 Welcome to Breeder Syndicate 2.0, where we explore the history of a clandestine scene. Researching everything from cannabis strain history, old smuggling tales from the first person perspective, to breeding science and news on current subculture. I'm your host, Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homey, not so dog, Breeder and grower from Mendocino, 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. We joined this conversation already in progress, and it kind of ends abruptly, too. So, yeah, let's get to it. We tend to be on, like, meth-head hours, which sucks, because, like, you don't want to have that in common with them, but at the same time, it's like, realistically, light hours are cheaper for an indoor grower at night. So, like, a lot of us live on vampire hours, and that's just how it goes, and if you're keeping moms, you also don't get to travel. And after 10 p.m., neighbors don't stop by randomly. Yeah, exactly. So, it's safe to get in your girl room and smell like weed. Exactly, dude. Yeah. It's funny, because, you know, I would imagine from the outside, and I've always kind of looked at it, like, I wonder what my neighbors think, because, like, they see this young man who, like, barely ever leaves the house, never leaves on trips, never, you know, and is up at all these odd hours. Like, they must think of a tweaker, and that's just the only conclusion, you know? Well, nowadays, you can say you work online, and that's normal, but back in the day, 20 years ago. That's true. That's, yeah, we couldn't use that excuse back in the day. Yeah, that's hella sus 20 years ago, right? Yeah, for sure. So, I'm here with Jay from Next Generation Seeds, formerly a Federation Seeds. And who is with you? My friend Casey. He's been growing, other than growing his own death bubble for years. He's been working with different LPs, big companies in Canada, doing a lot of the paperwork, and doing the extractions for a few different LPs up here. That's the guy I call when I need to make bubble. Oh, nice. I love me some good bubble. We've got to go for some bubble tech. That's one thing we have not covered at all on this show is hash bubble hash tech. That's the shit. Yeah, I've been, that's one thing with growing seeds. You always have lots of samples of different hashes. Yeah. It's insane the number of different grades, and actually, I have a box right here. And a tote, just every different strain you could think of, different samples. Let's go through them. Let's go through and hear what kind of strains that you have over there in hash form, because it gives us a good idea of what's going on over in your territory as far as the strains currently that you're into. Yeah, well, as you know with different types of hash, some are really good for pressing, for rosin, and some just like dump the resin or just sticky right away. And then some, no matter how good it is, it just, it won't press. It'll still always look kind of golden, but it won't actually get slippery. Yeah, it'll get like classy all the way through. Yeah, but I'm really happy with one of the strains I've done lately, my red truffles. Okay, what's in this? It's the truffle strain crossed with the Colombian red. And when you put that in your hand and just, it just goes like a slick plastic within seconds. Oh man. It's an amazing, amazing strain. And I've actually got a lot more of it going on, on the next round here. Fresh frozen. Yeah, we're going to do some fresh frozen as well. Oh. But when we can. Yeah, but 90% of my crop is usually done for seeds, so it's usually dry. And also dry sieve, but even the dry sieve, just, you know, some strains are pretty powdery. Like the Greek God, even though it's one of the sweetest ones, it just, it doesn't get slick and slippery. Does it, does that one more sandy? Is that like a sandy type of thing on the Greek God? Yeah, it is. Yeah, a lot. It's not like that. Actually, the old sweet tooth was the same thing. No matter how great sweet tooth was, and it'd be white and pure, it just wouldn't stick together. Whereas the BC Kush would just melt in your hands. But the sweet tooth was a lot nicer tasting, but it didn't look as good for an educated buyer. So it is wild how differently certain strains will wash versus in press versus others. Like, you know, for example, there's the cookies and cream and stuff like that has that same sandy type of resin. When I think of purples, like purple punch, they have that same sandy type of resin. You know, so when you said Greek God, I was thinking of that, that super purpley type resin. I work that similar to the purple punch, which is super sandy. Yeah. And larger resin heads. I recently got a new camera for doing macro shots. Oh, nice. It was neat to see all the different strains and the size of the different heads. Before we had these good cameras, we just never got to see that. No. And it's kind of cool to be able to... Sanding versus the greasy rate is like your stock to head ratio. And when you're harvesting, it makes a huge difference, right? So I was talking with one of my buddies, and this is kind of a random tangent, but it just sort of hit me. And he was over in... Where was it? He was in... It's either Thailand or India. And they were talking about the land races out there, how they don't have as much... It says... The farmers were saying that they look more resinous, but they don't have as much heads per square centimeter or square millimeter, whatever it is. And for that reason, the quality has gone down. That was their explanation for why the quality has gone down so far. It was in Milana. So I was wondering, does that even make sense? I don't know as a non-hash guy or non-hash maker. Yeah, I'm not a big hash guy too, but I can tell you what I see from my own strains. Yeah, some of them have much larger heads and smaller stocks, but there's some strains that... They're almost all stocks on the trichomes and just tiny little heads on it. Yeah, that's exact. Yeah, but Casey's the professional on that. That's it. You're looking for those big heads and like fire in, fire out, you know, like the better quality you're putting in when you're harvesting that low quality plant matter. You're going to get other that automatically comes along with that. And if you only have a little bit of this and a little bit of this, what you get at the end is the quality rate. You want to get a lot of this and clean a little bit out of this, right? It's funny because people ask that about breeding. Are fem seeds better than reg seeds? Do you find that they're more potent? Is this hash better? And it's just like literally, you can break it down to shit in, shit out. You put in shit, you get shit. You put in good quality and that is it. Whether it's fem seeds, whether it's anything when it comes to cannabis, good quality gets you good quality. Yeah, I've never noticed a difference between quality between the regulars and fems. You know, obviously I do my breeding with the regulars. Yeah, fems are just to grow out for people to grow. But you know, but there is some breeders out there who I don't know if they just don't know any better or they don't care. There is that actually breed with feminized seeds. And I'm still, maybe it's bro science or I don't know, but still breed with feminized seeds. Everything's got to be selected. All my mom's are selected from regulars. Most of the clone-owned leaves in today's California market, not even California's, the US market, all the clone-owned leaves in fact were found via feminized or bagged seeds. You know, like accidents, whether it's sour OG, any of the cookie stuff, anything modern, it all came from it. So it's just one of those things that over time, I think that was definitely a way that people thought at the beginning was like, yeah, use rags to breed. Because at least, you know, you get that extra chromosome and, you know, you're not breeding out the female chromosome, whatever. But over time we realized, oh, it's just that chromosome isn't there. And it's a different, it's autosomes taking course over sexual chromosomes. And that's just kind of where it's fit. So it's, it, there's not really any, it's the same kind of thing. Shit in, shit out. So if it's a plant that naturally herms a lot and will constantly kick herms of itself, it's probably going to breed a lot of herms into it and intersects into its future, right? But if it's something that happens just very rarely, an errant one, you know, then it's a lot easier to breed with that. I tend to do anything that shows any herms. I tend to just toss right away. Yeah. But there is a few strains here and there that maybe spit out a little banana at the end that you keep. But I really don't have any, except for, I have one different phenol of a purple pineberry that I don't really sell. But, but yeah, it, the last week or so it puts a little banana, but they're always sterile. But the buds are so beautiful and big. It's hard for me to toss that mom. See, as a, as a seed maker, it's hard, right? Because like we see all these other qualities that are in plants that have nothing to do with their sex traits, sexual traits. Like they can have the most amazing resin production. We want to, we want to carry that trade on, right? Like we want to use that. But we know that if people buy those seeds and they find that intersex trait, they may not have that same like compassion for intersex traits that we have. So we just can't work with it. We just cannot have it in our rooms. And so as a seed company, you can't be selling people things that go harm. And yeah, because there's a lot, there's a lot of newbies out there. And, and they usually fuck up on a few different things here and there. So that's something I really haven't had much of a problem with. Yeah. As far as hermaphrodites or mutants, even with, I make my feminized with STS. Yeah. Yes. And yeah, I had no problems. People say like with the, with the other methods of making seeds, sometimes there's a few Hermes or they're not 100% female. Yeah. With my formula of the STS, I've had, I've had no, basically no issues for about 10 years now. You're bringing with a lot of really, really stable stock as far as like uniformity because their lines you've worked. I noticed a lot of the intersex issues pop up is when it's newer lines that are unworked, like, you know, doing a hybrid between two brand new, crazy polyhybrid. It's like animal mints crossed to, I don't know, cherry truffle butthole. You know, like you could, you cross those two, then there's like all this parentage below. So all these possibilities of plasticity come out and intersex traits are bound, you know, like that's the way I look at it. If you, if you've worked lines already worked out those intersex traits and you're feminizing yourself, then they're going to be pretty freakin' stable. And they're going to have a lot less phenos popping up. It's going to be more true to what people want from that product, you know. Yeah. What they expect when they go to your site. Well, a lot of my strains are, I've been working with for 25 years and I haven't read them out to anything else. But obviously here and there I bring in new, like, like the red truffles I brought in because it was just so impressive. Sure. But yeah, I bring in new stuff here and there, but it has to pass a few tests to get into the, yeah, into my mother room. So. What kind of, what kind of tests are there? Like, talk about some of your qualifications for bringing this product in. Well, basically it's got to, well, as we said last time on the show, flavors is the number one thing for me. The terpene levels, it's got to taste really, really good from start to finish on that joint. That's number one for me. Before plant structure, before anything, it's the terpenes and the flavor. Yeah, so right now actually one of the ones I've been really pleased with is our blue dynamite. Yeah. And I brought that back, way back in 2007. It was all over high times and I won a few awards with it. But I just recently brought it back and we grew out a big batch of it and I selected five different phenos that I wanted to rejuvenate and master cones around. But after I grow out the seedlings, I pick my favorites, rejuvenate them and then try them as a clone before I make my final selection and try the samples of each one, send them in for some tests. Back in the day, we weren't able to send them in for tests because they didn't exist. But nowadays, we get to do that. But before the numbers comes the flavor. Sometimes I don't care if it's only 20% and not 24, if it tastes better. Yeah, usually don't notice. And if the terpenes are high, you don't notice those lower numbers. That's true. People drink wine and not ever clear for a reason. It's not always about what the number is. It's about how you enjoy it. Exactly. And for me, when it comes to smoking, taking the edge off is like 99% of the time, that's all I want to do is take the edge off, not inhibit it. I don't want to be cross-eyed and confused and walking into walls. Yeah, I have to be able to function and run a company. Yeah, there are times when that's very appropriate. At other times, most of the time I have to run a company and stuff. Yeah, I have some of that view, but I don't know if you can tell on the camera. But man, the latest batch, the cross I have now, it's a really good outdoor strain, but purple, I don't know if you can tell that. No, you can't quite see it. Yeah, okay. You know, we just had a big breeder's meetup about, I think, two months ago now. And one of the strains that came in was Blue Dynamite. Oh, really? Someone actually threw a big, really nice outdoor batch of Blue Dynamite and it was really good. Sweet. It was very grapefruit dominant. Super, super pink grapefruit. Super. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's apple and crossed original grapefruit. Yeah, that makes sense. And I was like, well, you know, it's grapefruit. Maybe I won't get too baked, but I mean, I was baked due to damn good job. I mean, like, I don't smoke a lot of outdoor because I've always been an indoor grower and there's not a big outdoor scene where we're at in Bakershield because it's so hot, nobody grows outdoor that much. So I don't get to try outdoor often. And I wasn't expecting to be floored, but it was really good. It was decent stuff. That's good, yeah. A lot of our strange people, people tend to really like our strange for outdoors because a lot of the hardiness we have from the mold resistance on the West Coast. Vancouver Island, it's raining all the time. So in the first 10, 12 years of my breeding career was all on the island where it's everything's just the humidity is through the roof. So yeah, mold resistance is something I always, you know, sometimes by accident, but it's something you select for. Yeah, the Mendo growers love it. And I know a lot of East Coast growers lately that hit me up. The one thing I've been telling them is just like, dude, you like everybody, everybody that I know in Mendo that is in like more human situations, they all grow, they grow next gen seeds like they all do. So I've been, I've been recommending that for East Coast growers that are like, man, my situation is so humid. Well, I got, you know, this is a great solution. People that have bred in this kind of climate, great strains, good quality strains for this climate. This is what people need to be thinking about. Not, I wish people would think more about that as opposed to what's hype. What will work good for me in my area? I think that would solve a lot for a lot of people and their issues. Yeah, well, I've noticed that too. We've got a lot of feedback in the last few years here for outdoor growers, even with our auto flowers, but also with our, some of our other outdoor varieties like the Avalon, Blue Dynamite, Time Warp. The strains that are bred on the West Coast tend to be way, way better for mold resistance. Yeah, you can finish them in those hills. You can finish them in town. A colleague of mine, Ron Harrington with Golden Hat Seeds, he's originally from Oregon State. And it's very rainy and humid there, just like it is in Canada on the West Coast. And he, he breeds a few auto flowers as well. And last year on his farm, he did a bunch of his own varieties, obviously, and my grapefruit haze and my dynamite. Alongside ethos seeds, a few auto flowers from them and a few other American companies that aren't from a human climate. And all of the, all the American strains molded. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. And mine, mine was, my grapefruit haze was sitting in the middle of a bunch of moldy buds. And all mine, not a drop of butchitis. That's awesome. So it's, yeah, and it was a pretty wet year last, last year. So, but yeah, that's one thing that people don't realize. If you're on the, if you're growing outdoors or on the East Coast, a lot, especially, they'd really like the more moldy stuff. Because they get more rain than you guys do down in California. Oh yeah. Yeah. So what's next generation working on currently? Like where, where are you guys at? Other than the red truffles, what are some of your directions you're wanting to take the company? Yeah. I've got my Avalon strain, which is the tough, hardy outdoor strain. We've got some CBD in it now. We've crossed it out to a Spanish CBD strain that I crossed it with and I did a few backcrosses now. So we have a good Avalon CBD. It's about 20% THC and about 4% CBD. Is Avalon one of the more great 3D ones? It's originally, it was the very first strain I ever bred back in 1996, I believe. And it's an Afghani hash plant crossed with a blueberry. That's what it was, the hash plant blueberry. Yeah. But years and years of selective breeding outdoors, I did all my selections outdoors on the West Coast. So it became really, really hardy. It finishes about the end of September and you can put up with a lot of wind and a lot of rain. And just like some strain, we've got a big wind storm, it's laying over, but the Avalon's standing up straight. You can put up with that. I bet. It's that hardy breeding dude. Yeah. So, and the other one, while we're actually working on our first contact strain, we've got doing a big phenol hunt on that. It's a, the mother is a one to one CBD THC strain. Yeah. But I've out crossed that now to myromulin. Oh, wow. So we're testing that out right now. It's a catalog. Yeah. What's that one called? First contact. First contact. Okay. Yeah, I kind of recommend not to beginner smokers because it's lower, a little bit lower THC, but the CBD is really high. Yeah. But the terpene levels on that strain are through the roof. That's awesome. It's just really, really stinky and branchy. It branches out like crazy. It's always a give and take a little bit when it comes to quality and terpenes, right? Like it's almost a little bit of give and take. It's very rare that you see something in the high, high testing range with high, high, high terpene percent. It's very rare. It can happen more often than not. Yeah, you're right about that. I noticed that with my grapefruit diesel strain, which is the highest terpene levels I've ever recorded. Yeah. Just over 5 percent. Yeah. Which is extremely rare. That's high, yeah. That's extremely high. Yeah. But the THC level is only like 16 or 17. Yeah. But it's still my favorite to smoke. One of my favorites. Yeah. Everybody smokes and just loves it because you're tasting that flavor right down to the roach. Yeah. And everything I cross it with tends to have about 2.5, 3 percent terpene level. That's nice. So I've been playing with that quite a bit, yeah. What kind of terps is it coming out with mostly? You know what? I can't honestly, I can't really say honestly. Yeah. I don't remember what the great one is. It's a new selection for a new mother. So I haven't sent that one in for testing yet. Yeah. I rarely get to do testing just because I'm so cheap that I just don't. But I get customers that aren't as cheap as me. And every once in a while you get those cool customers. Yeah, we get a lot of feedback too. Yeah. We get a lot of feedback too because over the last few years we've been selling a lot of seeds to some of the big LPs here. Yeah. And they do the tests on it and they give us the feedback. That's awesome. That's amazing to be able to get that much feedback back in big pots. Yeah, it's always neat. We listen to all the customers getting back to us after they grow out of the crop and the good reports, the bad reports, we've got to hear it all. Yeah. But generally they're pretty good. I hear a lot about LPs in Canada. We've had a few guests on in the past. Our last guest has talked about LPs. Can you kind of explain for us Americans what an LP even is? Is it just a company, a cannabis company? Yeah. Well, in Canada we have several different types of licenses. They're highly controlled by the government. There's the LP. It's a licensed producer. That's where I believe. Producing producers. And then there's the micro growers for the people who are smaller. Like they have a small, medium-sized warehouse. Yeah. And then there's the nursery license where you're only allowed to sell seeds or clones. Gotcha. But they're all highly, highly regulated by the government. In case you can tell you more about that. But the LPs are allowed. It basically covers the whole gamut of being able to package it. A micro grower or a nursery person has to go to another company to package it for you. Yeah. They're just fixing all that now. When it first started, as a micro, you had to go to an LP or you had to get a processing license. And now you can get a sales license. So you have your own path to sales. But originally, you'd have to go through an LP, which would have all of the licenses to be able to get you to market. And they're slowly fixing that. The one thing that blew my mind that I found out about Canadian, maybe this is just territorial. I'm not sure. But was that the people who were in charge of buying for the government are like just randoms. Like not weed people at all. And every province or state, as you guys call it, is different and different regulations in every province. So yeah, if I was, that's one reason we still haven't gone for our full license here in Canada is if we went for our full nursery license to sell seeds and clones on the legal market, we would be prevented from selling on our website. Yeah. We wouldn't be allowed to sell overseas, which is the majority of our market is overseas. So for us, so right now I'm growing for medical, a few patients. So that allows me to do my selecting and breeding and then provide the medicine for the patients. But the full legal market for us isn't really, it's not the way to go. So we're looking for perhaps eventually here getting, moving out of Canada. Yeah. So yeah, I've already got a location down in South America. I started reading at, but we've even not considered working in the States. So would you guys have the same thing too? It's the same issue. Where every state is different. Yeah. Yeah. California is a nightmare, man. Like they, the way, the way that I think that it's going to wrap up is to where there's not going to be any path for anyone to breed, because there's not going to be a plant count that allows you to breed. You know, nothing realistic. Like 12, you may get 12, but for a seed company, it's what we piss on 12. You know, like then we need 12 for one mom to stay alive. We need 12. You know, like that's not realistic. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We have two licenses here for 317 plants to license. So we're just about 635 plants we can do. So that's nice. That's just, that's just enough for me to work with. I wish I had more. Yeah. I know. Never enough, right? Never enough. Yeah. But yeah. Well, someday, someday, maybe in South America, we're looking, we're looking at a license in Argentina where they, when you get a license, they just allow you a flat two acres. Do whatever you want on two acres, whether it's indoor, outdoor, green house. It doesn't matter. It's simplified, but there's other, there's other steps they have there too that are, that are quite difficult. Do they, do they have like a good power grid to where, no matter where you're at, no matter where you live in Argentina, you can just hook up like a fucking big old indoor and blow it up. Yeah, it's pretty good actually. That's pretty well set up. The electricity cost is both the same as Canada, probably a little more expensive than the US. But you know, there's no snow there. Yeah. So as Canadians, we like, we like not having snow. Oh, are you guys sick of snow up in Canada? Snow is good. Ice fishing. No, he's, he's ice fishing. So he lives in the woods. But for me, I absolutely hate the snow. So. Yeah, here, it gets up to like 120 degrees Fahrenheit here. So like, I hate the sun. I hate the sun. I could deal with the snow because I can put on clothes, but I can't get more naked. So I hate. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck that. Well, I'd rather be in shorts and shirtless. Yeah. Yeah. That's just me. Yeah. Cooking. Cooking. I'm not a good Canadian, I guess. I'm a Canadian or you've got to love snow and hockey. Come on. So let's talk a little bit about the LP structures and stuff because that is something we've never really covered. Let's say you want to run a big seed company up there. What kind of license would you need? Just hypothetically though. You know what I mean? Well, I need a nursery license. Like, like the warehouse that we're in right now, I'm working in now. We're about 90% of the way to be having it built for a nursery license. And we, we put a stop to that a few months ago when we realized that the market isn't here in Canada. For us. It just didn't, doesn't make sense. So we're probably going to have something changes in the next few months. We're probably going to wind down operations here in Canada and move overseas. Just the regulations are just way, way too tough. Yeah. And like if the government employee who selects the products to sell in the stores says nobody buys seeds, so we don't want your seeds. I can't sell them. That's insane to me. That's insane to me. Like, oh, this person who has no tap on the market at all says, today we don't want XYZ. And that's your main strain. You're like, what, what, what's your input? What's your context for this? Yeah. In the province we're in here now in Alberta, I believe it's a few years ago they took a bunch of seeds in from some micro growers and LPs. And they didn't sell very well in this strain because basically everybody had like one or two strains. It was all white widow or a big bud or something like that. Oh, no. And then the government said, well, these aren't selling very well. So we're not going to buy seeds anymore. So. Well, it's saturated. And now it's saturated. Now the market is saturated, too. So do you think, so just from my perspective as an American, I noticed right at the beginning of COVID was when the drop happened as far as the market in the US, like that's when the weed market just bottomed out. And it may not have been, it might be like it might have just been a correlation causation type thing where it happened at the same time, but whatever happened happened here at that time. Like that was a very good mark to know when the weed market completely bottomed out. Yeah. And it affected the seed market. It affected the seed market maybe six months after that. Did it hit around the same time there? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty similar for the weed market. Yeah. The legal restoration kept doing kind of its thing. I think it might have picked up a little bit, but I would say like on the flower side, on the gray, it would be down sales for sure. I don't know about seeds. Yeah. And on the black market here, prices on the street dropped from about 12, $1,400 a pound down to about five or six. And for five or $600, that barely pays your electricity bill. Exactly. It's not. But a lot of the, there was a lot of stuff going out the back doors of the LPs. Sure. And the mic grows like how it always is, but now these days the customers in Canada have slowly just moved, they're lazy, they go to the store. There's a store on every corner. Yeah. And only the good growers and the guys that really weed geeks, they're the ones still buying seeds, but there's not as many of guys that are just kind of doing it for fun to make a little extra money on the side. A lot of used growth. There's a lot of used growth. Oh my God. I did. I got two pallets of lights here that I can't even give away. No way. A thousand watt HPS is, I got about 45. Oh, I bet. I can't even give them away. So. That's crazy, right? Yeah. Quickly it flipped. It was just like on its head and then flipped all the sudden and yeah, seeds, the seed market bottomed out as far as I could tell. Yeah. The seed market too. Yeah. The seed market for us, it's mostly been maybe in the last six months to a year is where we really noticed the big change because we have our whole, we sell a lot of wholesale seeds. So people want to buy whether it's a hundred seeds or a thousand or 10,000. Yeah. Our wholesale prices have just dropped. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy how much it's dropped. So. Anyone who hasn't dropped their price per packs during this is silly because they're probably cutting themselves off because it's, it's what the way I looked at it was like seeds are a, they're not a, you don't, not everybody needs seeds that are growers. It's a, it's something that they do extra when they have extra space to collect, you know, I want to find something new, but they can go get clones down at the grow store for, you know, 10 a pop. So why would they need seeds? It's not something they necessarily need to select new stuff every time. They can go get what's hot, what's hit from clones. And that seems to be what happened when everybody's money kind of vanished, you know, in the U S with COVID and everything else going on and the weed market body going out, but seeds weren't so necessary anymore. Yeah. Well, you guys down in California, I mean, you can sell and buy and sell clones in stores. Yeah. Yeah. We can't do that in Canada. You know, I take that back because for a while. Yeah. Yeah. While we were able to, I don't know when 64 hit, I don't know. It kind of screwed everything up. And the last I saw here locally, they were not allowed to sell clones anymore, but a lot of places do. So I don't know. Yeah. One of those things. Yeah, they're starting to now. There's some stores that have set ups to actually house clones to be able to move them. And then I think through the medical market as well, companies can sell clones to medical patients. But there's the logistics side of it, right? Depending on where you are, it's tough to send clones through the mail and depending on what you're getting, right? Yeah. And who you're getting it from because you just don't even know if it's going to be what you expect. And I mean, if government regulations all up in the middle of it, that really fucks you up, like super because they really don't know what the fuck they're doing. They have no place in it. Like really, like on random, what the fuck does that have to do with anything? Yeah, the people that made the regulations were not, they were not pot smokers or growers. Just a bunch of bureaucrats, it seems, trying to figure out how to do it. Yeah, like they wanted to treat it like Oscar Meyer Ham and anything else like that. Just not how it works. Yeah. They didn't really understand weed customers, like weed customers. It's not like somebody who drinks beer every day and they go Budweiser, Budweiser, Budweiser. Exactly. And they get a brand. Weed smokers want to try something new. All the time. Yeah, sometimes they have their reliable go-to strings, but yeah, they want to try new flavors. Yeah, it's not like the alcohol business and that's how it was really viewed up here for a lot of the regulators. They just seen it as like alcohol. Yeah. That's the way they viewed it and that's not how it is. And that's how they try to treat it here, too. And I think that's one of the big issues that they've run into with even driving, trying to figure out how to screw people over and give them DWIs for smoking. They're having problems with that. How do you figure that out? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me a lot cooler. I don't get all worked up about other drivers. A little less road rage. Yeah. I learned to chill out. As a young man, what I didn't used to smoke and drive a punch. I'd get all rowdy about how fast I was getting places. Get out of my way. And now it's just like, just chill. I'm with other people that have the road. I get there when I get there. It's like, what are you so worked up about? Yeah. It helps. Right on. Yeah. But I don't smoke as much as I used to when I was young, but yeah. A long road trip always needs a few puffs. So what's something that you smoked recently that, not necessarily out of your own stuff, but that you've tried recently that really was like, wow. That's different. That's a unique strain. Has there been anything? I live in a bit of a closet here. A big closet with lots of plants. So here in Canada, I'm smoking most of my own strains always. Yeah. But in South America, I tried some really interesting strains down there. What kind of strains did you try down there? Yeah. Actually, I met a really good farmer in Chile. They were kind of working. He's growing out a bunch of my stuff right now, but he had a lot of different Jamaican strains. Oh, wow. And I really, really like a few different Blue Mountain sativas. And also he had a, it was interesting because he also has a Colombian red down there. Oh, interesting. And I grow Colombian red up here. I've been in the past and I'm breeding with it now. But it was nice to see that his was very, very similar to mine. Oh, that's rad. Yeah. It's on the other side of the planet. But it was, yeah, a bit of a confirmation that I'm getting a bit of the real deal here. How long flowering is that Colombian red? That's got to be about 12-ish. Yeah. Yeah. 13. Yeah. That's the one. Well, we have a cross with it now. It's the Colombian red crossed with our Mexican sativa that I'm calling Latina sativa. And that went about 13, 14 weeks. Yeah. And it probably could have went more, I bet. Yeah. It could have kept going. It wasn't like done, done like the rest of the room. The rest of the room, because when I was down in Argentina, my buddy Casey here was watching the crowd for me, taking care of things. And some of the strains, he's like, Jay, I can't keep these alive. What's going wrong? I said, well, 13, 14 weeks old. Yeah. That's why you can't keep them. Because when I grow seeds and breed the seeds, I grow that plant so long until it almost dies on the stick. Yeah. Just get the best quality seeds. And I fertilize to the end. And you thought he was doing something wrong here for a while. Yeah. No, no. Look at the date. I put those in the room. Oh, okay. I figured it out. That's funny. Yeah. Some of those Colombians go 26 weeks. Every bit of it. Like 30. There's some jungly Colombians out there. Yeah. I'm a big fan of the sativa sale. Some guys like the cushions and the Indicas, but I'm a sativa guy. Yeah. I can't get nothing. And he's an Indica dude. But I'm all sativa. Yeah. Yeah. I like the sativas myself. I like ties and very clear-headed type highs. But it's just a different smoke for a different occasion though for sure. One of my buddies told me to tell you if you do want the celestial temple sativa, the old, old release, he has them for you. I don't know if it's him or somebody else. It's on my list to talk about here. It's about two weeks ago saying he has Yeah. He watched the podcast and he has the celestial temple or Christmastime. Yeah. He's in the mail, he said. That's awesome. That's so cool. We're going to send them, we told them anything you want, man, pick whatever you want from the catalog. Oh, that's rad of you guys. So, yeah, I can't wait to try out. That was such a nice, very unique strain, man. I haven't seen a buddy, a mutual friend of Breeder Steve and Red Bert Dan back in Vancouver who will know who Bert Dan is. Okay. He had it sitting in the corner of his living room for like two or three years as a house plant. Yeah. And he always like, oh, he kind of ignored it. And it was just, it stayed in veg, just sitting in the corner of the living room. So, yeah, I can't wait to try it out. I think Breeder Steve had given him this cut and it's kind of just sat there for three years. That's funny. And the story is it's from Ecuador. Yeah. But whatever you did with it, it was hard to get it to flip into flour. You can sit there in veg forever and I believe that took about 12, 13 weeks to flour as well. Yeah, not fruity or piney at all. Yeah, yeah. And it made kind of like so much Jamaican strains I grew up. It left me always kind of confused feeling. Yeah. It's one of those trains that you don't dare new math. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of that stuff you have to like put your light hours down to eight or nine hours to get it to trigger into flour and initiate and just leave it because it's got to go to flour with whatever that that one wants. But some of those have the most quality wild special highs and that's what makes them worth it. That little weird chase. Yeah. Yeah. People don't grow enough sativas up here. I agree. There should be a lot more of them going around. But that's cool in the art too and get the great things out there. That's awesome. But up here in Canada outdoors we can't really finish them properly other than a few of the early sativas and a few of the strains from Great White North and Yeah. Canadian Red Seeds they did the Yeah. They did some early sativa was basically a Durban. Yeah. Yeah. From Manitoba and stuff like that. Yeah. There's a lot of different things going on. Yeah. Yeah. So he was bringing up a few things about how about BC Bud and how all the big players in BC back in the day or maybe even now but back in the day anyway. They weren't from BC. Yeah. We all migrated from out East. We always heard about okay you can grow weed in BC and not go to jail for too long. So we moved to the coast. That's awesome. And learned how to grow weed. Now but most of Canada a lot of the biggest breeders and players in the game were not from BC. Yeah. We moved to advantage of legal climate and yeah. I think of kind seed there are a bunch of Alberta boys. Mark Emery is from Ontario. A whole bunch of really top manateuba which nobody talks about there because you could go to jail for 20 years for growing plants so there's bunch of the big breeders rural manateuba and even a bubble man Richard Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark Mark So it's generation after generation of growers. But yeah, that's mostly the island and the Kootenays. Yeah. So yeah, a lot of good strains. But when I moved out there to BC, I didn't realize that a lot of my friends were lazy hippies. And they didn't keep mother plants around because they could just go to talk to somebody else and buy a tray of clones for the next grill. And for me, being from the prairies where it was all rare, I was just a rabid collector. And I just got everything I could get my hands on. My bedrooms were bigger than my flower rooms after time. Oh, same. Same, always. Yeah, yeah. Always. And they grew up with it. It was always there, so they kind of didn't take it seriously. So that's why I think a lot of us Easterners kind of came in and took over the market. Yeah. And even when the Prairie Boys or the East Coast guys had weed to sell to the states, they just called it BC Bud or Beasters because you would never tell anybody that you're actually growing it. It's like, oh, yeah, I bought it from a guy in BC. That makes sense. You wouldn't even tell your best friend that you were growing in your basement. Yeah, yeah. That's how secretive it was back in the 90s. Yeah, yeah, it's still that way here where I'm at. Even all my friends know, we don't know where Matt lives. That's what it is. They just know that's part of the drill. Yeah, it's an old-school mentality. And I don't think it's probably not even necessary as much anymore. But the idea back then was that you didn't want to end up on any one short list when someone's grow got robbed. You didn't want to do that. So it was like you didn't even want to ask someone where they lived if you were a grower. And if you were a grower, you didn't want to talk about it because you didn't want to get ripped or robbed. Yeah, you need to know only. Only need to know. Yeah. And anybody who is going through a divorce or split up with a girlfriend, you was like, OK, bud, no offense, but I'm not going to talk to you for a year until things go over. Because one of the most dangerous things was when somebody split up, a vindictive ex-girlfriend would just fucking rat you out. My chick has been mind blown. Like she went to that party in the mountains with a bunch of us that all met up around the country. And the one story she heard in common was that we all have exes that have blackmailed us over weed. Like that is just a part of our life. We all have been blackmailed over growing. Yeah, you got two guys that can confirm that here. Right? Like, it's just how do they even know to do that? Like, is there a rulebook somewhere? It says, hey, find a grower and blackmail them. Lived happily on it for years. And so it goes away. Fuck you. Yeah, you got kids even worse. Even worse. Yeah. Yeah, we've both been there. Man. Jesus, yeah. That's one thing I liked about when I moved over to Spain. It was so waiting for me to be able to, oh, how do you? Welcome aboard. Yeah, living in Spain, I was able to live openly and free. Vancouver Island, we had a couple of friends that actually knew where we lived. And nobody else really knew where I lived, even though they were close friends. Sure. But in Spain, nobody gave a shit. Everybody was growing. You never had to hide it. Like I said, the first tray of clones I sold in Spain was to the local police officer. That is so crazy. It was a non-issue. Didn't have to hide it. What year? Two years ago, I was in Spain. I believe I went there in 2008. OK. The week that Mark Emory got busted. You went there during the glory days for Spain. Yes, exactly. That's why I know a bunch of the big players in Spain. Yeah. All the big farmers for Dynafem, Royal Queen, all those guys. La Motta, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I was there 2008 until 2016, I believe. Oh, shit. 2016 or 2017. So yeah, nine years live in there. So let's break into something. I know I've mentioned it on the show before, but it's something that is very often not talked about. It's one of those golden rules to see things that the guys involved don't want people talking about it. But it's a reality. Can you talk about some of the big players in Spain who are making the majority of the seeds for the seed industry? Is that something you're open to talk about? Yeah, it's an open secret. Anybody that's close to it. There's probably only a couple dozen big farmers that provide seeds for all the big companies. Most of the Spanish companies, originally, the Dutch were the big companies. And then they started farming out seed making to Spanish growers because everything was cheaper in Spain. And it became more illegal in Amsterdam. They cracked down on it. Yeah, and the Dutch guys were getting older, too. They'd been doing it for 20 years, and they wanted to retire. They'd get older. So they'd bring their clones down to a Spanish farmer and give you the clones, say, hey, can you make these seeds? I'll give you 50 cents a seed. And I was propositioned by a few different growers, too, from Paradise and then Sirius to make seeds for them. I never did it. Maybe I should have, but yeah. I don't know. After the first five or six years or 10 years of the Spanish guys farming the seeds, they're like, well, forget these Dutch guys. And the Spanish slowly took over the market. And they stepped up to. But a lot of the companies down there, there's a few that are breeding their own things and aren't just resellers. But the majority of the Spanish companies, they buy it off a farmer. And three or four different seed companies will have the exact same bag of seeds, but all have a name that's similar. Yeah. And what I noticed was a lot of it started with, OK, the Dutch would bring their clones down there. The seed lines would be true to what they were selling at the time. But then over time, I noticed greenhouse, you'd never consistently get the same seeds in the same pack, because they were just like, give us something like Jack Harer like, and well, is it lemony a little bit? Lemon haze. All right. Is it sativa lemon? Ah, fuck off. And it started to get a lot more like that. And I think it's probably one of the most open secrets behind the scenes. But on the front side, most people don't know that they're buying from 12 breeders in Spain when they're buying these large, large companies, like the major company. I don't even need to name them. But yeah, the large company. Yeah, we don't need to name them because it's obvious. If you look at the catalogs, everybody's got a critical cross or a silver haze or amnesia or something. Yeah. Yeah, they all come from the same bag half the time. Yeah. But yeah, and a lot of the auto flowers, too. The Spanish are really big on the autos. They did some great breeding on autos there. Really good breeding. No, they made the autos a good thing. Because when autoflowers first came onto the scene, they were shit. Yes, they were. They were tiny little runts. It was kind of a novelty at the beginning. Yeah. And actually, a lot of the first breeders of the autoflowers actually were from Canada as well, out in Toronto region. I don't know them myself personally. But I think a lot of the first autoflowers that were marketed, like the Lowrider. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dr. Doctors. That was an Ontario guy. Man, I'd love to talk to that, dude. Yeah, I have no idea what happened to them. I don't either. I never said that. Yeah, the Spanish guys brought it up a level. And they got better and better with their autoflowers. And I started doing autos probably about eight or nine years ago because the market demanded it. Yeah, yeah. And all my friends, I know a few of the big farmers that made seeds for like Royal Queen, Dynafem, Sweet Seeds, Pyramid Seeds, all the Spanish companies. So I ended up, my first big run of the autos was a big bud, northernized big bud. Yeah, yeah. And that's what I used as my first breeding material to breed into my strains. Was that Buddha seeds? They're not like big bud, was that Buddha? No, it's my buddy Louie's neighbor. The neighbor. So he sells to about three or four different companies. That's awesome though. So yeah, a lot of the farmers there will sell to three or four different seed companies. And yeah, that's the way it works. A couple of guys will get really good at growing a few of the strains that they like and they dial it in. Like, I'm not going to shit talk to the Spanish guys. They know what they're doing. No, I think they do great. I think they do good work. But a lot of the seed companies are different than the seed breeders and growers. Absolutely. The seed companies, I would say 80%, 90% of them are just the resellers. They're good at marketing, but they don't actually make their own. Yeah, I call them seed sellers versus breeders. Like, they're seed makers who don't really breed. There's breeders who breed and make seeds. And then there's seed sellers who are just resellers who don't really have much of an interest in the breeding aspect. They're interested in the movement of seeds. Yeah, it's a business. They run the website. I often find it amazing how into seed making people get and how little they actually understand what's going on just behind the curtain in that regard. I mean, it seems like when you talk, if I remember correctly, I think it was 99 or 2,000, the Dutch closed their law that made seed making legal. Yeah. They had a loophole. And then there was a bunch of busts. And that seemed like it shifted a bunch of people's work to either Switzerland or Spain. But it's kind of been a little bit that way the whole time. Like the whole reason most of that work even went out to Amsterdam in the first place was it was more permissive than the 80s and the Reagan drug war and all that. And so it's almost like the movement looks for where it's liberal and they can get away with it. Get away with it just enough. Just enough. And then you were just saying, like various companies, we won't name. It happens in America right now, too, where it's like people have a brand and they have packaging and they have a following. And so all they need to do is put seeds into that packaging and into that brand and into that following. And people think that they did it from beginning to end. When in reality, they farmed it out. And they're just buying from a menu because they have all that packaging and that brand and they're going to do a drop and they're going to do a collab. And people don't understand. People think that all these individually weed famous people, most of them are making their own stuff and keeping their own mothers and in-house working it. And it's such an open secret. But it's also so poorly understood by 90% of the rest of the group out there. And I don't want to act like I'm shitting on any. And I know you guys aren't either. I don't want to make it sound like I'm shitting on any of the steps in this process because each of the steps of those process do their own thing and they're making their own success. Obviously, some of these major companies that have people that don't make any seeds, that have never touched a seed other than to resell them, are the most successful companies. Yeah, it's pretty funny because a lot of the companies that sell a lot of the seeds, they've probably never grown hardly 10 plants. Yeah, exactly. And even myself, we sell a lot of wholesale seeds. For other companies, they want to buy a bulk batch of seeds and they package it themselves. They're better at marketing than I am. Yeah, there's a lot of people like that. My breeding, so. And most breeders are like that. We're into the plant side. I've had to force myself to get into the podcasting side and the marketing aspect. None of this stuff I'm comfortable with. I mean, to some degree, dude, for a long time, regardless of what country you're in or whatever, people that were deep weed people, the best thing they could do was stay invisible and keep their head down. And so it's a very different skill set to be like, oh, get out there, promote yourself, promote your brand, promote your company, be the face of it. So in a lot of ways, like, you know, it's just not, it's just all different. Yeah, if you want to survive in this business, you got to change. And I've been realizing that as well. I have to be more proactive with social media or people don't know who you are. Yeah, yeah. I had a few weeks ago, I got on a stupid argument like you shouldn't do on Facebook. And some guy was telling me, like, oh, I'm the biggest player around here. I move packs and I supply stores. And I've been into this from the old days. I've been around for like eight or nine years. And I've never heard of you. Who are you? And I'm like, He's been around since eight or nine years, the old school. Yeah, so you kind of engage with those people. It's got to just ignore it. It's very hard though, sometimes. It's so hard when you just want it. Because our culture, we were raised different. Like it was, a lot of us were raised with like an apprentice type culture where like you fucking smack stuff. Don't embarrass the people around you. Don't embarrass your culture. Well, it was hard to get. I mean, I don't, I try to explain to people a lot. And I don't, I don't think it sinks in very much because we live in such an information dominated society. But when most of us started, how difficult it was even to figure out the basics. Yeah. Yeah. You know? I mean, it's hard to say. Yeah, you know, there wasn't forums, there wasn't the internet, there wasn't the exchange of ideas yet or anything like that. And because it was so risky, getting into a trusted circle was hard and almost by accident, more than intention. Yeah. You know? It's almost like. Yeah, I was a complete accident. We all purposely, we kept our circle small because it was just too risky to have a big circle. Yeah. But yeah. You know, I'm not, and I just want to make everybody clear. Like I'm not dissing anybody in Spain. It's mostly, you know, like, because probably some of those Spanish breeders and some of those Spanish farmers are really good at what they do. Oh, I know if you really kick ass growers and breeders in Spain now. You know, so it's not to disparage them. It's just more like, like, you know, you got these, these brands, we don't need to mention them, but you got some big brands that like, kind of ruled the 90s from Holland. Yeah. They start getting busted and they're getting older. Like you said, and they like, they kind of lost their verb for it, but they have this brand and they can sell a lot of seed. And so, you know, you talk to a lot of the Dutch and they'll never claim that they lost a single thing. Sure. Yeah. If you were to talk, if you had your parents, everything. I mean, why, why admit that you lost anything? 40 years in running. I mean, what's funny is, you know, I mean, I guess I'll dissense you for a second or whatever, but like, no, they still, if you go on their webpage today, they still use the same pictures that Neville had in his seed bank catalog in 89 and 90. Yeah. Yeah. They haven't updated their super skunk picture in 35 years. Yeah. The same. Some of the Dutch, some of the bigger ones, I know Green, I like my, my, my business partner is, he's a friend with Ari, and he ran time seed back in the day and he used to move a lot of their, the seeds for Ari and, he's been in their mother room. He said, there is these trees in Ari's main mother room that are, they're trees, they've been going for years and years. And there's a few companies that have the original cuts, but most probably don't. And we all, we all know we've all lost strains that we, that we've reproduced. But let's be realistic. Like, Crain House are the ones that are probably the most notorious for doing the white labeling of seeds. I have never understood why Ariad would keep moms of anything for that long. And he doesn't even sell seeds of the shit that he's keeping these moms up. Cause he probably does it all, dude. I mean, yeah, he maybe he does, but I just, it doesn't make sense in my head. Like I see them doing the, the strain hunters. And I don't, I don't want to diss the dude cause he's done a lot, I guess, you know, but I see strain hunters. I see them collecting all these land raise strains, but I've never seen like these big massive reproductions of all these strains. And then Balt is what I've seen. That, that dude is, I couldn't say for sure, but he probably is the most, as far as the public people go, he's probably the most successful business person in cannabis. Sure. Yeah. You know, Franco, before he died, like Franco Ariad's partner, or, Yeah, yeah. Franco had a heart for weed. He, he really, he was a weed geek. You get to nail your jars and samples in front of him. And he was just passionate about it. He could smell everything and he would go on about it. Arian barely maybe spoke the odd joint in the evening. He was the businessman, you know, the good looking face behind it. But, but Franco, he was the real deal. So, but like just like nowadays, I actually talked to Arian when I was down in South America at the trade show, just down there. And him, he, a lot of the seeds now are made in Columbia, because it's so, so cheap to produce down there. And, Man. When I told him I had, oh, I got a couple hundred thousand auto flowers here. I need to move, blah, blah, blah. And he looked at me and laughed. He goes, I got a barrel full. And I, I bet he does. He's like, okay, well, okay. Yeah. But, But he bought him a farmer. You can, you can look at that. And it's like, that's always, I actually look at Holland and Amsterdam. I look at all the eras as like teaching moments in a way. Because it doesn't really change that much. And even like living in California and having like legalization sort of start to sweep through America, all the same stuff that was happening in the nineties in Holland is happening here now. Yeah. You've got your like underground weed nerds that just want to like have a good living and work with plants. And they have to bond with like sort of straight business people that don't care nearly as much, but have that aspect or have sides of like, they have access to capital or money or the things that you don't and from, you know. Yeah. That's one reason like six, about five, six years ago I moved back to Canada. A few of the big companies here, the big LPs were kind of courting me and trying to get me to come grow for them. But I would have had to sell out all my genetics and give them my strains. And I would have just started making a wage maybe a percentage of the big company. I'd maybe make 5% shares from the company or something. Sure. And I kind of, after a few of them came to me, that's why my partner now, Taylor, I chose him as a partner because he ran kind seed really, really well. Yeah, he's old school. He's legit. He knows how, he knows how to, he's, anybody talks to him on the phone when they call our website. Taylor's the most friendly guy. He'll help you. You like Taylor. Taylor's cool as fuck. And yeah, yeah. When you talk to him on the phone, you're his best friend after 10 minutes on the phone. And he's a bit of a big stuff, teddy bear here. And he'll always give me a free stuff. Which is fun. But he's somebody who I know will can deal with the customer. So I teamed up with him even though he didn't have the funds and it was a bit of a slower rise to get back into the game over here in Canada. But when he has, when he's on the phone with a customer, that's one of our rules. Like when I teamed up with him years ago, he's like, there's no bullshit. Like if a customer asks something about a strain, if you don't know, just tell them you don't know. Yes. And he even said that to me yesterday. I told him we were going on the podcast. He goes, Jay, just don't say anything that's not true. If you don't know something, go do it. And it's the advice I gave him and he gave that to me. Yeah. It's just something like- That's beautiful, isn't it? To be in this business for this long, people see that bullshit. They do. And there's no shame in admitting you don't know where that strain came from or what crosses what? Exactly. You tell people what you know and that's it. So- One thing that's held true on our podcast since day one is that our, at least the people who are serious weed nerds and that appreciate our show is that they always sense when someone being transparent and just being like, yeah, I don't know. You know, like I just tell it the way it was. And you can always see it in the comments. Everybody always is like, yep, yep, this guy's not a bullshit or appreciate it, you know, all the time. And that's what I think. Yeah, last night when I was watching Pete there on there. Yeah, yeah. It was 20 minutes into the podcast and I was like, oh, this guy's not a bullshitter. Nope. He's a real deal. Yeah. No bullshit defeat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I actually like that. It'd be interesting to have a little podcast with me and him chatting because he knows a lot of the Ontario scene. I know that BC scene better and we could probably- Let's put that together. We have all the mutual friends. But yeah, it'd be pretty interesting to actually chat with him sometime. Yeah, that'd be great. I'm sure he'd enjoy it too. He loves it. He's an old dork like us. Yeah, I only watched one podcast of his but I think you guys have about two or three. Yeah, I think we did with every total. Yeah, yeah. With him, it's just, he's got so much information in there. It's just about keeping him on point, you know? Because he's like, he'll start talking about something. And then he'll get a thought in his head and all of a sudden you're like a 45 degree angle, you're off on a tangent about something totally else. Yeah, yeah. I'll be all the way, don't worry. Yeah, you know, and he, I like that he gives unvarnished opinions of what he thinks about people, you know? Yes, that's my favorite. You know, because it's like a lot of times, one of the hardest things about like doing a show like this is like, you're trying to get information across, right? And people come on for different reasons or whatever, you know? But it's like, it's very difficult to be like just real. And what I mean by that is to not just like make, it's really tempting to make yourself look better than you are. Yeah. You know? There's no need for that. There's no need for that. It hurts you in the long run. As any of us know, it's like a lot of breeding is accidents. A lot of breeding is failure, you know? A lot of breeding is like, you wish you had the things you had back then now because you do a better job with them now than you would have done 15 years ago when you were still just figuring it out. And, you know, I actually think it's amazing how much cool stuff has come out of cannabis, despite like most of it coming out of garages or little warehouses or little greenies or little seas. I mean, when I was first going to Holland, I just had no idea that like every five or six years weed would reinvent itself. And what I mean by that is that like if you don't get seeds when they're available, you have no idea if those seeds with those parents will be around again. Well, I mean, that changed over time though, it accelerated. The process of how quick strains turned over accelerated. I mean, OG Kush lasted 20 fricking years. Like White Widow lasted, you know, 20 fricking years, but now it's like cookies and then brunts then, you know, it's going way faster. The fads are going faster, I think. Yeah, I think that's modern marketing. Yeah, yeah, it's just marketing for newbies. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, like actually to go back to what Pete said about, I'm going to tangent here as well, what Pete said about Mark Emory and back in the day, he made some really good points and like to clarify, like the last podcast we were chatting and I was a little bit vague about some of my history back in the day, working with Emory, but I don't have to be that vague. But yeah, for about a year or so, like with Federation, when I split from Federation, it was a big argument I had with Mark and with Mike from Federation, because I was out of the city for about a month or so, and I came back and my partner at Federation had a bunch of strains on Mark Emory's catalog that I know did not exist. Oh, that sucks, dude. He was just renamed and that was the last straw and I went in, I went in, I told Mark, hey Mark, I'm done with Federation, me and Mike are split, I'm starting my own seed company. And by the way, all of those crosses that you have there in the catalog, they don't actually exist. They're just renamed seeds because Mike wanted to make money. And Mark did not care. He goes, oh well. Of course he did. And I was like, and that's when I start, I stopped selling seeds to Mark. That was that same day that I was done. So I went over to Kind Seed, I started selling to Kind Seeds, Amsterdam seed company, or Amsterdam Cafe. Yeah, right. And a few companies online in Ontario, but I stopped selling to Mark Emory that very same day. And that's awesome. It was only about five or six years later when I don't know if you guys know Michelle Rainey. No. Anyway, she came to Vancouver and she took over the business end of Mark Emory seeds in probably the mid-2000s. And she ran it straight because Mark was too busy doing his political shit. Oh yeah, yeah. I was getting into trouble and blowing money. So when Michelle took over, she ran it straight and she was honest about it. So that's when I went back into the Emory catalog, but for that from about 1999 to 2005, I never sold to Mark because I knew I was off. You know what I gotta ask, don't you? You know what I gotta ask? What strains were on the list? What strains were on the list? Dude, I can't, you know what? There was about four or five of them that he had and I can't really remember. I don't know. Had to though. Had to try. I'd have to, I actually, I do have some of the old Emory catalogs here. I could probably figure it out by looking at the old catalogs, but off the top of my head, I wrote it off and left. Yeah, of course. Like they weren't your creations so why the fuck would you here? That's me that's always been the risk of like when you're buying, especially from different countries and stuff and like an order comes in for eight packs of this and they don't have it, but they have other seeds. And so they're like, well, I'll just take the money and I'll fill this order with, this is close enough and off it goes and, and you know. That's a slippery slope indeed. Yeah. I always tell people, unless it's a really big established company, if a company online always has a strain in stock, chances are they're bullshitting. Like as a breeder myself too, like sometimes you run out of seeds, and I don't have room in my grove to make that strain for another six months. So you can't always have every strain in stock unless you have an insanely well-organized, large operation. That's the one thing I tell people when they ask me, what's the most thing I can, things out of stock? Yep. When people ask me, what's one thing I can look forward and know if a seed company has, is reputable. And I'd say, well, look how long they've been around and has any other stuff ever gone out of stock. That'll give you your answer. Yeah. I mean, it's not always true because there are amazing people who can keep their stuff in stock and much better than I ever could, obviously. But yeah, for the most part, if they're doing it legit, they're gonna run out of stock and stuff every now and then. And you know, sometimes if you're doing regular, if you're doing regular breeding, sometimes you get like a prolific amount of seeds as he was just talking about. You might have a 55-gallon drum, like he was saying, like full of whatever. Yep. And then you're not gonna run out, you know? Sometimes it's just unpopular, you know? But you can't really sell them after three years or so. The germination rate goes down if you're not storing them right. Sure. Every year when you start seeing a dip in the germination rate, that's what I found. Good seeds. Yeah. Yeah, if they're not fridge stored, people don't understand like how quickly, like, cause they can go from being real nice to just bop all of a sudden, a month later, nothing's popping. I saw it happen with a lot of my old strawberry stuff for whatever reason, all at the same time, but just took a shit. And that was that. Can't sell any more. One of the things I think is interesting about the mom. When you're storing these, too, it's about stability. Go ahead. Yeah. I was just saying that like, one of the big shifts, at least that's happened in America, is like, a lot of the old school people have what I call, you know, they have lines, right? And like you were saying, you have lines and you remake those lines at different times for new seed. A lot of the smaller breeders these days, everything is a one-off. Yeah. Everything is made once and it exists until it's gone. And the likelihood they ever make it again is very small. Yeah. You know? Cause they're not really operating. Yeah. And when they do remake it, it's a different phenotype. Yeah, exactly. So it's become very flash in the pan in that way where people advertise a drop. And if you want that hybrid, you better get it then because, you know, it's not like the old seed company days in America, at least for a lot of people where it's like, I have these H drains. Here are the lines I offer. Yeah. You know, and I've been working on these lines for quite a while. And so, you know, but strangely, people want worked lines, but they also want new stuff every single drop. Yeah. Yes. That's what I ran into. And that's why I said, with the blue bonnet shit, I was like, I'm done. I'm done. I'm not changing anymore. I'm just staying because either way I'm not winning. So I'm just going to stay here. See how it holds. Yeah. Stick on the gun. And I wish I had some of the same cuts I had back in the 90s and I would have stayed there with a few of those strangers. You can't get any better. If you only knew it. Yeah, if you only knew. Right? Right? Like some of those lines from Neville? I mean, Matt and I were talking to someone that was very close to Neville the last decade or so of his life. And even he bitched about, he wished he had a lot of the stuff he had in the 80s and early 90s now. Yeah. Because you got 30 years of breeding in and man, what could I do with them in my 60s? Yeah. I was in it. I mean, I think part of life is I wish I had now what I had back when I was an idiot kid. Yeah. And I think that keeps happening the older you get. Like, man, I wish, because you gain experience if you're good at what you do and you care. Is that a man thing? Does anybody know any women that have that same drive for something like that? I'm their driver. Like, I don't know any women that are like that about that. Like, oh, I wish I had that old strain from back in 62. Like, never would say that ever. And I don't know, maybe it's like a man's drive to, I don't know. There's a few, but not very many. Yeah, I wouldn't think there's very many. Yeah. I just think there's some industries that are male dominated. Yeah, that's true. And I think cannabis or some combination of it. Yeah. Actually, yeah. We're still in Canada. There's quite a few women that are big players from the game. Yeah, especially in the legal recreational market. Because women are facing like, they're better at doing work and going through the legal system than we are. And creative too. Like, I know some really creative women in the recreational market that are doing really well with their branding and stuff like that just because of it. You know what I mean? There's a huge gap up here between the old school guys that have been doing it forever and businessmen and trying to throw the government into. It's just miserable. Yeah. A few times some of my best partners were women that ran my websites and they're weak geeks and can out smoke. So in South America, I encountered that as well in Argentina and Chile. Women are running the show down there. They're running, they're doing the seals. They're running the shops. It's more so than Canada in that way. I didn't really expect that because it's more of a machismo male dominated culture. But down there, the women are hardcore. That's awesome. That's awesome. And you know, a lot of the women growers that I know that actually interact with the plant tend to be much better growers than men too, for whatever reason. They have that connection with the plant. Yeah, you don't want to admit it, but yeah, that's true. In the end of the day, you're taking care of a living thing, right? Yeah, back in the day in Vancouver, all the Asian growers, it was all the women running for rooms. Oh, wow. And all the Vietnamese and Chinese groups in the Vancouver. Yeah, the women would be in there taking care of the plants and the guys would be out there selling and dealing with the gangsters. Gambling. And gambling and weighing their money. Yeah. Do you know much about that culture? Like that's not a culture that's ever really been talked about. Like the Asian culture, the Asian black market culture in cannabis. Or in Vancouver, we have a very, very large Asian population there. Yeah. So like the one city I lived in right next to Vancouver called Richmond, it's probably 80% our Asian descent. Wow. And they would rent these big giant mansions and they would pump out the pounds. That's awesome. No pots, no nothing, dirt on the floor. Yeah, dirt on the floor. Yeah, lights. Yeah, you'd walk into these places, there'd be mold halfway up the walls. Like wherever the poly started up was fine and down was black mold. And they'd just run these giant hot houses, burn them and turn them and onto the next place. What? Yeah, when they got big in the late 90s, it's their fault that the rental societies told, the police told landlords that you have to inspect your rental house every two months to make sure it's going to go up. And that's all because of the big Asian gangsters. You would go in and destroy a house. They'd take the bills for two or three fair crops and then they'd move on to the next house. It kind of wrecked the rental scene in British Columbia. Wow, I didn't even know that was a law. That would fucking come be a nightmare. Yeah, only in British Columbia. Only in British Columbia because one out of three rental homes were a grow-off. Commercial grow-off, not a small one. It was a... It's actually not. I mean, I think that's just a story to some degree of how a lot of times immigrant populations work, in the sense that... They hustle harder. Well, yeah, not only that, but they have tighter family units. The people are willing to live on less. They're willing to bond together to raise themselves up. Whatever they're doing is far better than where they came from to begin with. They stick together. Rating on the group is unthinkable because it's your entire family and everyone you know and all of your connections and all that. And so it's actually a pretty effective method. And it goes on in America too, in all kinds of different ways. I used to... I didn't know very much about it, but I used to have some friends in the Canadian scene, 20-something plus years ago, and they were independent. And they said the hardest thing to be independent was like, you basically had to be invisible to the Asians and the bikers. Because those were the two big groups that kind of wanted to dominate everything. And so he was always like, I always have to bob and weave and not irritate either of those groups, you know? Yeah, yeah, and Vancouver and British Columbia back in the day was exactly the same. Yeah, Edmonton too. And everywhere across Canada was the same. If you got up to a certain size, you kind of... To not get taxed, you kind of had to know someone, or... But I was lucky, I was in the seed business. So they kind of seen us as a novelty. They didn't take us too seriously. We weren't competition to them. So I would, some of the boys I would give clones to and they were often by their personal bag off of me and they wouldn't even spoke their own stuff because they fertilize it right up to the end and they'd sell it to the States and call it Beasters. And but they wouldn't even spoke their own stuff. So the boys would come to me and buy their personal stash. So I was always kind of left alone to do whatever I wanted. But yeah, once you get to a certain size, you kind of have to have the blessing of that. I wonder if they were trying to tax Emery at all. Not really. I mean, he's pretty big and flashy. I don't think so. Yeah, he was too flashy, I think. They didn't want to be associated and get busted. And he kind of took the heat away from them. He took the heat away and he was, he was out there advertising BC Bud to the world. BC Bud is so great. He brought everybody to the market. He brought people to British Columbia to buy their weed. So they let Mark be at the biggest flower. He was a useful fucking idiot. It's what he was, a useful fucking idiot. In the neighborhood, you'd come because that's where his store was and then you'd find the 10 other stores that were hidden around the market, right? Honestly, if you're even in America too, if you're in the flower market and the seed market, you don't really intersect very much. That's right. That's true. They just don't, like, and they don't affect each other all that much. If you're pumping out specific clones for production, you know, like somebody with 30 different strains trying to make money in that way, he's not affecting your clientele or what you're doing or your life at all. It's just not even the same world. Yeah, it's really not the same world. Exactly. Yeah, since I moved back to Canada about five, six years ago, I make seeds. If I had a couple pounds of weed, I wouldn't even know where to sell it. Same. It's bizarre. Same. Like, yeah, when you're in the seeds for that long, like, I tell people this a lot too that are interested in getting into the seed game. I always tell them, if you're ever gonna get serious about it, you're gonna have to make that choice one day to permanently turn to seeds. And when you do flower, it's only gonna be your testers. If you're not gonna be in flower production anymore, you're gonna lose those contacts eventually because you're just not gonna need them. You're gonna devote your life to seeds. So, you know, you're really gonna have to be one or the other. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I've always, my buddies back in Vancouver, back in the day, they look at me like I'm an idiot sometimes because I'd be growing these big rooms of Congolese and Mexican sativas that take 16 weeks to flower. And like, Jay, you could have flipped two crops by now and made all this money. And they were right. But I'm a weed geek though. So, yeah, it was all about selecting. For me, I was looking at the long game. So I know even if I exit the industry, I can come back. As long as I have my genetics and stay true to what they are and don't bullshit, I can always re-enter the industry. But if just going bud and just flipping pounds, you're nobody and there is no brand. You're just a guy with a bag of weed. Yeah. I think there's multiple ways to do that. I mean, where I live, there's a bunch of people that sold flower to support their lifestyle and then did a bunch of breeding for themselves and their friends because that's what interested them. You know, so it's almost like they had a commercial side of it, but then that funded their interests. Yeah, you grow one commercial room to pay the mortgage and pay the bills and then you play in the other room. Tough not to be interested, that's for sure. Yeah. Because for my experience has been, and I don't know about you guys, but like the older you get in the weed scene, in order to stay excited and like, you know, pumped to get into your room, I'm in my mid 40s or whatever. Most of my friends, if you tell them, I want you to monocrop this. They could do a good job, but they'd probably want to like, just shoot themselves after a while because they'd be so bored, you know? Like literally, like, you know, my buddy, you know. You lose your passion, yeah. Yeah, you're like, okay, I grow these two strains. I've dialed it in, I figured out all the, when to raise and lower the EC, I figured out exactly how it likes to be grown and now I'm just making minor adjustments and steering the ship. And I feel like I'm a factory worker. Yeah. We're like seeds and all this other stuff. Yeah. It brings joy. Yeah, exactly. Well, we need those people to produce weed for the public, but that's not me. Yeah, definitely not me. I have to grow, I'm growing out seedlings. It's like Christmas time when you start a new batch of seeds to see what's gonna come up. I'm like a little kid at Christmas wondering what's under the tree. Yeah, for sure. You can dial it in. Yeah, but yeah, he's more of a pick a few strains and dial it in. So we all need each other in the industry, but that's not my thing. I mean, what I find hard about like being a breeder or seed popping or anything like that is that it's pretty small amount of size seed pop you can do where you can honestly judge like what just happened. Because if you do a big seed pop and you wanna save it and you wanna have backups and then you wanna get all your friends that you trust to help you smoke and test it. Like you can do a big seed run, but eventually how are you going to judge those hundreds of plants? Yes. And the problem is for me is that all the stuff that you can visually see, like you can be like, oh, that one has the structure I like, that one has the leaf ratio, this one has the resin, but the part that really will make a strain lasting or not to me is invisible. Like you don't know how it's gonna affect you or taste until you try it. Yeah. You can't look at it behind you and be like, oh, that's gonna be the one. Yeah. And in fact, also like what I like to do as well is after I've given my selections out of a phenohunt, you have to grow the clone of the variety too, not just this seedling after you. Oh, yeah. You see the structures and different characteristics and you gotta put it through some stress. You only get it to see that one way, one time. CSI and I talked about that a whole bunch where I got to a point where I never flowered, like when I was testing seeds inside, I never flowered the seed plant. Yeah. I would take clones and root all the clones and flower the clone because I would see the seed plant once and it would never be that way again. And I was always interested, well, what is the clone gonna do? Yeah. How is that? Well, you don't have that tap root. You don't have that seed plant bigger. You don't have the same stretchiness. It's just different. Well, even though I'm switching most of my rooms over to LEDs, when I do my seed selection, because I've been growing under HBS for decades, when I do my selecting in my tester room, I do it under the HBS and I trim nothing off the bottom. I leave all those shaggy bits at the bottom to see how, and I don't pinch it, just to see how it grows naturally. Sure. And that's what I've been doing for 25 years. So I wanna see what it does all on its own without any manipulation. Yeah. And then I make my selections. Just the way I've been doing it for, that's my way of doing it. Because, and then after that, with the clone, then I start playing, see if it ties down good, how it reacts when I pinch it. I mean, because sometimes unless you see what it does, you won't know what kind of manipulation to apply to get what you want out of it. You know, if something, if you don't pinch it and something makes some incredible two and a half foot long cola, you might not wanna pinch it and go for all those side butts. Yeah. You might wanna leave it that way. Sometimes you might grow something and all those bottom nugs end up nice and solid. You know, sometimes they end up all leafy in a mess. And so if it's leafy in a mess, you're like, oh, I have to strip all that off to concentrate it up top. But sometimes it'll make nice snug all the way down to the base without any effort. And you know, sometimes you have to watch what the other player tells you. Exactly, yeah. I remember the first big time, I seen that I was impressed with was actually Breeder Steve's Shishkeberry. And oh my God, it was like three feet tall. It was one big giant cola. And just, you hardly see any red hairs on it. It was just big green and crystal-y with almost no red hairs and. What did it smell like? I always wondered what Shishkeberry, because I've never had like, just your guys' cuts up there. A little bit on the fruity side, I'd say. It was, there was almost too much resin that it cut out all the terpenes. It wasn't really like turkey strains. I know what you mean, I know. It just fucked up and it was huge. And lime green, huge lime green buds. I gotta have Steve that one, man. He nailed that one. That's why people like this Shishkeberry. And it was a quality name. Yeah, yeah. I mean, people, we can talk about all the things. You know, sometimes what's funny about it is like a cool name goes a long way. It did what it does. And even Shishkeberry, like it's got a cool nickname. You can just call it the Shish. You know, like things that, like that matters. You know? Yeah, there's so many strains that I know that are just kick-ass, but they have a shitty name and nobody buys them. Yeah. It's sad, but you know. Wait, what's that? If you could think of one strain, each one of you, one strain that you think should get more recognition than it currently does. What's this first strain that comes to your minds? So from Vancouver Island Seed Company, Chiffy Pot. Okay. And from my own stuff, probably my first contact. The first contact? Yeah, because it's high CBD and super chirpy, but I don't really sell, I got a big bag of it, but I don't really sell many seeds. People don't know what they're missing on that one. Yeah. It's just super, super chirpy. You just rub your hand up against the leaves and you know, you're sticking to it. And it's a nice buzz, really nice buzz. It's not super stony, but it's one of those. Quality. When my son started smoking weed, that's the strain I gave him because I wanted the higher CBD and lower THC. Yeah, yeah. 18 years old, you got to get your head together a little bit and get to work. So I told him, hey, if you want to smoke weed, do my first contact. So, but no, it's one of my best strains that people don't buy a lot of and they should because it's one of my best ones. But yeah, other than that strain of mine and Chiffy Pot from Vancouver Island Seed Company, those are, yeah, the two right off the top of my head, those are the two I can think of. What do you got, Casey? I'm all about the death bubble. I think we up here, we got, it's the pre-98 death bubble cut it's called and it's just like that obnoxious, kush, gas, candy. Like it's just amazing in the, like the medical benefits that come along with, I don't know if it's the mixture of terpenes or what, but it's phenomenal. Like even for myself or nausea, like it's just been, like it's one of those strains that I could never, if I had to pick one for the rest of my life, that would be it. And it's just so. You know what's in it? If you give me a couple minutes, I'll figure it out. I've got test results here, I just gotta dig them up. I wanna, I wanna say a long time ago, somebody gave me seeds of it. It was like a black domino bubble, maybe. But I think that there's been a few over the years that have had that name. So I always wonder like, when people talk about the death bubble. Yeah, up here it's just, we just call it the pre-98 cut. It's been a cut that's been around for years and years and years. Similar to the OG Kush. Yeah, it's like super, super gassy, super. I wonder if it's just Bubba. Kush. I wonder if it's just our Bubba down here, the pre-98 Bubba. Or if it's a hybrid of the pre-98 Bubba. Yeah, I have no idea. I have the OG Kush and I'm not a big Kush guy, but everybody has it. I stick with my own strains, but. I like the high of OG Kush. I like the high of old OG Kush to me is what always, it like, no matter what any cup I've ever gone to, where it's like a real legit cup, if someone brings a really good cut of OG Kush, it's very hard for anybody to not pick that one as the winner. Like it just seems to always be the winner in the room for the high. There's a few similarities as well with the cheese. I know people have noticed that, that cheese is a little more rank smelling, but there is some similarities. When it's overdried, you can really see the similarities with the cheese. So in this death Bubba, it's dominated as beta caraphylene and then fennshall, alpha humilane, isoboroneal, lemonyne, beta mercene, pineene, alpha and beta pineene. Complex. I think that just means it gets you fucked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very complex is what it is. Yeah. Yeah, like I've oat salmon fishing on the ocean, seasick, like puke in two puffs, straight me right out. Same thing I had knee surgery. Yeah, knee surgery, come out of the hospital, they knock you out for it. Yeah. And woke up dry, even puke in, tried to gravel no good out of the hospital, two puffs straight me right out, like pain management and stuff like that, like on the medical side of things, like I think it should be everywhere. There's a company finally, I think bringing it out in Canada here, Pistol in Paris, they're gonna be launching it into the legal recreational market. And like, I think it should be on the medical side of things for sure, like if they should do studies on it, right? I'm gonna be crossing it with my Romulan here on the next round as well. So give it a try. He keeps raving about it for years and I've smoked it, it kicks my ass. I'm gonna have to try it. I'm gonna have to try it, like for nausea stuff, that sounds awesome. That sounds killer. Yeah, no, yeah, if you can find it, it's something else. Yeah. Not so, what about you? I'm gonna make some seeds, I'll send it out to you. Yeah, I'll take them. What's this strain that you think has a crappy name maybe or whatever and doesn't sell get the shine that it should? I mean, there's a bunch of them, but like the dog shit. Yeah. There's this strain. It used to be called in Minneapolis it had a way cooler name, it was called Electric Vogelu. And it's a little mysterious what it is, but I think it might be like Silver Pearl by Hayes or it's some kind of hazy hybrid from the early 90s. And it's one of those ones where like, Matt and I, you know, we have some get-togethers with a bunch of friends, you know, and people gather from all over and breeders come and stuff. And it always ends up being one of those ones that like everybody isn't, it's in their top two or three that they tried. And they always can't figure out why it's not more popular. Yeah, it's definitely one of those ones that I, you know, I was talking about it the other night with someone. I was like, I think when it comes to elites, they're like everybody seems to love Bubba. Everybody seems to universally the most part like Oji Kush and everyone likes Electric Vogelu. And I can't think of anything else that like, some people like blueberry, some people don't, some people, you know, that like those three I could think of. I mean, I tend to think too that we're in such a commercial industry in a way that people only wanna grow what's currently popular. And so when you get old like we are now or older, there's been all these great strains that have gone through your hands that deserve their moment in the sun, but they just don't get enough play because they're not currently popular. They're not being cropped for production. People aren't getting to try them that much. And so as a result of that, it has nothing to do with the quality of the plant itself. It basically has to do with this weird hype and people's access are not to it, you know? Yeah. And then it ends up just getting saved by heads and passed around and grown for personal and passed around to friends and stuff like that. And everybody can't believe what, you know, and names are a huge thing. I'll tell a story. There was this strain in Mendo that was made by a friend and it was called, it was made by everybody's shot. It was called Big Rec. It was Big Bud by Train Rec, okay? And it was frosty and it was beautiful and it finished at the end of September. It was really pretty, but nobody wanted Big Rec. Nobody was interested in Big Bud Train Rec, right? And so one of my friends changed the name to Barry White. And as soon as the name changed to Barry White, not only could they move endless packs of it, but they got a premium. You know, they got a couple, you know, they got a couple hundred bucks more than they should for other things. And it was all about the name change. Nobody wanted Big Rec, but Barry White, I want some of that. That happened with us as well a few years ago when I started working with the OG Kush. We just had it named as a cross and never sold. And then when we, our OG Kush crossed with the Romulan, we renamed it Ogopogo and it started flying off the shelves. I don't know if you know what Ogopogo is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like our, like our sea monster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Catchy names like that make a big difference. You know, I tend to think Jeasel is one that I've noticed that like it's one of the original cams, but for some reason it's no one's ever hunted it and everybody that had it dropped it for whatever reason because the name just never caught on. It was a dumb name. I mean, it's, and that's what I was saying before too, about how like a lot of weed access is kind of flash in the pan, where it's like, if you weren't there for those few years, you might not have access to it at all. And so most of the currently popular strains aren't nearly as good as the collection of old school classics that some people have access to. There's just not a proper way to market them and get them out there. And people often wanna do what's easy. Yeah. You know, and they wanna do what the brokers and the buyers and the market is asking for. And so whatever that shift is, they'll just go with that flow. And, you know, you can end up having people, hundreds of people, hundreds of growers having some popular cut. And then the market shifts and 10 years later, four dudes held onto it. Yeah. And that's like the most common thing. Well, I'm thankful for those four dudes. Yeah. Is that right? I've gotten a lot of strains back from some old friends that I thought, strains that I thought were gone years ago and people come out of the closet and say, hey, I still got a cut. Yeah. What's really important actually is people in like, I don't know about Canada specifically, but like in America, people that like, you know, live in areas that like don't change all that much, right? So they can grow their two or three little strains and they can sell them to their friends and their friends are just stoked on getting really high quality weed and the fads don't affect them. Yeah. And a lot of times who you find, oh, I thought this thing was lost. And they're like, no, I have it, you know, I never was forced to change. And we still love it. That's how I got my Hawaiian sativa back. Yeah. A good old boy from rural Manitoba said, hey, I still have it. I bought it in 1999 and he has beautiful cut and thank God for him. Yeah, that's a great line. Classic, classic Hawaiian sativa line. One of our buddies is, I just gave all my seeds of it to my buddy Rains and he just did a big pop of it. So he's gonna be running a bunch of those and reproducing those to see what you can find in them. But that's my favorite. I mean, I never had a traditional Hawaiian line because it's before my era, but out of all the lines I've ever had called Hawaiian, that was the one I thought was the nicest. It was a nice like sativa sweet, just had a really nice quality high though. Really nice. Yeah, anything that I usually see now that's called Hawaiian is not like it was back in the day. Oh, yeah. A lot of the Hawaiian from the 90s, I remember a real, what do you call it, menthol? Mm-hmm. Menthol flavor sativas. That's how I remember the Hawaiian. Interesting. But nowadays, no, not, you don't get that menthol flavor very much anymore. It was intensely menthol. And that was during the 90s from Hawaii up there in Canada? Yeah, yeah, I got, well, with Federation Seed Company, we got those genetics from Vancouver Island Seed Company from G-Man there. Yeah, he had a few different versions of it, a few different crosses. It was amazing. But he got it straight from Hawaii. I know we've touched on him briefly before, but it seems like he had a major, major influence on your career, at least, and a few others around you and the strains in Canada in general, not just in Vancouver Island. Yeah, he was a big influence for me and a few other breeders on the island. And a lot of the source genetics came from him. He was growing since the mid-70s. And I was a youngster on the scene coming in in the mid-90s. So, yeah. I'd love to talk to him about when he saw the first Indicas and stuff like that since he was around during that time and what his experience was with him. Has he ever told you about anything like that? Oh, yeah. We grew side by side for years back in the day, but he's kind of dropped off the planet here. And I actually mentioned, or I messaged him about two or three months ago. And he hasn't gotten back to me. Oh, that's too bad. So... Yeah, hopefully he'll turn up because he sounds like an interesting guy to interview me. Yeah, but you probably won't ever see his face. That's funny. Old, old school. Old, old school, yeah. Yeah. It's hard for some people to turn off that decades of programming. That's true. I don't want you to see my face. I don't want you to see my name. I don't want you to have any association. I mean, we even have friends of ours that'll come on the show and, you know, they wanna wear a mask or they wanna be in a dark room or, you know, they live in a state that's not that permissive yet and they worry about it getting out, you know, or even friends or family or, you know, in some cases even wives, you know, something like that knowing. Yeah. So everyone has a different perspective on like what their own safety is or perception of it. Yeah, a different era. Yeah, for me, even like I've been selling since mid-90s and like didn't tell anybody anything. Like if you didn't buy off me, you didn't know. And now to see all the brands that are popping up just because they didn't care or they would advertise or whatever, now they've got established brands years later where it's myself, like I didn't say shit with a mouthful to anybody and they started from scratch, right? I got a whole lot more knowledge, but on the branding side. Yeah, sure. He's right. I mean, when I was young in Chicago, like there was only two or three people that knew I grew and sometimes I would be at a party and off of one of those people I would buy a full price eighth or quarter. Yeah. So that way when friends saw me with the weed they knew where I got it. They wouldn't think that I, you know, he can't be the grower. I saw him buy it off a homie for a hundred bucks a quarter. You're scared, bro. You're scared. I've heard that a lot of people do that. You know, it's one of those things where it was like, I mean, we used to, I used to, I had a good friend of mine. I would pay him to drive me to the grow store because he was straight as can be. And if they ran his license plate and they raided him he literally had nothing that was going to get him in trouble. Yeah. They couldn't get him on anything, you know? And so we wouldn't even go, we wouldn't even go to the grow store with a car that was tied to any of the sites. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You park two or three blocks away. Yeah. I didn't understand computers. And so when Overgrow and Cannabis World and some of those first forums came out I was terrified to post. Yeah. Because I didn't know if a government agent could just like call me up and figure out like exactly where I was posting from and where the computer was. And I didn't have. And so many good jokes I could pull right now and I'm just not going to. Even medical licenses, even medical licenses is Canada. Like I thought that was a joke. Like they were just like people were signing up to get raided, right? Yeah, yeah. For sure. And it could have went out and got a license and been legal. I just shut up and kept doing what I was doing. And just didn't want to be on that list, right? I did not want to be on that. I thought everybody was just eventually going to get pulled. I thought it was a biggest honeypot. Like you guys are ridiculous. Like you don't see what's going on here. Yeah. But you know, that's interesting too because when I first ended up in Mendo I actually ended up on a legal medical program because my ex had cancer, right? And it was through the Sheriff's Department and it was through the health service of our county and all that. And literally, like the Sheriff was so cool back then he burned like the feds threatened to come in and take all of his records because they wanted to know who was who. And he burned them all. Yeah, that's pretty possible. He literally shut the program down and he burned all the files because he was like, you're not going to come in and raid a bunch of sick people. Nope. I don't know who it is. You don't know who it is. Oops. Yeah. And so sometimes there were cool people. A cool cop, that's never heard of that before. That's crazy. I mean, for a time, Mendo. They exist in theory. They exist. In theory, yeah. They do exist. I mean, they're humans like anybody else. They might be a preponderance to one side or another. But I mean, weren't you mentioning earlier on the show that like, you were in Spain, you were selling clones to cops and scenes to cops? Yeah. I never feared the cops when I lived in Spain. In Canada, it's a whole different story. When you run into a cop, you kind of look all straight and proper and pretend nothing's going on. DLT until proven innocent. And in Spain, no fear of the cops. You can walk up to them with smoking a joint and report something legitimate. I just didn't fear cops there. That would be nice. It's a whole different culture. In their years? Yeah, that's a different culture. That's a thing. Yeah, as an American, I often forget. And not even just an American like where I'm from specifically is very cop heavy and conservative. So I forget. He lives in the worst place in California. The worst. The worst. We have TV shows about our police force being jackasses. You know? Yeah, it's not good. So like my perspective is a little skewed on police that I never really have any positive outlook that I forget. Like, yeah, other places, they are your peers. Like it's not that same adversarial thing. Yeah, when I was growing up on the prairies here in Canada, my parents, they worked for the police. They like janitors and they get some guarding at the prison. And my dad told me after years of working with it, he said, one out of five, he's a good guy. He's there for the right reason. He said, the other four, there are just people who want revenge on society. But one out of five is a good person. They're for the right reason. So just hope you get one of those, one out of five. Yeah. I mean, if you get off having an unreasonable amount of power off of people in most situations, that's not a bad career for you. Yeah. Unfortunately, it draws people with that bent, you know? Yeah, exactly. It does. It does. I mean, Spain has always been interesting to me because it's almost like the only place in Western Europe that has a climate that's close to where I live, to some degree, you know? When you look at the map of how much sun Europe gets versus how much sun America gets, it's unbelievable how much sunnier large parts of America are compared to Canada or compared to Europe, you know? And so, did you get to grow any city, did you get to, was Spain, did you get to do some outdoor there? Did you get to do some gaps? Did you get to try a lot of new things? All the streams that I couldn't do, all the streams that I couldn't grow outdoors here in Canada, I was able to grow in Spain. And up here, we're around the 50th parallel here. And when I lived in Spain, we were around the 35th, pretty much the same latitude as Northern California, like San Francisco, where I lived in Spain. And I was able to grow all my sativas. That's the first thing I did. All my islands, sweets, dumps, my great fruit hayses, my Hawaiians, first thing I did was plant those sativas. And I had a few big properties there where I grow a bunch and then a few patches in the mountains and then I give away that. So I have some questions on that because that's one of the reason I brought it up was that I've done a bunch inside. And I, you know, I obviously live in an area where I get to do a bunch of sungrown too. You were, I would imagine you were primarily indoor in Canada for a long time, right? So then you go over to Spain. Well, you were just talking about, let's just focus on the stuff that you couldn't grow outside in Canada. But you grew it inside in Canada because that's where it could finish. Were there strains of yours that did things you didn't expect? Were there things that when you've got to grow them in the sunlight, you've found some differences or you've found some things that really surprised you, you know? Because, no, yes. Not too much actually. Maybe a little bit, but I had already been growing for about 12, 13 years before I moved to Spain. So I kind of had a good feel for how my varieties performed in different situations. Sometimes they wouldn't grow outdoors on the island, but I always had greenhouses. So I had a good idea of what kind of, what's gonna express itself in the selection, but yeah. Did you see anything like notably different over there? Like, is that what we're trying to get at? Like the expressions, like from maybe even. I'll give you a couple examples. So like the chem family that I run and some different stuff like that. If you grow it inside, it grows a certain wet. If you grow it outdoors, you'll get hot pink to magenta hairs on it quite a bit. That I'll never, ever see inside. But then sometimes if you grow it in the full sun, you'll get a leafy Afghan mess. Where if I grow it like say under like woven poly that takes out some of the UV and I grow it smaller like in a greenhouse, I'll get like a more indoor expression. Yeah, I noticed I was got my Romulan growing my Romulan. Yeah, in the time warp as well. Outdoors in Spain, a lot of the red hairs would come out on the Romulan that I'd never seen indoors or even in the greenhouse in Canada that the red hairs in Spain just were popping out. It was a beautiful, beautiful looking plant. Yeah. Other than that, not a big difference in most strains. Interesting. Cause I feel like indoor you can have, you have control over everything, but the light, the, you know, there's not a better light that I've experienced than the sun. I've tried all kinds of different combinations and mixed light inside and you can kind of approximate it, but like it's weird. Like I would bring a lot of my strains and like some old euros and stuff like that. Like Neville and Shanti and some old guys actually told me this where they were like, if you want to keep old moms healthy, try to give them three or four months a year of sunlight. You know. That makes sense to me. Yeah, that makes sense. And I would take my plants in February or March and I would put them into a greenhouse and I would think they looked pretty healthy. And then after about a month of being outside, I'd be like, man, these things are banging. These things are really happy. These plants are really growing well. And so there's something about like just that full spectrum where it has all the spectrums in spades. I will say indoor, I indoor, I can kind of do the same kind of trick though with the Reavage, like maybe not as vigorous because it's not the sunlight. Now, obviously plants prefer the sunlight because of the spectrum, but you can get like that little bit of a vigorous re-jump on plants with the Reavage. At least I found like, especially for breeding and stuff, old stock, old mom stock, a Reavage does wonders. Yeah, there's nothing better than this on, so. Outdoor guys. I mean, it's just, it's one of those things where, the only reason why I asked is because if you're stuck up there, not stuck, but if you're in norther, like, there's certain sativas, there's certain things that like, even for my area, like it doesn't stay nice into December. I can't in my environment, like I can't grow certain equatorial stuff and get away with it. It just doesn't finish. And so then there's these things where it's like, the only thing I've ever experienced with them is growing them inside. Because I can't take a 16, 20 weaker and see what it does in a greenhouse. Unless I've got added light and mad heat and all these different things that we typically don't around. So I was just curious, if you like, when he went there, did he get to see different things from strains that like, especially when you were talking about some of these like 16 week Mexicans and different things that you were crossing, if you got to play around with those more because the weather was just nicer? Well, I really like playing with my grapefruit haze and my island sweet scum. Those are the two strains that I can never finish properly in Canada. And down there, I was growing monster plants, like four or five pounds of plant and just that lemony hazy flavor. That was just branches and branches of the weight. It just can't, they did actually grow a lot, bit of a different structure than indoors. They're a lot branchier, both of those strains. Indoors, maybe it's because of growing technique, indoors, it can't keep the plants close. All right. You know what I mean? You have been like your medium is so much different when you're outside for the most part too, right? You're not just growing in peed. Yeah, well, actually I do most of my plants were growing in containers. So, yeah, the soil was pretty similar. But yeah, other than that, yeah. What was the island sweet scum again, real quick? What's that? The island sweet scum. What was that one again? That was selected from Breaker Steve's sweet scum. What was his sweet scum? Do we remember or did we not know? Nobody really knows, I think. You have to ask Red or Steve about that. Red would probably be the best source of info. I may have. I remember how he said it. He thought it was a Northern Lights. NL5H? NL5H. NL5H. Maybe across the Steve's grapefruit. That's what I think it was. No, yeah, maybe something. NL5H. That's what I think it was. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. If I'm remembering, I hope not. NL5H, man. Hopefully I'm not remembering it wrong. But if I remember correctly, that's what Red thought. It was some NL5H, and it maybe at some point was added into great, great got grapefruit or something like that added to it. And then he was saying that there was a difference, talking about Mark Emery again. There was a difference between the original sweet scum. And then people gave seeds to Mark, and he added the island, and he sold some different weird hybrids of it and stuff like that. I added the island. I added the island. Yeah. When Mike and I started Federation, we had a clone of the island sweet scum, or the sweet stunk that was going around the city. We got a cut. We made our own cross with it, and it is island sweet scum instead of sweet scum. Yeah. But you kind of had to because Steve did not want you using his fucking name, right? Like Steve was like, don't do sweet scum. Oh, no, no. He didn't like that very much. Yeah. I was trying to give him credit for it, and he didn't like that. Sure. Yeah, back in the day, I get it in the beginning as that way too, and people would knock off my string and just rename it. Kind of bugged me a bit in the first years, but nowadays, everybody does it. This far in, this far in, it's like... It's just that you're growing with great genetics. If somebody is copying you, it's a compliment. It's not a ripple. Yes. That's where I am now. I always felt like a compliment was somebody would take your strain and grow it themselves. I almost thought a bigger compliment was somebody would take your strain, grow it themselves, rename it as something else so they would get the credit for it. If it was good enough, they'd want it to be named as well. Because every single person that's, if you never want anyone to grow your strains, then you can't have a seed company. You can't let them out. You can't have friends do it because that's the most classic thing in weed is people are going to take it and they're going to do what they want with it. Always. They're going to buy your stuff. All my work was done by somebody else before me. Yeah, it's just the most... I mean, Neville got hella bitter because he thought 90% of the Amsterdam scene was people just buying and biting his seed work. Yeah, he did. And then you don't get loot for it. But that's the... And I think, honestly, that's also what led to a bunch of seed companies never wanting to reveal what was in their actual mix because they got tired of competing seed companies using the exact same verbiage on their advertisements and the exact same lineage. So people started getting all secretive about their mix and what was in it and what the sauce was and what they used because they didn't want people to know. That's the way she goes. That's the way it works. Did you have anything else on your list that you wanted to get in? Because you're like two hours in. I mean, if there's anything else she had written down that you wanted to get on this episode. Not a heck of a lot. Just to let the people know, we have some good outdoor strains whether they're autoflower or feminized. Springtime's coming up, so get your seeds now. Absolutely. And what's your website? Where's the best retailer to get them? Next generation seedcompany.com. Awesome. We have very few other resellers right now because we do a lot of bulk sales to other companies and LPs and big farmers in the States. So people are looking for bulk seeds. We have that or we just have packs as well. So. And you mentioned you have a phone number too that people could call. That's not super common. What's the number? Yeah, it's, I believe I sent you a text. I can look it up in one second. It's a Canadian number. Is it the one that you texted me from? It's gonna be one second here. Yeah, it's Taylor. When you call the phone number on our website, it's my partner, Taylor, and he'll, he's great talking to people. He'll probably throw you some stuff in the frame if you give him a call. But it's a, Yeah, Taylor's awesome. 1-780-170-782-7804. Okay, there you go. Anybody you wanna get your Canadian seeds? And maybe you're not even in Canada. Maybe you're in the U.S. and you're in a climate that needs that mold resistance. It's awesome stuff. There's all the hype out there and then there's the solid stuff that's been around forever. So don't buy the hype. Anyways, Natsu, you wanna get anything else? I just always like talking weed with people. So I'm always appreciative of people's time. Okay, man, we loved having you. That was good with you guys, yeah. And we need to do a hash episode. So, you know, you're welcome back on, bro. Like, we need to get a full episode. Yeah, for sure. We can talk about dead bodies. We're the hash master here. Yeah, dude. For sure. Well, I appreciate your guys' time so much. And yeah, I need to get to editing so we can get this thing out tomorrow. Yeah, have a good one. Awesome, good to meet you guys. Have a good one. Yeah. 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