure sativas that were couch locky. And I would say like modern people today, everybody thinks that if you get couch locked, it's the Indica something coming through. Like people don't associate couch lock at all with any kind of pure sativa, but I just heard both Raho and you mentioned that some of the pure sativas you smoked kind of were like, you know, couch lock. However, they were the Colombian sativas to me. Mexican sativas were very powerful, but you still wanted to go do something, go hiking, go climbing, you know, go bowling even. But Colombians, the couch locky Colombians were just so overwhelmingly powerful. And they were pure sativa. I've heard people talk about, you know, Colombian Indicas. And I don't, I don't think that's correct unless they were introduced, you know, to Colombia. Yeah. Where genetics have spread as possible, but not native to the jungles. No, no, no. And I also think there's a, there's a part of me. Oh, go ahead, Raho. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, go ahead, Raho. Go ahead. I was going to comment on the, the couch lock and the, and the Indica from Columbia, the idea of Indica and Columbia. So, I mean, you know, the couch lock piece of it, it's, it must be, you know, it's just so hard to get a Colombian to reach maturity in, in outdoors and the kind of, you know, latitudes that most of us live in. You know, part of it may be that it's, we just never really get it there to the point where those, those, those, those effects become, you know, come out. But also Columbia, you know, as a country has just got such a diverse kind of breadth of, of different kinds of wheat. And, you know, from, you know, from the, from the gold up, up in Santa, Santa Marta, it's interesting that, you know, people talk about Indica in, in Columbia because Santa Marta, you know, the, the times that I had, it was, you know, legit from Florida, from my, one of my buddies, dead head sisters. And, you know, this stuff was fresh. It was, it was chips, so it was pressed, but it was bright, bright yellow gold. And, and, you know, it was, it was moist, you know, the, the moisture level throughout this stuff was very consistent. You could see the calluses, large golden calluses, kind of throughout these, these little chips of gold. And, you know, there was gold and a little bit of green in there. And when we smoked it, the taste was, you know, it had a lot in common with, with what we think of as Indica today. You know, it had that same kind of hashiness. It had some citrus elements to it, but there was, there was also something that you just don't really find in, in Indica and there was a sandalwood taste in there, which was, was unique, right? And so, but it's funny that there was so much in common with Indica, you know, coming out of that gold while being, you know, probably something completely different. I don't know, you know, I'm not sure. I understand that at some point there was some pharmaceutical company that was growing, you know, took genetics down to Columbia and did some work down there. I don't remember the details of it, but I'm not throwing out a theory that had anything to do with Samara gold or anything, but just, just what I smoked it. Yeah. The biggest issue I would have with Indica's making their way down to Columbia is that they would just flower at like, you know, at, at shin height or something. And, you know, you really have to breed them heavily into the native stuff because, you know, it's, it's Colombian is basically equatorial. The equator runs right through Columbia. And so, you know, if you put out pure Indica there, they would literally flower instantly within a matter of days they would start putting on, they would start putting on stuff. I just think it's interesting that like, we've accepted that wide leaf is always means that there's Indica heritage, thin leaf always leans towards Sativa. Sativas have this certain set of highs. Right. And then Indica's have this other set of highs and the two don't overlap. And basically what you guys are talking about right now is that there's a range of leaf width and there's a range of highs that maybe they do overlap some more than people thought. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my experience with Mexicans was that they were kind of head rushy and that the duration of the effect, you know, was uplifting. It was, it was happy. It was, it was head rushy, but the duration of the effect was not that long. Your audio is clipping a little bit, buddy. Okay. The duration of which was very long. It's better now, yes. The duration of the, the duration of the Mex was, was not as, not as long. And it was head rushy, you know, uplifting, you know, positive, but, but nowhere near, didn't last anywhere near as long as the Columbians. And the Columbians were more of a kind of zonked. Part of that, part of that, you know, the commercial stuff was probably because of processing, handling just the degradation of the cannabinoids to CBN and stuff like that. But when, you know, when you talk about sativas being trippy, that's, that's kind of a pet peeve for me because it's, it's such a vague term to say trippy. It's almost to the point of being meaningless, you know, I mean, I'm not an expert on, on tripping, but you know, the, it seems like people could be a little better about describing the effects of being trippy. It's a bit of a pet peeve for me. I, I think that, you know, I think the language around highs is individual. And I think a lot of times people think whatever happens to them is what the weed does. And it's, it's always been interesting to me that some people, it's a lot easier for them to smoke weed and trigger a paranoia experience where other people can smoke that same cannabis and not feel that at all. They're just like warm and happy and energetic and they feel great. And the other person that smoked the same joint is like ready to crawl out their skin and maybe needs an intervention from their friend. You know, so I think like how it interacts with our bodies isn't as understood as we would like, you know, and we think it's monolithic. Like, you know, this weed does this to these people, but it's not always the case. I don't think, you know, I also wanted to mention something. When we talk about Colombian or we talk about Panama or we talk about Thai or whatever, one of the things that gets talked about with Colombian a lot is Colombia is pretty mountainous. And so they talk about lowland Colombians that are grown in the valleys and stuff. And then highland Colombians that were grown like way more often the mountain valleys or even on ridges and things like that where the elevation was much different. And those two things seem to grow quite a bit differently and probably have different highs too, you know, because their climates are so much different. Yeah. Matt, Jag and I have a friend who's kind of an expert in the variation within, you know, the Colombian family of plants from effects to taste, smell, turps, you know, just this guy can go through and do a Fino hunt on a line and just basically of haze types or, you know, Punta Roja or, you know, various and just basically slice it and dice it out into different, completely different Colombian types. Wow. I don't have that level of, you know, detail. You'd have to run way more plants than I ever did to be able to do that. And I guess this guy is just, he's really passionate about it. Highland Lowland, you know, it's like, jeez, man, by the time it got here, nobody really knows where it came from. I always get a little irked about that because it just seems like marketing talk more than the reality of what happened where the farmer did his work, you know. Yeah. I think that, I think certainly like not knowing where it came from is true. I mean, I talked before on one of our previous episodes about you guys are talking about Oaxacan and Guerrero and Michoacan and the differences. And when I was getting Mexican in high school, by then it was just straight Mexican. You weren't getting any regional information. There was green and brown and you were hoping to get the lesser compressed stuff that was green. That was your goal, if you could. But as far as like where it came from, by the time the 90s were around and I was smoking it, you had no idea. Your dealer didn't know. Their dealer didn't know. I don't know how high up the chain you'd have to go before someone had an idea of origin. I think that's all Mad Jack's fault for giving those two kilos a seat in the cartel. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, even if they, I mean, maybe people knew, but it wasn't trickling down to 16 or 17 or 18 year old me. You know? There was too many layers in between. Yeah. There's maps that they have nowadays that talk about which cartels are going which routes and we're going into which things, but I think that's like the best idea we can grab from anywhere right now. Because I agree, even, you know, I came in 10 years after not so and it was the same experience like you have Mexican that's not as compressed. And sometimes honestly, the stuff that wasn't as compressed wasn't as good as the stuff that was compressed for me. And it always looked way better and smelled way better and it never really had the same kind of high. So there's like good old big Mexican and big old good Mexican. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I actually speaking of them, I actually just read this thing yesterday, you guys, where they were talking about the, I don't know what they have some nickname for them that I don't remember, but they were calling that like the kids of El Chapo and how they've realized that like if they want Mexican to be considered world-class weed, they need to reinvent it again. And so it sounds like they're doing something similar where they're gathering up genetics from all over the place because they have money and space and time and they're trying to reinvent things, figuring that it's going to go legal before too, too long and they want to be at the forefront at it. So it sounds like there's some pretty extensive breeding projects and they have an interest in it of taking it from like your traditional good old Mexican and like reinventing it for the modern market. I mean, they've got the longest time in this bit or some of the longest time in this business. So it makes sense that they'd want to keep it. You know what I mean? This is their stake. I mean, it's a good climate. They have their own challenges down there just like Thailand does and just like we do in the States and that the impact of the war on drugs has just delighted. It's just caused the massive loss of so much heirloom genetics. But the positive thing is that in the opening just like in Thailand there are going to be pockets of people who have kept this stuff alive that are going to kind of pop up from their from their holes and start doing the work again. I mean, I know Jaggy and I both have we have friends down in Mexico who are in remote areas working with very old genetics people who have kept this stuff alive and are working to kind of bring back something from the glory days. It's very humble people very passionate about what they're doing and, you know, it's I feel honored to read about their work when I get the chance. You know who else is really passionate about spreading land races? Sorry, had to bring in our boys. Oh my gosh. Who's that? He was holding up he loves one of his favorite possessions is his Arjun bobblehead. Oh man, yeah. That's great. He is the king of cannabis. I love that. It's all cartel, man. We know a couple individuals who are outside of that realm and they're just humble farmer type guys that are on forums and forums. And, you know, I've never smoked any of it or had anyone that I know so far receive it from them. It's usually from here being sent down to them because they're interested in seeds also. But back to the Colombian part in Colombia like you mentioned there's low land there's the highlands there's the valleys and Santa Marta way up in the north next to Venezuela almost on the Caribbean high elevation of Santa Marta's every one of those was distinct high early at least in 1969, 70, 71, 72, 73 I met my Colombian friend who I ended up being friends with any state in the United States for eight years at the redway in redway at the Tavern country Tavern in 1973 and he I think I mentioned, you know that wacky weed that he had was I've never seen anything still that's that potent it was it was compressed it was black it was seedless there was no stems and it was from one source one old grower he said up in the mountains in Neiva NEIVA and he would get five or six ounces at a time in New York City and they looked like chunkies and they were in aluminum foil in a square maybe two inches by two inches by an inch thick and it's so I told Rahu this in 1973 it sold for a hundred dollars an ounce I mean there was people in Arizona that would drive from Flagstaff on a phone call if you said there's some here you have to come now they would drive immediately two and a half hours speaking of the wacky weed specifically yeah that's it because it was so rare and so unusual and he used a razor blade to cut it it looked like a chunk of hash and he would just zip off little fragments then roll half joints New York needles pin joints whatever you want to call them and I one of my friends from Chicago came out to Phoenix and he took one hit on one and it was really hard to pull because they were so thin and as he did he fell forward and hit his face against a brick wall broke his glasses and went unconscious on the ground Jesus I didn't really I smoked it quite a few times but when I did I had to sit down it was the ultimate couch luck I didn't want to go hiking with my friends in Tempe it made them more normal you know the more they smoked the more that they could do stuff for me it was like green kryptonite for me and red kryptonite for them yeah that's I've seen that a lot with like I have what I consider like at least typically I'm reversed from what most people feel when they smoke cannabis like I smoke more longer flowering relax whereas pure afghanis even things like skunk one don't agree with me at all they make me paranoid and it's just not it gives me this nasty funky feeling you know it's weird how different brain chemistry can really really flip all that and I noticed from going you know as a young man smoking to being sex me is drastically different than it did when I was young and I don't think it's just the level of potency in the weed more like hormones and things how we how our brain chemistry and body chemistry change I think it just has such a drastic effect and that's one thing I found to hold true with a lot of males is that when they're young cannabis affects them a lot different than when they're hormones run at everything man yeah and depending on your age your hormones are different at different stages of your life yeah I am especially for Matt yeah and not that I just started his new hormone regimen so I'm really proud of him for that you know I will say that at my age which in my mid 40s IG I would go my hair get more testosterone become more manly you know just started getting the TRT ads yeah the targeted ads they have for people who are 46 you're like oh man they really are they really are trying to make it seem like I'm falling apart I suppose don't fight the algorithm not so just slam it I'll make a couple points that you know when I first started Indoor which is how I started because I lived in Chicago and that was like that was the only way you could get away with it the stuff that we were getting from Amsterdam and all that it was primarily Indica weed right and so the only sativa weed I really had experience with when I was young was Mexican which I didn't think was all that potent but I do remember like after a few years of growing asking some of my connections to get me like the best green Mexican that they could like even though it wasn't as nice and it didn't taste as good as the stuff we were doing ourselves it had a completely different buzz than all of these Amsterdam based heavy Indica strains that we were running indoors right and I have this clear memory of I think it was in 1997 when they released Neville's haze and Neville's haze was kind of like the haziest or the most sativa thing that had been released up to that point right that at least like normal people could get access to and by that point I had made enough friends in Amsterdam that when I went over there and visited I got to try some different things that weren't just from coffee shops but were from some collectors and I clearly remember I thought about this when Mad Jag was talking I clearly remember smoking a pinner joint with the guy and my buddy who had come with me three of us so like it didn't go by off this sativa that it almost felt like air was rushing over my brain and then when we walked out of his little his little flat in Amsterdam there was about six or seven steps that went down to the cobblestone street or whatever and I held the railing to make sure I was going to make it down those steps safely right like I felt like at this time it was 1997 I was in my early 20s like looking down the stairs and being like I better hold the railing you know because I was nervous about like my sense of balance my equilibrium where my head was at with my head with my feet obey my mind have we broken that chain where my legs and arms aren't going to obey what's coming out of my mind and tell them what to do and that was not something that I had experienced before some of these older guys talking about this like psychedelic or these trippy experiences off sativas maybe they weren't bullshitting because for a minute it was just completely outside the realm of my experience with all of this like very heavy Afghan or in best Afghan sativa weed that leaned Afghan right because people weren't buying and growing pure sativas then you know all the growing you know mostly predominantly indica leaning stuff because that was easy and chunky and small and manageable hard fat ones yeah it just it just and so that's what you got you know this weed that hits you like that you're saying this was a pure sat no it was Neville's haze which is Neville's haze you know it's basically the two haze males that Neville had with a little bit of northern lights in there yeah depending on if you believe Sam more northern lights in there I mean whatever the whatever the case maybe it was it was I mean that cut still exists that cut still gets grown and sold in Amsterdam but it was you know some people described it as some people got paranoid some people I literally got you know I know you said you don't like trippy I learned about my legs of banging my mind you know like as a 22 year old I didn't usually grab the railing to like go down six or seven steps but I did I think I think that's basically the peak of of Neville's work right there you know that I got smoked out by a buddy right about that same time period of some stuff that had the exact same effect I mean we're sitting there and I don't like bongs and I was like after I coughed my head off I sat on the couch and I just went into like silent mode for 30 minutes and I know you've seen this before I mean where I sat there not saying a word and just like freaking out until finally I was like I gotta go and everybody's like okay see you know and I walk out of this place and I'm stumbling you know it's like head spinning I gotta go down these stairs and I'm grabbing onto that railing from my dear wife I try and drive home I get lost I'm like you know three miles from my house get totally lost right on roads that I've driven a thousand times you know one calling into work and say hey and I'm like hey I'm lost I leave her recording for my co-workers tell them I'm not going to be in today I took the wrong turn and I don't know where I am you know so I mean that's to me that is his legacy you know and this is the same stuff probably that turned into the Cuban black and all those other famous NL hazes out there you know this is the kind of thing that came from Neville's peak it was kind of the stuff that he called at the beginning of his Holy Grail project because he regretted like by the time that he realized how special haze was he had already lost several of the plants that he had gotten from seed because they were just such an enormous pain in the ass to grow and keep and he was he only had the two males and then he lost the one male in 89 and so he ended up out of the six or seven plants he had he only ended up with one probably by 90 or 91 and so the Neville's haze was his attempt to cross two of them together with a little bit of indica in it and then that was going to be the basis for his project and it was going to be a private breathing I believe but then it was just so good they decided to release it to the public people underestimate the impact of that NL5 that Neville made those crosses with you know it's kind of like a turbo or a supercharger on an engine for that sativa you know it cranked up the quantity of cannabinoids in any particular nugget just because the resin production was way up if you ran it in a lab like people do today and you compared the haze with the NL hybrid you'd find just a much higher level of cannabinoids simply because there's more resin there per gram and that NL5 was you know the peak of his his NL breathing work you know it was the best plus the best to say that it's just a little bit of NL maybe that's all it took but I consider it to be a real multiplier on the effect of those haze which would be discounted we recently learned some other stuff that kind of dovetails into maybe something we can talk about a little bit involving some of the pearls and girls and early stuff and it was that Neville's apparently one of his main things he wanted to do was rework the early pearl and find that early pearl or early girl that he had originally encountered and I always thought that was interesting the NL5 and the NL work was probably the peak of what he considered his like Afghani type work but I guess at the end he was chasing the pearl yeah not so he was working with a lot of Mexicans yeah right and I guess one of the reasons why he was working with a bunch of different Mexicans that he could get was because that early girl and early pearl he loved the sweetness of the flavor and the high so much he was trying to find it again and I think it was one of those things that he thought would be common you know and then he lost it and couldn't get it back type of type of gig you know because the era had passed or whatever but some of some of his associates in that were very close to him in the last 10 years of his life have said that one of his main projects in addition to like the sativa side of you know of the holy grail extreme sativas was also like bringing back some of those Mexican memories that he had and that was what was captured in because early girl and early pearl are basically predominantly Mexican with a little bit of Afghan and he was infatuated with it he really was he wanted the flavor and the buzz of certain kinds of Oaxacans that he had he wanted that back again really badly apparently well I can't blame him I mean that early early pearl you know it's best is just delicious smoke with a great effect you know I mean but the problem he probably ran into was that you know it was by the time he started trying to recapture it it was damn near impossible to find it coming out of Mexico the cartels had taken control of who grew what and I mean if you tried to take your stuff through the plazas and I don't know this right this is just from reading stuff you know at first hand or whatever I don't but from what I understand if you know if you were a small producer cranking out a family heirloom on your little piece of land and tried to try to sell it move it across the border or whatever you might get some very serious problems with the cartel they kept a lock on this stuff and hybrids were the order of the day so he must have gone you know Mr. Nice you know and his catalog also you know he thought early pearl needed if you read what he put in his catalog he said that early pearl needed skunk number one and he crossed the skunk and then was doing it again to try and get it where he wanted I think those were probably mainly commercial he was pursuing instead of kind of sorgo but I guess later he wanted to appreciate what was unique about the pearl and and but I guess he didn't have much to go back to after that I was going to say he knows what he thought about the pearl the human condition which is Neville regretted that he didn't have all of those varieties that he had in the 80s later on in life when he was much much better at what he was doing and that they were almost wasted on him when he was young just trying to figure it out which I think is kind of what we all think in a lot of ways about ourselves you know it's like oh I wish I could have done that with what I know now you know back then I was just stumbling along but that would be interesting so magic when you were getting all that skunk one and you were talking to Rob about that was I know you said that's all you got but did he talk to you about some of those other lines that they had and the different stuff that they were messing with you mentioned he brought like a whole selection of weed that put you on the floor slow burst cash indeed so I'd be did he mention any early girl or early pearl or any Mexican he was the other thing he brought a few packets of that and I looked back through notes and his skunk number one packets were two big gelatin capsules with 25 seeds each I thought it was 50 so each pack was 100 but it was 50 was the whole pack and he I don't know he I was when he finally did come the second year out to our place came out to Arizona and he stayed for a day or two he had his personal stash and this little zip pouch with individual vials and he had pre-rolled joints so he didn't he had a tie joint he had a Colombian he had this and that he probably had what you're speaking about Northern Lights and various things as I remember samples in there I took one hit of the Colombian that he had and I just laid on the floor and listened to him talk for an hour in my living room I I couldn't focus really I don't remember anything your honor I you know I don't remember I'd like to get back though to the questions you were talking or the concepts you were talking about okay so trying to compare one of these massively powerful highs that we all have experienced at different times in our life what about comparing them to edibles today and I don't mean edibles that are just pure TAC there are some edibles that our friends make or you might make or I've made like cobs or cookies cornbread it's full spectrum because you use the whole plant you're not just trying to get high THC edibles which I find not that exciting they sell them at all the different dispensaries and Rex stores now yeah the hash edibles that are just mostly THC like extract edibles but I've had cornbread from my friends who live 30 miles from here down the dirt road and they said they gave me a square of cornbread and they said make sure you only eat a quarter of it I don't eat more than a quarter of it so I took a quarter it was delicious huh it was delicious we had to do it I took a quarter of it and cut it in half and took an eighth and the next day I was in the morning I thought well this will make my day mellow at work I started driving to work and I got about one mile away and I realized I couldn't really drive pulled over there's no way I'd be able to hide where I was at and there was weed that powerful back in the days you know in 69, 70 and 71, 72 that you could take a few puffs and get to that point where you had to hold the railing or you would fall so but Raho and Notso were talking about I know we've all experienced that so now I like edibles also because they last all day and you save your throat you have to have you know a special ability I don't like to drive if I'm that high that's for sure but if you have a designated driver wow go to the art museum go to parties go to great restaurants and have and hold the railing on the way in and you know a lot of ex-opiate will message me because they know I've been through that and I openly talk about it you know and they'll message me and say did you ever find a strain that gave you the same effects or similar effects to the high of opiates anything that was a good replacement for that and the one thing I could say is the closest I've ever gotten was edibles and you know it was a similar experience where someone gave me a tray of brownies like from Humboldt and he's like hey man you know I was a fat kid so I was like this is delicious I'm gonna eat it all and I was seriously high drooling for two three days like not non-functional barely alive and I'd have to say that is the closest I've ever been to just a whole opiate knot off was an extreme case of weed brownies so for those struggling with that that might be an option edibles I mean they take you far and put you out for sure for sure the closest I would have to compare to that in current times is last year a friend gave me a bottle of of coffee liqueur from Starbucks that he had poured cannabis oil in that he had made and I said well how do you make the oil and he's it was not really oil as an extract he just took and boiled them and boiled them down to it became more of a syrup and he poured it into that and I said well how much what's a dose and he said I don't know he said I just took a swig of it one day and I laid down and I didn't move off the couch all day so I went wow and I still have it in my fridge here it's awesome it is it's the closest to than anything I've ever experienced in the cannabis world it takes away pain it makes you relaxed you you can't do much that's the sad part of it but it's very disabling at times I watch a movie supposedly it creates I'm not the most biggest chemistry guy but supposedly it creates something in your bloodstream called THC 11 which is different than THC 9 and it is my heart out of of my crush I didn't do it I wanted to but I wanted to just like I wanted to get the foundation of I I wanted to And I thought when I got, if I got pulled over, my only saving grace would be like, I'll take a breathalyzer right now because I hadn't drank any alcohol. And I'm like, let's just get it out of the way. I'll blow a zero, zero. Of course I haven't done anything. But if they would have asked me to get out and like lift my leg and touch my nose or walk in a straight line, I would have been doomed. Like, dude, no chance. I would have been able to walk in a straight line. Like all of my motor functions, it messes with my, it makes me feel drunk in the sense that it messes with my equilibrium. And it gives me a little bit of the spins and it makes me feel warm. And I have a bunch of friends that tell me that eventually it'll feel pleasant. And I'm like, well, how many times do I have to feel unpleasant before the pleasant starts? Because right now I'm just getting a bunch of unpleasant. So when do I break through to the fun part? In a similar vein, a friend of mine was driving up from Phoenix to the Verdi Valley where I lived at that time. And he said, he was driving along and all of a sudden his car started going do, do, do, do. And then he woke up. He had fallen off the wheel and he was going like 20 and fourth gear and the car, you know what it does. And he's on the interstate. He's on the interstate. But at night the traffic was very small and he didn't crash and die, which today you couldn't do that. No, you couldn't do that. There were 285 behind you that would just cream into you. Yeah, yeah. That's hilarious. But it is interesting because some people really obviously a lot of people like edibles because they're sold all over the place and at dispensaries and things like that. I can smoke, I don't wanna say I can smoke any amount of weed but I can smoke a lot of different kinds of weed and be fully functional if need be with my day. And edibles, they can take me out and be like, well, all I'm doing is a whole lot of nothing until this feeling goes away. I have two daughters, but they're grown. So at this point in my life I can spare a day if I want to. Yeah, no, I have a bunch and they're all needy at this stage of their life. So it's rare that they don't need anything from me. Yeah, that's funny. I'm sure you appreciate what a great part of your life this is not so and I'm really happy for you. Oh yeah, no, it's killer. I have four daughters, you know, and three of them are still at home and they're all, yeah, I mean, they all still like me. So that's a positive. I might be a glorified Uber and ATM at this point. But, you know, yeah, I mean, you know, it's good. It's not everybody likes having kids, but I do. Yeah, yeah, I'll stick with dogs. Dogs for me. You know, honestly, there's a there's a weird thing about my life, go ahead. This delay is horrible. Sorry, guys, man, you had a picture up on the screen for a while. It's that bud with the yellow bandana. Yeah, there it is. So, yeah, I figured you probably wanted me to talk about that. That's... Yes, I did. Yes, sir. Okay. Okay, so that's from that's from my 1982 season. I had, you know, the tie and all that stuff was the year or year before the two years before 1980. 81, I grew some seed that a friend of mine brought me from California, hitchhiked around Mendoff for, you know, several months and collected seeds every time he got a ride. Cause everybody there was a grower, they all had weed. They'd smoke and they'd given the seeds. So, that particular plant came from that collection and it was actually on his way home from California to for Christmas. And he stopped at the SFO airport. He walked by a guy smoking a joint in a Corvette and he just kind of walked up to him and gave him the smile and the guy invited him to smoke with him and he wanted to pick up these seeds. And so, you know, the names of the stuff he brought home and gave me, he would collect these seeds and then bring them and give them to me. And this one, of course, got the very intuitive and descriptive name of Plainweed because, you know, he was about to hop on a plane. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, he didn't really know, you know, besides the names he would give me for these seeds which he actually had a story attached, you know, that this, you know, there was never really any knowledge about what was in it. He wasn't quite the connoisseur that I was and didn't read as much stuff as I did. So, you know, it was kind of up to me to figure out what it was after we grew it and smoked it. And this particular plant was an F1 hybrid with tie and some sort of AFI or Pakistani wide leaf. And it was amazing, you know, that I talked about being an in-school suspension writing about the tie effect that I was experiencing a couple years before. Well, that analysis, that introspection that came from that exercise came, you know, had come just, you know, locked in my mind. That's tie weed, right? That's me, that was what I knew it to be. And so, when I sat down with this thing, as I started smoking, I recognized it was like halfway. You know, the effects were literally, you know, half of the effect of tie weed with this kind of sedative effect of the AFI or Pakistani. I always thought it was Pakistani because the weeds looked so firm. And I don't know what your guys' thoughts are on it, but you know, like when you guys were talking about Thailand and Thai having like, you know, not all of it, but like a significant portion of it had a lot wider leaves than Colombian, right? Was that something that, do you, I always wondered like, was that, you know, do you think that Colombian and Thai, like, do you think they took the same amount of time? And because I always look at like leaf width as basically like a genetic thing on like the plant, you know, there's sun panels, right? So it's like, how much sun does the plant get? And if it needs more sun, it gets wider leaves to capture it. And if it needs less, it's a little thinner, right? Because it doesn't need to as much. You know, and Matt and I and others, we've had some like long talks about how, like if you look at Afghans, if you look at like stuff from like the low elevations, a lot of that stuff is like your traditional super fat leaf Indicas. But then if you go up into like the mountains areas, like the Hindu Kush type regions, those Indicas are much thinner leafed. I don't know if that was like UV or the sun was stronger or they just didn't need to have as big solar panels. But what percentage, like maybe you don't know, but like, would you say that like much wider leaves than Colombians or Panamanians was like a fairly distinctive trait of a lot of ties that you saw? I didn't see enough ties. You didn't see enough tie. Yeah, me either, you know, I mean, I grew very little of it. What I saw was, you know, pictures of the wide leaf tie and people described it, but I never had any experience with that. But the phenomenon you're talking about, you know, wider leaf at lower elevation or, you know, related to elevation, I always thought that the width of the leaf had something to do with transpiration, you know, and maybe if they're in arid environments or humid environments that, you know, that would affect, but honestly, I don't know. Lebanese tended to be more narrow than like say a broad leaf Afghani. I do know that much. And I think they're in similar elevations. So I think it has something to do with transpiration a lot, you know, humidity, stuff like that. Yeah. Or lack there of, yeah, exactly, exactly. You're protecting it. I mean, you know, it, I mean, I was actually talking to somebody from Kentucky, Majag, who was like really getting into like your experiences with, you know, on previous shows that we've done. And he was talking about how like in Kentucky, they could water a patch about your size with a few hundred gallons because it was so humid there that the soil stayed moist and you didn't really need that much water to keep the soil wet. And he was like, man, this guy's out there in the desert and he's pouring thousands and thousands of gallons down there just to give the plant enough to drink, you know, but by the time he came back and I could do the same size patch with like 5% of the water, you know? And that's, I basically told him, it's probably like, you know, you're growing in a humid forest and he's growing in an arid desert-like environment to some degree. How about people who live in Hawaii or Jamaica where in the rainy areas where it rains every day for an hour, every afternoon? You know, they don't irrigate at all. It's all just natural. Yeah. They don't have to irrigate. Maybe with climate change, that's starting to differ. But traditionally, my friend in Columbia, he once went down to the West Coast where they used to ship from and it rained so much that the biggest problem with growing, they grew tons and tons of weed, but to dry it. They had to hang huge tarps up, like massive like tents, like circus tents almost, to be able to dry it. There was no way around it, you know? And it would probably take a lot longer to dry in that humidity. Nature really, you know, it presents, you know, different benefits and different challenges for sure, you know? I mean, in the Midwest where I'm from, you know, they grow a lot of corn and soybeans. They don't irrigate it at all. They're completely dependent on the weather to come along and just rain on their crops. Where in the West Coast, where I live now in California, it's all irrigation. If you can't bring water to it, you can't grow. Doesn't matter what kind of crop you're doing. I grew up in the West Coast of Chicago, 20 miles west of Chicago, where I grew up. And my friend was one of my best friends one summer, got a job with a company that was eradicating cannabis that was growing wild along the Ray Roads, basically since World War II, when they were making rope out of it. And he had a map of all these spots that they were gonna go out to destroy. And we would go there first. And one time, it wasn't far from my home. It was just growing. And we had never noticed it along the Ray Roads. And we harvested like 20 pounds of this stuff and dried it. And you could smoke an entire joint and not get high. Oh yeah, we called it Pretendica. In fact, this is obviously much later than that, but sometimes I got bamboozled when I was growing up in Chicago and I would buy these very expensive ounces that were frosty and green and juicy. And I was like, oh man, I'm really getting it. And then we'd smoke and smoke and smoke. And we'd be like, this isn't working like even as good as the Brown Mexican. This is really weird. I'm not getting high. I had never heard a CBD. I didn't know what it was, but it was ditchweed. That's what it was. It was just ditchweed, you know? Yeah. They actually, there was a thing called Hemp for Victory or whatever where during World War II, they grew millions of acres in the Midwest of hemp for everything from ropes and sails and duffel bags and all kinds of stuff for the war effort. And then as soon as World War II ended, they made it illegal again. But after growing that many seeded crops, it basically permanently in Indiana and Illinois, some Wisconsin, some Kansas, that kind of thing, it was just kind of a permanent thing. And the government would go out there and collect money and they would go and eradicate all this like not weed, but it looked like weed. Yep. Yep. You know, and so they were protecting society from something that wouldn't work. I pre-rolled a hundred joints of this in Hitchhike to California. It was the first time I'd been to California and two guys picked me up in Utah in their Volkswagen and then I begged them to give me a ride. They took me all the way to California. It was like 1200 more miles. And in exchange, I gave them the hundred joints. And I said, this is not very good weed. And I told them the whole story. And they said, no problem. We're gonna sell it at the high school and they'll buy anything. Oh, wow. So I got my ride and they got a hundred joints and that was it. All right. So that 82 crop, you know, I wound up with that Thai Afghani or Thai Pakistani plain weed. And, you know, the smoke told the tale. You could absolutely feel the exact same cerebral introspective kind of thoughts surfing, kind of, you know, floating from thought to thought. But it had this sedative effect. You know, it may just sleepy. And, you know, the taste was amplified. I'm not gonna talk about the Thai Terps, but, you know, there was a citrus that was mixed in with the Thai from the Indica and the hashiness that was just delicious. It was honestly, it was maybe one of the best plants I'd ever smoked. And if I had it right now, I'd hang up right now so that I could smoke myself into oblivion. But, you know, that year was pretty amazing, 82. We had started off in a whole different state and wound up having a brush with the law that I kind of fast talked our way out of. And we came back home with a travel trailer filled with our plants. And my two partners who I was growing with, you know, after things kind of went bust, they'd had enough. They didn't wanna try and do it back at home. So they said, you can have the plants. And I spent some time trying to find a place to grow. You know, that's always the hardest part. You make the wrong decision and you wind up behind bars, you know, your life ruined. So some friends of friends wound up coming to the rescue with a place along some power lines. And we, you know, hauled the plants out there. And then for the rest of the summer, I did like 99% of the work, you know, raising these things. This collection of seed lines from Northern California, original stuff, each line different, you know, one of them looked like what today we'd call Afghani number one, another one looked like that was from Mount Shasta that, you know, they called Cush and it looked like what we know, what we think of today when we say Williams Wonder. It was just amazingly consistent morphology of the plant. Every leaf, just like carbon copies of the other, the symmetry of the branches and the nodes and the flowers just like these monstrous freaking balls at the end of, you know, on every node, it was gorgeous, gorgeous plant. So, you know, it was a season of a lifetime right there. And unfortunately somebody, and you never, you know, you never really find out who did it, that somebody wound up stealing half the crop. I showed up to Waterham one day and, you know, probably two or three weeks left to go and show up to Waterham and half the plants are gone, right? Who steals half the plants, you know? But when you walk into something like that, the first thing you're thinking is holy shit, they're probably like watching me right now because I just interrupted them while they were stealing all the plants. But, you know, that turns into, it's time to harvest everything right now. And, you know, you take what you've got left. But, yeah, that plainweed was really something special. And those genetics turned into the foundation of what I did for like the next six years. You know, I wound up growing my own F generations of, you know, the best affees and different hybrids that I'd made for a couple of years. And I was like, you know what, if I'm gonna do this, this is what I wanna do for a living. You know, I wanna be a grower, I wanna be a breeder, I wanna be the best. And kind of like, you know, what inspired Mad Jag to, you know, brand his stuff and go in the canyon and document what he did. You know, it was all very, very intentional, but at the same time these days, it just seems so, you know, almost naive and innocent, you know, that just anything seemed possible. And, you know, the idea that you could be a pot grower for a living and, you know, be in high times magazine like Mad Jag was, it was pretty exciting for young kids. You know, I went out to Mendo, I made arrangements with friends and connections and wound up there, you know, in the hills for the summer. And, you know, one of the reasons I think they let me go out there and join him on the hill was because my buddy told him about my seed collection, you know, I mean, he had collected all the best stuff from their backyard, sent it out to the East Coast, I took it, worked it and was now bringing it back. They wanted it, you know, they knew that it was the good stuff. So plus, I think he kind of portrayed me as some sort of, you know, young mad scientist that was gonna, you know, teach him something. But, you know, when I got out there, it was all about digging holes and shutting up and working. And that was, it was hard, you know, being away from home and everything. I missed my girlfriend and, you know, that just didn't work out. The partnership got very tense and I was out there for almost three months before, you know, it was time, I had to go. And luckily, you know, while I was out there, I went to a July 4th picnic at Bill Kreuzman's house, you know, drummer for the Grateful Dead. It was pretty fucking amazing. 1985, basically, everybody at this party was a grower. And, you know, my partner had rented a Mustang from the local car rental place to go to this party. It was a big deal. He, you know, collected a bunch of party materials for us to enjoy when we went. Didn't really tell me where it was or what it was gonna be until we were sliding sideways down the gravel road off the mountain to get there. You know, it was amazing. Showed up, you know, did my substances. And, you know, it was pretty, it was trippy. It was trippy. You know, there was music and big loud speakers and giant barbecue grills and growers all around me. And I didn't know anybody. My boys and my boys that I came with disappeared as soon as we got there. And, you know, basically I just kind of roamed around until it got late at night. And it turns out, you know, my partner ran into one of the guys that had provided the seeds that were my first pure indica in 1981. And I ran into him and it was like, I desperately wanted those seeds back because when I made my F2s or whatever, I made a bad choice on what female I dusted. And I, you know, I put it on the big tall giant indica instead of the little short squat ping pong ball, a hash plant indica. And it turned out that that was like, you know, that little short one was the once in a lifetime plant. And so every year after that, I was growing these seeds out. And every time, you know, as they grew and flowered, I was like, damn it, you know, why didn't I dust that other one? But when I saw this guy, I was like, oh man, I'll get the original stuff. I can get that short plant back again. But he was some sort of cokehead or something by that point. He lost it. He'd completely lost the line. Turned out he'd stolen the line from his mother to begin with, probably a classic Mendoz story there. But I'm just having a hard time thinking anybody would want to listen to this much of us talk. You'd be shocked, dude. That's how we're not used to it. We used to think that same thing all the time. And we would debate heavily on how not to bore the pants off of people. Because you got to realize, too, that most people never lived in Mendoz. They never did outdoor. They never did guerrilla. They never did any of this stuff. They came on in an era where it was Instagram and it was this. So it's like a time capsule. And there's not even really that many good places to go read about this stuff. And like we were talking about at the beginning of the show, most people that are talking about this stuff are trying to sell themselves. They're trying to promote something. They're not actually interested in the history. They're interested in a narrative that promotes something they're currently into. So it does. We talk about that all the time. How are we not going to bore people to death? Like I said, Raho and I talked for three hours this week. And it was like there was zero planning involved. It was basically just like friends chatting about nerd content. So we could have a little bit more focused chat, I'm sure, on subjects. But whatever. Thank you. That's a plan. Thanks, guys. Awesome talking to you. Thank you, guys, of course, for your time and everything. And I'll get all this edited together and banged out. And I appreciate it, man. All right. Great talking. All right. Hit me up any time, either of you. OK, we'll have to both of you. Yeah, you too, you too, guys. 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. 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